In an April 26, 2022 interview with Ivan Yegorov of Rossikaya Gazeta titled " Patrushev: the West Created an Empire that Aims to Destroy Russia", Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of Russia's Security Council described the current fighting as Russia's fight for survival as a sovereign nation. The Ukrainians fighting Russia were merely the proxies of the evil American Empire, who were willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. The Americans never valued the lives of others as can be seen by their treatment of the American Indians, the nuclear devastation to Japan, and continuing with atrocities in Vietnam and Iraq. The Russians and other unprofitable nations could now be sacrificed to prevent overpopulation of the planet.
The interview was picked up by most Russian outlets and for good reason. Patrushev is considered one of Vladimir Putin's few confidants and replaced him as head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) the successor to the KGB. It has been rumored that if Putin is incapacitated by illness, Patrushev will take over the reins. The interview with Patrushev follows below:[1]
Nikolai Patrushev (Source: Katehon.com)
Nikolai Platonovich, today the term "Second Cold War" probably no longer seems an exaggeration. The Americans unabashedly announce that they won the confrontation with the USSR and will be victorious now as well. How would you evaluate these views?
Tragic scenarios of world crises, both in previous years and today are imposed by Washington in its quest to buttress its hegemony [in an attempt] to resist the collapse of a unipolar world. The US is doing everything to ensure that the other centers of a multipolar world won’t even dare to raise their heads. In turn, our country not just dared to do that but announced loudly and clearly that it would not play by the rules imposed on it. They tried to force Russia to renounce its sovereignty, its identity, its culture, its independent foreign and domestic policy. We have no right to go along with this approach.
In an attempt to suppress Russia, the Americans, via their proxies in Kyiv, decided to establish an antithesis to our country, cynically choosing Ukraine for this task. Basically they tried to divide an essentially unified nation. As Washington failed to find a positive basis for bringing Ukrainians to their side, it had long before the 2014 coup instilled in the Ukrainians the exclusivity of their nation and hatred of all things Russian.
History teaches us, however, that hatred can never be a reliable factor of national unity. If anything unites the people residing in Ukraine today, it’s fear of the atrocities of nationalist battalions. Therefore, the result of the policies of the West and the Kyiv regime, under its control, can only be the Ukraine’s disintegration into several states.
Europe, as you warned us a year ago, ended up facing an unprecedented crisis, including one caused by the inflow of Ukrainian refugees. How might this affect the domestic situation in the European states themselves?
Europe will face a deep economic and political crisis. Growing inflation and declining living standards are already affecting the Europeans' wallet and sentiments. Furthermore, a large-scale migration adds new problems to old security threats, such as illegal drug trafficking and transnational crime. Nearly 5 million Ukrainian migrants have already arrived in Europe. In the near future, their number will rise to 10 million. The majority of Ukrainians, who flee to the West believe that Europeans should support and provide for them, and when they are forced to work, they start to rebel.
Representatives of the criminal underworld, who fled Ukraine, will try to occupy profitable niches [of criminal activity] and assume control over the local criminal groups. This, no doubt, will be followed by an aggravation of criminal activity in Europe. Such a widespread "business" as the trafficking of orphans smuggled from Ukraine for illegal adoption in Europe, will get a "second wind".
The West has already witnessed a resurgence of the grey market for the purchase of human organs from vulnerable social groups in the Ukrainian population for underground transplants for European patients. The inflow of migrants from Ukraine began long before 2022, and now it simply has reminded Europe of its long-forgotten diseases. After all, only one-tenth of refugees from Ukraine are vaccinated against COVID-19, viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, rubella, and measles. This is due to the almost complete destruction of the system of sanitary and epidemiological control and primary health care [that existed] in the formerly flourishing Soviet republic.
But I guess that's just a beginning?
You're right. This is just the beginning. Against the background of anti-Russian sanctions, the world is gradually falling into an unprecedented food crisis. Tens of millions of people in Africa, or the Middle East will be on the brink of starvation at the fault of the West.
To survive, they will flock to Europe. I’m not certain whether the Europe will survive the crisis. Political institutions, supranational associations, the economy, culture and traditions could become a thing of the past. Europe will be "kicking itself," while America will dispel its main geopolitical fear, i.e. the political and economic alliance between Russia and Europe.
The US and its allies are truly blind to the neo-Nazis and openly fascist ideology in Ukraine, flooding the country with the most modern arms. Maybe it’s a high time for us to recognize a number of unfriendly states as supporters of fascism, with all the consequences that flow from this.
Europe is already facing a revitalization of officially banned manifestations of fascism and neo-Nazism, as criminals with neo-Nazi views, who were raised by Banderites are fleeing [Ukraine] from inevitable prosecution along with the migrants. This will prompt a revival of Nazi ideas in Europe, manifestations of which not so long ago were considered impossible. One cannot also exclude the rise of far-right sentiments which can be stoked by myriads of trained and combat-experienced Ukrainian radicals, who have already found common ground with Hitler’s European fans.
History is developing according to a spiral form. After all, almost until September 1939 the West was denying the danger of the Nazi regime. In 1938, Time magazine declared Hitler its Man of the Year.
Back in the 1930s, the West not only didn’t deny, but actively promoted the establishment and build-up of fascist power in Germany (this was true especially of big businesses). Later, after the war, Western historians created a myth about German industrialists, who, allegedly, made a major contribution to the establishment of Hitler's war economy. Some American companies cooperated with the Nazis until 1943, that is, until the decisive turning point in the war.
There is even a theory that the "Cyclone B" gas used by the Nazis to kill people in the death camps was created by using Western technology.
I advise you to read on how the Nazis designed this entire process. Everyone knows, for example, the "IBM" corporation. The Nazis kept records and planned the destruction of people in the concentration camps on adding machines, produced by that company. Its CEO, Watson was rewarded with a medal by Hitler. And this is just one of many examples. Now history repeats itself. Even now, the West actively supports the Ukrainian neo-Nazis and continues to supply arms to Ukraine.
The US and European military and industrial complex is jubilant, because there is no shortage of orders due to the crisis in Ukraine. Not surprisingly, unlike Russia, which is interested in speedily concluding the special military operation, while minimizing casualties on all sides, the West is determined to drag out the conflict to the last Ukrainian.
For some reason, the world still thinks that militarists and aggressors necessarily wear uniforms. But don't be fooled by Anglo-Saxon respectability. Not even the sharpest looking suit can disguise hatred, malice, and inhumanity.
Many of our opponents in the world claim that they don’t understand or don’t recognize the goals of a special military operation, believing that they are far-fetched.
The special military operation has concrete goals, on whose achievement depend not only the well-being, but the lives of millions of people, as well as the task of rescuing the LPR and DPR residents from the genocide that the Ukrainian neo-Nazis have been committing for 8 years. Back in the day, Hitler's fascism dreamed of destroying the entire Russian population, and today its successors, following Hitler's precepts, are sacrilegiously trying to achieve this task with the hands of the Slavs. Russia won’t let this happen.
Speaking of de-Nazification, our goal is to smash the neo-Nazi springboard created via Western efforts at our borders. The need for demilitarization was caused by the fact that Ukraine, saturated with arms, poses a threat to Russia, including in terms of the development and use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
Do you think that the US could really orchestrate such provocations in Ukraine?
You speak of a country, whose elite are incapable of appreciating the lives of others. Americans are used to walking on scorched earth. Starting with World War II, entire cities have been wiped from the face of the earth by bombings, including with nuclear arms. They [the Americans] doused the Vietnamese jungle with poison, bombed Serbs with radioactive ordnance, burned Iraqis alive with white phosphorus, helped terrorists poison Syrians with chlorine. I don't believe that lives of Ukrainians move the US that has repeatedly proven its aggressive anti-human nature. As history has proven, NATO has also never been a defensive alliance, only an aggressive one.
Why do the American elites need all this?
America has long divided the world into vassals and adversaries. In the US, people have been taught since childhood that America is a shining city on a hill, while the rest of humanity is only a testing ground and a resource appendage.
Four hundred years ago settlers arriving from England robbed and murdered Indians because they perceived them as uncivilized savages. Now all this has been replaced by democratization and human rights rhetoric, while the [American] piracy continues on a worldwide scale. American elites remember how the US was able to become a superpower after two world wars, and now they don’t want to accept the fact that the American global empire is in agony.
In this cartoon accompanying the article that originally appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda Uncle Sam uses a map of Russia to paint Russia as fiendish monster.
In your opinion, has the collapse of the American-centric world become a reality?
This is the reality in which we must live and establish an optimal course of conduct. In this regard, Russia has chosen the path of complete defense of its sovereignty and firm insistence on its national interests, cultural and spiritual identity, traditional values, and historical memory.
Our spiritual and moral values allow us to remain ourselves, to be true to our ancestors, and to preserve the individual, society, and the state. Europeans, for instance, have made a different choice. They have adopted so-called liberal values, although in fact it is neo-liberalism. It promotes the priority of the private over the public, individualism, which suppresses love for the Fatherland, and the gradual atrophy of the state. It’s already apparent that Europe and European civilization have no future with such a doctrine. As it seems, the unlearned lessons will have to be repeated again.
Exactly what lessons?
There are quite a lot of them. Don’t forget that all historical catastrophes began with the spread of popular but potentially destructive ideas. Let’s recall the French Revolution. Its misinterpreted slogans led to the Napoleon’s tyranny, who drowned half of Europe in blood, but broke its teeth in Russia.
What did our country do? [Did it] dismember France, burn Paris? - No, Emperor Alexander I restored French statehood, and in 1815 initiated the creation of the Holy Alliance in Europe. The Alliance strived for a respect of the territorial integrity of states, suppression of nationalist movements, and secured Europe forty years of peaceful existence.
A little over a hundred years later, the ideology of Nazism emerged. The Soviet Union did everything to destroy it, but at the same time initiated the restoration of an independent German state. Stalin insisted on this during the Yalta Conference. In addition, the Soviet Union was the first country to support the Germany’s unification back in the late 1980s. Throughout the history, our country was playing a special role in shaping not only the geopolitical, but also the moral climate of the world.
You vividly described the Anglo-American way of interacting with the world as piracy. Now the West is engaged in a similar piratical foray against Russia. This raises the question of how justified was the decision to store the country’s gold and foreign currency reserves abroad?
This decision, as it turned out, was unreasonable from the perspective of the state's financial security. Another issue is that by doing so, the West is striking not only at Russia, but also at itself. The existing global financial system is built solely on trust, including trust in the US, acting in the capacity of issuer of the world's reserve currency. Half a century ago there was the gold factor [affecting the US currency], but in 1971 the US withdrawn from the effect of gold quotations on the exchange rate, which in turn allowed it to issue money practically without control.
In an attempt to prop up its economy in a constant state of pre-crisis, the US begun actively to pump up its banks, businesses and the public sector with money, secured by government obligations. The result has been high inflation in America and Europe. Meanwhile, the US foreign debt exceeds 30 trillion USD. And Americans, for some reason, are discussing a possible default by Russia. It's high time for them to proclaim default. In order to overcome the negative consequences and in order to facilitate a new enrichment the US artificially creates a global crisis. That is, they want to solve their problems at the expense of the rest of the world, and primarily Europe.
The Europeans are okay with this, in my opinion.
What’s more, they are happily stepping into the abyss that the US has dug for them. In this regard, much has changed since the Cold War. Back then, the Europeans resisted Washington more confidently. I believe, it’s because the old generations of realist politicians were still around. Back then, the wall was in Berlin, while today's European elites have a wall in their heads.
Back in the 1980s, in an attempt to weaken the Soviet economy, the US tried to prohibit European companies from buying hydrocarbons from Moscow. At the time, Europe did not give in to Washington's demands. The US barred its own companies from selling coastal drilling technology to the USSR. As a result, dozens of American and Japanese firms were hurt. Washington used disinformation tactics to delay the Soviet Union’s construction of a gas pipeline to Europe. Does this ring any bells?
And what do we need to do to ensure the ruble’s sovereignty?
In order to achieve the sovereignty of any national financial system, its settlement means must possess internal value and price stability, and not be attached to the dollar. Experts are now developing a project on the establishment of dual-track currency and financial system, proposed by the scientific community.
In particular, it’s proposed to determine the value of the ruble, which should be secured by both gold and a group of goods (with a monetary value) in order to bring the ruble exchange rate in accordance with the effective parity in purchasing power.
Similar ideas have been voiced before. However, a number of experts claim that these ideas contradict the conclusions of economic theory...
They contradict not the conclusions of economic theory, but the conclusions of Western economics textbooks. The West has unilaterally appropriated an intellectual monopoly on the optimal structure of society and has been taking advantage of it for decades. Let’s recall that the shock reforms of the 1990s in our country were carried out strictly according to American method books.
The infatuation of our entrepreneurs, who emerged this era, with only market mechanisms (without considering the specifics of our country) is a risk factor. We are not against the market economy and participation in world production chains, but we are clearly aware that the West allows other countries to act as its partners, only when it is profitable for it. Therefore, the most important condition for securing Russia's economic safety is to rely on the country's domestic potential and to restructure the national economy on a modern technological basis.
What’s this task’s progress today? Now there have been a lot of talk about import substitution, but it’s no secret that a decisive breakthrough has not yet been achieved.
The set tasks and priorities are absolutely correct, and we will continue to implement them. An entirely different issue is that we need to significantly improve the discipline of such implementation, including among the relevant ministries.
We would have been able to avoid many of the problems that the Russian economy is facing today, provided all of the President's instructions on import substitution had been executed on time.
An example of this was the commissioning of a plant in St. Petersburg tasked with production of high-quality insulin, which was opposed by a number of departments. Today it is a serious company, whose drug production is absolutely independent of imports (except for packaging). However, even the packaging should be locally produced. Food producers tell us about it. Naturally, we cannot turn a blind eye to significant achievements. Enterprises that are part of Rostec Corporation, primarily those engaged in manufacturing of defense industry goods, have made significant progress in import substitution.
Rostec a success story (Source: Realty.ria.ru)
Let me give another example. The Food Security Doctrine designed by the Security Council, allowed for accurate calculations, which led to an increase of our country's self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs. This is quite a significant achievement, which our country was unable to fully attain during the entire twentieth century. Thus, all the Westerners attempts to shift the responsibility for the global food crisis instigated by them on Russia are undoubtedly doomed to failure.
Russia will have to expand the list of domestically-produced high-tech products. It’s important to put the local research and development results into production as soon as possible. Special attention will be paid to qualitative changes in the hiring process for scientific personnel and in their performance evaluation. Russian science must become the leading productive force, one of the engines of our country's development.
I’m positive that we’ll deal with all the issues that arose as a result of the sanctions. Today Russia is reorienting itself from the European market to the African, Asian, and Latin American markets. Priority attention will be accorded to the EAEU, whose importance has risen manifold in the current environment. We are increasing our cooperation with the BRICS member-states and the SCO, which unite about three and a half billion people on the planet.
You’ve mentioned science, however in today's conditions, I believe, it’s necessary to restructure not only science, but also higher, as well as elementary school education.
I’m sincerely convinced that the country cannot develop successfully without all members of society having a clear understanding of our national goals and objectives, and the entire depth of our spiritual and historical identity. For this reason, every resident of our country, every Russian must realize and understand, from the age of childhood, for the sake of what we are striving, living and working for.
The West continues to follow the inhumane doctrine of "golden billion" that calls for a significant reduction of the planet's population through various means. To this end, the West has vilely created an empire of lies, which involves the humiliation and destruction of Russia and other unwanted states. They spit in our eyes, but claim that it is divine dew.
Washington and Brussels do not hide the fact that their sanctions are aimed at both the material, as well as spiritual impoverishment of Russians. Destroying our education by imposing so-called "progressive educational models" is equally part of the Westerners' strategies, as NATO approaching our borders.
In fact, there is nothing progressive about it. In the US, for instance, many people are already declaring that one should sing and dance in math classes because solving problems and equations oppresses and discriminates against someone. We do not need such "progress." The current situation proves the need to uphold traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, to reform the system of education and enlightenment with the return of the historically proven advantages of the Russian school system. I remain convinced even now that the Soviet school of education was the most advanced and progressive in the world history-wise, and forward movement must be made, bearing this fact in mind.
What should be done exactly?
More efforts should be put into the development of logical thinking, in the creation of sound knowledge, in the ability to make independent decisions, instead of focusing on ticking off boxes on test sheets. We must develop the applied use of scientific fundamentals.
One shouldn’t place a bet solely on digitized education, since the Internet can be a source of encyclopedic information, but also of politicized misinformation. The development of personal intellectual and spiritual qualities should form the basis of everything. Well-mannered, comprehensively educated, physically and morally healthy children, who know and understand the history and culture of their Motherland, is our wealth and the guarantee of Russia's successful development. It’s for the sake of our children's future, for the sake of a prosperous and flourishing country, in which they will live, that we are working today.
[1] Rg.ru, April 26, 2022.
