Schiller Institute on YouTube Schiller Institute on Facebook RSS

Home >



Fidelio, Vol.III,No, 1. Summer 2004

LaRouche in Dialogue
With the Intelligentsia
Of Russia

 

 


Lyndon H.LaRouche, Jr.

As Russia fell deeper into a chasm of and political disorder and poverty during 1993, interest arose rapidly in the proposals of the American economist and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

In January, the first Russian translation of a book by LaRouche came off the press—a 10,000-run edition of his So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics?, published by the Schiller Institute and the Ukrainian University in Moscow. On Oct. 1, at the height of the political crisis in Moscow, when Boris Yeltsin crushed the parliament of the Russian Federation by force, the widely read daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta printed a full-page article on how LaRouche had achieved his status as an American political prisoner: by his authorship of the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) policy, and by organizing worldwide opposition to the International Monetary Fund. More than a dozen Russian elected officials and other political activists signed appeals for LaRouche to be freed from prison.

On Oct. 14, LaRouche was elected a corresponding member of the International Ecological Academy of Russia, or “Academy of 100”—the first non-governmental scholarly society to be founded in the former U.S.S.R. LaRouche was proposed for membership by Professor Taras Vasilievich Muranivsky of the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Ukrainian University in Moscow, and strongly supported by Professor Bencion Fleischmann, a professor of mathematics in Moscow, who characterized LaRouche’s So You Wish To Learn All About Economics? as “the work of a real genius, full of original ideas.... LaRouche can be thought of as the father of a new direction in the natural sciences.”


Taras Muranivsky

Viktor Kuzin

During 1993, two prominent Russian intellectuals were able to visit LaRouche at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn., where he was incarcerated, to interview him for Russian periodicals. Professor Muranivsky, visited on May 10, is an editorial board member of the journal Profsoyuzy i Ekonomika (Trade Unions and Economics), which circulates among the intelligentsia, workers, and professional economists. Mr. Viktor A. Kuzin, who met with LaRouche on Nov. 1, was a founding member of Democratic Union, the first organization to declare itself a political party in opposition to the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1988. He was elected to the Moscow City Council in 1990 and headed its sub-committee on the Defense of Civil Rights, until the Council was dissolved by Boris Yeltsin in October 1993. He is a special correspondent of Svobodnoye Slovo (Free Word), the newspaper of Democratic Union.

Prompted by these discussions, and in response to the honor of his election to the Academy of 100, LaRouche authored the essay “LaRouche’s Discovery” for circulation among the widening circles of interest in his ideas within the intelligentsia of Russia. We present this essay, therefore, as LaRouche’s continuation of the dialogue begun in the interviews with Prof. Muranivsky and Mr. Kuzin, which we excerpt below with their kind permission.

Muranivsky: First, I would like to convey to you, Mr. LaRouche, warm greetings and sincere respect from a large group of Russian, Ukrainian and other scientists and specialists from the new independent states (former USSR), who know and value highly your views, especially your scientific and economic concepts. Your books, the EIR journal, New Federalist newspaper, and other publications of the Schiller Institute in English and German are known to us and are getting wider and wider distribution.

The translation into Russian of your textbook, “So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics?”, and of several other publications, was a major, important event. Your book has been included on the textbook list for students of the Russian State University of the Humanities, where I am a professor.

I am, of course, most of all concerned with the problems of Russia, Ukraine, and the other newly independent states. But I also understand quite well, that these can only be solved in the context of solving world economic problems, above all, those connected with the world economic crisis.

How do you assess the present situation in the world economy, and what are the chances for establishing a new world economic order?

I will try to make this question somewhat more concrete. In the introduction to the Russian edition of your book, written 18 October 1992, you wrote that “the greatest financial bubble in history is collapsing upon us.” I would express the following doubt: I do not deny the fact that such a financial bubble exists. But what are your grounds for saying that the bubble is collapsing? And that “a new form of national economy must be constructed.” What kind?

LaRouche: The answer to this is a bit long, because it’s technical, it requires a technical foundation.

First of all, we are dealing in a system with various kinds of accounting which are all absurd, relative to this kind of problem. When economies are moving on more or less one level, without any qualitative change, you can use linear approximations. You can make linear approximations of profit, you can make linear approximations of costs. But when an economy is undergoing profound structural changes, and by structural changes I emphasize changes in the structure of the division of labor, including unemployment, these linear measures are no longer applicable.

They are also not applicable in two other conditions. One is a rapid rise of science and technology, in which the coefficients change; it is non-linear. Secondly, if you have a rapid deterioration of the economy, the coefficients are not linear. You cannot use these, because the structure of the economy is changing in a non-linear way, at a rapid rate. Therefore, statements which are made on the basis of standard accounting, tend to be absurd under those conditions. So people use accounting for years and then suddenly come into a crisis, and then the accounting no longer tells you anything. It will always lead you to the wrong answers. That is the problem today.

In the long term, in the non-linear measure, we must measure profitability of a society physically, in terms of the effects of increase of the productive power of labor. As labor is more productive, as long as we can meet the constraints of increasing the standard of living, in terms of market basket—real physical market basket—we can also produce a surplus from the labor, which is far in excess of that formally per capita. Then the economy is going to grow, if this is correlated with technology.

Today we are having a reverse process: not a technological curve non-linear up, but non-linear down. But in the final analysis nonetheless, of all of these financial instruments and profits which have created all this paper, some day, have to be paid; and it can only be paid from the productive base, ultimately. And the productive base is being collapsed by the growth of paper. Therefore, you have a non-linear process of a false or fictitious growth which is depressing the real means of payment, in order to sustain that fictitious growth.

So we are now in a non-linear period, not a constant rate of decline, but in an accelerated decline, which will come into a process which is very much like what Riemann described in physics, in his 1859 paper on shock waves. What happens is that you have, let’s say, a simple sine-wave form at a very low speed; as you accelerate, the characteristic of the wave gets more and more like an ocean wave, higher on the front. Then finally it becomes very steep on the front, at the speed of sound.

So this defines a shock wave. So we are in a process which is accelerating—as you see it in Russia—which is going to lead to a shock. A shock is when breakdown occurs.

Change the Technology of the World

Muranivsky: There is a lot of talk in Russia right now, about the concept of conversion, how to use the accumulated capabilities of the military sector.

LaRouche: What I hear is talk about going from high-technology military to low-technology civilian; it will not work.

Muranivsky: You are right.

LaRouche: That is why I was so happy with this little story from Izvestia, on April 2.

Muranivsky: About the “Trust” proposal.

LaRouche: Because I studied this technology. I knew that the Soviet capability in strategic defense was largely in this area because of the work of Kapitsa and others on ball lightning. You could see from the sky this big installation in Russia [Krasnoyarsk], and people said, “it’s a phased-array radar.” I said, it’s not a phased-array radar. It’s a phased-array microwave system. Because in order to make ball lightning in the atmosphere, you have to use phased-array microwave installations on the ground.

If I want to create a tidal wave in Gibraltar, I must put a series of bombs at the bottom of the Mediterranean. And then I must set off these explosions in phased array. If I use the same thing all at once, it doesn’t function. This is the same as the Riemann principle, of the Riemann acceleration of the shock wave.

Now, the problem is that when you do this business with this phased array, you create a microwave mess—a plasmoid—in space. Ball lightning. You need a very powerful laser to create a path in the atmosphere, through which this plasmoid will follow.

‘How do you build private industry? You have to start with something—with infrastructure. ‘Look at Russia. The first thing you get, is the rail system. You cannot build a road system. Why? The population density of all the inhabited and productive areas of Russia is very low. So what does it cost, in time and labor, to move goods from one factory to another in Russia, as opposed to Belgium? In Belgium, it’s very short distances; in Russia, big distances. Therefore, you need economical high-speed rail.’

Library of Congress
A switch operator poses on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, near the town of Ust Katav on the Yuryuzan River

 

We knew this, because I knew the work of Kapitsa, I knew the importance of Kapitsa’s work, I knew the work on microwaves disappeared from the Russian literature at a certain point; and also I knew the work on the high-powered lasers. And also how Velikhov worked on these one-power pulse systems, these short-time pulse systems, like electromagnetic pulse.

Then we have, in Russia, certain other signs of what the high-technological potentials are. We have the indications of the work of certain scientists or groups of scientists. They have technological capability.

So we look at the world situation. We say, “What technologies does the world need? What are our opportunities to change the technology of the world? We must use these industries to produce articles—especially machine tools.”

Muranivsky: There is a person named Maley in the government, who deals with the military-industrial complex. He has talked about how the process of conversion must be carried out not by destroying the existing technology, but rather to immediately to put it to work for producing other types of objects for the civilian economy.

LaRouche: Take the particular case of high-powered lasers. This involves scientific technology and engineering technology, which has many applications and opens new areas of applications. The plasmoid technology is also not only a weapon; it is an industrial technology.

People have to think about this. Sure, Russia must export, yes. It must export high technology, because only high technology will have a value.

What they don’t understand, is infrastructure. And the privatization question has been complete insanity.

Muranivsky: I read your interview, where you give the example of Thatcher’s privatization of the water system. You are quite right.

LaRouche: Well, how do you build a private industry? You have to start with something. How did we do it in the West? We did it with infrastructure. How did Colbert in France do it? With infrastructure. How did Charlemagne do it? He made a census of all material production, what every farm in the whole realm produced. How much per year. He then calculated water systems, canals, roads, fairs, trading centers, and so forth. Louis XI in France did the same thing.

Now, we look at Russia and eastern Europe, Russia in particular. The first thing you get, is the rail system. You cannot build a road system. Why? Take the population density of all the inhabited and productive areas of Russia. The population density is very low. So what does it cost in Russia, in time and labor, to move goods from one factory to another as opposed to Belgium? In Belgium, it’s very short distances; in Russia, big distances. Therefore, you need economical high-speed rail.

Then you get the privatization by two things. You have two categories of major privatization. Forget the small businesses as such, they will come automatically if you solve the major problems. What the state has to concern itself within the privatization, is not the small businesses, because that comes later, that comes from the business itself.

One kind of small business is very important, and that is the repair shop and the high-technology machine-tool shop. That is where the inventions are made, that is where the technological ingenuity is employed, where you have a few engineers or scientists and so forth, who have a machine-tool industry. They have a relationship to laboratories and they make machine tools for laboratories and for industries. Then you have the big industries, which cannot be as efficient scientifically, because they are too complex to make sudden changes. The changes come from the small firms which go into the big firms. The smaller firms make the machine tools, the big firms use the machine tools; so you have to have two contracts.

If I want to build a rail system in Russia, I will copy some western European technology, but I will also look and see: Maybe we can do something better. Maybe we have a military industry which can do something better. For example, ceramics. Maybe we should make a new type of system. We also know that we have the problem of the magnetohydrodynamics. What do we have in Russia in magnetohydrodynamics? What is our most advanced thinking in magnetohydrodynamics and materials for a rail system or anything else, for magnetic levitation? On the rail system, because of the extreme differences in temperature, hot and cold, we have a special problem. What about the design of the rail roadbed, the underbed?

Now, you have to have a rail system which is interchangeable with local truck delivery, so that you take the unit off the rail, as we have in the West. The unit comes off the rail, goes on a truck, in a container system.

You have to have warehousing facilities at each point, because you are not simply moving things, you are moving them from one place to the other. You have to have efficient classification, because your objective is to get cheapness and efficiency in time between the point from which you shipped and the point at which you received. That is the economy. This is big.

Now you take these military industries, and you say, “Can some of you people create something for us for this project? We’ll give you a contract. You form a company with this part of the industry. You can use the old state company, but you form another company, which contracts with the state company to do its own business.” You take a group of engineers and scientists and production people, and they say, “Okay, we will form a company, we will buy the production from this state industry.”

Muranivsky: You would have these people in a private firm which is carrying out state tasks. But couldn’t state institutions fulfill the same role?

LaRouche: What you want, is the freedom of private initiatives in the mind. So what you do, with, say, the state military-industrial companies, is that they form, they encourage certain of their associates or others to form, a private company.

Muranivsky: So these companies would be set up, and the state would then use them as needed?

LaRouche: Instead of having the military-industrial complex send its best people to the West, you say, “All right, we don’t have enough work in the military now. Why don’t you, instead of being unemployed—you’re good people—form a company around some idea you have, to help service a state contract in infrastructure? A private company. We will work with you, to help make you successful. You will come to us when you need to, and we will give you production.”

The Modern Nation-State

LaRouche: Let me shift to something, before coming back to your questions, and put this in a larger perspective of what I am working on now.

You think, and the West will think, that the cultural problems inside Russia, in particular, are the greatest problems imaginable in the world because of this kind of difficulty. Let us look at a worse problem. Let us look at China. What is happening in China? Just think about it.

The regime is a Chinese Legalist regime; it is a Legalist tradition, like Mao Zedong. I call him Dao Zedong, because he is a Daoist. These are Legalist successors of the Daoist dynasty. Li Peng and so forth.

What are they doing? They too have adapted to the West, to the free enterprise zones. They have adapted to Lord Palmerston’s idea, from the inside. They say the coastal areas are the free enterprise zones. That is what Lord Palmerston said to the Chinese Emperors.

So what is happening? The Chinese regime is taking the countryside and depopulating it. They are moving these hundreds of millions of Chinese from the countryside toward the free zones. This is called Auschwitz, without railroads. They say: We have too many Chinese. So we will sell the Chinese at half price. We will pay them half what it costs to produce a Chinese. They will die. We will eliminate the excess population and we will get money for it. And we will build up the rest of China. This is your shock therapy model, in Russia.

Now, what do we say about people? We say we have peoples in the former Soviet Union. We have the Belarussians, and especially Ukrainians and Russians, who are the key to the whole business. Ukrainians and Russians and Belarussians, are the key to the whole thing, to what happens to the rest, because of the nature of the beast.

Do the Russian people say: We do this to ourselves? A few years ago, Moscow would have blown up the whole world, if half such a threat were made. But since Chernobyl, it’s a little different.

But doesn’t a people have the ability to save itself from this?

You see similar things inside the United States, inside Western Europe: destruction, self-destruction.

So, our problem is not the economic problem. Yes, that is the practical problem we must address, but the problem is: how do we get the ability to make the decisions which we know will work, if we have the right cultural impetus? The problem is a cultural problem.

That is why, in 1989, I raised the question of Witte and Mendeleyev, in the case of Russia. One had to look in Russian history, to find something which the Russian people would recognize historically, which would serve as a benchmark to adopt a new policy. You say, “Ah! Okay. Bolshevism is a big mistake. We can cry about this forever. But let us now look at what we must do.”

There are two things we should have learned from the past 600 years, especially work in developing the modern nation-state.

First of all, as Dante Alighieri emphasized, if a people is to become sovereign, it must have a literate form of its own language. Because the participation of the people in the society, is through the medium of the use of language. It is not in the language, but the language is essential to that.

Therefore, for that reason, we require a world which is based not on some kind of global soup, but on the basis of a community of sovereign nation-states, each based on a literate cultural form of language.

So we have to look at the Russian problem as part of the problem of a community of peoples, each of which must address this problem. And we must together make sure this solution works for all nations. And we look into China, we see a real horrible problem!

But we see a solution, but the solution is very distant. The Russian solution is much easier.

Leibniz and Peter the Great

Now, what do we have in Russian history? Well, we have Kievan Rus and so forth, but that was a long time ago. And though that is important historically to understand, we start with this past 600 years.

We have the emergence of Rus from the Mongol yoke. What came out was a disaster. Because what came out, were Byzantine ideas of a Roman Empire, a Russian Roman Empire. Muscovite.

Muranivsky: The Third Rome. There will be no Fourth Rome.

LaRouche: Yes. “There will never be another [Rome.]” Crazy idea.

But then you had the rise of the Romanovs. Preceding Peter the Great, there is a development which begins to occur, which is influenced by the Renaissance developments in Western Europe, coming in in a second wave.

‘Leibniz successfully convinced Czar Peter the Great to create the Academy of Sciences, which all Russian academies come from, and to create the idea of a national economic interest, to develop agriculture as a progressive area, which meant to free the serfs. Because unless you engaged the peasant’s mind in changing agriculture, you could have no agriculture.

‘By taking Leibniz’s program, Peter elevated Russia. The production of manufactured goods in Russia, during Peter’s reign and immediately after him, was greater than the production of industrial goods in England.’ 

GFDL
The Bronze Horseman, monument to Peter the Great.

Now you have this Peter. Peter is a very mixed person. He is a Western Roman Pontifus Maximus. He thinks himself in the sense of a Western Roman Emperor. He is the chief of the church and the chief of the state, and he will not allow the monasteries to run the churches without his permission.

But Peter wanted to go into Western Europe. He did not want to be an Asian nation, blocked by the Black Sea. He wanted to go West. So he got the idea of the new city on the Baltic, and he made a war with the Swedes to get a new city on the Baltic. And he made the capital St. Petersburg, in order to make this change in the orientation of Russia, to get out of Moscow, to get into the West.

So he did something. He is a very sly fellow. He did something with the advice of people like Leibniz, who understood exactly what he was doing. And Peter adopted the program of Leibniz, not the way Leibniz intended—and I think Leibniz understood that—but for the purpose of Russian Third Rome, Western style.

But nonetheless, look at the history. The history was, that what Peter did, by taking Leibniz’s program, was that he elevated Russia. The production of manufactured goods in Russia, during Peter’s reign and immediately after him, to the middle of the century, was greater than the production of industrial goods in England.

Well, let’s go look back at Peter and let’s look at this nineteenth-century development, the abolition of serfdom. The introduction of modern industry, again after a dark age in the early part of the century. It worked, didn’t it? Peter, despite these crazy religious nuts, the raskolniki.

Translator: It is difficult to discuss this, for example, in Ukraine.

LaRouche: This is because of the Roman Imperial attitude of Petersburg.

This is the same thing in Ukraine. It takes a different form in Ukraine, in the terms of history. In Ukraine it takes the form of the cultural-historical development of science and so forth in the language. You have the modern development Ukrainian scientist in Russia, which is important in the history of Russia, and in the Soviet system. Mainly they were dissidents, but there were great scientists.

Vernadsky is extremely important. For the Ukrainian, Vernadsky and Gurvich and so forth—these are extremely important people. They had global conceptions, they were an integral part of world science, as he was with Pasteur. And if you look at Mendeleyev, and then you look at Vernadsky, you see a continuation of the same mentality from Mendeleyev and the Periodic Table to geochemistry and to the idea of the organization of life and to the work of Vernadsky.

Muranivsky: The noosphere.

Solving “The Peasant Problem”

LaRouche: So this is very important material. But the question is: Culturally, how do you get at what the Bolsheviks used to call the “peasant problem” solved? For example, the Soviet budget, the economic failures. They’re going to replace the bricks in the old factory with bricks like the old bricks. They’re going to replace the machine tool in the factory with a machine tool like the old machine tool. It’s a machine tool design they don’t want; the factory tractor, which is maybe not the best in the world, but it’s a tractor, that is left in the field.

So this kind of problem comes back, and the question in Russia is how in Russian history do you solve this problem, of the brutalization, of so much of the population in general. They were treated like cattle, and this does not come out of their minds, yet.

For example, take the southern black population in the United States. Four hundred years of black chattel slavery. No family. The man is just a breeding bull. He is not a husband. They’re separated. The wives, the children. Then you get the reaction: the Ku Klux Klan, that reaction in the United States. You get the conditions of poverty in the ghettoes. You get a whole black population which is brutalized. These are human beings. They have a mind from birth; they are perfectly capable of anything, as any human being is. But because of these environmental-social conditions, a tradition, a heritage of brutalization affects them and makes them less than they are. And we see this in every part of the world, what was called in the Soviet literature “the peasant problem,” the effect of brutalization on the population, which led the Russian leaders to use the brutality in Russian society, as the way of solving a problem.

Muranivsky: It’s profitable for them to do this because the stupider the people is, the easier it is to control them.

LaRouche: Manipulation. Our problem is, we wish to get the Russian people—or some of them—to be inspired and to have confidence, and the others to follow that model. And the problem is to get enough people who represent a leading stratum, who understand that, and who will see that that is what really has to happen. It also has to happen in China. In Russia, it is easy compared to China.

Muranivsky: In Russia today, you can’t even talk about the standard of living because 90 percent of the population is below the poverty level. In terms of finding a core of people who can play a leading role, this leads me back to the question of cooperation.

LaRouche: This is where your trade union question comes in. Always, in society, you have certain older people who represent a resource of leadership. But most older people are not willing to change very much.

For example, in 1793-1794, the French Jacobins had butchered most of the scientific leadership of France, such as Lavoisier. But then take a great genius, Lazare Carnot, and his teacher and friend, Gaspard Monge. How did they approach this problem, which was a very useful solution until 1815, when the counterrevolution and foreign powers shut down the Ecole Polytechnique under Monge and put it under others?

Monge set up brigades, as he called them, in the Ecole Polytechnique. He took bright students from all over the country, and they brought them to the Ecole. And then taught them in brigades and they made them teach others. And as a result, they produced a generation of French scientists, which continued the hegemony of French science in world science.

So in the world today, we have a similar problem. That is, people under 25 years of age who think of themselves as students, who think of themselves as wishing to learn. You see academics when they get to a certain age, they say, “I don’t learn any more. I’m now professional.” And it’s very hard to do anything with these people. Because they say, “But I learned this.” “Can’t you learn anything any more?”

So, the energy, the dedication, of young people around a nucleus of older people who are capable of educating them or guiding them in their education. And then some opportunities for them to do what they should do, to set examples. That is the long-term solution.

The Principle of a Constitution

In the meantime, you have a Russian government which is an institution by default. So you have a decaying—actually eroding, collapsing, disintegrating—institution of the Yeltsin regime. There is not yet a Russian government. There are some people who want to come back with who-knows-what, and so forth, from the Dark Ages, or from the fourteenth century, or from the thirteenth century. But a center of leadership [does not exist.]

If I were just a poor Russian person, I’d look up and say this is terrible, I have to rush for even a little to eat; I’d look up: “We were a powerful country. What happened to us? Who is leading us? I see nothing.” So that is an admitted problem.

I can define solutions, but I can’t make them. I can tell you the solution is to have the right program. The solution is to understand what the problem is sociologically, psychologically, culturally, historically. The solution is to build groups of people and to strengthen them, who do understand, who are trying to understand.

Translator: We were discussing the question of a Russian constitution. In Moscow, people say repeatedly, “Your program is good. But we can’t do anything until we know in what kind of country we are living.” And there’s a big debate about the constitution. Yeltsin has a draft of the constitution, somebody else has another draft; in none of these constitutions is there even a reference to economic science, technological development, and so on.

Muranivsky: Not only is there no glimmer, but these are actually seen as two opposing processes. This constitutional struggle is counterposed to getting out of the crisis.

LaRouche: But this is the influence of Lockean ideas. You can see it very clearly there. The idea that some kind of constitutional democracy is going to solve everything. It is not.

This is the “Matushka Rus” problem. The problem is, that people don’t understand that a constitution, among other things, defines the protection of the rights of the individual against the majority.

For example, do they understand the difference between the U.S. Federal Constitution, its Preamble, and the Confederate Constitution of the traitors? That difference is what is crucial. Why is that so important? They have to understand that today, the United States is under the control of the Confederates, in terms of legal ideas. Look at the Supreme Court decisions and so forth. This is the Confederacy in this century. Teddy Roosevelt is a Confederate; Woodrow Wilson is a Confederate. When you talk about constitutions, they don’t know these questions.

For example, in Europe, people today are told through the United Nations and other idiotic institutions, that a constitution is a “basic law.” That is, a group of laws—a list: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Laws. It’s like a trade union contract negotiation. It’s not a constitution; it’s a trade union contract.

So they don’t think about a principle of government. The U.S. government was designed, there were compromises, and so forth, but it was designed to establish a balance of institutions in order to effect the strengthening of a principle. And you have to know: What is the principle?

The principle is the Russian cultural problem. In the West we say “imago Dei” and “capax Dei,” which were rejected by the Muscovites. The greatness of Western culture is based on these two ideas, which is a big cultural problem, which is also a religious problem, for the Russians. It is an unresolved problem.

Muranivsky: What do you mean, the Muscovites rejected it?

LaRouche: The religious basis. What is the secret of the greatest achievements of the West? Forget about the crimes. I know about the crimes. That’s easy. Because the crimes are the same all over the world.

We have to see where the achievements come from. Obviously, they don’t come from these crimes. The achievements come from one thing, which the Renaissance typifies and Charlemagne in his own way typifies, from the emphasis that individual man is in the image of God. And the image, as Philo says, is the image of creativity. To the extent that man, unlike animals, can create as the Creator creates—with ideas—and put these ideas into practice, to revolutionize practice, creativity.

When a person sees himself as an individual, how does he see himself? Is it as a physical body? No, an animal has a physical body; that is not very human. What makes a person an individual? Mind. Creative potential of the mind. Without the recognition of the creative potential of the mind, without saying that the person has rights not because they have a body (an animal has a body), they’re meat, like an animal. They have rights, because they are human. And they are human, because they have creative potential.

That is the secret of everything that is accomplished in the West, including its best achievements in constitutions, civilization, government—everything good—came from that idea. And the idea also, that man must participate in God. That man, through his creativity, must contribute to his society, past, present, and future. And the individual must draw his happiness—

Muranivsky: I have read about these things in “On the Subject of Metaphor.”

LaRouche: The problem here, is dealing with the Russian people. The constitutional discussion is important. It is not to be ignored. It is a useful discussion. It must occur, even in crisis; but in crisis, people should discuss everything. But how do you get across to them, how do you inject into this, the idea of principle?

What is the state going to do? A constitution—what is that? That’s a constitution of a state. It is not a social contract. It is a constitution of a state. And what is the purpose of the state? The purpose is to protect the family and the person. For what purpose? For the development of this potential, and for the opportunity of the individual to use that potential, and to protect, for the rest of society, the benefits which each individual’s contribution can make to society. That is the purpose of the state, and that is what the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution should be seen to mean. These ideas were there. That is what is important.

Then they set up three branches of government, to balance.

Muranivsky: When we were discussing these questions, the question we posed, was how to splice together constitutional and economic questions.

LaRouche: First of all, anyone who worked, as I worked in a factory (and I worked in a factory as a very young boy), can tell you, that work is monotonous. Why does it have to be so monotonous? How do you improve it? If you were working in a monotonous job, you would think about how to improve the job. You would count, you would begin to analyze the job. You would begin to think, How could a machine do this job? How could I get a machine to do this? If you had a machine, how to make the machine better?

Muranivsky: And maybe the worker himself thinks through how to improve his own work function and makes a proposal to the manager.

LaRouche: That can help. But the most fundamental thing is that, suddenly, he changes himself. He no longer thinks like a worker, he thinks now like a productive engineer. He thinks, “Hey, I must think about this. This is important. Look, I have so many years to live. Am I going to live my life doing this, this, this and this? Am I going to be a horse? A bull? An ox? Or am I human?”

The humanization of work, which is needed for humanity. For example, pride in the product. The worker says, “I don’t want to be ashamed of working in this place because the product stinks. I want a good product. I take pride. This is my life.”

These qualities are the connection. Does he want a better family? Does he want more education for himself and his children? A better home? Does he have problems of diet? Does food spoil?

All these problems affect everybody every day, and they affect—what?

Well, all the problems have beauty. The beauty is, that the problems force us to solve them, to use our mind. And if you have a people who is self-conscious of this, saying: Ah, we have problems. Yes, but the problems force us to use our mind to find solutions. And to think like people. We are not oxen, we are people who create. We do what we have to do, but we always try to do it better, because we shouldn’t do it the same way, that would be like an animal. And that’s the great problem we have with the oppressed people of the world, is that the majority of the oppressed are trained to think in what they call traditional ways: “What my father and grandfather did.” They think they honor their father and grandfather by doing the same thing. They dishonor them because it becomes as if their lives were for nothing.

Muranivsky: Perhaps even in the course of the life of one person, everything can be changed.

LaRouche: To me, to educate in politics, economics, you cannot simply stick to politics and economics. It cannot be done. Because, in order to educate a people—like this problem, the problem of the monotony of labor, and not just the monotony of labor, but the solution to it. Well, this is the subject for a great dramatic tragedy, in order to get people to think about these concepts and to recognize these things in themselves, and to make people better people.

It is the function of great Classical poetry, of all Classical art, to inspire people by these ideas of beauty, of what is beautiful in life, and to be moved to do good things because they are also beautiful.

Information Theory

Muranivsky: I want to ask you about Norbert Wiener and Shannon. In “On the Subject of Metaphor” you have some very interesting reflections on the theme of information also. Very convincing. And I can be a little bit proud, that I actually criticized von Neumann ten years ago. I was in disagreement with the primitivism of his approach to his game theories.

LaRouche: For instance, you mean in the book by von Neumann and Morgenstern, The Theory of Games? The so-called “Robinson Crusoe model”?

Muranivsky: The people who defended von Neumann, explained the primitivism of von Neumann’s game theory, saying that the level of development of the computing technology at that time—methods, machinery for counting—prevented the development of a higher and more complex conception. Therefore, there could be an apology for his use at the given phase of development of information theory of a less developed theory, as long as it were recognized that this were not perfected, in order to move forward a little bit; but as one moved forward, naturally, more perfected, better methods would be developed.

This year, 1993, as a matter of fact, a Wiener/von Neumann prize has been instituted in Russia, to be awarded to those who have the greatest achievements in the area of computerization and so forth.

My question is the following. How should I understand your critique of Wiener/Shannon, von Neumann? Are these theories harmful in general, and if so, why? Or is it the case that perhaps they would have a certain application at certain phases and in certain cases?

And if they’re not, what should one have put forward at that phase in counteropposition to it?

Let’s set aside for your answer the question of entropy versus negentropy, because this is clear. Podolinsky and others cast doubts on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, already at the end of the nineteenth century. Vernadsky also spoke against entropy. So therefore, we shouldn’t touch on entropy and negentropy, but information theory as such.

LaRouche: First of all, this information theory is so simplistically absurd, that it’s amazing that anyone who considers themselves a scientist would ever be taken in by it.

Muranivsky: What do you mean by information theory?

Library of Congress
Russian Peasants

‘You have two Russian economies. A scientific-military-industrial section, which functions, and another Russia which is back in the serfdom of the early nineteenth century. How do you solve the problem of the brutalization of the population? They were treated like cattle, and this has not yet come out of their minds.

We see this in every part of the world, what Soviet literature called “the peasant problem”—the effect of brutalization on the population. The intelligentsia has a twofoldproblem: in the long term, to convince the Russian peasant he has a soul, to treasure the labor of his mind; and in the meantime, to elevate the activity, the creative powers, of his mind.’

LaRouche: That’s what I’m getting to. That’s the incredible part. It can only be explained by a kind of mafia principle that works in managing the ideology of institutionalized science.

In the English-speaking world, this particular theory starts actually at about 1518, with the appearance in England of a Venetian sex adviser to the lecherous King Henry VIII, by the name of Francesco Zorzi, who wrote a book attacking Nicolaus of Cusa, called Harmonice Mundi. This book is the basis for empiricism.

All modern science started essentially around Nicolaus of Cusa and his De Docta Ignorantia of 1540, on the Socratic principle of what was called docta ignorantia, or learned ignorance. This was based on the Platonic principle that man does not know reality through his senses, that is, not through sense certainty, but rather man knows reality by recognizing the role of creativity in changing the conditioned behavior of mankind, and in observing the effects of these changes in conditions of behavior and then showing a correlation between the method we use in our head to generate our ideas, and the effect of these ideas in response by nature in general, as measured in terms of effects on human beings. All of this is Cusa’s method. This is the method of Leonardo da Vinci, this is the method of Kepler, this is the method of all the great French scientists of the eighteenth century, Leibniz, the Bernoullis, and so forth.

This was attacked, in a very primitive way. The attack was little known in modern times. Zorzi was the ideologue behind the movement that later became Bacon and Hobbes and Locke and so forth, and British Freemasonry, the so-called Rosicrucian cult that came to England. It was out of the Rosicrucians in England, that empiricism developed. It was out of empiricism, that information theory came directly. It developed over many centuries, but essentially it was there all along, in a theory of communications and of the mind, a theory of knowledge, based on these neo-Aristotelian ideas by Zorzi, as we have it from Bacon, from Thomas Hobbes, from Locke, from Robert Fludd’s attack on Kepler, from Newton, and so forth.

The idea is that only sense certainty gives us knowledge; and that all that man can do, is rationalize the relations among the phenomena of sense-certainty. That is what information theory is.

Obviously, this is pure nominalism. Why? Admittedly, Baconian or Lockean empiricism is not based entirely on words. It is not radical nominalism. But the theory of sense-certainty is a little more sophisticated than pure, simple dictionary nominalism. It’s based not on a word, but on an idea of a sense-experience. It is a sense-idea, we might call it, in the head, but then you put a word on the sense-idea. But the empiricist does not base himself on the word; the radical positivist may. But the classical empiricist does not use the word. The classical empiricist uses the sense-experience, the particular datum, point data.

What he says, then, however, becomes pure Aristotle, because he derives the relationship, when he attempts to rationalize sense-certainties, from the Aristotelian syllogism. Therefore all you have is sense-certainties, which are names for objects, they are not real objects. They are the names for a sense-experience. So you put a name to the sense-experience.

But the important thing is the syllogism. Everything shows the contrary. Plato had already showed the contrary, in his work. But let’s take Cusa. I use Cusa’s De Circuli Quadratura (On the Quadrature of the Circle), as an example. The circular action is a higher species of existence, ontologically, than the polygonal processes which it circumscribes.

That is, the circle is not the asymptote of the polygon process, but is outside it. Augustin Cauchy, who made a vulgarized version of the calculus, vulgarizing Leibniz, replacing him with Newton, is wrong. Cauchy’s calculus is absurd. Cauchy invented the theory of the asymptote, and that is key to this whole process, what is called asymptotic freedom, as it became known after the 1920s. And it’s out of asymptotic freedom that you get information theory.

Euler attacked Leibniz on the question of divisibility. Euler insisted that space was infinitely divisible, whereas Leibniz had said it was not, in his Monadology, as Cantor later said the same thing. Space is not infinitely divisible, in a simple analysis situs. It cannot be done. So the facts show, that the universe was not ordered, by the linear relations which can be attributed to the syllogism.

The development of [the principle of] least action, from Cusa, where it started, through the work of Bernoulli and Leibniz at the end of the seventeenth century, had completely overturned any mathematics—even Newton had admitted this, in a sense. Newton had admitted that his sense of the world, implied in his mathematics, did not correspond to reality, but that he was compelled to leave that impression because that impression was imposed on his evidence by his choice of mathematics. So it was recognized that this kind of mathematics, derived from the syllogism, based on sense-certainty, had this failure, that it misrepresented reality.

Now this is all because of the same Platonic argument, which says, that sense-certainty is not actuality. It is a reflection, a shadow, of actuality, not the actuality itself. And we must get behind the sense-certainty, to find out what is the cause of the sense impression. We cannot interpret the sense impression, to find its own cause.

Least action says (as Kepler had said) that the universe is organized on the basis of a principle of least action, not a principle of action at a distance.

It is obvious, that you have to get to negentropy at this point, because when you look at the behavior of the human species, you cannot use the term “negentropy” simply, because many people will think that negentropy means Boltzmann’s conception of negentropy, and there is where the problem lies. Boltzmann said you could have a negative of entropy, living processes, by simply negating entropy, reversing entropy. You cannot. Entropy essentially belongs to this algebraic manifold; it exists only in an algebraic manifold. Negentropy does not exist in the algebraic manifold. It is not derivable. It is not ontologically the same species as entropy, but rather is self-similar development. What we call negentropy is only self-similar development. Human discovery.

Obviously, when we’re talking about society, my starting point was, we are talking about what happens in the human mind, and what happens between minds in the effective transmission of ideas from one person to another, which is correlate with this self-similar development. A statistical theory, such as Boltzmann’s, cannot, for ontological reasons, contain what he might call the information represented by this self-similar result of behavior.

Shannon is saying that information is a probability of distribution of a Boltzmann type, and that if you have a series of probabilities, the series must change in a certain statistical distribution, plus or minus. That does not account for the self-similar process that we are dealing with, of an energy system which has a rising temperature of the energy of the system. But the total temperature is increasing more rapidly than the energy of the system. There is no such statistical gas-theory system; it does not exist.

But it does exist in the form of the development of the Periodic table, in the form of evolution of species, the biosphere, and in the form of the development of human society. And since we are talking about information, we are talking about the change in man’s relationship to Nature, especially through production, which is accomplished by the development of ideas.

I use an example of this, which I always use. It’s very simple. Any college graduate in science or engineering, should know the example. How do we increase the productive powers of labor, essentially? We increase it with technology. What does that mean? It means we start with a scientific experiment. We have a hypothesis we develop. Now we construct an experimental apparatus, which is appropriate to the hypothesis. We have a successful result. We prove the hypothesis, we demonstrate hypothesis. We then make a refined experimental apparatus, to refine our study of this phenomenon, this hypothetical phenomenon.

I take the scientific apparatus, and I go to a machine tool business, and I make a machine tool which now utilizes that discovery as a principle in machine-tool design. I then take that machine tool design to a factory, and I teach the operators the hypothesis which goes with the machine tool. They now increase the productive powers of labor, through the education and use of a better tool.

That is typical of the transmission of the kind of information, upon which the existence of the human race depends.

The Potential in Russia

Muranivsky: Thank you very much. Maybe you have some questions about Russia.

LaRouche: I have so many questions about Russia. I sit here, every day trying to know what’s going on in the world, especially the important things.

The Russian crisis must be solved, in its present form. But that is only the means for solving many other crises, which are beginning to face us. The problem is the incompetence of leadership shown in so many countries. If you had two or three countries where you had capable, strong leaders, who could respond to the sense of reality of a crisis, and give leadership to other countries, and say, Look, we have to do this, then this crisis could be solved. It would have been solved.

We have such miserably, disgustingly weak and stupid governments, it’s unbelievable.

Muranivsky: Because of this, the problems are complex all over the world, not only in Russia.

LaRouche: I can understand the problem in Russia, because the former regime destroyed many potentials, because of the environment in which people lived.

But also in Russia, there are certain potentials in science and so forth, among a layer of people of that sort, which can be used to help make up for the lack of potential in other areas. We can use technological and scientific progress as a way of awakening the people to a new kind of morality, a new kind of way of behaving. Because they will say, This works, we’ll do this, this is a good. And a new sense of self and education. That will solve the problem. If I could have one year, two years, of massive infrastructure development programs, you would change the mentality of the Russian people. Now, because it is a crisis, they’re looking for solutions. If they see something for one or two years that works, that makes things better, they are going to say, Ah! This works. Not because all of them will see it, but because leading people, the more sensitive minds will see it, and they will persuade the others, with leadership.

But the problem is, you have people all through Russia, I’m sure, who are potential leaders—all kinds of people. But when they look at the center, and they look at the world around them, they don’t see any leadership that they can follow. They just see confusion, chaos, dishonesty. Things become worse; nearly everything becomes worse.

I’m sure you can find in Russia, you can find people there, who have all kinds of talent and a certain moral commitment to using their talent, their ability.

******************************************************

The Historical Concept of the SDI

Kuzin: In the Soviet Union, the idea of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was always presented in such a horrible fashion, as a sneaky plan by reactionary imperialist forces of the West for annihilating the USSR and all the countries of the East Bloc. There were the attacks in the Soviet press of that time against the idea itself and against you personally as its initiator. Briefly, what was the full content of the SDI conception, and what motivated the distortion of this idea by the Soviet side, and the attempts to exploit it in the political confrontation of the two blocs?

LaRouche: The problem is, is that from both sides, on the part of the ordinary, sincere Soviet politician or the sincere U.S. politician or the military in Western Europe or the United States, or even from the standpoint of people like Ogarkov, there was a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the so-called Cold War. Even people who at a high level participated in it, didn’t understand it. It’s like the actor on stage who doesn’t know what the intention of the playwright is.

We had approaches from a Soviet, obviously intelligence, person in 1981 at the United Nations. We read him as probably GRU or KGB. We didn’t know which. He was nasty, but sincere. Professional, in short. He approached one of our people at the United Nations, and said, in effect: We don’t understand the Reagan administration. We think that our usual U.S.-Soviet channels are not giving us the right information.

I heard about this, so I caused a report to be made to various people I knew in the U.S. government, a report of the discussion and my comment. My recommendation was that the Reagan administration treat this seriously as a request for a new channel. Our source suggested they explore opening a new channel.

Now, I also suggested that the question of strategic ballistic missile defense be considered. My particular point of emphasis, which I did in my oral report, was that I knew that on the Russian side, there was an understanding of the stupidity of Mutual Assured Destruction, and very few people on the U.S. side had the same understanding. And I knew, from what we knew of Soviet work on strategic ballistic missile defense, that there was great concern about the danger of this so-called peace or detente. Most of the official back channels were loaded with people who were promoters of this detente. But from the standpoint of any traditional military thinker, the thermonuclear deterrence, is only a preparation for war.

But also, and I must explain my motivation which colored the subsequent events, I had a private reason for this. I understood the true nature of the relationship between the Soviet government and the Anglo-Americans.

Kuzin: It would be good to hear this in a little bit more detail.

LaRouche: None of the Soviet press that I ever heard of, ever reflected any understanding, that the entire relationship between the Soviet government and the Versailles powers for the entire almost 70 years, was a complete fraud.

The reason the Soviet Union came into existence, had many accidental features to it. One is the persistent contradiction and paradox of the czarist regime with the oligarchical character of old Russia, which crushed every attempt at genuine reform, most notably the case of Peter the Great, who was a reformer, Alexander II or Count Witte.

A certain section of the Russian intelligentsia was always looking for reform, which used to center around the St. Petersburg Academy. The positive part of the Russian intelligentsia and political establishment was very close, on one side, to Germany (St. Petersburg especially), especially in the Leibniz tradition of science. This was the part that was very pro-American at various times, against the British. Then you had the Moscow group, which had a different tradition.

When the American Civil War happened and Russia the second time demanded neutrality of Europe against the Americas, the British intelligence, the Palmerston faction, were terrified of a continuing alliance among Russia, the United States, and Germany, because if this kind of economic development occurred in Eurasia, then Eurasia would go out of control of the British Empire.

So actually, the Bolsheviks were always very embarrassed about the fact, that they were in large part a creation of British intelligence.

Kuzin: We’ve had widespread acceptance of the version, which was spread about especially since the early years of perestroika, that the Bolsheviks were really able to come to power, thanks to financial and other backing from German secret services. Is this some special disinformation?

LaRouche: It’s also true, but it’s not complete information.

Kuzin: So, what is whole picture? This is very important for us to understand the reasons for what happened.

LaRouche: Exactly. It’s key to understanding why I did what I did. My approach is based on this historical understanding.

The Russian radical developments were part of the Palmerston-directed radical movement of the 1830s and 1840s.

For example, the example of this in the British mind, is the case of the absurdity which occurs in France, which is a good way of comparing absurdities which occurred in the Soviet Russia.

On July 14, 1789, the Duc d’Orleans, the cousin of the king, hired a street mob which he equipped with weapons. They marched on the Bastille, which was almost empty, except for four lunatics, who were awaiting transfer to mental institutions. But all the political prisoners were already out. The guards surrendered. So the mob chopped off the heads of the guards. They put the heads of the guards on pikes. They put the lunatics on their shoulders. They carried the bust of Necker before them; and this was an election rally by the Duc d’Orleans to force the king to make Necker—who had just bankrupted France’s finance minister—prime minister of France. And I will often ask French friends: “Why do you celebrate Bastille Day? This is not a demonstration of freedom.” But the British did that to France, destroying France as a competitor.

Similarly, the British were out to destroy the czarist system, not because the czarist system was the system of freedom, but because it had a recurring tendency to go opposite to Britain. And the history of Europe to this day, as Thatcher shows in this century, is the history of [efforts by] Britain to prevent France, Germany, and Russia from becoming a center of global economic development, particularly in Eurasia.

Kuzin: What are the global goals of the British elite, or the Anglo-American elite?

LaRouche: To keep France, Germany, and Russia at each other’s throat, with the aid of the Balkans, in order to prevent this.

The British, in the 1930s, put Hitler into power in Germany, because they knew that von Schleicher, with his economic reform, was going to move again for German economic cooperation with Russia. With the German system of credit, and Russia at that time starved for capital, the natural tendency would be for Germany, as it was tending to do with the Black Reichswehr, to move into cooperation with Russia secretly, particularly at a time when the Anglo-American powers were in collapse financially. The British and the Americans put Hitler into power, to ensure a future war with Germany and Russia.

Kuzin: Was this a divide-and-conquer policy, divide et impera?

LaRouche: Exactly. The so-called detente was the same thing. Take the characteristics of this from the end of the First World War. Then look at Yalta. Now Stalin, probably as the files will begin to show sometime, was a fanatical Russian nationalist in his own way. A Bolshevik Ivan Grozny. He became that.

Stalin knew, in his own paranoid, shrewd way, what he had signed. You see Stalin: “They cheat me today, I cheat them tomorrow.”


Library of Congress
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta conference.

‘The history of Europe, is the history of efforts by Britain to prevent France, Germany, and Russia from becoming a center of global economic development, particularly in Eurasia.

The British put Hitler into power in the 1930’s, because they knew that von Schleicher, with his economic reform, was going to move again for German economic cooperation with Russia. Then look at Yalta: Stalin was a fanatical Russian nationalist, a Bolshevik Ivan the Terrible. He did not want to partition Germany, he wanted German production for Russia. But the British policy was to use nuclear weapons to force an agreement upon Russia; and Bertrand Russell said, if they do not make an agreement, we’ll bomb them!’ 

Kuzin: One gets the sense that the entire history of Europe, at least in the twentieth century, is a history of mutual deceptions. This was completely immoral politics.

LaRouche: So the point was, that Stalin signed the agreement, out of weakness. The key thing about Stalin, is that Stalin did not want the partition of Germany. Stalin wanted German production for Russia. Churchill had a lot of problems with Stalin. But you see, the British policy was, we must use nuclear weapons, number one, to force an agreement upon Russia; and Bertrand Russell said, if they do not make the agreement, we’ll bomb them. This is all public. It’s not a secret.

When Stalin died, now the Soviets had nuclear weapons. And because of Vernadsky, they also had a thermonuclear weapons, because Vernadsky’s atom project produced them, because Vernadsky started that back in the middle of the 1920s.

So at that point, Stalin is dead. It took less than two years. As soon as Khrushchov had consolidated power, Khrushchov sent messages to London, to Russell’s meeting, and out of that came the Pugwash agreements. The policy was: The Anglo-Americans had an agreement with Moscow, and a subsidiary agreement with China. So they say: Now we create a system of an exclusive nuclear club, and nobody must develop defensive weapons. We must use the balance of terror to control the club. The key thing becomes clear, when you see the developing sector, and you see the U.S. and the Soviet government on the issues of the developing sector. It’s a partnership to control the world.

Kuzin: In what way was your conception of the SDI an alternative to this?

LaRouche: First of all, we both agreed—that is, the scientists on both sides, who are objective, have to agree that the system with the increasing of targeting, with thermonuclear pulse, with the precision and forward basing, that the system of deterrence is a system for war, not to stop one. We’re living in insanity, where you have what are called utopians, ideologues, fanatics, such as McNamara, Kissinger, Bertrand Russell on the Western side, and then those like Khrushchov, who said, we’re going to make an agreement with the West on this basis. These ideologues say: We must have the balance of terror, the utopian system.

But the reality was, that I knew, because of the things that I read, that you could see, in the Soviet scientific and military community, there was a completely correct understanding of what this problem is. The point is, if you see this from the correct military standpoint, then you understand what the real political, global, historical standpoint is. Because we had discussions of this from a military standpoint, with Americans but also German and other European experts. And the insanity of the military doctrine, is what makes clear what’s wrong with the whole policy.

Just very simply, the military principle: There is no such thing as a deterrent in history. This is true in terms of the world of atomic weapons, as well as any other type. There are only two things: either an effective defense or a preemptive conquest.

You had signs on both the European side, the Western side, and on the Soviet side, of tendencies in both directions. And I could see around Nikolai Ogarkov, things like this. I got almost to the point, that I could almost read his mind from a distance—because his thinking was dangerous, but it was militarily correct. It’s a sane, rational adversary. A very dangerous adversary, because he is sane.

If a nation believes it’s about to be destroyed, or it is at the point of losing the future ability to defend itself— In the 1970s, we had the emergence of that condition. The Soviet system could not continue economically to work indefinitely in the form it was in. And under the policies which the Anglo-Americans adopted for the West in 1964-67, the West could not last either. You had a race to collapse, of two powers. The question was, which one would collapse first? And the one that thought it was going to collapse first, is likely to start a war. And there were both tendencies, on both sides.

The only solution, to me, was, first of all, to bring the truth out, and say we have idiots, insane people on both sides—

Kuzin: One gets the sense, that some very influential political figures in the U.S. and some very influential political figures in the Soviet Union, your political elite and ours, so to speak, had certain common interests and acted jointly. These two groupings, yours and ours, opposed the very concept of SDI and coordinated that.

LaRouche: More than that. I knew what I was doing. I was using the fear of the patriots in the military and other institutions of two superpowers, to say: What we’re doing is insane. We are going to destroy each other unless we make a change. And the change is: End this terror, use a new technology, which requires us to go to an international science-driver economic policy. To attempt to play the patriotism on both sides, in NATO and in the Soviet Bloc as a force against an oligarchy.

The Nature of the Oligarchy

What had developed over the period, is a not-invisible oligarchy behind the security services in the Soviet Union—on a higher level, but behind the security services—and behind the owners of Henry Kissinger in England. Kissinger’s importance is much exaggerated in the press. He’s only a tool. Chatham House: the Royal Institute for International Affairs, which is the old Wheeler-Bennett geopolitical group. In this group, the geopolitical tradition is centered.

There is a force centered around wealthy foundations, wealthy families, family names.

Kuzin: Who, personally, is this oligarchy? This is very important for people to understand in Russia.

LaRouche: This is an oligarchy which had its root in Venice, from the old times, which began to move, in the sixteenth century, to take over the Netherlands and England, which has been the center of every major war in Europe for hundreds of years. This group is organized in a form which is called in Italian fondi. These are foundations.

For example, it used to exist in Russia, in the form of landed estates, vastly powerful families, which owned the equivalent of whole countries, in territory. You had these institutions called fondi. They were foundations. They were a trust, that is an organization which would take the wealth of a family. These are what some people would call finance capital, which is not capital. It does not come from industry. It is essentially usury. It takes rent from everything. These families, even when they biologically no longer exist, exist in the form of a fund, like a corporate form which has directors who are self-perpetuating.

You have many kinds of these things which are spun out of this. For example, you have the old feudal oligarchy which is organized in the form of funds like this. The family does not really own the fund. The fund owns the family, like the Thurn und Taxis family in Europe, for example. It’s a fund, and the prince is nothing but an heir of the fund. The British royal family is a collection of funds. You see all over the world: Corporations, wealthy families, create funds.

For example, the Rockefeller family: they don’t have much money. They have millions, but not billions. The billions are in the funds. So you have a non-human collection of dead souls.

Kuzin: What, then, is the objective role of these fund? What do they want, say, for America, for Russia, or for the world?

LaRouche: The fund, first of all, is based on usury. That’s pure rent. The fund is nothing but a financial corporation, which usually has some tax exemption, for charity or whatever. The personality of the fund is given to it by its self-perpetuating directors, its trustees.

It’s like human beings supplying their intelligence to a non-existent alien thing. The funds all operate under what are called covenants, or agreements, which the people will serve. The essential general purpose of the fund, is to perpetuate itself by means of usury.

European and American society are dominated by these kinds of funds. Most of the property titles, the created financial property titles, are held by these funds. Now the funds derive their money by rent of various kinds. They invest in financial paper. They invest in corporations, in trade—profit on trade. Like the international food cartels, grain cartels. The funds take a minimum amount of risk. They will loan their money to people who are entrepreneurs, who take the risk.

They will be the financial power behind banks, behind insurance companies, and so forth. As a result of this, they control most of the people in economic life. Now, they’re also charitable. They give money away. So they control education by donations. They control scientific research, they control the culture, the arts.

Kuzin: And probably also politics, not least of all, right?

LaRouche: Yes, they control the press, the major press.

Thus you have a society, in which people say: The government does this, the government does that — no! Who makes the government do what it does? You have this form of parasite. These are like cancer, because in a rational society, we would say: Why do we allow ourselves to be destroyed by this?

In eastern Europe, this function was dominated, to a large degree, by the monasteries. You could see this, for example, in the Mongol occupation of Russia. The princes were marginal figures. The monasteries were the real power under the Mongol satrapy, which had a great deal to do with the history of Russia.

In Serbia, the Serbian Church, like the Russian Church, was a monastic church, not a lay church. Mount Athos, the holy mountain in Greece, controlled Serbia entirely through the monastery. The monastery is a fondo. The monks, particularly the officials of the monastery, are the people who control the fondo. And in poor countries, the monastery controls the economic life of the countryside.

In the West, the way it happened, is that we had the Benedictine Order. The Benedictines came in the West, first of all, out of the formation of religious orders as deposits of funds of families. Then the Benedictine Order was created from Constantinople in about 500 A.D. The Benedictine monastery was a government. It was an autonomous government. In the case of Venice, the primary fondo was the Church of St. Mark’s. The Church of St. Mark acts like a central bank, into which all the other family banks would deposit their money.

What happened was the conversion of the American wealthy families into fondi, around the beginning of this century, and under President Theodore Roosevelt, this was consolidated. Roosevelt and Wilson consolidated this institution early in this century. So, you have an Anglo-American collection of fondi, which is tied together around the idea of British Freemasonry. But the Freemasonry is the lower part of this. It’s just like an influence, a process of influence. So you have therefore, from outside of government, a hierarchy of personalities who are associated with these kinds of institutions. And if you are familiar with them, then you know that certain professors, certain law firms and so forth, these figures are an American nomenklatura, or an Anglo-American nomenklatura.

You have, therefore, a twofold character of governments. You have the actual constitutional government, which sees its interest as the nation, which sees the individual, but it sees essentially the perpetuation of the population as a whole, and its development. That’s government.

The other power, is this other thing, this fondo, this group of fondi. The two conflict. In principle, they conflict. But then the fondi try to control the government.

This was my point with the SDI, to appeal to the patriotism within the government. I say, in the patriotic interests of our countries— Now, if we had had in Russia, not Andropov, but any Russian leader who had the intelligence to recognize this problem, to recognize that this kind of agreement would destroy the power of Yalta—

Kuzin: But wouldn’t any such person, by doing so, bring down on his head the wrath of the oligarchy, and encounter powerful opposition from it?

LaRouche: Look at Russia today. You see a very clear warning of something, and you see how this works.

There are two ways to make a revolution. One is, any idiot can start shooting in the street. The other way to make a revolution, is to use the forces of the mind to bring about a revolution. The force of patriotism, for example. We have a people. If the people care for the nation, that is the most powerful motivation we have.

The Mission of the Intelligentsia

Kuzin: I would ask you then to develop in a little more detail the concept of patriotism. This is very important for Russia today. Russia’s national interests are literally being trampled on.

LaRouche: That’s right. Obviously, and how are they being trampled? The most devastating part of this operation, from the reports I get, is very clear to me.

You see, what in Russia can change Russia? And you look at Russian history, particularly the history of reform since the Time of Troubles. You have the struggle of the Romanovs against the raskolniki. This is key to me in all the history of Russia.

Leibniz, whom I take as my predecessor, had a conception of how to approach this. He successfully convinced Peter (I) to adopt a policy, to create the Academy of Sciences, which all Russian academies come from, and to create the idea of a national economic interest, to develop agriculture as a progressive area, which meant to free the serfs. Because unless you engaged the peasant’s mind in changing agriculture, you could have no agriculture.

Of course, Peter himself was Third Rome, in his own way. He was a more Western Third Rome, more on the Western Caesar, less on the Eastern Caesar. Because he recognized that Western culture was superior to the Eastern. Therefore, he said: I’m going to be a Western Czar! So I would not wish to impute, wishfully, noble motives to Peter. Efforts of his family to improve the life of the serf, were probably pragmatic.

Then you had the retreat into darkness again, so that by the time of Alexander II, Russia is destroyed again. Then, after the British, French, and Turkish War [the Crimean War], there’s a sudden growth again under Alexander II, to rebuild. Then you have the development of this. Who are the key people? We have Mendeleyev. Mendeleyev goes to Paris. He becomes interested in agricultural chemistry. He’s a genius, a great genius. He goes back, he builds railroads, as well as making a revolution in chemistry.

Under Alexander II, there’s a sudden growth to rebuild. Who are the key people? Mendeleyev, who goes to Paris, becomes interested in agricultural chemistry. He’s a genius, a great genius. He goes back, he builds railroads, as well as making a revolution in chemistry. And Count Sergei Witte.
National Archives
Count Sergei Witte, Russian finance Minister (1893-1903), Prime Minister (1905-6).

Dmitri Meneleyev

‘Look at the evidence on which he worked to develop the Periodic Table: fractional crystallization. There are very few people today, given the limitation of that evidence, who could have done what Dmitri Mendeleyev did.’

 

And Sergei Witte. What you have throughout Russian history, you have a history not of the Czar as such, because the Czar is only a political figure of influence. What you see is the Russian intelligentsia, which is trying to help the Russian people. It’s the Russian intelligentsia which has this patriotic motive. Not necessarily all of the intelligentsia; but within the function of the intelligentsia, there is this motive.

The real intelligentsia has one characteristic which is key to understanding the whole business, which is my special area: creativity. When a person deals with ideas not as a romantic, but in the fashion of a scientist and discoverer or, analogous, like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Or Leonardo da Vinci, or, specifically—Mendeleyev. Very few people, I think, appreciate the mind of Dmitri Mendeleyev. What goes on in that mind? I know what goes on in that mind.

Look at what the evidence was, on which he worked to develop the Periodic Table: Fractional crystallization. There are very few people today, given the limitation of that evidence, who could have done what Dmitri Mendeleyev did. You see, in the work of Vernadsky, a similar thing.

I mention these two because I’m familiar with their work, or certain parts of their work. I know these are two examples of creative thinking.

Take someone who is of the intelligentsia. What does he do? He works someplace, he teaches, or whatever. He walks in the street and he sees the Russian people. He goes in the countryside and he sees the same thing. He says, “Who am I? Who am I in relation to all these people?” Then one day he looks in the mirror, in the mind, and he sees something in himself which reminds him of Mendeleyev. He says, “I am one of these people. But I have developed something in myself. My job is to develop it in those people.” What Russian can want to go in the street, and see a cousin drunk in the gutter? He says, “What is this? A beast? Is this a Brother Karamazov? Or what?” Or does he say, “This person has within him this quality which I call imago Dei,” which is demonstrated by the creative principle. You say, “I do not wish to see my cousins beasts any more. Yes, we have to have work. We must have agriculture, we must have industry, but it must be done as human beings, not as beasts.” Then the answer comes: Can I do it tomorrow? No! They’ll continue to suffer in drudgery, but their grandchildren shall not. And that is the true patriotism. And that is the function of the intelligentsia, and that is the function of the Russian intelligentsia, of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

Kuzin: This is very truly said. This is all right, and this is very close to my heart. And so, what you have said is not a discovery for me personally, but it will be extraordinarily important for many people to know this in Russia. Because people today in Russia look at America very differently from the way they did even five years ago. And I am more than sure that for many people in Russia, it will be a revelation that there is anybody in the United States thinking the way many people in Russia think.

Corruption

Precisely insofar as Yeltsin and his group basically oriented towards making capitalists out of a narrow layer of the former communist elite, the Parliament essentially, despite all of its contradictions, did enunciate and conduct a line in favor of democratic reforms in all areas. This gets at the true underpinnings of the conflict between the executive and representative branches, which has been officially portrayed in a false light.

In reality, the national wealth of Russia remained in the hands of Yeltsin and his cronies, in the executive structures. Even the communists who remained in the Parliament ceased to be people with access to real power, that is to the allocation of the wealth of the country. They had nothing left to depend on, except the support of their voters. Therefore, even against their own will, they had to express the interests of the voters in the Parliament.

Since Yeltsin carried out the so-called economic reforms in violation of the law, there arose an acute conflict between the Parliament and Yeltsin’s partisans, on these grounds. In order to be able to continue to violate the law (without which the former nomenklatura elite would not be able to grab all the wealth of Russia), the policy of the executive institutions is directed towards the crushing of the state as such, the state as guarantor that rights and the law will be observed.

One of the leading ideologues of building capitalism in Russia is Gavriil Popov. Gavriil Popov in the past, was a professor at Moscow State University, specializing in the socialist market economy. And it should be specified, that all of the ideologues of capitalism in the close entourage of Yeltsin are ex-communist professors. Gennadi Burbulis, for example, was a professor of scientific communism at an institute in Sverdlovsk. Yegor Gaidar was deputy editor of Kommunist the Communist Party journal.

LaRouche: These types I know. I have had exposure to these people in the West and so forth, and I have an image of crocodiles. Literally, they’re not human. On the surface, they sometimes seem urbane. When you scratch them, you get a crocodile. There’s a certain type of personality which you find in the leadership of communist organizations in various parts of the world, but also elsewhere. You find them among academics—like Sidney Hook, for example. Most of the professors of economics today, are of that type. The professors of malthusian biology. A certain type of liberal who does not believe in right or wrong or truth or falsehood.

I can imagine in Russia, that these people look like the most unpleasant characters from a Dostoevsky novel, like an academic character portrayed unpleasantly by Dostoevsky.

Kuzin: At the same time, I would say that the scope of these phenomena in Russia is absolutely unprecedented. The degree of cynicism and the openness with which people act.

LaRouche: You see this from the standpoint of the corruption of the intelligentsia. You see two aspects. When a good person becomes evil, it’s sometimes the worst. What happened in Russia, obviously, I see in some of the writings, I see it in the history of the Communist Party. The key to this corruption, is the word “lie.”

To be a member of the intelligentsia, really—I’m not talking about accountants or people like that, but scientists, artists, historians—when you do creative work, it’s like jumping off a cliff. In that case, you’d better be a master of the laws of flying. In creative work, the laws of flying, in that circumstance, are called truth. And since you never get absolute truth directly, you have to keep sailing, you have to keep sailing on. And you must keep struggling for truth every moment. Each moment must be more truthful than the previous one, because you can never come to rest, because you never absolutely reach truth.

Look at this in Russia. Take the intelligentsia, as I looked at it, and also from a military standpoint. The Russian intelligentsia faces a big problem. He faces the raskolnik in the Russian farmer. The raskolnik is like a sick brother. If he can’t save the brother, at least he’ll save the grandchildren. Whatever. He’s got to do something.

This was true of the scientists in the Soviet military sphere. I used to read these Soviet reports on the Russian economy, particularly reports on detailed problems: factory problems, this problem, that problem. And I came up constantly against reports of what might be called generically the “peasant problem.” A factory’s rebuilt, they build with old-style bricks. Or the machine they want to replace with an exact replacement of the old machine. They don’t want the new machine.

So you get, on one side, the ordinary Russian economy that produces for the people—horrible oppression! Then you see the Cosmodrome, or a certain edition of the Mig-29, or whatever. What you see is a perfect example of the Russian intelligentsia at its best. The civilian economy is the base on which it rests—the whole system. They make something which militarily, from the scientific standpoint, does the job, by applying their ingenuity to the terrible product produced by this peasant problem in the economy.

So you get two Russian economies. You have a scientific-military-industrial section, which functions, which, in a sense, understands Russia. Then you get another Russia, which is back in the serfdom of the early nineteenth century.

Now, the practical problem for a Russian patriot is: Why? Why is this so? What’s wrong with the peasant? Very simple—for me it’s simple, because I know plenty of American peasants too. Especially among our contemporary artists. The problem is, the Russian peasant does not believe he has a soul. Russia has a soul, but he doesn’t. He has only passions and appetites.

So the problem of the intelligentsia, is twofold. One, in the long term to convince the Russian peasant he has a soul, to treasure the labor of his mind, and, in the meantime, to elevate his activity of the mind, the creative powers of his mind.

Kuzin: The Russian peasant today has no time to think about his soul, because he cannot feed his body.

LaRouche: It’s the same problem. How do you convince somebody to have a soul, to point out that he can do something that the animal he owns can’t do?

You see this all over the world, this problem. The great problem of humanity, and it’s a great irony, that we can only improve the condition of life of peoples and their productive powers of labor with technological progress. But, at the same time, even if that were not necessary, a person—because he’s a person—needs to have technological progress also to make his work consistent with his need of being human.

Kuzin: I would like to go into a little more of the specifics of our problems in Russia today, so that you picture the situation more precisely. What you say about the thieving instincts and all sorts of lower instincts, fully characterizes our nomenklatura today and always has. It is the nomenklatura which has reduced the people to the state of cattle, when they are in the realm of instincts. All the best that we had was destroyed from 1917 on, by the very same people who are today claiming to be the ones to lead Russia to democracy.

Thievery and criminal thinking have become the official ideology of this elite. Gavriil Popov, for example, whom I mentioned, about a year ago publicly attempted to give a theoretical grounding to the usefulness of corruption. He proposed to draw up a special roster of services which officials would grant for bribes, and to establish the proper payment for each bribe.

LaRouche: Was $20 million the highest one?

Kuzin: They were very high prices. Also, unlike bribetakers in the West, Russian bribetakers do not feel obliged to deliver. So you can imagine the scope of absolute chaos and the opportunities for criminal enrichment of the ruling elite in Russia.

But as for the ordinary people, workers, employees, farmers—they don’t even have in their genetic memory the necessary skills, which the new economy would require. How, with the help of the state, would preconditions be created, for people to act in a new way? The reform program in Russia provides for nothing of the kind.

Everybody talks about economic reforms in Russia, but nobody has ever told the population what the reform is supposed to be. This reaches the absurd. On the April 25, 1993, we had a referendum, in which Yeltsin posed the question of confidence in him personally as President and in his economic policy. In the course of interviews of voters, on the eve of election, they were asked: How do you understand the government’s economic policy? Not a single one of them could even reply, what this economic policy was.

Having complete control of the mass media, especially the most powerful such as radio and TV, Yeltsin, in the spirit of the old traditions of the old communist nomenklatura, assured the people: “I’m the best” and that he understood the needs of Russian democracy and interests of the people better than the others. So in fact, the elite of today is simply parasitizing on the old stereotypes of the cult of personality.

LaRouche: That’s worse than Stalin. Stalin at least faked discoveries.

Kuzin: Yes. At the same time, the looting and destruction of the state continues. Huge quantities of oil, raw materials, and gold are shipped out of the country, for bribes to officials. And the greater part of the hard currency income from these exports remains in Western bank accounts. The Parliament had estimated this flight capital, acquired through the export of the national wealth, at $80 billion. These funds could have been used for conducting real reforms. But they remain in the West. At the same time, as you know, Yeltsin asks for $24 billion from the West, from the IMF.

LaRouche: They beg for $3 billion! It’s like Venezuela, it’s like Colombia, like Argentina, like Brazil; it’s a Third World country.

Kuzin: Therefore, it’s no accident that the Yeltsin government has earned the name of a government of national betrayal.

LaRouche: They ought to start using the old communist term, “comprador.”

Kuzin: Yes. At the same time, there’s a great stratification, with respect to who has what, in Russian society. You have on the one hand this narrow group of the super-rich elite, the former communist nomenklatura, and mafia capital. And on the other side, almost 90 percent of the people now live below the poverty line, which means that whereas a monthly subsistence minimum requirement would be a 90,000 Ruble wage, the average wage is 50,000 Rubles.

LaRouche: That’s $80-90, approximately, for the requirement.

Kuzin: Suffice it to say, that a normal family, if, for example, the refrigerator or the television breaks down, in order to buy a replacement, the entire family should work for the entire year, and spend their whole salary on just that. Even the purchase of clothing has become problematic.

LaRouche: So they bake bread, and they sell it in the street—

Kuzin: After the decontrol of prices in January 1992, approximately 40 million people on pension overnight essentially lost their entire income, what they had in banks. This is the underlying reason, defining political developments in the recent period.

Now under these conditions in Russia, the criminal business, the mafia, has begun to acquire extraordinary clout, because a normal economy cannot develop. So you have dope trade, and trade in weapons; and we have even begun to see develop a new type of business, with international contacts—trade in human organs.

By August of this year, the executive branch was forced to admit they were impotent to combat the mafia, and had had to sit down at the negotiating table with the mafia. The subject of the agreement was to jointly maintain at least some modicum of order in the city.

During the crisis days of September and October, Yeltsin set himself the goal of dissolving the Parliament, understanding perfectly well that he was liquidating a parliamentary republic in Russia and the democratic Constitution, and that he was breaking once again the fragile tradition of representative democracy in Russia, just as his predecessors, the Bolsheviks, did in 1917, and that he was returning Russia once again to that very dangerous political tradition of one-man rule, of an oppressive dictatorship and the cult of personality.

He was able to accomplish this in those days, essentially, by relying on the Army and the support of the West. I would stress again, that Yeltsin was not acting against just that given constitution, but against constitutionality as such.

During those days, in fact, the Army virtually did not support Yeltsin, but insofar as Minister of Defense Grachov is a crony of Yeltsin, he acted to disorganize and the section of the Army that would have wanted to support the Parliament, and deprive if of the ability to communicate internally.

LaRouche: I think that it was all settled by the 15th of September. The army troops, the right troops were moved up, the wrong ones were not there. You had provocations, provocateurs. Everything was set up. There was a plan: Number one, destroy the intelligentsia, which is being done economically, chiefly. It’s being done because when you have the communist system destroyed, you have the nomenklatura largely self-discredited.

Leadership for a Nation

The only institutions in Russia which can pull the country back together— You have two alternatives: You have only the intelligentsia and the military, with the church in the background, with the church preferring the military, historically.

If you destroy the intelligentsia, you crush the people, what you are going to get is either chaos or a dictatorship which is not necessarily a military dictatorship, but which rests on the military. Because the military’s function, catalytically, in that circumstance, is as a unifying force. It’s the only force left to unify.

The dangerous thing is that the mistake people in the West are going to make, is to misunderstand what the words “Third Rome” mean. In the West, they think it’s an ideology. (Not everyone.) It is not. It is the Russian coming out from under the Mongol Conquest, in which all of Russia was looted by the Mongol Conquest. Everything that existed before Genghis Khan had been looted, the people driven to the lowest level. And then this horror and fear of the West and the corruption of the West, the inability to understand the world at large, so that, in a sense, “We must control the world, everybody outside is an enemy, everybody is a danger.” The Third Rome requires only the idea—not of Filofei of Pskov—but only the idea, that a unifying institution, or a set of unifying institutions, unify the Russian people.

The question, therefore is: We have a great intellectual and moral crisis in Russia. The ideas have failed; therefore, what are the new ideas? At the same time, a fear of new ideas. If you starve the intelligentsia—

Kuzin: Who has this fear of new ideas?

LaRouche: People will be afraid of new ideas, the peasant will be afraid of new ideas.

Kuzin: But I get the impression that people in general, despite everything that’s been done to them, are open to new ideas. But the political forms— We have not escaped from the old totalitarian structures.

LaRouche: Exactly. Therefore, the question is, since the people have this historically determined problem, the people are going to look to find institutions which can unify them against their problems, particularly after the terrible winter which is now going to happen. I think that, in Russia, we are facing horror in the coming months into the Spring.

Now if the intelligentsia is in place, with all the problems involved, but if it were still in place—the institutions—as long as they did not give way to lies (the lies are the problem)—

Kuzin: All the intelligentsia, practically, is giving into lies, and you could count on your fingers the number of people, who remain devoted to the interests of the people. That is one basic problem. Yeltsin is, in the very near future, either going to have to go to war against the people, or leave the scene.

LaRouche: Or the Army will dispense with him. He’s made himself a prisoner of a process. Remember, we’re dealing with other things that are going to happen in the world, besides just inside Russia.

The World Crisis

Kuzin: When I’m talking about Yeltsin, I’m not separating him from the Western supoprt that he depends on. This is a powerful force.

LaRouche: Oh no, but we’re talking about a world crisis, though. People in Russia have to see what the global reality is. That history of lies blinds people to the global reality. We have old stereotypes from the old regime, and now we have the new stereotypes from the Yeltsin regime and the news media. But what is really happening, is something more complicated. You have to see the insanity and self-destruction in the West, in order to see the full picture.

I’ll give you the picture from my standpoint. In October 1988, in a television broadcast which I gave nationwide, in the speech I gave in Berlin, I had two things especially: that the Russian economy is going to collapse, that the East Bloc is going to collapse, Germany will probably be reunited, there will be a major rebuilding crisis facing Russia and Poland.

I saw what was going to come, it was very clear to me. And, what we must do, we must build. We must not stop. We must build railroads especially, and so forth. Use the existing production facilities to full capacity, wear it out, and replace it. Mobilize the military scientist group to apply their skills to the problem of the non-military sector, through large-scale production.

What happens? 1989. Did the West respond intelligently? No. Now they say, “We don’t have to be sane any more.”

If you look at the governments of Western Europe and the United States since 1989, you see something happen. You see, George Bush went clinically insane, absolutely insane. But if you look at what happened in France, the destruction of the government of Italy, the destruction of Germany inch by inch and so forth, you see that they are now destroying the world. Now, part of this is intentional.

Kuzin: Is it their will, or is those behind them?


www.Kremlin.ru
Russian President Boris Yeltsin

`In 1991, you had a Russian population which was very upset by the deterioration of life. Perestroika tasted good when you ate it, but it didn't sit in the stomach. The Yeltsin phenomenon is part of that. Yeltsin is like a sentimental pimp who likes to go to concerts on Saturday afternoon. One must not overestimate the man: he's an apparatchik. `If I were in Yeltsin's position, I would say, My dear friends, we're going to have to drop all this free trade nonsense. Create a national bank. Create true currency reform, with currency controls to wipe out the speculators. Create a credit issue; not to give money out, but to pay money as credit through the national Parliament, loaned by state institutions through a national bank.'

LaRouche: Those who are behind them. And also they, but they don’t know any better. The Bengal man-eating tiger does not know the morality of what he’s doing. He’s only eating; and so it is with some of these governments. The most essential thing, to understand what faces Russia, is that what will happen in Russia, will be in large part a response to new developments which will probably occur [elsewhere].

So you have people who say as follows: Russia is gone, it is no longer a power. We are the power, we have the power now. Therefore, whatever we desire, will happen because nobody can resist us.

Now, Yeltsin sees this. When he looks in the eyes of Washington and London, that’s what he sees. He says, “Ah. We’re already conquered. We lost the war. They can do whatever they wish to with us.” And he says: “I am smart. I am going to submit.” He says to his friends, “We’re smart. We’ll work with them. These people in the Parliament, they’re living in the past. We’re in the present.”

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!

‘All problems have beauty. The beauty is, that the problems force us to solve them. If you have a people saying: We have problems, yes, but the problems force us to use our mind to find solutions. We are not oxen, we are people who create..

‘The majority of the oppressed are trained to think in what they call traditional ways: What my father and grandfather did. They think they honor their father and grandfather by doing the same thing. They dishonor them, because it becomes as if their lives were for nothing.’

NASA Johnson Space Center Collection
Cosmonauts Valeriy N. Kubasov (left) and Aleksey A. Leonov are seen in the Soviet Soyuz Orbital Module during the joint U.S.-USSR Apollo Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), in 1975.

LaRouche: It’s very simple. The way the private sector works, is you want to build a railroad. You’re going to build a power station, you’re going to build something. So you go to hire a construction firm and you do it the way it used to be done, in the United States. Every week, every month, they get a loan. They don’t get the money, they get a loan. Every week, their payroll is paid by the bank. Their bills for materials are paid by the bank, based on an inspection to make sure they’ve completed that part of the work. So the public sector will be the principal contractor of the main public works. But these firms will then contract with local firms to supply what they need to do their work.

The problem is this: There exist in Russia no real national private industries. There are certain factory buildings and capacities that exist. Now if a bunch of citizens want to take over this factory and run it, we’ll sell them the factory on credit. All they have to do, is convince they’re going to be able to run it. Many of these people, if they’re intelligent, are going to take one of our public works, and they’re going to find something they can do, that they can sell to the public firm.

Let me give you an example, I think an example makes it clearer. In Russia, one of the big problems is spoilage of food. What do we do? Our military sector has nuclear expertise. We have radioactive isotopes, all you want. The United States and others have experimented on how to irradiate food to keep it from spoiling. So, we say, we’re building a transportation system to improve this. Now we have to have a standard system for the security of the population, for grains and other things. We’ll seal them, we irradiate them; you move them. This is going to be helpful. We’re going to get less food spoilage, you’re going to get more food. You want to set up a business to participate in this process? Okay. You want to come to the railway, take a truck and deliver this? Okay. We’ll give you a two months’ trial. If you can do it, we’ll give you a permanent loan and you’re in business.

So you go through a list of things that are needed, that can be done on that basis. And you use the old Russian method, you have meetings in every town and village and community and oblast in the region. Do you want to find out what the opportunities are? You come to the meeting, we’ll tell you what’s the latest.

They have to have an education on how to do this; so therefore you have to have a process which is like a political process, where they’re engaged in it.

Kuzin: For us this is again the problem of power, because the current government has no desire to teach anybody, and does not want the firms to come into the hands of people who would actually be interested in producing something. So it comes back to this question of power. Everything that you’re saying is rational and this is what the authorities in the nation should be dealing with, but they’re not.

LaRouche: That’s the point. That’s the issue. Sure, power, I know. Obviously. I’m here. It’s a power struggle. No disagreement.

But the point is, that the wasted opportunities in power are what the danger are. And one must prepare for the aperture. The lack of clarity on what needs to be done, weakens the will at the time when the opportunity for action occurs. They have to get up from thinking just about themselves, and think about their whole nation, and see ideas about the whole nation.

In 1982-1983, I said we have a Bolshevik state. I had no illusions about the government of Brezhnev or Andropov. But we had to try, by understanding that the problem is not the Soviet government; yes, that was a problem, but the problem was an international condominium in which the Soviet government was a partner in a condominium with an Anglo-American oligarchy. How do you get the two superpowers to break free of the condominium? Once they break, you create an opening then for reality to intervene.

The great secret of history is that, when human beings are doing creative work, they are different people than when they are not doing creative work. It’s like comparable cases in the Middle East on which I’ve worked for years, the same thing. I have no illusions about the Israelis. But some of them are more intelligent than others. Out of simple, intelligent self-interest, some of them recognize, they have to work with the Arabs. If they cooperate in great projects to change the region, then you change the way they think.

Every person has two potentialities. They can become a beast or they can become a human being. And if you just try to create the environmental conditions under which the human being can be asserted. Particularly when you cannot see all the answers clearly, for me you cling to a few principles which you know will work. And that works. It’s like battle command: You have to be extremely flexible on the field of battle, but your principles must be firm; you always have to know which side you’re on!

Kuzin: Thank you.

LaRouche: Thank you. I think we’ve touched on what my concerns are at this point. The crucial thing to me is the development of a network of people around ideas so that you have the ability to take young people and begin to pull them in the direction of a national idea and then the national idea can then seize upon the opportunity and not waste the opportunity. It’s going to be very difficult; but maybe we’ll have some good fortune. I’ve seen some good fortune over time.

Related

Fidelio Table of Contents from 1992-1996

Fidelio Table of Contents from 1997-2001

Fidelio Table of Contents from 2002-present

Meet Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

LaRouche Articles