Operation Dragon by R. James Woolsey

Author:R. James Woolsey [Woolsey, R. James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2020-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

A KGB COUP IN THE KREMLIN

With the abolition of the Communist Party and the opening of the borders, Russia has been transformed in complex ways. The barriers the Kremlin spent seventy years erecting between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, as well as between individual Russians, might have come down. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had a unique opportunity to cast off that peculiarly Russian instrument of power, its political police, the Okhrana, created by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. The Russian people proved as yet not ready to seize that opportunity.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, our old KGB counterparts must have been chortling in their graves when KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin installed himself as Russia’s president at the end of a quiet KGB coup. Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected president in the history of Russia, announced his forced resignation before a gaily decorated Christmas tree and a blue, red, and white Russian flag with a golden eagle. “I understand that I must do it and that Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new intelligent, strong, energetic people.”21

Yeltsin then announced that he had signed a decree “on the execution of the powers of the Russian president,” stating that under Article 92 Section 3 of the Russian Constitution, the function of the Russian president shall be performed by Vladimir Putin starting from December 31, 1999.22 Putin then signed another decree pardoning Yeltsin, who had been accused of massive bribery schemes, “for any possible misdeeds” and granting him “total immunity” from being prosecuted (or even searched and questioned) for “any and all” actions committed while in office. Putin also gave Yeltsin a lifetime pension and a state dacha.23

Quid pro quo, most of the Western media noted. In reality, it was a quiet KGB palace coup.

Now it was back to the future. In keeping with Stalinist traditions, Russia’s schoolbooks released in September 2000 said of the unknown Putin: “This is your president, the one responsible for everything in this country…. He is not afraid of anything. He flies in fighter planes, skis down mountains and goes where there is fighting to stop wars. And all the other presidents of other countries meet with him and respect him very much.” On December 31, 2000, the anniversary of his coup, Putin resurrected Stalin’s national anthem with new lyrics by Sergey Mikhalkov, then eight-seven, who had been Stalin’s official lyricist.

Yelena Bonner, the widow of Nobel Peace Prize–winner Andrey Sakharov, called the revived Soviet anthem a “profanation of history.” Putin disagreed: “We have overcome the differences between the past and the present.”24 In his own way, Putin was right. During the Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. Now the KGB—rechristened FSB—is the state.

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