Therefore, what’s the situation? You have these people in Washington and London. Listen to Margaret Thatcher, to what she says. It has no correspondence to reality. Listen to Washington. The greatest crisis in the history of modern civilization, has broken out and is dripping into our economy. The entire financial system of the Anglo-American powers is about to collapse. The most insane speculative financial bubble in all human history. And to survive they come to Russia and suck blood, as they do in the developing countries.
Now you see Somalia, you see former Yugoslavia, you see China—[the West are] idiots, they’re insane, what they’re doing in China. You have 400 million adult Chinese from the interior, who are ready to starve to death. So they move millions of Chinese adults from the interior to the coast, to work like slaves at Auschwitz.
Kuzin: There is also economic genocide in Russia today. Because of the extreme impoverishment, which resulted from Gaidar’s economic measures, for around a year, the death rate has exceeded the birth rate.
LaRouche: In China, that’s the basis. But they call this “prosperity”!
Then you look at Somalia, Haiti, and so forth, the world. Here’s the great one-world superpower, the United States. And what is this government doing? It’s talking about a health-care plan which cannot work. The family of Nicholas II of Russia, never went to the level of stupidity, that the Washington government’s on today!
So you have governments who are submitting to this policy—insane!
See, they forget about two powers that exist, which they forgot they didn’t conquer. One, they’ve forgotten about God. They’ve finished him off, they say. They also forget Nature, that Nature itself will not obey them.
Kuzin: You can’t fool nature.
LaRouche: That’s right. So what’s happening is, we are now in a period where the entire system is collapsing. What you have, is a process of a plunge into chaos around the world. And what have they got in mind? What they always had in mind, this crowd. Their intention is to have a North-South war, including to have Russia in a war with Central Asia, with Iran and other Islamic states.
Kuzin: To reduce the population and clear political space for themselves, geographically?
LaRouche: To have a war. It’s geopolitical. This is a population war, a malthusian population war. Now to do this, they say we need this war to “give a structure”, so that the 20 percent of the population in the Northern Hemisphere will survive at the expense of 80 percent in other parts. With the so-called environmentalism, they are trying to destroy science, technology.
Kuzin: And why are they trying to destroy science and technology?
LaRouche: Well, this comes again from the species of the fondi. It’s all throughout history. Remember the slave-owners in the United States, where they controlled the law, made it a capital offense to teach a slave to read and write. Look at the decrees of Diocletian in the Roman Empire. Once human beings understand that they as individual persons are in the image of God by virtue of creative reason, can they accept a system where they see their fellow human beings treated like animals and slaughtered like cattle?
You see, their purpose is to simply perpetuate the rule of a permanent group. Look at the world population curve, as we’re able to trace it, and you’ll find that the great increase in population worldwide occurred after 1440. It occurred why? Because of two things: a new conception of political institutions, including the invention of modern science as science and the commitment to evangelization of the world. This particular benefit, which was developed within Europe, focusing in that period, where it crystallized, transformed the world in uplifting the institutions and the productive powers of labor of mankind.
The people who advise the fondi in this matter, are not the stupid politicians we see or the stupid this-or-that we see. For an example of this, you read things such as Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is merely one of many works which were used by the British in order to design their attempt to create a British Empire. So these people know what they’re doing. They just happen to be evil—that’s all.
What I was doing with the SDI, was to attempt to use patriotism, essentially, to mobilize nations against the oligarchy. And today we’ve come to the point that the enemy has triumphed, but in his triumph, the enemy is bringing about his own destruction. And thus we’re going to have a crisis which will change the correlation of forces globally, and we have to look at the Russian situation in terms of that changing global correlation of forces.
While we don’t ignore trends inside Russia today, after you look at the trends, then say: What are the institutional factors in Russian society which we can look at in terms of changing the response of the society as a whole?
The Intelligentsia in the Army
By default the military is the last bastion against chaos.
Kuzin: Yes, and just now Yeltsin is drastically purging the Army.
LaRouche: That’s a dangerous thing for him to do.
Kuzin: It’s not just a purge. The leader of the parliamentary group, Army Reform, Col. Vitali Urazhtsev, who’s a consistent anti-communist and became the leader of the first military trade union, [Shield], believes that under the guise of reforms, the Army is actually being destroyed.
LaRouche: The other element is, that the Army has certain limitations, except that the Army has a built-in intelligentsia, which is what Yeltsin would go at. We have two elements of the intelligentsia in the Army, which you can watch very carefully, because they’re crucial, because they exist by definition. One is the strategic intelligentsia. These are the students of strategic thinking. Then you have the scientific-military intelligentsia, who are the brains of the military-industrial facilities. And you have the technical cadres who work with them.
Then, in Russia as a whole, you have another intelligentsia, and that is the historians, scientists, and so forth.
These are the only institutions which exist in a country with Russia’s history, which can respond. You have a very a concrete problem. What can you do with the military-industrial complex in Russia, to save Russia?
Kuzin: That is, how to utilize the technical capability of the military-industrial complex, its enterprises, in such a way as to transform them into enterprises for civilian-sector needs? Yeltsin, instead of this, is effectively destroying these capabilities.
LaRouche: You have to look at what has the function been of this sector and see in its organic past what its present capabilities are. It developed some of the characteristics of a Roman legion, in the sense that it began to develop its own economic base, in large degree, to sustain itself, independent of the economy.
Kuzin: A self-sufficient system, so to speak.
LaRouche: Yes, right. So now the point is, that’s what it is. The question is, don’t convert it in a way that destroys that.
Kuzin: So far, under the guise of conversion, they’ve been destroying that sector. This destruction was inflicted too openly, to consider that it was a mistake.
LaRouche: Oh no, it was deliberate. It’s plain looting. You take something, and you say, “Why is it cheaper?” It’s because you’re going to export it at a cheap price. So therefore you take something which is at a high price, you export it at a cheap price, and the nomenklatura—
But you must not go to a lower level of technology. What I proposed with the SDI, is the same thing: Don’t go to a lower level of technology. Use the baseline for infrastructure-building.
In Russia, you have several sections of the obvious sectors, say, the tank production. These capabilities, these cadres, must be kept together, because you have a heavy tool industry capability behind tank production. You have the Ural complex, Uralmash. I could build a transportation system with these capabilities.
We have in Russia, vast distances. The great problem of the Russian economy, the great distinguishing problem, is the low population density of the territory of Russia. The big problem, is that they don’t have enough Russians! (So we have to tell the men and women to go back to normal things.) Because if you must transport something a great distance, you have two costs. One is the cost of transport, the other is the waiting time. Because when you have this time, you have to build up more inventory to make up for the time it takes to move things.
You also have food loss, great loss of food and spoilage. Therefore, the one-rail track system is insane! You need two- and four-track systems. They must be high-speed. You must be talking about 200, 300 kilometers per hour at least.
Kuzin: How should these measures be carried out: through the private sector, through the state sector, or through some combination?
LaRouche: A combination.
Kuzin: And what would the component role of each be?
LaRouche: Friedrich List and Sergei Witte understood: You have national banking, not central banking. You have protection of your industries, protection of foreign exchange and capital exchange—everything the IMF prohibits.
Let’s look at this from a physical standpoint, not a money standpoint. Do I have labor? Do I have unemployed labor that I must employ? Do I have factories? Do I have farms? Ah! Do I have needs?
Therefore, everything we need internally, we have. We only have to think about what we must import, that we cannot produce.
The first thing is, we take national infrastructure building. So I would take the military-industrial complex. I’d take railway systems, water management systems, power systems, power distribution systems, communication systems, health and education. That’s the national sector base. I’m going to produce high-speed rail lines. Why not make them magnetic? We have magnetohydrothermodynamics in Russia. We have the technology. Work with the German design, and make a common design. We’re going to build a railroad system, from Brest to Vladivostok. We have the capacity. Don’t take anything down! We need it.
Nuclear: Russian designs of nuclear plants are defective. Ah! But we have a Russian nuclear industry. In Germany, Asea-Brown-Boveri has a good design. There are new designs in the United States, not yet being used. France is good at these designs, in a different way. The nuclear industry can produce its part. The rest is concrete, aggregate, steel, and so on.
You can have a phased development of a railway system where you put in track immediately, then you also upgrade that to high speed and then to magnetic [levitation]. If you take the corridor from St. Petersburg to Moscow and then into Central Asia, if I go 500 kilometers an hour, if I have the type of car that I can take on and off quickly, if I use my nuclear waste to irradiate food when I seal it so it doesn’t spoil, then what is the change in the Russian economy simply by doing this? At 500 kilometers an hour, how long is it from Moscow to Vladivostok?
Kuzin: This is all very valuable. The main problem for Russia right now, is how we are going to get a government, such a power, which would conceive of these undertakings as a priority?
LaRouche: First of all, you have to have the idea based among the people to build a political constituency. You cannot whisper to government, you must take the idea to the people.
You have from the military, the retired people who were in the military, who were pilots, who were engineers, who were tank drivers. You come from a country that had universal military service. The proudest members of this service, have technical backgrounds in the military. You have a core of a scientific intelligentsia, which was once one of the best scientific intelligentsias in the world, and the largest. People who understand these things.
Now you take the problem of Russia. It’s cold in the winter; and the winters are long. Ah! So how do we grow food? Do you want strawberries in Murmansk in the wintertime? How? Well, if you have cheap energy, then we grow the strawberries in a building. Hydroponics. The difficulties of Russia are the potentials for new industries. Every difficulty is a potential new industry.
All these professors of economics know nothing about economics.
Kuzin: All professors of economics, or our Russian ones?
LaRouche: Virtually all, all, all today. Why? Because, what is the definition of profit? For most of these people, such as Gaidar’s advisers, it is theft. For others, it is trading. For others, it is interest or rent—which are also lies. Marx didn’t know any better.
The true source of profit, or true profit, is the increase of output over input. And how is that done? By improvement in the productive powers of labor. And how is that done? Technological-scientific progress.
So the basic formula, without which there is no solution, is to take the known potentials for this in Russia, to mobilize them, not destroy them—to do this. Because every time we take a Russian and we effectively employ him in modern technology, we solve the problem.
The Question of Power
Kuzin: To what extent is all this compatible with the current dictatorship, which has come back into existence in Russia? How much can this correspond to its plans and interests?
LaRouche: Not really at all. Well, in a sense, under pressure, under political pressure, you can make a dictatorship do something.
Kuzin: How can we pressure, if we are bereft of political rights and freedoms?
LaRouche: What if the backing of the dictatorship is weakened? What is Yeltsin? Yeltsin is a man who sees himself as a smart thief who has adapted to the reality of a master overseas.
Translator: And if the backing from the West is weakened?
LaRouche: He’s nothing.
Kuzin: Yeltsin’s not thinking about that.
LaRouche: He may not worry about it, but he’s going to begin to worry about it. He will see, the master begins to go away. And others will see it.
Look at August 1991. What happened in August? My view is that the problem is that the Russian intelligentsia or at least a section of it, did not have an idea of what to do which could then be imposed upon a dictatorship.
Kuzin: You know, this is my problem. I have a very murky concept, of how one would influence the Yeltsin regime, or the Gorbachov regime in the past, from below, because these regimes are not democratic. They are repressive, dictatorial regimes. They depend basically on the support of the West, as everybody now should be able to see. Their political survival, therefore, does not at all depend on the support of the population. Therefore, they simply will not fulfill any desires or demands from society.
LaRouche: I would not disagree up to a point with that. But in our business, the point is, you always look for the thaw, and you must move properly in the thaw.
Kuzin: And what presages this thaw?
LaRouche: That’s not the problem. The problem is, how do you prepare for that opportunity? The problem was, there was not preparation for the opportunity in 1991. The characteristic of 1991, was that you had a Russian population which was very upset by the deterioration of life in the two years since 1989. Perestroika tasted good when you ate it, but it didn’t sit in the stomach.
The very Yeltsin phenomenon itself, is part of that. Yeltsin at the White House, I remember that. I’ve been in prison all this time, you know, but some things you can see even from here.
Kuzin: But to what degree was that serious and genuine, and to what degree was it a show in which Yeltsin was participating, not even being conscious of what he was doing? Because for all intents and purposes, Yeltsin then continued the line of Gorbachov, preserving the same layer of people in power.
LaRouche: That part’s simple. Yeltsin is like a sentimental pimp who likes to go to concerts on Saturday afternoon. He even goes to church once in a while. One must not overestimate the man. He’s an apparatchik.
But what happened to Russia, what happened to Moscow, in August, in November of that year? Yeltsin is only like a symptom.
What was the naivete? You had Gorbachov. Oh, his wife wore shoes from Gucci, Gucci handbags and so on. He was the first Russian General Secretary ever appointed by the Queen of England. So you had glasnost, perestroika, so forth and so on. What did it amount to: “We’re taking ideas from the West, we’re taking ideas from the West.”
In August-September of 1991, the Russian people said “We don’t need you any more; we’ll take our ideas from the West directly.” But then you had all these apparatchiks of the nomenklatura saying, “I spent a lot of time in New York myself, I’ll give you the ideas.” Where were the Russian ideas? So, you talk about democracy, but it doesn’t mean anything.
Kuzin: Right, that’s the problem. Even in even in August of 1991, the Russian people were not deciding anything. They were allowed into these events to the extent it was required to convince the West, that this was a real democratic revolution, just as during the whole perestroika-glasnost under Gorbachov, people were permitted now to speak—
LaRouche: And to think.
Kuzin: But they still could not decide anything.
LaRouche: The question is, to define what is the fundamental issue. The word “democracy” doesn’t mean anything. What means something, is the right of the individual as a person under law, the protection of the family, the right of people to have families. And, above all, the right of their mind to participate in a process by which they’re governed.
All revolutions generally take the form—except for peasant revolts—of student-led revolutions, for a very simply reason. Good revolutions, bad revolutions. How? Because during certain apertures in the process, in the social process, in the educational process of people who are reaching the middle years of adolescence and beyond, they get ideas. This process, which I’ve been through a couple of times personally, in participating as a teacher at one time, and experiencing the 1930s and the wartime period— The power of adolescent and post-adolescent youth, particularly the intellectual youth, to lead a nation in its ideas, must not be underestimated. And in the process of educating youth, you find that people who teach them, who are really involved in this process, are excited and they become alive again.
Kuzin: Our woe is that basically this young generation, which has gotten into the power structures recently, these have preferred to make themselves a personal career and to be bought off by the nomenklatura, to occupying any honest positions.
LaRouche: That’s what I mean by the lies. The genesis of lies leads to careerism. For example, in Germany in the postwar period: The German educational system, up until 1970-72, was still the Humboldt standard. Going back to Humboldt came out of a reconstruction of Germany education following Hitler, to rebuild the education system. You have a process. You have those who started this process, up to 1955 in Germany, from ’47-48 to ’55, under early Adenauer. They were committed. Then you have the generation that came in 1955, into the universities, 1955, 1960 and beyond. They were the career opportunists. Then you had, up until 1968-70, you had people who are coming out of the gymnasium education, who were well educated. Then, after the Brandt reforms, where this was destroyed, now you have there, as you have in the United States, unbelievable immorality and stupidity.
Kuzin: Why did this happen? What was the reason for this?
LaRouche: Because of the opportunism of the parents. I went to war, not very seriously war, I was in Burma and so forth. I came in very little danger of being killed, but still I was away. In the war, I saw conditions in India. So I saw, well: This we cannot tolerate any more. We cannot have a world that’s safe, as long as people suffer like this. I also saw how the Communist Party of India, under orders of Stalin, in collaboration with Churchill, betrayed India. Many people with me as soldiers shared my views, that we must not let the world go on like this any more.
But when I came back, most of the people, very soon, within two or three years, were opportunists. They became terrified. They wanted to make money, to have success. The environment of moral commitment was gone from their family household.
What happened, is that they grew up without that kind of moral commitment which makes for a good intellectual life. They had three parents: a mother, a father, and a television set; and they became very shallow, not as ignorant as they are today; but in the postwar period, I saw the population of the United States degenerate.
But nonetheless, I’ve seen what I’ve been able to do with a few friends. We’ve been able to shake the world. They wanted to kill me, but that didn’t work, so they put me here. But that’s all right. I did what I had to do—not enough. Not enough.
Kuzin: I would ask this question: Yeltsin and his people constantly say that for Russia’s economy to develop, we don’t have enough money in the budget. But at the same time, I gave you the order of figures, at which the national wealth is being stolen. In your view, if financial aid were given to Russia, what would be its fate? Would it really aid progress, or are there other possible consequences?
LaRouche: Money doesn’t mean anything. If I were in the position that Yeltsin’s in in Russia and were faced with the problem, I would say, “My dear friends, we’re going to have to drop all this free trade nonsense,” and I might even say, “If you don’t let me do this, my military’s going to kill me and bomb you. Now you better let me do this.” This is the best way to handle the problem. Create a national bank. Create true currency reform, with the currency controls; we’re going to wipe out the speculators by the currency reform; we’re going to tax them for everything they made.
Now we’re going to create a credit issue. We’re not going to waste the money, we’re not going to give money out; we’re going to pay money as credit through the national Parliament, loaned by state institutions through a national bank on the authorization of of the national parliament.
Kuzin: Would these investments go into private businesses, or the state sector?
LaRouche: State sector. Now we go from the state sector, we loan the money, on progress payments. That is: We’re going to build a railroad. We’re going to get employment going again, so we’re going to create projects.
Kuzin: But still, it would be helpful to be precise on this question of the role of private firms, and here’s why. People say in Russia: Oh, the state sector, that’s socialism. We’ve had it with socialism!
