The Dashed Hope of Chechen Independence

0:00I was one of the advisors. I was not THE advisor, so I will not take all the blame. I was AN advisor, and advisors were not listened to in the Soviet Union, and in today's Russia actually as well. For example, speaking about Chechnya, it looks like all the advices Mr. Yeltsin was soliciting before invading Chechnya, all these advices were negative. He would ignore all these advices, and the only advice he would listen to is the advice of his bodyguard, General Korzhakov, with whom he actually is his crony, with whom he drinks all the time.

0:50It looks like these two people decided upon invading independent Chechnya. Well, Chechnya, it's a very sad story. It's a sad story of statism, a sad story of socialism, a sad story of how the nation was practically raped for such a long time by the Russian Empire at first and then the Soviet Empire. Moreover, Chechnya, I would think it's the first shot in some new developments in that part of the world. I would say that we saw the dissemination of two already socialist empires. One was the Outer Empire, which collapsed with the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

1:39That was an empire which would include countries like Poland, like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, GDR, Vietnam, The Soviet Empire collapsed on the Christmas Eve of 1991, when 15 countries gained their independence on the 24th of December 1991. And what's interesting that Chechnya, as well as some other countries, which right now are part of Russia, also declared their independence on this glorious night of 24th of December 1991.

2:24But due to a very interesting, I would say kind of legal, I wouldn't say even error, but misfortune of Chechen people, Stalin, who wrote the first Soviet Constitution in 1936, he hated Chechens because he is Georgian, and the Georgians are kind of neighbors of Chechens, and they hate each other with passion. And so he wouldn't include Chechens as the so-called sister republic of the Soviet Union. He included Chechnya into the Soviet Union as the so-called autonomous republic. And then, because of that, I would say, absolutely strange, and you cannot even explain why this happened, or why we should follow the Stalin's constitution, or why Mr. Clinton should follow what Stalin wrote in 1936, then everybody who were the so-called sister republics, also kind of, I think, an idiotic name even, sister republics of the Soviet Union, They were recognized immediately by the international community and granted membership in the United Nations and whatnot.

3:36But the so-called autonomous republics, they were not recognized by the international community. And right now in Russia there are 20 of these republics. So we don't know when this process of disintegration would stop, if it would stop at all. I was a week ago speaking at the Capitol Hill Club, it's a Republican club in Washington DC, I think maybe last time probably. I was debating when a Department of State official, he was saying, look, Chechnya seceded. It's the same as the state of Maine would secede.

4:24Well, I made a point that there is some difference, not much, but some difference, that I said, well, Chechens are Muslims, they are of Turkish origin, while people of Maine are more or less like all other Americans. But what he said is, if this is so, if the Chechens would prove that they are different, they should probably have a right to succeed. And I would say, prove to the US Department of State probably, I was kind of thinking in the direction of that, what if the founding fathers of this Republic, could they prove to our today's Department of State that they are really different from the British? I mean, it would be difficult, I think, to find something which...

5:15So, I believe that the people should have the right to succeed, not because they're different, but because the cost of secession would be probably lower than the cost of staying in. I mean, the problem with the economics, the problem with the opportunity cost, If the benefits of getting out are higher than the benefits of staying in, and usually it's not even benefits, only costs are involved in that. So, Chechnya, I think, can be a very interesting beginning, actually, of the end of this Russian Empire. Somebody in Milwaukee gave me an interesting, I think it's called Mabery Report, it's like a newsletter, and maybe this investment newsletter.

6:08And the gentleman who published it came up with an interesting name. He said, well, what we see is the emergence of Causton, Causton. That's how he calls that part of the world, the cow-standard means the state of cows. Because Russia today is the country of 110 different nationalities, of about 450 different linguistic groups, then all Russians themselves, I think, would be happy to secede from Russia, at least from Russian government, In the same way as my neighbor in Wisconsin, in Kenosha, would like to secede from the Internal Revenue Service. So the cost of staying in Russia, I would say, was at least much higher than the cost of secession.

6:58So to increase the cost of secession, Yeltsin unleashed this bloody war of genocide against the people who suffered so much from their Russian neighbors. The story of Chechen misfortune started in 1846, when Chechnya was incorporated by force into the Russian Empire. Count Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, was the captain of the Russian Imperial Army in Chechnya in 1848. And after that, he quitted the army, he quitted drinking, he quitted smoking, he quitted to eat animal flesh, he quitted everything, and became kind of a hermit in his estate, professing this non-violence wherever.

7:49So, the war was extremely bloody on both sides. Tolstoy called Caucasus, Chechnya actually is a mountainous, it's a nation of highlanders. The Caucasus mountains are about 18,500 feet. It's about one mile higher than our Colorado Rockies. It's a mountainous country, which you can never conquer. I mean, you can conquer the valleys, but it's impossible to... Russians, I would say, arrogantly believe that with helicopter gunships you can do wonderful things. But actually, the war in Afghanistan proved that only up to a certain height, Today we saw a complete disaster for the Russian Army as well.

9:0011,000 Russian soldiers were killed or died because of wounds which were inflicted them during this conflict. It's only 6,000 less than they got in Afghanistan. Nobody knows how many Chechen civilians were murdered. According to Russian human rights groups, about 200,000 of civilians in Chechnya were murdered. Russian soldiers are rats, roaches and spiders who ought to be put to death immediately and without hesitation. They are dirty rapists and have lost their god and their honor.

9:45An old Chechen woman told it, but not a correspondent of CNN, but she told it to the Count Leo Tolstoy in 1848. In 1944, when Stalin already kind of believed that he is larger than God, he decided to exile the whole nations he didn't like. And Chechens were the first to be exiled. All Chechens, it's not that Chechens who are not paying taxes or Chechens who don't like the government, all of them probably didn't, but all of them were exiled to Kazakhstan.

10:33About 7,000 miles train ride, and the people were hoarded in cattle cars, and Ruslan Hasbulatov, who was the speaker of Russian Parliament. I actually, right now I'm thinking of maybe he was not as bad as I thought he was. Ruslan Hasbulatov was the speaker of the Russian parliament who opposed Yeltsin when the parliament wacoized his parliament. Ruslan Hasbulatov was the leader of the parliamentary revolt against Yeltsin. At that time, I was kind of thinking, I wrote a book with Ruslan, and at that time he was a closet capitalist.

11:24And we wrote a book with him published in 1988 called Political Economy of Transition. And in 1988 there was still, communism was in place, and I remember from the economics department of the Communist Party, of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, they called me and they said, Where you wanted to transit to? I mean, what's the political goal of transition? Are you not in the optimum right now? Where you wanted to transit? So the book was kind of, I would say, I would say it was a revolutionary book, but it was kind of the manual how to make transitions from, because we couldn't say where from to where from. It was like how to make any transition in any direction. And then Ruslan Hasbolatov became the chairman of the Russian Parliament and I thought that he completely became insane, but right now I'm kind of reconsidering it, that maybe he wasn't insane, but maybe if Yeltsin was as a murderous alcoholic as he is right now, at that time maybe Ruslan saw the threat, even at that time, but Ruslan, he is a native Chechen himself,

12:38He is a native Chechen himself, and he told me the blood-freezing stories of people hoarded into these cattle cars, which some of them would not be open for 10-12 days. So the corpses would be traveling with children. The people wouldn't have any amenities if they were absent. The whole nation, very proud nation of highlanders of this caucus, highlanders were sent to Kazakhstan. When Khrushchev returned them all back, returned them all back, not actually all back, he could return only about half of them, half of them perished on the way to Kazakhstan and perished in Kazakhstan.

13:37Kazakhstan is like, it's just like South Utah, I mean, it's salt and deserts and that's about it. So these people were in desert, and so I would think that they have quite a reasonable grudge actually against Russians, these people. And so when communism was no more, Chechens were the first, one of the first to declare their independence, together with all these other nations. But then again everybody else was recognized except Chechens. They had a very interesting president of Chechnya.

14:22President of Chechnya was a general in the Soviet Air Force. He actually is a very cherished person in the Baltic states because he was a commander of the Vilnius military air base in Vilnius, Lithuania. When in 1991 another murderer in charge of the Soviet Union, Mr. Gorbachev, he sent troops to crush the uprising in Vilnius, then Mr. Dudaev, this Chechen general, who was a Soviet Air Force general, he refused this Marine Corps planes to land on his Air Force base.

15:09So they were sent to some other part and when they got permission to land and came to Vilnius, it was already late. I mean it was already late from one hand, it wasn't late for Gorbachev to physically, with tanks, they crushed a lot of these old babushkas and teenage girls and even two Soviet military servicemen, it was in January 1991. But General Dudayev, the Chechen president, was cherished by Lithuanians. And what's interesting is that Lithuania and Estonia are the only two countries in the world who were courageous enough to recognize the independent Chechnya.

16:00The Estonian government even said that we will immediately send an ambassador to Chechnya, if there will be anywhere to send this ambassador to. So it's a very, very sad story. Then Mr. Dudayev, this Chechen president, he was still a Soviet Air Force general in Moscow, and then he went to visit his folks, his family in Chechnya, his parents. And he came there when these independence talks were around. And so he went to a political rally, and then decided to speak out, spoke out, and was immediately elected the president of the Republic of Chechnya.

16:48And then he quit the Soviet Air Force and became this president. He was one of the people who helped, also enormously helped, Yeltsin during the coup d'etat in August 1991, when he was still a Soviet Air Force general. At that time he moved the whole air wing to support Yeltsin in Moscow. So, Yeltsin paid him back, I would say, in a very strange way. So, the Chechens, at that time, 150 years ago, they were led by Imam Shamil, who is...

17:37Chechens are Muslim people. I've been to Chechnya three times. And Chechens, I would say, for Russia, it's the most insane thing to keep these people inside. I mean, it's the people, I would say, are kind of really different, really different. So, I would say it's like I lived for a while in inner city, Racine. And if this inner city would like to succeed, I mean, God bless them. And the Chechen people are really, really different in the sense that they are also the source of mafia. I mean this, they have the, with collapse of Russian economy, the only kind of relations you can, trustworthy relations, with absence of private property, you can have only on tribal basis or on the basis of family. So the same way as Sicilian mafia emerged in the United States, the Chechens are running all this underground world in Russia. So I think it It was a blessing for Russians that these people would succeed, but they wouldn't understand.

18:49I was reading Count Tolstoy yesterday night. He has a very interesting short story about Chechnya, that Russian Orthodox priest came to baptize people in Chechnya 150 years ago, and he had his throat slit like five days after on his arrival, but everybody liked him. So the investigator came from Tiflis, from the Russian center there, and was trying to find out what happened. And it looks like this, this Orthodox priest, he was walking down the street and saw a nice boy. He patted this boy and he said, what a nice boy. And this boy died three days after, because of cholera. And so, for the Chechen people, even today I think, it's just a causal kind of relationship between what the priest did to the boy and his death is completely obvious.

19:42But it's a beautiful country, very proud people, and I don't think that Mr. Clinton should follow Stalinist constitution. In Russia today, inflation is completely run away. The economic economy is collapsing, also due to the war in Chechnya. In Chechnya, Russians are behaving themselves like they would never win this war. I mean, they're destroying everything inside. If you would think that you will take charge over the country, you probably wouldn't destroy the highly sophisticated and expensive things.

20:34And they're destroying, they've destroyed petrochemical, huge petrochemical complex, which was worth about 2 billion rubles, whatever it means today. In Russia today the distrust of the government is on the highest. Another Muslim republic inside Russia, Tatarstan, the place I was born in, they declared their independence, so that's the source of another teaching. Anti-Yeltsin moods are just kind of everywhere in the air. In Izvestia recently, that's the major newspaper in Russia, the headline said that the fate of our motherland is hanging on his liver, implying his alcoholism.

21:35and I would say that in this kind of environment, what Mr. Clinton forgot in that part of the world. But he is going there to Russia to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the victory. But I think that he would be abused and abused again, and probably he is kind of aware of that, that the war against German Nazism, which on the Russian side, I mean, it was like two dictators were fighting each other. In an omnipotent government, Ludwig von Mises wouldn't make any preferences between Stalin and Hitler.

22:27Stalin probably murdered much more people than Hitler, although Hitler was a very vicious socialist as well. So I don't think that with Russians I have a lot of things to celebrate, Except that probably the Second World War was good for Russia that it stopped some of Stalinist experiments. Because Stalin already had some other kind of great designs for it, like to move nations all around the place, to reverse rivers and to eradicate deserts or what not. And so the war kind of stopped him in that. But to see the President of the United States saluting these Chechen veterans, the people who are covered with blood and minced meat all over, I think it's really just disgusting.

23:24It's something which Murray Rothbard called the bureaucratic international. So, the beginning of this kaostan, I don't know whether it will happen or not, I mean, I don't know whether it will happen in 1995-1996, but it will definitely happen if the situation in that part of the world will be getting worse and worse and worse. And I don't see why it wouldn't. Because right now we see that the Russian government economic policies are getting more and more insane. They recently accused George Soros. George Soros is an American well-wisher, a billionaire, who organized kind of some think tanks to help Russians.

24:18Well, I don't think these think tanks did any thinking, but he was a well-wisher, definitely. Right now he is accused by the chief of modern Russian KGB that he is a CIA spy. Mr. Soros is. The Peace Corps people who are in Russia, many of them were attacked by the Russian mob. The anti-American feelings are also very widespread, and I think that at last we see some fruits from our aid we are providing these people.

25:03The more aid usually you provide, the more people will hate you, and so right now we are first kind of getting the first fruits for that. Also, IMF believes that it's not enough aid for this hatred and right now 15 billion dollars are to be delivered to Russian Treasury during this financial year, 15 billion dollars, this is the most disgusting thing. It is also disgusting that it is in complete violation of the U.S. Constitution what is done here, because it was not authorized by the U.S. Congress, so the power of the poor belongs to, you don't know even whom, it belongs to.

25:51I remember I was invited to consult a certain congressman, a democrat, several years ago. And his point was, he said, World Bank, what is that World Bank? I wrote him a memo saying, just to mention World Bank. I said, you don't know what's World Bank? He said, no, I know they're in the Far West, that's the part of Washington they're in. But what they're doing there? And this person was voting for giving your money to this World Bank all his life without even knowing what this money would come to. And so IMF already accumulated all this money, and IMF and the World Bank were appointed by the Western governments to avoid the legislatures, to provide the so-called assistance to Russia and other post-communist countries.

26:46So I would say the ruling elites are trying, I don't know why the ruling elites are trying to save all ruling elites, I mean it's because that elite is really kind of looks like right now in a very bad shape and quite rotten and what not. So in Russia today we see the government which is in the top of the criminal state. And the criminal state is literally criminal state, because right now we see a merger of the mafia, the government structures, of everything. So if any one of you are trying to invest something there or whatever, I think it's the right time to get out and probably invest in, I don't know even where, probably Cayman Islands or whatever.

27:35It's a very sad story. What the U.S. government is providing us with, I thought I would read some books for this, and one book, I couldn't believe it, it's called, Mr. Gottlieb, Nation Against State, I thought it's a good title for a book. But it was published, actually, again, on your money, and what we need right now, what we need right now, it's National Security Council, National Security Council. The first is recreation of the balance of power. The balance of power, because of the collapse of Soviet Union, kind of shifted, right? There's no power to balance.

28:29So we need to recreate this balance. It's something I never even think of. I mean, we're fighting this balance that, I mean, the balance kind of popped up by itself and then we need to... Then development of alliance systems. How many of them? I mean, we already are members of, maybe, 12 different alliances. And then the third one, world government. World government. National Security Council Document, NSC 79-12

29:26A national home regime would permit the issuance of two sets of passports to the inhabitants of a country, a set of national passports, and a set of citizenship passports to the citizens of the states. A common national passport could thus be issued to persons of diverse citizenships, diverse citizenships. That's the, so instead of seceding, we kind of would join several citizenships. That's the idea of Mr. Gottlieb. Mr. Gottlieb was published by Council on Foreign Relations Press.

30:16and had a very nice, very nice, people like George Shultz adored this book and Bill Rogers and who not, all these big imperialists adored it. So, what are the prospects? I think the prospects in Chechnya are very gloomy. I mean, you never can win over this also small nation, I mean, they just don't have any choices, the Chechens. What they can do? I mean, if these people came and destroyed their villages and whatever, raped everything. So, it will go on and on and on, I think. That's kind of Russian way.

31:03When I was all the time, when I lived in Washington, I was invited for the so-called CIA simulations. CIA has a very exciting way of disposing taxpayers' money, not only by murdering some, I don't know, Guatemalans or US citizens there, but another way they're dispersing this money, they're organizing simulations. That means they would invite like 50 experts, and everybody should come up with scenario, and the more scenarios the better. So that's the most kind of, even in Soviet Union, I mean, all you can have 500 scenarios, so what? But this, speaking about these scenarios, that what this Soviet Union, whether it will collapse, how far it will go, whatever, That was the case of the simulation I was a part of.

32:03And I think the simulation number one, the person who won, he said that on the 1st of November 1996, General Boris Gromov will take over Kremlin and establish himself as the president of Russia. And so he was kind of endorsed by Say Because he came up with something very concrete, probably the most idiotic thing you can imagine, but something, I mean, a few collecting scenarios, so, so that's why I think it's still unpredictable country, I mean, not only with unpredictable past, as Churchill said, but also unpredictable, we just don't know what will happen there, but it's probably like everything in Russia, it will just go on and on and on in a very kind of slow, slow, slow way. In Russia still, We see the people fighting, Russians still fighting in Tajikistan, in Kazakhstan, in Turkmenistan, in Kyrgyzstan, in all these other parts of Kazakhstan.

33:08They're fighting Afghan rebels, they're fighting each other. A lot of people don't know what they're fighting for. But that's when the communism collapsed, and the fear was out of the system. The worst case scenario is that today we see a lot of Muslim volunteers pouring into Chechnya from Afghanistan, from Pakistan, from Palestine Liberation Organization. So these people can really prolong the conflict for just the whole places.

34:01If you go 100 miles to the south, there is another place called Nagorno-Karabakh. Grozny, the capital of the Czech Republic, is completely destroyed. 400,000 people made homeless. 120,000 according to this data die. Stepanakert, 160 miles to the south, capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. 500,000 people homeless, because we kind of don't, there it's the battle between Armenia and Azerbaijan, they kind of both, from our point of view, kind of obscure or whatever, so we're not focused on that. But that's another, another so-called mini-imperialism, which is even worse, I think. Then there is a place called Suhumi, which probably will be 500 miles eastward of this is completely destroyed, former resort, beautiful place. That's all these ethnic wars, ethnic wars are going on.

34:57In Chechnya also we can at least point to the aggressor and help them responsible for that. Well, I think God bless the Chechen people because they suffer so, so much.

35:18Thank you very much.