Russia Debates LaRouche and His
Proposals for Economic Recovery
by Rachel Douglas
Amidst the flaring global, systemic financial and economic crisis, ever greater interest in Lyndon LaRouche's initiatives to solve it is appearing in public policy discussions in Russia. The latest publications to take up LaRouche's "four-power initiative," in particular, include articles by Prof. Yuri Gromyko and by the maverick political figure Alexei Podberyozkin, as well as interviews with LaRouche in RPMonitor and the print monthly Smysl ("Sense").
An interview with LaRouche by economist Andrei Kobyakov appeared September 28 in the online journal RPMonitor, which Kobyakov edits, under the headline "The Threat Comes from London: Defeating the World Oligarchy is the Common Task of America and Russia." It has been reposted on at least 15 other Russian websites and blogs. Excerpts of this dialogue, which was recorded in May 2007 during LaRouche's visit to Moscow, appeared in EIR of June 15, 2007.
LaRouche's insistence that Russian leaders, as well as others, must understand the fundamental difference between the nature and potentialities of the American System and the British Empire got another boost on Oct. 18, when the website of the Anti-Globalist Resistance, a Russian movement, posted its own dispatch on LaRouche's Oct. 10 webcast, under the headline, "Save the American Republic from the British Empire!" The editors wrote:
"In connection with the now unfolding financial crisis, which the well-known economist and politician, several-time candidate for the U.S. Presidency Lyndon LaRouche has forecast for some time, he gave a three-hour Internet webcast on how he sees the situation. LaRouche recalled that in January 2001, at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, he had forecast the inevitability of a collapse of the dollar system, and said that acts of terror could be committed in an attempt to avert this. And, as everybody knows, an act of terror, which LaRouche believes had some internal underpinning from within the U.S. government, did occur on Sept. 11 of that year. Subsequent events showed that Vice President Dick Cheney, who is guided by British influences, was behind the Bush war policy.
"Continuing along that line, the U.S.A. has not only landed in a real estate crisis that is catastrophic for the majority of the population, but it risks being pulled into yet another military adventure—this time in Iran. LaRouche thinks that the solution is impeachment."
In its July 2007 issue, the monthly magazine Smysl, issued by the Rosbalt press agency, featured LaRouche in a package about the current moment as a turning point in history: the "end of capitalism," as they put it, and the breakdown of the globalization system. The Smysl interview with LaRouche was featured among other articles by Russian academic and other experts. See English text of the interview.
Prof. Yuri Gromyko contributed an article to the September 2007 issue of the publication Political Class, put out by the well-known journalist Vitali Tretyakov. In the form of a memo to the Russian Security Council on the necessity of a new monetary system, Gromyko discussed the need for the great projects, upon which Russia is currently embarking, to be based on the most advanced technologies, rather than merely off-the-shelf achievements of past decades. In the 20th Century, he noted, the shaping of "a process of industrial development that is technologically ground-breaking, rather than merely catching up" took place in the United States: "The first such attempt, about which Lyndon LaRouche has written a lot, and very convincingly, was associated with the efforts of the U.S.A. under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to break free from the influence of British imperial policy, which wanted to keep the nations of Asia as human cattle. It was in this period, LaRouche believes, that the objective was set of transferring to Asian countries the most advanced technologies and of creating institutions that would be conceptually capable of mastering these technologies. After the death of Roosevelt, however, the United States abandoned this strategy."
Political activist Alexei Podberyozkin concluded an Oct. 19 essay on the Heritage of the Fatherland website, about Russia's current direction, by suggesting a serious look at what LaRouche proposes. A decade ago, Podberyozkin was in the headlines as a pro-industry factional leader in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In 2000, he was instrumental in deep-sixing Mikhail Gorbachov's attempted launch of a Social Democratic Party, by joining it, and then pulling out.
Podberyozkin wrote: "Some experts believe that a global economic crisis is approaching, the collapse about which Lyndon LaRouche has warned repeatedly. He has been calling for many years, so far without success, for a radical reform of the entire financial and monetary system of Western civilization, which would free it from the rule of the financial oligarchy. In particular, he believes that to save civilization in the foreseeable future, we urgently need to create a world coalition of forces around key agreements, which would be reached among four leading countries (LaRouche has in mind the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India). What is needed, is an agreement that returns us to Roosevelt's plans for the post-war world as a system of cooperation among sovereign nation-states, united by a single system of the American type, with fixed exchange rates, working for development of the entire planet. It can be stated absolutely plainly and fairly: strategically, all efforts should be directed towards building a new, just world economy system of general development, guiding relations among the nations and peoples of the planet. The alliance of the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India as leading partners in a true United Nations program is a necessary precondition, which should not be sacrificed for any other concerns."
