Our Millennium-Old Civilization Is at Threat
The attempts to rupture the continuity of history, “to start it all from scratch” have been experienced in Russia more than once: The early 17th century saw that in the Time of Trouble; later, Peter’s reforms came, and then the February and October revolutions. The attempts to disrupt and discard the national tradition are made again these days.
They all have ended in fiascos, in fact. And the fiascos were followed by a revival: the phoenix of Russia would rise from its ashes. However, overcoming the obsessions of self-destruction took so much time and effort; the revivals would cost so dearly in terms of sacrifices.
In 1991, the Russian statehood was plunged, again, into a contra-natural state of self-annihilation. We were pushed several steps down the stairs of evolution/devolution. We found ourselves among the countries doomed to live aimlessly, losing more and more under the globalization. At the same time, not only the country’s ‘elites’ but considerable parts of its populace as well developed a mental dependence on the West. Now, the has come when we are called to sweep away the main ill-effects of the contra-natural Time of Troubles that our people experienced at the end of the 20th century.
To escape critical risks imminently threatening its very existence, the Russian State faces, today, the dire necessity of a decisive advance strategy. If the current delayed-action course is continued any further, the Russian Federation will run into such overwhelming threats that may soon turn its ongoing in-system crisis into a downright collapse. Another year of the delayed-action drift may lead to an irreversible erosion of the country’s sovereignty. More specifically, one can expect a major war within a year, whose outcome would be unfavorable for us [1].
It is now that a strategic breakthrough is still feasible. In the current situation, there is a window of opportunity half-open for Russia, through which we can find a way back onto our own path of development, breaking away from the rules of unfair play imposed by the transnational forces.
Changes in the political line have already been set out by the President. Countermeasures are taken against agents of foreign influence on the country’s polity and public opinion. The leadership reexamines its attitudes towards the high-ranking officialdom, the role of ideological mechanisms and mass media, actions in the information realm. Huge resources are funneled into the main direction of growth, i.e. an upswing of Russia’s military-industrial complex (MIC).
Those are the first signs of a breakthrough strategy, as we see it, which is yet to be developed into a system. The systemic nature of the re-formation required is conditioned by a systemic nature of Russia’s crisis, and a complicated nature and intensity of the global crisis. A major breakthrough cannot be effected or be effective if confined to some segment of activity. To be effective, strategic changes must be implemented simultaneously in a few pivotal segments of development. They must set off a large-scale re-formation of the entire Russian Statehood – setting off, in effect, a New Course for the country.
The situation has changed irreversibly. Those who still hope for a return to the pre-crisis ‘2000s’ are wrong in their expectation. The critical deficiency of strategic-action commitment in the governing echelons becomes a factor of existential threat by itself. From a number of signs and indications one can see that the country’s leadership is coming to an understanding that the state machinery, in its present shape, is unable to meet the new challenges. There is a gap growing between the leadership’s rhetoric, which is now coming closer to the historical and cultural Russian norm, and the prevailing political reality. Thus, Putin’s executive orders, signed on May 7, 2012, in pursuance of the main guidelines of his election program, have hung in a void of the bureaucracy’s veil of silence and incomprehension. As for his words that Russia needs now a modernization like that of the 1930s, these made a good half of the ‘elite’ fall into a brain freeze.
The large parts of the country’s governing stratum have quite different guidelines and concerns. They concern themselves with taking out their funds, wives, and children abroad; instead of “serving the State”, the state officials concerns themselves with “making a living”; with foreign business and foreign interests being quite a force for many of them. As for Russia’s wealthiest magnates, most of their assets have been carted off into offshore havens. Many of them, in fact, have half-emigrated, acquiring British or other foreign citizenships.
The deficiency of sovereign strategic-action commitment in the governing strata is only too evident. Out of all that, we believe, there rises an urgent imperative call for a turnaround, proceeding from an unambiguous expression of the nation’s inherent will, and a goal-focused re-building of the governing elite, which is feasible only based on an appeal to the nation’s popular majority and its basic tradition-steeped value system. The leadership can gain a footing for such fundamental breakthrough action only by consolidating, under a common cause, the people’s majority as the country’s constitutional supreme sovereign, and a repository of its specific civilization identity.
This report gives an outline of reorientation of Russia towards a Major Breakthrough action. The entire state system is to be redirected. This is, inevitably, a sketchy outline of the technical process involved. Yet we hope that it will give a clear idea of what the partisans of a strong sovereign Russian State see as our national imperatives.
A new course for the country springs from the need to avert mortal threats to Russia’s millennium-old civilization, and is called upon to preserve us a nation, with a soul, mindset, will, and cultural identity of our own, entitled to decide what kind of future should be in store for our children.
I. On the Scope and Trends of Change on the Global Scene
The world capitalist system is undergoing the most acute crisis, unparalleled in its history. The crisis is system-wide, and involves geographically the entire planet. Experts describe it as a concentrated sum total of traits of the greatest crisis of the past. In effect, it reveals a stalemate dead-end into which the world has been dragged by a handful of avaricious global-scale usurers with connections in major ‘family funds’.
At the same time, they themselves, or their acolytes and stooges (‘think tanks’, intelligence agencies, etc.) design and suggest schemes for a way out. According to them, solutions to the crisis are to be sought at the expense of greater part of the planet’s population. It is on the graves of dead human billions that the ‘ruling upper crust’ wishes to build a “brave new world” of theirs. To do so, they think of staging clashes of the world’s major civilizations, orchestrating wars between scores of countries, reducing the planet’s population by a few billions, mainly at the cost of non-western areas of humanity. To that deadly end, a broad variety of means can be brought into operation, such as starvation, bloody conflicts, new and old kinds of epidemics, suppression of human fertility by most updated means, same-sex ‘marriages’, GMOs, and so on and so forth. The new world of theirs is to be marked by an increasingly strict control over humans, and human behavior, as well as over information flows and, of course, resources [2].
Since the end of World War II, the globalist upper crust has raised and fostered their offshoots virtually throughout the world: those cohorts of local ‘aliens’ (‘alien’ to targeted countries) who follow the calls of the global matrix control center. As early as under George W. Bush, the so-called ‘colored revolutions’ were orchestrated mainly through pseudo-NGOs (QUANGO)[3] rather than corporation lobbies. Finally, under Barak Obama, the latest stage of postindustrial society, the global power brokers have incited surrogate revolutions using monopolized ‘social networks’ co-sponsored by the global oligarchs’ family funds (Omidyar Network, Rockefeller Family Fund, Soros Foundations, etc.), and operating as public private partnerships. Those networks using 2.0 technologies (Worldchanging, Global Voices, Avaaz, Ushahidi, Techchange), while rallying the youth under a ‘freedom-of-information’ banner, are managed from few strategic centers by a very narrow ring of people (the New America Foundation is an example). That is their way to gain profits, including profits from fratricidal civil clashes, and ‘regime changes’.
In his book The Choice Z., Brzezinski described those groups of local ‘aliens’ as being well aware of their interests of transnational origin (that run counter to their countries’ popular majorities). It is to such cohorts of local ‘aliens’, dressed up as ‘liberals’ or ‘neoliberals’, that the task is assigned by their masters to help shift the main burden of the crisis from the world’s high and mighty ones onto the weaker ones, thus wiping off, with a Rubber of History, ‘useless eaters’ from the face of the earth, making it possible for the masters to appropriate the lands and resources that belonged to the weaker ones.
In the crisis-ridden world of today, there develop several geopolitical/geo-economic processes of importance, with two of them deserving special attention. One is a globalization process. Basically, that is a development trend, driven by the endgame idea of a world government, which would wish to exercise tight control over the world’s thinned populations and remaining resources, and act as the sole master of finances and various machines of noneconomic coercion. Another development trend could be termed neo-imperial one. It refers to the emergent macro-regional blocs of countries, based on common geopolitical and geo-economic interests. Such blocs can already be descried through the veil of globalization, which is bulging at the seams. Their borderlines remind one of the lineaments of past world powers. The age-old keys, thus, may open up the locks of new doors – doors into the future.
The globalist and neo-imperial processes are now intertwined to such an extent that it is often not easy to say which of the roles this or that State, or closed structure, play. Possibly, many political actors will have yet to choose between the two difficult options: to go into the future either with the globalists (thus, ceding their sovereignty), or with the partisans of re-emergent empires.
However, it is clear that, insofar as the two trends are in conflict, their implementation will entail the most fierce struggle for control over resources (regional wars, larger wars in Eurasia or Africa, and an all-out global war cannot be ruled out), mass movements of population (another ‘great transmigration of peoples’), and armed interventions into many countries, especially those with large unexplored resources (minerals, water, land). Obviously, the largest and richest of such territories is northern Eurasia, that is, our country.
A program targeting the appropriation of Eurasian resources was launched by supra-national (originally, Britain-based) corporate-oligarchic clubs as early as the 1880s. In 1991, after a hundred years’ war, the Western powers achieved, to a large extent, the goals, which were set in the late 19th century, and which were within an inch of success during the Civil War of 1918-21, but were thwarted by Stalin and those behind him in the late 1920s. However, the very fact that Russia, today, continues to exist as an officially sovereign State with a nuclear war arsenal (due to that, Russia is regarded by the US as one of its principal enemies) is an impediment for a full implementation of the schemes aimed at an all-around control over Russia’s resources and territories.
The Cold War the West had waged against the USSR did not discontinue in 1991. Its target is now Russia, against which the western powers struggled well before 1917, and continued to do so after 1917. Z. Brzezinski, in his interview to the Nouvel Observateur, made it cynically clear: throughout its history, the West had fought Russia (whatever her name might be) rather than Communism. It is no surprise, therefore, that after 1991, the western information-psychological war against Russia went on, and when the country’s leadership attempted to broaden its field of maneuver beyond the tight constraints inherited from the troubled years of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s ‘freedoms’, it was escalated sharply. This was especially palpable in the tightly synchronized reaction of leading western figures to Putin’s comeback to the office of President in 2011-12.
What is more, the outside forces and their local political assets will be trying to stir up unrest in the country to set into motion the tried-and-true (it was set in motion in Russia in 1917 and, again, in 1991) mechanism of “Crisis – War (civil) – Revolution/Turmoil”, or some other form of ‘controlled chaos’. (Americans, such as Stratfor’s G. Friedman, admit that destabilization is actually the aim of their policies, globally). By means of destabilization the rivals of Russia will be trying to ensure against possible re-emergence of a strong power in Eurasia and, above all, avert the resurgence of a powerful Russia.
More pressure will also be brought on Russia due to developments on these three fronts:
— The tightening conditions in the West amidst the growing system-wide crisis of capitalism;
— The exacerbation of economic tensions between China and the USA;
— Fomented threats of climatic and geophysical catastrophes.
The last trend demands special attention. An augury has been spread up in the transnational media that, in case of great climatic convulsions, northern Eurasia will be the planet’s only stable and resources-replete area. The augury itself is questionable, yet the contention has been openly or implicitly supported by leading western politicians (with the ‘fifth-column’ agents in Russia parroting them): It is unfair, they said, that the Russians hold such huge territories and resources, which they do not utilize. Ergo, those territories, such as Siberia and the Far East, must become a part of “global common weal”.
In effect, this amounts to a point-blank suggestion that transnational control be imposed over Russia’s territories, thus curtailing its sovereignty and dismembering it territorially. Revealingly, in November 2012, the Brookings Institution in cooperation with the London School of Economics brought out the ‘Project on Internal Displacement’, which they had worked on for 3 years. That is a scenario for mass population displacements following the threat of real or feigned climate change, which is only the tip of a much broader iceberg of related closed research.
The ongoing and oncoming repartition of the world is not only about the grab of resources and assets under a guise. What is at stake is the issue of human survival: who may survive, and who may not?
II. The World Crisis Affords Ample Opportunities for Russia
This crisis has a moral aspect to it, too. That becomes especially evident when long overdue economic problems are settled by the western transnational high-ups by resorting to the proverbial “continuation of politics by other means”. That was done prior to, and during World War I. In a similar vein, the 1940s saw the US corporations making tremendous profits out of World War II. Again, at the end of the ‘Cold war’, the breakup of the USSR and the Soviet bloc came amid an unparalleled expansion of the US-based transnational corporate interests, and enormous capital and brainpower outflows from the post-soviet countries. Similar developments occurred a year ago, with the unraveling of the “Arab Spring”, when the assets confiscated from an arbitrary selection of ‘dictators’ were not given back to the nations whose liberties the western politicians seemed to be so painfully anxious about.
From all this it follows that, today, very serious threats are impending for Russia. At the same time, hopefully, there emerge opportunities which were non-existent yesterday. The fact is that, at present, new lines are drawn between several rivaling global power groups due to radically exacerbated conflicts within the global power elite. Analysts tend to depict the changing situation in terms of confrontation between two major ‘clans’, or clusters of interests; the real world, however, is far more complicated than such bipolar picture. The thing is that members and allies of all the major ‘clans’/clusters are represented, mainly, in the same supranational structures of global governance and coordination (orchestration) and in the Federal Reserve System (FRS), albeit in various proportions. The acuteness of conflict arises not only from the ongoing world crisis but also from the fact that the FRS’s lease period for the printing of US currency expires at the end of 2012.
Otherwise put, what is taking shape globally in the 2010s is analogous in a sense to what existed at the turn of the 1920s/1930s. History, these days, repeats itself: Russia does need a new reindustrialization. Also, a large enough market, in this case, is required to build a viable powerful economy. At the same time, there open up now, for Russia, more opportunities to go into building a self-sustained macro-region in Eurasia.
It appears that some global-elite players no longer see a Russia-led integration in the ex-Soviet area as a totally unacceptable scenario. At any rate, until recently any feeble move in the RF leadership to turn aside from the road of economic ‘liberalism’ was crushed in the egg by those who control, in the West, the assets of Russia’s “offshore nobility”. At present, however, the globalizers’ codes of conduct become more varied allowing for our country’s development, and even for the building of a Russia-based Eurasian macro-region.
Russia may and must capitalize on the ongoing epochal shift involving changing rules of the game in the world market and politics. This being said, it should be stressed that taking advantage of divisions between certain global players is not the main thing. The window of opportunities, which could now be open for us, demands above all our own clear vision of a prospective transit onto a new technological mode, a dynamic development, and a life-saving Major Breakthrough. The system-wide crisis, including its technological, financial, psychological, and ideological dimensions, allows for a reconfiguration in the balance of powers: While the world’s leading powers get immobilized, those who have lagged behind may break forth into the lead. A determination to act ought to ensue from this clear vision of the situation, to be followed by appropriate system-based strategic work. This is pivotal.
In 1931, J. Stalin said that within a decade the USSR would have to race a distance that other countries had covered in a century, or else the country would be crumpled up. At the time, the Soviet Union did make an unparalleled spurt, which laid a basis for the war victory, further achievements in space exploration, and for acquiring a superpower status. At present, we can hardly have 10 years at hand – only 5 to 7 years at best; the ‘fifth column’ is now stronger than it was in the 1930s, and the globalizing West, more powerful, comparatively. These days, therefore, a mobilization spurt must be far more forceful and resourceful.
Actually, this amounts to a revolution from above. If this is not done, then another revolution from below will gather, of which outside forces will avail themselves most certainly: That was precisely how they destroyed the Tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet Russia, whose authorities missed the right moment to effect life-saving strategic change. Nevertheless, we live at the time when crises do have ripple effect. Strangely enough, it is the world crisis itself that offers, to Russia, an opportunity. Catching it, Russia may not only survive but win as well – while coming back to its millennium-old history.
Historically, political developments in the outside world were more than once favorable to our country: Owing to severe turmoil in Europe or the world, Russia was able to get out of its own historic pitfalls several times. To illustrate, one can go back to the aftermath of the 17th-century Time of Trouble: Europe, then, was torn apart by the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). Or let us recall the post-Peter-I period (when Russia, again, was very weak): the Europeans were immersed in the wars for various ‘successions’ (Spanish, Austrian); also, there was a similar period of respite in the aftermath of World War I. In similar historic circumstances, even a short period of respite would help the country to survive.
However, as is well-known, “luck is an inventing god” (A.S. Pushkin). This means that a crisis can help only the one who is prepared to meet it – prepared in terms of one’s intelligence and determination. The ‘intelligence’, in this case, refers to one’s awareness of the realities of the Russian and world crises, and of an urgent need to change the course. The ‘determination’ stands for one’s willingness to act accordingly, and — quashing the enemies, both domestic and alien ones – go fighting for the Truth of one’s own civilization, its precious memory, good name, and independence.
III. A Major Breakthrough Is a Vital Necessity
In modern and recent history, there appear only these four scenarios for the resolution of in-system societal crises.
Disintegration: Society disintegrates, with its in-system crisis going temporarily depthward to lower levels of societal fabric to come up to the surface later to be resolved along the lines of one of the three scenarios that follow.
Hostile Takeover: Direct or indirect occupation by an alien power; surrendering society is integrated in other power/powers’ strategic project/projects and subdued to alien strategic interests.
Revolution by Counter-Elite: Counter to the previously established project and power system there emerges a fundamentally new project and, accordingly, a new subject of action to implement it.
Mobilization-Based Breakthrough: Building-up and implementing a reflexive system-based strategy leading to a qualitative transformation of an entire system.
Now, if the current global conditions outside and in Russia are taken into account, then there remains only one option: a system-based strategy which should emerge and be implemented in the form of an emergency mobilization-driven project. As far as the country’s survival is concerned, there are no other ways out.
The mobilization project for Russia results from the following political reasons (factors):
— A major war is highly probable within the next 7 to 10 years;
— The existing system of corruption practices threatens the state, but can be dismantled in flexible and soft ways only within an mobilization project;
— It is only within a special mobilization project that a new effective system of state government can be molded, able to meet the critical challenges and threats of the prewar period;
— Absent a hard-framed mobilization project, the 20 trillion rubles allocated for rearmament programs in view of the looming war dangers would be misappropriated, to a large extent. Furthermore, even the best state-of-the art types of armaments may turn out to be wasted or useless in the absence of appropriate personnel recruitment programs, enhanced mobilization-driven conscience, focused improvement of the social relations and institutions involved, and restituting the duly level of professional training of specialists;
— It is precisely under successful mobilization projects that long-term national strategies of system-based modernization have been carried out effectively; there are virtually no examples to the contrary (due to Russia’s stature and caliber, any alternative scenarios of modernization should be seen as pure wishful thinking);
— A mobilization project promoting the introduction of innovations in the country’s real economy is a necessary prerequisite for a strategic breakthrough in a number of key sectors, and for entering the 6th wave of technological revolution;
— The current phase of the system-wide global crisis sees an exacerbated competition between specific national mobilization projects [4]
History shows that the world powers having mobilization projects that were successful in a period of drastic global-scene changes would become the cornerstones of a subsequently emergent global system. Thus, in the aftermath of World War II, which was the final stage of the 20th-century system-wide global crisis, there emerged a global system based precisely on the competing strategies of Stalin and Roosevelt, which, in turn, sprang from the implementation of two specific mobilization projects.
At present, very few actors on the world scene may have under their belt such one-of-a-kind background experience of mobilization emergency project-building as Russia has as the Soviet Union’s successor. This being said, it must be emphasized that in building and implementing a system-based mobilization project it is vitally important to avoid importing or assimilating in an uncritical way — from the past or from abroad – any previous mobilization methods.
When evaluating and applying various mobilization methods and mechanisms used previously or today the USSR, the USA, China, or other countries, we should bear in mind as well such factors as our resources-related advantages (thus a priority should be placed on the adoption of technologies in the extractive sector), limited labor supplies, specific cultural patterns (labor force redeployments will require enhanced incentives), etc.
The vitally imperative demand for a mobilization-based ‘Major Breakthrough’ can be validated from various standpoints. Thus, for one, it ensues from what is the bottom line of the present-day world crisis. It is becoming evident that further growth is no longer possible within the production methods of the 5th wave of technology revolution; so there is a demand for an advance onto the next (sixth) wave of technology revolution, based on a new cluster of technologies. Massive employment of such processes would enable substantial changes in the pattern of demand, giving rise to a new long-range paradigm of economic growth.
As happened at similar turning points in the past, i.e. in the previous periods of transit from one technological mode to another (in the 1930s, or in the 1970s), the bottleneck lies in the existing system of economic and political institutions, which are unprepared to launch the transition process.
The amounts of investment infusions needed to bring about such transition are huge. In Russia, the overall investment expenditures should be doubled, investments in R&D increased by a factor of 3 or 4, and in state-of-the-art technologies, 50-fold or so. That would tax the country’s powers to the utmost, demanding the goal-oriented concentration of resources for a period of 5 to 10 years.
The opportunity exists for the country’s advanced development, based on a rapid build-up of the innovative technological mode, whose annual worldwide-average rate of growth is now 35%, and, according to estimates, will be maintained for long in the years to come. In this perspective, however, the financial and economic system, which is now operating in Russia, is totally dysfunctional – both in the budgetary machinery and the credit sector. What is more, the assets created in the country’s economy are extensively moved out abroad, and used to fund western countries’ advances in technologies.
Therefore, to bring about the breakthrough in question, one should resort to a mobilizing function of the State. In the modern context, it is the State that has become the principal agent of development. The achievements of China, Korea, Japan, and the general ‘eastward shift’ in the trends of economic growth indicate the main lineaments of a development-friendly system of national economy management. To a large extent, these are based on the reception of our country’s past experience, both positive and negative, i.e. on a careful and critical assessment of the Soviet planned economy model and methods of the 1930s – 1950s. None of the countries, to be sure, operate a centrally planned economy with prices administered from top to bottom, yet the State there plays a pivotal role in ensuring a the development of more advanced technological modes of production.
However, no State could achieve much in fact if it did not profess an ideology which, in turn, should be in tune with the country’s specific history, civilization-specific codes, and cultural hallmarks.
IV. An Ideology for Mobilization Project
The mobilization project for contemporary Russia must pursue, in our view, the following strategic objectives:
· To make up and build up a sovereign strategic Agent of Action, the embodiment of a Russian civilization-specific code;
· To curtail as far as possible the Russian State’ dependence on outside powers and forces;
· To redirect the country’s economy onto the path of rapid development, with attaining a role of its own in the latest generation of technologies, and creating its own innovation market segments;
· To reindustrialize the post-soviet economy, relying on the economy’s state sector as the main driving force and a pivotal structure of a would-be Eurasian socioeconomic system [5];
· To reunite the now divided Russian people (Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia) for the benefit of common survival, and as a base for a wider Eurasian integration;
· To shape a multi-layer system of Eurasian integration at the following levels: (a) Eurasian economic macro-region; (b) Sovereign credit and financial center; (c) Common military and general security organization; (d) Supranational political union body; (e) Common cultural and language community; (f) Common area for technology, science, and education; (g) United multi-polar ideological space, based on the ideology of inter-national/inter-cultural accord and brotherhood.
Parallel to this, the Major Breakthrough strategy shall pursue the following aims:
§ National consent is to be attained as regards the proposed program of development;
§ Mobilization-conscious centralization of control and government functions in several key segments of activity;
