Last night's Executive Order: targeted shock event and tempers are hot

Bannon Bans Muslims:

Heather Cox Richardson

Boston College professor of American History

28 Jan 2017

She is writing from the position of a moderate. She has published several books on the history of the Republican party.
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I don't like to talk about politics on Facebook-- political history is my job, after all, and you are my friends-- but there is an important non-partisan point to make today.

What Bannon is doing, most dramatically with last night's ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries-- is creating what is known as a "shock event." Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order. When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies. As society reels and tempers run high, those responsible for the shock event perform a sleight of hand to achieve their real goal, a goal they know to be hugely unpopular, but from which everyone has been distracted as they fight over the initial event. There is no longer concerted opposition to the real goal; opposition divides along the partisan lines established by the shock event.
Last night's Executive Order has all the hallmarks of a shock event. It was not reviewed by any governmental agencies or lawyers before it was released, and counterterrorism experts insist they did not ask for it. People charged with enforcing it got no instructions about how to do so. Courts immediately have declared parts of it unconstitutional, but border police in some airports are refusing to stop enforcing it.

Predictably, chaos has followed and tempers are hot.

My point today is this:

Heather Cox Richardson

But because shock events destabilize a society, they can also be used positively. We do not have to respond along old fault lines. We could just as easily reorganize into a different pattern that threatens the people who sparked the event. A successful shock event depends on speed and chaos because it requires knee-jerk reactions so that people divide along established lines. This, for example, is how Confederate leaders railroaded the initial southern states out of the Union. If people realize they are being played, though, they can reach across old lines and reorganize to challenge the leaders who are pulling the strings. This was Lincoln's strategy when he joined together Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, anti-Nebraska voters, and nativists into the new Republican Party to stand against the Slave Power. Five years before, such a coalition would have been unimaginable. 

Members of those groups agreed on very little other than that they wanted all Americans to have equal economic opportunity. Once they began to work together to promote a fair economic system, though, they found much common ground. They ended up rededicating the nation to a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Confederate leaders and Lincoln both knew about the political potential of a shock event. As we are in the midst of one, it seems worth noting that Lincoln seemed to have the better idea about how to use it. 

How Putin Became President: by David Satter

from: The American InterestThe summer of 1999 Russian apartment bombings:
In the summer of 1999, the Yeltsin era was coming to an end and those at the pinnacle of power feared for their freedom and even their lives. There were the first signs of an economic recovery, but ordinary citizens were still living in poverty and waiting months to be paid. The Yeltsin entourage, which was widely hated for its role in pillaging the country, was increasingly isolated. According to Russians and Westerners with access to the Kremlin leadership, the leading members of the Yeltsin “family”—Tatyana Dyachenko, the President’s daughter, Boris Berezovsky, the country’s richest man and her close adviser, and Valentin Yumashev, a member of the Security Council and Dyachenko’s future husband—lived in fear of a cruel reckoning. Many ordinary citizens were convinced they would never surrender power.

During the 12 days from September 4-16, however, everything changed. Four Russian apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. The controversies that wracked the country over corruption and privatization were suddenly forgotten. Eight years of post-Soviet Russian history was telescoped into the shocking images of bodies being carried out of the rubble of bombed apartment buildings.

Putin, the newly appointed Prime Minister, expressed perfectly the desire of the country for revenge. On September 24, Putin said, “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then in an airport, and, forgive me, if we catch them in the toilet, then we’ll rub them out (mochit) in the toilet…. The question is closed once and for all.”

Russian officials said there was a “Chechen trail” in the bombings. The wording was unusual, not proof but a “trail.” The Chechens insisted that they had nothing to do with the bombings and no proof of their involvement was ever adduced. But Russian forces were already fighting Chechen rebels in Dagestan, and the country was looking desperately for someone to blame. Russians were opposed to further involvement in Chechnya but, in the wake of the apartment bombings, they were now ready for a new Chechen war.

But were the bombings what they were depicted to be? In fact, the mystery of who bombed the Russian apartment houses in 1999 has not been solved to this day. And to the extent that there is evidence as to the perpetrators, it points not to Chechen terrorists but to the Kremlin leadership and the FSB.

Russia in the spring of 1999 was a nation traumatized by impoverishment and criminalization under Yeltsin and far from certain that the presidential elections set for June 2000 would take place. Yeltsin’s popularity rating stood at 2 percent, that of his newly appointed Prime Minister and heir apparent, Vladimir Putin, was also 2 percent. It was regarded as nearly inconceivable that anyone connected with Yeltsin could win a free election. But there was a widespread fear that Yeltsin would find a pretext for declaring a state of emergency so that the elections would not take place.

On June 6, Jan Blomgren, the Moscow correspondent for the Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, reported that a faction in the Kremlin was seriously weighing “terror bombings that could be blamed on the Chechens.”1 On July 22, Alexander Zhilin, a military journalist, in the July 22 issue of Moskovskaya Pravda, quoted “trustworthy sources in the Kremlin,” that persons close to Dyachenko were planning to use terror attacks in Moscow to discredit Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, who had emerged as one of Yeltsin’s most serious political opponents. The plan was referred to as “Storm in Moscow” and was to include attacks on the headquarters of the FSB, MVD and Federation Council, kidnappings by Chechen rebels and a war between criminal gangs. All of this was intended to create the impression that Luzhkov had lost control over the city.2

During this fateful summer when Moscow was awash with rumors, I was friendly with a Russian political operative who was well connected to the higher levels of Russian power. When I met him, he told me about the growing fear in the Kremlin about the possibility of losing power and the indications that Moscow would be the scene of a huge provocation. He said that the issue was the security of Yeltsin and his family in the case of a handover of power. He said that if there was no agreement on terms, “they will blow up half of Moscow.”

I sensed the uneasiness but did not know how to assess the prediction of my friend. I had no illusions about Yeltsin and his cronies but it was hard to imagine that a man who came to power as a result of a peaceful anti-communist revolution with massive public support would be willing to murder his own people to hold onto power. Developing events, however, were to change my mind.

At 9:40 p.m. on September 4, a truck bomb exploded in Buinaksk, Dagestan’s second-largest city. It destroyed a five story apartment building, which housed soldiers from the 136th Motor Rifle Brigade.

The events in Buinaksk, although major, did not stun the nation because Dagestan was a war zone. On September 9, however, the terrorists struck again, this time in Moscow. Shortly after midnight, a bomb exploded in the basement of a building at 19 Guryanova Street in a working class area in the southeast part of the city. The central section of the building was obliterated, leaving the left and right stairwells standing on each side of a gaping hole. Fires raged for hours under the rubble. “It’s like hell underneath,” one rescuer said. “Even if they survived the blast, they would have been burned alive.”3 In the end 94 persons were killed and 164 injured. Russian officials blamed the bombing on Chechen terrorists seeking revenge for their “defeat” in Dagestan. The Moscow FSB announced that items removed from the scene showed traces of TNT and hexogen, a powerful military explosive.

On September 13, four days after the explosion on Guryanov Street, there was an explosion at five o’clock in the morning at 6 Kashirskoye Highway in Moscow that flattened a nine-story brick apartment building, transforming it into a pile of rubble. The explosion took place at a time when almost all of the residents were asleep. Muscovites awoke to graphic television footage showing emergency workers feverishly going through the debris. The death toll was eventually established at 119 with 200 injured.

The Russian capital was now seized by fear. Every one of the city’s 30,000 residential building was ordered to be checked for explosives and residents organized round-the-clock patrols. There were thousands of calls to the police reporting suspicious activity.

On September 16, the terror spread. With the funerals of the Moscow victims still going on, a truck bomb exploded in Volgodonsk in southern Russia. The blast ripped off the facade of a nine-story apartment building. The dead bodies of 18 persons, including two children, were pulled from the rubble. Eighty-nine persons were hospitalized. The explosion, like that on Kashirskoye Highway, took place at five in the morning. The psychological shock was so great that afterward hundreds of people were unwilling to sleep in their homes and insisted on spending the night outdoors. The bomb left a crater 3.5 meters in depth and 13-15 meters in diameter. Parts of the GAZ-53 vehicle that carried the bomb were dispersed over a radius of 1.5 kilometers.

The Volgodonsk bombing appeared to mean that there would now be attempts to bomb apartment buildings in cities outside of Moscow. This expectation was soon borne out, but with surprising consequences. At 8:30 p.m., on September 22, Alexei Kartofelnikov returned home to his apartment in Ryazan, a city 120 miles southeast of Moscow after a weekend at his dacha. He noticed a white Lada parked in front of the building at 14/16 Novoselov Street with a male passenger in the back seat. The last two numbers on the car’s license plates were covered with pieces of paper that had “62,” the code for Ryazan, written on them. Kartofelnikov went up to his apartment and called the police. His daughter, Yulia, a 23-year-old medical intern, went out onto the balcony and watched as a man emerged from the basement, checked his watch and got into the car where there were two persons.

When the police arrived, Yulia insisted that they check the basement. The basement had been used as a toilet by local derelicts so they were far from enthusiastic. But the police finally went down the steps. They ran back up shouting, “There’s a bomb.” The building was soon engulfed in chaos. Police began going door to door telling residents to leave. People took babies out of bathtub, grabbed documents and threw on overcoats. Those too ill or weak to leave the building were left behind

As residents watched on the street, the police, including Yuri Tkachenko, the head of the local bomb squad, entered the basement. Tkachenko, disconnected a detonator and timing device and then tested three sacks of a white crystalline substance with an MO-2 portable gas analyzer. The contents of the sacks tested positive for hexogen, the same substance used in the previous apartment bombings. There now was no question but that someone had tried to blow up the building.

The sacks were taken out of the basement at around 1:30 a.m. and driven away by the FSB. The FSB agents forgot to take away the highly professional military detonator, however, which was left in the hands of the bomb squad. They photographed it the next day.

On the basis of descriptions by Kartofelnikov, his daughter and a neighbor, the police prepared identi-kit portraits of the suspects. In the meantime, the railroad stations and airport were cordoned off and roads leading out of the city were blocked.

As morning broke, the white Lada was found abandoned in a parking lot. A short time later, a call to Moscow was made from a public telephone in Ryazan, and the operator, who connected the call, caught a fragment of the conversation. The caller said there was no way to get out of town undetected. The voice on the other end replied, “Split up and each of you make your own way out.” The operator reported the call to the police and they traced the number. To their surprise, the number belonged not to Chechen terrorists but to the FSB. The terrorists were soon arrested and to the stupefaction of the police, produced FSB identification. The FSB called and ordered them released.

The FSB now had no choice but to offer some type of explanation.             On Friday, September 24, the FSB director Nikolai Patrushev came out of a Kremlin meeting and announced that the evacuation of the building had been part of a training exercise.

Patrushev’s statement was in direct contradiction to what the authorities had been saying for two days. On the morning of September 24, Alexander Sergeev, the head of the Ryazan FSB, appeared on television and congratulated residents on being saved from a terrorist attack. Vladimir Rushailo, the Interior Minister, announced on national television that an attempted terrorist act had been foiled. But now Patrushev said the incident was a test. The sacks found by the bomb squad contained sugar and the reading that indicated that they contained hexogen was an error. Patrushev said that there were similar exercises in other cities but only in Ryazan did the people react promptly. He complimented the residents on their vigilance.

The strange “training exercise” provoked anger in Ryazan where people had spent the night on the street. Journalists now raised the possibility that all the bombings—the four successful bombings and the failed bombing in Ryazan—had been the work of the FSB. Society, however, proved incapable of reacting in an organized fashion. The day after the supposedly fake bomb in Ryazan was discovered, Russian aircraft began bombing the Grozny Airport, and on October 1 Russian troops moved across the border launching the second Chechen war.

Russians refer to Hitler’s “treacherous attack” on the Soviet Union, and it was anger over the treachery that helped to mobilize the population in the first days of World War II. The apartment bombings played a similar role. For the vast majority of Russians, the Chechens, by bombing the buildings in Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, had carried the war to the Russian people and now had to be made to pay a price. The Ryazan episode was disturbing but it slipped from consciousness, temporarily forgotten amid the rush of fast moving events.

Five years earlier, the first Chechen war had begun with the slaughter of Russian troops trapped in their tanks in the narrow streets of Grozny on New Year’s night, 1994–95. This time, the invasion of Chechnya was carried out methodically and seemingly with success. In the wake of the apparently successful Russian revenge attack, Putin’s popularity soared. In August, 2 percent of the population favored Putin for the presidency. By September, his popularity was 4 percent. In October, it reached 21 percent. In November, Putin was favored for the presidency by 45 percent of the population, far more than any other candidate. It was now clear that there would be no need to introduce emergency rule and postpone the elections. Putin would be able to win the election on his own with the help of a new war.

On September 14, the day after first Moscow bombing, Putin said that the security services were certain of the participation of Osama Bin Laden in the bombings. Nikolai Patrushev, the director of the FSB, said that the organizers of the bombings were “international terrorists dug in in Chechnya with the connivance of the official powers in Grozny…” These statements had some effect in leading the West to tie the apartment bombings to international Islamic terrorists.

More important, however, was the sheer difficulty of accepting the idea that any regime would murder hundreds of its own citizens to terrify the nation and hold on to power. This refusal to believe the unbelievable, however, came at a cost. It crippled Western and in particular U.S. policy toward Russia, rendering it naive and ineffectual. From the moment Putin took power the West was dealing with Russia on the basis of a picture of the country that had no relation to reality.

In December 1999, Russia held parliamentary elections and the groundswell of support for Putin and the new war in Chechnya transformed the political landscape. The “Unity” Party, which was created on the advice of Berezovsky and had no platform besides support for Putin, achieved a striking political success. If, under Yeltsin, a powerful President was confronted by an oppositional parliament, now the pro-Putin forces achieved a firm majority in Parliament and there was no longer a political base for opposition.

On New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin resigned and Putin, who only months before had been almost completely unknown, was appointed acting President in a Kremlin ceremony and given the nuclear codes. Putin then issued a decree granting Yeltsin lifelong immunity from prosecution.

With the help of the September bombings, the anger of the population was redirected from the criminal oligarchy that had pillaged the country to the Chechens. The election took place on March 26, 2000. Putin eschewed serious campaigning and avoided even explaining where he stood on the major issues facing the country. Despite this, he won with 54 percent of the vote.

The strange events that made possible Putin’s rise to power were not an anomaly. In fact, the bombings were the logical culmination of the history of the previous eight years. Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s led to an upheaval that destroyed the moral orientation of the population. Under communism, Russia was organized on the basis of false values, but a moral code of sorts did exist. In the post-Soviet era, the idea that there was such a thing as right and wrong was all but jettisoned, and a new hierarchy emerged in which the gangster was king.

The criminal takeover of Russia under Yeltsin unfolded with a seemingly tragic inevitability. The transformation of economic structures was dramatic but it took place without the most important pre-condition for civilized capitalism: the rule of law.

On January 2, 1992, the reform government led by Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar abruptly freed prices. In ten months, prices rose 25 to 30 times. By April, almost all the money in people’s savings accounts—money saved for decades—had disappeared.

Officially, privatization started in 1992 with the distribution to the population of vouchers. Each voucher, denominated at 10,000 rubles, supposedly represented a citizen’s share of the national wealth. Factories were converted into joint stock companies and citizens were invited to exchange their vouchers for shares in any enterprise.

Most Russians, however, had no idea what to do with their vouchers. Some used them to buy shares in their own factories. Others invested them in supposed voucher funds which advertised widely and promised dividends. Many vouchers were sold on the street, often for as little as $10 or a bottle of vodka. Mysterious persons who looked like vagrants appeared at bus stops and metro stations with cardboard signs on which were written the words “I buy vouchers.” The shabby appearance of the purchasers was deliberate. It created the impression that the vouchers had no real value. Watching this spectacle in 1993 and 1994, I also formed the impression that the vouchers were useless. But corrupt business and organized crime groups were behind the vagrants. Through them, the first private property was created legally in Russia, and the first fortunes.

Representatives of the groups that collected vouchers appeared at auctions and used them to buy shares in industrial enterprises. By some estimates, a third of Russia’s industry passed into their hands for vouchers worth $1.2 billion. As for the rest of the population, in most cases their investments in voucher funds or shares of their own factory produced nothing.

In the latter part of 1994, voucher privatization was succeeded by privatization for cash. By now, there was a group that could participate in it. Voucher privatization produced at least five oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman, the head of the Alfa Group, Oleg Deripaska, who gained control of the Sayansk Aluminum Factory, Vladimir Bogdanov, the head of the Surgutneftegas oil concern, Kacha Bendukidze, who received a share of the giant Uralmash machine building factory, and, in part, Vladimir Potanin through his firm, Microdin, which worked actively in the privatization market. In addition, several others had become billionaires by appropriating state resources with the help of corrupt connections: Mikhail Khodorkovsky (currency operations), Boris Berezovsky (automobiles), Valdimir Gusinsky (real estate), and Alexander Smolensky (banking).

Many of the newly rich set up banks, and these banks began to be “empowered” to handle government accounts. The official rate of return on the government’s money was not high, but what mattered was that the empowered banks, ignoring instructions that were not enforced anyway, treated budgetary funds as free capital available for investment. They delayed payments for months, often using the money for short term inter-bank credits that were given at rates as high as 400 percent. In the meantime, non-payment of salaries became a reality for millions of Russians.

It was this new group of millionaires and billionaires who, with the advent of the second stage of privatization, were able to buy up Russia’s mines and factories for a fraction of their true value. Enterprises were officially sold at auction. But the auctions were almost always fixed. The State Property Committee routinely eliminated bidders or provided information about competing offers to the predetermined winner. True competitive bidding was a rarity and in the event that a powerful group was outbid by an insistent competitor, the successful bidder could easily pay for his tenacity with his life.

The prices for which enterprises were sold stunned Russian society; 324 factories were sold at an average price of less than $4 million each. The Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Combine went for $3.73 million. The Murmansk Trawler Fleet, which consisted of a hundred ships, was sold for $2.5 million. On September 9, 1994, the bulletin, “Independent Strategy,” wrote:

The greater part of the basic productive funds of Russia are being sold for somewhere around $5 billion. Even if one considers that in Russia the price of the basic means of production is equal to her gross domestic product [in the West, it usually is at least 2.6 times higher] … in effect, 300 to 400 billion dollars; the sum realized in privatization is minimal. For this reason, the agency recommends English investors not to miss the chance and to take part in the purchase of Russian enterprises.”4

In late 1994, the Russian government launched the “loans for shares” program which made possible the creation in Russia of companies comparable in size to the largest American corporations.

Under the program, the government mortgaged shares in the most desirable non-privatized enterprises in return for loans. Once an enterprise had been mortgaged, the proprietary bank was free to exploit it, and when the government failed to repay the bank loans, which given the state’s revenue shortage was always the case, the enterprise became the property of the bank that provided the original loan.

The loans for shares auctions resembled a play. A previously unknown firm would offer a bid that was almost identical to the starting price set by the bank that organized the bidding. The organizing bank could then, after ruling out other bids on various pretexts, offer a bid that was slightly higher than that of its “competitor.” The organizing bank thereby effectively set the price at which the enterprise it was buying would be sold.

Loans for shares completed the process of creating a class of super-rich oligarchs by allowing them to acquire the nation’s assets at almost no cost. The scheme, however, provided very little in badly needed revenue to the government. In 1995, for example, the total revenue from the mortgage auctions of 21 of Russia’s most profitable enterprises was $691.4 million and 400 billion rubles, a fraction of the real value of what had been the crown jewels of the Soviet economy.

In April, 1996, the oligarchs were already a well-established institution in Russia. Despite the fact that in almost all cases they owed their wealth to theft, they presented themselves as enterprising capitalists with an indisputable right to rule. In a letter signed by 13 oligarchs and published in leading Russian newspapers, they issued a veiled threat that appeared to be directed against the communists, who were gaining in the public opinion polls. “Those who rely on social confrontation and ideological revanchism,” the letter said, “should understand that the national entrepreneurs have the necessary resources and will to deal with … unprincipled … politicians.”

The pillaging of the country, however, led to economic collapse. In the period 1992–98, Russia’s gross domestic product fell by half. (During the Great Depression, the American economy shrunk by 30.5 percent.) The collapse of industrial production was even greater, declining 56 percent between 1992 and 1998. This did not happen even under German occupation. Russia became a classic third world country, selling its raw materials—oil, gas, and precious metals—to import consumer goods. People went months and even years without being paid. As a result, millions were forced to spend weekends in the countryside growing their own food in order to survive.

The economic disaster was accompanied by a demographic catastrophe. In the years 1990–94 male life expectancy fell by more than six years. In 1998, it was 57 years, the lowest in the industrial world. Female life expectancy fell from 76 to 70. Child mortality doubled. The almost vertical rise in the death rate was nearly unprecedented for a country that was not at . At first, Western demographers did not believe the figures. During the 1990s, the Russian population overall fell by 750,000 a year.

The government during these years, having received very little from privatization, regularly spent more than it had. In a bid to narrow the deficit, it began issuing short term government obligations (GKOs). These were denominated in rubles and usually had a three- to six-month term. The market grew from $3 billion at the end of 1994 to $47.6 billion in 1996 and $64.7 billion in 1997. As the government’s financial position worsened, however, the rate of interest rose, sometimes exceeding 200 per cent. By mid-1998, the government was spending $1 billion a week simply to pay on its obligations. Faced with an overwhelming financial crisis, on August 17, the government devalued the currency, defaulted on $40 billion worth of treasury bills and halted the repayment of commercial debt. Prices rose sharply and the nascent middle class was destroyed.

The 1998 collapse was a shock for Russian society. People returned from summer vacations to find that the cash machines of their banks were locked. Currency exchange points posted new ruble-dollar exchange rates every hour. People began to scoop up everything in the stores, including salt, sugar, matches, and flour. Many small businesses collapsed, and there was a rash of contract killings of borrowers who could not repay their debts. Living standards fell by an estimated 40 percent.

In 1998, in the wake of the Russian financial crisis, Yeltsin nominated Yevgeny Primakov, the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, to be Prime Minister. The crisis had destroyed much of the support Yeltsin still had, and the appointment of Primakov was a compromise with the political opposition after the Duma twice voted down Yeltsin’s attempt to reappoint the former Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to the post, causing a sharp decline in the economy. Primakov, however, was not content with the political status quo. Once appointed, he authorized an investigation of the Yeltsin family and of some of the oligarchs, starting with Berezovsky.

In the fall of 1997, Carla del Ponte, the Swiss Prosecutor General, was given police reports showing that Russian organized crime controlled more than 300 firms in Switzerland and that a Swiss businessman of Albanian origin, Behgjet Pacolli, who headed Mabetex, the construction company that was doing reconstruction work on the Kremlin, was providing unexplained funds to Yeltsin and his daughters. In September 1998, these documents were forwarded to Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov. On January 22, 1999, the office of Mabetex was raided in Lugano, and records were discovered that showed payments of $600,000 on the credit cards of Yeltsin’s daughters. It also seemed that Pacolli had paid kickbacks to Pavel Borodin, the director of the presidential administration, for the contracts to work on the Kremlin. Skuratov, meanwhile, intensified his investigation into the activities of Berezovsky. On February 2 and 4, heavily armed FSB agents raided Aeroflot and the private security firm Atoll, which was also associated with Berezovsky.

The investigation of Dyachenko and Berezovsky was a direct challenge to the regime. It came, moreover, at a time when Yeltsin was reportedly suffering blackouts and periods of disorientation and many important decisions were being made by Dyachenko.

The Yeltsin entourage was not slow to react. The FSB under then-Director Vladimir Putin secretly filmed Skuratov in a sauna engaging in sex with two prostitutes. The film was shown on the state television channel, RTR in primetime, and Skuratov was forced to resign. An arrest order against Berezovsky was revoked.

The elimination of Skuratov, however, could not eliminate the long-term threat to the Yeltsin “family,” in the event of a future loss of power. Yeltsin’s health was deteriorating rapidly. Sensing Yeltsin’s weakness, the opposition in the State Duma scheduled a vote on impeachment. For months, Yeltsin had absented himself from the daily political struggle and avoided decisions. On May 12, the day before the opening of the hearings, however, he fired Primakov and installed the Interior Minister, Sergei Stepashin, as acting Premier. Yeltsin’s readiness to fire Primakov, the most popular politician in the country, was taken as a sign to the deputies that, his health notwithstanding, in the event of impeachment he was ready to suppress the parliament by force.

The impeachment vote failed, but Yuri Luzhkov began to organize opposition to Yeltsin in anticipation of the 2000 elections. He recruited Primakov for his Fatherland-All Russia movement and said that if Primakov ran for President, he would support him.

At first, members of the Yeltsin entourage hoped that Stepashin would be able to defeat Primakov in an election. It soon became clear, however, that Stepashin did not relish attacking Yeltsin’s opponents, and there were reports that he rejected schemes for introducing a state of emergency and cancelling the Presidential elections out of fear of igniting a civil war. Among the schemes being discussed by insiders was “Storm in Moscow,” which was reported by Moskovskaya Pravda. On August 5, however, with the political crisis at its peak, a Chechen Islamist force invaded Dagestan.

The invasion of Dagestan was suspicious from the start. In late spring, with an attack expected, the authorities withdrew Russian internal troops that were stationed on the border. A high-ranking Russian police official later said that if the internal forces had not been withdrawn, the invasion would not have been possible.

When a force of 1,200 armed men commanded by the Chechen leader Shamil Basaev entered Dagestan from Chechnya, they encountered no serious resistance. On August 23, they withdrew, again without encountering resistance. A Russian commander told a reporter for Time magazine that he had Basaev in his sights but was ordered to hold his fire. “We could have wiped him out then and there,” he said, “but the bosses in Moscow wanted him alive.”

On August 9, Stepashin was dismissed and Putin was named the new Prime Minister. The prospects of the all but unknown Putin, like those of anyone associated with Yeltsin, appeared negligible. But between September 4–16, the apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk were blown up, completely changing the course of political events.

1Patrick Cockburn, “Russia ‘planned Chechen war before bombings’,” The Independent, January 29, 2000.

2John B. Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999 (Ibidem-Verlag, 2012), pp. 20–2.

3Oksana Yablokova, Simon Saradzhyan, and Lera Kor, “Apartment Block Explodes, Dozens Dead,” Moscow Times, September 10, 1999

4Svetlana Glinkina, Andrei Grigoriev, and Vakhtang Yakobidze, “Crime and Corruption,” in The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry, Lawrence R. Klein and Marshall Pomer, eds. (Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 247

David Satter has written about Russia for four decades. 

He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow 

at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). 

The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, from which this essay is adapted, is his fourth book.

Andrew Jackson calls for Indian removal: Submitting to the laws of the States, ~~ merge(s) in our population.

Andrew Jackson calls for Indian removal

State of the Union address, 1829.

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Andrew Jackson had long wanted to remove American Indians west of the Mississippi. When he became President in 1829, he pushed for Indian removal to become official U.S. policy. About the painting

The condition and ulterior destiny of the Indian tribes within the limits of some of our States have become objects of much interest and importance. It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life. This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits. A portion, however, of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama. These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which inducedthe latter to call upon the United States for protection.

Under these circumstances the question presented was whether the General Government had a right to sustain those people in their pretensions. The Constitution declares that “no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State” without the consent of its legislature. If the General Government is not permitted to tolerate the erection of a confederate State within the territory of one of the members of this Union against her consent, much less could it allow a foreign and independent government to establish itself there.

Georgia became a member of the Confederacy which eventuated in our Federal Union as a sovereign State, always asserting her claim to certain limits, which, having been originally defined in her colonial charter and subsequently recognized in the treaty of peace, she has ever since continued to enjoy, except as they have been circumscribed by her own voluntary transfer of a portion of her territory to the United States in the articles of cession of 1802. Alabama was admitted into the Union on the same footing with the original States, with boundaries which were prescribed by Congress.

There is no constitutional, conventional, or legal provision which allows them less power over the Indians within their borders than is possessed by Maine or New York. Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the General Government to support them in resisting such a measure? Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent people under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty of this Government to protect them in the attempt? If the principle involved in the obvious answer to these questions be abandoned, it will follow that the objects of this Government are reversed, and that it has become a part of its duty to aid in destroying the States which it was established to protect.

Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.

Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast over-taking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new States, whose limits they could control. That step can not be retraced. A State can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race. As a means of effecting this end I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any State or Territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use. There they may be secured in the enjoyment of governments of their own choice, subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes. There the benevolentmay endeavor to teach them the arts of civilization, and, by promoting union and harmony among them, to raise up an interesting commonwealth, destined to perpetuate the race and to attest the humanity and justice of this Government.

This emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase. Submitting to the laws of the States, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property, they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population.

On Saponi Collins Family: Robert K. Thomas Aug 1980

August

12, 1980

Dear Mrs.******

I am writing to you to thank you and your husband for your kindness to me when I was in Coeburn last month. I am now finished with my survey of the Indian groups in the southern Appalachian area and am back in Michigan. Since you seemed interested in the history of the Collins family in your area, I will pass along to you what I know of their

history.

As far as I can determine, all the Collins of Northeastern Tennessee, Southeastern Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky are descendants of one household of Collins who resided in Orange County, N.C. in 1760: a family of Saponi Indians. I know that it must be “mind-boggling” to imagine that the thousands of Collinses in your area are all descended from just one household, but such is the case. Further, this is not so amazing as it sounds.

 It is common among pre-Revolutionary American families. For instance, all the Carters in the South are descended from three brothers who came to Virginia in the late

1600’s.

Let me start at the beginning , with the Saponi Indians.

 The Saponi were an advanced tribe who originally lived on the Roanoke River about where it crosses over into North Carolina from Virginia. In the late 1660’s, they moved

further west to the area of modern Clarksville, VA. Here they allied with the

neighboring Tutelo and Occanuki Indians. All of these tribes spoke similar

languages, a variety of language akin to modern Sioux of the Dakotas. In the

1670’s, they got into a war with Virginia whites, the so-called Bacon Rebellion,

and moved west to the Yadkin Valley around modern Winston Salem. In the early

1700’s, the Saponi started migrating east, returning to their original homeland.

In 1714 Governor Spotswood of Virginia established Ft. Christanna

near modern Lawrenceville,VA and convinced the Saponi, Occanuki, and Tutelo to

settle there. In about 1722, the Tutelo left and joined the Iroquois in New York and during the Revolution, fled to Canada where they now live on the Six

Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario. The Occanuki were absorbed by the

Saponi in this period. About 1728, the Saponi became involved in a war with

the Tuscarora and Nottowa Indians who lived further east. They fled from Ft.

Christanna, and went to live with the Catawba in South Carolina.

In the early 1740’s, the Saponi left the Catawba country and started north. By 1740, Collins and Bowling (Scien, Bolling, etc.) were common family names among the Saponi. One band of Saponi headed north to the Iroquois area and were adopted by the

Cayuga and Seneca. There are descendants of the Saponi now on the Caltaraugus’s

reservation near Buffalo; some of them named Collins. [We need to find these

Collins among the reserve.] Another band of Saponi stopped in North Carolina

and settled on the plantation of Colonel William Eaton, near what is now

Henderson, N.C. The Saponi had fought with Eaton in the wars with the Ohio

Valley tribes. Eaton’s plantation was on the frontier and the Saponi were,

no doubt, his protectors.

Around 1750, several tribes further east --- the Nansemond, Yeopin, and Poroskite --- lost their lands and began to fragment into individual family groups. These Indian families began to migrate to the frontier and settle near the Saponi. In 1760, Eaton died and the frontier had moved on. The Saponi lost their land base then and also began to fragment into individual families, and move west. In 1760’s, I can pick up the Collins in Orange County, on the frontier, west of Hendersonville, N.C.

1755 Edition of the Fry-Jefferson map shows the location of Occaneechi

By 1790, many of these Indian families, including the Collinses, had “bunched up” in the counties of extreme northeastern North Carolina. Then in the 1790’s, they spread all over

Northeastern Tennessee, Southwestern Virginia, and over into what is now Letcher and Knott Counties, Kentucky. Many of them , like the Bollings of Wise County, became prominent families in their areas.

Then, in the 1830’s, Virginia became one of the more consciously racist and deliberately elitist states in the Union. First,  most poor whites were disenfranchised by a property value requirement; most Virginians west of the Blue Ridge, as well as the poor further east, could not legally vote in Virginia. Further, a new legal category included citizen Indians, free blacks, and all non-whites. These “free colored” could not vote, bear arms, travel freely, etc. In southwest Virginia and neighboring parts of Tennessee, the more established Indian families “weathered the storm”.

The Bollings in Wise County, redefined their status as being descendants of

Pocahontas and John Rolfe, thus escaping the free colored category. Other

families who were less wealthy, darker, and concentrated in one area, got caught

in the free colored category; and, thus the Melungeons of southern Wise County

came into existence.

By 1840, the situation became intolerable for some Indians in Southwest Virginia, and they began to head for Kentucky, a less repressive social and legal atmosphere. In the 1840’s, three Collins families moved into Kentucky, into Letcher County. In the 1850’s, two Collins families moved to Johnson County, just south of Paintsville (Grandpap William Collins and brother). {Frankie’s note here: This is where my 2nd great grandparents Griffin and Rachael Collins went also, and were listed as Mulatto on Johnson County census records} These Collinses were very Indian looking and dark. They must have been almost full-blood Indians.

In Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, Indians were just another variety of “n----r” in the 1850’s, but Kentucky was much more liberal, at least in regards to Indians.

By World War I, the situation had changed. Being Indian had almost a romantic prestige about it, and many families like the Collinses in Kentucky, had become successful

mainstream citizens. It was at this point that the Melungeons began to be seen as possibly being part black, in order to explain their low rank and exclusion.

Of course, the Collinses did not stop in Johnson County. The lower Big Sandy drainage and Southern Ohio is full of Collinses who migrated to those areas from further south in Kentucky and Virginia after the Civil War. [Where are all these Collins?]

Freeling and Hannah Stephens Collins

Not all the Collinses headed west in 1760 after Colonel Eaton died. Some few went south to what is now Robeson County, North Carolina, and became part of the modern Lumbee Indians in that region. The history of the Collins family is both remarkable and fascinating. They are almost an “ethnic group” all by themselves. There are Seneca Cayuga Collinses in New York [Again we need to find these Collins families], White and Melungeon Collinses in east Tennessee and Southeast Virginia, part-Indian Collinses all down the Big Sandy and into Southern Ohio, Lumbee Indian Collinses in North Carolina --- all, at least distantly, related and all descended from two or three households of Saponi Indians in 1740.

 Someone should write a novel about your family; at least, you should rent a stadium and have a family reunion. What an “outfit”! I hope this brief sketch of the Collins family

history repays you for your kindness to me, some small measure.

Sincerely,

Robert K.Thomas

1980, submitted by Keri Conley:

August 12, 1980

The Dark Historical Roots Of Our 'Thanksgiving'

Lest We Forget...
From Tristan
11-26-3

The arrival of Europeans on the east cost of North America occurred not in 1620, but well before. French and Dutch fishermen and settlers had been in the area as early as 1614, and had been responsible for kidnapping Indians, selling them into slavery, and maliciously infecting them with smallpox.   In 1620, the pilgrims arrived on the east coast and within two days they had received assistance from the local Wampanoag Indian tribe: The pilgrims stole their stored crops, dug up graves for dishes and pots, and took many native people as prisoners and forced them to teach crop planting and survival techniques to the colonists in their new environment.    Sachem Massasoit Luckily, for the colonists, an ex-slave named Squanto had recently escaped slavery in England, spoke English fluently and was able to instruct the pilgrims in crop planting, fishing, and hunting. Squanto not only escaped from slavery, he was also one of the only survivors of his tribe, the rest had been wiped out from the European smallpox plagues years before. When it came to helping the rag-tag team of colonists, Squanto, not only was able to put aside his personal differences with the people who had enslaved him and killed off his entire tribe, but also helped make the colonists self-sufficient, and aided in brokering a treaty with the Wampanoag tribe. In 1621 Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, signed a "treaty of friendship" giving the English permission to occupy 12,000 acres of land. In 1621 the myth of thanksgiving was born. The colonists invited Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags, to their first feast as a follow up to their recent land deal. Massasoit in turn invited 90 of his men, much to the chagrin of the colonists. Two years later the English invited a number of tribes to a feast "symbolizing eternal friendship." The English offered food and drink, and two hundred Indians dropped dead from unknown poison.   The first day of thanksgiving took place in 1637 amidst the war against the Pequots. 700 men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe were gathered for their annual green corn dance on what is now Groton, Connecticut. Dutch and English mercenaries surrounded the camp and proceeded to shoot, stab, butcher and burn alive all 700 people. The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony held a feast in celebration and the governor declared "a day of thanksgiving." In the ensuing madness of the Indian extermination, natives were scalped, burned, mutilated and sold into slavery, and a feast was held in celebration every time a successful massacre took place. The killing frenzy got so bad that even the Churches of Manhattan announced a day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the "heathen savages," and many celebrated by kicking the severed heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls. 1637 Pequot tribe massacre The proclamation of 1676 announced the first national day of thanksgiving with the onset of the Wampanoag war, the very people who helped the original colonists survive on their arrival. Massasoit, the chief invited to eat with the puritans in 1621, died in 1661. His son Metacomet, later to be known by the English as King Phillip, originally honored the treaties made by his father with the colonists, but after years of further encroachment and destruction of the land, slave trade, and slaughter, Metacomet changed his mind. In 1675 "King Phillip" called upon all natives to unite to defend their homelands from the English. For the next year the bloody conflict went on non-stop, until Metacomet was captured, murdered, quartered, his hands were cut off and sent to Boston, his head was impaled on a pike in the town square of Plymouth for the next 25 years, and his nine-year-old son was shipped to the Caribbean to be a slave for the rest of his life.   On June 20, 1676 Edward Rawson was unanimously voted by the governing council of Charlestown, Massachusetts, to proclaim June 29th as the first day of thanksgiving. The proclamation reads in part: "The Holy God having by a long and Continual Series of his Afflictive dispensations in and by the present War with the Heathen Natives of this land, written and brought to pass bitter things against his own Covenant people in this wilderness, yet so that we evidently discern that in the midst of his judgments he hath remembered mercyÖ The council has thought meet to appoint and set apart the 29th day of this instant June, as a day of solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God for such his Goodness and FavorÖ"   It was not until 1863 that Abe Lincoln, needing a wave of patriotism to hold the country together, that Thanksgiving was nationally and officially declared and set forth to this day. At the time, two days were announced as days to give thanks, the first was a celebration of the victory at Gettysburg on August 6th, and the second one became the Thursday in November that we know now.   The most interesting part of thanksgiving is the propaganda that has been put out surrounding it. During the 19th century thanksgiving traditions consisted of turkey and family reunions. Whenever popular art contained both pilgrims and Indians, the scene was usually characterized by violent confrontations between the two groups, not a multi-cultural/multi-racial dinner. In 1914 artist Jennie Brownscombe created the vision of thanksgiving that we see today: community, religion, racial harmony and tolerance, after her notorious painting reached wide circulation in Life magazine. national day of mourning Plymouth, Ma Adamant protests to the celebration of thanksgiving have taken place over the years. As early as 1863 Pequot Indian Minister William Apess urged "every man of color" to mourn the day of the landing, and bury Plymouth Rock in protest. In 1970 Apess got his way. 1970 was the "350th" anniversary of thanksgiving, and became the first proclaimed national day of mourning for American Indians.   State officials of Massachusetts asked Frank B. James, President of the federated Eastern Indian League, to speak at the thanksgiving celebration. The speech he submitted read: "Today is a time of celebrating for youÖ but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my peopleÖ The pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape CodÖ before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beansÖ Massasoit, the great leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his people welcomed and befriended the settlersÖ, little knowing thatÖ before 50 years were to pass, the WampanoagsÖ and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from themÖ Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important." James was subsequently barred from speaking.   As a result, hundreds of people from around the country came to support him by gathering around the statue of Massasoit that had been erected in town. The protesters buried Plymouth Rock twice that day. For the next 24 years, American Indians staged protest every thanksgiving, in 1996 the United American Indians of New England put a stop to the annual pilgrim parade and forced the marchers to turn around and head back toward the seaside (symbolism?). In 1997 the peaceful protestors were assaulted by members of the Plymouth police, the county sheriffs department, and state troopers on horseback in full riot gear. Men, women, children, and elders were beaten, pepper sprayed and gassed. Twenty-Five people were arrested; blacks, whites, latinos, Indians, and even a 67-year-old Penobscot elder were taken to jail. Videotape was later produced to confirm the assault and ensuing police brutality. Plymouth is known as "Americas Hometown."   Finally in 1999 plaques were approved and dedicated to commemorate "genocide" and other crimes against indigenous peoples of the Americas. The plaque at Coles Hill, where the statue of Massasoit is reads: "Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the pilgrims and other European settlersÖ To them, thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture." The second plaque in the towns post office square honors "King Phillip", Massasoits son.   ~~~~~~~~~~   Please email: Tristan_Ahtone@hotmail.com for a copy of sources used to compile this information. And please feel free to use this piece at your thanksgiving dinners, give it to your friends, or send it with your kids to school. He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think he knows enough.