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Russia's President Vladimir Putin and China's President Xi JinpingPool / Getty

(LifeSiteNews) — In his memoir New Lies for Old (1984), Anatoliy Golitsyn, an important defector from Soviet Russia, described how, years before “Perestroika” appeared in the USSR, the communists had long-term plans to make an apparent change for freedom.

This would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the return of dissidents, an opening to the West, and a liberalization (modeled on Lenin’s “New Economic Policy”) that would bring funds and goodwill to Russia. As a KGB specialist in disinformation, Golitsyn warned against major deceptions, including a sham rift between the USSR and China, that had been precisely laid out by the Soviets to trick the West into believing Russia would be a reliable partner. Up to 95% of his precise predictions came true.

Using his inside knowledge, Golitsyn described in his 1995 The Perestroika Deception the use of glasnost (“openness”) and Perestroika (“restructuring”) as ploys for the “Second October Revolution” that would lead the world towards global collectivism.

This does not necessarily mean “communism” as we knew it in the 20th century. It means a totalitarian rule governing all aspects of life, public and private, where business corporations cooperate with, and obey, the State. That State enjoys an effective single party rule: think of present-day China.

This information was confirmed later by another dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, who showed how Perestroika, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, aimed at federalizing the European Union on the model of the former USSR. Perestroika gave varying degrees of freedom to citizens of Russia and the former USSR, and enough freedom to Eastern European nations formerly dominated by the USSR to turn westwards.

When I worked for the French internet news site Reinformation.tv, I researched widely on these themes. I was intrigued to discover that all the large global regions are setting up the kind of treaties and agreements that lead to supra-national power. They are using very similar, if not identical, instruments and “free trade agreements” that in practice give power to regional commissions and courts such as the European Commission. These include the African Union, several Latin American agreements, the Transatlantic Treaty, the Transpacific Treaty, and others.

Putin himself is piloting the Eurasian Economic Union which is very similar in structure to the European Union. It includes former Soviet satellite states, with Mongolia as a candidate state. The next step is coupling the Eurasian EU with China and Europe in the “Great Eurasian partnership.”  Of course, the New Silk Road (or Belt and Road Initiative) aimed at easing exportation and trade from China to Europe and other nations is part of this. 

In my opinion, this is a sure sign that — far from being a force or “bulwark” protecting sovereign states from globalist integration — Russia is on board with globalism and with moving towards the SDG goals (Sustainable Development Goals), which are profoundly collectivist by nature. This also shows sympathy with the “environmentalist” movement that is progressively weakening many Western states.

The New Green Order

As can be deduced from his book The Search for a New Beginning, Gorbachev was one of the first and most prominent promoters of this new “Green” order. Disarmament and “green” politics had already been used by the USSR to weaken their opponents. This seems to be continuing in Russia today. 

So-called “ecology” or environmentalism was, in fact, first launched and supported by the USSR, and it should be noted that it has spiritual objectives: it makes “Nature” and “Mother Earth” the divinities that must be honored in our “Common Home.” This is made very clear in The Search for a New Beginning, which reads like a plea for an errant new Genesis. The idea of a revised Genesis, breaking away from God and focused on a pantheistic ideal, is common in this school of thought.

Incidentally, environmentalism and the switch to so-called sustainable energy is what has made Germany profoundly dependent on Russian gas and petrol these last few years, creating ideal conditions for Russia to invade Ukraine.

In fact, neither China nor Russia is actually giving up on fossil energy, but they are prominent in discussions forcing Western countries to do so. 

Perhaps there are various versions of this globalism at work, or even working against each other. But we should not forget that such opposition is one of the pillars of Marxism-Leninism. Communist “dialectics” rely on it to move to new “syntheses”. Dialectics imply dividing people into two radically opposed camps, forcing them to choose one or the other – while striving either to control both sides, or to use them towards a certain end.

Putin is involving Russia in more than one globalism, and the facts confirm this. They include its support for a form of Islamic globalism the USSR helped to create. The overlap of Western finance in the contemporary Russian economy is also a sign that Putin is a part of the global picture. Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum identified Russia as a long-standing participant in Davos at the 2021 virtual meeting. Incidentally, Schwab has a bust of Lenin in his office, as can be seen in a recent television documentary about Davos partially funded by the European Union.

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB colonel 

Putin is a former KGB colonel who never rejected his communist past. Today many describe him as a conservative and even as a converted Orthodox Christian – but Orthodox Christianity in Russia has generally been subject to the nation’s rulers, and this was also true under the Soviet rule, when the Russian Orthodox hierarchy had links with the KGB.

Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He believes this because, as he said, “[t]ens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” But he was referring to a system that killed several hundred million people and plunged many millions more into misery under totalitarian control.

This phrase actually begins to explain why Putin is so intent on reconquering or regaining influence over former Soviet satellites. He has already used invasions, partnerships, and annexations (in Georgia, Chechnya, Transnistria…) and military and financial and other support to maintain or regain “socialist” allies, as in Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, and other countries. Russia maintains close links with Belarus (where Russian troops were stationed at the Ukrainian border before the invasion) and with Kazakhstan. That country’s president for 30 years, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was actually the first secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party in 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his recent successor Tokayev is strengthening those close ties: some even say his rise to power was engineered by the Russian FSB (Federal Security Service.)

Putin remains loyal to his former KGB (now FSB) friends, too. He headed the FSB from July 1998 to August 1999, moving on to the post of head of the Russian government in 1999 and president of Russia one year later.

He joined the FSB’s yearly celebrations at the sinister Lubyanka headquarters where so many thousands were tortured and killed in the USSR years. A more than life-size portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky – founder and head of the Cheka secret police from 1917 to 1926 – still hangs there. Bernard Antony, former EU member of parliament, testified to these facts in his documentary film 100 years of communist crimes. Dzerzhinsky’s memory was rehabilitated under Putin’s watch. His statue had been removed from in front of the Lubyanka when the Soviet Union fell, but by 1999, shortly after having been made Prime minister, Putin made a speech to his glory even though he is known as Bolshevism’s most vicious organizer of terror and torture. Dzerzhinsky ordered his men to make their victims “suffer as much as possible for as long as possible.”

In that official rehabilitation speech, Putin also glorified the memory of Yuri Andropov who headed the KGB for 19 years. In the FSB museum, “visionary” pronouncements made by Dzerzhinsky are displayed as proof of his “economic genius” and “fight against corruption.” Andropov is credited by official historians of the secret police as the true mastermind of the Perestroika. This could be a myth – or corroboration of  Golitsyn’s assertions in New Lies for Old

According to the Lebanese Catholic daily L’Orient-Le Jour, this “propaganda” was necessary order to justify the placing of FSB agents at top administrative and economic posts. Based on research by “Memorial” historian Nikita Petrov quoted by the daily, it appears that as soon as he rose to power, Putin concentrated police power into the hands of the FSB and used the “old boys” of the secret police to key posts: the former chief of the FSN press service headed the national television company, while a veteran military intelligence officer, Igor Sechin, still presides the board of directors of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company of which he was named chairman in 2004.

Nikita Petrov noted that suspicion towards all that is foreign is deeply embedded in Russian history: “The mentality of the FSB people is deeply influenced by tsarist and Soviet behavior. It is a closed group, closely associated with the power in whose stability have an immense interest. They have never stopped considering the West as an enemy.” According to Luke Harding, an expert on the Russian secret services, Moscow implements this ideology in western countries by supporting “extreme-right” movements.

In September 2014, the Russian Interior Ministry announced that an elite police unit, previously known as the Independent Operational Division, would be reverting to its former name of Dzerzhinsky Division. The decree was signed by Vladimir Putin.

Since 2002, efforts have been made to reinstall Dzerzhinsky’s statue in Moscow in front of the Lubyanka. Yuri Luzhkov, former mayor of the Russian capital, was the first to work in that direction, and an inconclusive e-poll was held last year, meaning that the principle of its return was accepted by the Russian authorities, even though this has not (yet) happened. But government prosecutors went on record saying that the dismantling of the monument to “Iron Felix” in 1991 was “illegal.”

Busts and plaques of Dzerzhinsky are present in other FSB headquarters, notably in Saint-Petersburg. A bust of the secret police chief was also erected in Crimea in 2014 shortly after the peninsula’s annexation by Russia, and another in Krasnodar, Southern Russia.

This would be the equivalent of raising monuments in Germany to the head of the Gestapo.

Putin also honors the memory of Stalin. Since 2015, he has repeatedly spoken positively about that mass murderer, justifying the 1939 non-aggression pact signed by Stalin with Nazi Germany and at the same time glorifying Stalin’s role in toppling Nazi Germany after 1941. The 70th anniversary of the end of World War II was marked in Russia by the glorification of Stalin.

Statues are still erected in Russia under Putin’s watch to the memory of the man who not only bloodily “purged” the Soviet Union but organized the genocide of the Ukraine through the “Holodomor,” the organized famine that killed 5 million Ukrainians who were compelled to give up all their grain and agricultural produce to Soviet Russia and punished, even by death, when scavenging fallen wheat. Given the Holodomor, Ukrainians can hardly see Russia as a “liberation army.” Indeed, it explains in part why Ukraine has turned to the West.

Dozens of statues of Stalin have been erected in Russia since 2010 at official military memorials, and therefore under the responsibility of the Russian government, and the “Little Father of the People” even appears in a mosaic in the Central Cathedral of the Armed Forces near Moscow.

In May of 2021, the first stone of a new museum and educational center “presenting a positive vision of Stalin” was laid in Bor, east of Moscow by a businessman, Aleksey Zorov. Such a construction could not take place without government approval.

In this honoring of Stalin, little mention is made of the Hitler-Stalin pact (technically the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939-1941) mentioned earlier, that allowed Russia to invade Poland and establish its 50-year influence over Central and Eastern Europe. Why evoke this in a study of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Simply because one of the main “reasons” Putin has given for the “special military operation” by Russia in Ukraine is an aim to “denazify” the former Soviet satellite.

It is contradictory indeed to denounce Nazism (and not even consistently, given the fact that Stalin is being whitewashed of his involvement with Nazi Germany) and to brush over the over one hundred million victims of communism, many of whom died under Stalin.

Putin’s efforts to anchor his acts in 20th century history, and his description of the fall of the Soviet Union as a major “catastrophe,” shed light on his present political and military actions. The facts show that he is intent on reconquering or regaining influence over former Soviet satellites. He has already used invasions, partnerships, annexations, and military and financial and other support to maintain or regain “socialist” allies, as in Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, and other countries.

Are we really to believe that Putin has broken with communism?

There are clues in the present. Indeed, a few anecdotes will help towards answering this question.

Take the case of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY, a UN approved NGO) . It was created in 1943 and received the support of Churchill and Stalin who wanted to see the youth of the world cooperate for “peace.” It was mainly supported by Soviet Russia since 1945. Like other communist “transmission belts” or “fronts” that promoted Soviet politics while pretending to be independent from the Russian Communist Party, it preached “disarmament, peace and “friendship among peoples.” The star guests of its regular international events included Yuri Gagarin, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro. Its members are “socialist” or overtly communist youth groups.

The WFDY has continued to receive Russian government support since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin went out of his way for the WFDY to hold its most recent world meeting to date in Russia, for the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The event was held in Sotchi, Russia, in 2017. Putin spoke at least twice at the meeting. Its main themes were interreligious friendship, sustainable development, UN goals, the memory of Lenin, hammer and sickle images, climate change, social justice, and “anti-fascism”.

Meanwhile, Putin recently banned “Memorial,” the small group doing research on the victims of Soviet communism. On a lighter note, Putin’s Russia also banned the screening of the wonderfully satirical – but profoundly accurate despite some historical errors – film about Stalin, The Death of Stalin. It depicts the internal social and political power struggle among the Council of Ministers following the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953. It was banned in Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan for mocking the countries’ past and making fun of their leaders, but for all its comedy, shows deep knowledge of the inside wheels of power in Soviet, Stalinist Russia and how Stalin, as a capricious tyrant, terrorized Russia but also served as a model for its future rulers.

Russia does not exemplify traditional family values and is deeply anti-Catholic

Does Russia represent traditional values opposed to the decadence of the liberal West? No.

First, there is its anti-Catholicism. The Catholic Church was banned from Soviet Russia and while it has been allowed to return after the fall of the Soviet Union, it represents only 1 percent of the population according to Russia Beyond, part of a government press agency. It could be much less. Many are related, it says, to Catholics deported from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine to Siberia in the Soviet era. There are only three Catholic churches in the muscovite megapolis (15.5 million inhabitants). And there are only two Catholic schools in the whole of Russia. A meeting of Pope Francis with the Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, in Cuba in 2016 was widely publicized, but Catholics in Russia remain marginalized and conversions from Orthodoxy to Catholicism are few and far between.

General statistics show how bad the situation is in Russia. The life expectancy at birth for baby boys is 67. There are 10.8 annual homicides per 100,000 inhabitants (as opposed to 5.4 in the US and 1.78 in France). The suicide rate in 2019 was 25.1 per 100,000 (against 13.8 in France and 16.1 in the US).

Meanwhile, only about 3% of Russians engage in regular religious practice. This percentage has not budged since the fall of the USSR in 1989. This is similar to post-COVID France but far behind the USA where, according to the latest Pew Center survey (2014), 35% of Americans attend religious services at least once a week (39% of Catholics, 58% of Evangelical Protestants, and 31% of Orthodox Christians).

In terms of Russia’s family values, there are only 6.3 weddings per 1,000 inhabitants, twice as many as in France but fewer than in the US. Russia also has a whopping divorce rate of 70% (against roughly 44 % in both the US and France).

Russian fertility rates were at a low of 1.16 child per woman of reproductive age in 1999. The rate went up to 1.75 under demographic support plans as Russia panicked over a dwindling population but has fallen back to 1.5 since 2019. As the population ages, the nation is shrinking. Russia lost nearly 1 million inhabitants from October 2020 to September 2021. It has fewer inhabitants than when Putin rose to power in 2000.

Russia’s October Revolution legalized abortion, free union, homosexuality and divorce in 1917. Today, abortion is free in Russia (100% state funded) and available under no conditions during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. It is legal up to 22 weeks in the case of rape and until birth for “medical reasons.” Doctors have only a limited right to conscientious objection.

It is true that some legal justifications for abortion between 12 and 22 weeks have been scrapped under Putin and that the absolute number of abortions has gone down (officially, 535,500 in Russia in 2020, against 4 million at the fall of the USSR). However, Russia’s abortion ratio was 419.7 for 1,000 live births in 2019 according to Johnstons’ Archive. This is almost double that of the US (240.2 for 1,000 live births in 2020). In Russia, “modern” contraception is on the rise, and sex education is compulsory in schools. 

Surrogate motherhood was made legal in 1993, officially in order to fight demographic decline, making Russia the first state ever to approve “womb-renting.” It was also in Russia that the first ever baby carried by a surrogate mother was born in 1995. Having one of the most liberal legislations regarding surrogacy, Russia soon welcomed foreign clients.

Jurisprudence soon made it possible for single people to use surrogacy, and the fact that there is no requirement for couples to be married to be allowed to hire a surrogate mother was also used by homosexuals to obtain babies in Russia. When the first COVID lockdown occurred, about 1,000 babies “gestated” for foreign clients were “blocked” in Russia between February and July 2020. A draft law banning foreigners from using Russian surrogates was presented last summer but has not yet been adopted.

Advertising homosexuality to minors is a delict in Russia, but you can find LGBT venues in all the major cities and their addresses, specialties, and opening hours are easily accessible online.

In fact, the pro-family and pro-life language coming out of Russia does not correspond with local laws and practice. The rhetoric is largely aimed at Western European and North American countries where pro-life, pro-family groups are large and influential enough for the operation to be worth the Russians’ while. Think of the World Congress of Families: a US coalition that promotes Christian traditional values internationally. At international meetings Russia is heavily represented.

For instance, its 2018 meeting was held in Moldova under the auspices of the pro-Russian president Igor Dodon. It has frequently been said that the WCF has (or had) ties with the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, who is close to Putin. His business partner, Aleksei Komov, is on the WCF’s board. And I personally witnessed how Komov and other members of this group of influence joined French and international pro-family meetings in Paris, explicitly doing their best to create “goodwill” for Putin and Russia.

Why? What interest can Russia have in creating links with pro-family movements in the West? The only answer to this is probably in dialectics: using contrary forces that destabilize. In the present situation, these efforts have also ensured that a non-negligeable part of public opinion in the West is favorable to Russia: in France, this includes the right-wing presidential candidates and a number of parliamentarians from mainstream parties.

Russian international media such as Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik are also revelatory. I have closely followed these outlets in several languages. They are state media created by the Kremlin to transmit a positive image of Russia and give a “different”, less one-sided view of the news, in contrast with the Western mainstream media.

I noticed that whatever the language of RT and Sputnik’s websites, the common denominator was firm support for groups and events that could destabilize local societies. In France, these media had a right-wing veneer, supporting “La Manif pour tous” movement against “gay marriage” and the “Yellow Vests,” for example. But the English version supported the Black Lives Matter riots. In Spanish, the Russian outlets’ rhetoric was left-wing and included glorification of Che Guevara. In some stories it even pushed LGBT “rights.”  

The gnostic religio-political philosophy of Alexander Dugin

By whose political philosophy is Vladimir Putin inspired? Many mainstream news sources have started looking at the figure of Alexander Dugin as one of the ideological pillars of Putin’s régime since Russia invaded Ukraine. His influence seems to me to have been very real, having been attentive to his work over the last five years. The founder of the National Bolshevik party after the fall of the USSR, Dugin appears to have been a close adviser of Putin before falling into so-called disgrace according to commentators. He was an official member of Putin’s trip to Turkey in 2004, and Putin’s emissary to Ankara in 2015, according to the Turkish press.

According to Galia Ackerman, an expert on the post-Soviet world who interviewed him in 2014, Dugin is truly Putin’s “ideologue.” A personal friend of former president Nursultan of Kazakhstan, Dugin is credited by the interviewer with having theorized the Eurasian Economic Union which is one of Putin battle-horses and of which Kazakhstan is a member.

Dugin theorized “the Fourth Political Theory,” “multipolarity,” with the Russian terrestrial “Heartland” as a central, virtuous power facing the corrupt, “thalassan,” “Atlantist” sea-power of North America and the UK, while at the same time creating a “Turkic-Slavic” Eurasian unity. Dugin believes chaos will bring about this redistribution of power. As a believer in gnostic spirituality (as a disciple of René Guénon) and in “anti-bourgeois revolution,” he is close to the Neo-Pagan right.

It is now said that Dugin is out of official favor with Putin, but in a regime that closely controls its opposition and does not hesitate to jail or assassinate undesired intellectuals and journalists, Dugin’s continued presence in influential online media as close to Putin as Katehon – of which more below – is a clear indication that his theories are considered acceptable to central powers. 

Dugin was present at a meeting of European so-called “far-right” leaders in May 2014. He is close to the Russian groups and individuals engaged in “seducing” pro-family movements in European countries, including the billionaire Putin insider Tsargrad TV founder, Konstantin Malofeev and his representative Aleksei Komov. Malofeev is the head of the supervisory board of the Katehon website  in which many of Dugin’s articles are published.

Katehon is clearly close to power circles in Russia. Apart from Malofeev who is close to Putin, its board includes Sergey Glazyev, a Russian politician and economist, member of the National Financial Council of the Bank of Russia. He was advisor to Putin on regional economic integration from 2012 to 2019.

Another member is Leonid Petrovich Reshetnikov a Soviet and Russian secret service agent, Lieutenant-General of Foreign Intelligence Service and director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (29 April 2009 – 4 January 2017).

Andrey Klimov is a “United Russia” Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation and a staunch supporter of Putin.

Lastly, Prince Zurab Chavchavdze of Georgia. He is not an admirer of the October Revolution but one of the reasons he gave in a recent interview does shed light on today’s rhetoric: “In losing its status as a worldwide bastion of Christianity, Russia lost its apocalyptic function as ‘the one that restraineth,’ thus loosing the hands of apostate powers and condemning the peoples of the world to untold sufferings during the course of the twentieth century, and continuing on to this day to sow everywhere enmity, division, and spiritual and moral corruption.” Here the (Russian) Orthodox contention that it is the one and only true Church of Christ tasked with saving the world discreetly appears.

It is more visible on the website itself. For instance, during my navigations on Katehon, I found articles in which it appears quite clearly that Russia could be using Fatima against the Catholic West in an attempt to discredit the Catholic Church and its papacy. The series, called “Dante’s prophesy of the fall of the Roman Catholic church,” is presented here. Its main idea is that the Catholic Church effectively apostasized with Vatican II, and that Moscow is the “Third Rome,” and Orthodoxy the only true Church. It reads the Fatima message in this light, conveniently omitting the fact that the Orthodox Church generally rejects the dogma of the Immaculate Conception which is at the heart of Marian apparitions of Lourdes and Fatima. Of course this anti-Catholic narrative is helped along by many sounds coming from Rome, but this does not change anything to the truth that we Roman Catholics profess.

On Katehon and elsewhere, Dugin has long campaigned for the invasion of Ukraine and frequently writes articles justifying its occupation or clamoring for the war to accelerate. These articles are published in Katehon on geopolitica.ru where he and his friends preach what could be called a “traditionalist freemasonry” which aims at returning to man’s pre-Christian ethnic and geographical roots.    

Here is a DeepL.com translation of one of Dugin’s recent warmongering articles on Katehon (otherwise available only in the Russian version, here), claiming that Russia needed to wage war in Ukraine or die:

Russia has entered the first line of world history and world politics.

As the special military operation unfolds, slowly but surely, we are beginning to pay more and more attention to the internal political situation in Russia itself, to the atmosphere and style of change. Many people are obviously disappointed because nothing even remotely resembling Operation Z is happening inside Russia. And we would like to see the forces that the people hate no less than the Ukrainian Nazis begin to fall to the cauldrons [Ed: That is, encircling troops]. Of course, we’re talking about the liberals, who, except for the most hardened and swiftly exiled, have generally maintained their positions in power and society.  In all emotional solidarity with the patriots outraged over this, I would like to express my own – more moderate – opinion.

Operation Z crossed the watershed so fundamentally that there can be no turning back. And it is irreversible. It’s hard to believe, but that’s exactly what it is. And nothing else really depends on the subjective intentions of the authorities. The Kremlin may sincerely believe that the old political-economic structure that took shape in the 1990s and is based on liberalism (and corruption) and the modern elite will continue to exist in the new conditions. Well, if only with a few cosmetic adjustments. But the seriousness of the steps already taken during the special military operation does not leave a single chance for this. The operation itself became inevitable precisely because without it the processes of purification and recovery of Russian society could not get past the critical point, constantly sliding back – back to the 1990s. Otherwise, we would have had other means of preventing the emergence of anti-Russia in Ukraine, which we are now working so hard to liquidate at such a high price.

Now this system, which was formed in the 90s, and which was changing with great difficulty every hour (no, every year) by teaspoonfuls, is in such a condition that it cannot withstand even a short period of time in its old state. In a direct collision with the West, the old Russia has no chance of surviving, let alone winning. This is why the need for a new Russia will make itself felt.

The existing system and its elites are not able to act in a direct and head-on confrontation with the West, which can no longer be undone or smoothed out. Now we can only win. There is nothing left to pull and nowhere to go back to. The bridges are blown up. Russia came to the first line of world history and world politics.

When put in this situation, members of the ruling elite – even the most liberal – will have to choose one of two things: either to liquidate themselves or urgently re-train as patriots. Moreover, the option of the previous compromise – that of the 6th column, which, while remaining liberal and in essence an agent of influence, grudgingly accepted Putin’s rules – will no longer work. Under the new conditions, it will very soon come out as direct sabotage and incompatibility with the position. In war, in moments of disaster, or even in prison, people are quick to reveal who they really are. Only the pampered and sneaky peaceful life of the sleepy philistine opens up boundless space for lies, mimicry, bashful corruption and long unnoticed betrayal. In the current extraordinary – by historical standards – circumstances, who is who will be instantly visible.

This is easy to check by experience: we give everyone, even the most worthless and failed members of the current elite, a real job, and we ask them to perform by wartime criteria (no, not by war-time criteria, but only a military operation, but that’s enough). If they fail, it does not even matter why or who ordered them to do it. They are simply dead men. And if they succeed, they are ours. They may have just become ours. Everything always happens the first time. In the same way, you can become Russian at any time, correcting your former non-Russianness (or lack of Russianness). Now we are all either Russian, and responsible for each other and our common victory, or … (and there’s nowhere to run …)

The authorities no longer have any room for maneuvering inside the country. None at all. Once it has begun what it has begun, it is impossible, by definition, to stop it. Thus, the compromise has irreversibly collapsed, and the living space for the 6th column [Ed. That is, Russia’s liberal, pro-Western elite] has disappeared.

In Gramsci’s language, we have gone beyond “Caesarism,” that is, beyond the pragmatic flirtation with the global capitalist system, into which we have tried in vain to integrate ourselves, but in terms of maintaining our sovereignty. Today it is clear: either liberal Western hegemony or a sovereign Russia — sovereign as a civilization, as a culture, as a subject. The only way we can respond to hegemony now is to counter-hegemony. And right now, it is a matter of total indifference that the Ministry of Culture has rejected an excellent project about traditional values. The state, society, the people and our warriors who are now giving their lives in the battle against hegemony need traditional values like air. Now they will not just be proposed but must be formulated and followed. For that is the condition of victory. One of several that have become not a wish, but a vital necessity.

Yes, we do not see, now, adequate movement and appropriate change within Russia. And yet, Operation Z has already changed everything fundamentally. And these changes will inevitably take place. The elite simply has no choice. [They must] join the counter-hegemony or disappear into historical non-existence.

The Russian idea is no longer something that we can freely choose (or discard). No one can exist without it. Although we can try, but I would not advise it; it is like cutting off access to oxygen when the body needs it.

Surely, the force of inertia is such that not everyone has realized what happened on February 22, 2022. That’s okay, they will soon. Anything further will not require any subjective decision by the authorities, everything will unfold automatically.

I see this crystal clear. If we have no other way, there is only one thing left for us to do: win. History has left us no chance for “either/or”.

– Alexander Dugin, March 21, 2022

There’s plenty more of this from Dugin, together with rhetoric about Putin waging war against the “Great Reset”, Western hegemony, and the West’s “Nazi” stooges in Ukraine. Don’t forget that Soviet and communist propaganda has always claimed to be fighting “Nazis:” that and the “extreme right” are keywords used against any kind of enemy, including pro-lifers and political movements that favor natural law, as the political history of these last fifty years abundantly shows in countries like France.

Also, don’t forget that Russia backs an ultimate “great reset” that involves world collectivism and a global spirituality that expresses itself in the “traditional religions” that are not acknowledged as true. There’s a lot of evidence showing that Putin is not the “anti-globalist” his right-wing supporters in the West think he is. A recent LifeSiteNews article analyzed Putin’s actions in this field, the most striking of which is this:

In February 2022, Putin and Xi Jinping released a joint statement vowing to “accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” calling for international cooperation in the “key areas “ of “poverty reduction, food security, vaccines and epidemics control, financing for development, climate change, sustainable development, including green development, industrialization, digital economy, and infrastructure connectivity.”

For more information about Putin’s alignment with the UN “Sustainable Development Goals” and other signs of his support, largely speaking for the New World Order, see the LifeSite’s March 18 article entitled Are Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin both globalists?

Back to Dugin. In April 2017, I followed a symposium in Paris called “the West against Europe.” (My report is here.) Its aim was to convince us that contemporary Russia has nothing to do with communists and everything to do with “Holy Russia.” While researching background for my report, I found this text by Dugin, expressing his spiritual ideas. Here’s an excerpt:

Mankind has always had two types of spirituality, two paths — “Right Hand Path” and “Left Hand Path”. The first one is characterized by the positive attitude to the surrounding world; the world is seen as harmony, equilibrium, good, peace. All the evil is viewed as a particular case, a deviation from the norm, something inessential, transient, without deep transcendental reasons.

Right-Hand Path is also called “The Way of Milk”. It doesn’t hurt a person, it preserves him from radical experience, withdraws from immersion into suffering, from the nightmare of life. This is a false path. It leads into a dream. The one going by it will reach nowhere…

The second path, the “Left Hand Path”, sees all in an inverted perspective. Not dairy tranquility, but black suffering; not silent calm, but torturous, fiery drama of spirited life. This is “A Path of Wine”. It is destructive, terrible, anger and violence reigns there. For the one who is going by this path, all reality is perceived as hell, as the ontological exile, as torture, as immersion into the heart of some inconceivable catastrophe originating from the heights of space.

If in the first path everything seems as good, in the second — as evil. This path is monstrously difficult, but only this path is true. It is easy to stumble on it, and it is even easier to perish. It guarantees nothing. It tempts nobody. But only this path is the true one. Who follows it — will find glory and immortality. Who will withstand — will conquer, will receive the award, which is higher than life.

The one going by the “Left Hand Path” knows, that one day the imprisonment will be over. The prison of substance will collapse, having transformed into a celestial city. The chain of the initiated passionately prepares a desired moment, the moment of the End, triumph of total liberation.

Some Catholic circles excuse or justify Putin’s war in Ukraine, exalting Russia as a bulwark against “Western” globalism. They seem to have been convinced by the idea that Moscow could truly be the κατέχον (2 Thess. 2:6-7) or “Katehon” as it is called in Russia: that is, the eschatological obstacle to the Antichrist.This idea has obviously been promoted by Russian sources, as noted earlier, and is even being taken up among Catholics who now seem prepared to believe that Moscow is truly the “Third Rome,” as mentioned above. 

This concept refers to the replacement of “Rome” by “Constantinople” as the true Church after the Orthodox schism (and by the way, Constantinople is designated as “Tsargrad” by Pan-Slavics who dream that Istanbul will one day become the capital of the Slavic Federation will create once it has captured the city). Constantinople, the “Second Rome,” in turn fell into decadence and has been replaced by Moscow as the “Third Rome,” according to this belief.

Some Catholics are adopting this despite major discrepancies between Catholic doctrine and Orthodox beliefs, not least of which is the rejection of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. They criticize Amoris Laetitia for allowing divorced and remarried couples to receive Communion, but seem to have forgotten that Orthodoxy (in various degrees) actually blesses second marriages of divorcees.

They also forget that is was the Roman Catholic Church that evangelized the world, and not Orthodoxy (let alone Russian Orthodoxy), and are ready to assert that the Virgin Mary prophesied that “the errors of communism” would be spread by the Soviet Union. Once it fell, they imply, Russia should be given a free hand to play its role as κατέχον. But in Fatima, Our Lady was careful never to mention the “Soviet Union” or “communism:” she used the word Russia (“Russia will spread her errors…”), and she certainly did so with a purpose.

As for Putin’s purported “conversion,” it would be wise to question its sincerity. It can hardly be argued that he is a believer whose faith is irrigating all his actions because of images showing him holding a candle at Orthodox services. If you recall the New Lies for Old set-up mentioned at the beginning of these reflections, you might be suspicious of such ostentatious piety. If former dignitaries of Soviet Russia are playing the long game to bring about a “Second October Revolution” worldwide, this would be but a small deception to make.

Is Putin on a “spiritual” mission to recreate the Russian/Soviet empire? If he is, the spirit behind it is not one of truth and peace.

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