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Chubais – The next neoliberal head to roll in Russia?

I venture that few outside the Russian Federation will even know the name of Anatoly Chubais, today the CEO of a Russian high-tech company called Rusnano. Following the high-profile November 15 arrest of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s Minister of Economics, Alexei Ulyukaev, on charges of accepting at least $2 million in bribes in a state privatization involving Rosneft and Bashneft energy companies, the spotlight has turned to the company of Anatoly Chubais, Boris Yeltsin’s 1990s privatization czar, today CEO of state-owned Rusnano. If charges are formally brought against Chubais–undeniably one of the most hated of the Yeltsin-era kleptocrat “reformers” who worked with the CIA during the 1990’s to plunder Russian state assets worth hundreds of billions for just pennies – it will signal that Putin feels in a strong enough position to purge the pro-free market liberal mafia that still holds a lock grip on the development of the Russian economy.

by F. William Engdahl for the Saker blog

On 16 November, the day after the dramatic arrest of Ulyukaev, state prosecutors and police raided the offices of Chubias’ Rusnano. Notable about the reports of the prosecutors’ questioning Chubais and other top officers at Rusnano, is the fact that several have fled Russia in recent months to avoid prosecution. To the present, Chubais remains, and vehemently claims innocence.

In my view, there is vastly more at stake here than the innocence or guilt of Chubais. This move, if combined with the arrest of Ulyukaev, signals a major cleanup of corrupt elements who, beginning even before 1991, organized to sell Russia to the CIA and Western speculators like George Soros.

Some history that has generally been blacked out in the West about the true role of Anatoly Chubais and the Yeltsin Presidency are instructive to also understand the irrational rage of Washington and US banks and oligarchs directed at Putin and at everything he does to re-establish Russian sovereignty and stability.

Part 1 - CIA’s Yeltsin ‘Democracy’ Coup

The rape of Russia–the Russian nation, the Russian state, the Russian people–beginning the end of the 1980’s, was a coup d’état engineered by the US Central Intelligence Agency along with rogue and not so rogue networks directed by former CIA Director, then President, George Herbert Walker Bush and continued by Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. Western accounts of what took place inside the Russian Federation during the Yeltsin years of the 1990’s speak of “Russian mafia,” or “Russian Organized Crime.” Never do they mention or even hint that those Russians who plundered their own country were organized and paid, made rich by the West, to be more precise, by the Old Boy CIA networks loyal to former CIA Director and then US President, George Herbert Walker Bush.

What took place in the 1990’s under the Russian Presidency of Boris Yeltsin was described by one knowledgeable US insider, Mortimer Zuckerman, a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and owner of US News & World Report as, “the largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in history.” The giveaway or more precisely said, theft, was done through outright theft, currency war and a fraudulent loans-for-company stock shares program that Anatoly Chubais directed.

The Bush Sr. Administration’s attack on post-communist Russia, dubbed “Operation Hammer,” had four distinct covert elements. The CIA would secretly finance the August 1991 Generals’ coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They would use their secret financial war-chest to destabilize the Ruble. They used corrupted Russian Gosbank national bank officials to organize the theft of the country’s official gold reserves, most all of it. Then they began a systematic takeover of strategic energy, raw materials and military state industries in the Soviet Union via IMF-dictated privatization operations that were run by Yeltsin’s Finance Minister, Yegor Gaidar and his close associate responsible for state privatization, Anatoly Chubais. Gaidar and Chubais worked in league with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs and other friends of billionaire hedge fund speculator, George Soros in the literal rape of Russia as one insider described it.

As the rogue ex-KGB generals and their hand-picked protégés looted the gold reserves of the now defunct Soviet Union, as well as the significant financial assets of the now-banned Communist Party, all with the blessing and complicity of Boris Yeltsin and his inner circle, the Bush CIA Old Boys were ready to launch the next phase, systematic takeover of strategic energy, raw materials and military state industries in the Soviet Union via IMF-dictated privatization operations that were run by Yeltsin’s Finance Minister, Yegor Gaidar, and his accomplice, Anatoly Chubais.

In November 1991, Chubais became a minister in the Yeltsin Cabinet where he managed the portfolio of Rosimushchestvo–the Committee for the Management of State Property, which Yeltsin decreed to be the agency responsible for devising Russia’s privatization of the state companies. Gaidar and Chubais worked in league with George Soros, the Wall Street speculator and funder of the CIA front, National Endowment for Democracy. Soros in turn brought Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, architect of the Polish “economic shock therapy,” and other American “friends,” to the Yeltsin circles.

George Soros and his Open Society Foundations had been linked to the CIA by Chinese intelligence and others. His Open Society institutions “coincidentally” appeared in every situation where the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy front and the US State Department sought regime change to a pro-Washington government. Already back in 1987, while Gorbachev still headed the Soviet Union, Soros took advantage of the regime’s efforts to reform and open cautiously to the West by founding his Open Society Institute in Moscow. There he could give money to key researchers and others to support “market economy” research.

All actions of Yeltsin were guided by his CIA and rogue KGB handlers, notably KGB Generals Filipp Bobkov, Alexei Kondaurov and Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard, General Alexander Korzhakov–the cabal who, in coordination with George Bush Sr. and his CIA Old Boys described, staged the phony KGB “coup” attempt against Gorbachev that propelled Yeltsin, with support of mainstream Western media, as the “champion of democracy.” In December 1991, four months after, Yeltsin, then President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the largest federated “republic” within the Soviet Union, met with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus and signed what was called the Belavezha Accords declaring the dissolution of the USSR that had formally existed since 1922. It was the key note in the US-backed coup to open up the rape of Russia. By then Gorbachev had been utterly discredited and resigned.

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