When the famous Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin orbited around Earth for the first time in human history in the early 1960s, Viktor Krasnov, from the city of Stavropol in southern Russia, had not yet landed in the world, but like all children of his young generation in the shroud of Soviet Russia, he was glorified. Krasnov, "the historical astronaut, hostile to everything religious, and uses the famous saying attributed to Gagarin:" I went into space and did not see God there, "as one of the founding propaganda saying of" atheist "Soviet communism.
Therefore, in his darkest nightmares, Krasnov was probably not envisioning the advent of a day when he would be judged in the heart of Russia as a result of an Internet discussion in which he described the Bible as “a collection of Jewish stories and myths that are nothing but nonsense,” in his view.
In March of 2016, Krasnov's house was raided by the Russian police, before a federal judge subjected him to a mental examination to ensure his eligibility for trial on charges of "insulting the feelings of the faithful", a charge that is perhaps the strangest in the history of Russia since the Soviet era, and neither Krasnov nor anyone else was They expect their government to be serious about implementing it, even when it was officially announced in mid-2013.
At that time, Russian President Vladimir Putin passed a controversial law criminalizing insulting the feelings of religious people in the country, and stipulating a prison sentence of up to one year if the "offensive" act was performed outside places of worship, and up to three years if it was issued inside one of these places.
The Krasnov case did not cause much controversy at the time, but Moscow was intent on pushing ahead. In August of the same year, video blogger Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, from Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in Russia, did not take television threats in turn. His country is seriously, and the result was that he was placed under house arrest for 11 months before he was sentenced to two years and three months in prison. Despite submitting a petition to commute the sentence, the Russian federal judiciary refused to accept him.
Ruslan Sokolovsky
The world was living in the midst of a virtual revolution brought about by the famous Pokemon Go game, when Russian television broadcast a warning that anyone who would chase virtual creatures into places of worship would be punished according to the law "insulting the feelings of the faithful."
In a video clip that received more than a million and a half views, Sokolovsky participated in his trip to hunt colorful cartoon creatures inside the city cathedral next to the altar as the cathedral priest prepares to perform the prayer, accompanied by a sarcastic comment in which he says: "I caught all the Pokemon, but I did not hunt the rarest Pokemon Jesus, hey." This Pokemon does not exist in the first place. "
These issues, and many others like them, represent an amazing turnaround in Russia's recent history.During the first two decades of the Soviet era, more than two hundred thousand clerics were killed, while millions of other Christians were persecuted for their faith, and this anti-religious discrimination continued even before the beginning of the Soviet fall. 1990s.
But things were not so in pre-Soviet Russia, and specifically in Tsarist Russia, where the church was strongly present in the social and political scenes.
Today Moscow appears to be reverting to its relatively old past, in some respects overcoming its nearby Soviet roots.
The strange thing is that the apostasy comes at the hands of Vladimir Putin, who until not long ago was one of the most prominent Russian intelligence men, described today in Moscow as a "tsar", as everyone seemed to have colluded in ignoring the apparent contradiction in giving such a title to Moscow's strongman, the official. For the Kremlin's game management to this day.
During the Tsarist era in Russia, the ruler of the country was seen as God’s chosen one to lead the Russian nation tasked with emulating the values derived primarily from the principles of Russian Orthodoxy.
With the end of the era of religious persecution with the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Orthodox Church began to work to restore its religious role.
In the beginning, space was open to competition for followers and influence in the Russian religious sphere, as floods poured in from Western missionaries, including evangelicals and Catholics, taking advantage of a "spiritual vacuum" that accompanied the fall of the non-religious Soviet Union, which caused the Russian Church to fear losing its opportunity in Reconstructing her spiritual influence, and from her transformation into just one of many religious bodies in the new Russia.
These fears prompted the Church to fall under the purview of the state, and in 1997 it succeeded in pushing the government to pass a law restricting the freedom of religious practice of "foreign" religions, which placed the Orthodox Church in the seat of the religious leader again.
The Church significantly strengthened this situation with Putin's rise to power again in 2012, when the Terrorism Act, issued in mid-2016, strengthened the authority of the Church by prohibiting any missionary activity outside the scope of official institutions.
And before that, early in Putin's presidency, the State Duma passed a law whereby all the property of the conquered church returned during the Soviet era, which turned the latter into one of Russia's most prominent landowners, and Putin directed state-owned energy companies to contribute funds to rebuild thousands of destroyed churches under Soviet rule, with some 25,000 churches rebuilt since the early 1990s, most of them built during Putin's rule.
In addition, the Church was granted a role in public life and religious education in schools, as well as the right to review any legislation before the State Duma.
Putin cannot be considered a religious person, just as he has never been a communist atheist in the literal sense, and he believes that what Russia really lost with the fall of the Soviet Union are the influence and power, not communism in itself, and for him Orthodox Christianity is the other face of Leninist communism, where each plays a role Functionally in the service of the state.
Ultimately, this function is centered around consolidating cultural control and nurturing a unique national identity.
In the end, it does not matter if Russia is Tsarist or Soviet, religious or atheist, what is important is that it is strong, united, and always under control.
The Russians today do not differ much from their president in their view of Christianity. While the vast majority of Russians define themselves, up to 90% in some estimates, as "Orthodox Christians", approximately one third of the percentage define themselves at the same time as atheists as well. What makes the Russians' view of Christianity is dominated by a sense of patriotism rather than a spiritual or religious affiliation.
Thus, Putin and the Church shared the view of Orthodox Christianity as a means of consolidating each other's control over their own space, the spiritual symbolic space in the case of the Church, and the political space in the case of Putin, so they also shared the hostility towards all forms of unregulated and official religious evangelization, which represented a threat to the symbolic hegemony of the Church over the The social life of Russian Christians, and the state's political and security grip on the other hand.
These were the features of Putin's new deal: Russia lost a lot with the fall of the Soviet Union, and on top of what it lost was not having a strong ideology that unites its citizens at home and preaches it abroad, and the solution came in a combination of Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity, under the auspices of both the state and the Church.
On the one hand, the church is regaining its lost symbolic role during the rule of the Soviets, and on the other hand, Putin's new synthesis provides a strong, unifying ideology at the same time subject to subjugation and control, and it seemed to be a smart and profitable deal for both parties.
The New Deal provided a solid ideological justification for Putin to suppress the opposition and other religious groups with dissenting political views, and helped consolidate his influence shaken by the popular opposition accompanying his second rise to power in 2012, however, the new missionary suit that Putin wore was not directed at the Russians only, but rather It proved its effectiveness as the most prominent pillar in his grand plan to restore Russia's influence and influence in its former regional environment.
An ocean dominated today by the West, especially Europe, Putin's archenemy has always been, and whoever believes the Tsar must pay the price for her "arrogance" today, from a door she has long been proud of as the bearer of the torches of liberalism and enlightenment.
And if Europe believes its wars over religion ended in 1648, then the current confrontation with Russia makes it clear that this is not the case.
"Europe gives us a lot of money, but it asks for quite a lot. It demands that we neglect our souls, and that we distance ourselves from God, and this is definitely unacceptable."
(Bishop of the pro-Russian Orthodox Church in Moldova - a European country and one of the former Soviet republics)
In the heart of the capital, Paris, the golden main dome of a new Russian Orthodox cathedral rises on the banks of the Seine, creating a main neighborhood full of government buildings and international embassies.
(Reuters)
We are now at the end of 2014, and the tension is most intense between Europe and Russia as a result of the latter’s decision to annex Crimea by military force. However, the situation in Nice, to the south on the Mediterranean coast, is very different from the situation in one of the main capitals of the Union, "Paris", where the leaders Locals from the right-wing loving Putin, some of whom publicly praised his "bold" step to annex Crimea, together with the Russian ambassador and Orthodox priests at a festival in one of the most luxurious hotels in the French city, an event that uncharacterized smoothly between the West Parisian spirit and the East Russian spirit, while everyone celebrated The official return of Nice Cathedral to the Russian Patriarchal fold in Moscow, after many years of tensions.
Over these years, the French Orthodox Society remained subordinate to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, "Istanbul", the historical religious opponent of the Moscow Patriarchate, and one of the most important sanctuaries for Putin's many religious opponents.
After a long legal battle, Moscow finally regained control of Saint Newcastle Cathedral and installed its own priests, indifferent to the objections of the local cathedral followers, and immediately proceeded to rally the faithful behind various projects to warm France's cold relations with Russia, but the influence of Putin's priests in France does not appear today. Confined to distant Nice alone.
In the heart of the capital, Paris, the golden main dome of a new Russian Orthodox cathedral rises on the banks of the Seine, creating a main neighborhood full of government buildings and international embassies.
Moscow finally got this site after years of Kremlin pressure, and after a fierce competition with other countries, led by Canada and Saudi Arabia in 2008. Moscow soon allocated a colossal sum of 100 million euros to establish a "spiritual cultural center" in the heart of Paris, which is a huge complex. It is made up of four separate buildings, including a church, a school, a conference hall and a cultural center run by the Russian embassy, and it appears as a huge display of Russia as a religious and cultural force in the heart of the castle of enlightenment and Western secularism, and it is also personally associated with the Russian President, to the point that the former Minister of Culture in France, Frederick Mitterrand, He sarcastically suggested that it be called the "St. Vladimir Center", or "St. Vladimir".
Putin, the "Saint," likes to describe his battle with the West as a "spiritual and cultural war," not just a political or military battle, a war in which the Russian president presents his country as a "civilized model that can mobilize those affected by the erosion of traditional values around the world."
In the wake of the global financial crisis, popular uprisings swept across Europe, but Putin apparently sensed that there was a bigger uprising about to flood the old continent, and that this time it would not be just a fleeting financial crisis no matter how big it is.
A keynote paper prepared in 2013 by the Center for Strategic Communications, a pro-Kremlin think tank, noted that large sections of the Western public “today despise those prevailing values in the West such as feminism and gay rights movements, and more generally the liberal trend towards which modern Western elites are pushing their societies.” .
With the traditional masses of supporters of the cultural uprising awaiting, the Russian president was waiting for the opportunity to put on his new dress, a garment perfectly laid out for him by the strategic paper drawn up by his advisers: It is time for Russia, and Putin in particular, to become "the new leader of the conservative world."
Putin did not wait long, and his rhetoric quickly changed dramatically since 2013. That year, the rhetorical shift appeared on more than one occasion in very direct terms, such as “How many European Atlantic countries today reject their roots, including the Christian values that are the basis of Western civilization. They deny moral principles and all traditional identities, on the national, cultural, religious and even sexual levels.
Moscow has used all the tools of its soft power, from its relationship with the Orthodox Church, to the Kremlin-financed media, such as Russia Today and Sputnik, in exporting its new image as a sponsor of the world of religious conservatives, by spreading an anti-homosexual creed and adopting a law prohibiting homosexuality inside Russia. In 2013, by addressing any attempts to place individual rights above the rights of the Russian family, society, or nation.
The Russian Orthodox Church is helping Russia's new project as a natural ally for all striving for a "safer and less liberal world, away from the rush of globalization, multiculturalism and the flurry of women's and gay rights."
Meanwhile, the media is working to communicate Putin's voice to conservative and nationalist groups abroad, with the message that he stands with them against gay activists and the forces of "moral decay" as they call them.
On the other hand, it continues to broadcast propaganda against liberal values in Europe, described today in the Russian media as Gayropa, or "gay Europe", as a kind of moral stigma that always reminds of the perversion of European values.
It seems that Russia's new orientation has come to fruition faster than Putin himself had thought, and thanks to the close alliance between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin, religion has proven extremely effective in former Soviet lands such as Moldova, as high-ranking priests loyal to the Church in Moscow launched an organized campaign to prevent the integration of their country with the West, Meanwhile, priests in the Republic of Montenegro led intense efforts to obstruct their country's plans to join NATO, months after months passed, and Moldova remained an ally of Russia as it was, and Montenegro remained far from NATO.
But Putin's ambitions seem to go beyond restoring some influence in the Soviet lands itself to take revenge on the whole of Europe, and in the background is a bitter scene that Putin will never forget to lower the Soviet flag over the Kremlin to replace it with the Russian flag.
In his view, Europe and America were most responsible for this, and although Russia today is not a force that would allow it to take a strong revenge, Europe today is not strong and united either, while we find the United States as well in one of its most preoccupied moments with its internal concerns.
The Russian strategy of revenge came from the brainchild of the Russian Chief of Staff and the current Deputy Minister of Defense, Valery Grasimov, who believes that the Kremlin today lives in the midst of a complex world that contains political, economic and military forces and alliances that exceed the capabilities of Moscow at the present time.
But for Grasimov, according to what he published in his famous article in the Journal of Social Industrial Korea, which is concerned with Russian military strategy, under the heading "The Value of Science in Prediction," today Russia does not need to match the military strength of Europe and the United States to be able to achieve its geopolitical goals.
At a time when Russia preoccupied the world with its deliberations in Eastern Europe, it surprised everyone by its intervention in Syria, causing the largest wave of refugees flowing to the old continent.
The Arab Spring was a major model on which Grasimov built his ideas so that they are today known in political circles as the "Grasimov Doctrine".
In today's world, and overnight, a calm and stable country can turn into an arena for a global conflict that shakes it upside down, and then turns it into a pile of rubble, and this type of conflict would become a means to achieve political goals, even for unrelated forces. In essence the conflict itself.
Paradoxically, these conflicts do not need a lot of military investment, as much as they need a combination of intelligence, technological, economic, diplomatic and informational power, and the employment of neutral assets, such as peace-keeping forces, for example, in a mixture that does not represent the military force more than a fifth, a mixture known as "a mixture." Grasimov 1: 4, and it is a recipe that Russia tried in Ukraine, then in Syria and possibly in Libya, and despite all that is said about Russia's aims to intervene in these conflicts, there remains one thing that unites them all, which is that they are all directed to Europe.
At a time when Russia occupied the world with its deliberations in eastern Europe, it surprised everyone by its intervention in Syria in 2015, causing the largest wave of refugees flowing to the old continent, and it now wants to control the refugees' faucet by gaining a foothold in Libya, the African country holding the keys to the flow Refugees across the Mediterranean.
At a time when internal European conflicts over issues of security and identity are raging due to economic crises, refugee flows and "terrorism", the "leader of the conservative world" has moved to the next stage of his plan, and began to move his pawns lurking in the heart of Europe itself.
Although the world today classifies Europe and the United States as being on one side of the political spectrum, the picture looks somewhat different if we decide to move beyond the political surface to a deeper social outlook.
There is a long history of mistrust towards the United States rooted in the European subconscious, in which Europeans are not very content with a world in which the leadership has moved to the other side of the Atlantic.
Therefore, it was natural for Europe throughout its history to know a legacy of infatuation with Russia and hatred for America that cast a shadow over the currents that are today on the far right of its political side.
Russia has been aware of these facts from the beginning, and has engineered its plan to connect these currents to a global network that resembles its old global communist network, or what is known as "Comintern".
Putin and Marine Lubben (Reuters)
Russia initially focused its steps on France, and Moscow controlled two of the three most prominent candidates to occupy the Elysee Palace during the last French presidential elections, the first being Marine Le Pen, a fierce critic of immigration and globalization, who received in 2014 a loan from a Russian bank worth nine million euros in exchange for Her party, the National Front, promoted Russia as a natural ally of Europe, and the second of them was François Fillon, who won the candidacy of the center-right at the time, and who did not find anger in declaring his fondness for the Russian president, to the point that Alain Juppe, Fillon's rival at the time, said that it was for the first time in the history of the French elections "The Russian president chooses his candidate."
In contrast to the traditional tendency of "anti-Americanism", there are many reasons explaining Putin's embrace in France, and perhaps one of the most prominent is the dominance of the pessimistic "crime-ideological" orientation, a trend that has long characterized the French culture full of criticism of society's diseases and predictions about his imminent downfall.
Much anxiety in France today centers on the idea of a "massive exodus", fear of France turning into a Muslim country, and what is known as a "demographic danger" in light of talk about the low birth rate among the native French, and the French right-wing figures argue that the country is on the way to dissipating Its revolutionary traditions and cultural heritage without raising a finger to save itself, which is what the French journalist and one of the pioneers of Islamophobia in the country, Eric Zemmour, calls "the French suicide".
But the phenomenon of infatuation with Putin and Russia in Europe does not stop at the borders of France alone, but extends to the rest of Europe from east to west, starting with the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, the godfather of Putin's fans in Europe, and the Hungarian Nazi Jobbik Party as well, who is also accused of receiving Russian money. Passing through the Freedom Party in neighboring Austria, to Germany itself, the heart of the European Union, where the extreme German national party and its leader, Udo Voigt, who does not hide their authority with Putin in any way, while accusing his country's advisor Angela Merkel of "treason" because of her opening the country's borders In front of immigrants coming from the Middle East, and ending with Britain itself, where the star of Nigel Farage, founder of the Independence Party and the populist leader who is personally close to Putin, stands out, and who is famous for saying: "Do not poke the Russian bear with the stick, because if you do, it will respond to you."
Supporters of the Russian "Motherland" Rodina (Reuters)
Moscow shares with far-right groups in Europe, and around the world, a firm belief that, regardless of ideology, traditional elites must be ousted due to their support for globalization and transnational institutions such as NATO and the European Union.
In 2015, in an attempt to unify the extremist and sometimes intertwined right-wing groups and place Russia at the forefront of the expanding movement against the liberal elites, the Russian "Motherland" party, close to Putin, organized a meeting of national figures from Europe, countries, and elsewhere, in a narrow conference room in The Holiday Inn in St. Petersburg, at the time, Fyodor Biryukov, the party's leader, said it was the first time that activists gathered in "a new global vanguard to overcome same-sex marriage, radical Islamists, and New York financiers."
Although Biryukov asserted that the Kremlin did not support his initiative, he did not oppose it either.
The phenomenon of European infatuation with Putin has attracted the interest of many researchers, among them Pippa Norris of Harvard Kennedy College and Ronald Englihart of the University of Michigan, conducting research that combined the rules of statistics and social sciences, and found that the right-wing populists largely threw in isolation. Older white voters who feel anger at the erosion of traditional values, so that those today feel that they are strangers to the prevailing values in their country, which has created a weakness in their faith in democracy, and a yearning for a "strong man" or "ALFA" that can spare them disaster.
It was remarkable that this isolation, and this fondness for a strong man, was forcefully imposed on the other side of the Atlantic, when the United States elected Donald Trump as president at the end of 2016, at a time when he did not hide his admiration for Vladimir Putin.
More than three decades ago, and specifically in March 1983, US President Ronald Reagan was giving a speech in a place that did not seem familiar to his predecessors from American presidents, and Reagan’s rise to power at that time was driven by the voices of religious conservatives and followers of the Evangelical Church, who flocked to vote in an organized manner. For the first time in the history of the US elections.
And 3.5 million supporters of the Evangelical National Assembly would pave Reagan's way to the White House, so the Assembly itself was the most appropriate place for Reagan to declare his holy war.
US President Ronald Reagan and his wife in the church (Reuters)
Reagan needed moral support in order to fight his cold war against Russia, and the chants of "Forward, Soldiers of Christ," echoing between Reagan's stands during his famous speech to the Evangelical Society, were all he needed, and at this time Reagan announced that Communist Russia She represents the "axis of evil in the modern world," and that marked the start of the Cold War.
Reagan would not have imagined in his most extreme dreams that after three decades, with the advent of a new Republican president to the White House, Russia would turn into a model to be praised by his former conservative supporters. Russia was no longer that atheist communist entity with a widespread threat to conservative American values. Today, however, it has turned to the desired model to restore those values.
Evangelists who once supported Reagan's war against Moscow turned into a chorus of celebration for the Russian president in the heart of the United States, headed by Brian Fischer, a spokesman for the American Evangelical Family Association, saying that the law criminalizing homosexuality in Russia is "a kind of policy that we support." The American Center for Law and Justice, a prominent evangelical legal group, has introduced some of Putin's anti-gay measures, and Brian Brown, co-founder of the National Marriage Organization, traveled to Russia to testify about anti-gay legislation, describing Putin as "the lion of Christianity". Franklin Graham's son The famous priest Billy Graha, one of Reagan's most prominent supporters, praised Putin in an article in 2014, and launched a sharp attack on Obama at the time, describing him as a "supporter of atheism."
And unlike in Europe, where immigration and Islamophobia are the main pillars of the pro-Russian right-wing network, family values and homosexuality play a major role on the other side of the Atlantic.
In the United States, Russia supports a mysterious American group called the World Council of Families, an organization that has played a major social role in America since its founding in 1997, but its activity has grown significantly since 2014.
Brian Brown, the current president of the "World Council for Families" (networking sites)
The headquarters of the organization is located in Rockford, Illinois, and it claims that its goal is "to help secure the foundations of society" and to defend "the natural family based on marriage between a man and a woman." One of the symbols of the council and the current head of the organization is Brian Brown himself, whom we previously mentioned, one of the The most prominent face of the extreme right in America, and last February of our current year, Brown was landing in Moscow on one of the rounds of transatlantic communication between Russia and the American religious right.
But the links between the organization and Moscow are not due only to that last visit.
In fact, the World Council of Families is a joint American-Russian product, and it is the brainchild of Anatoly Antonov and Victor Medkov, professors of sociology at Lomonosov State University in the Russian capital, as well as American Alan Carlson, the current honorary president of the council.
The two Russian scholars were looking for a way to stave off a demographic winter looming on the horizon due to progressive legislation, from birth control to gay rights, when they stumbled upon Carlson's ideas.
In an apartment owned by a Russian Orthodox Sufi, the outlines of an organization were drawn up to restore glory to the international Christian right.
At a time when former US President Barack Obama was entering his second term, Moscow was passing its own law to criminalize homosexuality.
Despite widespread condemnation of the law from Europe to the US, the American religious right was quick to support the Kremlin.
In the midst of the raging dispute between the United States and Russia in 2014 over Ukraine, the Family Council announced plans to hold its annual conference in Moscow, prompting the United States to place two of the council's biggest supporters in Moscow, former MP Yelena Mizulina and former Russian Railways President Vladimir Yakunin, On the US sanctions list.
Steve Bannon, former senior advisor to former US President Trump and theorist of the alt-right ideas, is well aware of Putin's imperial ambitions and kleptocratic inclinations.
Just a year later, the council was holding its annual meeting in Salt Lake City, just months after the US Legislative Court Aubergeville legalized same-sex marriage throughout the United States, and it seemed that the Moscow game in America did not flourish politically as much as it did in Europe, but fate He was hiding a sudden rise of the American alternative right on the shoulder of the American white man's frustrations as well, and before the world woke up from his shock, Donald Trump had set his foot in the White House.
In the corridors of the ruling alternate right in the United States today, Putin is not as revered as he does among the ranks of the far right in Europe.
Steve Bannon, a senior adviser to former US President Trump and theoretician of alt-right ideas, is well aware of Putin's imperial ambitions and kleptocratic leanings, but this skepticism has not undermined his sympathy for the Putin project.
Bannon shares Putin's vision of a world that is sliding tragically into multiple religious and capitalist crises, and he has always called on Americans to fight to protect their beliefs against "the new barbarism that has begun, and will completely wipe out everything we have inherited over the past centuries."
It cannot be overlooked that the ongoing debate about Russia's role in preparing the climate for the rise of the alternative right of the White House, starting with the discussion about the role of the Russian hacking of the Democratic Party's databases and the leakage of its documents to the media, through the rumor campaigns broadcast by the Russian media against Hillary Clinton, to her growing celebration With Trump during the first months of his presidency, an issue that raises great controversy in public opinion and within the corridors of American government from its time to the present day.
While it is impossible for a sober analyst to claim that Russia brought Trump to the White House, it would also be futile to ignore the long history of Russian efforts to manipulate Western public opinion, a role that was never limited to supporting currents and people close to Moscow.
The New Yorker magazine tells the whole historical story in a lengthy investigation it published about this role. With the midst of Reagan’s first term in office, Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, ordered that "active measures" be taken to prevent Reagan's re-election, whom Moscow had classified at the time as a high-level threat. For its very existence.
The slogan "Reagan means war" was raised, and Moscow agents began to tarnish his image as a candidate as a "corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex."
But the result was a complete failure, as Reagan secured the largest victory in the history of the United States presidential election, with 49 of the 50 states in total.
In Europe, Estonian President Thomas Hendrik Elvis was the target of Russian piracy in 2007, when Estonia was involved in a conflict with Russia (Reuters)
Reagan was not the only case targeted, as Russia used rumors against Washington extensively during the Cold War, and Moscow rumored that the US government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King in the 1980s, and rumors were spread that US intelligence had created the AIDS virus in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
In 1996, Russia had added electronic warfare to its arsenal, when it succeeded in implementing the first targeted penetration of the US military network, and stealing tens of thousands of files, including designs for military equipment and maps of installations and troop formations.
And in 2008, the Russians achieved their greatest electronic achievements when they succeeded in penetrating a secret American network that was not even connected to the Internet, after Russian spies published storage discs loaded with viruses in vending kiosks near the NATO headquarters in Kabul, and betting very cleverly on a rare human error, And that one of the workers at the headquarters will buy one and insert it into a secure computer.
In Europe, Estonian President Thomas Hendrik Elvis was the target of Russian piracy in 2007, when Estonia was involved in a conflict with Russia over plans to move a statue of a Soviet soldier of World War II from the center of the capital Tallinn, and Moscow warned that moving the statue would have dire consequences for the Estonians .
In Georgia, coinciding with the war in 2008, Russian pirates penetrated fifty-four websites serving the government, the media and banks, and stole military information and paralyzed the internet in the country, and while the Georgian officers were unable to communicate with their forces, the citizens of Georgia did not have any means. To see what really happens.
And during the last French elections (2017), the General Directorate of External Security, the main French spy agency, was concerned that Russian pirates were working to help Marine Le Pen to reach the Elysee, at a time when the Russian media launched a massive campaign against the then-left candidate, Emmanuel Macron, describing him It is merely "a tool for US banks and has gay tendencies," but the campaign failed to lose Le Pen and Macron actually won, in a failure scenario similar to that of Reagan.
In Germany, Bruno Kahle, head of the CIA, did not hide his concern that Russian hackers were also trying to shape the German political scene against Chancellor Angela Merkel.
We cannot read Putin's religious tendencies, the activity of his media empire and his electronic pirates as isolated matters from each other, after all, none of these matters exceed his functional role in Putin's comprehensive plan, who seems happy today with what he has achieved in recent years, which does not exceed his capabilities only. And his country's capabilities, but he may have surpassed his dreams as well.
On the morning of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States, the Russian Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper was celebrating the matter in its own way, so the newspaper recalled the scene of Lenin's supporters storming the Winter Palace in 1917, when they arrested the capitalist ministers and overthrew the political system, and said although no one in Washington was planning to storm Congress or the White House, and prominent members of the old regime were hanged on January 20, "the feeling of the liberal West today did not differ from the feeling of the Russian bourgeoisie a hundred years ago."
The Russians love propaganda, and Putin is certainly taking advantage of a panic covering the features of a liberal west that today fears undermining the foundations of his regime, and he also enjoys dozens of articles in prestigious Western newspapers warning about his plans to destroy the Western world.
But Putin realizes that if there is something that can destroy the Western world today it will be self-destruct, or that it self-destruct.
Russia's breakthroughs were not the reason why Trump came to power in America or millions of Americans questioned the election results that drove him outside, and millions of Moscow alone were not enough to push Le Pen to the Elysee, while white discontent was caused by the effects of globalization and the division caused by the system of liberal values. Western panic over losing control of their country to the benefit of the immigrant hordes, and the economic decline of the middle classes, are much more important factors, and all that Putin and his tools skillfully does is further undermine confidence in a system that is fundamentally shaking, to the point of his belief that one man is today able to destroy it, Without firing a single bullet.
For Putin, all he does is repeat the previously tested plan. When Bismarck, in the nineteenth century, saw protests as a challenge to his rule, he turned everyone’s attention to gays and lesbians.
Putin was never interested in the sexuality of the Russians, as well as the Europeans, but today he may feel a lot of pleasure observing this Western confusion in values before politics, as for Ronald Reagan, it may be his good fortune that fate has missed him from the world, before he is forced to follow the details The drama of his world, which is destroying itself today in the midst of a hypothetical war at best.