GOP MAGA ex-president’s support of Russia over Ukraine is alarming. This alignment is not in the best interest of US national security interests. Those who study history know that if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin succeeds in invading and annexing Ukraine, like other authoritarian-Fascist leaders, he won’t stop there. He’ll continue to overrun countries that were part of Soviet Union before 1991which followed the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The countries Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania have become members of NATO and as per Wikipedia, NATO members agreed at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO in the future”
Voters who want to understand Vladimir Putin’s imperial longings of today which reflects the feelings of many Russian citizens must study the story of what happened to him on a dramatic night in East Germany a quarter of a century ago.
As per a March 27, 2015 BBC News analysis by Chris Bowlby, “Vladimir Putin’s formative German years:”
“It is 5 December 1989 in Dresden, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall has fallen. East German communism is dying on its feet, people power seems irresistible.”
“Crowds storm the Dresden headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who suddenly seem helpless.”
“Then a small group of demonstrators decides to head across the road, to a large house that is the local headquarters of the Soviet secret service, the KGB.”
“The guard on the gate immediately rushed back into the house,” recalls one of the group, Siegfried Dannath. But shortly afterwards “an officer emerged – quite small, agitated”.
“He said to our group, ‘Don’t try to force your way into this property. My comrades are armed, and they’re authorised to use their weapons in an emergency.'”
“That persuaded the group to withdraw.”
“But the KGB officer knew how dangerous the situation remained. He described later how he rang the headquarters of a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection.”
“The answer he received was a devastating, life-changing shock.”
“We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow,” the voice at the other end replied. “And Moscow is silent.”
“That phrase, “Moscow is silent” has haunted this man ever since. Defiant yet helpless as the 1989 revolution swept over him, he has now himself become “Moscow” – the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.”
“I think it’s the key to understanding Putin,” says his German biographer, Boris Reitschuster.”
“The experience taught him lessons he has never forgotten, gave him ideas for a model society, and shaped his ambitions for a powerful network and personal wealth.”
“Above all, it left him with a huge anxiety about the frailty of political elites, and how easily they can be overthrown by the people.”
Background:
“Putin had arrived in Dresden in the mid-1980s for his first foreign posting as a KGB agent.”
“The German Democratic Republic or GDR – a communist state created out of the Soviet-occupied zone of post-Nazi Germany – was a highly significant outpost of Moscow’s power, up close to Western Europe, full of Soviet military and spies.”
“Putin had wanted to join the KGB since he was a teenager, inspired by popular Soviet stories of secret service bravado in which, he recalled later, “One man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people.”
“Much of his work in Dresden was humdrum.”
“Among documents in the Stasi archives in Dresden is a letter from Putin asking for help from the Stasi boss with the installation of an informer’s phone.”
IMAGE SOURCE,BSTU“And there are details too of endless Soviet-East German social gatherings Putin attended, to celebrate ties between the 2 countries.”
“But if the spy work wasn’t that exciting, Putin and his young family could at least enjoy the East German good life.”
“Putin’s then wife, Ludmila, later recalled that life in the GDR was very different from life in the USSR. “The streets were clean. They would wash their windows once a week,” she said in an interview published in 2000.”
“The Putins lived in a special block of flats with KGB and Stasi families for neighbours, though Ludmila envied the fact that: “The GDR state security people got higher salaries than our guys, judging from how our German neighbours lived. Of course, we tried to economise and save up enough to buy a car.”
“East Germany enjoyed higher living standards than the Soviet Union and a former KGB colleague, Vladimir Usoltsev, describes Putin spending hours leafing through Western mail-order catalogues.”
“He also enjoyed the beer – securing a special weekly supply of the local brew, Radeberger – which left him looking rather less trim than he does today.”
“East Germany differed from the USSR in another way too – it had a number of separate political parties, even though it was still firmly under communist rule, or appeared to be.”
“He enjoyed very much this little paradise for him,” says Boris Reitschuster. East Germany, he says, “is his model of politics especially. He rebuilt some kind of East Germany in Russia now.”
“But in autumn 1989 this paradise became a kind of KGB hell. On the streets of Dresden, Putin observed people power emerging in extraordinary ways.”
IMAGE SOURCE,BSTU“In early October hundreds of East Germans who had claimed political asylum at the West German embassy in Prague were allowed to travel to the West in sealed trains. As they passed through Dresden, huge crowds tried to break through a security cordon to try to board the trains and make their own escape.”
“Wolfgang Berghofer, Dresden’s communist mayor at the time, says there was chaos as security forces began taking on almost the entire local population. Many assumed violence was inevitable.”
“A Soviet tank army was stationed in our city,” he says. “And its generals said to me clearly: ‘If we get the order from Moscow, the tanks will roll.'”
“After the Berlin Wall opened, on 9 November, the crowds became bolder everywhere – approaching the citadels of Stasi and KGB power in Dresden.”
“Vladimir Putin had doubtless assumed too that those senior Soviet officers – men he’d socialised with regularly – would send in the tanks.”
“But no, Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev “was silent”. The Red Army tanks wouldn’t be used. “Nobody lifted a finger to protect us.”
“He and his KGB colleagues frantically burned evidence of their intelligence work.”
“Two weeks later there was more trauma for Putin as West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived in the city. He made a speech that left German reunification looking inevitable, and East Germany doomed.”
“Kohl praised Gorbachev, the man in Moscow who’d refused to send in the tanks, and he used patriotic language – words like Vaterland, or fatherland – that had been largely taboo in Germany since the war. Now they prompted an ecstatic response.”
“It’s not known whether Putin was in that crowd – but as a KGB agent in Dresden he’d have known all about it.”
“The implosion of East Germany in the following months marked a huge rupture in his and his family’s life.”
“We had the horrible feeling that the country that had almost become our home would no longer exist,” said his wife Ludmila.
“My neighbour, who was my friend, cried for a week. It was the collapse of everything – their lives, their careers.”
“One of Putin’s key Stasi contacts, Maj Gen Horst Boehm – the man who had helped him install that precious telephone line for an informer – was humiliated by the demonstrating crowds and committed suicide in 1990.”
“This warning about what can happen when people power (democracy at work) becomes dominant was one Putin could now ponder on the long journey home.”
“He also arrived back to a country that had been transformed under Mikhail Gorbachev and was itself on the verge of collapse.”
“He found himself in a country that had changed in ways that he didn’t understand and didn’t want to accept,” as Gessen puts it.”
“His home city, Leningrad, was now becoming St Petersburg again. What would Putin do there?”
“Soon Putin realized he had acquired a much more valuable asset than a second-hand washing machine (from Dresden).”
“In Dresden he’d been part of a network of individuals who might have lost their Soviet roles but were well placed to prosper personally and politically in the new Russia.”
“In the Stasi archives in Dresden a picture survives of Putin during his Dresden years. He’s in a group of senior Soviet and East German military and security figures – a relatively junior figure, off to one side, but already networking among the elite.”
“Prof Karen Dawisha of Miami University, author of Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? says there are people he met in Dresden “who have then gone on… to be part of his inner core”.
“They include Sergey Chemezov, who for years headed Russia’s arms export agency and now runs a state programme supporting technology, and Nikolai Tokarev head of the state pipeline company, Transneft.”
“Putin-watchers believe events such as the uprising on Kiev’s Maidan Square, have revived bad memories – above all, of that night in Dresden in December 1989.”
“Now when you have crowds in Kiev in 2004, in Moscow in 2011 or in Kiev in 2013 and 2014, he remembers this time in Dresden,” says Boris Reitschuster. “And all these old fears come up inside him.”
“In 1989 he saw in Dresden how patriotic feeling, combined with a yearning for democracy, proved so much more powerful than communist ideology.”
“So, when wondering what Vladimir Putin will do next, it’s well worth remembering what he’s lived through already.”
Gronda Morin 
[…] Source: GOP MAGAs Support of Russia Over Ukraine Is Counter to US National Security Interests – Gronda Mor… […]
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dear Ned,
Thanks a million for your continued support and for reblogging this post.
Hugs, Gronda
LikeLike
Posted on FB
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dear Rugby 843,
I appreciate your continued support and for reposting this blog on Facebook.
Thanks a million, Gronda
LikeLike
Wonderful post, Gronda! A fascinating history lesson, and a prescient warning. I’m reblogging this a.m. Thank you! Hugs
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dear Jill,
Thanks for the reblog and for your support. Yes, this history explains Putin’s mindset. The sharing of historical context to current news is why I miss Rachel Maddow on MSNBC except for Monday nights. She’s great at this.
Hugs, Gronda
LikeLiked by 1 person
‘Twas my pleasure, dear Gronda! As always, you do great work! I’ve never watched Ms. Maddow’s show, though I have seen her elsewhere, on PBS and in an interview with Stephen Colbert not too long ago. Hugs
LikeLiked by 1 person
Gronda, well done. The affinity by the GOP for Putin is two-fold in my mind and it hinges on future demographics. Per former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, it scares Republicans that American whites will no longer be a majority in a couple of decades. So, they set forth a two-part strategy – recruit more non-whites and restrict democracy including voting.
They love Putin because he runs a lily-white country. Plus, he is an autocrat operating beneath a veneer of democracy. This is the goal of the GOP and its standard bearer. Claim every one cheats, institutions are complicit and newspapers lie, which makes it easier to cheat yourself. That is Trump in a nutshell.
Keith
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dear Keith,
Thanks for your comments.
You describe the GOP MAGA ex-president well. As he accuses Dems of cheating without evidence, he cheats and there’s a mountain of evidence proving this. He can’t conceive that his opposition won’t act like he does. For example, he was certain that POTUS Biden participated in business wrong doings because that’s the way he operates.
Now, he’s accusing Biden of cheating by using drugs before he debates. If I were POTUS Biden I’d accept Trump’s challenge to get drug tested because we know that the accuser wouldn’t pass.
Yes, he’s playing reality host to millions who’ll vote for him out of fear of peoples of color becoming a majority population but they’ve no idea that the one they should be most fearful of, is the one they’re supporting.
Hugs, Gronda
LikeLike
A timely reminder and comprehensive over view of Putin’s motivations. These should leave no doubt in people’s minds that Putin is not in favour of Democracy in government and relies on stark and strong-arm tactics which are designed simply to demonstrate the means justifies the end.
Like many who have had a successful rise to the top through tough and at times brutal means he becomes a prisoner of his own mindset and thus broods, suspicions ever in his mind.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dear Roger,
I’m afraid that the US GOP MAGA ex-president’s love for Putin makes him a clear and present danger to US national security interests. It’s very disheartening to see leaders like Putin and Prime Minister Netanyahu basing their policy strategies with the hope of a Trump win.
Putin has long been planning to invade Ukraine and all the other countries that were part of the Soviet Union before 1991. He’ll not be agreeing to anything while waiting on the possibility of a Trump win. Ditto for Netanyahu.
Hugs, Gronda
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hello Gronda.
The basic problem with all International Relations is that a nation or community will naturally always be drawn to putting its own well being first. In a more stable world this takes the form of diplomatic dancing around trade or some sort of co-operation. It is when the issues are extreme that the dangerous differences become obvious. What Netanyahu is doing is to be expected and with support from a substantial part of the population.
Putin earlier this year made that oddly logical remark that he would prefer Biden as he was more stable. However a USA in chaos which will result from another Trump presidency or another coup attempt would suit him.
And China looks on, calculating.
As you say Putin would have decided a while back Ukraine needed to be hauled back into the fold. If he succeeds the Baltic states would be next.
For me the most infuriatingly depressing factor is the naïve willingness of both factions on the Right and Left in the West to give The Kremlin Court a free pass.
Naivety is as dangerous as any terrorism.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dear Roger,
It’s a nightmare to have to live with the possibility that a convicted felon, wannabe dictator is even in the running to become the next US president with most Republican Party politicians supporting him.
There’s no way Putin prefers Biden. All the world’s dictators are licking their chops with the hope that the GOP MAGA ex-president who advertises that the White House will be open for business, squeaks out a win.
I’m afraid denialism has long been a part of the political scene. In this instance the ex-president has been openly declaring his intentions and yet, he’s still a viable presidential candidate.
Hugs, Gronda
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dear Gronda.
Somewhere in my childhhod I started to take an interest in the USA, starting with light culture such as TV, then moving into music, politics and into my adult years the USA as a whole. This held firm for most of my life, thinking that the USA was despite its own share of flaws and shortcomings (which nation doesn’t have them?) somehow in terms of society was making progress.
Then came to hysterical racist outraged at an African American getting into the Whitehouse and a vitriolic backlash based on nothing more than an urge to return to White Male Supremacy with a few token members of other races.
I have been very dispirited by the rise of this howling mob who choose to favour someone such as Putin solely because they would like to ‘his sort in charge in the USA’.
There is no doubt that over the past ten years a grim cloud has hung over America and it is hard to see that dispelled or forced into some receptacle, bottled up and locked away in a cellar without some very bitter struggles.
It would seem that a section of the population have confused ‘reality tv’ (a misnomer if ever there was one) with the true reality of making poor political choices. I don’t think they realise they cannot switch off that ‘tv’, walk away and do something else.
Take care
Roger
LikeLiked by 1 person