Roger Ellis - AK-239

Tom is already tearing into an entire huckleberry pie.

“Fat squad here you come!”

Tom ignores the insult, “Let me introduce you to my psychiatrist. Wanna a piece of him?”

“You know, we call that a Man Caused Disaster!”

Tom casually looks up and with a mouthful of food says, “MCD?”

Moscow, Russia — Lubyanka Square

Three days ‘til Christmas

While Portland, Oregon today is raining and a dreary forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, Moscow’s high for the day is a brisk high of twenty-six degrees with six inches of snow!

At night here the streets are absolutely beautiful!

Lights, lights and more lights!

There are over 3,000 trees with Christmas lights. A giant red ball in Red square with a map of the world on it, the center, of course, is Moscow!

Today, a very secret meeting has been called for Russia’s top military leaders at Lubyanka Square, inside the old KGB building, 900 meters from Red Square.

General Petrov Andropov, General Sergei Aleksandrov, General Aleksandr Bortnikov and Admiral Victor Perchinkov sit in General Andropov’s office. It might be below zero outside but inside it was exactly seventy-six degrees. The general’s office is decorated in beautiful Italian White Carrara marble and African black woods. General Andropov loved his caviar, vodka and women. Andropov was an old friend and longtime business associate of President Ivan Mironovich and was, in fact, appointed to office personally by the president.

Generals Aleksandrov and Bortnikov were from the SVR and GRU military wings, respectively. Admiral Perchinkov is clearly the brightest of the bunch. The admiral is also a close, personal friend and business partner of the president.

Fact is: All of these guys are close and have many business dealings together.

One prominent example of their business dealing in which they’ve entangled some of the largest American companies is the Skolkovo Innovation Center, Russia’s Silicone Valley.

It is built on the old Russian Potemkin Village model: Beautiful and perfect on the outside with all sorts of devious rot on the inside.

Located just outside of Moscow with 30,000 workers all under the strict control of the “president’s counsel.” A secret organization with an even more secret board of directors. About 100 major American corporations have business dealings here. This entanglement was considered so dangerous that the FBI, Boston, warned American corporations in 2014:

“The [Skolkovo] foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilitiesand dual-use technologies with military and commercial application. [Emphasis added].”

With the end of Communism, as Russia was attempting to transition to a market economy, only a handful of oligarchs fully understood what was happening and profited immensely. They were known as the siloviki clan. They were mostly former Communists from the KGB and other military agencies. They were in the right place when this Russian form of capitalism took root.

There is nothing exactly like them in the West. The closest explanation would be to combine billionaires, mobsters and generals, a lethal combination:

Crony capitalists with nuclear weapons!

Around these cronies grew a few but very wealthy crime syndicates who would intimidate and kill if necessary to further their business interests, generally with the quiet blessing of the Russian government. If you were one of them you could get away with murder, literally.

Although many Russians are living far better than they were under Communism, by Western standards, many people are still far behind.

The employed were just happy they weren’t forced to drive the Communist East German car, the Trabant, voted the world’s worst automobile ever created! The Trabant had a smoke-induced, ear-splitting 18 horsepower engine, and you were lucky if you could find one that ran.

It cost at the time about five years’ worth of the average East German’s salary and you were told never to buy one made on a Friday. That was because most of the “people’s workers” would get their free bottle of vodka that day and would likely knock off early and no telling what was missing on your beautiful new Trabant.

Today, amazingly, the official unemployment rate of Russia tracked very close to that of the United States except, of course, it was always slightly better!

Coincidence?

Maybe, but probably not.

As Winston Churchill once said, “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

Kind of like a matryoshka doll also known as a Russian nesting doll, which is a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. In Russia, things are usually not exactly as they appear.

With the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communist USSR, Russia was made to feel inferior and less than the West. President Ivan Mironovich came to power vowing to stop this slide. Ivan vowed to return Russia to its former glory.

But Russia was so far behind militarily, it could not have any hope of catching the West either in sheer military numbers or in military aerospace technology.

Admiral Perchinkov knew Russia could not beat America in a naval battle head to head. However, with sixty-five submarines (twenty-four more in the works), the Russian submarine fleet (now under the personal direction of President Mironovich) it looks like Russia was trying to beat America, should it come to that, under the great oceans of the world.

For a while President Mironovich really did try to better relations with the U.S. His FSB warned the FBI about the Boston bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but the FBI didn’t catch a misspelling of the terrorist’s name until it was too late. The FSB had stopped several terror attacks on Russian soil but the FSB had, in some ways, become a very sophisticated terror group itself as it now moved, seemingly, against anyone hostile to the president.

Several courageous Russian journalists had written articles on the massive amounts of money being poured into Skolkovo and submarine technology but now those voices had mysteriously gone silent. This wasn’t mysterious to the average Russian over the age of forty. They could see what was happening. Russia was transitioning into this weird form of an oligarchy, run by communist KGB oil and gas billionaires.

Six reporters had turned up dead and several others were jailed for investigating the Russian military. Opposition leaders and journalists had been trashed, imprisoned or ended up murdered as well.

A political consultant commented: “This is a now a Weimar atmosphere where there are no longer any limits."

Weimar is obviously a reference to the regime just prior to the Nazi takeover of Germany.

This is the greatest insult you can tell a Russian as the Nazis attacked Russia and killed many millions of Russians in World War II.

But there is some truth to the Weimar insult. Russia is now the third deadliest country in the world for journalists only behind Algeria and post war Iraq!

With President Ivan Mironovich graduating more pilots, taunting American warships, making new ICBMs and running massive war games, the military has boosted his popularity in Russia to over eighty percent.

Crazy Ivan was even more emboldened in his plan to restore Russia knowing he had a far higher approval rating in the U.S. and Great Britain than their own president and prime minister!

Mironovich, through his friends, have let it be known that he does not want a repeat of the 100,000 people who marched in Moscow in 2011 against him. The President, a former KGB officer in the old Soviet Union, believes the CIA was behind that dissent. So President Mironovich is doing all he can to insure his own reelection would proceed without any disturbances.