Putin is a untrustworthy and unsavory despot, but Golitsyn is a fraud. He claimed that the collapse of Communism in not just the Soviet Union, but also the rest of East Europe was staged.
"The "Sino-Soviet Split," the alleged splits between the USSR and Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, and Moscow's "break" with so-called "Eurocommunist" moderates in Western Europe were all elaborate deceptions managed by the Kremlin and its KGB strategists. An equally elaborate deception is the KGB-created "Russian Mafia," which is blamed for the corruption, violence, chaos, and mayhem that have plagued Russia and the CIS since they "went capitalist."
In truth, all of the leading Russian crime bosses, the "oligarchs," — Loutchansky, Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Khordokovsky, Mogilevich — are veterans of the KGB-FSB and/or the Komsomol, the Communist Youth, and were "set up" in business by the KGB, following a refined version of Lenin's New Economic Program of the 1920s. Besides providing the fictitious appearance of a genuine free market to attract Western capital and technology, the KGB-Mafia also provides an efficient means for dealing with political undesirables: when a foreign or domestic "troublemaker" needs to be liquidated, it can be done with the blame falling on unidentified criminal elements, rather than the State, or communist officials.
Amazingly Accurate Predictions
With his intimate knowledge of the KGB strategy, Golitsyn accurately foresaw, years ahead of actual events, many specific developments that have now occurred. He correctly predicted that Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov would be succeeded by "a younger leader with a more liberal image," perfectly describing Mikhail Gorbachev and the political restructuring process that would be carried out under the name "perestroika."
In his 1984 blockbuster book, New Lies for Old, Golitsyn correctly predicted that Solidarity would be legalized in Poland and allowed to form a coalition government with the communists after sham multiparty elections. He also foresaw, with astonishing precision, democratization in Czechoslovakia, with a revival of former communist dictator Dubcek and close allies; the opening of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany as the core for a United Europe; the implementation of "democracy" in such countries as Romania and Hungary; the end of the Warsaw Pact; and the efforts of Eastern European governments to join the European Community as a prelude to unification with the West. Golitsyn even stated that these changes would begin during the five years following his 1984 book — which actually happened, from Gorbachev's appointment in 1985 to the renewal in Eastern Europe since early 1989.
Mark Riebling, author of the important 1994 book Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, says of Golitsyn's predictions in New Lies for Old: "139 out of 148 were fulfilled by the end of 1993 — an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent." That record is even more astonishing when one considers that Mr. Riebling's assessment includes only the more prominent of Golitsyn's projections; it does not include many of his more subtle analyses and forecasts. No other foreign policy analyst even comes close to Golitsyn's level of accuracy and depth of analysis.
James J. Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, and Alexander Count de Marenches, who headed French intelligence, both saw Golitsyn as an invaluable ally and an indispensable asset in our efforts to understand the Soviets' geo-political chess game. Unfortunately, both of these men were opposed by powerful forces in their governments who wanted to believe in and embrace the perestroika deception. Angleton and de Marenches were fired, while Golitsyn and his warnings were ignored — when they weren't scorned and ridiculed.
A Not-so-grand Bargain
On May 20, 1991, Russia's economic adviser Grigory A. Yavlinsky met with a group of cognoscenti from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the private U.S. organization that has dominated both Republican and Democratic administrations since at least FDR's time. The group, which included Stephen Sachs, Graham Allison, Stanley Fischer, and Robert Blackwill, drew up what they termed a "grand bargain" which recommended granting the Soviets $15 to $30 billion per year for several years. A few days later, on May 24, the New York Times went even further with an editorial ("A Western Spur to Soviet Reform") urging a Soviet bailout package of $150 billion. This was followed with an article by Allison and Blackwill in the CFR's prestigious journal Foreign Affairs calling for aid of "$15 billion to $20 billion per year for each of the next three years."
At a 47-nation Soviet aid conference convened in Washington in January 1992, President George Bush (the elder) pledged more than $5 billion. But that was just to prime the pump; untold billions have followed since.
As costly as our Russian foreign policy has been financially, the cost to our national security has been immeasurably greater. For more than two decades, America's leaders have marched our nation headlong into the deadly perestroika trap, ignoring the warnings of Anatoliy Golitsyn and the overwhelming evidence that vindicates those warnings. They have embraced the Russian and CIS leaders as our "allies" and intertwined our military, police, and intelligence agencies as "partners" in global security.
Now, with Putin's FSB Chekists coming brazenly into the open, it is long past time to repudiate this deception and reverse course — before the trap door is shut and bolted behind us.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia