QAnon, Jan. 6th, & Putin’s Real Motive

Review by Bill Doughty––

Jewish elders supposedly gathered in a cemetery in Prague at the beginning of the last century to discuss their plan to rule the world. The cabal of Jewish elders reportedly wrote down their plan in a document that would become known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” published as “Anti-Christ” in Russia. The book injected an idea that would spread fear of replacement of white Christians through various extremist groups.

The trouble is, the document was not real. Russian secret police forged it under the reign of Czar Nicholas II. Nicholas needed to distract the public from his failures as a leader. Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko call “The Protocols” “the original fake news” in “Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon” (Stanford University Press, 2021).

The authors take readers along a poisonous vein leading from “The Protocols” to replacement theory, apocalyptic terrorism, the J6 Capitol insurrection coup attempt, and various overlapping COVID conspiracies, including conspiracies involving Navy hospital ships USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort.

“In April 2020, Eduardo Moreno, a train engineer from San Pedro, California, derailed a train because he believed the USNS Mercy hospital ship was part of suspicious plot to spread (and not cure) the coronavirus.

“On April 30, 2020, Jessica Prim, a 37-year-old QAnon supporter from Illinois, was arrested after live streaming on Facebook her journey to New York City to ‘take out’ Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton … Prim, a stripper, was traveling with a dozen knives. She said she was driving to the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship docked in New York harbor, but accidentally ended up at the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier museum … She claimed to have been inspired by President Trump. ‘I was watching the press conference with Donald Trump on TV and felt like he was talking to me.’”

It wouldn't be the last time Trump followers were incited to attempt violence.

Hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) returns to Norfolk, May 2, 2020, after treating COVID-19 patients in New York and New Jersey (MC1 Joshua D. Sheppard)

A Woman's Place: In QAnon?

Bloom and Moskalenko make an eyebrow-raising assertion: That women were a “driving force” of the failed insurrection of January 6, 2001, and that they play a “pivotal role in bringing together an ad hoc network of far-right militants, Christian conservatives, and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory.”

Women have a protective instinct about children (who are supposedly threatened by vampirish pedophiles), according to the authors, and many white women have a vested interest in maintaining a white patriarchy. “Women have been at the forefront of white racist movements for the past 100 years."

It's hard to agree completely with the authors’ contention about a prominent role of women in domestic extremism when considering the male-dominated so-called “militias.”

And it should be noted that strong, patriotic women have stood up for democracy, as personified this week by Cassidy Hutchinson (pictured above). Hutchinson testified to the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Another patriot, Representative Liz Cheney (pictured at top),  places the Constitution and the truth above political power.

The ranks of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Patriot Front, and other militia groups are apparently overwhelmingly male.

Many of these white supremacists, Aryan Nation believers and Christian nationalist extremists have embraced global conspiracies and targeted the federal government as the enemy. They focus on prominent Jews like George Soros, and they justify their beliefs, in part on the antisemitic “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Although “The Protocols” isn’t real, it hasn’t stopped true believers from thinking otherwise –– and acting on their beliefs. QAnon promotes theories that Democrats drink the blood of babies and that lizard people are in positions of power in various countries. QAnon believers, led by people such as retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (disgraced former National Security Advisor  to President Trump) think they must “save the children” from evil nonbelievers.

Then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn returns a salute upon his arrival at MacDill, AFB, FL, Feb. 6, 2017, with President Trump. (D. Myles Cullen)

Bloom and Moskalenko take a compassionate approach in understanding and explaining how QAnon believers like Ashli Babbitt and Roseanne Boylan (both killed in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol) came under the spell of QAnon after their own personal setbacks and trauma. The authors show there is a tie to PTSD as they offer help in mindfulness therapies. In fact, the authors devote the last part of their book, in a section called FAQs, to strategies and tactics to help friends and family members.

Russia Connection, Putin's Motive

Russia figures prominently in the origins of the conspiracies on which QAnon is based –– and promoted. 

Russia has been using QAnon to advance its interests,” Bloom and Moskalenko write. Russia promoted Pizzagate, Michael Flynn, Trump, and online misinformation related to Q, including COVID disinformation.

"With ample evidence of Russia supporting and amplifying QAnon social media conflict, it is important to identify the man behind the curtain. Q may not have been directly controlled by Russia, but Russia has been using QAnon to advance its interests. Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia for over 20 years…

“Putin’s reign has become famous for the way he constructed a ‘vertical of power,’ with him at the top, and anyone below either heeding his command or suffering the consequences. Twenty years into this effort, it is safe to assume that Russian foreign policy efforts are Putin’s foreign policy efforts. In this sense, QAnon’s speed is a well-executed psyop –– a psychological operation to influence ‘hearts and minds’ –– a specialty of Putin’s KGB training.”

Just as Czar Nicholas had tried to distract the Russian people, Putin did the same with bogeymen creations 120 years later, according to the authors. He targeted the United States, Ukraine, the World Health Organization, and NATO with stories of victimization and conspiracy theories. Putin embraced fascism and Orwellian schemes to justify his revanchism and ethno-nationalism.

“Russia’s efforts in amplifying QAnon have promoted Vladimir Putin’s primary interest in ‘Making Russia Great Again,’” the authors write, “as well as his master plan of undermining democracy in the United States and abroad.”

Often Russia’s efforts targeted elections, both in the United States and Europe, with Putin and Q followers targeting progressive democracies, supporting authoritarians, and stoking anti-vaccine conspiracies.There are parallels with what QAnon did during the COVID pandemic.

“Thus, the ‘manufactured virus’ –– that in the American QAnon version originated in a Chinese bio lab in Wuhan –– in the Russian version originated in a U.S. lab and was brought to China by NATO soldiers. The NATO soldiers were carrying the virus around the world, the narrative explains, because it serves the deep state’s purpose to get rich off the mandated masks and the lockdowns, This story was followed up in the Russian-controlled informational space by fear-mongering stories about the dangers of collaborating with the United States in the area of biochemistry. These follow-up stories supplied a list of ‘dangerous’ laboratories in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kazakhstan –– post-Soviet countries that Russia has attempted to bring back under its influence. The nature of the folQlore is the same: Use the real threat of the virus, add to it a sinister component of plotting governments, and point the finger at potential targets of public anger. Only the main characters are recast to better fit the audience’s mindset. The Russian version of QAnon folQlore blames NATO, an organization Putin detests, and directs public fear and outrage at countries that reject Russian control.”

The authors note, “Both narratives fan public distrust in science and fear of vaccines.” And, with Putin’s devotion to Russian Orthodox Christianity, there are strong parallels related to religion. QAnon is popular among American evangelicals.

“What made evangelicals especially vulnerable to QAnon was that the language and terminology that QAnon used sounded explicit Christian, debating the existence of good and evil,” Bloom and Moskalenko say.

Can it be that Putin’s purported reasons for invading Ukraine –– to rid the former Soviet territory of Nazis –– is actually an Orwellian Big Lie? Like QAnon, is it fake News?

Remember QAnon’s roots in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” replacement theory, and especially antisemitism and Christian nationalism. Is it possible that Putin’s hatred of Ukraine and his unprovoked attack on innocent civilians is fueled by the fact that President Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew?

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy participates in an Armed Forces Full Honors Wreath-Laying Ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, September 1, 2021. (Elizabeth Fraser)

Rejecting Gilead, Embracing Carson

Review by Bill Doughty––

Retired Admiral James Stavridis writes this about author and environmentalist Rachel Carson, author of “The Sea Around Us”: “I’ve read many, many books that try to describe the power and glory of the deep ocean, but none eclipses the writing of Rachel Carson.”

Stavridis offers that highest praise to Carson in the first part of his four-part collection, “The Sailor’s Bookshelf,” reviewed late last year on Navy Reads. Great writers are drawn to other great writers.

Such is the case of Margaret Atwood, who also highlights Rachel Carson’s “The Sea Around Us” (as well as three other classics, including “Silent Spring”) in the final essay of her latest collection: “Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004 to 2021.”

Just as Stavridis and Carson believe, Atwood writes, “The oceans are the living heart and lungs of our planet. They produce most of the oxygen in our atmosphere, and through their circulating currents they control climate. Without healthy oceans, we land-dwelling, air-breathing mid-sized primates will die.”

In her 2021 essay “The Sea Trilogy,” Atwood celebrates the republication of Carson’s first three books –– “Under the Sea-Wind,” “The Sea Around Us,” and “The Edge of the Sea.”

Atwood writes: “In all three of these books there is one underlying refrain: Look, see. Observe. Learn. Wonder. Question. Conclude. Rachel Carson taught people to look at the sea, and to think about the sea, in fresh ways.”

Atwood herself is perhaps best known for her fresh observations about the rise of authoritarianism and her imaginings of what might come. She is the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Testaments.” She’s the mind behind the demented mind of Aunt Lydia and the darkness of Gilead. Her concern about the rise of authoritarianism continues.

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, she reflected, “Totalitarianisms were preoccupying me; the worldwide drift in that direction was alarming, as were various authoritarian moves made in the United States. Were we yet again witnessing the crumbling of democracy?”

Two years earlier Atwood wrote a scathing essay called “A Slave State” about the effects of restricting reproductive freedom and a woman’s right to an abortion. Here’s a timely excerpt, in light of today’s United States Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade after fifty years as established precedent in U.S. law:

“Nobody likes abortion, even when safe and legal. It’s not what any woman would choose for a happy time on Saturday night. But nobody likes women bleeding to death on the bathroom floor from illegal abortions either. What to do?

“Perhaps a different way of approaching the question would be to ask: What kind of country do you want to live in? One in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning his or her health and body, or one in which half the population is free and the other half is enslaved?

“Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put. The only similar circumstance of men is conscription into the army…

“No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth.“

In a gripping 2015 essay, “Reflections on The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood writes this:

“As a generalization, let us say this: absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women. In fact, human societies have taken such an interest. Who shall have babies, which babies shall be ‘legitimate,’ which shall be allowed to live, and which shall be killed (in ancient Rome it was up tot he father, etc.), whether abortion shall be allowed or not, or up to what month; wither women should be forced to have babies they didn’t want or couldn’t support, and so forth.”

While many fundamentalists want to restrict a woman’s right to choose, most Americans, according to numerous polls, are not in favor of overturning 1973’s Roe v. Wade. As today’s SCOTUS decision sinks in, so does anger and resentment.

Atwood discusses the anger she witnessed in the early 1970s, “at the time of the second-wave feminist movement.”

Atwood and Le Guin

In her 2018 obituary essay “We Lost Ursula Le Guin When We Needed Her Most,” Atwood turns to Le Guin to explain the outrage women felt after decades of “suppressed anger” from “being treated as lesser –– much lesser…” Atwood quotes from Le Guin’s 2014 essay, “About Anger”:

“Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a a weapon –– a tool useful only in combat and self-defence … Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice … Valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness.”

About Le Guin, Atwood writes, “The long-term goal, the dogged pursuit of justice –– that took up a lot of her thought and time.”

Le Guin was a premiere voice in science fiction and speculative fantasy. She's the author of "The Left Hand of Darkness" and the "Earthsea" series.

Atwood’s collection of essays is a tribute to a wide spectrum of iterature and free-thinking wisdom. Readers will be rewarded with deep dives into the works of Shakespeare, Alice Munro, Ray Bradbury, Gabrielle Roy, Homer, Dickens, Graeme Gibson, Richard Powers, and, of course, Rachel Carson.

Empathy and Seditious Conspiracy

Review by Bill Doughty––

Mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu was one of first politicians to take a stand and remove monuments honoring the “Cult of the Lost Cause.” He stood up to violent opposition and removed statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, and more. Landrieu sees the removal of monuments to white supremacy as a moral more than a political issue. He sees “a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it.”

Landrieu

Landrieu demonstrates empathy and a willingness to listen and understand the issue in his memoir, “In the Shadow of Statues” (Viking, 2018).

How and why did European Americans build and revere Civil War monuments? How did those memorials and monuments make African American residents feel?

People in the Confederacy were willing to commit treasonous sedition and kill other Americans for their beliefs: that they had the right to continue to buy, sell, imprison, and abuse other humans. And that they had a God-given right to separate families and expand slavery to western states and territories.

Monuments that honor seditious leaders of the Confederacy became a red-hot issue in recent years in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. The issue gained momentum as the Black Lives Matter movement gathered strength in 2019 and 2020, especially after the murder of George Floyd and a string of police shootings of African Americans.

DoD Shows Empathy

The need for accountability touched the Department of Defense in recent years, too.

Former Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper recounts in “A Sacred Oath:Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times” (HarperCollins, 2022) how his commander in chief wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military to quell protests and riots. Esper tells how President Trump wanted troops to shoot U.S. citizens; Trump asked, "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Esper writes, “Ensuring law and order was important, indeed imperative. But it was important to distinguish between peaceful protesters and violent opportunists. Rather than also working to address the underlying problems and heal the division, however, Trump was fanning the flames of discord, and putting the U.S. military right into the middle of it.”

Esper adds, “Enforcement of the law needed balancing with empathy and understanding.”

Esper and Milley give testimony to Congress, March 2020. (Lisa Ferdinando)

He and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, along with other senior military leaders, also used empathy and understanding to address the issue of Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag.

Military leaders invested time and employed patience as they listened to service members and their experiences facing prejudice and discrimination. Esper writes about his initiatives in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder:

“In the months that would follow, I conducted nearly two dozen listening sessions with our service members as I traveled around U.S. military installations. I would hear the same story over and over. From all parts of the joint force, both in America and abroad, I would learn about the racism and discrimination that so many of our uniformed personnel of color, and their families, had experience growing up. And in many cases, too many cases, that they were still experiencing while in uniform, on base, and certainly off base. This was troubling for me to hear…”

Trump and Esper (Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith)

Despite Trump’s support of Confederate symbols, Esper and Milley moved to eliminate flags and namesakes of the Confederacy at military facilities.

It’s hard to argue with the logic of renaming places that honored seditious leaders of the Confederacy, even if many service members have had no idea of that heritage.

“Regardless,” Esper writes, “the common thread running through all of these Confederate leaders was that they violated their sworn oaths and took up arms against the United States. It was that simple.” (More about Esper’s empathy and “A Sacred Oath” in the follow-on review.)

Out of the Shadows

Back to “In the Shadow of Statues.”

Landrieu writes this about the importance of empathy:

“Until every life matters, including black lives, we won’t be able to plant seeds of hope in beleaguered neighborhoods and fulfill America’s lofty promises. I believe that we are bound together as one people, indivisible, with one shared destiny. We cannot allow young black men to feel forsaken. We must go forward together or not at all. We must press on, share the agenda that the culture of homicides is evil and unacceptable, and resolve ourselves to changing it, however long it may take or incremental it may be. But to do so requires us to value every life. The monuments hover and tell a different story. The shadow these symbols cast is oppressive. It is in this broad context that people must now understand that the monuments and the reasons they were erected were intended not to affirm life but to deny life. And in this sense, the monuments in a way are murder.”

Landrieu builds a bridge from art and emotion toward facts and education.

“Art and music engage the human heart and transcend time; sadly, so does hatred,” Landrieu writes. So, what can hate and, conversely, love through art teach us?

In the epilogue, Landrieu said he is often reminded of lyrics to a song he heard as a young man from the musical South Pacific.

A scene from the 1949 Rodgers-Hammerstein musical South Pacific.

He writes, “I am still struck by the way Rodgers and Hammerstein handled the experiences of GIs on an island in the Second World War, a place where different cultures intersected and where we could see dramatized the yearning soldiers (sic) felt to finally go home.”

The song that impacted him is “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” Here's a cover version by James Taylor:

The Rodgers-Hammerstein song was controversial when it was released in 1949, considered "Communistic" and "un-American" for its call for understanding the roots of prejudice and racism.

“The gist is that hate is a learned behavior, passed down from parents to children, generation after generation," he writes. "Hate is not the natural order of things. The question then remains –– what do we need to do to unlearn it?” Again, empathy and openness lead the way out of the shadows.

Confederate Mound Monument dedication, 1895, at Oak Woods Cemetery. (LOC)

Landrieu says Confederate monuments he removed “cast a dark and repressive shadow over my city and, in a way, held us back.” Studying the motivations for setting up the monuments, he concluded: “The statues were not honoring history or heroes. They were created as political weapons, part of an effort to hide the truth, that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of history.”

His soul-searching and healing introspection is welcome in this time of division, especially after January 6, 2021 and the Capitol insurrection and attempted coup. His view is needed when the nation is split along so many issues, including guns, abortion, race, religion, and the right to read certain books.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand, but to heal our divisions we must be able to hear one another, see one another, understand one another and feel one another. Once we start to listen rather than speak, see rather than look away, we will realize a simple truth: we are all the same. We all want the same thing –– peace, prosperity, and economic opportunity. And for our kids to have a better life than we do. There are many who are cynical and believe we cannot change, that our divisions are somehow part of the natural order of things. This is the moment to prove them wrong.”

In his endorsement of Landrieu’s book, Walter Isaacson writes, “It’s an important book for everyone in America to read, because it shows how intellectual honesty can lead to moral clarity.”

Note: Current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, commissioned a group to consider new names for military installations and facilities that are now named for Confederates. The commission is led by retired Navy Adm. Michelle Howard.

”It’s important that the names we recommend for these installations appropriately reflect the courage, values and sacrifices of our diverse military men and women," Howard said in a statement. "We also are considering the local and regional significance of names and their potential to inspire and motivate our service members.”

A gate at Fort Hood after a mass shooting there in November 2009  that killed 13 and injured 33. (Army Sgt. Ken Scar)

SECDEF Lloyd Austin is planning to announce new names for some of the country's most iconic military facilities in 2023, including, for example, Fort Bragg, which could become Fort Liberty, and Fort Hood, which may be renamed Fort Cavazos.

SECDEF Esper Post Script

Review by Bill Doughty––

Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s 752-page tome, “A Sacred Oath” (HarperCollins, 2022), is a book of mea culpa justification and behind-the-scenes candor. There are some shocking revelations.

Esper

But the most shocking thing to come out of the Trump administration, Esper says, was the seditious insurrection attack on the Capitol, January 6, 2021. Readers interested in the military and the Constitution will be rewarded by some of the insights, warnings, and attempts at explanation.

For example: Esper tries to convince readers that he did everything he could to promote and retain Col. Alexander Vindman in the wake of 2019 Ukraine scandal leading to President Trump’s first impeachment. Esper contends that Trump’s support for disgraced former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher was “the nadir for the DoD” in politicizing the military. Esper said he shut down a White House request to interview senior officers eligible for promotion, interviews that he and others saw as “loyalty tests.”

Esper reveals that Trump wanted to recall Adm. McRaven and Gen. McChrystal to active duty so he could court-martial them. Trump didn’t like what they'd said about him and his leadership.

Speaking to reporters aboard government aircraft, Dec. 16, 2019. (Ferdinando)

Unfortunately, Esper has a different stance on support for now-retired Capt. Brett Crozier, former CO of USS Theodore Roosevelt. Crozier was railroaded for taking extraordinary steps to get his crew to safety when Coronavirus hit his ship's crew in the early months of the pandemic. Crozier’s efforts to get help were revealed by the media, and Trump wanted him fired. So did Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly.

Esper doubles down on his support of former SECNAV Modly’s decision to fire Crozier, and he unsurprisingly agrees with the internal investigation that justified Modly's conclusion. Modly, as we remember, traveled to Guam to tell the crew of TR on the 1MC that their captain, who had tried to save their lives, was “stupid.”

There’s more to read here about Esper’s role in the Trump administration and Trump’s failure to end the war in Afghanistan, for example, as he’d promised. There’s also more about how Trump and his team dealt with North and South Korea; Communist China and Democratic Taiwan; Putin’s Russia; and threats to the NATO alliance –– as well as other strategic issues, including the COVID pandemic and immigration issue.

On the home front, Esper closes his book with a lament about the seditious conspiracy that led to the attack on the Capitol.

Esper expounds about the people who came out of the shadows at Trump’s request and incitement on J6:

“The most shocking and troubling event of the Trump presidency was the organization and incitement of a pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and stopped the constitutional process Congress was following to affirm the election and transfer of power to a new president. I never thought I would see what happened on Capitol Hill that day.

“It was the worst attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, and maybe the worst assault on our democracy since the Civil War. And as someone who worked for many years in Congress, and had an office physically in the Capitol, I was shocked, angry, sad, and hurt by what I saw on TV that day. It was doubly hard to believe our fellow Americans conducted these criminal and seditious acts.”

Readers are left with wanting to know more about what Esper knows, especially after he gives his view about former national security adviser and retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn’s call for martial law and for the military to seize voting machines –– “Scary, and real.”

And monumentally treasonous.

There is much to learn from Esper’s experience as a well-defined guardrail in the careening last year of Trump’s presidency.

Esper says his former boss is not fit for leadership on the national stage. About Trump: “He is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.”

Former U.S. President Donald J. Trump pulls Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper in for a handshake after hearing remarks from Vice President Michael Pence during a Full Honors Welcome Ceremony for Esper at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., July 25, 2019. (Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith)

Ironically, Esper’s attempt at a completely honest portrayal is told through his own lens of self-interest and concern about his legacy. Yet, thank goodness, he kept his oath to the Constitution.

‘Putin’s Russia’: ‘Even If the Cost Is Too High’

Review by Bill Doughty––

He was soldier U-729343, a dedicated defender of the Soviet Union, born in 1975. As a boy he wanted to serve in uniform. Fresh out of high school, he chose to follow his dream and left home to study at the Far East College for Officers. In 1996 he received a commission.

Army officer U-729343 was assigned to USSR’s 58th Army, and by January 18, 2000, he was in Chechnya to fight in the second Chechen war.

Soon after, Lieutenant U-729343 writes a scathing letter home to his parents about poor training, terrible living conditions, and lack of command and control:

“Our lessons have been appalling … The officer in charge of this unit before me was blown up by one of our own booby traps … the soldiers, though mostly very young, are holding out. We sleep together in a tent, on the ground. There is an ocean of lice. We’re given shit to eat … What lies ahead we don’t know. Either we’ll attack who knows where, or we’ll just sit around until we turn into idiots or they pull us out and pack us off to Moscow. Or God knows what…"

The following month U-729343 was involved in a fierce firefight in Ushkaloy, where he would pay the ultimate high cost of an unnecessary war. U-729343 was killed along with several other soldiers.

His unit abandoned him, and the military lost track of his remains.

Anna Politkovskaya gives a name to U-729343, prints his letter home, and introduces us to his grieving mother in “Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy” (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2004).

“Pavel Levurda had been desired on the battlefield and then forgotten. Nobody cared that his body was lying there, or that he had a family awaiting his return. What happened after his death is typical of the army, a disgraceful episode that stands for an ethos in which a human is nothing, in which no one watches over the troops, and there is no sense of responsibility toward the families.”

With a reporter’s voice, Politkovskaya shows Pavel’s mother's painful fight with the military and government for accountability, and what happens once his remains are finally recovered. Only his decapitated skull is returned, and that’s how Pavel’s mother has to identify him.

It’s just one of the tragic stories in this book, written several years before Putin invaded Georgia and nearly two decades before his unprovoked and merciless invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russian sailors stand under a naval flag on the bow of the battle cruiser Pyotr Velikiy (099) in Severomorsk, in northwestern Russia, April 15, 2011. (Photo by MCC Tiffini Jones Vanderwyst)

Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka

Politkovskaya includes a surprising number of examples from Russia’s military in this insightful work about life in Putin’s Russia. She gives a detailed evaluation of conditions for sailors of the federation's fleet.

For example, Politkovskaya travels to remote and spartan Kamchatka in far northeastern Russia to see how senior submarine officers in the Russian navy live, along with their families. It’s a life of desolation and deprivation. No hot water and not enough food. A “troglodytic existence.”

She tours the nuclear ballistic submarine Vilioutchinsk (formerly Kasatka, now K-456 Tver), where she observes: “An atomic reactor with nuclear missiles is an explosive mixture. The submarine is packed with nuclear weapons, the economy is in crisis, and the armed forces are in a state of disarray. What could be scarier than that?”

Putin in 2004

“Kamchatka,” she writes, “is at the outer reach of our land and at the extremity of state heartlessness.”

She tells the tragic story of a World War II veteran found frozen to death and stuck to the floor of his unheated apartment in Irkutsk “in the depths of Siberia.”

“He was one of those to whom President Putin sends greetings on May 9, Victory Day, wishing him happiness and good health, she writes. "Our old men, our veterans unspoiled by too much attention from the state, weep over these form letters with their facsimile signature … His name was Ivanov, the most common Russian surname. There are hundreds of thousands of Ivanovs in Russia.”

Much of what she writes back in 2004 sounds applicable to what we witness about Putin and the Russians in 2022.

She says:

• “In Russia, holding on to power is more important than saving soldiers’ lives.”
• “A Soldier is an officer’s slave … An officer can treat a soldier exactly as he pleases.”
• “The Russian army has always been a fundamental pillar of the state. To this day, it is mostly a prison camp behind barbed wire.”
• “A depraved society wants comfort and peace and quiet, and doesn’t mind if the cost is other people’s lives. Citizens run away … and would rather believe the state’s brainwashing machine than face the reality.”
• “People leave Russia when staying becomes life-threatening or involves massive injury to their integrity and dignity.”
• “Today’s Russia, brainwashed by propaganda, has largely reverted to Bolshevik thinking.”
• “There is no doubt that Communism was a dead loss for Russia, but what we have today is even worse.”
• “Our constitution is on its death bed … and the FSB [KGB] is in charge of the funeral arrangements.”
• “The shroud of darkness from which we spent several decades during the Soviet era trying to free ourselves is enveloping us again.”

Politkovksaya

Politkovskaya says there are two types of war criminals in Russia: the enemy terrorist [Chechen, then; now, no doubt, Ukrainian], who is always found guilty even with little or no evidence, and the Russian soldier, who is almost always found innocent even in the face of evidence of rape, torture and murder of civilians.

Using a reporter’s skill in presenting interviews, court records, and facts of the case, she dives into the scandalous story of Col. Yuri Budanov, initially found not guilty of the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen girl. The account of the teen's torture and death at the hands of Budanov is chilling.

“In 2002, when the experts accepted that Budanov had been temporarily insane at the moment of committing the murder, he was cleared of rape. No storm of indignation swept the country. There was not a single protest demonstration, not even from women’s organizations. No civil-rights defenders took to the streets. Russia thought what had happened was fair enough. The report acquitting the colonel triggered a wave of war crimes in Chechnya, committed by soldiers who used the disastrous situation and the cruelty perpetrated by both sides as a cover. Throughout 2002, ‘purging’ of territory continued in Chechnya on a massive scale and with extreme brutality. Villages were surrounded, men taken away, women raped. Many were killed, and even more disappeared without a trace. Retaliation was elevated to justification for murder. Lynch law was encouraged by the Kremlin itself –– an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We discovered that we were moving backward, from stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev to the out-and-out arbitrariness of Joseph Stalin. Terrifying as the thought was, we probably had the government we deserved."

(Of note, Budanov was eventually convicted but given a light sentence of ten years for rape/murder. He was released on parole and was murdered in 2011, shot in the back of the head with a silenced pistol. His body was found next to a playground.)

Politkovskaya presents dozens of profiles and stories.

In "Putin's Russia," she reports on the massive tragedy at Nord-Ost, at No. 1 Dubrovka, Moscow, a theater in which 800 mostly Russian hostages were held by several dozen terrorists from Chechnya in October 2002.

Under orders from President Putin, several anti-terrorist units stormed the theater after using a “secret military gas.” All the hostage-takers were killed but so were nearly two hundred civilians.

Observing the ten-year anniversary of the Nord-Ost tragedy at Dubrovka Theater, Moscow.

Yet, despite the destruction and significant loss of life –– even of Russians –– Putin declared a triumph for Russia.

Politkovskaya reports,

“Let us look at those whose lives were crushed by the events at the Nord-Ost. Let us look at the victims about whom today’s state machine is trying to forget as quickly as possible, and to induce the rest of us to do the same by every means at its disposal. Let us look at the ethnic purging that followed the act of terrorism, and at the state ideology Putin has enunciated: ‘We shall not count the cost. Let nobody doubt that. Even if the cost is very high.’”

The cost is high now in Ukraine. And the cost was as high as it gets for Anna Politkovskaya, (who had previously been threatened, poisoned, interrogated, and subjected to a mock execution), when on 7 October 2006, she was found shot to death in an elevator to her block of apartments in Moscow. She had been shot twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once, point blank, in the head. At least two other associates of hers were also assassinated.

Although there have been several arrests, there has been no final resolution. Who ordered Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in Putin’s Russia remains unresolved, for now.

[According to IMDb, Maxine Peake ("The Village") will star in a movie about Politkovskaya titled “Mother Russia” now under production, co-starring Ciaran Hinds ("Belfast") and Jason Isaacs ("The Death of Stalin").]

Top Photo: Memorial of the Defenders of the North, Severomorsk, Russia. (MCC Tiffini Jones Vanderwyst)