Has Vladimir Putin Stolen $200 Billion from the Russian People

A friend gave me a copy of the 1971 movie "Nicholas and Alexandra" for Christmas since he knows that I am a history nerd with an emphasis in Russian history.  The tax away from the film is that Nicholas and Alexandra were inept and totally over their heads in ruling Russia as autocrats.  That said, they tried to do what they thought best for Russia and, compared to their Bolshevik successors ruled with a kind and gentle hand.  Indeed, Wikipedia gives a taste of what Bolshevik rule brought:

During the Red Terror, the Cheka carried out at least 250,000 summary executions of "enemies of the people" with estimates reaching above a million.Some 300,000–500,000 Cossacks were killed or deported during de-cossackization, out of a population of around three million. . . . . The industrial production value descended to one seventh of the value of 1913, and agriculture to one third.

Now, Russia has another would be Tsar: Vladimir Putin.  While Putin hasn't inflicted the mass murders of his secret police predecessors, Putin is robing the Russian people on a scale that would have shocked the old imperial establishment.  One hedge fund manager estimates that Putin has stolen $200 billion from the Russian people.   Business Insider has details.  Here are some highlights:

Hedge fund manager Bill Browder, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, estimates Russian President Vladimir Putin's wealth at $200 billion — which would make him by far the richest man in the world.

When asked to estimate his net worth by Fareed Zakaria of CNN, Browder said: "I believe that it is $200 billion.

"After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on — all that money is in property, Swiss bank accounts, shares, [and] hedge funds managed for Putin and his cronies."

Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, became Russian prime minister in August 1999 and president in May 2000.   Browder notes that the "first eight or 10 years about reign over Russia was about stealing as much money that he could."

Putin consolidated power while making his friends and himself absurdly rich from state coffers.

"Soon after taking over, [Putin] made it clear that he intended to remove the Yeltsin-era elite and to put a new elite in its place—mostly from St. Petersburg, equally corrupt, but loyal exclusively to him," Anne Applebaum in wrote recently in The New York Review of Books.

A full transcript of Browder's statements can be found here.  The Russian people need to overthrow Putin and seize the stolen wealth as soon as possible.

Religious Based Ignorance Once Again Thwarts Russia's Future

Before the Russian Revolutions of 1917 - first the February Revolution and then the Bolshevik Revolution in October/November - one of the mainstays to the retardation of Russia's modernization and movement towards a constitutional monarchy was the Russian Orthodox Church.  Now, while modern developed countries around the world are rejecting anti-gay bigotry and discrimination in favor of modern scientific knowledge on sexual orientation, Vladimir Putin - much like his Tsarist predecessors - is listening to the idiocy and ignorance of the revived Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy and pushing an anti-gay and anti-modernity agenda.  Putin is stupidly focused on the short term goal of hanging on to power at any cost with no thought or concern for the long term damage done or the lives ruined by the state sponsored bigotry that he has endorsed.  

In their quest to save the Russian monarchy, Nicholas II and Alexandra unwittingly set the stage for the revolutions of 1917 and the ultimate fall of Russia to the Bolsheviks and the ensuing civil war between the Whites and the Reds which damaged Russia so severely that economic output did not return to 1913 levels until the eve of World War II.  In the intervening years, millions of Russians perished.   By embracing the far right and the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin is repeating the same mistakes and making Russia a laughing stock in the process.  Now, as the Moscow Times reports, efforts are in motion to establish state sponsored "ex-gay" programs to turn Russian gays straight.  Here are highlights on this lastest idiocy from Russia:

Degtyaryov said that the Duma is also considering a program to provide anonymous and voluntary counseling for gay and bisexual people who want to be heterosexual.

"Many want to return to a normal life, to become heterosexual like 95 to 99 percent of our citizens," Degtyaryov said.

He also said that failure to forbid homosexuals from donating blood is a type of "sabotage."

LGBT activist Nikolai Alexeyev said that  . . . . There will be a lot of noise, and zero implementation of the law. Our politicians are so detached from reality that they no longer have any connection to the people. They just imagine gay people everywhere," Alexeyev told reporters.

Health Ministry spokesman Oleg Salagai said that the ministry will carefully consider the initiative.

Putin has apparently learned nothing from history.  It is ironic that he is embracing the same forces of reactionaries that helped destroy the Romanov dynasty.  One can only hope that his bigotry and willingness to make allegiances with forces seeking to oppose modernity will bring him a similar fate - all the more so because, unlike his imperial predecessors, he should no better because of all the available modern knowledge. 

Russian Court Rehabilitates Last Czar

The history major in me is coming out and I found this story from the New York Times interesting. Having read published diaries of both Nicholas and Alexandra, they obviously were not cut out for the position of absolute monarchs, but were they truly bad people? I do not believe so. They were simply way over their heads, a situation which was aggravated by Alexis' hemophilia which was kept secret and only caused their actions to look all the more bizarre at times. Obviously, their children ere innocents - like so many thousands who died under the brutality of the Bolsheviks and Soviets. Here are some highlights:

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MOSCOW — Russia’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of full rehabilitation for Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, and his family, officially recognizing the executed royals as victims of Soviet repression 90 years after their deaths. The ruling brings Russia closer than ever to public reconciliation with the execution, one of the most significant events in a bloody revolutionary period that led to more than 70 years of Soviet rule.

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Nicholas II and the monarchy were reviled in official Soviet history. But since the fall of the Soviet Union they have increasingly come to be seen as important, if not positive, elements of Russia’s past. . . . . “This decision shows the supremacy of law and the victory of justice over evil and tyranny," said German Lukyanov, the lawyer for Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, a descendant of the czar who first filed a suit for the rehabilitation of her family three years ago.

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In July 1918, under Lenin’s orders, the czar, his wife, Aleksandra, and their children, Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia and the 13-year-old heir to the throne, Aleksei, were shot to death in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains in central Russia. The killings by the fledgling Bolshevik government were meant to solidify its hold on power in the midst of an intensifying civil war.

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Other members of the royal family had been rehabilitated previously. In 1999, four Romanov princes killed by the Bolsheviks, including the son of Aleksandr II — the Russian czar blown up by revolutionaries in 1881 — were found innocent of criminal wrong-doing.

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The Russian Orthodox Church, which canonized the Romanovs as martyrs in 2000 and was itself subject to massive persecution by the Bolsheviks, welcomed Wednesday’s decision. "It is an important step to remove from our history the heavy burden of this crime against the czar’s family," said Father Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the Church.