US-RUSSIA RELATIONS
SIMON BARBER: Stalin’s playbook still bedside reading in the Kremlin
"Where suspicions exist, they will be fanned; where not, they will be ignited"
Efforts "will be made ... to disrupt national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defence, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity.... Poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents.... Everything possible will be done to set major western powers against each other.... Where suspicions exist, they will be fanned; where not, they will be ignited." That, warned George Kennan, then deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Moscow, was what the Russian regime had in mind for the West. The year was 1946. Stalin was in charge and the Cold War was just beginning. Seventy-one years later, Soviet communism supposedly in the grave for a generation, Stalin’s latest successor, Vladimir Putin, appears to be guided by something uncannily akin to Uncle Joe’s playbook, as Kennan described it in his famous "Long Telegram". Whether the active measures Putin’s security services deploy...
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