RUSSIA and THE WEST - РОССИЯ и ЗАПАД

Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Lessons of History | The Origins of the WWI or: "Did the Russians Off Archduke Ferdinand?!"

The Lessons of History

The Origins of the WWI - The Russian Connection

or: "Did the Russians Off Archduke Ferdinand?!"

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria Sparked a World War I. Gavrilo Princip and others in his cell belonged to the Black Hand, controlled by Apis controlled by Artamonov and Hartwig from the Russian embassy, and during the period (June and July of 1914) around the assassination, by Verkhovsky, apparently for the Russian military intelligence. This chain leads directly to the General Staff, Nicholas Nikolaevich, and Nicholas II, all of whom probably were itching for the European revanche after the inglorious defeat in the Russian - Japanese War of 1904, which sparked the 1905 Russian Revolution. Trotsky and the Leftists behind him might have had a direct hand in it too, and to what degree, is really unknown to this day. Just a lot of sparks.

"One of the people who had the most profound impact on Gacinovic was Leon Trotsky, a friend whom he had known from Serbia in 1913. After the Sarajevo events , in the fall of 1914, Gacinovic regularly visited Trotsky at his Hotel Odessa on the rue d'Odessa in Paris, accompanied by his friend Sergei Khibalchich, the son of Nikolai Khibalchich of the
Russian terrorist group Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), who was executed for his part in the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881."

Trotsky might have alluded to this hypothetical participation or role post factum, "in 1916", as dated in this link below. Gacinovic was poisoned in 1917, there is a contradiction in the dates if this article is interpreted as a "eulogy" for him. Gacinovic death in August 1917 followed the Salonica trial and execution of Apis in June 1917. It is possible that some party, hypothetically the Russian General Staff, was covering their tracks in Sarajevo events by getting rid of potential (or actual) talkers in the case of the continuing investigation and trial; it was evident that the war was not going well for the Russians at that point.

"A direct impetus to the immeasurable events of the present war was given by a few Serb youths, almost boys, who killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in July 1914 in Sarajevo. National romantic-revolutionaries, they, least of all, expected the global consequences of what unfolded from their terrorist act. I later met a member of this revolutionary organisation in Paris, in the first months of the war. He belonged to the group that organised the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but he went abroad before the murder and, in the first days of the war, joined as a volunteer in the French navy as a ‘translator’. At that time, the allies organised a landing on the Adriatic coast of Austro-Hungary in Dalmatia(1), having the intention to support an uprising in the South-Slav provinces of the Habsburg monarchy...
“How do you explain this?” the young Serbian revolutionary who I mentioned above, asks me. “It turns out that the allies, without ceremony, are simply selling the Serbs to Italy. Where is the war for the liberation of small nations now? And in that case what are we, the Serbs, dying for? I didn’t volunteer only to facilitate, with my blood, the transition of Dalmatia to Italy. And in the name of what did my friend in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip(2) and others perish?"

He was in despair, the young man with a dark, slightly pock-marked face and feverishly glittering eyes. The true background of the war of ‘liberation’ was revealed to them from its Dalmatian angle… From him I learned many details about the internal life of the South-Slav revolutionary organisations and, in particular, about the group of boys who killed the heir to the Habsburg throne, the head of the Austro-Hungarian military party.

The organisation, with the romantic name, Crna Ruka (the Black Hand), was built on strictly conspiratorial Carbonari(3) principles. The new members went through mysterious rituals: a knife was put to the bared chest, an oath of loyalty was taken on pain of death, etc. The strands of this organisation, which had branches in all the South-Slav provinces of the Habsburg monarchy and was filled with self-sacrificing students, were gathered in Belgrade, in the hands of officers and politicians equally close to the Serbian government and to the Russian embassy. Agents of the Romanovs in the Balkans, as is well known, have never stopped using dynamite.

That Vienna was dressed in official mourning did not prevent the masses of the urban poor being quite indifferent to the news of the death of the heir to the Habsburg throne. But immediately the press got to work on public opinion. In the events of the present war, it is hard to find sufficiently graphic words to describe the truly villainous role played by the press all over Europe and around the world. In this orgy of baseness, the Austro-Hungarian black and yellow press, not over-blessed with knowledge or talent, indisputably occupies not the last place. Since the assassination in Sarajevo, on a command from the unseen Centre – the diplomatic cauldron where the destiny of peoples is decided – hacks of all political shades mobilised as many lies as has been seen since the creation of the world."

"The truth about the Sarajevo assassination team was already known. In each play, every actor has a well defined role: entering the stage, saying his lines and making his gestures. Then the time comes for him to go behind the curtain. And as such, the key witnesses and players in the drama of Franz Ferdinand’s murder all passed into oblivion. Nedeljko Gabrynowicz was the first to leave this world. Gavril Pinciple quietly followed him on May 1, 1918, succumbing to tuburculosis in prison like his cohort. They had completed their roles as the young terrorists in two ways: killing the archduke and putting the Austrians on the “right” track. They played according to the script prepared by the military and political organizers of the assassination. Colonel Apis Dmitrievich, the head of the organization of the Serbian nationalists, “the Black Hand,” was fighting honorably on the front of the war they had provoked four years earlier when he was suddenly arrested on the orders of his own government. The important organizer of backstage affairs was now an unnecessary witness: the military court-martialed the intelligence chief of the Serbian general staff, and, without delay, sentenced him to the firing squad.
The “political” organizer of the Sarajevo assassination, Vladimir Gachinovich, also died under mysterious circumstances. He was simultaneously a member of all three organizations suspected of the crime: Young Bosnia, Civil Defense, and Black Hand. He was also the chief ideologist and most influential member of Mlada Bosna, which carried out the terrorist act. It was Gachinovich who gave his contacts in these organizations to Russian revolutionaries, who in turn used them to sieze the opportunity to mount a revolution. Among his friends were socialist Natanson, and social-democrats Martov, Lunacharsky, Radek and Trotsky. The latter even eulogized him after his death, for in August 1917, the strapping young Vladimir Gachinovich suddenly fell ill. It was such an incomprehensible and mysterious disease that Swiss doctors twice (!) operated on him finding nothing. But, later that month Gachinovich died …"

"Gaćinović, who was personal friends with European socialists such as Victor Serge and Julius Martov,^[12] met Leon Trotsky by chance in Paris. His revolutionary zeal impressed Trotsky.^[13] From autumn 1910 to the summer of 1912, Gaćinović was a student at Vienna University.^[14] In his late teens, after visiting the Kingdom of Serbia, Gaćinović organized underground cells, kruzoks, amongst Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zagreb, and western Slavonia. In 1911, he became the only Young Bosnia leader to join Unification or Death, Dragutin Dimitrijević's secret society.^[3] In the same year, the term Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) was popularized in an article by Gaćinović, and modeled by him after Young Italy and Young Russia...
He was poisoned with arsenic in August 1917 in Fribourg, Switzerland, by either the Austrians, the French, the Serbian police, or by one of Serbia's rival political factions."

One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the intersection of the Russian (radical) Left with the Russian Military Intelligence before the WWI. Trotsky and Verkhovsky were certainly well acquainted, the question is since when? Their Odessa days? Do they have any Odessa connection?
Verkhovsky "c 1913 — старший адъютант штаба 3-й Финляндской стрелковой бригады. Был командирован в Сербию для изучения опыта участия сербской армии в Балканских войнах. С началом Первой мировой войны вернулся в Россию, вместе со своей бригадой участвовал в боях в Восточной Пруссии в составе 22-го армейского корпуса."

Did he meet with Trotsky in the Balkans in 1913? Was he acquainted or introduced to Gacinovic by Trotsky? Their strategic aims might have coincided at that point.

In 1907-1914, "in Vienna, Trotsky continuously published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers, such as Kievskaya Mysl, under a variety of pseudonyms, often using "Antid Oto". In September 1912, Kievskaya Mysl sent him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two Balkan Wars for the next year... On 3 August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, in which Austria-Hungary fought against the Russian empire, Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian émigré."

A "war correspondent", of Trotsky's stature and credentials, ("The War Correspondence
has been hailed as a masterpiece") would certainly be of great interest to the Russian General Staff and military intelligence at that time.

The future role of Belgrade in the operation "Trust" is also of interest:
"The Sforza-Volpi concoction, Yugoslavia, was to become a main staging ground of the East-West intelligence nexus known as the Trust, since a good portion of the "White" Russian opposition, involved in that project, was based in Belgrade."

M.N.

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Saturday, June 25, 2016

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:40 PM

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia
Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:40 PM

MOSCOW — After waging war on Islamist militants within its borders for decades, Russia now faces the prospect of such extremism along its southern frontier in Central Asia.

On June 5, radicals robbed two gun stores and stormed a military unit in the city of Aktobe, Kazakhstan, killing eight and injuring dozens in the first attack of such a scale in the oil-rich country.

Image: Mourners carry a coffin containing the body of Andrey Maksimenko

According to Arkady Dubnov of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, this latest in a series of incidents highlights the risk that a "second front of jihad" could emanate from Kazakhstan and other nations that once made up the Soviet Union's Central Asian republics — Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan.

While violence in the mostly-Muslim region of 85 million has not reached anything close to the levels seen in the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan, analysts worry about the future.

"The long-term threat of Central Asian jihad is quite real," Dubnov said.

Up to 2,000 Central Asians are fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, according to U.S. intelligence sources who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity.

Image: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan

The real number of jihad supporters is likely much higher, Dubnov said.

"For every [Central Asian] fighter in ISIS, there may be up to a dozen men in a sleeper cell at home and 100 sympathizers," he added.

Fighters from Islamist fighting groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Tajik groups Jundullah and Jamaat Ansarullah have crossed the borders into Afghanistan and Pakistan, inflaming active insurgencies there. IMU fighters were affiliated with the Taliban and al Qaeda but more recently pledged allegiance to ISIS.

There are an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 IMU militants in Afghanistan, according to a senior Afghan intelligence officer who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

More than 1,000 Tajik militants area also fighting in Afghanistan, the source added.

Threat within borders

Experts and officials are carefully watching trends in the mainly poor and authoritarian countries for signs that extremism could destabilize governments across the region.

Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan especially face threats from within, according to Nargis Kassenova, a professor at leading Kazakhstan university KIMEP.

"The Islamists have a chance of taking power in Tajikistan, where the state is pretty weak," she said.

The supreme commander of Tajikistan's riot police last year defected to ISIS, saying it was in protest against oppression of Muslims. Gulmurod Khalimov — who has previously been trained by U.S. instructors in the U.S. — joined the militants with 10 compatriots and pledged in a video statement to bring jihad to his country.

Khalimov's defection did not come out of a vacuum, experts said.

A history of clan feuds and radical Islamic ideology fueled a civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s, the most brutal conflict to flare on the ruins of the Soviet Union after the fall of Communism in 1989. Up to 100,000 people were killed and one million more displaced in the war, according to United Nations estimates.

Neighboring Uzbekistan, meanwhile, has seen serious crackdowns since the Soviet Union dissolved and it became independent in 1991.

In 2005, suppression of what the government said were Islamist extremists — but many locals maintained were peaceful protesters — left between 180 and 1,500 dead.

Russia, which has retained close ties with the Central Asian governments, says officially that these matters are not its business. After the June 5 jihadist attack in Kazakhstan, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the problems were the "internal affairs" of that country, according to RIA Novosti.

Despite those carefully chosen words, Russia is clearly concerned about the situation in the region — to the point of keeping its biggest foreign military base of 8,000 troops in Tajikistan.

"In case of a full-blown Islamist uprising even they will be not enough," Dubnov of Carnegie think tank warned.

Shaving beards

Radical Islamists in the region are mostly keeping quiet or leaving, for now. But poverty and authoritarianism — conditions that often allow extremism to flourish — are growing in the region, experts say.

With the exception of Kazakhstan, all five countries have per capita GDP of between $2,000 and $6,000, according to the International Monetary Fund. Millions of locals are forced to take menial jobs as work migrants in Russia where per capita income averages at $23,000.

The countries' leaders are notoriously heavy-handed and have a fondness for cults of personality.

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon is praised in official poems, reportedly compared to the sun in meetings with his subjects and enjoys the semi-official title "His Excellency." His late Turkmen counterpart, Saparmurat Niyazov, built 14,000 statues of himself; Niyazov's successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, is slowly replacing them with his own posters.

Image: Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev on May 1

The current parliament in Uzbekistan is dominated by Nursultan Nazarbayev's party Nur Otan, which won 81 percent of the vote in the 2012 election. Nazarbayev, who has held power since the 1991 Soviet collapse, was last re-elected in 2011 with 96 percent of the vote.

This authoritarianism leaves the Central Asian countries little room for forging individual national identities, leaving Islam as the prime contender for filling the void, experts said.

"[Central Asians] embrace Islam as identity because that's the easiest option," Dubnov said.

Local regimes, run by former Soviet-era Communist party bosses with no deep explicit religious convictions, are cracking down on Islamic movements as they do with any political opposition, he Dubnov said.

In Tajikistan, police have been closing shops that sell hijabs — the Muslim veil — and last year forced 13,000 men to shave their beards.

Tajik authorities have also shut down the sole legal Islamic party, all but pushing Muslims into the political underground, said David Lewis, an expert on Central Asia with the University of Exeter.

In Uzbekistan, almost 13,000 Muslims have been jailed over the past 25 years for their religious convictions, according to local rights organization, Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders.

The Turkmenistan regime is described by Human Rights Watch as "extremely repressive" with " harsh restrictions on media and religious freedoms."

Repression of independent religious activity by local leaders is the main factor that could propel jihadists to power in the region, experts believe.

"I'm not sure that governments in the region have the political flexibility to deal effectively with the problem except by relying on their usual methods of coercion and repression, which could backfire," said Lewis.

Levels of violent Islamism are rising towards those seen in the Russian republics of Dagestan and Chechnya, according to Kassenova, the professor with KIMEP, who added: "The war on terror is only breeding more terrorists."

The foreign ministries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan did not return requests for comment for this story.

Read the whole story

· · · · · · · ·

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia - NBCNews.com
Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:34 PM

Russia - Google News

NBCNews.com

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia
NBCNews.com
MOSCOW — After waging war on Islamist militants within its borders for decades, Russia now faces the prospect of such extremism along its southern frontier in Central Asia. On June 5, radicals robbed two gun stores and stormed a military unit in the ...

and more »

Арест губернатора поразил кировчан by SvobodaRadio
Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:31 PM

SvobodaRadio's YouTube Videos

From: SvobodaRadio
Duration: 02:53

Басманный суд Москвы санкционировал арест губернатора Кировской области Никиты Белых, обвиняемого в получении взятки в особо крупном размере. Что думают об этой истории прохожие на улицах Кирова?
Ссылка на источник - http://www.svoboda.org/media/video/27820340.html

Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Lessons of History | The Origins of the WWI or: "Did the Russians Off Archduke Ferdinand?!"

Links

Saturday, June 25, 2016

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:40 PM

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:40 PM

Threat within borders

Shaving beards

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia - NBCNews.com Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:34 PM

Арест губернатора поразил кировчан by SvobodaRadio Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:31 PM

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia
Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:40 PM

'Second Front of Jihad' Looms on Russia's Border in Central Asia - NBCNews.com
Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:34 PM

Арест губернатора поразил кировчан by SvobodaRadio
Saturday June 25th, 2016 at 12:31 PM