What About the Russians?

[Prominent pols and pundits now recall] the Sovietology era, when Russians were cast as evil, emotionless manipulators, cold as their icy homeland.

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For journalists like me who have backgrounds either working or living in Russia, the new Red Scare has been an ongoing freakout.

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Many of us were early Putin critics who now find ourselves in the awkward position of having to try to argue Americans off the ledge, or at least off the path to war, when it comes to dealing with the Putin regime.

There's a lot of history that's being glossed over in the rush to restore Russia to an archenemy role.

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After Boris Yeltsin won re-election in 1996, Time magazine ran a gloating cover story – YANKS TO THE RESCUE! – about three American advisers sent to help the pickling autocrat Yeltsin devise campaign strategy. Picture Putin sending envoys to work out of the White House to help coordinate Trump's re-election campaign, and you can imagine how this played in Russia.

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The Yeltsin regime, which incidentally also saw wide-scale assassinations of journalists and other human rights abuses, was widely understood to be a pseudo-puppet state, beholden to the West.

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Essentially, Yeltsin agreed to privatize the jewels of Russian industry into the hands of a few insiders – we call them oligarchs now – in return for their overwhelming financial and media support in the '96 race against surging communist Gennady Zyuganov. The likes of Vladimir Potanin, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were gifted huge fortunes before bankrolling Yeltsin's re-election bid.

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This may have prevented a backslide into communism, but a by-product was accelerating a descent into gangsterism and oligarchy.

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Former Yeltsin administration chief Sergei Filatov denied that the three advisers did anything of value for Yeltsin. But even if Filatov is right, American interference throughout the Nineties was extensive.

  Matt Taibbi

Continue reading. There's lots more there.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.