Lately Dmitry Anatolievich Medvedev, elder statesman of Russian politicum, has taken to issuing short encyclicals, a sort of urbi et orbi, that are really quite interesting because they let us look into the mindset currently shared by a large majority of Russians starting at the highest levels. Since this mindset clashes with the dominant narrative perforce endlessly repeated by all public figures in the West, it is deemed unacceptable and is steadfastly ignored. Is that a safe thing to do? Somehow I doubt it! Those who insist on operating with incomplete and faulty information make bad decisions and create bad outcomes for themselves. But it gets worse: while wallowing in the putrid bath of predicaments of their own making, they will discover that they have earned the Russians’ hate and that the Russians have been planning to take revenge on them.
Medvedev’s words are like a subzero arctic gale blowing toward you from the boundless frozen tundra of Russian thought. While playing tag team with Putin—trading places as president and head of government—Medvedev positioned himself as a liberal pro-Westerner. We will never know how much of that was real (his opinions may have evolved over time as he was presented with new information) and how much of it was feigned (his task was to portray Russia as weak, helpless and dependent all the while it was furiously rebuilding and rearming itself). But this much we know for certain: he is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a pro-Western liberal any more.
His latest encyclical is presented below. The translation is my own.
The latest fake Western narrative, emanating from some secretive tiny brain located, most likely, somewhere in suburban Virginia, is that Putin is responsible for looming world hunger because of the war in the Ukraine. “Putin Blocks Ukraine Grain Exports! World Hunger Looms!” screams the expertly concocted fake newspaper headline. A very simple analysis of the available numbers is enough to prove that this narrative is a fake.
It is generally a good idea to avoid ascribing nefarious intent to actions explained by mere stupidity. But this is a case where mere stupidity cannot possibly explain the long, steady procession of foreign policy errors spanning three decades, all of them specifically aimed at strengthening Russia. It is not possible to argue that a surplus of hubris, ignorance, greed and political opportunism and a deficit of competent foreign policy analysts can produce such a result, for that would be essentially the same as arguing that some monkeys armed with drills, mills and lathes can produce a Swiss watch. But the only alternative would be to claim that there is a network of Kremlin’s agents ensconced deep within the bowels of the American Deep State and that they are all working in concert to advance Russia’s interests while meticulously maintaining plausible deniability all the while and at all levels of the operation.
Ostensibly, the plan was to weaken and destroy Russia; but then, following the Soviet collapse, Russia was weakening and destroying itself very well all by itself, no intervention needed. What’s more, every US effort to weaken and destroy Russia has made it stronger; had there existed even a most rudimentary feedback mechanism, so vast a discrepancy between policy goals and policy results would have been detected and adjustments would have been made. Superficially, this may be explained by the nature of America’s sham-democracy, where each administration can blame its failures on mistakes made by the previous administration, but the Deep State remains in power throughout, and it would simply be forced to admit to itself that there is a problem with the plan to weaken and destroy Russia after a few cycles of this unfolding fiasco. The fact that it hasn’t detected any such problem brings us full circle, back to the suspicion that there are Putin’s agents toiling tirelessly deep within the Deep State.
But that’s pure conspiracy theory and we shouldn’t want to go anywhere near that. Suffice to say, there is at present no adequate explanation for what happened. After the Soviet collapse, very little was needed to speed along the collapse of Russia itself. But none of these steps have been taken, and the steps that were taken (with the ostensible goal of weakening and destroying Russia) have done the exact opposite. Why? Below are listed 10 of the most successful initiatives of what appear to be a US Deep State MRGA campaign. If you have an alternative explanation, I’d like to hear it.
According to hearings held recently by the US Congress, the Pentagon has accumulated quite a bit of evidence of something or other of an extraterrestrial origin: sightings of aircraft or spacecraft that behave in ways that defy both current technology and, possibly, the laws of physics. Things got really interesting when it turned out that these extraterrestrials had disabled some number of US nuclear missiles. At that point the meeting was hastily adjourned and reconvened in a top-secret format later.
The Pentagon’s best and brightest being confused by some puzzling evidence is neither here nor there. On the other hand, the idea that extraterrestrials would brave the vastness of interstellar space just to troll a bunch of Pentagon knuckleheads seems quite outlandish. An obvious question to ask is, Who would want to troll the Pentagon, posing as extraterrestrials, while putting US nuclear arsenal out of commission? Why, of course, that would be the Russians!
What evidence can I present in support of this claim. Why, none at all, of course. I know nothing, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you because that would be treasonous of me. But what I can do is tell you a story.
It is very interesting to observe the surprised facial expressions of popular economists when discussing the topic of Western sanctions against Russia: these sanctions were intended to tear the Russian economy into shreds back in March of 2020 but have resulted in an epic strengthening of the Ruble and an equally epic weakening of Western economies. Chinese economists, on the other hand, have been able to identify the cause: the Russian national currency has been cleansed of speculative market pricing and has been strengthened by stopping the outflow of capital and government control. That is, by issuing just three executive orders, Putin was able to achieve financial and economic stability. He has banned Russia from financing the economies of hostile nations or to sell real product for play money. The situation was further normalized by the order to sell gas for rubles.
Instead of scrimping and gleaning, Russia is now able to maintain a positive balance of payments and a trade surplus. The Chinese comrades have found this example very interesting and Beijing is planning to carry out a crash-test, to see how their own financial system could benefit from the imposition of sanctions.
Even Mikhail Khazin, who is usually highly critical of the Russian government and of Elvira Nabiullina personally, now recognizes the fact that her temporary imposition of an extremely high 20% Central Bank interest rate was necessary and beneficial. This economist predicts a 12% interest rate by June and its gradual lowering. In the medium term, this will lead to normal credit availability for the real, non-speculative sectors of the economy. And so… dollars and euros are leaving Russia, and it only makes sense to purchase them for tourist trips and minor trading operations.
Internationally, the ruble will be used to control trade within a gigantic region, serving as a sound basis for transactions involving raw materials, products and direct investments. Meanwhile, Western financial system will crater. Even Bloomberg admitted last week, gritting its teeth, that the ruble is the most stable currency of 2022… even though Biden prophesied that it would 200 to a dollar while silly panicked Russians were buying dollars for 150 rubles each. Now the course is fluctuating around 63.
Let’s start with the truly ridiculous and work our way out. At its height, the cryptocurrency bubble was capitalized at almost $3 trillion. Yesterday it stood at $1.17. Between $110 and $160 billion is leaking out of it daily. Over the past few weeks cryptocurrencies lost between 30 and 99% of their value. The only reason for the recent blossoming of this crypto-idiocy was excess liquidity that resulted from insane fiscal and monetary policies of the US, the EU and the rest of the collective West. It resulted in a loss of faith in fiat currencies and prompted a search for a financial surrogate. When liquidity was spurting out of every nook and cranny, all sorts of contrived mechanisms were need to soak up this impulse of monetary madness. Cryptocurrencies were one of these mechanisms: their fundamental value is precisely zero, yet they prompted the creation of entire analytical centers within investment banks charged with seeking out the best and the most brightest among virtual coins, looking for a kernel of rational sense where none can possibly exist.
Somewhat unusually for me, this post is an actual site report (accompanied by some commentary). Yesterday, May 9, 2022, I participated in a million-person march down Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg: the annual march of the Immortal Regiment. A million people (probably quite a bit more) marched under portraits of their relatives who fought in the Great Patriotic War (a.k.a. World War II). We marched under a portrait of my wife’s grandparents, who served together in the signal corps and got along so well that my mother-in-law was born a couple of months before the fall of Berlin. They lived long and happy lives; but many other participants marched under portraits of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents whose lives were cut short. Some died in battle; many others died of mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis. It was a tragedy of immense proportions and hardly any family in Leningrad/St. Petersburg remained untouched by it, but the immensity of the tragedy is matched by the immensity of the victory, and the raw power of a “Hurrah!” sweeping across several kilometers of the six-lane Nevsky Avenue, packed wall-to-wall, was tremendous.
In that war, Russia vanquished Nazi Germany and (as is often overlooked) also Rumania, Finland, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia and Austria, which sent their troops into Russian territory, as well as numerous mercenaries and volunteers from the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France and Spain, and, of course, Britain and the US which bankrolled the German Nazis and provided them with key technologies and fuel. Thus, the Russian victory was not even specifically against Germany but against the combined West. The cost in human life was absolutely staggering—a human tragedy beyond comprehension—but most Russians will tell you that it was entirely worth it. Furthermore, many Russians will say that they will repeat the lesson if necessary.
Luckily, as often happens in history, the tragedy is being repeated as a farce. In place of Hitler we have German Bundeskanzler Liverwurst who made a name for himself in Russia: he thought out loud that calling tens of thousands of civilian casualties accumulated during eight years of Ukrainian shelling in Donetsk and Lugansk as “something like genocide… is really ridiculous.” The ridiculousness doesn’t stop there: there is the aptly named lady-gynecologist Ursula von der Lyin’ in charge of lyin’ for the entire European Union and the various foreign and defense ministresses who like to go on joyrides atop NATO tanks (a ritualistic humiliation for any politician, but these ones are too stupid to realize that).
And then there is the rest of NATO, which looks impressive only on paper and keeps sending all sorts of useless or obsolete military junk to the Ukraine, where it gets either stolen on the way or remotely blown up by the Russians. The little bit that does reach the front ends up lying abandoned in heaps by the retreating Ukrainians who are, at this point, mostly raw recruits who hate their commanders with a passion and are often quite eager to surrender—because, you see, Nazi Ukraine is running out of Nazis! The Nazis are part of a neopagan death cult, are high on special battlefield drugs that the Americans have been providing, and so tend to fight to the death, but their numbers are being quite successfully whittled down by Russian artillery. The Russians are treating the entire “Special Mission Of Demilitarization and Denazification of Ukraine” (SMODDU) as a live fire training exercise and are currently busy rotating their forces.
One of Karl Marx’s better-known quotes is “Being determines consciousness.” Before it can be understood, “being” has to be unfolded to the physical conditions of daily life of society and “consciousness” to public consciousness—all the stuff that goes into it, including laws, rules and regulations, administrative procedure, public morality (or lack thereof), the sort of value-signaling that is required for entry into polite society and all that sort of mental furniture and pious claptrap. It sounds quite a lot pithier in the original German: “Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein”—that old bearded guy sure had a way with words!
Marx was all about social progress of the revolutionary persuasion. In his tidy view of human affairs, a wave of economic progress in the systems of production created a superstructure of human culture which over time became ever more constraining; then a wave of revolutionary change would sweep away the prevailing social order, making room for a new wave of economic development. Thus we had the progression from slavery to feudalism to bourgeoisie to proletarian revolution (I would include both the communist and the trade-unionist varieties)… but then, rather unexpectedly, it’s back to bourgeoisie, and then, once the physical resource base becomes depleted, then back to feudalism and, finally, back to slavery.
As I mentioned, Marx was a great believer in social progress and so he didn’t think far enough ahead to resource depletion and collapse—but I did, and pretty early on I hit on the idea that when it comes to collapse Marx had it exactly backwards: it das Bewusstsein that determines das Sein. The first to go is the belief in the continued existence of the status quo, and that this loss of faith propagates through the entire technology stack of social consciousness, top to bottom—financial, commercial, political, social, cultural—in a sort of psycho-socio-economic domino effect. At the time, I knew better than to drag old Karl into it, sensing accurately that members of the bourgeoisie would be less thrilled to have me as their dinner speaker if I compounded the sin of being Russian by sounding like a Bolshevik. But it’s such a neat idea—that regress recapitulates progress—that I believe that old Karl must be given his due (yet again). And so, with no further ado…
ClubOrlov 
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