Russia and American elections, now featuring radical republicans as co-stars

[Anastasis 23699]

1 hour ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

You got to admit that small window of time with Gorbachev and drunk Yeltsin wasn't too bad.

You mean the timeframe that western financial interests were literally raping the resources and economy of the country and establishing an environment that led directly to the emergence of Russian oligarchs and Putin. Good fucking times they were man. 

[Fudge Nuggets 19407]

1 minute ago, Anastasis said:

You mean the timeframe that western financial interests were literally raping the resources and economy of the country and establishing an environment that led directly to the emergence of Russian oligarchs and Putin. Good fucking times they were man. 

For us, yes.  For them, not so much.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Better the Western interests than the Russians mafia which ended up getting it all anyway.

[Anastasis 23699]

That fine, but let's not act all fucking naive when we talk about "exploitation" and "good faith" relationships. 

[sidis 9990]

 

7 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

For us, yes.  For them, not so much. 

that tends to end well...

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Better the Western interests than the Russians mafia which ended up getting it all anyway.

cause-effect, action-reaction.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

1 minute ago, Anastasis said:

That fine, but let's not act all fucking naive when we talk about "exploitation" and "good faith" relationships. 

Our government was on good faith terms.  

It’s not our government’s responsibility to keep our private capitalists from being private capitalists. 

Wouldn’t that be government overreach if they did? 

[sidis 9990]

2 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Our government was on good faith terms.  

It’s not our government’s responsibility to keep our private capitalists from being private capitalists. 

Wouldn’t that be government overreach if they did?  

bruh...

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/foreign-corrupt-practices-act

[Fudge Nuggets 19407]

3 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Our government was on good faith terms.  

It’s not our government’s responsibility to keep our private capitalists from being private capitalists. 

Wouldn’t that be government overreach if they did? 

Free markets!!!!!

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

6 minutes ago, sidis said:

bruh...

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/foreign-corrupt-practices-act

We might be talking about two different things.

I was thinking more along the lines of the Bill Browder types that found extremely lucrative investment opportunities in the former Soviet Union only to get squeezed out by the corrupt Russian government/mafia. 

[Anastasis 23699]

8 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Our government was on good faith terms.  

It’s not our government’s responsibility to keep our private capitalists from being private capitalists. 

Wouldn’t that be government overreach if they did? 

You really have no idea what you are talking about on this one.

Article from the Nation in 1998.

https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/

After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.

The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais’s drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he “may be the most despised man in Russia.”

Essential to the implementation of Chubais’s policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the prestige of Harvard’s name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D. officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.’s role in Russian privatization, and its suspected misuse of taxpayers’ funds.

At the recent U.S.-Russian Investment Symposium at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, made what might have seemed to many an impolite reference to his hosts. After castigating Chubais and his monetarist policies, Luzhkov, according to a report of the event, “singled out Harvard for the harm inflicted on the Russian economy by its advisers, who encouraged Chubais’s misguided approach to privatization and monetarism.” Luzhkov was referring to H.I.I.D. Chubais, who was delegated vast powers over the economy by Boris Yeltsin, was ousted in Yeltsin’s March purge, but in May he was given an immensely lucrative post as head of Unified Energy System, the country’s electricity monopoly. Some of the main actors with Harvard’s Russia project have yet to face a reckoning, but this may change if a current investigation by the U.S. government results in prosecutions.

The activities of H.I.I.D. in Russia provide some cautionary lessons on abuse of trust by supposedly disinterested foreign advisers, on U.S. arrogance and on the entire policy of support for a single Russian group of so-called reformers. The H.I.I.D. story is a familiar one in the ongoing saga of U.S. foreign policy disasters created by those said to be our “best and brightest.”

Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of “shock therapy” to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock–not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent–than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside. When Gaidar came under seige, Sachs wrote a memo to one of Gaidar’s principal opponents, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, then the Russian parliament, offering advice and to help arrange Western aid and contacts in the U.S. Congress.

Enter Anatoly Chubais, a smooth, 42-year-old English-speaking would-be capitalist who became Yeltsin’s economic czar. Chubais, committed to “radical reform,” vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to H.I.I.D., which was founded in 1974 to assist countries with social and economic reform.

 

H.I.I.D. had supporters high in the Administration. One was Lawrence Summers, himself a former Harvard economics professor, whom Clinton named Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993. Summers, now Deputy Treasury Secretary, had longstanding ties to the principals of Harvard’s project in Russia and its later project in Ukraine.

Summers hired a Harvard Ph.D., David Lipton (who had been vice president of Jeffrey D. Sachs and Associates, a consulting firm), to be Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. After Summers was promoted to Deputy Secretary, Lipton moved into Summers’s old job, assuming “broad responsibility” for all aspects of international economic policy development. Lipton co-wrote numerous papers with Sachs and served with him on consulting missions in Poland and Russia. “Jeff and David always came [to Russia] together,” said a Russian representative at the International Monetary Fund. “They were like an inseparable couple.” Sachs, who was named director of H.I.I.D. in 1995, lobbied for and received U.S.A.I.D. grants for the institute to work in Ukraine in 1996 and 1997.

Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and already a tenured professor of economics at Harvard in his early 30s, became director of H.I.I.D.’s Russia project. Shleifer was also a protégé of Summers, with whom he received at least one foundation grant. Summers wrote a promotional blurb for Privatizing Russia (a 1995 book co-written by Shleifer and subsidized by H.I.I.D.) declaring that “the authors did remarkable things in Russia, and now they have written a remarkable book.”

Another Harvard player was a former World Bank consultant named Jonathan Hay, a Rhodes scholar who had attended Moscow’s Pushkin Institute for Russian Language. In 1991, while still at Harvard Law School, he had become a senior legal adviser to the G.K.I., the Russian state’s new privatization committee; the following year he was made H.I.I.D.’s general director in Moscow. The youthful Hay assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece.

H.I.I.D.’s first awards from U.S.A.I.D. for work in Russia came in 1992, during the Bush Administration. Over the next four years, with the endorsement of the Clinton Administration, the institute would be awarded $57.7 million–all but $17.4 million without competitive bidding. For example, in June 1994 Administration officials signed a waiver that enabled H.I.I.D. to receive $20 million for its Russian legal reform program. Approving such a large sum as a noncompetitive “amendment” to a much smaller award (the institute’s original 1992 award was $2.1 million) was highly unusual, as was the citation of “foreign policy” considerations as the reason for the waiver. Nonetheless, the waiver was endorsed by five U.S. government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the National Security Council, two of the leading agencies formulating U.S. aid policy toward Russia. In addition to the millions it received directly, H.I.I.D. helped steer and coordinate some $300 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants to other contractors, such as the Big Six accounting firms and the giant Burson-Marsteller P.R. firm.

A s Yeltsin’s Russian government took over Soviet assets in late 1991 and early 1992, several privatization schemes were floated. The one the Supreme Soviet passed in 1992 was structured to prevent corruption, but the program Chubais eventually carried out instead encouraged the accumulation of property in a few hands and opened the door to widespread corruption. It was so controversial that Chubais ultimately had to rely largely on Yeltsin’s presidential decrees, not parliamentary approval, for implementation. Many U.S. officials embraced this dictatorial modus operandi, and Jonathan Hay and his associates drafted many of the decrees. As U.S.A.I.D.’s Walter Coles, an early supporter of Chubais’s privatization program, put it, “If we needed a decree, Chubais didn’t have to go through the bureaucracy.”

With help from his H.I.I.D. advisers and other Westerners, Chubais and his cronies set up a network of aid-funded “private” organizations that enabled them to bypass legitimate government agencies and circumvent the new parliament of the Russian Federation, the Duma. Through this network, two of Chubais’s associates, Maxim Boycko (who co-wrote Privatizing Russiawith Shleifer) and Dmitry Vasiliev, oversaw almost a third of a billion dollars in aid money and millions more in loans from international financial institutions.

Much of this largesse flowed through the Moscow-based Russian Privatization Center (R.P.C.). Founded in 1992 under the direction of Chubais, who was chairman of its board even while head of the G.K.I., and Boycko, who was C.E.O. for most of its existence, the R.P.C. was legally a private, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization. In fact, it was established by another Yeltsin decree and helped carry out government policy on inflation and other macroeconomic issues and also negotiated loans with international financial institutions. H.I.I.D. was a founder of the R.P.C., and Andrei Shleifer served on the board of directors. Its other members were recruited by Chubais, according to Ira Lieberman, a senior manager in the private-sector development department of the World Bank who helped design the R.P.C. With H.I.I.D.’s help, the R.P.C. received some $45 million from U.S.A.I.D. and millions from the European Union, individual European governments, Japan and other countries, as well as loans from the World Bank ($59 million) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development ($43 million), which must be repaid by the Russian people. One result of this funding was the enrichment, political and financial, of Chubais and his allies.

 

H.I.I.D. helped create several more aid-funded institutions. One was the Federal Commission on Securities, a rough equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.). It too was established by presidential decree, and it was run by Chubais protégé Dmitry Vasiliev. The commission had very limited enforcement powers and funding, but U.S.A.I.D. supplied the cash through two Harvard-created institutions run by Hay, Vasiliev and other members of the Harvard-Chubais coterie.

One of these was the Institute for Law-Based Economy, funded by both the World Bank and U.S.A.I.D. This institute, set up to help develop a legal and regulatory framework for markets, evolved to encompass drafting decrees for the Russian government; it got nearly $20 million from U.S.A.I.D. Last August, the Russian directors of I.L.B.E. were caught removing $500,000 worth of U.S. office equipment from the organization’s Moscow office; the equipment was returned only after weeks of U.S. pressure. When auditors from U.S.A.I.D.’s inspector general’s office sought records and documents regarding I.L.B.E. operations, the organization refused to turn them over.

The device of setting up private organizations backed by the power of the Yeltsin government and maintaining close ties to H.I.I.D. was a way of insuring deniability. Shleifer, Hay and other Harvard principals, all U.S. citizens, were “Russian” when convenient. Hay, for example, served alternately and sometimes simultaneously as aid contractor, manager of other contractors and representative of the Russian government. If Western donors were attacked for funding controversial privatization practices of the state, the donors could claim they were funding “private” organizations, even if these organizations were controlled or strongly influenced by key state officials. If the Chubais circle came under fire for misuse of funds, they could claim that Americans made the decisions. Foreign donors could insist that the Russians acted on their own.

Against the backdrop of Russia’s Klondike capitalism, which they were helping create and Chubais and his team were supposedly regulating, the H.I.I.D. advisers exploited their intimate ties with Chubais and the government and were allegedly able to conduct business activities for their own enrichment. According to sources close to the U.S. government’s investigation, Hay used his influence, as well as U.S.A.I.D.-financed resources, to help his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hebert, set up a mutual fund, Pallada Asset Management, in Russia. Pallada became the first mutual fund to be licensed by Vasiliev’s Federal Commission on Securities. Vasiliev approved Pallada ahead of Credit Suisse First Boston and Pioneer First Voucher, much larger and more established financial institutions.

After Pallada was set up, Hebert, Hay, Shleifer and Vasiliev looked for ways to continue their activities as aid funds dwindled. Using I.L.B.E. resources and funding, they established a private consulting firm with taxpayer money. One of the firm’s first clients was Shleifer’s wife, Nancy Zimmerman, who operated a Boston-based hedge fund that traded heavily in Russian bonds. According to Russian registration documents, Zimmerman’s company set up a Russian firm with Sergei Shishkin, the I.L.B.E. chief, as general director. Corporate documents on file in Moscow showed that the address and phone number of the company and the I.L.B.E. were the same.

Then there is the First Russian Specialized Depository, which holds the records and assets of mutual fund investors. This institution, funded by a World Bank loan, also worked to the benefit of Hay, Vasiliev, Hebert and another associate, Julia Zagachin. According to sources close to the U.S. government’s investigation, Zagachin, an American married to a Russian, was selected to run the depository even though she lacked the required capital. Ostensibly, there was to be total separation between the depository and any mutual fund using its services. But the selection of Zagachin defied this tenet of open markets: Pallada and the depository were run by people with ties to each other through H.I.I.D. Thus the very people who were supposed to be the trustees of the system not only undercut the aid program’s stated goal of building independent institutions but replicated the Soviet practice of skimming assets to benefit the nomenklatura.

Anne Williamson, a journalist who specializes in Soviet and Russian affairs, details these and other conflicts of interest between H.I.I.D.’s advisers and their supposed clients–the Russian people–in her forthcoming book, How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy. For example, in 1995, in Chubais-organized insider auctions of prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares, the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university’s endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros were the only foreign entities allowed to participate. H.M.C. and Soros became significant shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia’s second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose reserves exceed those of Mobil. H.M.C. and Soros also invested in Russia’s high-yielding, I.M.F.-subsidized domestic bond market.

Even more dubious, according to Williamson, was Soros’s July 1997 purchase of 24 percent of Sviazinvest, the telecommunications giant, in partnership with Uneximbank’s Vladimir Potanin. It was later learned that shortly before this purchase Soros had tided over Yeltsin’s government with a backdoor loan of hundreds of millions of dollars while the government was awaiting proceeds of a Eurobond issue; the loan now appears to have been used by Uneximbank to purchase Norilsk Nickel in August 1997. According to Williamson, the U.S. assistance program in Russia was rife with such conflicts of interest involving H.I.I.D. advisers and their U.S.A.I.D.-funded Chubais allies, H.M.C. managers, favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates working in Russia’s nascent markets.

 

Despite exposure of this corruption in the Russian media (and, far more hesitantly, in the U.S. media), the H.I.I.D.-Chubais clique remained until recently the major instrument of U.S. economic aid policy to Russia. It even used the high-level Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, which helped orchestrate the cooperation of U.S.-Russian oil deals and the Mir space station. The commission’s now-defunct Capital Markets Forum was chaired on the Russian side by Chubais and Vasiliev, and on the U.S. side by S.E.C. chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Andrei Shleifer was named special coordinator to all four of the Capital Markets Forum’s working subgroups. Hebert, Hay’s girlfriend, served on two of the subgroups, as did the C.E.O.s of Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other powerful Wall Street investment houses. When The Nation contacted the S.E.C. for information about Capital Markets, we were told to call Shleifer for comment. Shleifer, who is under investigation by U.S.A.I.D.’s inspector general for misuse of funds, declined to be interviewed for this article. A U.S. Treasury spokesman said Shleifer and Hebert were appointed to Capital Markets by the Chubais group–specifically, according to other sources, by Dmitry Vasiliev.

In fact, H.I.I.D. projects were never adequately monitored by U.S.A.I.D. In 1996, a General Accounting Office report described U.S.A.I.D.’s management and oversight of H.I.I.D. as “lax.” In early 1997, U.S.A.I.D.’s inspector general received incriminating documents about H.I.I.D.’s activities in Russia and began investigating. In May Shleifer and Hay lost their projects when the agency canceled most of the $14 million still earmarked for H.I.I.D., citing evidence that the two managers were engaged in activities for “private gain.” The men had allegedly used their positions to profit from investments in the Russian securities markets and other private enterprises. According to sources close to the U.S. investigation, while advising the Russian government on capital markets, for example, Hay and his father allegedly used inside information to invest in Russian government bonds. Hay and Shleifer may ultimately face criminal and/or civil prosecution. Shleifer remains a tenured professor at Harvard, and Hay continues to work with members of the Chubais clique in Russia. Sachs, who has stated he never invests in countries where he advises and who is not implicated in the current U.S. government investigation, remains head of H.I.I.D. After Yeltsin’s Cabinet shakeup in March, Chubais was moved to a new position of prominence. His role in Russia’s political-economic affairs had been tarnished by reports of personal enrichment. Two examples:

§ In February 1996, Chubais’s Foundation for the Protection of Private Property received a five-year, $2.9 million unsecured interest-free loan. According to the pro-Yeltsin, pro-reform Izvestia, Stolichny Bank, an institution that enjoys lines of credit from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank, made the loan in return for a small percentage of the Sibneft oil company when it was sold at auction, and for later control of one of the state’s largest banks. Chubais defended himself by saying such practices were common in the West, but failed to provide any reasonable explanation for some $300,000 in 1996 income not accounted for by his government salary.

§ During Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential campaign, security officials apprehended two close associates of Chubais as they were walking out of a main government building with a box containing more than $500,000 in cash for Yeltsin’s campaign. According to tapes of a later meeting recorded by a member of one of Russia’s security services, Chubais and his cronies strategized about burying evidence of any illegal transaction, while publicly claiming that any allegations of chicanery were the work of political enemies. A protracted, lackadaisical investigation began but was eventually dropped–more evidence of Chubais’s remarkable resilience. He remained valuable to Yeltsin largely because of his perceived ability to deal with the West, where many still regard him as a symbol of Russian reform.

During the five years that the Chubais clique presided over Western economic aid and policy in Russia, they did enormous harm. By unconditionally backing Chubais and his associates, the Harvard operatives, their U.S. government patrons and Western donors may have reinforced the new post-Soviet oligarchical system. Shleifer acknowledged as much in Privatizing Russia, the book he wrote with Chubais crony Maxim Boycko, who with his patron would later be caught in another financial indiscretion involving taking a “veiled bribe” in the form of advances on a book on the history of Russian privatization. “Aid can change the political equilibrium,” they said, “by explicitly helping free-market reformers to defeat their opponents.”

Richard Morningstar, U.S. aid coordinator for the former Soviet Union, stands by this approach: “If we hadn’t been there to provide funding to Chubais, could we have won the battle to carry out privatization? Probably not. When you’re talking about a few hundred million dollars, you’re not going to change the country, but you can provide targeted assistance to help Chubais.” In early 1996, after he was temporarily removed from high office by Yeltsin because he represented unpopular economic policies, H.I.I.D. came to his rescue by placing him on its U.S.A.I.D.-funded payroll, a show of loyalty that former U.S.A.I.D. assistant administrator Thomas Dine says he supported. Western policy-makers like Morningstar and Dine have depicted Chubais as a selfless visionary battling reactionary forces. In the spring of 1997, Summers called him and his associates a “dream team.” With few exceptions, the U.S. mainstream media have promulgated this view.

United States policy toward Russia requires a full-scale Congressional investigation. The General Accounting Office did investigate H.I.I.D.’s Russian and Ukrainian projects in 1996, but the findings were largely suppressed by the agency’s timid management. The audit team concluded, for example, that the U.S. government exercised “favoritism” toward Harvard, but this conclusion and the supporting documentation were removed from the final report. Last fall Congress asked the G.A.O. to look into Eastern European aid programs and Shleifer’s role in the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. Such questions need to be answered, but any serious inquiry must go beyond individual corruption and examine how U.S. policy, using tens of millions in taxpayer dollars, helped deform democracy and economic reform in Russia and helped create a fat-cat oligarchy run amok.

 

 

Janine R. WedelJanine R. Wedel is an anthropologist and associate research professor and research fellow at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at The George Washington University, and the author of Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998(St. Martin's).

[Fudge Nuggets 19407]

When I was working over there I asked one of my friends how it came to pass that all these former state-owned companies just one day came under control of a small group of people.  He told me that right after the collapse of the Soviet Union no one other than the crooks had fuck all, but everyone was given what amounts to stock certificates in those companies.  Right after the certificates were handed out you had all sorts of shady dudes hanging out in parking lots, parks, busy street corners, basically anywhere people gather offering them basically pennies on the dollar for the certificates.

In his words, "Well, you can't eat a certificate but if I sell all of them I can buy a few loaves of bread... so there you go."  I have no idea how the overall value of the companies was appraised, nor how the distribution of certificates was determined; but basically the oligarchs / mafia took advantage of the people.  Go figure.

But sure, it was all Exxon's fault.

[sidis 9990]

Just now, Hugo Stiglitz said:

We might be talking about two different things.

I was thinking more along the lines of the Bill Browder types that found extremely lucrative investment opportunities in the former Soviet Union only to get squeezed out by the corrupt Russian government/mafia. 

did you read browder's book?  on top of the obvious mistreatment of browder and his lawyers, did you see the type of corrupt practices that were engaged in across the board by all the vultures (regardless of nationality) and how these oligarchs came to be?

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

1 minute ago, Anastasis said:

You really have no idea what you are talking about on this one.

Article from the Nation in 1998.

https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/

We did a shitty job of transitioning the Russian economy and incorporating them into a successful democracy. 

Mistakes were made.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

1 minute ago, sidis said:

did you read browder's book?  on top of the obvious mistreatment of browder and his lawyers, did you see the type of corrupt practices that were engaged in across the board by all the vultures (regardless of nationality) and how these oligarchs came to be?

Yes. 

[Anastasis 23699]

Just now, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Mistakes were made.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Your sniper trolling is always amusing but the idea that the United States/West was responsible for all of Russia’s post Soviet problems is very, well, Russian.

[Fudge Nuggets 19407]

1 minute ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Your sniper trolling is always amusing but the idea that the United States/West was responsible for all of Russia’s post Soviet problems is very, well, Russian.

Yes, the Russian mafia was completely innocent in all the doings.

[Anastasis 23699]

2 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Your sniper trolling is always amusing but the idea that the United States/West was responsible for all of Russia’s post Soviet problems is very, well, Russian.

I never said anything like that.  You have no idea what you are talking about unless it involves your autistic fixation on active measures.  For somebody who prides themselves on connecting the dots, the fact that you cannot connect the clear dots that lead directly from the White House, to US interference in the Russian democratic process, to the rise of Vladimir Putin is what is really amusing. Maybe if somebody started a twitter thread about it, you could run with it. 

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Why don’t you try to explain in your own words what I’m missing instead of hurling shit? 

Edited February 1, 2019 by Hugo Stiglitz

[F250 29176]

1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

You mean the timeframe that western financial interests were literally raping the resources and economy of the country and establishing an environment that led directly to the emergence of Russian oligarchs and Putin. Good fucking times they were man. 

Excellent point. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russians opened their country to the West. The West then stepped in and not only fucked Russia but turned them out to start turning tricks. We justified all of their previous distrust and it ended up justifying Putin's actions after he took power.

 

[JimmyJames 12271]

3 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

We did a shitty job of transitioning the Russian economy and incorporating them into a successful democracy. 

Mistakes were made.

Yep. Russia is kind of like the foreign policy version of our private prison system misadventures. Combine inefficiencies of government with the corruption of capitalism and you get stew full of shit. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Pretty good twitter spat thread between Glenn Greenwald (possible clown) and Caroline Orr (behavioral scientist).

 

[Bama Chick 28596]

Greenwald has really gone off the deep end here lately.

He seems like someone with something personal to hide in regards to the whole Russia thing.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

40 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

Greenwald has really gone off the deep end here lately.

He seems like someone with something personal to hide in regards to the whole Russia thing.

Greenwald’s worldview has always seen the United States government as the evil empire and whether consciously or not he supports efforts to bring it down.  This also happens to be the worldview of the Kremlin so it’s no surprise he often gets labeled a Russian propagandist when he echoes their talking points constantly.

He has also been consistently wrong when it comes to the Russia investigation and the interference in the 2016 election.

It makes little difference at this point if he’s actually being paid by the Russian Federation.

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

We could learn a thing or two from Estonia 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Dear US citizens, avoid Moscow for a while. 

MOSCOW — Michael Calvey, one of the most prominent U.S. investors based in Russia, faced fraud allegations in a Moscow courtroom on Friday in a case that could raise fresh doubts about the country’s ability to attract foreign capital.

Calvey, who was taken into custody, denied the fraud allegations in court and said he was ready to cooperate in the police investigation, according to Russian news agencies.

His private equity firm, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, said that Russian authorities had detained him and three other employees as a result of a shareholder dispute at a bank, Orient Express, in which the firm holds a stake. 

 A Moscow court notice showed Calvey had been detained on suspicion of “fraud carried out by an organized group.” Such a crime is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, according to the Russian criminal code.

It wasn’t clear whether political motivations also played a role in Calvey’s detention. He wasn’t known as a vocal critic of the government. In a sign of the significance of the case, two of the most prominent figures in Russian finance — the heads of the country’s sovereign-wealth fund and of its biggest bank — both spoke out in support of the U.S. investor on Friday. 

Calvey, who is 51, grew up in Oklahoma and founded Baring Vostok in Moscow in 1994. The company says it has invested $2.8 billion from North American pension funds and others into companies across the former Soviet Union. Calvey kept investing in Russia even as sanctions, official corruption and the sputtering economy scared away many Western companies.

[retread 2951]

 

[bolverk 30236]

34 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Dear US citizens, avoid Moscow for a while. 

MOSCOW — Michael Calvey, one of the most prominent U.S. investors based in Russia, faced fraud allegations in a Moscow courtroom on Friday in a case that could raise fresh doubts about the country’s ability to attract foreign capital.

Calvey, who was taken into custody, denied the fraud allegations in court and said he was ready to cooperate in the police investigation, according to Russian news agencies.

His private equity firm, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, said that Russian authorities had detained him and three other employees as a result of a shareholder dispute at a bank, Orient Express, in which the firm holds a stake. 

 A Moscow court notice showed Calvey had been detained on suspicion of “fraud carried out by an organized group.” Such a crime is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, according to the Russian criminal code.

It wasn’t clear whether political motivations also played a role in Calvey’s detention. He wasn’t known as a vocal critic of the government. In a sign of the significance of the case, two of the most prominent figures in Russian finance — the heads of the country’s sovereign-wealth fund and of its biggest bank — both spoke out in support of the U.S. investor on Friday. 

Calvey, who is 51, grew up in Oklahoma and founded Baring Vostok in Moscow in 1994. The company says it has invested $2.8 billion from North American pension funds and others into companies across the former Soviet Union. Calvey kept investing in Russia even as sanctions, official corruption and the sputtering economy scared away many Western companies.

1

Board Members Memberships

Non-Executive Director

Volga Gas

Independent Director

Gp Investimentos Ltda.

2006-Present

Non-Executive Director

Volga Gas plc

2017-Present

Non-Executive Director

Nostrum Oil & Gas PLC

Education

Bachelor's Degree 1989

University of Oklahoma

MS

The London School of Economics and Political Science

https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=123485&privcapId=689493

Sucks for him but it wouldn't be the first time a Sooner got in trouble for not knowing when to quit dealing with shady folks.

[GHOSTUSER 361]

Nm

Edited February 16, 2019 by Iconoclast Texan

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Who is advocating for democratic socialism?  

I just want my fellow Americans to not live as slaves to the banks because of student loans and medical bills.

[sidis 9990]

https://www.wired.com/story/roman-dobrokhotov-insider-russia-gru-bellingcat/

figure some here would enjoy reading this.

[retread 2951]

^ Here's the text

Quote

THE RUSSIAN SLEUTH WHO OUTS MOSCOW'S ELITE HACKERS AND ASSASSINS

 TEN YEARS AGO, Roman Dobrokhotov sat down in the front row of a Kremlin auditorium, surrounded by a polite audience of journalists and dignitaries attending a speech by Russia’s then-president Dmitri Medvedev. Medvedev was only a few minutes into his address on the importance of the country's constitution—which he had just amended to allow Vladimir Putinto serve as president again—when Dobrokhotov stood up, turned around, and addressed the audience himself.

“Why listen to him? He’s broken all our human rights and freedoms,” Dobrokhotov said in a loud, clear voice. “And he tries to tell us about the constitution!”

Dobrokhotov still remembers the faces of the people around him. “They tried to pretend they couldn’t hear, but the acoustics were actually very good,” he says. In a typical scene of Kremlin doublethink, Medvedev told the crowd that the young heckler should have the right to speak, even as security guards covered Dobrokhotov's mouth and hauled him out of the room.

Today, Dobrokhotov has found a better megaphone. And the 35-year-old Muscovite is using it to broadcast something that’s much harder for the Kremlin to ignore: the secrets of one of its most aggressive and dangerous spy agencies.

Over the past two weeks, the investigative news site Dobrokhotov runs, the Insider, has published a series of exposés on the alleged third agent of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU involved in last year’s attempted nerve-agent assassination of Russian defector Sergei Skripal. The attack resulted in one person’s death and the hospitalization of three others, including Skripal and his daughter.

The Insider's reporting, published in collaboration with researchers at the website Bellingcat, has shown that the accused man, Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev, appears to be linked to a separate attempted killing with a nerve agent poison in Bulgaria in 2015. Their stories exposed yet another alleged GRU assassin's identity, hinted at the wider extent of Russia's use of chemical weapons in assassination efforts, and established an apparent new link between Sergeev and a private mercenary company known as the Wagner Group.

"To do that work from Russia takes a remarkable amount of courage."

JOHN HULTQUIST, FIREEYE

These are just the latest in an ongoing series of reve­lations the Insider and Bellingcat have made about the GRU, an agency now believed to be respon­sible for everything from the Skripal assassination attempt to the hacking and leaking operation targeting US and French elections.

A significant portion of what the world knows about the GRU's involvement in those recent scandals comes from the work of Dobrokhotov's site and its Bellingcat partners. The Insider has revealed the GRU's role in hacking the emails of then presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in France, ahead of the country's 2017 election—even naming the specific GRU unit responsible—months before an indictment by US special counsel Robert Mueller exposed that same unit's hacking efforts in the US election. Dobrokhotov has helped to identify two Russian military officers allegedly involved in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine, which killed all 298 civilians on board. And most recently, it has worked with Bellingcat to investigate Skripal's would-be assassins, identifying two of the three alleged GRU killers by name last year before completing the trifecta last week.

The GRU's Gadfly

Dobrokhotov says he never exactly made a decision to target the GRU, which for decades has remained even more opaque than fellow Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB or SVR. "We just start to investigate one story, and it turns out to be a GRU officer. Then we investigate a totally different story, and it seems to be a GRU officer again," Dobrokhotov says in English that he has honed with hours of watching Stephen Colbert. "They're just so active, and they make so many mistakes, that they pop up in every investigation."

But while most of the international credit for that string of GRU revelations has gone to Bellingcat, Dobrokhotov and his staff have taken on higher stakes. Unlike Bellingcat's researchers, they're Russian and live in close proximity to the very spies and assassins they're exposing. That has allowed them to run down some details of their investigations that Bellingcat never could have otherwise. It also puts them at far greater risk of arrest—or worse—than their international collaborators.

"I'm astonished by their ability. They're extraordinary investigators," says John Hultquist, a former State Department staffer and current researcher at security firm FireEye who has focused for years on GRU hacking. "To do that work from Russia takes a remarkable amount of courage."

Or as Thomas Rid, a cyberconflict-focused professor at Johns Hopkins puts it: "These stories mean more in Russian. The consequences of stepping on someone's toes in Russia can be far graver than they are here."

But when I met up with Dobrokhotov last November in a central Moscow bar—the closest thing the Insider's dozen-person staff has to an office—he told me he has no misgivings about taking on this particular adversary. "The choice is very simple. if you want to be a journalist in Russia, you either choose the real topics, the most important topics, or you’re not a real journalist," he said. "If you write about traffic jams, that’s fine in Switzerland or Sweden. But in Russia you have to work on these topics, because they can change society."

From Dissident to Detective

Long before becoming a journalist, Dobrokhotov spent his adulthood fighting the Russian government's secrecy, censorship, and corruption. He took part in his first protest as a first-year college student, after the Kremlin's takeover of the independent television station NTV in the year 2000. Later he founded the dissident group known as We—created in opposition to the pro-Putin youth group Nashi, which translates to Ours. He also helped organize events like a circle of thousands of people dressed in white, holding hands around the entire center of Moscow in 2012. In a commentary on free speech, he led a group of protesters with white tape over their mouths, standing outside the Russian government building known as the White House with blank signs. Police spent 10 confused minutes trying to decide whether he was for or against Putin, Dobrokhotov recalls, and then arrested him anyway—one of more than 100 times he says he's been detained.

"If he'd been born in 1880, he'd be one of those guys throwing bombs at the czar," says Aric Toler, one of Dobrokhotov's collaborators at Bellingcat.

By 2013, Dobrokhotov had finished his PhD and felt he had outgrown the youth movement. So he made the switch to full-time journalism. "There are many people who can organize big protests," he explains. "As an investigative journalist, I don't have that many competitors."

Before his career as an investigative journalist, Dobrokhotov was a leader in Moscow's anti-Putin youth movement.

MAX AVDEEV

The Insider made some initial ripples with corruption exposés on Medvedev, state oil firm Gazprom, and dozens of high-ranking Kremlin officials. But its first scoop to get the attention of the West came in 2017, when Dobrokhotov started looking into the hacking of En Marche, the political party of French president Emmanuel Macron, whose emails were stolen and leaked just ahead of France's election.

France's own cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, had declared no trace of Russian hackers targeting the campaign. But one of the hacked emails contained metadata that identified a user who had at some point touched the documents: Georgy Roshka. Dobrokhotov and his staff found that same name listed as a representative of the technology firm Eureca at a conference in 2014, but Eureca denied Roshka was an employee. So the Insider staff painstakingly contacted dozens of the conference's other participants until they obtained its attendee list from the previous year—and found Roshka plainly listed as a member of GRU Unit #26165, based at 20 Komsomolsky Prospekt in central Moscow. It would be nine more months before the same unit number and address was revealed in Mueller's indictment of GRU hackers meddling in the US election.

Chasing Assassins

Dobrokhotov's collaboration with Bellingcat began last year, when he responded to a photo on Twitter posted by Bulgarian Bellingcat researcher Christo Grozev, showing what appeared to be a GRU officer in Montenegro. They began sharing information and months later would together identify three GRU agents they believed to be involved in an attempted coup against Montenegro's pro-NATO government.

Around the same time, Ukrainian intelligence and the Dutch government publicly released intercepted radio conversations among the pro-Russian soldiers suspected of shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine. Bellingcat and the Insider believed two Russian officers might be involved, based on partial names in the recordings. Dobrokhotov called them up, posing first as a friendly journalist and then as a survey taker. Bellingcat and the Insider then forensically matched the voice recordings from those calls to identify two GRU officers, Nikolai Tkachev and Oleg Ivannikov.

“We would not have been able to do this work remotely,” says Bellingcat’s Grozev, who says he now speaks with Dobrokhotov daily to brainstorm leads and investigative ideas. “And few Russian journalists have the courage to call up a top GRU colonel responsible for hundreds of deaths abroad and pose as a pollster. But this is the kind of work Roman is amazingly good at.”

Just a few months later, in September, British police released CCTV photos and pseudonyms of two Russian men believed to have poisoned GRU defector Sergei Skripal with the Novichok nerve agent in the UK town of Salisbury. Bellingcat and the Insider began combing through leaked databases of Russian passports, flight manifests, and car registrations, some of which Grozev had obtained from underground sources. They worked from a hypothesis based on a pattern they'd found in GRU cover stories: The men's last names were often fake while their names and patronymics—Russian middle names based on a father's given name—were real.

Amazingly, they say they were able to find matches for both men in their documents and learned what they believe are their full identities: Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga. (The same techniques would allow them to identify Sergeev, the alleged third agent involved in the operation, months later.) With only a night before publication, Dobrokhotov even sent an Insider staffer to Mishkin's tiny home village in Western Siberia. A family acquaintance there proudly identified Mishkin and matched him with a picture taken from Russian television, where the two killers had given an interview under their pseudonyms, claiming to be mere tourists in Salisbury.

Three alleged GRU agents the Insider and Bellingcat have accused of involvement in the attempted Skripal assassination: (from left) Anatoliy Chepiga, Denis Sergeev, and Alexander Mishkin.

COURTESY OF THE INSIDER

When Dutch authorities released the names of four more GRU agents caught attempting to hack into the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, Bellingcat and the Insider were able to cross-reference those names against their list of leaked car registrations. The additional names confirmed that more than a thousand GRU agents appeared to have registered their real names to GRU building addresses—a massive, embarrassing leak of the agency's secrets that Dobrokhotov says has already aided their investigations and will likely serve as a powerful tool in future ones.

"It's like reading a detective story," says Dobrokhotov, who notes that he was a fan of Sherlock Holmes growing up. "With one link, you pull out the whole chain."

Russian Roulette

But as Dobrokhotov's team continues their serial GRU revelations, the question looms: Can they continue to expose the agency's alleged spies and killers without becoming a target themselves? Dobrokhotov notes that he could easily be arrested for exposing state secrets at any time, but he says he's so far faced no reprisals. The Russian government has instead focused its criticism on Bellingcat, accusing it of serving as a tool of foreign intelligence agencies. (Dobrokhotov was, however, barred from attending a press conference Putin held in December—perhaps not a surprise given his 2008 Medvedev disruption.)

“Every time he’s meeting me or anyone else in Europe, often on the day we publish a story, we try to convince him to take a few days, to not go back to Russia, to let the dust settle. He never does,” says Bellingcat’s Grozev. “On a scale from one to one hundred, he’s a hundred in terms of his bravery and willingness to risk everything to get the story out.”

Despite the steadily growing number of reporters murdered for taking on Russia's ruling class, Dobrokhotov argues that he's unlikely to be killed or arrested for his work on the GRU. It's more often the oligarchs and lower-level politicians in Putin's orbit, he says, who give the order to kill a journalist. Then again, he points out minutes later, the Insider has published investigations about those people too. "We don't have any red lines we won't cross," Dobrokhotov says. "We haven't gotten a warning, but these people don’t warn. They just react without warning."

Dobrokhotov says he takes precautions. He encrypts his communications, talks in person whenever possible, avoids walking empty streets, and works under the assumption that his cell phone is tracked and his home is bugged. "These measures aren’t enough to stop possible killers. But it makes it impossible to do it without leaving any traces," he explains. "If you’re always in the light, society will know who did it, and that's very politically costly."

Regardless, he says he refuses to let the ever-present risk of arrest or even death change the Insider's coverage. "If I changed my job and started doing something else, then I would have lost without even having a real fight," he says.

When he considers his odds, he compares them to those of his grandfathers, both of whom served in World War II. In that war, Dobrohkotov notes, men on the front lines had a dismal chance of survival—around 40 percent of all Russian men who were 18 at the start of the war were killed. One of his grandfathers was even underage at the time, Dobrohkotov says, but volunteered to fight anyway. "I've just risked being imprisoned and a very small chance of being killed. So why would I be scared?" he asks. "It's the same question of fighting against fascism now as it was then. This is about the freedom of the country, the future of our children."

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[F250 29176]

What's the deal with Louise Mensch? She caused a kerfuffle on my Twitter timeline this morning. She started blocking everyone from a infosec group to which I belong after falsely accusing people of being Russian enablers and cybercriminals. Which is hilarious because the people she was accusing are former NSA, DOD, US Cyber Command employees.

I saw this happen a little over a year ago when another Russian espionage "expert" was floating theories about how the Alpha Bank, Spectrum and Trump Org were exchanging voter data. The explanations were asinine and when a number of people pointed out the technical improbability of the theory, they were labeled as Russian enablers.

I suspect a number of Twitter resistance folks are actually Russians attempting to make the resistance look bat shit crazy or this particular hobby attracts the crazies.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

1 hour ago, F250 said:

What's the deal with Louise Mensch? 

She’s nuts

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

1 hour ago, F250 said:

I suspect a number of Twitter resistance folks are actually Russians attempting to make the resistance look bat shit crazy or this particular hobby attracts the crazies.

Yes, the old controlled opposition play. No doubt this has been going on.

[suddenly shaggy 929]

Mensch is controlled opposition and no one should pay any attention to what she says. She's both a wolf in sheep's clothing and insane. 

Here she is with Milo in July 2016. 

 

Here she is praising the Trump team, including Betsy Devos and the Mooch.

"Whilst I'm not completely on the Trump train, I've bought my ticket and I'm waiting on the platform.  

 

Another video, go to 11:15 if it doesn't autoload. "Although I am not ready to get on board the Trump train, let me put it this way, I'm on board Trump Force One. I'm on board Trump Force One..."

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

She was also all in on Brexit.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Woland 755]

On 2/25/2019 at 1:11 PM, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

I was just reading the story of Vladimir Bekhterev, a doctor who examined Stalin and then made the mistake of discussing the patient. He was shortly afterwards poisoned while attending the performance of the Bolshoi Ballet.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/02/28/drunk-russian-sailor-rips-gaping-hole-south-korean-bridge-a64664

An allegedly intoxicated Russian sailor with poor English skills has crashed a cargo ship into a bridge in South Korea.

The Russian-flagged Seagrand vessel created a five-meter hole when it rammed into the highway bridge in the port of Busan, Russian outlets reported Thursday, citing South Korean news media. 

The detained captain of the 6,000-ton ship registered a blood alcohol level above the legal limit, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing the coast guard service.

No injuries were reported, but parts of the bridge were closed for precautionary reasons, it said.

[InkaUtexas 26802]

12 hours ago, tjhooker said:

Seriously, how in the fuck does that happen?

Russia is not left at the border. 

[DigglerontheHoof 21516]

13 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/02/28/drunk-russian-sailor-rips-gaping-hole-south-korean-bridge-a64664

An allegedly intoxicated Russian sailor with poor English skills has crashed a cargo ship into a bridge in South Korea.

The Russian-flagged Seagrand vessel created a five-meter hole when it rammed into the highway bridge in the port of Busan, Russian outlets reported Thursday, citing South Korean news media. 

The detained captain of the 6,000-ton ship registered a blood alcohol level above the legal limit, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing the coast guard service.

No injuries were reported, but parts of the bridge were closed for precautionary reasons, it said.

Trump's next Secretary of the Navy

[Nivek 17330]

Seriously, how in the fuck does that happen?

Well. We now know you are not married.

[retread 2951]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Fuck Putin

[InkaUtexas 26802]

41 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Fuck Putin

Yep, fuck him! 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]