Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright with then German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel in 1998.
Photograph: Michael Urban/Reuters
Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council and one
of the most senior officials in the country, has given an interesting
interview to Kommersant.
Among other things, he said that America is jealous of Russia’s great
natural resources, and believes that “we control them illegally and
undeservedly because, in their view, we do not use them as they ought to
be used”.
He substantiated this by saying: “you surely remember ex-US
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s claim that neither the Far East
nor Siberia belong to Russia”.
This phrase, “you surely remember”, is misleading and you cannot
blame the interviewer for not interrupting Patrushev and asking him for a
source. It is one of those claims we have heard somewhere before. Upon
hearing it again, we are liable to nod absent-mindedly and think “yes,
yes, I remember”. But therein lies the trap.
A number of pithy foreign quotes circulate in the Russian political
language as common currency. But turn to the original language and no
one can find them. There is the Dulles Doctrine (a supposed plan by the CIA to destroy the Soviet Union) and Churchill’s apparent claim that “Stalin came to power when Russia had only a wooden plow, and left it in possession of atomic weapons”. There’s Margaret Thatcher allegedly saying that the Russian population could happily be cut in three, and there is Albright’s quote about Siberia and the Far East not lawfully belonging to Russia.
When these quotes are wheeled out by Russian “patriots”, they attract
the attention only of uncritical acolytes. Patrushev, on the other
hand, is an important figure and his words were picked up on by
journalists who all rushed to discover the origin of the Albright quote.
They found it.
In 2006, the government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published a lengthy interview with a retired Russian general, Boris Ratnikov, about the security service’s occult and parapsychological activities.
A lot had already being written about
this in the 1990s. Alexander Korzhakov, a former KGB general who served
as head of the presidential security service from 1993 to 1996, had a
deputy, Georgy Rogozin, who dealt specifically with these matters. He
raised the souls of the dead, penetrated people’s subconscious through
photographs and made up horoscopes for Boris Yeltsin. That was the sort
of time it was.
Rogozin’s contemporaries made fun of him, of course, but time is a
great leveller. Reading the interview with Ratnikov, who served under
Rogozin, everything looks quite respectable. Who knows what the security
services get up to?
Ratnikov said his boss Rogozin had used a photograph to penetrated
Madeleine Albright’s subconscious, where he discovered thoughts about
the need to strip Russia of Siberia and the Far East.
After the recent interview with Patrushev, the BBC Russian service tracked down Ratnikov,
who repeated the claim that Rogozin would lie down and fall into a
hypnotic state through which he could communicate with Albright.
What are we to make of this? Not much. The world is full of
unscientific tosh and not short of people to believe in it. Rogozin was a
believer, Korzhakov believed Rogozin and Yeltsin believed Korzhakov.
But this was all long ago and there is nothing to do but to laugh about
it.
Or rather you could laugh if it were not for Patrushev, who now, in
2015, apparently credits the words uttered many years ago by a Kremlin
parapsychologist in a hypnotic state, and attributed to Albright.
Think
about it. Patrushev is a very important and influential politician, a
person crucial to the system. He has been with Putin from the very
beginning, since his rise to power in 1999. Patrushev is now secretary
of the Security Council, meaning that his purview extends to the most
serious matters of state, including war and peace. Any mistake on his
part risks catastrophe.
This is the man who repeats the words attributed to Albright as if
they were self explanatory, when in fact they were pronounced by an
eccentric Russian general 20 years ago. On the basis of these words,
Patrushev draws conclusions, conceives notions and pens doctrines.
Perhaps Russia is preparing for war with the US because it says in some
secret file of his that Albright planned to take Siberia away.
It turns out that the hallucinations of a long-dead Kremlin psychic
could result in a real war or, at the least, a real crisis in foreign
policy. Imagine that Patrushev’s file comes to the attention of Putin
and that when he meets his American counterpart he thinks about how the
Americans want to seize our natural resources.
This state of affairs is unhealthy and abnormal and one would be
justified in calling for Patrushev’s immediate resignation. Here, after
all, is a man who confuses lies for truth, is incapable of properly
weighing up existing threats and has proved unable to critically assess
the reliability of sources.
We Russians have a real problem on our hands here – which goes well
beyond the story with Albright. Our authorities are unchanging and
isolated. We can only judge what is going on in their heads from their
chance blunders, as in the case of Patrushev. Within their circle they
speak a language all their own, their folklore and humour are unknown to
us. They believe in things of which we have not the slightest inkling.
Their superstitions, horoscopes, saints, fears, hopes, their good, their
bad – all these have existed for a long time and mutate in ways foreign
to us, the ordinary Russian people.
For decades, people on the other side of the power divide have lived
outside the world of you and me. It stands to reason that a new,
distinct culture has grown up in which only they can live, in which the
voice of Madeleine Albright in the head of a Kremlin psychic is by no
means the most surprising thing one might find.
One day, we will find out everything about them. On that day, we will be in for a big surprise.
A version of this article first appeared in Russian on Free Press. Translation by Cameron Johnston
[EDITOR'S NOTE] Read the fictional book "The Psychic Spy" by Irene Allen- Block. The book that was the inspiration for this news site. As Nick Redfern author of The Real Men In Black says..."The Psychic Spy is filled with adventure, intrigue and shadowy characters. As Irene Allen Block skillfully shows, the mind is a mysterious and dangerous tool."
We have to ask ourselves just how much of the book is based on true fact, do many secret services still use Psychics? After all the author is a trained Remote Viewer and a very mysterious character in herself... What does she really know that she is not saying?
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