A columnist for The Washington Post and author of the Pulitzer-winning Gulag, Applebaum has been writing about Russia since the 1990s. Her fifth book is a detailed study of Stalin’s 1929 policy of agricultural collectivization, which set off the worst famine in European history. Some five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. Of these, roughly three million were Ukrainians, and Applebaum definitively shows that they died due to deliberate government policy. Drawing on newly opened archives and personal accounts not previously translated, Applebaum substantiates the stories that Stalin suppressed Ukrainian uprisings by closing the borders, stopping food shipments, and letting the rebellious peasants starve.
(32 min): wrote about the Ukranianism of American politics with Paul Manafort
Search out far left and far right. They don’t invent, but they do fund.
Question: how do we divide people.
38:12
[Stalin] writing in private you know what he
writes to Kaganovich and these other
sidekicks he believes his ideology and
one of the things that’s important about
them about the Bolsheviks is they
believed that Marxism wasn’t just some
kind of theory and it could be money
they believed that it was a science and
it was true and it’s even more common
because it’s science and it’s true and
we define what it is and that means that
whatever we’ve said you know is true and
this is this is how things are going to
be and if it doesn’t work out in reality
the way we thought it was going to then
somebody else is responsible and who’s
responsible saboteurs wreckers kulaks
enemies of the people enemies of the
state you know and I actually believe
now that a lot of the you know a lot of
the violence the kinds kind of cycles of
violence you have in the Soviet Union
1932 and 33 you had the famine a few
years later you had the purges of 1937
and you have cyclical violence and
that’s almost always a response to
policy failure you know it hasn’t worked
the revolution hasn’t brought prosperity
and made us happy there has to be a
reason for it
okay you know let’s find the let’s find
the the parasites who are sucking the
blood of the revolution and get rid of
them and so that was you know and so the
so so your point you know your logical
point okay well look this agricultural
policy hasn’t worked let’s change it
that’s not how they thought you know it
wasn’t let’s change it love wheat you
know it’s not our policy that needs to
change it’s you know
the people in reality that has to adjust
our way of thinking and anyways I said I
Did Russia teach Paul Manafort all its dirty tricks?
Manafort is alleged to have laundered money, to have cheated on taxes and to have lied about his clientele. All of this he did in order to “enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States,” according to the indictment. Among other things it is alleged that he spent $1,319,281 of his money, illegally hidden from the U.S. Treasury, to pay a home lighting and entertainment company in Florida; to purchase $934,350 worth of rugs at a shop in Virginia; and to drop $655,500 on a landscaper in the Hamptons.
.. Some will find it ironic that Manafort did all of this while coaching candidate Donald Trump to run an “anti-elite” election campaign, one directed at “draining the swamp” and cleaning up Washington.
But in fact, this is exactly the kind of tactic that Manafort perfected on behalf of Russia, in Ukraine, where he worked for more than a decade.
.. in 2006, when he brought dozens of American political consultants to Ukraine to assist in an ethnically charged election that pit Russian and Ukrainian speakers against one another, in an attempt to help Russia retain influence over the country.
.. In 2010, he was one of several advisers — the others were mostly Russians — who helped remake the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the ex-con whom the Russian government then supported for president of Ukraine. Yanukovych charged the sitting government with corruption, declared that the election would be “rigged” and finally won.
.. The exploitation of ethnic tension; the dislike of NATO; the constant talk of opponents’ corruption, whether warranted or not; the shouting about falsified elections — these were Trump tactics, too
.. And he sought to undermine Ukraine’s constitution, first subtly and then openly.
.. For a long time now, a part of the U.S. political and business class has been merging, ideologically and aesthetically, with its post-Soviet counterparts. The use of shell companies and Cypriot bank accounts; the over-the-top spending on clothes and houses; the profoundly cynical manipulation of ethnic or racial divides to win elections — these behaviors are now common to a particular set of sleazy operators on two continents. If this indictment is correct, Manafort is the living embodiment of this Russian-American convergence.