The British Imperial Plot To Destroy Russia

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91, the British imperial game masters believed they had an open field for one of their long-term objectives, the destruction of Russia as a superpower. They deployed accordingly, with great damage to Russia and the other nations of the former Soviet area, and the world as a whole. But there was always the threat that the ultimate result of this confrontation with the world’s second most powerful thermonuclear power would be world war.

Now, however, with the decisive, bold move by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Aug. 8, in response to Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, the Russians have thrown over the British chessboard.

Idiots in the Western press still reiterate that Russia is “paranoid” about Western (read, British) attempts to surround and destroy them. The following chronology of the last 20 years, compiled from EIR’s archives, should put that canard to rest.

1983-90: Starting at the time of Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov’s rejection of cooperation with the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, a full six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, British economists of the Mont Pelerin Society’s cult of radical free traders, begin to cultivate a small group of young Soviet economists, who could be trained to step in with radical “neo-liberal” policies, if power were to shift in the Soviet Union, under the crush of its attempted military build-up. Lord Harris of High Cross coordinates the project from the London Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).

July-August 1990: While Germany is trying to establish new, positive economic relations with the Soviet Union, the British government of Margaret Thatcher leads a campaign to vilify Germany for its expanding economic ties. At the same time, the British and their American puppets in the Bush 41 Administration move toward setting up war in the Persian Gulf. Thatcher is widely reported to have “stiffened the spine” of Bush, against attempts to get him to negotiate, rather than wage war against Iraq.

September 1990: Peregrine Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, puts the British policy in print, in a Sept. 2 editorial entitled “Imperialists for Peace.” He says the world needs “a new form of imperialism directed against countries of the Third World.” In fact, to achieve such an “imperial peace,” the British imperialists would have to subdue the most powerful opposing force, the U.S.S.R.
That month, three Russian economists who are members of Lord Harris’s network, and co-authors of the “500 Days Plan” for crash transition of the Soviet Union to a fully deregulated economy, are flown to Washington, at the expense of financier George Soros, to attend the annual conference of the International Monetary Fund.

January 1991: The Bush Administration, with its British and other allies, launches war against Iraq—despite the verbal opposition of the Soviet Union, Germany, and France. The Soviet leadership is simultaneously pre-occupied with a surging independence movement in the Baltic republics, and unrest in the Transcaucasus area of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

March 1991: With U.S.-British victory in Iraq, Bush gloats about the emergence of a “unipolar” world, a reference to the eclipse of Iraq’s ally, the Soviet Union.
Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, who as finance minister had blocked the 500 Days Plan the year before, accuses the West of carrying out financial warfare to dismantle the Soviet Union.

Aug. 23, 1991: At the end of the week that saw Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachov drastically weakened in an abortive coup attempt, and Ukraine declare its independence from the Soviet Union, the Times of London writes in its “Diary” column that the “free market gurus and thinktanks that helped redraw the economic map of Britain during the 1980s” (i.e., the Mont Pelerin-Thatcherites) “are planning an ideological invasion of the Soviet Union, in the belief that the failed coup has rendered the empire ripe for a dose of Thatcherism.” Lord Harris’s group is set to move.

August-December 1991: As the Soviet Union comes apart, the Mont Pelerin/IEA trainees are maneuvered into the government of Russian President Boris Yeltsin—including Yegor Gaidar, the first prime minister of independent Russia.

Dec. 28, 1991: Lyndon LaRouche warns, “If Yeltsin, for example, and his government, were to go with a reform of the type which [Harvard Professor Jeffrey] Sachs and Sachs’s co-thinkers demand—chiefly from the Anglo-American side—then the result in Russia would be chaos.” With the political impact of such a development, LaRouche adds, “then we have a strategic threat.”

January 1992: The Gaidar team imposes “shock therapy,” the equivalent of a military bombardment. Within half a decade, Russia’s population, living standards, industry, and agriculture will plunge, in a looting process that economist Sergei Glazyev will document in his 1998 book, Genocide.

February 1992: British Prime Minister John Major makes a speech at the United Nations, declaring the need to strengthen that institution in its “capacity for preventive diplomacy.” This is seen as a foot-in-thedoor for supranational police powers against the spread of nuclear technology.

February 1992: The U.S. Defense Department, under British agent Dick Cheney, adopts a policy memorandum, which is widely publicized in the Russian press, that declares that the reconstitution of the U.S.S.R., or a strong Russia, will not be tolerated: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.”

May 1992: Russia and the 14 CIS countries are brought under the IMF, an act which the Financial Times, mouthpiece of the City of London, describes as a “new imperialism . . . orchestrated by the G-7, IMF and World Bank.”

Summer 1992: EIR notes that an “arc of instability” has been created all around Russia, including Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, with the IMF in a crucial role.

August 1992: British agents at the United Nations, led by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, declare plans to adopt an agenda for peace, which amounts to eliminating national sovereignty in the interest of “human rights,” and other considerations.

1992: Jokhar Dudayev, the future separatist leader in Chechnya in Russia’s North Caucasus, visits Prime Minister Thatcher during one of his international tours in search of support. Thatcher is “100% on our side, our most important supporter in Britain,” says a Dudayev associate.

September-October 1993: Yeltsin abolishes the elected parliament, which refused to endorse the latest privatization agenda, and sends the Army to storm the legislature when the lawmakers refuse to capitulate, effectively ending democracy in Russia in favor of the British-IMF economic dictatorship.

1994-1995: Collaboration on Caspian Sea oil projects between long-standing British assets in Azerbaijan and other Caucasus locations, and British oil interests intensifies, side by side with an active presence of British agents in Chechnya—including the future business partner of Thatcher and Lord McAlpine, Chechen separatist moneybags Hoj-Ahmed Nukhayev. A lowintensity insurgency breaks into a three-year full-scale war in November 1994, when Yeltsin sends the Russian Army against the separatists.

May 10, 1996: A “New Atlantic Alliance Initiative” is launched in Prague, under the patronage of former British Prime Minister Thatcher, Sir Henry Kissinger, former (West) German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, and former Polish “shock therapy” czar Leszek Balcerowicz. Thatcher “is to spearhead” this “effort . . . to forge a new Atlantic Alliance between the United States and Europe.” The aims will include bringing the former Soviet satellites into NATO and the European Union, and creating an Atlantic free-trade area.

May 6, 1996: The Russian Foreign Ministry announces that nine British officials are being expelled for running an espionage operation with military and “strategic” targets. One maverick British strategist tells EIR that the expulsions are linked with the activity of British Intelligence in areas of great sensitivity to the Russians, such as the Caucasus. Russian sources tell EIR that the action reflects recognition of the British hand behind the predatory economic policies being imposed on Russia.

July 8, 1997: The Madrid Summit of NATO invites Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland to start accession talks. They fully join in March 1999.

September-October 1997: British asset Zbigniew Brzezinski publishes The Grand Chessboard: Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he, in effect, calls for the breakup of Russia. LaRouche emphasizes (“Tweedledum goofs again,” EIR, Dec. 5, 2007) that Brzezinski is acting as a British strategist, as he did in his push for the “arc of crisis” under the Carter Administration. Brzezinski’s argument, and his map of a divided Russia, are a press sensation in that nation.

1998: Speculative capital, fleeing the Soros- and other hedge fund-precipitated currency turmoil in Asia, floods into Russia, setting the stage for the government bond default and ruble devaluation of Aug. 17, 1998.

1999: The Russian Foreign Ministry issues an official démarche to Britain, charging that it is permitting the recruitment and training of Osama bin Ladenlinked terrorists in London, to be sent to Chechnya to fight the Russian Army, and carry out terrorist actions against civilians. The British government refuses to shut down the operation.

April 1999: In the midst of the global financial breakdown crisis which hit in 1998, the British oligarchical faction promotes a new war. NATO moves to utilize Balkan ethnic conflicts to wage war on Serbia, Russia’s historical ally. A political casualty of the bombing of Belgrade is the Russian prime ministership of Yevgeni Primakov, who had begun to rebuild Russia’s real economy in the wake of the August 1998 default.
Russia holds “all-ocean” naval maneuvers, including nuclear naval missile launches, for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
At the NATO 50^th anniversary meeting, British spokesmen call for its expansion to include all of the countries once part of the Warsaw Pact. August 1999: Raids against Dagestan in the Russian North Caucasus are launched from bases in Chechnya, by up to 2,000 guerrillas from the Muslim Wahhabite sect, including Chechens, Dagestanis, Arabs, and Afghanis. Leading personalities in this Second Chechen War will later seek and obtain safe haven in Great Britain.
The Russian Armed Forces officially adopt a new strategic doctrine, which would permit the first use of nuclear weapons. September 1999: Martin Palmer, advisor on “religious and cultural affairs” to Britain’s self-avowed genocidalist Prince Philip, confirms to EIR that British policy is aimed at the breakup of the nation-state system and provoking war and chaos on a global scale. “We are experiencing tectonic changes,” says Palmer. “We are now seeing the final dénouement of the processes unleashed in 1914. It is a process of the breakup of huge empires. Russia is breaking up, and we see the dying gasps of the old tsarist control of Central Asia. . . .” Palmer confirms that it is “absolutely fundamental to British policy” to encourage the process of “breakup of empires.” He concludes, “Perfidious Albion is alive and kicking. The British Foreign Office has a certain agenda, which is continued divide and rule.”

Jan. 1, 2000: Yeltsin resigns, making Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acting President of Russia, prior to his election to that post in June. Moves are made to crush the Chechen insurgency.

August 2000: The sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk brings the world close to World War III. The cause will not be identified with certainty.

October 2000: The British government of Tony Blair, with Wellsian U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in tow, threatens a new bombardment of Serbia. The threat includes deployment of the British fleet in the area.

September 2001: During the shock administered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Putin contacts President George W. Bush to say he has ordered Russian strategic forces to stand down, to avoid nuclear war by miscalculation. He then visits Germany, and voices his desire to end geopolitics and collaborate with world leaders in constructing the basis for peace.

January 2002: Spokesmen for the British imperial faction, including Paul Wolfowitz and Brzezinski, get more explicit. In the New York Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs, British writer Sebastian Mallaby promotes the idea of a “New Empire.” Mallaby’s imperial policy, recommended to the United States and Britain, is focussed on population reduction in the rest of the world.

January 2002: The Bush Administration, under British asset Cheney, issues a new Nuclear Posture review which, for the first time, discusses the possible use of nuclear weapons against Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Syria.

2002: NATO invites the Baltic nations (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania to join. The process is completed in 2004.

Oct. 3, 2002: Izvestia reports on a draft new Russian nuclear strategy doctrine: “Russia is attentively following the process of NATO’s transformation, and counts on the removal of direct and oblique anti-Russian components from both the military planning and the political declarations of NATO members. If, however, NATO continues to exist as a military alliance with the offensive military doctrine it has today, this will require a fundamental reshaping of Russian military planning, and of the principles of development of the Russian Armed Forces, including a change in Russian nuclear strategy.”

2003: NATO Council agrees with U.S. request to deploy troops to Afghanistan. This is the first true outof-area deployment.

November 2003: President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia resigns in the face of Rose Revolution protests that bring Mikheil Saakashvili to power.

August 2004: The London Economist prints two articles and a lead editorial in its Aug. 21-27 issue, on the potential for crises to explode around Russia’s periphery in the CIS countries. And, it notes, this periphery is now the border zone between Russia and NATO. It points to recent fighting in South Ossetia, together with other “former Soviet war zones,” where “unresolved wars have poisoned the newly independent republics of the former Soviet south, and [these] could flare anew.”

September 2004: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sept. 8 protests the behavior of Russia’s “Western partners,” who he says “bear direct responsibility for the tragedy of the Chechen people when they give political asylum to terrorists.” The immediate focus of Lavrov’s statement is the actions of the United States and Great Britain in giving political asylum to Chechen separatist leaders.

December 2004: A larger-scale repeat of the Georgian “colored revolution” experiment, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, culminates in the Victor Yushchenko-Yuliya Tymoshenko team coming to power.

August 2005: Vice President Cheney warns of a possible nuclear hit on Iran.

January 2006: Russia arrests a British diplomat in Moscow for spying. Putin declines to expel some of those involved, saying, “As soon as we send those agents back, others will come. Maybe smarter ones, and then we’ll have to bother about finding them.” The Russian government cracks down on NGOs it said had received funding through this particular diplomat. Putin speaks about destabilizations in Eurasia, including recent riots in Uzbekistan. “We know better than you do,” he tells a reporter, “who trained the people who ignited the situation, . . . where they were trained, and how many of them were trained.” Citing the volatility of the ethnically mixed region, Putin adds, “You probably know what the Fergana Valley is and you know how difficult the situation is there, the population’s situation and their level of economic well-being. We do not need a second Afghanistan in Central Asia, and we shall proceed very carefully.”

August 2006: Bush signs Iran Freedom Support Act, which not only codifies sanctions against Iran, but mandates secondary sanctions on its partners, emphatically including Russia, which is the major contractor on Iran’s nuclear power station.

October 2006: Tensions increase between Russia and Georgia, as Georgia seizes four Russian officers as “spies.” Lyndon LaRouche comments that the dispute has the earmarks of a deployment for the intended destruction of Russia.

2006-08: NATO and the United States begin discussion of emplacing anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly against threats from Iran. Russian officials repeatedly declare that these systems would threaten Russia’s nuclear deterrent. Even after Putin’s 2007 proposal to Bush at Kennebunkport, Maine, of alternative joint missile defenses, the United States reaches agreement with the East European countries on emplacement, in 2008.

March 2007: The Economist publishes a special futurology feature on the European Union, which includes a scenario following a confrontation between a President Obama and an expansionist Russia, over the nation of Ukraine. It says, “In the dangerous second decade of the century, when Vladimir Putin returned for a third term as Russian president and stood poised to invade Ukraine, it was the EU that pushed the Obama administration to threaten massive nuclear retaliation. The Ukraine crisis became a triumph for the EU, . . . promoting the decision to go for a further big round of enlargement. It was ironic that, less than a decade later, Russia itself lodged its first formal application for membership.”

May 2007: London’s Crown Prosecutor’s office on May 22 indicts Russian citizen Andrei Lugovoy for the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence (FSB) official, and the bodyguard of Russian fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and demands his extradition. The Financial Times editorializes: “Europe and the U.S. need to adopt a policy of robust engagement with Moscow. . . .”

July 17, 2007: The world comes dangerously close to a military incident between Great Britain and Russia. The London Times asserts that the Royal Air Force scrambled two Tornado fighter jets to intercept Russian long-range Tu-95 “Bear” bombers, which had allegedly headed for British airspace during a routine patrol on the Norwegian coast. Russian Air Force Commander Gen. Col. Alexander Zelin, calls this claim “rubbish.”

Sept. 5, 2007: Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Sorosfunded Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a frequent guest in U.K. strategic circles, publishes “Russia vs Europe: the sovereignty wars,” which defines the increasing conflict between the EU and Putin as a confrontation between Russia’s “nostalgia for the old-European nation-state,” as against the “postmodern hegemony” of the EU. Krastev is on record that a blow-up around Kosovo independence is “the crisis the EU needs.”

November 2007: The British House of Lords holds a debate on confronting Russia, in the context of a discussion of the EU’s upcoming Lisbon Treaty.

Dec. 12, 2007: EU planning team for Kosovo is established, headed by British diplomat Roy Reeve.

January 2008: James Sherr, of the Defence Academy of the U.K., writes “Russia & the West: A Reassessment,” in The Shrivenham Papers, raising an alarm over the revival of Russian power, and identifying weaknesses of Russians that could be exploited.

Feb. 18, 2008: Despite stated opposition by UN Security Council members Russia and China, Kosovo unilaterally declares independence from Serbia. It is immediately recognized by Great Britain, the United States, France, Turkey, Afghanistan, Germany, Norway, and others. A well-placed source reports that British advisors were crucial to drawingup the legal papers justifying the declaration.

What Did Lavrov Say?

On Aug. 15, the Associated Press featured a story in its news round-ups under the headline, “Georgia can ‘forget’ regaining provinces.” Writers David Nowak and Christopher Torchia led the item, “The foreign minister of Russia said Thursday that Georgia could ‘forget about’ getting back its two breakaway provinces, and the former Soviet republic remained on edge as Russia sent tank columns to search out and destroy Georgian military equipment.”

EIR correspondents found that even members of the Washington diplomatic corps were chagrined by the brutal-sounding formulation, attributed to Russia’s top diplomat. And it didn’t sound to us quite like Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, so we looked it up in the transcript of Lavrov’s Aug. 15 interview with Radio Ekho Moskvy, and we double-checked by listening to the audio recording. It turns out that Lavrov was answering a tendentious question from interviewer A. Benediktov, and the exchange went as follows:

Q: “Look, there have been three Presidents in post-Soviet Georgia, completely different people. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, with one biography; Eduard Shevardnadze, with a different one; and Mikheil Saakashvili, with a third. And all three of them ended up attempting a solution of the conflict by force. . . . It would appear that a history of force-based relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia is something predetermined with Georgian Presidents. Irrespective of their upbringing and education. Maybe it’s kind of a systemic story?”

Lavrov: “If that is the case, then I think that talk about the territorial integrity of Georgia can be forgotten, because forcing the Ossetians and Abkhazians to agree with that logic, that they can be returned to the Georgian state by force, will be impossible.” Lavrov went on to elaborate how the events on the ground, with the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali in ruins and civilians slaughtered, have created a situation in which “neither the South Ossetians nor the Abkhazians want to live together in one state with a person who sends his troops against [them],” so that, important as the principle of territorial integrity is, the real situation will make it difficult to honor.

The Caucasus Chessboard

The map shows the nearly dozen “autonomous republics” of the Caucasus region, within Georgia and Russia. Three are in Georgia: Abkhazia and South Ossetia along the mountainous border with Russia, and Adjaria bordering Turkey on the Black Sea. The Ossetes, an Indo-European people whose language is closely related to Persian, have lived in the Caucasus for two millennia. Their main religion is Orthodox Christianity, with a minority of Muslims. The status of these “autonomies,” and crises around them, are rooted in centuries of imperial intervention in this East-West and North-South crossroads of Eurasia.

The ancient nation of Georgia formally joined the Russian Empire in 1801, after late-18th-Century attacks by the Ottoman and Persian empires left the capital Tbilisi (Tiflis) in ruins. The acquisition consolidated Russian gains in the Caucasus, including Ossetian lands, which had advanced after the Russian-Ottoman War of 1768-74. In renewed conflicts in the 19th Century, Istanbul ceded its Caucasus holdings, in return for Russia’s withdrawal from Anatolia. Russia continued to battle Caucasus insurgencies up into the 1870s.

The British Empire made the Caucasus a theater of its contest with Russia over power in Eurasia—the Great Game, as Rudyard Kipling called it. Col. Claude Stokes, British High Commissioner in Transcaucasia, voiced one of the schemes after World War I: a large Eurasian Muslim buffer state, which “would lean upon Great Britain and provide a buffer between Russia and the British Asiatic possessions.” Stokes’s ally, British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon, advocated revival of a 1830s scheme of British intelligence figure David Urquhart for creation of a Caucasus Mountaineer Republic, which would foment Russian-Turkish conflict, to the advantage of the British Empire.

In the 1920s, the Soviet “nationalities policy,” formulated by Joseph Stalin after the 1923 Baku Conference of Peoples of the East (a hotbed of British and other foreign intelligence agents), led to the often arbitrary delineation of autonomous ethnic republics and regions within the republics of the Soviet Union. Thus, North Ossetia was in the Russian Republic, while South Ossetia was assigned to Georgia.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the autonomies went with their respective republics. Under Georgia’s first post-Soviet leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a Georgian nationalist, the autonomous status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was challenged. Civil wars broke out in both areas in the early 1990s. The brutal fighting ended in 1992 and 1994, respectively, with agreements for Russian peacekeeping forces under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to police the autonomous regions. The Russian presence in Abkhazia came to be endorsed by the UN and supported by on-site UN observers, while in South Ossetia, a joint Russian-Georgian peacekeeping force has been approved and monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The night of Aug. 7 , the Georgian peacekeepers turned their guns on the Russians.