BBC: Russia 'backed Litvinenko murder'

As if it needed to be said:

The murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was carried out with the backing of the Russian state, Whitehall sources have told the BBC.

A senior security official told Newsnight there were "very strong indications it was a state action". [...]

The BBC has been told that Russia's internal security organisation, the FSB, operated under Mr Putin with far more autonomy than the organisations usually entrusted with foreign espionage operations.

Our source said: "We very strongly believe the Litvinenko case to have had some state involvement."

Newsnight has also learned that officers at MI5 believe they thwarted an attempt last summer to kill another Russian dissident, Boris Berezovsky.

The BBC's source said the Berezovsky incident showed "continued FSB willingness to consider operations against people in the West". [...]

In November, head of MI5 Jonathan Evans expressed concern that there had been "no decrease" in the number of Russian covert intelligence officers operating in the UK since the end of the Cold War.

The service believes there are around 30 operating from Russian diplomatic missions here.

My personal opinion on why they killed Litvinenko was that it had something to do with what he knew about 9/11 and related Russian sponsorship of Islamic terrorism. Because it sure doesn't seem worth it to kill him over something like this, when no one outside of Russia seemed to care much. You can find a full archive of Russia-related posts here.

Soviet women had on average seven abortions

Radio Free Europe has an article about the sorry state of Russian family planning. Among the bombshells is the claim that women in the Soviet Union averaged seven abortions in their lifetime, though that factoid is in the blurb on the main page but is nowhere to be found in the article (something unfortunately I've noticed more than once with articles on that site). More babies are aborted than are actually born, and only between 3 and 13% of sexually active women use oral contraception, compared to over half in Europe. The article cites wariness about contraception due to decades of Soviet-made contraception that was ineffective as a reason for the low adoption rate in post-Soviet Russia, though it notes that the abortion rate has fallen from its pre-1991 level. Reliable contraception is now widely available, though at a price of $25 per month for the pill – this in a country whose constitution gives every citizen the right to free healthcare.

Active measures and the Right Reverend Wright

The Jeremiah Wright controversy has the potential to torpedo Obama's campaign, according to results of a poll published by the NYT. I find one of Wright's comments particularly interesting – that is, his belief that AIDS was/is a plot by the American government to decimate Africans and black Americans. Thanks to the Mitrokhin Archive and public acknowledgments by former Soviet officials, we can now say with some certainty that this conspiracy was deliberately propagated by Soviet secret services.  They were part of the broader strategy of active measures which the Soviets were quite fond of – contemporary FSB support of Chechen terrorists and al-Qaeda would fall under the same category. Anyway, I just found it incredible that Soviet active measures from decades ago are still working so well to stir up racial tension in America.

Communist party PR: who can, who can't

China has reaffirmed its total ineptitude with handing PR on an international scale in claiming the Dalai Lama is orchestrating suicide attacks. It looks like China will be spared a Taiwanese declaration of independence during the Olympics, but I doubt the Tibet crisis will be the last one before the end of the games in late August. I think China has grossly overplayed its hand in hosting the Olympics – at least in America, China is the villain du jour because of the latest anti-globalization backlash provoked by the longer-than-ever presidential election season. Europe has a similar antagonism, divided between intellectuals who look down on their human rights abuses and lack of freedom, and those who have been riled up by protectionist sentiment. The CCP has become so sure of its propaganda techniques at home that thinks that they'll work against world audiences. The truth is that they probably don't even work in China – the threat of the state coming down is strong enough to coax people into either apolitical or pro-party stances. I don't see this at all helping China anywhere where it matters (i.e., advanced democracies). In the rest of the world, the power and money is in the hands of people who aren't particularly concerned with China's big coming out party.

China ought to take a page from Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's totalitarian dictator. The Soviets had taught him well, and he turned on the Soviet Union (at least publicly) and managed to be the only communist dictator to secure Most Favored Nation trade privileges from the US. He knew that identifying a common enemy was key to obtaining favors from the West (at least till he went too far and squandered it all in the late '80s), and that allowed him to do some pretty terrible things. Essentially, Ceaușescu courted the West by railing against the Soviets, all in order to cover up behavior that was for more anti-liberal than anything in the USSR after Stalin.

Putin used the same model, and anti-terrorism was what he used to get Bush to look into his eyes and "get a sense of his soul" – and it was a good sense. Meanwhile, it's likely that Russia fabricated a lot of the attacks that were supposedly perpetrated by "Chechen terrorists." The apartment bombings that were the direct cause of the Second Chechen war were most likely black flag operations by the KGB FSB. Moscow theater crisis, too.

Of course, dictatorships have no monopoly on disingenuous PR. America has clearly provoked, if not intentionally, a lot of Islamic terrorism against itself, all in the name of rooting it out. Thankfully for Americans, it doesn't do nearly as well with PR than the dictatorships.