As we speak on January 26th, there is a decent chance of the biggest armed conflict in Europe since World War II breaking out any day between Russia and Ukraine.
It's not a foregone conclusion, to be sure, but it feels like it.
Almost eight years after the Maidan coup in Kiev and subsequent Russian reclamation of Crimea, Russia has massed forces in Belarus along its long border with Ukraine and in the Black Sea.
Why is this happening and why now?
And what are the prospects for war and the likely consequences?
To parse those questions and also discuss the bigger picture of U.S. and Russian relations amidst Cold War-esque drama, we're honored to welcome Charles Bausman, longtime American expat in Russia and the editor and publisher of Russia Insider for a full house special.
mp dove eye
welcome everyone to full house war drums edition I am your host with a still latent romanticism for Russia and Ukraine, Coach Finstock, over two decades after I studied in both countries, back with another hour or two tops to focus on one of the most important global stories unfolding today.
What else could you ask for, dear listener?
Before we meet our special guest and get to work here, however, if you like what you hear today, please consider supporting our efforts at givesendgo.com slash fullhouse or visit the support us tab at full-house.com.
And whatever you do, don't you dare miss our very special show in just a day or two when we will have on not one, not two, not three, but possibly up to four USS Liberty survivors to discuss their lived experience under attack by Israel.
Also, no Sam or smasher this episode, but with me, as always, my evil sidekick, Rolo.
How are you, buddy?
I'm feeling not so evil today, but thank you.
Good.
Come on.
If I don't rib you at least once, that'll be it for the show, okay?
I haven't done my job.
Thank you for joining us on this wintry day.
A little bit of a change in programming here.
And of course, we are delighted to welcome Charles Bowsman.
Charles, my friend, how the heck are you?
And thank you so much for making time for us.
Coach, great to be here and really a pleasure to be able to talk to somebody who's actually a Russia expert and who speaks Russian.
So very interesting.
You're a little bit generous there, Charles.
I did spend a semester in Moscow in 2001, but tragically, I was more interested in sightseeing my future wife to be and the local beer and alcohol options.
So I was not quite as diligent at the age of 20 as I should have been.
But that's what we have you here for, right?
I hear you've been there for a little bit of time.
You're a bit of a Russian hand, but in all seriousness, you know, give us a little bit of your Russia background.
How the heck did you end up living and working there for so long?
Yeah, well, let me just start with just the latest.
So I've been here for about a year now, continuously.
And so I've seen sort of the roll-up to what's happening today on the ground.
And geez, the way I got involved with Russia goes right back to my childhood.
My dad was a foreign correspondent here in the late 60s, early 70s.
So I was here as a small child.
And then we were always like, you know, a big Russia-fascinated family.
And I studied Russian in college and came here and worked as a, you know, entry-level like pencil sharpener assistant in journalism.
Intern, yeah.
Intern, basically.
Yeah.
And then ended up staying in Russia, you know, after that.
I mean, I came over literally a couple of months after I graduated from college.
And that was in 1987.
So amazing.
You've gotten to see that whole evolution from, you know, sort of late, well, even at the superpower.
You probably remember it going back to the 70s as a child still.
Yeah, I was eight when we left, you know, and so I remember very well what that was like at the height of the Brezhnev era, like when, you know, communism seemed to sort of be working in a way.
And yeah, and then it was still very, very, very communist and socialistic, obviously, in 87.
And so, yeah, and then I spent a couple of decades living and working here.
I didn't continue with the journalism very long and I switched to business and, you know, must have spent 25 years in Russia, all told.
I think those bona fides are good enough for our audience, Charles.
We're going to talk about Russia-Ukraine at the top because it is the talk of the global town, of course.
We're not going to go too much into the weeds, but try to make sense of it for everybody.
You know, I do have opinions on this, but it's a hot topic.
So we'll do that.
And then we're going to take a step back and widen the aperture and look at the bigger picture, U.S. Russia, where things are going, the perception that the United States is in decline, which I think is an accurate one, and that Russia is an ascendant power, why that is, how it's happening, who's responsible, et cetera.
But Charles, I know you've listened to at least a couple full house episodes.
I'm going to put words in your mouth.
I believe that you are of German ancestry.
You're an Orthodox Christian, and you have at least a couple kids.
Is that true?
Yeah, four daughters.
And that's all correct.
Yeah.
German mother, American dad of German ancestry.
And your American ancestry goes back to the revolution.
Was it an actual fighter or a declaration signer?
I remember you told me at one time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, my direct lineal grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence for the state of Pennsylvania from Lancaster, PA, where I live now.
Amazing.
Well, thank you, sir.
Great, great introduction.
Can't wait to get Kraken here and truly appreciate your time from over in the motherland.
All right.
So a little backstory on Ukraine.
I'll give my basic understanding here.
Kiev, of course, was really the cradle city of Russia as a concept going back to Kiev and Rus, sort of the origins of those Eastern Slavs coming together.
But the center of action slowly migrated northeast toward Moscow.
Eventually, there are a couple cities that became more important than Kiev.
And then, of course, Kiev was subsumed under the Golden Horde, like so much of Russia and the other major cities there.
Ukraine was split amongst various great powers until gaining brief independence after Russia's loss in World War I.
That, of course, was not meant to be.
Its west fell to Poland and the East to the USSR.
And then, of course, Ukraine was one of the founding quote-unquote republics of the Soviet Union and gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And it's sort of been a plaything between the West and Russia ever since.
And I mean no disrespect to Ukraine.
I actually was a student.
I was on a student exchange program to Kiev for six weeks total in the late 90s, made a ton of great friends there.
One of my fascinating memories of it was actually seeing the divide just in a high school in Kiev between kids who clearly nationalist pro-Ukrainians who wanted to speak Ukrainian and then the other kids who were more Russian oriented and actually insisted on speaking Russia.
So you could see that sort of civilizational divide right through the city back in the late 90s.
But Charles, put a little more meat on those bones in terms of Ukraine, what it means to Russia and why Russia might be willing to risk so much over this country.
It's sort of soft underbelly.
Yeah, so listen, the main reason, obviously there are these huge cultural and ethnic ties with Ukraine.
And I can explain a little bit more about, add to something what you said, which was absolutely correct.
But, you know, the main consideration right now is a security issue.
So Russia is really, really, really unhappy with this encroachment of NATO closer and closer to her borders.
And so that's the main reason why they're willing to do something at this point, or it seems like they're willing to do something about it militarily.
So we can talk about that more in detail a little bit later.
As far as the ethnic civilizational ties with Ukraine, it's really people don't really understand how Eastern Ukraine is really an integral part of historic Russia and has been for centuries and centuries.
And just to make it clear, in the czarist age, that whole part of East Ukraine that is now, you know, Donbass, basically, these breakaway republics, and also a good deal further west, was really the heart of the Russian industrial heartland at the time.
Like the Rhine was to Germany almost, some parallel.
Exactly.
It had a lot of industry, and it still does.
In Ukrainian economy today, the heavy industry and the serious stuff is in the east because it inherited it basically from Soviets who inherited it from Tsar's days when the railroads were built and the main factories were built and all these things.
And the West is much more agricultural.
So the population and economic might and power of the Ukraine is in the east.
And yeah, so the country is kind of artificial.
It's sort of got these different groups jammed together that were never really, you know, part of a homogeneous ethnic whole.
And to get a very rough sense of it, roughly the two-thirds of the eastern part of the country are very, very Russian and Slavic and Russian speaking and identify with Russia.
The western third has all these different kinds of people in it.
There is no such nationality as Ukrainian.
They're just, you know, different chunks of Hungary, Romania, Poland, and a bunch of Cossacks mixed up in the middle.
And they call themselves Ukrainian, but it's not a historic people, really.
Now, I'll push back there in the interest of diplomacy.
I mean, if Western Ukrainians see themselves as Ukrainian and they've had nominal independence, at least since 1991, who are we to say, no, you're actually, you know, something else.
I mean, Ukrainian nationalism, whatever the history of it, is a genuine feeling, I think, for millions of people in that country.
Is that fair?
That's true.
That's very much true.
And, you know, and because these pro-Ukrainian nationalist forces have been in power in Ukraine for 30, 30 years now, you know, that has been the official ideology of the country.
And so this has been impressed upon people.
So this sense of, you know, a pro-Ukrainian identity has grown far beyond that one-third, two-third, two-thirds, you know, so split that I was describing.
I was talking, when I said that, I was speaking more historically.
Gotcha.
So there are plenty of people now in the center of the country who would prefer to be part of a separate Ukraine and not part of Russia.
Absolutely.
And Russia's sensitivity over Ukraine is not new.
This goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed promise that Washington made that NATO would not be expanded eastwards.
Certainly not.
It would have been inconceivable in 1991, I think, even by the most fervent budding neocons that they would take in the Baltic republics or some of the other Warsaw Pact states.
But it seems like 2014 was what changed everything with the Maidan coup, as I call it, or I realized they now call it the revolution.
They renamed it.
It's not just the Maidan anymore.
It's like the glorious revolution or something like that.
But Russia had a Russia-friendly leader in Ukraine, Enyanukovich.
He wanted to back away from the West, orient East, and then basically this, whether it was part natural and organic, part Astroturfed, part Western influenced, basically kicked him out.
And that was when I think alarm bells went off in Moscow.
They went back into Crimea, which of course was historically part of Russia proper for centuries before Khrushchev sort of gifted it to Ukraine as a goodwill gesture.
Right, right, right.
So, you know, that was, you know, what, almost eight years ago.
So, you know, the West has had its eyes on Ukraine as a lever against Russian power for a long time.
But do you know, like, why, why is this happening now?
It certainly seems like Russia is pushing the issue to a certain extent by massing all these troops along the border.
You know, did something happen to really trigger them?
I didn't hear anything about like new NATO overtures or serious pushes.
But yeah, why now?
Why is this so hot right now in 2022?
Yeah, okay.
So I think what's happened is this is Russia just feels that now is the optimal time to press their advantage because if five years ago they were less militarily and economically prepared to do so, they also probably think that maybe five years into the future, the balance might not be so much in their favor.
And this is provoked by Western behavior because while there's no big event that you can point to and say, see, NATO just moved a bunch of equipment into Ukraine and did this and that and is putting Russia under threat.
NATO has taken this strategy of slicing the bologna incredibly thin.
So they do these tiny little baby steps, but they do them like every other week.
And it's just this like.
gradual, gradual, gradual encroachment.
And Russia has been saying for a decade now, this is not cool.
Do not do this.
You know, you're going to cross our red line sooner or later.
And this is not the direction this should be going.
You're basically going to get, you know, you're going to cause serious geomilitary vulnerabilities for us, which we're not prepared to accept.
And you've got to stop.
And a huge thing now is this idea that NATO wants to move offensive missiles into Ukraine.
And I'm not a huge expert in this, but I believe also into Poland.
And so I think Russia is looking at the West and thinking, look, we've got this huge weapons advantage right now over NATO and the U.S.
The West and U.S. is very much split.
Biden's a very weak president.
You know, Americans and Europeans are at each other's throats over this whole COVID debacle.
And we've got to put our foot down sometime and stop this encroachment.
And this is the right time to do it.
So they've gone on this diplomatic and military offensive.
And I've seen so many well-intentioned sort of realist foreign policy commentators saying, well, including Tucker.
I don't know if he qualifies as that.
But imagine if China, they turn it back to China.
They're really hot to make this about China and not without some cause, but they're like, what if China moved forces or moved for a close alliance with Mexico or Canada?
But it's actually worse than that.
Imagine if the United States actually lost the Cold War and broke apart and say Texas gained independence and California.
And then the Warsaw Pact went in there and said, actually, we're going to be considering adding Texas to our military alliance and moving troops and forces in there.
Like, do you think the rump American state would be just a little bit sensitive?
I mean, it's absolutely insanity to a rational person who's not a complete Western imperial project devotee.
Yeah.
And then also imagine that China also had military alliances with people along in Canada and that the country was basically encircled with forward Chinese bases surrounding the country.
So yeah.
Why would Putin escalate this so much?
Yeah.
Dastardly dog that he is.
All right.
So obviously he's feeling possibly high.
You know, a lot of this is speculation, audience, of course.
I did a lot of homework last night and reading into this.
And even the quote unquote foreign policy experts are basically like, your guess is as good as mine because Putin does like to be unpredictable.
That was in his KGB file I read recently that one of the knocks on him was that he had a low regard for his own risk, apparently.
So he's a gambler.
He's savvy.
And Frankly, by moving those troops within his own country and in Belarus where they have a treaty to do that, he's forcing the issue.
Does he want to, would Russia want to gobble up at least half of Ukraine?
Of course, they had the appetizer in Crimea.
They do see the West as weak and they don't want to see it falling into foreign hands.
However, that is not exactly a zero risk gambit for sure.
Charles, cards on the table, like right here at the top, it's January 26th.
It's winter.
They say, you know, they would want to do it while the ground is still hard, you know, harkening back to the great conflicts of Barbarossa, the weather and the terrain and the tanks.
The mud.
The mud.
And we have the Olympics in Beijing, too, right?
Some people are saying, oh, well, maybe he'll wait until the closing ceremonies to kick this party off.
If you had to gamble today, sir, do you think that Russia will invade Ukraine this winter, let's say?
You know, if I had to put money down, if you forced me to take one side of the bet or the other, I would say, yeah, I think there will probably be some sort of military confrontation.
And but that doesn't mean that I have any high degree of confidence that that's the case.
And that's what's so spooky about the whole situation, you know, is that I guess at this point, the best anybody can say is there's an extremely decent chance that this will happen.
And because the consequences of that are so unfathomable and hard to predict, it could be absolutely minor, you know, and just, you know, NATO could back down with a whimper and life could go on as usual, or, you know, Armageddon could break out.
And so given that range of outcomes, it's very, very rational for people to be totally freaked out by, you know, this is a substantial, whatever it is, 30, 40, 50, 60% chance that this could happen is way above anybody's comfort zone.
So yeah, so people are absolutely right to be totally freaked out about it.
I agree.
I mean, if you force me to guess, this time feels different.
You don't move.
I think the latest count, you know, depending on who's counting, is well over 100,000 troops stationed on or near the border, not to mention whatever irregulars they have already operating in eastern Ukraine.
Now, there's a counter, the counterpoint to this, the skeptics will say that this is perhaps actually a quote-unquote gay op by the West to hype this up, to hype these intra-Russia troop movements, which of course any country is entitled to, to make this, to almost force Putin's hand to the point where he has to make this invasion that he doesn't want to engage in.
And then, of course, so if he does, then he's possibly entangled.
And if he doesn't, then, oh, look, you know, all these threats of sanctions and countermeasures forced him to back down.
And then the project continues apace.
That's at least the argument against it.
But that's giving a lot of credit to it.
But you do see a lot of alarmism in the West, right?
Washington and London in particular have been very bellicose or dramatic about this.
And in the past couple of days, the French in particular and maybe the Germans to a lesser extent are like, you know, hold your horses.
And even the Ukrainians, of course, are saying there's, it's like that scene in Animal House, you know, everybody remain calm.
There's no invasion coming.
Nobody needs to flee their homes.
But meanwhile, of course, the Israelis are supposedly preparing to airlift something like 70,000 Jews out of the country.
So, you know, a certain audience would say, oh, look, Putin is already ethnically cleansing Ukraine and he hasn't even gone in yet.
But there's, you know, it's probably a fool's errand to say what's going to go down here.
But there's never been this much tension and escalation.
And they're also, they're foreshadowing it, right?
They're forecasting it.
They're almost willing it to happen.
Yeah.
Let me say a couple of things about this.
Like one of the things that's really a bad sign, okay, that this only really happens when things are really getting down to the wire is when you recall your diplomats.
So it's just the weirdest thing.
You know, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow is this enormous like complex.
It's cost like $700 million to build.
And, you know, there could be 400 American diplomats running around in there doing whatever diplomats do.
It's empty.
There's nobody there, you know, because the last dog in Rome has like gotten on the plane.
And you're like, oh, that's not a good sign.
And the same thing is true of the Washington Embassy in Moscow.
And in the Ukraine, the European and American, some diplomats have remained, but family and sort of non-essential staff have been cleared out.
And the people who are left could easily get out in an hour, basically, if they had to.
So that's usually a terrible sign.
And it's never happened before in all the tough talk and face-offs.
And even when 2014 happened, that didn't happen.
So that's a very interesting sort of telltale thing.
Another really interesting thing to look at is the exchange rate.
So the ruble has lost about 10% of its value over the last two weeks.
But what's more important, which is unusual because it's been incredibly stable, it usually fluctuates by like, you know, half a percent or something.
And it has done that for six or seven years.
The thing is, is that the important thing to understand here is that it's at historic highs now.
So the lowest it ever went in like this flash crash, and I'm forgetting what year it was, but it was 78, but then it went back down to 65.
Well, now it's lower than it's ever been.
It's 80 rubles to a dollar.
And that's why that's so important is because you've got traders on floors all over the world, you know, with five screens watching every single little news blip and then making decisions about whether they feel comfortable holding the ruble.
And so you've got this massive sort of financial brain kind of looking at this and saying, no, you know, because if Russia gets in a war and gets sanctioned, the ruble is going to go a lot, lot lower.
So that's almost like an interesting proxy sort of indicator.
Like throw out all the freaking political like analysts, right?
Just look at what the guys on the trading floor are doing because they're the ones, you know, who like – Putting their money where their mouth is.
Exactly.
Or you could look at it as international finance capitalism is already starting to turn the screws or try to impose costs.
But yeah, of course it does.
I mean, you know, like a political commentator talking ahead, he can be wrong 20 times a day and he's still got his job the next morning.
If you screw up for more than like, you know, two hours in a row on a trading floor, you're off the desk.
Now, let's pretend this may be a little bit hokey.
It just came to me, but let's play statesman here, Charles.
I don't know if you could be Russia, I'll be the United States.
But Putin's demands are essentially, or his, you know, essentially, you know, it really was like an ultimatum that they publicly issued stating no NATO in Ukraine, no further NATO expansion into any of the other former Soviet republics, plus sort of removal of U.S. and NATO troops from some of those other more legacy new NATO states that had already been there.
Now, you could say that that's him, you know, a Washingtonian would say that's an unacceptable ultimatum.
And of course, NATO would lose a ton of face.
And they've already said that's a non-starter.
You know, we can't possibly shut off this machine from accepting, taking in new members.
But if they say like rationality and Realpolitik finally returned to Washington magically, which is also why I think that war is probably likely here.
I mean, if they somehow accepted those demands and said, all right, we won't expand NATO any further.
I mean, if you're, if you're Putin, do you accept that?
Or it recalls his interview with Megan Kelly, which was such a classic from probably five or six years ago, where he just sort of smiled and chuckled with Trump in office thinking it was going to be a new time for U.S.-Russian relations.
He was like, your leaders come and they go, but the program remains the same.
So, you know, I'm not sure he would trust us or believe us, even if we did make some major concession at this point.
Well, no, but if they did make some, I think those very sort of, you know, ambitious demands that they're making were deliberately designed to give NATO the opportunity to compromise and say, look, we'll meet you halfway or a third of the way or two-thirds of the way, which would be enough for Russia.
And they would see that as a victory.
So I think that's really negotiating tactics that they made these demands.
But NATO's position has to be just to summarily reject them all.
And except for this latest written thing here.
So we'll see what happened today.
I guess they gave a written answer.
That's right.
Just before we went to tape, they showed the footage of the U.S. ambassador leaving the foreign ministry on those classic January Moscow streets with the snow.
It used to be like Neville, you know, Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper saying peace in our time.
I mean, you know, it could be that.
In fact, you know, this whole crisis does, it's so reminiscent really of, you know, the Czech, the Czech crisis with between 1939 Germany, 1938, Germany, I guess it was, and the lead up to the Polish thing and the Sudetenland and Austria.
I mean, it's very, very similar, you know?
Absolutely.
And I do have to say, listen, it's just an absolute fact that there's a war party in Washington and, you know, personified, I guess, by the neocons, the same folks who brought you all the crazy and stupid and horrible wars in the Middle East.
And, you know, I guess Victoria Newland is now the face of it.
And they've been trying to pick a war with Russia for 15 years, ever since Russia sort of got off the Globo Homo train and Putin started doing his own thing.
That hasn't sat well with that crowd.
And they've been trying to do this for ages.
And they tried to do it in 2008 with Georgia.
And then they pulled that 2014 stunt.
And so it's, you know, it's not, I don't like to talk about Putin doing this and Putin doing that or some other person in the West being like somebody making decisions.
I think it's these factions.
And the important thing to understand is that Putin also has factions.
He also has these different constituencies that he's kind of got to balance over because if he doesn't pay attention to them, you know, they'll toss him out.
At the end of the day, he's a politician trying to sit on top of a pretty wide range of views in Russia.
And I think at some point, if his generals come to him and say, look, we got to do something, whether Putin wants to or not, he kind of almost has to go with them because they could probably remove him if they wanted to.
That's right.
You mentioned the realities of Washington there with foreign policy in Russia.
When it comes to domestic U.S. politics, there's two rules as I see them.
You cannot defend white people as such on a racial basis in the United States, and you absolutely cannot criticize Jews as such domestically.
And there's sort of a mirror image of that on foreign policy.
There's only two things that both sides of the aisle agree on.
Russia bad, Israel's greatest ally.
So yeah, there's not a lot of wiggle room on our side either to take this major deviation from what has been our standard line for, I mean, frankly, since the late 80s fall of the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
And listen, there's something else going on I think is very interesting.
So I think one thing the Russians are really playing on is that they really sense that the West is divided.
It's deeply divided.
The U.S. itself is very divided between MAGA America and whatever you call the other half.
Monster America.
You know, NATO is very divided between what the Eastern states want and the Western states and also what the U.S. wants.
And I think one thing that they're kind of doing is they're raising the temperature really high and then keeping the suspense going.
Like, I kind of get the feeling like, geez, if they were going to do something, they really want to do something, they probably would have done it by now, but they're not.
So why is that?
And I think they might be thinking, look, let's just hold their feet to the fire for like a long time, like a month, right?
And just get them all fighting with each other.
Because like, if you, if you follow the U.S. media, people have only started speaking out about this literally like over the last week or so.
It's like this has been going on for like three weeks or a month almost.
And now the media is finally waking up.
Yeah, the articles really started there.
Yeah.
And, you know, Tucker's only started really banging on about it recently.
And I follow the MAGA media pretty carefully.
And man, they've just been, so literally in the last week, all of a sudden there's been this eruption of articles talking about this.
But what's so interesting about it is that they're very, very strongly pro-Russian, you know?
And places like the Gateway Pundit and American Greatness and the Western Journal.
I don't know how familiar you are with all these things.
This is sort of like mainstream MAGA.
National interest.
Yeah, for sure.
National interest, I wouldn't put in that camp.
They're a little bit part of the neocon crowd.
I'm talking about this whole new crop of websites and stuff that popped up in the last three years, sort of in the pro-Trump land.
So it's really interesting that they're coming out strongly against this.
Like this is really stupid and Russia has a point and Biden's being irresponsible and there's no way we should do this.
Now, if they reflect the opinion of, you know, MAGA America, which what is half the country again, like Russia is just sitting back and rubbing its hands in glee because they're like, that's exactly what we want.
I mean, if you think about like in the Iraq war, how much unanimity there was in the American public, I mean, it was like 90% were like, yeah, let's do this, right?
On both sides of the aisle.
If they can force like this major split in American public opinion, domestic politics, that works very strongly to their favor.
And the same thing in Europe.
And the thing is that people are so pissed off about the whole COVID thing, you know, and you've got all these demonstrations and riots.
And it's very, very, very toxic right now.
And Russia can sort of really use that to their advantage.
So they kind of, I think they're sitting there and saying, let's see how what fissures and cracks materialize in the West when we force them to face the fact that something extremely serious might go down.
Absolutely.
And we'll talk later about whether that is more akin to a sort of vulture circling dying prey or whether that might actually be a benevolent or semi-benevolent, like rational adult in the room.
I once asked you, I was like about Russian nationalism.
And you were like, well, it's not so much that Russia is like this fiercely nationalistic, you know, pro-white, pro-Christian country, although it certainly is more so than the West.
It's that it didn't go full globo homo and therefore that those natural human instincts and animal spirits rose organically, which I thought was fascinating.
And I also wanted to touch on, you know, we are no longer, I don't think we ever have been on the show since 2019, Trump supporters.
We grew disillusioned a long time ago, but you raise a good point.
Trump shattering that war hawk jingoistic consensus in that debate where he's basically said the invasion of Iraq was stupid, was a lightning bolt.
We always talk about when are the normal Americans going to wake up to see reality on race and Jewish power, among other things?
But you're absolutely right.
The war consensus, the American imperial project is nowhere near as strong as it used to be in this country for sure.
Let's say Putin does go in here, Charles.
Obviously, Eastern Ukraine is more or less a cakewalk minus whatever javelins and sorry frontline Ukrainian soldiers, essentially cannon fodder are there.
That's a fait accompli, essentially, de facto, would flip.
The speculation is that they would go in.
And again, we're speculating here, of course, the speculation they would go in from Crimea, they would come in from Belarus, possibly encircle Kiev.
A little more speculative than whether he just goes in or not.
Do you think he would leave a rump Western Ukrainian state?
Would he go for the whole enchilada?
Any speculation in Russia in terms of what it might actually look like?
Yeah.
I'm not at all a military expert.
And so I really wouldn't be able to say with any certainty answer that question.
But I did read something very interesting in that what he really wants to do is avoid any kind of sort of fighting, reaching the cities.
No, reaching the cities.
You don't want to get like, you know, troops in towns fighting with each other because that's an extremely difficult situation to sew up quickly.
And then civilians become casualties on the side and all gets very messy.
So what the Russians would probably do is just lightning strike, you know, standoff weapons, just vaporize basically like the entire Ukrainian military in literally, you know, like 45 minutes.
I mean, they've got these hypersonic weapons now that I read somewhere that Canada had sent like 5,000 troops.
I think into Ukraine, I think I'm remembering that correctly.
And I can just imagine these Canadian troops sitting there like saying, okay, and what do we do?
You know, forget about the 150,000 angry Russians that might come pouring over the border.
What happens when they blitz us with their Wunderwaffen?
You know, and then, and how are we going to like get out of it?
And it's just like ridiculous.
Reminiscent of like poor Dutch peacekeepers in Yugoslavia in the early 90s, you know, like, oh, God.
Yeah.
Impossible situation for them.
Yeah.
So when it happens, if it happens, it'll happen super quickly.
And the Russians have to neutralize the Ukrainian military before they can get troops into cities.
And so that's going to be a very important thing for them.
You know, how far they go.
And the West has already, yeah, yep, fair enough.
If I'm just like wargaming it in my mind with no actual military experience, I'd say, yeah, you know, cakewalk in the east, like you said, maybe just EMP the economy to death temporarily, you know, just fry everything, go in and take what's yours and no opposition in the east.
Kiev is sticky and tricky.
Ukraine's literal Jewish actor, prime minister, does he exercise his right of return at that moment or does he flee to the west or does he mount to stand?
I don't know.
But yeah.
Do you remember that famous picture from the Georgian war where when the Russians, I mean, the Georgian army just turned and ran.
And you know why they ran?
Because it was one thing for the Russian army to be coming in from the north, but the word got through to the Georgians that the Chechens were coming in from the east.
Oh, man.
And they were like, we're getting the hell out of here.
This is not going to.
They didn't even fight, basically.
They just ran away.
So like the traditions of the American Revolution.
And I don't know if you remember this famous picture, but at one point, Saka Shvili ran out of the presidential palace.
He was the president of the prime minister of Georgia at the time.
And I guess there was maybe like an airstrike threat or something.
I don't know.
And he ran out of the palace and he was like crouching behind some barricade or something on the street.
And he started chewing on his tie.
He was so scared.
And some brilliant person managed to take a picture of that.
And there's this picture of like Sakashvili with these absolute terrified eyes chewing on his tie.
I mean, that's one for ages, right?
So I wonder if Zelensky is going to be like in that situation.
I'm sure they've got an escape thing planned for him that he can get out.
Probably.
Yep, absolutely.
And just to be clear, I mean, the United States has basically said, no, we are not sending troops into Ukraine.
So some of the listeners who may not be paying a ton of attention to this, the likelihood of this escalating into NATO-Russia war or a U.S.-Russian war, yeah, it's more dangerous than it was six months ago, but still virtually nil.
If Russia goes in, they will almost likely, almost certainly succeed rapidly and do what they need to do.
And then after that comes the consequences, right?
And that's where I'm interested, Charles, the mood on the street in Russia and preparing for, you know, they faced serious sanctions in 2014 after going into Crimea and all the business in Eastern Europe.
But this time would be even nastier.
So I'm infamous for asking these long-winded questions.
Apologies, sir.
What's the mood on the street there?
And then, you know, you touched on the exchange rate and things like that, but is it like batting down the hatches in Russia in terms of Western blowback financially?
Not yet.
I mean, it's weird, but life seems really very normal here.
Like you don't have people like stockpiling food or like, you know, moving out of cities or, and you talk to regular Russians and they're very much, it seems a lot like, you know, if you were to ask an average American, do you think there's going to war going to break out soon?
And they'd be like, yeah, probably not.
You know, yeah, they're talking about on the TV, but it just seems so incredible, I can't believe it, right?
Let's see.
But, you know, what the people think is not hugely important because what's really important are what the elites think and what the experts think.
And this is where it gets really interesting.
So I sent you that article by Dugan that came out like 10 days ago.
Fascinating read.
And that article reflects a very influential and substantial faction in the elite, like one of these groups that, you know, Putin basically has to, you know, keep satisfied.
And they really believe that this is Russia's hour, that probably Russia should have done this in 2014 and would have been successful at it, that Russia didn't go far enough in just taking Crimea and that they should have just rolled into Kia, you know, into Ukraine and taken the whole country then.
And that, well, okay, it's seven years later, but now Russia is even relatively stronger.
And maybe in five years, it won't be as strong relative to the West.
So this is probably the right time to do it.
And Europe is weak and rotten and America is weak and rotten.
And this will totally change the equation because what's going to happen probably is that Belarus will join Russia in forming a new country.
And then if they take Ukraine or part of Ukraine, that will also join the new country.
And 140 million strong Russia now will gain, what, 8 million people from Belarus and maybe 30 million Ukrainians and the Slavic peoples will be united again.
And nobody's going to be able to do anything about it.
And the West can stamp its feet and gnash its teeth as much as it wants.
The sanctions, Russia is basically sanction proof.
And in fact, the sanctions have shown to help Russia in the past because every time they try and cut any kind of dependency and interaction on Western services or goods or anything like that, Russia just either produces it domestically or gets it from China or some other place.
And so it's just kind of not a problem.
And there's no reason not to do it now.
So a lot of people think this, you know, at the top.
And so this is like, they're almost saying, look, the reality on the ground is that this is our hour.
This is our destiny.
They've got nothing they can touch us with.
And we should go in and do it.
So obviously then the other people who are more like pro-Western and liberal, and there's a ton of those, obviously, also in Russia, in the elites I'm talking about.
And they very much don't want this because they dream of a friendly partnership relationship with the West and are unhappy by the fact that there's this constant confrontation with them, which they blame on the hardliners and Putin's kind of sits in between these two groups and tries to balance himself on top of them.
So that's the very interesting that's going on.
Those Russian liberals, are they of the same stripe as our leftists?
I mean, you know, they would love to see rainbow flags over the churches and mass non-Russian immigration and all the rest.
Are they of the same stripe or are they perhaps a better breed, if that's possible?
How do I say this?
Some of them are just the same or worse.
A lot of them probably wouldn't fall into that category, but they make the same mistake.
They believe that their future is with globalism and being part of a big, happy globalist family.
Like they're big fans of the World Economic Forum.
Maybe we should do a little bit of a segment, you know, a detour here into this incredible thing that went down in Russia over the last six months where anyway, so, you know, Russia up until the middle of the summer of this past summer was pretty laid back about the whole COVID thing.
And they went into like a hard lockdown right at the beginning, but then realized it wasn't that big a deal and sort of lightened up.
And then COVID seemed to be fading away.
And Russia was one of the best places in the world to be.
You know, Moscow was open, clubs were full, restaurants were full.
People weren't wearing masks.
It was all almost normal.
And then, and then we had that spike in the spring.
And then all of a sudden, like the wool, the fangs came out and the teeth got bared in Russia.
And this really radical, like COVID tyranny was suddenly being pushed on the Russian population by the government.
And it was, you know, rivaling like Australia or Canada in its insanity.
And it had like powerful support from top business leaders and the vast majority of Putin's ministers.
And Putin himself was being savvy and sort of sitting back and sort of not saying much or saying very equivocal things.
But his government at the same time was force vaccinating people, trying to institute vaccine passports so you couldn't go into anything basically except food stores without a proof of vaccination.
Same as in some of the craziest impositions in Western countries, Australia.
Exactly.
And yeah, it was really aggressive and extreme.
And that's when this globalist inner child of these Russian elites came like just came out, like jumped out like a boogeyman.
Well, anyway, so what happened was this was like rather unexpected.
And literally within like two or three months, this enormous organic resistance movement, the political resistance movement popped up.
By the way, this is all totally unreported in the West.
This is the most, I mean, there's like no journalists here on the ground.
They can't really follow what's going on.
Anyway, and they really there was a website, Charles.
If only there was a website for real recording in Russia.
Well, anyway.
So then they- Go ahead, plug it.
I mean, yeah, you're- All right, go ahead.
I don't mean to derail.
But the stock farmers are this priceless gift to humanity.
Okay.
But the thing is that I haven't been posting new stuff on there for the last two and a half years, basically because it required me doing it seven hours, seven days a week, 16 hours a day to do it well.
And I was just like, you know, I've done this for six years.
I don't want to do this anymore.
So what happens is there's a, but it's still a very interesting site because there's a bot on our site and it auto-publishes articles from the archives that are like ever of evergreen interest, right?
That are like cultural, historical things that aren't necessarily tied to current events.
So there's a ton of interesting stuff on there.
I highly recommend everybody to take a look.
You'll learn so much about Russia that people have no idea about.
Well, anyway, so back to this story.
Sorry, I didn't mean to derail.
Yeah, Charles.
And if there are other good sites in addition to Russia Insider for our audience in the United States and all around the world to get a more accurate representation, UNS has some great articles about this crisis that I'll post in there.
But by all means, send them to me so that people can get a non-Zog impression of what's going on there.
But yes, please, back to the organic COVID revolt.
I was surprised to hear that.
But so this was so interesting that so in the past, the political opposition to the government was coming from the liberal lefty side of society, the Navalny, pro-Western types who were getting moral and financial support from the Western intelligence agencies and governments and so on.
So they kind of went quiet because they want to keep their Western patrons happy and everything and their liberal attitudes went along with the whole lockdown.
But the people who really rose up and said this is an outrage that was the traditionalist, nationalist, socially conservative and Christian silent majority of Russia.
And it was very interesting that it was led actually by Christian organizations, which was fascinating.
And it had and has the sympathy of the military and the intelligence agencies, which are also nationalistic, chauvinistic traditionalists, like non, they're not on the global homo train.
And as they are in the West.
And this just roared into like being out of nothing.
They had no big beef with the government for like the past many years.
And all of a sudden, they got activated.
And I think the Putin and everybody in the government was really like shocked.
They were like, oh my God, this is nothing like dealing with these lefty liberal types.
This is like the real Russian bear.
I was told civil society was dead in Russia.
And there's just this total totality of the world.
No, it's not.
It's just democracy.
No, it's very, there's this incredible like stuff going on on social media here and Telegram is just full of these Russian channels.
It's just fascinating.
It's incredibly hard to keep up with because there's just so much of it.
Anyway, so these people really pushed back and the government basically gave up before Christmas.
They're like, you know what?
We're not going to do this.
And they dropped the whole sort of COVID tyranny program.
It's still in place in certain places by inertia, but it looks like it's going to sort of fade away and get rolled back.
And so that's a very interesting thing.
So, you know what?
I've forgotten why I went on this tangent.
We were talking about Russian lefties and whether they were as bad as our lefties, maybe segued into the stats of civil society.
This is a very sort of evil, like Klaus Schwabian elite.
Like the head of Russia's largest bank is this creepy freak who acts like he wants to be like Mark Zuckerberg.
His name is Herman Greff, ethnic German and supposed homosexual.
And he's just weird.
And he's like this Schwabian creature who is like one of the biggest supporters of the World Economic Forum and all that stuff.
And then you've got a lot of people who are on board with that whole sort of worldview and they're obsessed with digitizing everything and they want to and they're into transhumanism and they want to do all this stupid creepy stuff.
So yeah, it's a big problem in Russia.
But they just got they recently got their ass handed to them in this latest showdown over the COVID stuff.
So they're not on the ascendancy yet.
And if a military conflict does break out, people like that tend to be very quickly shoved to the side because it's the military guys who run the show when the chips are when it gets to people start shooting.
So hopefully they're on their way out and they hopefully they've damaged themselves politically over the last six months.
But that's like this huge big drama that was going on here that was like barely covered in the Western media.
Literally first I heard of it.
Absolutely.
Yep.
I wanted to just touch there real quick.
Very well informed.
You mentioned Dugan there and like on our side of the white advocacy cause in the United States, there's this weird obsession with Dugan where if you just mention his name, it's like Voldemort, right?
And they're like, oh, you're part of that like Eurasianist conspiracy with the Chinese to destroy Western civilization.
So just like clarification for the audience, he's an intellectual.
He's a very entertaining writer, very dramatic and emotional and probably hyperbolic.
But absolutely, he strikes me more as a Eurasian imperialist who is way too fond of China.
Now put yourselves in Russia's shoes with the West continually banging down the door to chip away at your former backyard or your still current backyard.
That's the unfolding civilizational catastrophe insofar as we still have a civilization in the West that's anywhere reflective of what it used to be is that we basically forced the world's largest country, which is still overwhelmingly majority Russian, resurgent Christian, tons of nukes, massive growing military into the arms, into the hands of a marriage of convenience and strategy with the Han behemoth, which also is no friends of ours.
I mean, if Bismarck were alive, he'd call us a bunch of retards for forcing them into, and Dugan's over there licking his chops about that.
So we are, well, we're not pro-Chinese, we're not pro-Dugan, and just get over that hangup about this one guy who writes in Russia.
Oh, Mitt Rolo says he is calling me a dude in this show.
Okay.
Oh, and Charles too?
Jesus, Rolo.
Listen.
Yeah.
Listen, I'm not a big expert on Dugan.
You know, I've met him a couple of times here in Moscow, and he's an incredibly colorful character.
And I don't know if anybody's seen him speak in English, but he's very hard to listen to because he's got this very sort of strange English accent that I find difficult to follow.
But in Russian, he's absolutely fascinating.
He's like, you know, he can be, he's spellbinding and he's got this real theatrical talent to spin this incredible like, you know, sort of speech, speeches about any, and they're almost like, you know, Shakespearean.
But so he's, and he says a lot of interesting things, but honestly, he's so, he's so complicated that I don't have time to really get to the bottom of what he's really talking about.
And I've tried to read some of his books and I'm like, this stuff is unreadable.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe I'm not just not as smart as other people.
But anyway, I just was like, whatever.
He's a character.
He says some.
That's the joke.
Nobody knows what.
Nobody knows what deaconism is anyway.
Very good.
Yeah.
Oh, listen, there's one important thing I think that we haven't touched on, which is a huge factor in the whole military thing.
And these are these advanced weapons that the Russians have developed over the last 10 years.
And they first unveiled them already.
Oh, geez, it must have been like five years ago, where they said, hey, guess what?
It was like the Sputnik moment, you know, like, hey, guess what?
We're way ahead of you in hypersonic weapons.
And, you know, we can launch rockets at anything and everything that can completely evade any kind of missile defense you might have.
And your whole navy is basically obsolete at this point.
If we wanted to, we could sink your whole fleet in about half an hour.
And you wouldn't have anything to hit us back with.
And at the same time, they've developed the most effective anti-ballistic missile system, ABM, anti-ballistic missile systems and anti-missile systems in general.
In other words, they can shoot down a bunch of stuff and it's far superior to what NATO or the U.S. has at this point.
Like dramatically superior.
So this comes back to why the Russians are feeling so heady right now, because they've established this massive, and we're talking about a decade.
They're a decade ahead of the West right now in this stuff.
And that's why I wasn't exaggerating when I called them Wunderwaffen, because they really are.
And, you know, I mean, Russia could hit like American cities.
Literally, I think these things could reach the U.S. in like 45 minutes and like take out an American city.
They can carry nuclear weapons and mark something off the coast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Park something off the coast and liquidate Washington.
And yeah, like you said, minutes.
Like there'd be no, there'd be no warning.
And so they feel that this is like, you know, the Russians are like, okay, we've got this window now of where we're ahead, but who knows how long it's going to last?
What if like, you know, the West like sinks a huge resources into catching up or even overtaking us with the next generation, this is the time to secure our advantage.
So that's a big deal.
And people don't appreciate that in the West.
And they don't talk about it.
And it's also not covered in the, I mean, it's downplayed in the Western media.
And to their great, you know, I could, because I guess it's extremely embarrassing, right?
I mean, if you really like talked about that a lot, and a lot of people started to realize how far behind they were, it would not be a good thing.
Yep, not something you crow about.
Who's over a barrel now?
Rush is saying.
Yeah, exactly.
Charles, excellent, excellent first hour.
If it's okay with you, let's take a quick break and come back and don't go anywhere, audience, because we're going to talk bigger picture parallels between the Soviet Union, both in the revolution, what happened during the Bolshevik Revolution and what's tragically unfolding in America, which we all see and feel every day, some other things Charles is working on.
And then also, I want to ask about the fascinating evolution of the Soviet Union from that sort of Judeo-Bolshevik tyranny from 1917 into the 20s and 30s to a very odd metamorphosis where they sort of pulled out of that and reversed course, only to, of course, still be called the evil empire by the West.
So, Charles, you get your game to go for no more than one more hour?
Take a quick break.
Sure.
Glad to.
Hot damn.
All right.
We will put on, do you have a Russian track you'd like to suggest here?
Or we can just throw it in after the show.
I'd have to just look, but you want me to do that?
Yeah, go ahead.
We'll take a break.
We'll pop it in and the show will be in the show notes, unless you know right now.
All right, audience, don't go anywhere.
Enjoy this musical selection by DJ Bausman.
Rusty at the wheels of steel And we will be right back
Not for me, Not for me.
The ruches, The ruches, The flame, The alamaze, The trees.
There is a girl With black bees.
She is not for me, Not for me.
There is a girl with black bees.
She is not for me, Not for me.
The butterfly Of forest In the river.
The ruches, The ruches, The alamaze, The spring, The new, The new, The new, The new, The new, The new, The new, The new, The new, The new, The new for me.
From the Passover, the Passover.
Jesus Jesus, pels Passover not for me, but so life for me, for me, for for for me, me.
And welcome back to full house.
Special edition, war drums in Europe.
As always, we're treating this with good spirits and a little bit of humor, but in all seriousness, this really is possibly the most dramatic event in Europe since, God, I want to say the Berlin airlift.
Certainly more dramatic than Civil War in the Balkans.
And we are delighted and honored to have Charles Bausman back with us for another hour to pick his brain, both as a man on the street in Mother Russia, but also somebody who's been studying these things for decades.
And we're going to step back from Russia-Ukraine here in the second half and talk a little bit more history and the dynamics of wither the United States and Russia and their relations together and all the rest of it.
It is a cozy January afternoon here.
My youngest son has been with me and is perfect and silent this entire show, and even the dog too.
And the guinea fowl is sitting outside here, the kitchen on the deck looking in, still begging to come in.
The last one.
So, so far, so good, knock on wood.
And we're grateful for Charles and Rolo's time too.
So let's get cracking here.
Charles, you have been working on a documentary of fascinating vintage and concept that may or may not ultimately come to fruition.
But regardless, you dug up a ton of fascinating parallels between the United States and the USSR going back into history.
I'll let you describe it and give us the meat of it, please.
Yeah, sure.
You know, it's a bit of a tangent for what we were talking about, but it actually is related.
It comes back and relates actually very much to what's happening now in the Ukraine.
And I guess I would put it this way.
You know, so your audience is very familiar with the World War II revisionist stuff, right?
And it turns out that everything we were told and everything most people in America probably still believe about that era is complete, absolute opposite of what happened.
It's not just, you know, wrong by 30 degrees or 60 degrees.
It's 180 degrees going the wrong direction.
And the thing is that the absolute same thing is true about what caused the Russian Revolution.
So my documentary, what I've been working on, which I've been had to temporarily shelve, unfortunately, hopefully I'll get back to it soon, is that it's not about the USSR and similarities with the USSR and what's going on in the US today.
It looks at how is it possible that this czarist empire turned into this total hellhole like in a matter of years.
And what led up to that and what caused it?
And it's not actually my research.
It's not something I did.
What happened was this very senior Russian churchman, he's probably going to be the next patriarch, which means the head of the Russian church.
He's the front runner, I would say.
And he's a very influential and popular figure.
Maybe the equivalent of, I don't know, some like, you know, major archbishop of Canterbury or some super senior sort of religious figure in the U.S. made a big documentary about it and put all their publicity behind it.
Anyway, he came out with this huge documentary in March where he basically made this incredible case of revisionist history about what actually happened during the revolution.
And I watched it and my jaw just dropped.
And I was like, this is insane.
This guy sitting here telling all these things, which are amazing even for Russians to hear, but he probably just doesn't even realize how eerily similar this is to what's happening today in the U.S.
And it's obviously hugely important because could we be heading into the same kind of nightmare that Russia stumbled into in the revolution, which was a complete and total bloodbath and disaster that turned, you know, it was just like, I don't think anything so miserable and evil and, you know, cruel has happened to any country ever.
I can't, right?
Not China, you know, under Mao, nothing.
There's nothing like it.
Even the Mongol, the Mongol.
Yeah.
Not even that.
Even worse.
Not even that.
It's worse.
Yeah, because it was prolonged and vindictive and evil.
Anyway, it was satanic, basically, in an extreme way.
And it went on for decades.
So I'm going to just really do the nutshell version because I know we're talking really about the Ukraine conflict.
But so I'll keep it super simple.
And real quick here, Charles, at the top, it just struck me that to the American ruling class, we dissidents, whether we're white nationalists or whether we're MAGA people who went to January 6th, they probably view us as the budding Bolsheviks, right?
We're this menace to the old order, whereas to us, it feels like we're living in a Bolshevik tyranny right now, or certainly a budding one.
They're just not able to get away with what they've already telegraphed is on the way from the secret police.
I had to interject that.
Exactly.
No, we're facing the same thing.
And Americans got to realize this.
We are facing the same thing.
So that's why, like, when I saw this documentary, I was like, oh my God, I've got to convey this to a Western audience.
And then I started digging even deeper because there were some things this guy was not willing to say because he's a big public official here and everything.
And I dug up a bunch of other stuff.
Anyway, I'll just do the super, the super simple version.
But I think I just want to say before I say that, that we live in this amazing age.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about.
It's a very odd time because with this advent of this, like, you know, unrestricted access to information about everything, we're like, suddenly all this stuff is coming into a folk into focus that was hidden in the past.
And, you know, it's like, imagine like being in a giant, giant sports stadium and it's covered.
And so it's dark in there.
And the lights are off.
And it's, you know, you can't really see very well.
Like, like, what's you're in the middle of the field and you can't really see what's up there in the bleachers and then the seats.
And it's full of stuff.
And it's full of really intricate and interesting, important stuff, but you're kind of squinting at it and there are other people sort of guessing about what it is.
And it's all very confused and not right.
And then imagine like that, like they turn on the floodlights like suddenly.
And all of a sudden, like in Technicolor and like Great TPL, you can see everything in the stadium.
Well, that's the age I think we live in, you know, where we used to have to believe what our history professors told us and what Hollywood told us and what the three networks.
Yeah.
Yeah, all this stuff, right?
And now it's like, oh, oh, wait a minute, that's all complete nonsense and actually the opposite of the truth.
And so anyway, so that's the case with the Russian Revolution.
So I'll try and keep it as super, super simple.
So like in a nutshell, like if you went to, if you took a college Russian history class or picked this up from a Hollywood movie or something else, here's the basic thing.
You read some book about Russian history, Russian Revolution.
This is the basic narrative you would hear, right?
It would say that Russia was really backwards and corrupt and incompetently ruled, that the Russian people were miserable and poor, either suffering in factories or in these miserable, like, you know, poverty in the countryside as peasants, that there was super repressive censorship from this bad czar.
And on top of that, he was weak and indecisive and incompetent and out of touch with his people.
Stupid.
Yep.
Yeah.
And then they got themselves, they were a party to World War I.
And they lost that war so badly that the strangest became too much for the suffering masses.
And they rose up and tossed out the czar and welcomed Lenin into power as the one who was promising them like land and peace and electricity and prosperity.
Okay.
That's basically what you would hear.
I mean, wouldn't you agree that's basically what we were taught in school?
That's what I always thought, you know, what the movie Reds is about.
That's it, right?
And the interesting thing is that's not just what was taught in American schools, but there's also what Russians were taught in Soviet schools.
And that's what most Russians still believe.
But since over the last 25 years, there's been this enormous amount of revisionist Russian history going on of people pointing stuff out and saying, you know, this actually was not true.
And it was actually very much the opposite.
So here's what was actually the case, right?
So in fact of the matter is, Russia was not a backwards country.
It was booming in advance and it was very similar at that time to the U.S. like imagine what the U.S. was like at the like the turn of the century, you know, this incredible explosion of like economic productivity and untrammeled growth.
Well, that was Russia.
It was a, it's just on an economic roll, like you wouldn't believe.
It was one of the best managed economies in the world.
It had like super, it was super laissez-faire.
It had the lowest tax rates in the world, except for the U.S., I think.
But anyway, tiny, right?
Basically, business was given a free hand.
Just go out and like, you know, conquer the continent, like, you know, make, build factories and become wealthy.
And there was very little restrictions on them.
And it was an enormous success.
And Russian GDP and wealth and technical sophistication were on a par with Europe, you know, extremely good.
They had the biggest air force in the world at the time.
Not that that's a big deal in World War I, but still representative of a lot.
And all their social standards, like their public hygiene, their education, you know, number of the literacy rates, everything was like top level.
Let's see.
Only thing that I can think of, Charles, is loss to Japan in the Russo-Japanese war was an alarm bell, right?
I mean, that was a knock to Russian prestige and even Western prestige, right?
I'm reading Lothrop Stoddard at the time in the 20s, that was a huge lightning bolt.
The first time that there was a crack in the idea or the impression of global hegemony and an unstoppable force.
Yeah, but that, but that was not that defeat.
Sometimes, you know, a big successful country can lose a war.
And that had much more to do with the fact that the Japanese were just also at that time exploding and were able to put up a much more effective military fight than the Russians could do because they only had this one rail spur going all the way to Siberia.
And it was just impossible to get the logistics out there in time to deal with it.
Anyway, so there's anyway, that was kind of like a not represented what was going on in Russia in the European side of Russia.
Okay, so the Russian masses were not poor.
They were not unhappy.
They had an extremely good standard of living and were basically content with their country and their ruling, their ruler.
And there was no like, there wasn't this like big like unhappiness among the people.
There was practically no censorship.
Okay.
There was basically almost like a free press.
The Tsar was not a weak and incompetent man.
He was a strong, successful ruler who over 20 years had taken his country to like unprecedented heights.
And on top of that, he was extremely decisive.
And he frequently like had a strong will and he overruled his ministers and he did what he thought was right when other people were, when it was risky.
And he was a strong, wise ruler, right?
Oh, oh, I forgot to say the other thing that part of that legend that we're talking about.
You're red-pilling me on Nicholas the second here.
Yeah, it's interesting.
And this is all backed by evidence, right?
So which I can't get into, but there's like tons of evidence about this.
Well, anyway, oh, the part of the legend that I left out was this whole figure of Rasputin, right?
So Rasputin was supposedly this evil, like, you know, charlatan, drunkard, corrupt sex maniac who weaseled his way into the czars and the dopey and gullible czars' favors because he was able somehow to like help their hemophiliac son.
And that he was a really bad guy.
He's like the epitome of evil, like, you know, Rasputin, Rasputin, the evil guy.
Well, it turns out that that's totally not true.
That Rasputin was this virtuous virtuous holy savant who many Russians think should be canonized.
And he almost saved Russia from destruction.
And he was like viciously slandered by you know who and eventually murdered by them because he was convincing the czar not to make like strategic mistakes that would have destroyed Russia.
And yeah, there's my mind is blown.
The Rasputin question, Charles.
This is great.
Sorry.
I mean, I just got to react.
Yeah, never heard that in my life that he was possibly actually a good guy.
Yeah.
Have that.
You know, apparently he was practically a saint.
And people now make icons to him and pray to him.
And like everybody, there's this huge faction that wants him to be canonized in Russia.
And I'll just, just one little thing, because it's just good radio.
Okay.
It's good.
It's freaking funny.
Okay.
So you know that group, Boney M, they had that hit like in the 80s called Rasputin Raspin.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine.
Closing music.
Closing music sided.
Sorry, whatever else you have in Ospera, we're going with the good one.
Okay.
So anyway, so guess what?
So this bony, and so basically, you can look the lyrics up online.
It's this really blasphemous song about how basically Rasputin was sleeping with the Empress, which was a common slander which was spread by the media at the time, the newspapers.
And anyway, so it was in like the early 2000s.
And so Boney M was already like a, you know, a has-been kind of thing.
And they were playing, they were playing a concert in St. Petersburg in like 2003 or something like that.
And so this was the hometown of the Tsar.
Oh, it's important to understand that the Empress, who's a figure in the song, has been made a saint by the Russian church, as is the Tsar's whole family.
So they're all saints now.
So the song is blasphemous about an existing Russian saint and about Rasputin, who many people think could likely be canonized.
Well, anyway, so this guy, the lead singer for Boney M sang this song on stage at a concert.
And then he went to his hotel and he died that night of a heart attack.
It's the curse of Rasputin.
Well, no, it's the curse of God.
That's the whole thing that, you know, God will not be mocked.
So if you go on stage in the hometown of these people where they lived through all this tragedy and you sing this blasphemous song about a saint like having sex with another saint and all these things, God will strike you dead.
So that actually happened, which makes you think for a second.
But so anyway, back to the nutshell thing.
Okay.
And so this was all Oh, and then the final thing that Russia lost World War I.
Well, that's not true either.
The fact is that Russia had basically won World War I. By the third year of the war, the opinion of the German staff was our position is hopeless.
We might as well freaking just go back to Berlin because we haven't been able to destroy the Russians.
And now they've like, you know, marshaled such an army and so many weapons and supplies that they're just going to flatten us.
So they were on the verge of winning, of marching into Berlin.
And so that's the truth.
And what we were told is just a bunch of baloney.
So what happened there?
Was it strikes on the home front similar to what happened to Germany in 1917, 1918?
When they were trying to go west?
It was a stab in the back.
So yeah, so this is what happened, right?
So you got to understand two things here.
So the question is, okay, if everything was so great, you know, and the Paris AR was so popular and Russia was on the verge of winning the war and like, for example, the economy wasn't even hit hard by the war.
Like they didn't experience some sort of like, you know, food shortages or lack of like consumer goods.
Everything was just like humming along pretty much normally.
And Russians weren't suffering because of the war in any way, in any material way.
So the question is, okay, so why did the country all of a sudden collapse into revolution?
How did that happen?
Well, it turns out that there was something rotten in Denmark at the time, rotten in Russia in that time, and that was the elites.
And what had happened over the preceding 30, 40 years is they'd become massively, massively liberalized and westernized by Western culture and Western literature and disinformation efforts by mostly British intelligence agencies and mostly by Russian media, which was a new phenomenon.
In those days, you know, I mean, daily newspapers only sort of appeared like in the 1860s, 1870s, and hadn't been along.
People didn't really understand what they were.
Anyway, so it was the elites, the Russian elites themselves.
And these were not Jewish elites.
These were not like some foreign elites.
These were just basic, wealthy Russian people, including the aristocrats, including the Russian church, including the military.
They had gradually been like zombified by this Western propaganda telling them that they should get rid of their czar.
It's antiquated, that Christianity is stupid.
They sort of abandoned Christianity en masse.
They became very morally corrupt, sexually corrupt.
There was this like, you know, this bachanalia, and it was combined with this incredible wealth that was being created.
And they got the best way to describe them.
The best way to describe these Russian elites were very different from the Russian middle class and the working class and the peasants was woke.
They so much resemble the elites of America today.
I mean, when you look at who's pushing all this lunacy in America, right?
This anti-white stuff, this Black Lives Matter stuff, this like transhumanism and sexual deviancy and transgenders and all this weird, creepy stuff.
It's coming from like the CEO of Apple, right?
It's like the CEOs of the top 100 biggest corporations and their top rights.
Yeah, it's in the army.
It's in the church, you know, the mainline liberal churches are that way, but it's even gotten into the evangelical movement.
It's in the Catholic church.
And so you see this incredible, like, it's, and, and, and the reason they became this way in Russia is because of the newspapers.
And the newspapers at the time were in the hands of you know who every single time.
And they were publishing this rot.
They were publishing this rot about how the czar was an idiot, how his wife was sleeping with Russ Putin, the empress, how if we want to be a progressive and serious country, we have to be like Germany or France and, you know, and get rid of this stupid Christian monarchy and like be more progressive and be actually be like England and France, not Germany.
And anyway, and the Russians were buying this Hook Line and Sinker.
And these were the rich and these were the privileged and they were the aristocrats.
And they're the ones who started the revolution because they created a fake food supply in St. Petersburg.
And here's the thing.
So Russia was winning that fake scarcity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Russia was winning that war.
And the thing is, if they had rolled into Berlin, they had agreed with England ahead of time that England would give them Constantinople because the Turks were on the side of the Germans.
And so it would be this massive diplomatic and military coup for Russia.
They would acquire massive territories in Europe and in the South, and they would control Constantinople and the access to the whatever it is, the Bosphorus, and the warm water seaports and Russia, which is like rise in stature, like enormously.
And so the British were like, we can't allow them to do that.
And so the British ran a third revolution with their fifth column in St. Petersburg and took out the czar.
And that's what really happened.
Oh, man.
That is some serious revisionism, my friend, but I don't doubt it.
I mean, so many scales have fallen from my eyes.
But even, you know, I always tell people there's always another red pill out there lurking.
So thank you for that.
I mean, I like to think, of course, being Germanic myself, that no, the Germans beat them fair and square and then pivoted to the West and they were stabbed in the back.
But I've definitely read a lot of that stuff and it totally makes sense.
I'm looking up at this Lenin biography up on my shelf written by a Jewish Wall Street Journal article.
It was fascinating.
Look into Lenin.
But a lot of those platitudes about the decadence and the indecisiveness of Nicholas, the backwardness of Russia, they just couldn't handle the war anymore and the Bolsheviks took advantage with the common.
No, that's not the truth at all.
It's completely the opposite.
The only bad thing that the horror, though, Charles, is that in our case here in America, I mean, it's not, it's that the elite that you described in Russia engaged in treachery.
I mean, they already have the power here.
They're the Tsar and the elite and the business owners and the propagandists and the newspaper owners.
I mean, you've been back here enough to probably not recognize the United States from what it once was.
It's extraordinarily depressing.
But here's an interesting, just a little factoid.
One of the things that was really popular at the time was this idea that they had to abolish the police.
So when the first revolution happened, when the first revolution happened, you know, it happened in two stages.
First, there was the bourgeois revolution, where it was basically the Russian elites who wanted to have like an English or like French sort of democratic republic.
And then they got kicked out nine months later by the Bolsheviks who staged a coup.
So those elites, one of the first things they did when the revolution happened was they abolished the police.
And instead of having a professional police force, you had volunteers from neighborhoods, you know, sort of patrolling drugs.
And of course, crime criminals went bananas.
And all these Russian cities were taken over by criminal gangs.
So, you know, you've got these weird, like, like this thing just doesn't change.
Like, like they've got the same sort of secret sauce in everything.
And that, and that revolution that was a false, like it was a color revolution in St. Petersburg that had nothing to do with the reality of the country.
They even used drugs.
Like they gave like amphetamines and cocaine to like, and prostitutes and vodka to these factory workers in order for them to riot and rampage and create a line.
Yeah.
And guessing.
History might not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
Yep.
Yeah.
So anyway, there's all, it's, it's so interesting.
There's tons of facts.
It's way too detailed to get into now.
I just wanted to like give you that sort of short version because it's super, super interesting.
And it's so important for what's happening in America today.
And Americans got if they would just know this story, right?
And I really have to get this documentary out there or somehow like get this across to people that look at what happened to Russia as a result.
It ended up in an absolute unbelievable purgatory that is just unimaginable.
That's also been understated by Western historians who are sympathetic to leftist ideas and so on.
It was worse than people have even said, you know?
So sounds like it could have the capacity to be a, sounds like it could have the capacity to be a, not a cult hit, but a smash hit, sort of like Europa, the last battle, the greatest story I've never told there.
These doesn't have to be, you know, big budget.
It doesn't have to be Hollywood slaves sacrificing, sacrificing liberty that these USS Liberty survivors, a four-hour, amazingly shot documentary about what happened to those men on that ship in the Eastern Med in 1967.
And those things do go around quickly, man.
For some people, just watching one documentary, it all clicks there in an hour or two.
So absolutely, go for it, Charles.
That's a good pivot.
We're really picking your brain here.
We're leaning on you here in the second half.
But I mean, from the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Terror, Stalin's purges, et cetera, the Soviet Union then did, if we could pivot to this, go through an almost conservative evolution, not quite a revolution, where those original Judeo-Bolsheviks were one by one sort of replaced and something approaching sanity.
And, you know, I don't want to like paint the Soviet Union too rosy strokes one because I wasn't there to witness it.
And I'm sure there were plenty of horrible things too.
But it certainly got less bad as the years went along.
And perhaps that could serve as a little bit of a lesson, you know, from Stalin de-Judaizing the elites to whether he was killed by Jews.
I mean, there's a lot there to chew on, but how did Russia go from Judeo-Bolshevik tyranny to essentially a, you know, a nationalistic, almost patriotic state without those elements at the helm?
Just a small question.
It's a super important question and one that people very, very rarely ask because you can't imagine a more dramatic pivot.
I mean, if you like, you imagine like just the insane misery that the Russian people were in in those like, you know, 20, 25 years of like, basically it was a Jewish dictatorship and a terror run by vindictive and evil and cruel, cruel, cruel Jews who are basically crucifying the Russian people, you know, in this weird, like demonic way.
I mean, there's so much stuff to, I could tell you about what they were doing.
But anyway, so they, stuff you don't really hear about in the West, which is amazing, right?
So anyway, but and so the question is, you're right.
Like, wait a minute.
And then 30 years later, like, you know, the Soviet Union was practically had anti-Semitism was an official policy.
They had quotas on Jews, like how many Jews could go to which universities and be in what professions.
And they weren't allowed in the KGB at all or in the armed forces.
And they were encouraged to get the hell out of town and go to Israel or Brooklyn.
Or Brighton Beach.
And I'll tell you what, anti-Semitism was an official thing in the USSR in the Brezhnev years, and especially in the KGB.
And there are these films have emerged from training sort of movies that KGB agents were encouraged to watch about Jewish power.
And there's one super famous one, which is like, it's like right out of like their Sturmer.
I mean, it shows like, oh, you know, it's got this giant Jewish spider like sitting on a globe.
You know, imagine this black and white, like Soviet area production thing.
And it's like, and it's showing this big nose like spider like on the globe, like taking over the world.
And like, it's like, Brezhnev being like, look at me.
I am the Fuhrer now.
It's like, you know, how did this happen?
I mean, this is like a radical, why doesn't anybody talk about this?
How do we go from one to the polar opposite?
And so what happened?
So I've been asking people about this.
I've been asking smart Russians who know their history and everything.
I was like, why is this so little discussed?
How did this happen?
Anyway, they explained to me.
They said, basically, what happened was that this radical Zionist, like insane kind of person, like who now represents our neocons in America, basically, the same sort of nutcase weirdos.
Basically, there were just too many Russians and they went way too far.
And this like resistance very gradually built up among the Russian people.
And instead of doing something violent and sudden and sort of rising up and like trying to, you know, stamp them all out and kill it, it was like this gradual, gradual, like, it's a Russian technique where managerial.
Yeah.
You sort of, you sort of like sabotage.
It's like part, you know, it's like guerrilla warfare.
You kind of sabotage these people and sort of resist them without really resisting them.
And you just kind of like envelop them in this Russian kind of sort of, you know, thicket.
And then they basically give up and then you've got the upper hand and you can slowly just, again, slicing the salami really thin, like sort of squeeze them out.
So there was this always this tension in Russia, like even in the 20s and 30s.
And it even had an official name that they would discuss like at party, like ideological debates.
So there were the internationalist, the cosmopolitan wing of the revolutionary party, which was the more Jewish one and the more one that really believed in global revolution.
It was epitomized by Trotsky.
And then there were the great Russian chauvinists.
And those were like the Stalinist types who are like, no, we don't want to go for global revolution.
We need to build socialism here at home first.
And once we've done that, then we can, as an example to the rest of the world, win them over.
And so there was this, you know, ideological debate going on already in like the 20s and 30s.
And Stalin managed to ice pick Trotsky and sort of dealt a severe blow to that whole thing there.
But it still continued on into the Stalinist era and during World War II and after the war and into the 60s.
How much credit before we go into the 60s, how much credit does Stalin deserve?
As much as we all want to hate him for numerous reasons, did he, I mean, did he suddenly get jaywoke or was it just about his power and recognized that he were a threat to them?
And what did he specifically do to sort of get the process started, if that's a fair characterization?
Yeah, well, you know, I have to say that in this, I'm not an expert, but I do know that he became quite anti-Semitic after the war.
And I think he was also dealing with like this triumphant, again, like the sort of the Jewish international kind of element of the Russian communist movement were like rejoicing over their victory over national socialist Germany and thought that the world was their oyster.
And Stalin was like, I got to reign these people in.
They're going to just go take us back onto another round of like what happened in the 20s and the 30s.
And he started actively sidelining them and arresting them and trying to take them down.
And then he died mysteriously.
And there's this theory that he was murdered by a Jewish, you know, whatever, plot in the Kremlin.
Dr. Yeah.
And then there was a, and then after Stalin left the scene, there was again a power struggle going on between these factions.
It was basically Khrushchev, the Khrushchev kind of wing, which was more radical with the kind of Brezhnev wing, which was more great Russian chauvinist, as the term is.
And gradually the great Russian chauvinists just kind of edged the cosmopolitans into the sidelines.
And sort of without any major events, you know, maybe something dramatic happened and just never recorded for the history books.
But as far as we're concerned, you know, by the mid-70s, suddenly, you know, Jews were out of favor in Russia and did not have and very much did not have power.
So it's a very interesting.
Isn't it amazing that?
Yeah, the Soviet Soviet Union was the bell of the ball in the Western press in the 20s and even into the 30s.
And then, ah, when things started to change on the domestic front there for our Red Sea pedestrian friends, then they morphed back into the evil empire.
And by the end of the Soviet Union, too, wasn't it even the Jackson-Vannick amendment?
We had to basically, we were compelling the Soviet Union to allow their Jews to emigrate, which I guess eventually they were like, sure, okay, we agree.
We can leave.
Please, you know.
amazing development.
And let's bring it home to the third and possible last topic here, Charles, if we could.
I don't mean to cut it short, but it's a perfect segue.
In our circles, there's so many things that we get hung up on, right?
Religion and which call, which direction is the best for us, et cetera.
But Russia and Putin is one of the biggest anime waifus.
Thank you, Rolo, for adding a little bit of limity here.
Charles is like, what is an anime waifu?
Don't ask.
You don't want to know.
I know.
But seriously, so all right.
You're hip to that.
I'm hip.
I'm chill.
I know what anime waifus are.
So the realities of Putin and Russia, to simplify, maybe mention at the top of the show, Putin is just the flip side of the coin.
He's in Haq to Chabad Lubavitch.
He's no friend to white nationalists.
You know, he's hostile.
All of our ideas, you'd just be swapping Western Zog hegemony in Europe for a Russian version.
Right.
Now, the counter argument to that is look at the utter transformation of Russia from the Yeltsin years of perdition when it was basically on its knees, bankrupt, destitute, drunk, suiciding and aborting itself and a total victim to Jewish international capital terrorism, essentially, just all those oligarchs buying everything up.
Putin comes in New Year's Eve, 1999.
Literally, Yeltsin resigns and he takes the helm.
I was there in 2001, and I remember thinking Moscow was pretty dangerous.
There were bombs passed out on the metro in piles of their own vomit.
I passed over a dead man in the snow once, like people just going about their business like that was standard.
And I had the chance to go back.
The last time I was there was 2006 for a brief work trip when I said, holy smokes, five years later, this is a completely different city.
Now, a skeptic would say, oh, that's all oil and gas money.
It's just a Moscow and it's a hell out in the countryside.
But there's no arguing that Russia is ascendant and had turned on a dime largely under Putin.
Now, maybe he's not hostile to the small hats enough.
Maybe he's playing a long, canny game.
But you've been there to see this through all these epics and dramas and transformations.
And we had a pleasant conversation, you and I, one summer about the nature of Putin and whether he knows about all these people or if he's in hockey to them.
What do you make of Putin and Russia's trajectory today?
Yeah, have fun with that one.
I got to tell you, you know, as like confident that I am, that I like really understand this country really well and feel it in my bones practically.
I don't know the answer to that question.
And I'm very much aware of this debate, obviously, because folks in, you know, in dissident right-wing circles talk about this a lot.
And then they ask me about it all the time.
So I'm very familiar with this argument that he's somehow, you know, just a puppet of Chad Lubovich and all that stuff.
And the simple answer is there's no way to tell.
You know, it's almost like, you know, what's very popular among Russian thinkers is this discussion of the fact that it's the, in fact, it's the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers who rule the world and these like secret families and that they're always feuding among themselves.
And that explains why you've got sometimes these geopolitical conflicts.
And it's all very interesting.
You know, like you're like, oh, yeah, so tell me about that.
And, but they can never prove it.
it's always like this theory right and you're like okay smoking interesting theory but where's the evidence like how do you prove this stuff so you know does does some like you know international global cabal uh have some you know leverage on putin that he's basically their errand boy i guess it's possible i don't know um But as you point out,
a lot of the things he's done has been so opposite to this sort of, you know, international globalist agenda, like the neocons.
I mean, if he was such a tool of them, why would they hate him so passionately?
And like, they seem to be obsessed with trying to topple him.
And how do you explain Syria and all these things?
You know, so it's contrary to the classic playbook, right?
You know, resurgence of Christianity, support for families, reduction in alcoholism, no LGBTQ parades down the streets of Moscow, you know, putting up a strong united front against the imperialism.
That all is contrary to checkmating is, you know, greater Israeli expansion in the Middle East and Syria.
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
And he's, but he's working for like some, you know, cabal.
I don't know.
You know, it's just, it's possible, but it's all in the realm of like, who knows?
Like weird stuff.
Well, and as a KG, as a KB man, you said that he, you know, there's no way that he could have been in the KGB and not actually gotten like explicit training about the JQ.
Like that was part of their document.
Right, right, right.
But for the folks who think who like this whole episode I was talking about earlier, how, you know, like the entire Putin government went major like vax like tyranny.
Let's like, you know, turn everybody into cattle here and also inject everybody with these vaccines.
And by the way, the Russian vaccine, which is called Sputnik, is basically the same darn thing as whatever it is, you know, Pfizer and Johnson ⁇ Johnson or whatever it is.
There's no difference.
And there's this really creepy guy, Jewish guy, actually, who makes the vaccine here in Russia, and he's all tied in with the World Economic Forum.
And it's just a freak show, right?
So the guys who have that argument that, no, this is all just a puppet show.
And in fact, there's this one global government and they're just kind of like, you know, putting on a show for us dumb, you know, regular folks.
Well, they got a lot, a couple of really strong arguments with the way that Russia was going whole hog into the whole, like, let's, let's like, you know, QR code, like, let's like stamp a QR code on everybody's forehead and inject them as much as possible.
And, you know, all that stuff.
So it was very weird and it was very spooky.
So yeah, so now that's an arrow in their quiver, in the quiver of those people's arguments.
So I don't know.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't.
It's a classic George Cannon line.
Yeah.
We see even from within, we see, we see Russia as through a glass darkly.
I love that.
Yeah.
George Kennan was arguably one of the greatest American, well, yeah, probably diplomats of all time, certainly a wise man, even to his old years.
He hated TV.
He said TV was going to rot the American brain.
He said that NATO expansion was madness and was going to lead to renewed hostilities in Europe.
Another one for his feather.
And he also was a little bit of a racial awareness guy.
He said, you know, my ancestors carved a new civilization in the wilderness of Wisconsin or Minnesota, whatever it was, from nothing.
You don't see that happen with just any other people.
I'm paraphrasing a little bit there, but that was in his in his papers, in his diaries.
He knew the score.
Unfortunately, far too few, if any, Americans like old George running the show back here now.
And yeah, I'll plug, I'll put the, I sent you the Anatoly Carlin Russia's Resurgence of Nationalism article.
Whether you agree with everything in there or not, it provides a ton of evidence of specific policies and then more gradual developments in Russia that simply run contrary to the idea that it's just a different puppet with a different stripe.
Because if so, I made a joke to my friend.
I was like, well, if that's the new face of like, you know, puppeteering, then it's certainly better than what we got going on here.
And then, of course, you've got our European nationalist friends who are like, we do not want that.
We do not want door A or door B. One might be worse than the other, but that's a little bit of a, you know, false choice that you have to choose between.
Listen, I want to say rule by Moscow.
I want to say, Coach, before we before we wrap this up, that it is so wonderful to be here.
Russia is living through a great time.
You know, and you were here and I was here at the same time, and I remember how brutal it was and how depressing, right?
And now it really feels, you know, it's just they've gotten their act together so well.
They've cleaned up their, so many of their smaller provincial towns.
I'm sitting in a provincial town right now.
It's absolutely lovely.
It's blanketed in snow.
There's been so much snow this year.
It's like a winter wonderland.
You know, the people have become like kinder and not so aggressive because, you know, they're better off and they don't have to, they're not so freaked out about the collapse of their society.
And it's just a really lovely, lovely place to be.
And this whole, this year I've been here has just been fantastic.
I mean, it's just been like living on some wonderful, like long vacation.
And then the other thing is, is, you know, there are a lot of them.
Rolo's crying.
I see Rolo.
There's a tear rolling down Rolo's cheek there and jealousy and mine here too.
And I didn't mean to cut you off there, Charles.
Listen, there's nothing here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And for the audience, Bausman's just trumpeting Russian propaganda about how good it is there.
I have a good friend who goes there every single year and has been doing so for a long time.
And he said it's indisputable.
It's on the ascendant.
That used to be, yes, the glitz started in the cities and it was still a little bit run down and corrupt in the countryside and alcoholism and stuff like that.
But the goodness, the health is spreading throughout the country.
It's not propaganda.
Saw it with my own face.
And my limited aperture from 2001 to 2006, it was plain as day as well.
So, hey, that's a good news story for a country that's still largely white Christian and sovereign.
Yeah.
And by the way, it's open to tourists.
The only problem is to get a visa, you can't get it in the U.S. anymore because all the diplomats have been shipped out because the war might start.
But if you can find a Russian embassy, you know, somewhere, I don't know, Mexico or I don't know, Canada, maybe, you can get a Russian visa and come here.
The country is open for tourism.
All right.
So Bausman's tours.
Another side project for you there.
That's awesome.
Charles, I'm all smiles here, my friend.
Glad to hear you from well across the Atlantic as opposed to just in cozy Lancaster.
Thank you for all that you do for spending time with us.
When you said before, you said, I just got to tell you, Coach, it's so nice to be here.
I thought you were going to say so nice to be here on Full House, but you meant in Russia.
Yes, I meant in Russia, but it's great to be on Full House.
It's one of my favorite shows.
It's in my podcast app at the top of the list.
Wonderful.
Thank you, sir.
God bless your family.
And, you know, I'm just going to say it.
God bless Russia too.
I don't care if that's heretical or like, it's not treasonous.
We, there are plenty of countries around the world that we want to see do well.
It doesn't mean that we are a stooge for them or a lackey or a show.
Have some nuance, people, right?
This is not all 100% black or white.
And maybe the thought occurs, maybe, just maybe that Putin is doing that sort of slow rolling evolution revolution that happened to the Soviet Union.
And you don't just snap your fingers like a certain uncle did in 1933 and start radically changing things.
The Russians are monsters.
They're not saboteurs.
They're saboteurs.
They're very good at sabotaging stuff because it's the only way they could fight back against the Soviet Union.
That's what they did.
Sposiba Bolshoya, Charles, anything else you want to plug?
I hope that documentary sees the light of day.
Russia Insider, of course, and anything else before we let you go.
Not really.
It's been a great talk.
I'm looking forward to the Boney M all right.
Yes, with the acknowledgement that it is heretical.
And like, you look, I remember the album.
It's, you know, it's funny.
You mentioned that concert in St. Petersburg.
When I, it was either in Kiev in the late 90s or Moscow in the 2001.
There was like a techno remix that was on the radio all the time.
So yeah, that was a real phenomenon.
But anyway, Rolo, thank you too, brother, for making time for us out of our regular schedule.
And we'll see you again tomorrow with our USS Liberty friends.
Thank you, Rolo.
He fell asleep.
That's all right.
Typical welcome.
All right, fam.
There he is.
This full house special was recorded on another bitterly cold, snowy January 26, 2022.
Here in West Virginia, we might have as much snow on the ground as I saw in footage from Moscow just earlier this evening.
Follow us on Telegram at pro white fam2 on gab at gab.com/slash fullhouse.
And please do consider supporting our efforts at gibsengo.com slash fullhouse or at full-house.com.
So to all of you out there trying to make heads or tails or good guys versus bad guys out of the looming showdown between Russia, Ukraine, and what's left of the West.
Hey, we hope you did a service.
And Charles has more experience and knowledge on this stuff than almost anybody.
With that, we will go out indeed to Boney M. I'll decide on the techno remix or the original on the fly here.
We'll go with the original.
I think it's fun.
We love you, fam.
All right.
Original it is.
We love you, fam.
And we'll talk to you tomorrow with the USS Liberty Survivors.
Take care, everybody.
We love you.
tuned to the news.
He was big and strong in his eyes of claiming go.
Most people look at him with terror and desire.
But to mushroom cheeks, he was such a lovely deal.
He could breathe the vibrant like a creature.
We're all ecstasy and fire.
But we all saw what kind of teacher we men would desire.
Roar-roar, Russine, lover of the Russian queen.
There was a cat that really was gone.
Rara, Rascotine, Russia's greatest love machine.
It was a shame.
But the cars are chunked, he danced really wonderfully.
In all affairs of state, he was coming to please.
But he was the real prince, and he had a curse to scream.
For the queen, he was no real dealer.
No, she heard the prince he done.
She believed he was a holy dealer.
No one would be her son.
Roar-Roar Raspberry, lover of the Russian queen.
There was a cat that really was gone.
Rara, Rasputine, Russia's greatest love machine.
It was a shame how he carried on.
But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder.
They just gotta go, declared his enemy.
But the lady to beg, don't you try to do it?
All this Rasputine had lots of hate and charms.
So he was paying fruit, they just fell into his arms.
And one night, some men of highest stand set and trap in order to lame to his influence.
And here he leaves.
Roar-Raw Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen.
They put some poison into his wine.
Roar-Raw Raspberry, Russia's greatest love machine.
He drank it all and said, I could find Rollo Rashkoutine, lover of the Russian beat.