Abolish the Police, Arm the Citizens: The "Sagra Model" of Privatized Security

No surrender, no retreat: Andrei (l) and Viktor Gorodilov at the bridge.

 “What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? Or, if during the periods of mass arrests ... people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?"

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

  

“They are coming to kill us!” exclaimed a young resident of Sagra, Russia as he spied a column of vehicles approaching the tiny village at the feet of the Ural Mountains. Responding to the alarm, several dozen residents mustered near the town entrance, bearing whatever weapons they could find. Some of them grabbed pitchforks, chains, or knives. Three men arrived on the scene with shotguns.

The leader of the approaching convoy was Sergei “The Gypsy” Lebedev, head of a criminal gang that had tormented Sagra for months. Lebedev's followers swiped anything of value that was left unguarded.  Power tools, appliances, and other household property disappeared; homes were vandalized as copper tubing and wiring were ripped out to be sold to scrap metal dealers. An onslaught of shoplifting threatened the survival of the village’s only significant retail store. 

Exasperated citizens complained to the police in nearby Yekaterinberg, only to be treated with a mixture of amusement and impatient annoyance. Mounting hostility against Lebedev and his underlings prompted the gangster to withdraw – but only to gather reinforcements.

Lebedev was no petty cut-purse; his entourage included at least one vory v zakone (“thief in law”) – that is, a member of a politically protected mafia. 

The gang leader’s intent was to seize control of the village as a base of operations for a drug operation, and he clearly enjoyed the covert support of the region’s “law enforcement” establishment. Thus it was that late in the evening of July 1, Ledbedev assembled a contingent of about 60 armed thugs and mounted a punitive expedition against the village of 130 people.

As the headlights from the 15-vehicle convoy probed the gathering darkness, the men of Sagra formed a human roadblock across the bridge at the entrance to their town. The infernal column came to a halt, while its leader tried to decide how to deal with the unanticipated resistance. Suddenly a voice from behind them exclaimed, “Grenade!” An object that appeared to meet that description landed in the midst of the raiders, causing several to bolt in panic.

 

In fact, the weapon was a pine cone that had been hurled by Andrei Gorodilov, who had taken cover beside the road. At that signal, the air erupted in curses and insults hurled by many of the women of the village, who had hidden themselves behind trees. 

The resulting diversion was brief, but effective: Andrei’s father, Viktor, let loose a blast from his shotgun. Two other defenders followed suit. The rest, bearing whatever improvised weapons they had found, lit into Lebedev’s hired killers with the unalloyed ferocity of men fighting on their own soil with their backs to their homes. 

One of the invaders was killed, several more were wounded, and Lebedev was forced to retreat. At some point in the skirmish, Sagra resident Tatyana Gordeyeva contacted the police, who – displaying the efficiency and timeliness for which their profession is known – arrived long after the battle was over, and immediately began to treat the defenders as criminal suspects. Their first priority was not to pursue and arrest Lebedev and his cronies (who were eventually taken into custody), or to collect evidence for their eventual prosecution; instead, they attempted to clamp down a cover-up of the matter. They didn’t succeed. 

Within a few days, news of the battle had been propagated throughout Russia, and Sagra quickly became “a catchword for a spate of violence around the country in which people have banded together to defend themselves in the absence of police protection,” noted the New York Times. An entrepreneur captured the public mood in a commemorative t-shirt with the inscription: “If the government can’t help people, it doesn’t have the right to forbid them from defending themselves – Sagra 2011.” 

Thanks for nothing: Russian police at Sagra following the battle.

 “What’s going on in this country is that the government isn’t protecting anyone,” observed Mr. Gorodilov, who spoke with the invincible authority of personal experience. That assessment was seconded by Konstantin M. Kiselyov of Ykaterinberg’s Institute of Philosophy and Law: “The police are corrupt or lazy or politicized, and it’s the same all across the country. So people must protect themselves. They can’t count on the government or its structures. That is why the country is turning into one big Sagra.”

The most remarkable reaction to the Battle of Sagra came from Alexander Torshin, the Speaker of the Federation Council (a position roughly analogous to Senate Majority Leader). Invoking the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Torshin announced that he would propose an amendment to the Russian Constitution guaranteeing “that a Russian citizen has the right under the law to bear arms.”

“We must give our citizens a chance at survival,” Torshin told the Interfax news agency, insisting that widespread private gun ownership doesn’t lead to “a surge in killings,” but rather “the reduction in street crimes and the murder rate.” 

 What makes Torshin’s stance all the more remarkable is the fact that roughly half a year earlier he had expressed support for banning private possession of “non-lethal” handguns. 

It’s possible that this dramatic volte-face was the product of a sincere conversion. It’s likelier that Mr. Torshin knew which way the winds of public outrage are blowing, and aligned his sails accordingly. In any case, Torshin’s proposal is tangible evidence of a growing -- and thoroughly commendable -- Russian contempt for the very institution of government. 

Totalitarianism is based on the assumption that human nature can be permanently altered through the systematic application of state terrorism. Lenin described his regime as a “scientific dictatorship” exercising “power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.” Within a generation or two, Lenin believed, his dictatorship would beget a new creature – homo sovieticus, the selfless, state-focused New Soviet Man. The gulag state would act as an alembic, refining troublesome individualism out of the species, even if this meant pitilessly liquidating millions of specimens regarded as unsuitable for the collectivist future. 

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Communism wasn’t a scientific doctrine for the perfection of the human species; it was, in R.J.Rummel’s phrase, a “plague of power.” After the Hammer and Sickle was furled in 1991, the plague of ideological Communism mutated into form of state gangsterism incapable of reproducing itself beyond Russia’s borders. The Party Nomenklatura abandoned the conceit that they were History’s infallible vanguard, and settled into a very comfortable new role as Russia’s crony capitalist oligarchy. 

While Russia’s criminal oligarchy has little use for ideology, they still embrace the idea of “power without limit, resting directly on force.” Valery D. Zorkin, chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court, laments that Russia’s contemporary political model is based on “the fusion of government and criminals,” with the country increasingly “divided between predators, free in the criminal jungle, and sub-humans, conscious that they are only prey.” 

In his November 2010 State of the Nation speech, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev acknowledged that in many parts of the country local governments have entered into a “direct merger with criminals” at the expense of the rights of law-abiding individuals. While this will surprise nobody who understands that the State is, and has always been, a criminal enterprise, this admission is striking when offered by a 46-year-old political leader who graduated from Leningrad State University. 

One acutely horrifying example of the merger described by Medvedev was provided by a November 2010 massacre in Kushchevskaya, a city of 35,000 about 700 miles from Moscow. The city was the site of several major state-controlled collective farms during the Soviet era. After the USSR was dissolved, the local branch of the Nomenklatura created a quasi-private agricultural firm called Arteks Agro, which was controlled by a career Party functionary named Sergei Tsapok.

For the past decade, a criminal clique headed by Tsapok, and that included current and former members of the city government, conducted a reign of terror in Kushchevskaya, plundering and raping as they saw fit and killing anyone who complained in a voice louder than a whisper. 

Complaints to the police availed nothing, since their duty was to maintain “order” – that is, to enforce the will of the local elite – rather than to protect the rights of the innocent. At public meetings, terrified and outraged local citizens would barrage municipal leaders with protests about the criminal onslaught, only to be told that “There are no criminal groups here.”

Last November 4, Tsapok’s gang invaded the home of Server Ametov, murdering him and eleven others, including four young children. The victims were stabbed, strangled, and set on fire. Ametov was a successful farmer, and since about 1998 Tsapok’s gang had been carrying out a modified version of Stalin’s collectivization program by driving small farmers off their land, murdering those (including Ametov’s brother) who resisted. 

The ensuing outcry was sufficient to prompt official intervention, leading to Tsapok’s arrest. For millions of Russians, the Kuschevskaya atrocity demonstrated the fatal futility of seeking protection from the enforcement arm of the ruling criminal elite. The Russian disaffection toward government has grown so widespread and intense that the ruling establishment is actually reducing the size and power of its law enforcement apparatus. This a development without precedent in the country once terrorized by the Oprichniki, the Okhrana, and the Cheka.

Two victims of the Kuschchevskaya massacre.

In Russia, as elsewhere, the role of the police “is to control situations and to control the people rather than help them,” observes Leonid Kosals, a professor of economics at Moscow’s National Research University. As a result, people “turn to their neighbors and to relatives and local networks to solve their problems by themselves…. [I]n Russia we have thousands of such cases.” 

The trend toward privatization of security in Russia is likely to grow as a result of President Medvedev’s recent initiative to reform the country’s militia – that is, its police force – by purging about 200,000 officers from the ranks. Sociologist Mikhail Vinogradov, who estimates that one-third of Russia’s police force is composed of alcoholics and psychopaths, points out that in 1991, the militia was reduced by about thirty percent – and the result was a sharp reduction in the crime rate.

During the past decade, the crime rate in the United States has declined, terrorism has been all but nonexistent – and the country has been transformed into a fair approximation of a high-security prison, complete with full-spectrum surveillance of the population and undisguised militarization of “local” police departments. At the same time, the political elite in charge of the former Soviet Union is addressing a legitimate crime crisis by drawing down the police force and recognizing (however tentatively) the right of citizens to armed self-defense. 

For all of its problems, Russia clearly is no longer the land of Lenin. For all of our advantages, it’s just as clear that the United States of America is no longer the Land of the Free. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Briefly Considered: Red Phoenix Rising?

Item: "According to a poll last month by the Moscow-based Levada Center, 54 percent of Russians between 16 and 19 believe Stalin was `a wise leader,' and a similar number thought the collapse of the Soviet Union was `a tragedy.' (Two thirds also thought that America was a `rival and enemy' and 62 percent believed that the government should `deport most immigrants.') `Many of my classmates believe that some kind of Soviet golden era existed before the West came in and destroyed everything,' says Fillip Kuznetsov, an international-relations student at Moscow University. `They also believe the state is justified in doing anything it likes to its citizens in the name of some great cause.'"


Item: "President Vladimir Putin said he had ordered strategic bombers to resume regular long-range patrols Friday as the Air Force carried out maneuvers involving 20 strategic bombers over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans," reported the Moscow Times. "One of those drills, involving 11 aircraft, prompted NATO member Norway to scramble F-16 fighter jets to observe and photograph the Russian planes as they flew over the Norwegian Sea. The group of strategic bombers, early warning aircraft, fighter jets and refueling planes represented the biggest show of Russian air power in that region since the early 1990s, said Brigadier General Ole Asak, chief of the Norwegian Joint Air Operations Center."

Item: "After a newly self-confident, oil-rich Russia teamed up with China in joint military exercises Friday, it is moving to reclaim the former Soviet Union's status as a global military power. A seven-year, $200-billion rearmament plan signed by President Vladimir Putin earlier this year will purchase new generations of missiles, planes, and perhaps aircraft carriers to rebuild Russia's arsenal."


My first thought, prompted particularly by the comment about the State "doing anything it likes to its citizens in the name of some great cause," was: The same neo-con cabal that has seized the U.S. executive branch has taken control of Moscow as well.

It makes more sense to believe that the Putin regime's embrace of a watered-down variant of Stalinism is at least in part a reaction to the militarist mania that has characterized Washington since the neo-cons -- who could be considered Trotsky's distant offspring -- took over. As I've noted elsewhere, Washington years ago replaced Moscow as the headquarters of the global collectivist revolution.

Managing relations with Russia would always be a challenge, even absent the ambitions of Putin and his siloviki. But in a display of the perverted genius peculiar to Washington, the Bush Regime has not only cultivated the worst elements of Russia's ruling clique, its behavior has provoked understandable concerns among the long-suffering Russian people and provided their rulers with a plausible foreign enemy.

For people living in Russia's "near abroad" -- Estonia, for example -- things are probably going to get unpleasant very soon. And Russia's status as a rising power in the most important economic realm -- energy -- will soon give Moscow greater leverage than its arsenal ever could.

Meanwhile ...

The U.S. is deeply in debt to foreign lenders, particularly China. Washington's military (I don't know that the collective possessive pronoun "our" still applies) has been all but used up in the Idiot King's Mesopotamian war. Because of that war, and the sanctimonious bellicosity of the Bush Regime, our nation's international prestige is at its lowest ebb. The machinery for a domestic police state akin to Stalin's is in place.

It seems to me that the last thing we need -- however useful it would be to our rulers, who are ever in search of new rationales for regimentation -- is a revived stand-off with Russia, particularly one that in relative terms is a more plausible rival than the Soviets. But that's just what we're likely to get.

On the lighter side, it's always fun to see The Simpsons vindicated as a source of political prophecy. Here's their take on the Golitsyn thesis:






Please be sure to visit The Right Source, and the Liberty Minute archive.

Planet of the Pig-Men

"[Rowan] Gaither was, at that time, President of the Ford Foundation. Mr. Gaither had sent for me when I found it convenient to be in New York, asked me to call upon him at his office, which I did. On arrival, after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said, `Mr. Dodd, we have asked you to come up here today because we thought that, possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of foundations such as ourselves.'

Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on to say, "Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here, have had experience operating under directives, the substance of which is, that we use our grant-making power so as to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union."

Norman Dodd, staff director of the congressional “Reece Committee” to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, recalling his 1954 conversation with Ford Foundation President Rowan Gaither

“We can honestly say that our two nations have more in common than ever before.”

Then-FBI Director Louis Freeh, speaking in Moscow on July 4, 1994, after signing a cooperation pact with the FSB – the successor to the Soviet KGB. FSB Director Sergei Stepashin, incidentally, marked the occasion by proclaiming: “Together, we're invincible.”

If we “won” the Cold War, why is our society beginning to resemble “post-Soviet” Russia?

Recently in Moscow, Russia's OMON Special Forces police, which is sort of a national SWAT unit frequently deployed to the battlefront in Chechnya, put on an exhibition of its hardware and tactics, which include sophisticated bone-breaking techniques.

OMON has recently received the mission of dealing with “riot control,” and its lead-handed tactics in dealing with peaceful political dissidents have earned some negative press. So the exhibition served the dual purpose of PR work and intimidation.

"This is a warning," OMON colonel Vladimir Antonovich explained. "We want to show off what we can do."

Political dissidents in Russia are painfully aware of what the OMON police can do; many of them were on the receiving end of the unit's brutal tactics during a recent anti-Putin demonstration in St. Petersburg. Hundreds were arrested and detained, and probably at least as many were beaten, kicked, and otherwise assaulted by OMON troops dressed in riot gear.

That's how things are in Russia – and measured in historic terms, this type of treatment represents a dramatic net improvement over past performance.

The trend-line in the United States, however, has run in the opposite direction.

Witness the ongoing and rapid militarization of law enforcement through the Department of Homeland Security, a trend often described here that has finally caught the attention of the “mainstream” media:

“With scores of police agencies large and small, from Lexington, Ky., to Austin, Texas, buying armored vehicles at Homeland Security expense, some criminal justice experts warn that their use in fighting everyday crime could do more harm than good and represents a post-9/11, militaristic turn away from the more cooperative community-policing approach promoted in the 1990s.... Law enforcement agencies say the growing use of the vehicles, a practice that also has its defenders in the academic field of criminal justice, helps ensure police have the tools they need to deal with hostage situations, heavy gunfire and acts of terrorism. But police are also putting the equipment to more routine use, such as the delivering to warrants to suspects believed to be armed.”

The funny thing is that OMON also invokes “hostage situations” and “terrorism” to justify its approach as well.

So what we're seeing is the mellowing of the regime governing “post-Soviet” Russia, from unalloyed totalitarianism into a superficially democratic form of authoritarian despotism, while the United States mutates from a republic into a quasi-Soviet corporatist police state.

The pigs and farmers have become indistinguishable from each other. And the two nations they rule are being plundered by them in remarkably similar ways.

By 1991, Russia scholar Anne Williamson recently told me, “No one [in the Soviet ruling elite] any longer believed the ideology, and certainly the nation was mismanaged under it, and approaching insolvency. (Sound familiar?) But Russia did not have a vibrant economy (it's functioning economy was "hidden," and that bit was relatively vibrant) to protect - but it did and does have tremendous national assets, and an industrial base. Naturally those assets were the object of the `privatization.' However, you can't pull a stunt like that in the US as presently structured...so this indirect route [buying up `public assets' through foreign intermediaries] is a good one for them, very clever. Nonetheless, both methods do/did involve the purchase of PUBLIC assets."

The use of foreign entities to strip-mine the United States “is brilliant beyond the pragmatic logistics of the deals,” Williamson continues, because “it will get the public accustomed to foreign ownership of large, publicly-utilized assets, so when the Chinese and the Russians start using those portions of their large reserves they have set aside for multi-100 billion dollar investment funds (not for buying US T-Bills), the public will more readily accept foreign ownership of US private and public assets.”

“Both situations involve the sale of public assets to well-connected insiders using all the levers of the state to tilt the results into the correct pockets,” she concludes. “Looks comparable to me, but the structure of each nation simply required different approaches. Russia's effort was raw, brutal, violent and highly-visible post-collapse...the US's is sneaky, incomprehensible to the average man, and therefore well-hidden, and set in motion pre-collapse.”

The route we're taking may be a little different, but we're going to end up pretty much exactly where Russia is right now: Ruled by an entrenched nomenklatura defended by a brutal military/security establishment, with our wealth controlled by a corrupt trans-national elite.

Which seems to be exactly what Norman Dodd was warning about a half-century ago.

Some perfectly sober and respectable people don't find Norman Dodd's testimony to be credible; they believe that the political gene-splicing that has made interchangeable pig-men out of the American and Russian ruling elites is a result of evolution, not conspiracy -- that is, malevolent intelligent design. I don't agree, but I do respect that opinion – as long as it is held by people who admit the reality of what's happening to us.

So, to revisit the question posed above about “winning” the Cold War”:

Who won the Cold War? The Pig-Men did.

Make sure to check out The Right Source!

Toward Global Energy Fascism

In 2041 ... Switzerland joined the United Nations*, now a military alliance. What had once been merely a debating society during the twentieth century had turned by the rapprochement of the super powers into ... an active military and economic alliance. An alliance whose purpose ... was to ensure that the less powerful nations of the Southern Hemisphere and Middle East continued to supply them with raw materials.

As their abundant resources propelled [them] to importance, old grudges against the “exploiting” powers radicalized the nations of the Southern Hemisphere. Controlling an ever greater part of the world's dwindling resources, the nations of South America, Africa, and Arabia used the massive wealth they were accumulating to modernize their countries, and their armies. Together they formed the Confederation of States, whose expressed purpose was little less than the domination of their former “oppressors.”

As these nations grew in both economic and military strength, they began looking for ways to flex their newfound muscles. The older countries, fading in both importance and economic strength, sought to reassure themselves by asserting their own power whenever the opportunity to do so safely arose. Soon minor skirmishes, mostly at sea, constantly threatened to erupt into a greater conflict.... By 2032 the world consisted of two mega-nations and a number of backward neutrals who were completely unable to affect the situation.

From the Prologue to The Jupiter War (1991)

Extrapolating from trends visible more than a decade and a half ago, renowned science fiction author Gregory Benford devised the foregoing premise and invited a group of his peers to describe a resource war between those two planet-spanning mega-states. Eager to control the globe without destroying it, the antagonists keep moving the battle lines away from the planet, eventually fighting a full-scale interplanetary war over the Solar System's resources.

In that long and increasingly pointless war of attrition -- “Neither side will surrender, neither will admit it might be wrong” -- the energy- and mineral-rich Jovian system was the grand prize.

Professor Michael T. Klare of Hampshire College avoids sci-fi extravagances in presenting a vision of the coming global resource wars. Klare, author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum, writes that we confront an era of perpetual war, economic regimentation, and garrison state oppression – a system he calls “Energo-fascism.”

“The rise of Energo-fascism can be traced to two overarching phenomena: an imminent collision between energy demand and energy supplies, and the historic migration of the center of gravity of planetary energy output from the global north to the global south,” writes Klare.

As this trend accelerates, Klare foresees the following developments, some of which are already visible in a limited sense:

• “The transformation of the U.S. Military into a global oil protection service”;

• “The transformation of Russia into an energy superpower with control over Eurasia's largest supplies of oil and natural gas”;
  

• “A ruthless scramble among the great powers for the remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia,” with the accompanying wars, proxy wars, client regimes, corruption, and repression;

• “Increased state intrusion into, and surveillance of, public and private life as reliance on nuclear power grows, bringing with it an increased threat of sabotage, accident, and diversion of fissionable materials into the hands of illicit nuclear proliferators.”

“Disparate as [these developments] seem, they all share a common feature: increasing state involvement in the procurement, transportation, and allocation of energy supplies, accompanied by a greater inclination to employ force against those who resist the state's priorities in these areas,” Klare points out.

(Although Klare seems to appreciate the deadly consequences of giving the state a monopoly on the use of force, he unfortunately has yet to re-think the merits of disarming the civilian population through UN-centered efforts to outlaw non-state possession of "small arms.")

Klare's analysis tacitly acknowledges a largely ignored fact that was highlighted by The Economist (subscription required) last August: Most of the world's energy resources are already either state-owned or state-controlled. The world's thirteen largest oil and gas firms, for example, are either partially or wholly nationalized through “state-owned firms through which governments retain profits from oil production.” Exxon, the world's largest private oil company, comes in at number 14 on that list.

All told, 16 of the top 20 oil and gas firms are State-owned and control roughly 90% of the world's oil. These national oil companies (NOCs) are riddled with the corruption and inefficiency that are inescapable symptoms of state ownership or control. As the Economist points out: “Few of the princes, politicians and strongmen who wield ultimate authority over these firms can resist the urge to meddle. At best, that leads to the sort of inefficiencies found at most state-owned firms.... At worst, the business of pumping and selling oil [and natural gas] is entirely subsumed by politics,” as when the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin choked off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine a year ago, in the middle of winter – the time of peak demand.

Klare considers Putin's Russia – which has been using undisguised state violence to consolidate control over the immense energy wealth of Russia and the “near abroad” -- as the paradigmatic “Energo-fascist” regime. Putin himself, in his Ph.D. Dissertation, set forth what could be considered the founding premise of that system: “The state has the right to regulate the process of the acquisition and the use of natural resources, and particularly mineral resources, independent of on whose property they are located. In this regard, the state acts in the interests of society as a whole.”

“No better justification for Energo-fascism can be imagined,” comments Klare. Indeed, Putin is to be commended for his candor; his counterparts in Washington are acting on the same premise while trying to conceal their intentions.

For example, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains a provision usurping state and local control over decisions related to energy infrastructure: Specifically, the Act deprived them of the authority to approve placement of natural gas “regasification” facilities.

Some communities had resisted construction of the huge facilities in local ports for various reasons – such as concerns over safety or possible terrorist attacks. This is a splendid example of how federalism should work, since other communities would be eager to exploit the resulting economic opportunities. But the Bush regime now has the power to veto those decisions in the name of acting in “the interests of society as a whole” (as Putin would put it).

Klare makes a plausible case that this could prefigure the wholesale federalization of all decisions having to do with energy resource development and allocation.

It's not unreasonable to see the theft of Iraq's energy resources by Washington (with a limited buy-in from a handful of cohorts) as an application of the same conceit on the international stage, as well as the first of many resource wars.

“By militarizing the energy policies of the consuming nations and enhancing the repressive capacities of client regimes, the foundations are being laid for an Energo-fascist world,” Klare predicts.

If he is right – and I fear he may be – we'll never have to worry about wars erupting in the Asteroid Belt or on the moons of Jupiter. Caught between apocalyptic violence and dystopian tyranny, humanity would never escape earth's gravity well.

*Actually, Switzerland became the 190th member of the United Nations in 2002, alas.