Greg Palast: How Billionaires Picked Putin as "Russia's Pinochet"

[Kid Berwyn]

How Billionaires Picked Putin as "Russia’s Pinochet"

By Greg Palast
BuzzFlash, March 16, 2022

Vladimir Putin did not arrive from outer space on an abalone shell.

Putin went from the virtually unknown Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg to Russia’s President and potentate by winning a weird competition organized by Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky who sought a "Russian Pinochet" to succeed Boris Yeltsin as President.

The competition, dubbed "Operation Successor," went so far as to send Russia’s "Larry King," Mikhail Leontyev, to interview General Pinochet for Russian TV while Pinochet was under indictment in Chile on murder charges. Russians were treated to the old dictator’s advice on choosing a leader who could imitate Pinochet’s "strong hand," a police state, while promoting a hyper-capitalist economy.

And Putin fit the Pinochet profile.

Continues…

https://www.gregpalast.com/how-billionaires-picked-putin-as-russias-pinochet/

[highplainsdem]

1. K&R

[Kid Berwyn]

4. Thanks, highplainsdem!

From Palast:

In 1999, Russia was falling apart. Literally. While big hunks of the USSR had years earlier scampered away (Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Ukraine and others), smaller regions were now declaring independence, including the Muslim region of Chechnya.

Yeltsin ordered a military expedition to recapture Chechnya. It failed disastrously.

But then Putin took charge, invading Chechnya. But this time, Putin took a page from Pinochet’s playbook: mass slaughter of civilians. When Chechens resisted the Russian invasion, Putin simply leveled their capital city, Grozny, killing, according to Reuters, 25,000 to 50,000 Chechens, most civilians. Notably, 14,000 Russian soldiers died — yet Putin’s popularity soared.

This is a sobering reminder for those who think Putin can’t withstand too many Russian body bags returning from Ukraine.

Continues…

https://www.gregpalast.com/how-billionaires-picked-putin-as-russias-pinochet/

The world faces an Ivan the Terrible with nuclear arms.

[Torchlight]

2. The 03/15/22 episode of Frontline was some really in-depth research

and narrated how he engineered his own rise to power using contacts, leverage and coercive tactics learned during his stint as mayor of St Petersburg, and perfected after Yeltsin appointed him chief of the Presidential Staff.

In 2004, 2004, Putin set about to strengthen the economy, winning a power-struggle with the Russian oligarchs, reaching a 'grand bargain' with them. This bargain allowed the oligarchs to maintain most of their powers, in exchange for their explicit support for—and alignment with—Putin's government (Conflict and Depolitisation in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, by Jolle Demmers)

[Kid Berwyn]

5. Thank you, Torchlight!

Frontline delivers Solid Information:

https://www.pbs.org/video/putins-road-to-war-ggv39p/

[UTUSN]

3. K & big R#5

[Kid Berwyn]

6. Thanks, UTUSN!

The head of Alfa Bank put it in 2000:

Putin urged to apply the Pinochet stick

Ian Traynor in Moscow
The Guardian, Thu 30 Mar 2000

Excerpt…

Vladimir Putin should resort to totalitarian methods to push through radical economic reform and redeem his promise to make Russia great again, one of Russia's most successful bankers suggests.

Petr Aven, president of Alfa, Russia's biggest and most successful private bank, and a key business supporter of the newly elected president, said that Mr Putin should model his regime on that of Augusto Pinochet of Chile, combining Reaganomics with dictatorial controls.

"The only way ahead is for fast liberal reforms, building public support for that path but also using totalitarian force to achieve that. Russia has no other choice," he said in a Guardian interview.

"I'm a supporter of Pinochet, not as a person but as a politician who produced results for his country. He was not corrupt. He supported his team of economists for 10 years. You need strength for that. I see that parallel here. There are similarities in the situation."

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/31/russia.iantraynor

Like the mother of all deja vu nightmares.

[crickets]

7. K&R for visibility.

[Kid Berwyn]

9. Thank you, crickets!

A Chilean Model for Moscow

By José Piñera
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2000

FREE MARKETS, FREE PEOPLE

What Russia needed at the beginning of the twentieth century was not a Bolshevik Revolution but an American one. The tragedy of that great nation was that it got a Lenin instead of a Jefferson. Today, nearly ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin, has the historic opportunity to start the freedom revolution that his country missed last century.

Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2000-09-01/chilean-model-russia

Article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20049888

[Kaleva]

8. Interesting.

[Kid Berwyn]

10. Thanks, Kalevala!

Putin's Critics Fear Russia Resembles Pinochet's Chile

By Paul Hofheinz Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
July 5, 2000 12:01 am

To hear the pundits tell it, Russia is about to disappear again behind a wall of darkness.

President Vladimir Putin, they say, is erecting a police state, jailing his opponents, harassing journalists and disregarding human rights. They say that the career secret service officer has already made the letters FSB, as the renamed KGB is known, into an acronym almost as ominous as the one it replaced. They hint darkly that the president's years in power will be a Russian version of Augusto Pinochet's reign in Chile -- a liberal economic reform combined with disregard for civil and other human rights.

Source (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB962741465200762342

[MerryBlooms]

11. r&k Interesting information. Thank you. n/t

[Buns_of_Fire]

12. Hypercapitalism administered with an iron hand.

So Russia's oligarchs took the Pinochet model, and now America's oligarchs appear to want to follow the Putin model. It actually explains a lot. Thank you.