The Soviet Union was actually built by Western technology, by Western firms and by Western enterprises … 90-95% of Soviet technology came from the West. ibid.
The Soviet military-industrial complex also originated in the West. ibid.
As you know the Soviets were supplying the North Vietnamese … for example, the Gorky plant which was built by the Ford motor company; the Gorky plant in Russia produces the gas and vehicles … We were supplying the equipment to the Gorky plant … I thought this was morally wrong. Anthony Sutton, televised interview Stanley Monteith 1980, Youtube 1.18.28
Every single Russian industry was rebuilt and restarted by foreign corporations. ibid.
About 1970 there was a massive grant of loans to the Soviet Union. ibid.
In the early hours of March 2nd 1953 the most powerful man in the world lay dying alone. He had suffered a stroke at least twelve hours. His guards were worried but they did not dare go into his bedroom. How could a man worshipped by millions be left to lie helpless soaked in his own urine? Stalin had built an empire on a framework of terror justifying it in the name of a political faith, and through it he ruled his country, his government, his party and his family. Stalin: Inside the Terror, BBC 2003
In the Soviet Union his image was everywhere; he had become a living icon. The subject of a cult of personality. ibid.
The real man was a mass of contradictions. A dictator whose position was unassailable yet who was haunted by paranoia. Stalin used terror more effectively and scientifically than any other ruler. ibid.
Family photos show a warm gentle man surrounded by daughters, son, aunts, in-laws … Most of the people in these photos would be destroyed by him. ibid.
Stalin proved his usefulness to the Bolshevik cause by his diligent work as a bank robber and agitator. His reward was a post on the party’s central committee. ibid.
He loathed the intellectually arrogance of the silver-tongued Trotsky. ibid.
Stalin now had control of the party machinery; he would use it over the next six years to destroy Trotsky and all his other rivals. ibid.
Over 100,000 people in Leningrad alone would be imprisoned or shot. ibid.
‘The terror was organised deliberately from the centre … It was done by quota, by numbers, and not even by name.’ ibid. Simon Sebag Montefiore
The circle of terror slowly closed in on everyone, tightening and tightening until it touched his own family. ibid.
Those he hadn’t killed were rotting in the camps. ibid.
The man he chose to deliver the final coup was the Georgian secret policeman who had been looking after his mother: Lavrentiy Beria. ibid.
Stalin decreed that the wives and families of prisoners should be treated as traitors. ibid.
He had won the war and conquered eastern Europe. ibid.
His family had started to disappear as early as 1938, but for them the terror never stopped. ibid.
The Soviet Union, March 1953: A brutal wave of terror is unleashed. Its architect the dictator Joseph Stalin who’s already killed thirty million Soviet citizens suddenly falls into a coma. Those surrounding his bed each have a motive to want him dead … New evidence suggests that someone in this room may have killed Stalin. Who Killed Stalin? PBS 2019
Why did the ultra-paranoid leader leave himself vulnerable in his sleep by telling his bodyguards to go to bed? Why did his most senior ministers deprive Stalin of medical assistance for twelve hours? And why did the official announcement of his death omit crucial medical details? ibid.
Soon The Beatles had conquered much of the world. But back in the USSR the repressive old men in the Kremlin tried to resist the Fab 4. They were defeated by their children. This is the untold story of how the Beatles helped to destroy communism. Storyville: How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, BBC 2019
Across the USSR The Beatles virus spawned hundreds of tribute bands. ibid.
Reviled by the Soviet authorities as Western pollution. ibid.
Mikhail Gorbachev quoted the famous words, ‘If not me, who? And if not now, when?’ Storyville: Gorbachev. Heaven, BBC 2022
He set about reforming his country, and, in doing so, he changed the world. ibid.
‘You can title all this, ‘Conversations with a crank.’ ibid. Gorbachev to interviewer
‘While freedom’s flame within us lives. While we, by honour’s voice, are guided, to Russia, comrade, let us give our spirit whole and undivided.’ ibid. quoting Alexander Pushkin
We in the West are never allowed to forget the political shortcomings (real and bogus) of the Soviet Union; at the same time we are never reminded of the history which lies behind it. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War I
The anti-communist propaganda campaign began even earlier than the military intervention. Before the year 1918 was over, expressions in the vein of Red Peril, the Bolshievik assault on civilisation, and menace to world by Reds is seen had become commonplace in the pages of The New York Times ... Historian Rederick Lewis Schuman has written: ‘The net result of these hearings … was to picture Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by adject slaves completely at the mercy of an organization of homicidal maniacs whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilisation and carry the nation back to barbarism.' ibid.
Literally no story about the Bolsheviks was too contrived, too bizarre, too grotesque, or too perverted to be printed and widely believed – from women being nationalized to babies being eaten (as the early pagans believed the Christians guilty of devouring their children; the same was believed of the Hews in the Middle Ages). The story about women with all the lurid connotations of state property, compulsory marriage, ‘free love’ etc. ‘was broadcasted over the country through a thousand channels’, wrote Schuman, ‘and perhaps did more than anything else to stamp the Russian Communists in the minds of most American citizens as criminal perverts’. This tale continued to receive great currency even after the State Department was obliged to announce that it was a fraud. (That the Soviets eat their babies was still being taught by the John Birch Society to its large audience at least as late as 1978.) ibid.
This, then, was the American people’s first experience of a new social phenomenon that had come upon the world, their introductory education about the Soviet Union and this thing called 'communism'. The students have never recovered from the lesson. Neither has the Soviet Union. ibid.
For the past century Russian history has also been the history of its security services. They were used by the Soviet state to crush dissent. But while many things may have changed in today’s Russia, its security network is arguably stronger than ever. And the reason behind that is the rise of a lowly Lieutenant-Colonel to president of this vast country. This is the story of the KGB. KGB: The Sword & The Shield, History 2019
Enemies have been a preoccupation throughout Russian history. ibid.
The first head of the secret police was the son of a Polish Catholic aristocrat – Feliz Dzerzhinsky – he soon earned the name Iron Felix. ibid.
Much of Soviet modernisation was achieved on the back of Gulag slavery. ibid.
It was execution on an industrial scale. ibid.
Nowhere would prove more important to Soviet Intelligence than a leafy English university town … The Soviets recruited the most notorious spy ring in history – the Cambridge Five. From 1940 these five Cambridge spies began to leak details of an American project to build a super-weapon. KGB: The Sword & The Shield II: Berija & Co
Khrushchev set out to reposition the communist party as the true defender of the people. ibid.
Philby would go on to serve the KGB as a trainer. ibid.
Andropov set about reversing many of the freedoms gained under Khrushchev. ibid.
The KGB had a mole somewhere at the very top of the CIA. No-one had a clue who he was. ibid.
In the summer of 1991 secret orders were sent out from KGB headquarters to field officers throughout the Soviet Union. The chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had ordered a quarter of a million pairs of handcuffs and three hundred thousand arrest warrants, and cancelled all KGB leave. Citizens of Moscow knew nothing of all this until tanks were on the streets. The announcement didn’t reveal that President Gorbachev was under house arrest in his dacha in the Crimea. KGB: The Sword & The Shield III, BBC 2019
Yeltzin now had control of the security apparatus. ibid.
Just one month after he [Putin] took office, four apartment blocks in major Russian cities were bombed. The outrage was attributed to Chechen rebels. ibid.
The poison attack was a warning to others: if you step out of line, there is no safe refuge. Radioactive polonium destroyed Alexander Litvinenko over 22 agonising days. ibid.
One year after the annexation of Crimea, a protest march was organised in Moscow by opposition leader Boris Nemsov. On the eve of the march, Nemtsov was murdered within sight of the Kremlin. He was shot four times in the head, heart, liver and stomach. All the CCTV cameras in the area were switched off for maintenance. ibid.
The security service has a state. ibid.