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640 pages, Hardcover
First published April 16, 2020
"I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naive about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia now is your friend. It isn't, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the US even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War." - Sergei Tretyakov, former colonel in Russian Foreign Intelligence, the SVR
[A White Russian émigré] described the philosophy of Putin’s rule as being "like a knot with three elements. The first is autocracy - strong government, a strong man, a papa, an uncle, a boss. It is an autocratic regime. The second element is territory, the fatherland, love of country and so on. The third element is the Church. ... It does not matter whether this is the Church or this is the Communist Party. If you look at the history of Russia, you always had these elements put together."
Putin’s Kremlin had taken over the media and eradicated all political competition. ... in what one analyst, Masha Lipman, later called the Russians' "Non-Participation Pact," they were content to let the Kremlin monopolize political and economic decision-making, as long as it didn't intrude into their own lives. ... It was, Lipman wrote, "the perennial Russian order - the dominant state and a powerless, fragmented society."
They didn't particularly care about the economic well-being of their country's people, as long as the economy was secure enough to allow them to hold on to power - and to project power globally.
The system Putin’s men created was a hybrid KGB capitalism that sought to accumulate cash to buy off and corrupt officials in the West, whose politicians, complacent after the end of the Cold War, had long forgotten about the Soviet tactics of the not too distant past.
The KGB playbook of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union deployed ‘active measures’ to sow division and discord in the West, to fund allied political parties and undermine its ‘imperial’ foe, has now been fully reactivated. What’s different now is that these tactics are funded by a much deeper well of cash, by a Kremlin that has become adept in the ways of the markets and has sunk its tentacles deep into the institutions of the West.
Western markets embraced the new wealth coming from Russia, and paid little heed to the criminal and KGB forces behind it.