By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The action the Lithuanian government implemented over the weekend to stop Russian trains carrying sanctioned cargos into Kaliningrad is regarded in Moscow as a long anticipated move, prompted among Lithuanian officials by the British government. The initial Lithuanian embargo action has been followed by a second one this week extending the blockade to trucks and road transport.   Neither action has been publicly announced by the Lithuanian government.

The first news came from Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad, following a  notice sent to him by Lithuanian officials. That notice has not been published.

Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauseda (lead image) has said nothing.  

Lithuanian Prime Minister  Ingrida Simonyte announced through the British Broadcasting Corporation that the blockade was not a blockade because only some cargoes were halted, and because “Lithuania is complying with the sanctions imposed by the European Union on Russia for its aggression and war against Ukraine ” . She also told the British state radio “it was important not to overreact”.  

She tweeted: “Any talk of a blockade of Kaliningrad is a lie. Lithuania is complying with the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia for its aggression and war against Ukraine.  The sanctions were agreed by all the EU member states on March 15…. Passenger transit is also taking place, under a special agreement by the EU, RU, & LT. Steel and ferrous metal products account for only around 1% of the total rail freight to Kaliningrad via LT.”  

In the three days which have followed the Lithuanian action, the US and British Governments, the European Union (EU),  and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have not supported the Lithuanian blockade.

The Russian Security Council met on Wednesday morning, but issued no statement on Lithuania.  The Secretary of the Council, Nikolai Patrushev, who was in Kaliningrad on Tuesday, had announced there that the “consequences will have a serious negative impact on the population of Lithuania.”

Yesterday, at the same time as President Vladimir Putin was chairing the Security Council meeting, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced it is delaying “concrete measures” in reaction:  “The measures will not be diplomatic, but practical, they are now being worked out in an interdepartmental format, We are not talking about this not because we are hiding something, but because the process of their coordination and elaboration is underway. I would like to emphasize once again (the third time for today’s briefing): we have told the European Union and Lithuania about the need to change the steps they have taken. Perhaps something from that side will be changed, and, accordingly, our reaction will be different.”

Here is a compilation of the official documents.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the rest of the world it is known as the cultural cringe. In Russia the wish to be loved by Americans is known as liberal reform.

In the very first paragraph of a new book called “Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union”, the author, Vladislav Zubok – the name in Russian means a small tooth — reveals that on the morning of August 19, 1991, when the first coup was attempted against Mikhail Gorbachev, then President of the Soviet Union, Zubok was flying to the US by arrangement with Strobe Talbott,   Moscow correspondent for Time and soon to be the Clinton Administration’s principal Russia expert. At the time Zubok describes himself as a “Moscow-based academic intellectual”. By this, he means he was no simple worker with a Moscow university degree. In Soviet class terms, he insists the reader recognise him to be an “intellectual”. That then was upper class, and Zubok wants the reader to know the difference between the Russian upper and lower classes —  immediately, on the nineteenth line of his very first page.

Zubok also wants the reader to know he had been hired with money from “the prestigious Amherst College in Massachusetts”. What exactly was prestigious about Amherst, or Massachusetts for that matter — and to whom? And why does Zubok think that in a history of Russian politics between 1983 and 1991, such a remote place, with such an adjectival tag, was worth the mention?

The answer, like the other revelations of the first paragraph, reveals what this book turns out to be. It’s an exercise in American-style reconstruction of what a small group of Russians for hire were keen to give their masters, about the circumstances of the years leading up to Boris Yeltsin’s replacement of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Russia of the Soviet Union. But this isn’t Russian history. It’s the history of Russians with cultural cringe – the desire to be loved by Americans, and to tell them what they wanted, paid for, insisted on hearing then, and demand  now.  

The payoff, reported on the dust jacket of the book, comes from Talbott, Zubok’s original employer. He is quoted as saying: “This is a deeply researched indictment of Mikhail Gorbachev’s timidity and mercurial policies which backfired.” “Instead,” Talbott adds, “Russia at the turn of the 21^st century was ripe for the rise of Putin.” Zubok was ripe for what Talbott meant. “In 2008,” according to Zubok’s history, Putin “used military force against Georgia, and in 2014 he annexed Crimea and waged an undeclared war on Ukraine in Donbass.”  The blame for that, Zubok means, was Gorbachev’s mistakes. Without them, “had the Kremlin ruler made different choices… the Soviet Union could have gradually made its way into the world economy by a process of trial and error, with a nomenklatura-style state capitalism, and certainly with its institutions of power preserved.”

As for the Russian cultural cringe, Zubok is sure it was one of Gorbachev’s biggest mistakes.  During his well-known trips abroad in the 1980s, Gorbachev took with him, Zubok records, “a “huge entourage…of journalists, social scientists, writers, theatre directors, filmmakers and other cultural figures. Most of them shared [Gorbachev’s] fascination, admiration, and envy for things Western.”

Zubok has written a book to prove he doesn’t suffer this cringe. The work proves the opposite. This is the problem with cringers. They are too bent out of shape to recognize the shape they are in.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 21st, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On March 15 the British Government announced it is imposing a ban on exports to Russia of “high-end luxury goods”.

According to the official press release, “the measures will cause maximum harm to Putin’s war machine while minimising the impact on UK businesses as G7 leaders unite to unleash a fresh wave of economic sanctions on Moscow. The export ban will come into force shortly and will make sure oligarchs and other members of the elite, who have grown rich under President Putin’s reign and support his illegal invasion, are deprived of access to luxury goods.”

Exactly what counts as “luxury goods” was loosely defined in the government’s statement as “luxury vehicles, high-end fashion and works of art” and “antiques”.

But the regulation issued to enforce the policy is much more comprehensive.  Section 11 of this regulation identifies “pearls, precious and semi-precious stones, articles of pearls, jewellery, gold or silversmith articles”. Section 21 covers “Works of art, collectors’ pieces and antiques”; that’s  the kybosh for oligarch luxury —  the Russia warfighters in London say they believe — to “cause maximum harm to Putin’s war machine”.

The official regulation defines this to cover goods higher in price than £250 (before VAT). They have been listed to include horses, caviar, wrist watches, xylophones, vacuum cleaners, ski boots, saddles, perfumes, and pottery. Russian women buying lingerie, Russian men buying pyjamas, Russian children buying rollerskates, and Russian housekeepers buying toasters have all been hit with “maximum harm”. Russian spies have been banned from buying British-made false beards and wigs.

Compression stockings for varicose veins will be stripped off Russian legs at the airport, and confiscated under the new rule.  Bathing suits, however, if worn instead of underwear, are exempted from the ban.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 15th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On June 13, for the first time since the Russian military operation began in the Ukraine, a detailed Russian intelligence assessment has been published in Moscow of Polish strategy for the future of Ukraine. This follows several weeks of brief statements by Russian security and intelligence officials claiming the government in Warsaw is aiming at an anschluss or  union  with the “eastern borderlands” known in Poland as Kresy Wschodnie, and in the Ukraine as Halychyna; that’s to say, Galicia.  

These Russian claims have been dismissed as propaganda by the Poles.  Polish strategy, according to Warsaw sources, is to preserve the Zelensky regime in Kiev and the unified Ukrainian military command — and not to acknowledge the possibility of their defeat by the Russian army east of the Dnieper River.

In this week’s discussion between Vlad Shlepchenko, a military analyst for Tsargrad in Moscow, and Vladimir Kozin, a leading academic attached to the Russian intelligence think tank, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, they consider the scope of the strategic problem which they think the Poles, and behind them the US and NATO, will continue to pose, after the objectives of Phase-1 and Phase-2 of the Russian military operation in the Ukraine have been completed.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 14th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Cossacks are known for many things, but not for being Roman Catholics like the Galicians of western Ukraine around Lvov, or like the Poles around Cracow.

Originally, the Cossacks swore off eating horsemeat, veal, hare, and pork. Pork is the principal meat of Lvivska (lead image, right) and Krakowska (left), the traditional sausages of Lvov and Cracow. They differ from one another in the spicing – Lvov with onion, marjoram, coriander and bay leaves; Cracow with nutmeg and sugar. In ingredients, the original Cossack sausages were closer to the Jewish ones.

In the war which is now extending from Europe to the world, taste in sausage shouldn’t be confused with race hatred. On May 22, when Andrzej Duda, the President of Poland, declaimed in front of President Vladimir Zelensky at the Verkhovna Rada in Kiev, that “you are – as your national anthem has it – of Cossack stock! You are magnificent!” Duda was making a racial observation with a profound mistake – and not only about sausages.  

The Cossacks of the Ukraine came from the lands between the Dnieper and the Don Rivers – that’s between 700 and 1,400 kilometres from Galicia and a journey of nine to twenty hours by motor, days by horse.  The Cossacks were Slavs and they were Orthodox Christians. By their ethnic origin, language, culture, and religion, they had little in common with the people who lived to the west of the Dnieper; that’s between Kiev, Lvov and the Polish border today. The Cossacks didn’t start eating pork sausage until after they gave up the nomadic life, got off their horses, and settled to farming.

When Duda told the Kiev deputies “I trust the goodness, the friendships made between millions of Poles and Ukrainians will mean we will be good neighbours forever now. This is a great historic opportunity and the great historic break–through”, he was getting closer to the truth of the history. But that is the history of  several hundred years of wars and race hatred between the Galicians and the Poles, and between the Galicians and Poles together against the Russian Slavs. It’s also a story Duda, his political party, and the Polish opposition backed by Mark Brzezinski, the US Ambassador in Warsaw,  recognize as a cause of war inside Poland, as well as outside.

The “historic break-through” which Duda declared in Kiev is only 81 years old, from the time of Duda’s grandfather.*  That was in 1941, when the German Wehrmacht incorporated Galicia into the General Government of southern Poland (Generalne Gubernatorstwo in Polish). Four years later, as the Germans retreated westwards to Berlin, it became the covert strategy of the US Army and then the policy of successive US governments for the extension eastwards of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) alliance; since 1945 that policy has also included regime change in Moscow, and the breakup, first of the Soviet Union, and then of the Russian Federation. That was also the announced strategy of Ambassador Brzezinski’s father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor of the Carter Administration between 1977 and 1981.   

Duda’s speech of May 22 was a Polish call to the Galicians to put aside the race hatred between themselves, and revive the race hatred which the two Catholic peoples, plus the Germans, have shown towards the Russians – also the Jews from whom the Zelensky family comes.

“How can I speak now,” Duda began his address, “when I am almost overcome with emotion”. Duda’s emotion was also calculated for the Polish audience who will vote in the next national election in just twelve months’ time.

Duda’s call to race war against the Russians was also an attempt to secure Poland against its more recent enemy Germany, and neutralize the US government’s attempt to topple the government in Warsaw. For Duda to manage this combination and hold on to power requires the appearance of a much closer Polish alliance with the Kiev regime than the Ukrainian military commanders and the Galician nationalists are contemplating at the moment, as they are forced into retreat westwards, like the Wehrmacht.  Their taste in sausage isn’t Duda’s, or Brzezinski’s, President Zelensky’s or the Cossacks for that matter.

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by Editor - Sunday, June 12th, 2022
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A new presidential decree issued yesterday by the Kremlin ends the special measures for foreign currency and capital control issued since the start of the special military operation in the Ukraine on February 24.  

Instead, a special commission of government officials and the board of directors of the Russian Central Bank have been empowered to decide, on application from Russian companies and individuals, how much foreign currency they will be permitted to export abroad, and over what period of time they will be allowed to do this.

These applications for transfer abroad of foreign currency will be reviewed and decided in secret. 

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by Editor - Friday, June 10th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There ought to be a law, or at least a sanction –  tenure cancelled, travel visa blocked – for American experts on Russia who claim to know from their reading of other American experts on Russia why Russia does things, and what will happen next.

Thane Gustafson, a Georgetown University professor publishing at the Harvard University Press, claimed very recently “it’s not too hard to reconstruct at this point what was likely going through Putin’s mind as he gave the order to attack…Putin was not nuts, not deranged, not isolated, etcetera. It was all a reasonable bet—by his strange lights—except that every one of the premises turned out to be wrong.”  Gustafson is certain he knows this; how he doesn’t say.  

But then Gustafson concedes: “All the cards are up in the air, and who knows how they will come down…I don’t know how this ends.”

There’s modest uncertainty for you — except that Gustafson is kidding. He wants you to know, he also says, that Russia is now a fascist state, and there’s really only one thing left he doesn’t know: because it’s such an effective fascist state, “the fact is that because of the regime’s control of information, we have very little idea of how Russians actually feel about the war, and how they will react to Putin’s apparent defeat.”

Gustafson didn’t notice he was squatting on the horns of a dilemma. If Russian regime control of information is so total(itarian), Gustafson’s information must come from the other side – American, Canadian, British, NATO headquarters in Brussels. The technical terms which professors usually apply to information emanating from one side of a two-sided war are misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, active measures, fake news, lies.  Between these things and the information Gustafson says he’s sure of, he has trolled himself.

So, to repeat the question, what if Russians actually support the war and blame the US for starting it?  What if they are as certain of this as Gustafson is certain Putin started it?

And what if the war ends in the US and NATO alliance retreat to Lvov; after which the Polish government will notify NATO HQ it is reviving its treaty claim to the Galician territory of the Ukraine; the chancellery in Berlin will then inform Brussels it requires the return of the ancient Danzig Corridor and Breslau, Polish territories  currently called Gdansk, Wroclaw,  and the  Ziemie Odzyskane;  and the Hungarian government will follow suit with the announcement of the recovery of historical Kárpátalja (Transcarpathia), the Zarkarpatska oblast of the Ukraine?

These were the spoils of the World War II settlement between the US and the Soviet Union in 1945-46. The territorial reversion claims aren’t new. What is new is that the US and the NATO alliance, plus the Galician regime still ruling between Kiev and Lvov, also in Ottawa, have aimed to change the terms of the post-war settlement by continuing the war eastward on to the territory of Russia itself, all the way to regime change in Moscow.

That is what Russia says it is fighting now to defend itself against. As Russian officials have been hinting in recent days, the foreign and defence ministries and the intelligence services are currently discussing in the Kremlin Security Council whether Russia’s long-term security on its western front may be best served by terms of a Ukrainian settlement in which the German, Polish, and Hungarian territorial claims are recognised.   

So, if these are indeed the cards that are up in the air, as the professor in Washington, DC, acknowledges, he isn’t the only one who doesn’t know how they will come down.

In the meantime he  and the Harvard printers want their new book to be a weapon in this war, targeted directly at President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. But what if the weapon misfires and they lose this war? Will Gustafson admit his ignorance or his mistake or his deception? Should he resign his professorship? Should Harvard pulp the new book? Or is the state in which Gustafson lives and lectures such an effective fascist state, losing the war against Russia to Germany, Poland and Hungary, minus the Ukraine, plus Russia, won’t matter to US officials any more than losing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria?

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 8th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was almost a century ago that a Chicago adman gave the Kellogg Company the idea of selling breakfast cereal  made of puffed rice by telling children that the rice grains cried out as the spoon scooped them  from the milk towards their mouths – SNAP! CRACKLE! POP! That’s what the rice sang in the radio jingle for what, in the American version, was called Rice Krispies. In the British version it was called Rice Bubbles.

Like popcorn, puffed rice is made by heating the grain under steam pressure. The technology is at least a thousand years old in China. To make it palatable in America, the box is filled with 90% rice, 9% sugar, and a pinch of salt. Without the jingle, though, no child would want it.   

Matt Taibbi (lead images), once a Moscow-based US reporter, has built up an  internet following by snapping, crackling and popping at well-known targets and names, mostly of US government officials and the media reporters who parrot them. His Substack audience is large, lucrative   and also demanding,  but not for Russian or Ukrainian war news, analysis, opinions. Not unless the US president, or his subordinates, or their mouthpieces on the big and small screens are making war-mongering fools of themselves. When they do, their krispies and bubbles turn into Taibbi’s sugar.

When the Russian special military operation began on February 24, Taibbi apologized with a pinch of salt. “My mistake was more like reverse chauvinism, being so fixated on Western misbehaviour that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough [SNAP!]. To readers who trust me not to make those misjudgements, I’m sorry [CRACKLE!!]. Obviously, Putin’s invasion will have horrific consequences for years to come and massively destabilize the world [POP!!!].”

“I fear there will be more to say soon, but I’ll leave it at that for today. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I was wrong about this.”    

Now eight weeks have gone by, and Taibbi has just announced:  “I believe it’s eventually going to come out that [George W.] Bushian ‘regime change’ is the plan for Russia, by force if necessary”. “Eventually” is the jingle word. The way Taibbi says it, he makes it sound as if he’s making a prediction he’s sure his readers will discover again months, maybe years into the future, when they are getting their subscription renewal invoices and Taibbi is hoping to bank the  earnings.  Predicting for the future what has already happened and been discovered in the past – that’s the new POP!

But Taibbi is still calling what is going on in the Ukraine “Putin’s far more serious invasion”. He hasn’t apologized yet for not explaining to his readers how Putin can “invade” if what the Russian army is doing, Taibbi insists he has now discovered, is defending against the “Bushian regime change plan for Russia by force”.  

If that isn’t puffing rice for breakfast, you can call me W.K. Kellogg.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Anna Akhmatova, the most famous poetess in the Russian language, will be 133 on June 23.

Akhmatova was the nom de plume she chose because her father said his family name would be disgraced by her publishing her poems.  The family name was Gorenko, and she was born in Bolshoi Fontan,  Odessa. A bust memorializes the place to this day; the rule of the city by anti-Russian forces since 2014 has not damaged it. The street leading to the memorial used to be called Ukrainskaya; it was renamed Anna Akhmatova, and still is.  

After her father — a naval engineer from a decorated navy family —   left the family, she lived with her mother, her brother and sister in Evpatoria, in the Crimea. They spent their summer holidays south along the peninsula, around Khersones; and northeast further inland, at the village of Slobidka Shelekhivska in Khmelnytsky oblast, near today’s Moldova border. The house has been turned into the Anna Akhamatova Literary Memorial Museum. No one answers the telephone there these days, but it is otherwise undisturbed.

Between 1905 and 1910 she lived in Kiev and attended Fundukleyevskaya Gymnasium, then the Kiev College for Women. There is a plaque in Old Russian on the wall at Number 7, Zankovetskaya Street, Kiev, to memorialize the time and place. The war has not touched it.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A German walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender tells him:

“That’ll be 100 euros.”

The German is in shock.

“What do you mean, 100 euros? Yesterday it was only 10!”

“Well today it’s 100.”

“But why 100, dammit?!”

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
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