Tag: ussr

Lenin’s New Economic Policy: When the Soviets Admitted Socialism Doesn’t Work

A century ago, the Mother Ship of Socialism—the Soviet Union—was teetering on the precipice. The Poles had just vanquished the hopes of dictator Vladimir Lenin to sweep across Europe. Under the bludgeon of Marxist central planning, the economy had collapsed to a fraction of its pre-war dimensions. The country was seething in discontent. Insurrection seemed imminent. Indeed, the month of March 1921 had begun with hungry Soviet soldiers and sailors mounting the Kronstadt Rebellion against the Bolshevik regime.

What was Lenin’s remedy for his unfolding socialist catastrophe? It wasn’t more socialism, at least for the moment. That would be like chasing a glass of tainted water with a gallon of Clorox. Desperate to reverse the consequences of socialism, Lenin turned to their only known antidote—capitalism.

Sunday marked the 100th anniversary of the start of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). In a stunning about-face on March 21, 1921, the NEP began undoing the previous four years. Expropriation of businesses and the nationalization of industries stopped. Lenin proclaimed a partial restoration of, in his own words, “a free market and capitalism.” Even state-owned firms would seek to operate on a “profit” basis. Individuals could own small enterprises again. Market prices would be permitted in place of state directives.

A little bit of freedom goes a long way. In this instance, it turned the economy around and saved the infant Bolshevik tyranny. But it did not last long. Three years later, Lenin would be dead. Before the end of the decade, Stalin obliterated the NEP with a massive collectivist campaign to re-socialize the economy. Of the NEP, former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1989 book, The Grand Failure, “For many Russians, even more than sixty years later, these were the best years of the era ushered in by the revolution of 1917.”

On that March day in 1921, the very day winter bowed to spring, the socialists in Moscow effectively admitted they had to stop stealing. There just was not much left to steal. In a 1990 article, economist Peter Boettke cited a litany of mea culpas from leading Soviet intellectuals, including a most revealing tribute to free market economist Ludwig von Mises from socialist architect Nikolai Bukharin. He grudgingly admitted that Mises’s devastating critique of socialism made him “one of the most learned critics.”

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The Bizarre Soviet Experiments That Attempted To Understand Psychic Powers

Could someone stop a heart with their mind? Could objects move through the use of mental imagery? Could someone communicate from the shore with a submarine through their thoughts? These were the premises of several strange experiments performed under direction of the Soviet Union. Citizens believed to possess unique parapsychological abilities were tested and studied by renowned scientists in an effort to illuminate the supposed physics that were thought to underlie supernatural abilities. Whether “bioplasma” or “psi particles,” brilliant minds were determined to reveal the science behind the paranormal.

The Cold War was a time rife with competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The nations battled for control of territories left vulnerable in the aftermath of World War II and fought to claim ideological supremacy. Fear and paranoia were stoked in the American public by the declaration of an arms race, although it was later revealed that the Soviet Union did not have access to such destructive weapons as the U.S. had claimed.

Both governments also competed in the realm of scientific advancement, most famously characterized by the Space Race, in which the U.S. managed to land people on the moon. In a time of such fierce competition, it was all hands on deck, including some scientists with rather peculiar beliefs. The U.S. received intelligence that the Soviet Union was attempting to capture the paranormal using the tenets of the scientific method, gaining an upper hand through telekinesis, telepathy, and clairvoyance.

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How MI6 backed ‘right-wing religious fanatics’ in Afghanistan

In 1980, journalist John Fullerton sat down for lunch in London with members of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6. The spooks asked the restless reporter to name five cities where he would like to work. He scrawled the answers unhesitatingly on a paper napkin.

“The top one was Peshawar in Pakistan,” he told Declassified, explaining his desire to move near the turbulent Afghan border. “The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan but I couldn’t find ways to be a freelancer out there. There were no journalists covering it. Everyone had left Kabul. So I wanted to cover the war and that’s how SIS employed me.”

He had been on good terms with SIS for many years already, after a chance encounter with Nicholas Elliott, one of the agency’s high fliers. Elliott, who famously confronted the KGB double agent Kim Philby, had just retired as an SIS director when he spotted an article by Fullerton exposing a power struggle between the police and military in apartheid South Africa.

Fullerton grew up in Cape Town, rising to night news editor on the Cape Times before migrating back to the UK, the country of his birth. After checking he was not a mole for the apartheid regime’s Bureau of State Security, British intelligence eventually took him on as a “contract labourer”, a cheaper option than a permanent SIS officer position.

“They employed quite a lot of these contract labourers, many from military backgrounds,” Fullerton commented. “SIS had gone through a period of retrenchment in the 1970s and early 80s and it had shrunk. From having three fully staffed stations in Latin America it went to having none.”

This all changed under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who received informal advice on espionage from Elliott. “She took a great interest in foreign affairs and intelligence and she tried to beef it all up,” Fullerton remarked, adding that her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington was eager to get “scenes of Afghans fighting communists onto television screens.”

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UFO intel documents stolen out of Russia reveal decade-long probes into alien encounters, abductions

Landmark UFO documents smuggled out of Russia 30 years ago — and just publicly revealed — show the Soviets investigated thousands of reports of extraterrestrial craft and encounters with aliens.

Legendary reporter George Knapp, 73, quietly released on Jan. 16 documents he smuggled out of Russia in 1993 under the nose of the KGB after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

The translated documents reveal the shocking extent to which the USSR and the post-Soviet Russian Federation probed the persistent phenomenon — despite the communist government officially deeming UFOs a concoction of war-mongering “American imperialists” in 1953.

The USSR commissioned several studies of UFOs beginning with the “Network-AN” program in 1979, continuing with “Galaxy-MD” from 1981-1985, “Pluton 7” in 1989 and 1990, and the continuing “Thread 3” program.

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Official CIA documents reported that a UFO turned a Soviet infantry unit to stone

UFO hype reached a fever pitch in 2025, as President Donald Trump’s order to declassify and release military and intelligence documents related to UFOs began to flood the internet. One document in particular received some extraordinary attention, relaying the story of a Soviet Red Army infantry unit that was attacked not only by a UFO, but by its alien crew.

A story reprinted in the Ukrainian newspaper Ternopil Vechirny (meaning “Ternopil Evening”) alleged that the American intelligence community received a 250-page file from the KGB’s archive after the fall of the Soviet Union. That file was said to contain documentary evidence (including photos) of an attack on a Soviet infantry unit in Siberia.

The KGB documents supposedly report that the unit was conducting a regular training exercise, when a “quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer appeared above” them. For reasons that no one really knows, one of the soldiers suddenly fired a surface-to-air missile at the craft. The UFO crash landed “not far away” and “five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes” emerged from the downed vessel.

The file says that two surviving Red Army soldiers reported that the aliens “merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape.” The shape began to buzz and hiss, then turned a brilliant white, growing bigger and bigger before it exploded in a bright white light. Instantly, 23 soldiers had been turned into “stone poles.” The two soldiers had been standing behind trees, which they believed helped them survive.

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CIA tried to recruit Winston Churchill – Telegraph

The CIA tried to recruit British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill to spread propaganda broadcasts on the agency-backed Radio Liberty in the 1950s, in an effort to undermine the Soviet Union, The Telegraph has reported.

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA-funded radio station targeted the Soviet Union with propaganda broadcasts, while its sister organization, Radio Free Europe, focused on Moscow’s allies. Both were covertly controlled and funded by the US intelligence agency until 1972 and merged into RFE/RL four years later.

In 1958, Radio Liberty’s controllers suggested riding the wave of “revisionism” gripping the Soviet Union at the time, and taking advantage of emerging ideological divisions within Marxism-Leninism to undermine the government, The Telegraph wrote on Saturday, citing declassified CIA documents.

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Declassified: MI6 Support For Nazi ‘Forest Brothers’

September 22nd marked “Resistance Fighting Day”. It was on this date in 1944 anti-Communist guerrilla forces in Estonia declared war on the Soviet Union’s ‘occupation’ of their state. Parallel paramilitary factions rapidly formed in neighbouring Latvia and Lithuania. For over a decade, these violent factions – popularly known as the Forest Brothers – waged a brutal, ill-fated insurgency against Soviet authorities. They remain venerated in the region and beyond today as courageous freedom fighters, immortalised by commemorative monuments, street names and statues throughout the Baltic states.

In reality, the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Forest Brothers were Holocaust perpetrators and Nazi collaborators. In many cases, militants joined the movement due to fear of prosecution and punishment for their activities during World War II. While waging their anti-Soviet crusade, the Brothers also murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including many children. However, critical scrutiny of the Forest Brothers’ genocidal legacy is criminalised throughout the Baltics. Academics, journalists and lawyers have been jailed for exposing the truth.

The same legislation moreover prohibits any public discussion of how the Jewish populations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were slaughtered in their virtual totality, largely before the Wehrmacht arrived in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa. Western powers are aggressively complicit in this historical coverup. In July 2017, NATO produced a slick propaganda film heroising the Forest Brothers. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits routinely whitewash Baltic Nazi collaboration, on the risible basis local populations simply sought to resist Communist rule.

There is another core component of the Forest Brothers’ history their advocates at home and abroad are keen to conceal. Namely, the Baltic Nazi guerrilla war was covertly supported financially, materially and practically by MI6. Britain’s foreign spying agency assisted their attempted insurrection by supplying explosives and weapons, infiltrating and exfiltrating agents, and sponsoring assassinations and sabotage attacks. Yet, MI6 records documenting this dark alliance are unforthcoming. Evidence of London’s cloak-and-dagger assistance to the Forest Brothers is provided largely by declassified CIA files.

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Putin compares ideology of modern West to USSR

Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn a parallel between the Soviet Union and the present-day US and EU, accusing them of imposing their own political systems on other countries.

Speaking at a plenary session of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, the president suggested that political systems which force their own values on others don’t last.

“The Soviet Union once erred by imposing its system. Then, the United States has taken up that baton. The EU has also distinguished itself,” Putin said.

“A nation that respects its own tradition, as a rule, does not encroach on the traditions of others,” the Russian president concluded.

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Declassified: CIA’s Covert Ukraine Invasion Plan

On August 7th, US polling giant Gallup published the remarkable results of a survey of Ukrainians. Public support for Kiev “fighting until victory” has plummeted to a record low “across all segments” of the population, “regardless of region or demographic group.” In a “nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022,” 69% of citizens “favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible.” Just 24% wish to keep fighting.  However, vanishingly few believe the proxy war will end anytime soon.

The reasons for Ukrainian pessimism on this point are unstated, but an obvious explanation is the intransigence of President Volodymyr Zelensky, encouraged by his overseas backers – Britain in particular. London’s reverie of breaking up Russia into readily-exploitable chunks dates back centuries, and became turbocharged in the wake of the February 2014 Maidan coup. In July that year, a precise blueprint for the current proxy conflict was published by the Institute for Statecraft, a NATO/MI6 cutout founded by veteran British military intelligence apparatchik Chris Donnelly.

In response to the Donbass civil war, Statecraft advocated targeting Moscow with a variety of “anti-subversive measures”. This included “economic boycott, breach of diplomatic relations,” as well as “propaganda and counter-propaganda, pressure on neutrals.” The objective was to produce “armed conflict of the old-fashioned sort” with Russia, which “Britain and the West could win.” While we are now witnessing in real-time the brutal unravelling of Donnelly’s monstrous plot, Anglo-American designs of using Ukraine as a beachhead for all-out war with Moscow date back far further.

In August 1957, the CIA secretly drew up elaborate plans for an invasion of Ukraine by US special forces. It was hoped neighbourhood anti-Communist agitators would be mobilized as footsoldiers to assist in the effort. A detailed 200-page report, Resistance Factors and Special Forces Areas, set out demographic, economic, geographical, historical and political factors throughout the then-Soviet Socialist Republic that could facilitate, or impede, Washington’s quest to ignite local insurrection, and in turn the USSR’s ultimate collapse.

The mission was forecast to be a delicate and difficult balancing act, as much of Ukraine’s population held “few grievances” against Russians or Communist rule, which could be exploited to foment an armed uprising. Just as problematically, “the long history of union between Russia and Ukraine, which stretches in an almost unbroken line from 1654 to the present day,” resulted in “many Ukrainians” having “adopted the Russian way of life”. Problematically, there was thus a pronounced lack of “resistance to Soviet rule” among the population.

The “great influence” of Russian culture over Ukrainians, “many influential positions” in local government being held “by Russians or Ukrainians sympathetic to [Communist] rule, and “relative similarity” of their “languages, customs, and backgrounds”, meant there were “fewer points of conflict between the Ukrainians and Russians” than in Warsaw Pact nations. Throughout those satellite states, the CIA had to varying success already recruited clandestine networks of “freedom fighters” as anti-Communist Fifth Columnists. Yet, the Agency remained keen to identify potential “resistance” actors in Ukraine:

“Some Ukrainians are apparently only slightly aware of the differences which set them apart from Russians and feel little national antagonism. Nevertheless, important grievances exist, and among other Ukrainians there is opposition to Soviet authority which often has assumed a nationalist form. Under favorable conditions, these people might be expected to assist American Special Forces in fighting against the regime.”

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Bombshell: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna Says Russia Agreed to Release KGB Files on Lee Harvey Oswald — Claims CIA Destroyed Evidence Handed Over at JFK’s Funeral

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who led the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, told Joe Rogan that the Russian government has agreed to release long-secret KGB intelligence files on Lee Harvey Oswald, documents she claims the CIA destroyed after receiving them at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral.

During her appearance, Luna detailed how she and two fellow members of Congress recently met with the Russian ambassador, the first such meeting on this subject since 1990, as part of her ongoing push to uncover the truth about JFK’s assassination.

According to Luna, the KGB conducted its own independent investigation into Oswald and handed the findings to U.S. officials in 1963, only for them to vanish under suspicious circumstances.

The Florida congresswoman went on to drop another bombshell that JFK was pursuing peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union, including a joint mission to the moon, at a time when factions inside America’s intelligence community wanted war in Cuba and confrontation with Russia.

“We never got those documents, and it’s my belief that the CIA actually destroyed that information and evidence because it would have confirmed what the KGB,” Luna told Joe Rogan.

“And mind you, at the time, JFK was actually in talks with the President of Russia, and his perspective was that he actually wanted to do a joint mission between the U.S. government and the Russian government to the moon. And there were aspects and divisions within the intelligence community—you obviously saw the Cold War was happening—they wanted war in Cuba, they wanted war with Russia.”

“So, for them to be able to say that Kennedy, who was not a Communist, was a Communist sympathizer, and “How dare he talk to these dirty Communists?”—I mean, that in itself would have given them any ammunition to turn a blind eye, or at least not fully figure out who assassinated Kennedy.”

Luna also revealed that the Russian government has now agreed to make its JFK investigation public for the first time this fall, something the U.S. Congressional Task Force failed to secure in the 1990s.

The files reportedly contain a psychological profile of Oswald compiled during his time in Russia, describing him as mentally unstable, incapable with firearms, and hardly fitting the profile of a lone mastermind assassin.

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