Secret HistoryS


Russian Flag

The Harvard boys do Russia

Gaidar/Chubais
© Getty ImagesFirst Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais (L)
First Architect of Economic Reform Yegor Gaidar (R)
December 1991
After seven years of economic "reform" financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia's wealth.

The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais's drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he "may be the most despised man in Russia."

Essential to the implementation of Chubais's policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the prestige of Harvard's name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D. officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.'s role in Russian privatization, and its suspected misuse of taxpayers' funds.

Russian Flag

The consequences of humiliating Russia

YeltsinPutinVoloshin
© Tass/Kremlin.ru/CC BY 4.0/Wikimedia CommonsDec. 31, 1999: Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin leaving Kremlin the day he resigned
Vladimir Putin • Aleksandr Voloshin
The Mafia is not known for its creative use of language beyond terms like "hitman," "go to the mattresses," "living with the fishes" and suchlike. There are, though, a few pithy sayings that carry enduring wisdom. One concerns honor and revenge:
"If you are going to humiliate someone publicly in a really crass manner, make sure that he doesn't survive to take his inevitable revenge."
Violate it at your peril.

That enduring truth has been demonstrated by Russia's actions in the Ukraine which, to a great extent, are the culmination of the numerous humiliations that the West, under American instigation, has inflicted on Russia's rulers and the country as a whole over the past 30 years.

They have been treated as a sinner sentenced to accept the role of a penitent who, clad in sackcloth, marked with ashes, is expected to appear among the nations with head bowed forever. No right to have its own interests, its own security concerns or even its own opinions.

Few in the West questioned the viability of such a prescription for a country of 160 million, territorially the biggest in the world, possessing vast resources of critical value to other industrial nations, technologically sophisticated and custodian of 3,000 + nuclear weapons. No mafia don would have been that obtuse. But our rulers are cut from a different cloth even if their strut and conceit often matches that of the capos.

Muffin

Wild grain consumption occurred in Ancient Europe before the arrival of agriculture

plaque
© Emanuela CristianiFood deposits on the teeth (one shown) of ancient people who inhabited what’s now Serbia and Romania contributed to new evidence that hunter-gatherers ate wild cereals for several thousand years before crop cultivation reached Europe.
People living along southeastern Europe's Danube River around 11,500 years ago never planted a crop but still laid the foundation for the rise of farming in that region some 3,000 years later, a new study finds.

Hunter-gatherers living in this part of Europe avidly gathered and ate wild cereal grains for several millennia before migrants from southwest Asia introduced the cultivation of domesticated cereals and other plants, say archaeologist Emanuela Cristiani of Sapienza University of Rome and her colleagues. A well-established taste for wild cereals among hunter-gatherers of the central Balkan Peninsula, near what's now Turkey, smoothed the way for farming to take root in Europe, the scientists conclude January 21 in eLife.

Previous chemical studies of human bones from Balkan sites indicated that ancient hunter-gatherers had eaten a lot of animal protein, mainly fish. Plant remains have not preserved well at those sites, leaving uncertain any role for grains on the menu of people who lived there.

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Green Light

Best of the Web: Russia declares war on the Straussians

Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss
Russia is not waging war on the Ukrainian people, but on a small group of people within the US power that has transformed Ukraine without its knowledge, the Straussians. It formed half a century ago and has already committed an incredible amount of crimes in Latin America and the Middle East without the knowledge of the United States. This is their story.

At dawn on February 24, Russian forces entered Ukraine en masse. According to President Vladimir Putin, speaking on television at the time, this special operation was the beginning of his country's response to "those who aspire to world domination" and who are advancing Nato's infrastructure to his country's doorstep. During this long speech, he summarized how NATO destroyed Yugoslavia without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, even bombing Belgrade in 1999. Then he perused the destruction of the United States in the Middle East, in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Only after this lengthy presentation did he announce that he had sent his troops to Ukraine with the dual mission of destroying the Nato-linked armed forces and ending the Nato armed neo-Nazi groups.

Stop

Fyodor Lukyanov: The end of an era

tank
© Sputnik/Konstantin MichalczewskiThe Russian president told his Turkish counterpart that nationalists use civilians as human shields
Russia's military intervention in Ukraine has spelled the end of an epoch in the state of global affairs after President Vladimir Putin launched the action last week. Its impact will be felt for years to come, but Moscow has positioned itself to "become an agent of cardinal change for the whole world."

The Russian Armed Forces' operation in Ukraine marks the end of an era. It began with the fall of the Soviet Union and its dissolution in 1991, when a fairly stable bipolar structure was overturned by what eventually came to be known as the 'Liberal World Order'. This paved the way for the US and its allies to play a dominant role in international politics centered around universalist ideology.

The crisis manifested itself long ago, although there was no significant resistance from major powers who were left unsatisfied with their position in the new political playing field. In fact, for quite a long time (at least a decade and a half), there had been practically no opposition at all. Non-Western countries, namely China and Russia, made efforts to integrate into the hierarchy. Beijing managed not only to do this, but also made the most of the situation to gain a foothold as a dominant player. Moscow, however, came out much worse and took longer to adjust to this new world order and cement a respectable place within its ranks.

Handcuffs

Flashback Best of the Web: To Catch a Nazi: The Secret History of Ukraine's Extensive Nazi Network, And How The US Government Gave Them Safe Harbor

Voice article
© Voice
"SUBJECT D" IS THE LABEL MOST RECENTLY used by the federal government to de­scribe a certain high-ranking Nazi collab­orator, an alleged war criminal whose co­operation with the Central Intelligence Agency allowed him to enter this country in 1949 and later become a U.S. citizen. Subject D's history was supposed to remain hidden; indeed, he felt so secure that his telephone number is listed under his real name. Now, after nearly 40 years, his secret is out.

Last June, the General Accounting Of­fice (GAO) completed a three-year inves­tigation of the illegal postwar immigra­tion of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, and of the secret assistance they allegedly re­ceived from U.S. intelligence agencies. This sensitive federal study was ordered by the House Judiciary Committee to supplement a 1978 review of accusations that federal agencies obstructed the pros­ecution of alleged Nazi war criminals.

After reviewing voluminous files and conducting many interviews, the GAO found "no evidence of any U.S. agency program to aid Nazis or Axis collabora­tors to immigrate to the United States." But among the 114 cases it reviewed — ­dealing with a small fraction of the sus­pected war criminals — the GAO did dis­cover five cases of Nazis or collaborators "with undesirable or questionable backgrounds who received some individual as­sistance in their U.S. immigrations." Al­though the 40-page report said that three of them were already dead, it named no names, or even nationalities, and referred to the five only as Subjects A through E. Much of the information about them and their activities remains classified. In two cases, the assisted individuals were pro­tected by their intelligence contacts from authorities seeking to enforce immigra­tion laws that prohibit the entry of war criminals and other persecutors.

The authors of the GAO report seem eager to justify the actions of the govern­ment, and regardless of bias, their effort hardly represents a comprehensive ex­amination of this historic problem. Yet despite its shortcomings, the report is a landmark — an official admission that Nazis and Nazi collaborators were assist­ed in entering the United States by the CIA.

The Voice has learned that the collaborator discussed in the GAO report as "Subject D" is a prominent Ukrainian nationalist.

Comment: To see more pages of the original news article, go to the end of the text here.


Info

An innovative 40,000-year-old culture in China

A well-preserved Palaeolithic site in northern China reveals a new and previously unidentified set of cultural innovations.
China Excavation Site
© Fa-Gang WangArchaeologists excavating the well-preserved surface at the Xiamabei site, northern China, showing stone tools, fossils, ochre and red pigments.
When did populations of Homo sapiens first arrive in China and what happened when they encountered the Denisovans or Neanderthals who lived there? A new study by an international team of researchers opens a window into hunter-gatherer lifestyles 40,000 years ago. Archaeological excavations at the site of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin of northern China have revealed the presence of innovative behaviors and unique toolkits.

The discovery of a new culture suggests processes of innovation and cultural diversification occurring in Eastern Asia during a period of genetic and cultural hybridization. Although previous studies have established that Homo sapiens arrived in northern Asia by about 40,000 years ago, much about the lives and cultural adaptations of these early peoples, and their possible interactions with archaic groups, remains unknown. In the search for answers, the Nihewan Basin in northern China, with a wealth of archaeological sites ranging in age from 2 million to 10,000 years ago, provides one of the best opportunities for understanding the evolution of cultural behavior in northeastern Asia.

A new study describes a unique 40,000-year-old culture at the site of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin. With the earliest known evidence of ochre processing in Eastern Asia and a set of distinct blade-like stone tools, Xiamabei contains cultural expressions and features that are unique or exceedingly rare in northeastern Asia. Through the collaboration of an international team of scholars, analysis of the finds offers important new insights into cultural innovation during the expansion of Homo sapiens populations.

"Xiamabei stands apart from any other known archaeological site in China, as it possesses a novel set of cultural characteristics at an early date," says Fa-Gang Wang of the Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, whose team first excavated the site.

Archaeology

Drowned Stone Age fisherman examined with new forensic method that could rewrite prehistory

drowned stone age fisherman chile
© Pedro AndradeArchaeologists unearthed the skeleton in a coastal area near Chile's Atacama Desert.
Tiny marine algae lingered in his bones.

Human bones dating to the Stone Age found in what is now northern Chile are the remains of a fisherman who died by drowning, scientists have discovered.

The man lived about 5,000 years ago, and he was around 35 to 45 years old when he died. Scientists found the skeleton in a mass burial in the coastal region of Copaca near the Atacama Desert, and the grave held four individuals: three adults (two males and one female) and one child.

Better Earth

Origins of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf solved

Willendorf Venus
© Bjørn Christian Tørrissen - CC BY-SA 4.0The Venus of Willendorf is a 4.4-inch Venus figurine, found in 1908 at a Palaeolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria.
In a new study published by the University of Vienna in collaboration with Vienna's Natural History Museum, researchers applied high-resolution tomography, suggesting that the Venus originates from a region in northern Italy.

Anthropologist Gerhard Weber from the University of Vienna used micro-computer tomography to analyse the Venus up to a resolution of up to 11.5 micrometres. Together with Alexander Lukeneder and Mathias Harzhauser from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, the team procured comparative samples from Austria and Europe for comparison to geologically determine the origin.

The study found that the tomography data from Venus had sediments deposited in the rocks in different densities and sizes. In between there were always small remnants of shells and six very dense, larger grains, so-called limonite. The latter explains the previously mysterious hemispherical indentations on the surface of Venus with the same diameter: "The hard limonites probably broke out when the creator of Venus was carving," explains Weber: "In the case of the Venus navel, he then apparently made a virtue out of necessity."

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Dollars

Shadowy money built steel empire - with bank's help

steel plant
© Andrew Rush/Post-GazetteWarren Steel Plant
Months after Ukraine oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and his partners abandoned an Ohio steel plant and left scores of workers without jobs, financial crime experts at Deutsche Bank shot up a troubling alert.

Millions of dollars were flowing into its U.S. headquarters for a business owned by the oligarch, but something wasn't right. Detecting signs of suspicious money — large round numbers from high-risk jurisdictions — the bank could have refused the transfers or even dropped the client.

But it didn't do either.

Despite warnings from its own workers, Deutsche allowed the money to keep pouring into its coffers six years ago while the oligarch and his partners secretly amassed a steel fortune in the United States.

Kolomoisky
© Mauricio Lima/The New York TimesIhor Kolomoisky, 2014, at his office in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.