Lyndon LaRouche and the Spirit of Russia’s Science

by Richard A. Black

[Print version of this transcript]

The following is an edited transcript of a presentation by the author to the LaRouche Fireside Chat of July 14, 2022. Richard Black is the Schiller Institute Representative at the United Nations in New York City.

I’m going to discuss tonight how Lyndon LaRouche’s essential ideas and fundamental discoveries helped to shape thinking within the Russian intelligentsia and within certain Russian policy-making circles, specifically in the past 29 years.

LaRouche first arrived in Moscow on April 23, 1994, in part at the invitation of the renowned physicist, economist, chemist, and biologist, Dr. Pobisk Kuznetsov. What was discussed at a series of meetings, including with Dr. Kuznetsov, was LaRouche’s science of physical economy.

At the time, Russia was being crushed by the “London boys” and by the University of Chicago and Harvard boys with the insane “shock therapy” privatization of the entire Russian economy. What LaRouche put forward was both a design for a new, just international monetary system, and a new educational system to provide young people with the Classical education to allow them to become nation-builders. Those ideas—which LaRouche had first put forward to the Russians in 1982 with his proposal for what became the Strategic Defense Initiative, and then, beginning in person in 1994, [as] the original ideas of the science of physical economy—are now the topic of government-to-government planning in Eastern Europe and in Asia.

China is a separate case, but China’s entire economic planning is based upon measuring rates of technological innovation in the economy taken as a whole. China has designed a series of economic tools, for instance, the Innovation Capacity Index—which is made up of 18 indices, measuring the rate at which advances in science are propagated through the machine tool sector to the Chinese economy as a whole. These tools can shape the content of education, and foster development of a higher and higher skill level in the labor force. This is a leading feature of the current Five-Year Plan in China. However, this is a topic for another evening.

Today, in Russia—currently under threat of nuclear war by NATO—and also among governments in Asia, what is being discussed is an entirely new set of relations among nations, based upon a shift out of a speculative, money-changing, and raw materials extraction economy, into an economy of industrialization and of science. In a word, a science driver in national economy, an industrial revolution. This, for sure, is what is finally beginning in Russia today, and as I think you’ll see, LaRouche’s proposals to the Russian Federation over the last decades are now moving out from academia and leading opposition circles into high levels of the government itself.

An Economic System Based on Scientific Principles

This Spring has witnessed an amazing series of discussions about the launching of a new non-dollar monetary system based upon the productive forces—agriculture, industry, science—of the nations of Eastern Europe, Asia and the Global South. Leading individuals, such as economist and Academician Sergey Glazyev, who are leading the discussions, have been both long-term public collaborators of Lyndon LaRouche, and sharp critics of the policies of the Central Bank of Russia and the International monetary Fund (IMF).

In the middle of March, Glazyev—currently the Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Commission, the permanent regulatory body of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and the Kyrgyz Republic)—and his team held a meeting with a group headed by Dr. Wang Wen, Dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, and Vice President of the Silk Road School at Renmin University of China. They discussed the ongoing collapse of the Western monetary system and the danger that it will lead to nuclear war. What they take as their mission is to launch a new system based initially in Eurasia. This was in March. It was a private meeting, although there was some minor press coverage.

By April, there was a meeting in Moscow of a group called the Sparrows Hill Group. Attending were the Deputy Speaker of the Russian State Duma; a leader of one of the party caucuses in the Duma; and bankers, scientists, and industrialists. It was an all-day session, and again, what was the topic?—how do we advance and implement a new non-dollar monetary system?

With the current illegal sanctions regimes deployed against many nations, the U.S. dollar is seen now by most of the world as toxic. By May, there was another public meeting, this time of the Eurasian Economic Forum (EEF), and Glazyev played a key role. What was quite extraordinary at this meeting was that the head of the much larger Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO—including Russia, China, Pakistan, and India, among others), Ambassador Zhang Ming, spoke at one of the panels. He said that if we can unite the EAEU and the larger SCO, we can create a new world system! This was the first time that the SCO leadership had publicly acknowledged this new process in historic formation.

Then this past month, in June, there was the meeting of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The “BRICS-Plus” includes about a dozen nations—including Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia—in various ways negotiating to become partners, allies, and collaborators of the BRICS. To what end are these negotiations? Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently personally announced, for the first time, that there are now government-to-government discussions underway to form a new international monetary system. Of course, those of you who have followed LaRouche’s work over the years know that in 1971, when the connection between the dollar and gold was severed, and the floating exchange rate speculative system was set up—making the value of currencies not determined by sovereign governments but by the international speculators—LaRouche outlined the need for a completely new international monetary system. Crucially, President Putin has now for the first time publicly added his voice to this historic dialogue.

LaRouche in Russia

You can think of the period from 1994 to the early 2000s as the decade of LaRouche in Russia. In 1994, right after LaRouche was released from five years in prison, the result of a railroad trial arranged by the Bush family and Henry Kissinger, LaRouche traveled to Moscow to meet with the intelligentsia at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS): people with all kinds of expertise—economics, mathematics, biology, physics, etc. This began an extremely intensive dialogue which was to become broader and broader within Russia.

In April 1996, LaRouche was invited by Academician Leonid Abalkin, Director of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a leader of the Free Economic Society of Russia; and by Academician Gennadi Osipov, the director of the Institute for Socio-Political Research (ISPI), to address a day-long seminar and dialogue with top economic figures, including veteran governmental leaders [from] the U.S.S.R. and scientists of post-1991 Russia. The seminar was devoted to LaRouche’s keynote presentation, “Russia, the U.S.A., and the Global Financial Crisis.” Among the many experts in intense dialogue with LaRouche that day—in addition to Academicians Abalkin and Osipov—were Valentin Pavlov, former Finance Minister of the U.S.S.R. (1989–91) and former Prime Minister (1991); and Vyacheslav Senchagov, Director of the Banking and Financial Policy Center at the Institute of Economics of the RAS.

In his talk, LaRouche analyzed the terminal collapse phase of the IMF-based Western financial system, using his “Triple Curve—a Typical Collapse Function,” and outlined the solution:

Russia has a very crucial role to play in this [solution] process, which is a political role more than anything else. The combination of the United States and Russia, now, as in 1945, with the cooperation of China and with the cooperation of other, lesser powers who require the benefit of the same kind of development—we can change the course of world history, and get out of this economic mess.

Reflect on today’s combination of nations coming together to replace the murderous IMF system with a new, just world economic order, as you read LaRouche’s concluding remarks to that 1996 dialogue with Russian experts:

Only a majority combination among great powers can break the power of these international authorities; therefore, not in order to create another global hegemonic system, but to create a world which is safe for sovereign nation-states. We’re in a great struggle. We’re in a great, strategic world-historical struggle. And therefore, as in war, the unity of great powers can be decisive in whether you win the war or lose it, as Roosevelt understood before he died.

In 2001, Academician Sergey Glazyev, the brilliant economist, was a member of the State Duma, and Chairman of its Economics Committee. He invited LaRouche back to Russia, to the Duma’s Economics Committee, to lecture on the continuing causes of the collapsing Western monetary system, and to outline parameters of a new system. The day before the meeting at the Duma, Glazyev and LaRouche were featured in a 2-hour press conference with about 50 media representatives. The next day, many members of the Duma Economics Committee were present as well as approximately 100 scientists, bankers, and academicians. [See the transcript of Mr. LaRouche’s testimony elsewhere in this issue —ed.]

By 2007, Helga LaRouche’s proposal for a World Land-Bridge, including its feature of uniting North America and Eurasia with a Bering Strait tunnel, was given major discussion at the highest levels in Russia. A representative of Mr. LaRouche presented a paper on the proposed Bering Strait crossing to a conference of top members of the Russian industrial-scientific elite.

A Russian Response

I want to indicate to you a bit of the clear insight that Russian academics and teachers had concerning what LaRouche was putting forward. In the year 2000, LaRouche was running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. President. Fifteen Russian thinkers endorsed his Presidential campaign. Here is their Open Letter:

Dear Mr. LaRouche,

With great interest and agitation, we are following the Presidential campaign in the United States, and your own participation in it. Despite the well-known obstacles thrown up by your opponents and the mass media that are faithful to them, we are well aware of your high standing among American voters. That standing is no accident. In our view, people such as you, Mr. LaRouche, best match the spirit of our times. The people who come to power now should be highly competent political figures who are capable of undertaking to solve extraordinarily complex social, economic, moral, financial, and political problems. Through personal contacts, and acquaintance with your scientific writings and your political speeches, we have gotten to know your profound erudition, the precision of your analysis, your sharp mind, your intolerance of phoniness, your high level of scientific honesty, and your ability to put forward original ideas and find constructive, sometimes unexpected, solutions and recommendations.

Like no one before, you have succeeded in uncovering the harmony and interaction of rigorous science and Classical art forms, as well as uniting the methods of scientific discovery and the education of youth. To this should be added your great human daring, strength of will, and confidence in your powers, as well as your ability to overcome the dangers and misfortunes which all manner of ill-wishers and foes have attempted to so generously heap upon you. It is difficult to imagine what the costs were to you in nervous energy and health, of those undeserved five years behind prison walls inspired by former President Bush and his entourage for political motives.

We think that you, Mr. LaRouche, are the one capable of directing your country onto the path of progress and prosperity for the American people. And for the sake of all the people of the planet, we hope that American voters will make the right choice by voting for you as the future President of the United States.

It’s signed by 15 scientific and educational leaders: directors of various sections of the Russian Academy of Sciences, teachers at pedagogical colleges, renowned individuals, editors of publications—a somewhat breathtaking array. You can see from the quality of their thought that they were “shaken up” by being introduced to Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche’s Science of Physical Economy

Rather than going through a chronology—which would take more time than we have—I want to mention six scientific concepts of physical economy which LaRouche defined as necessary for any nation’s progress. They are: (1) The nature of national sovereignty; (2) the role of a science driver in a sovereign national economy; (3) the development of a metric for scientific progress—LaRouche’s famous “potential relative population density”; (4) LaRouche’s unique definition of the common idea, misunderstood by most: Infrastructure; (5) the proposal for a Worldwide Land-Bridge connecting all continents by high-speed rail; and (6) the necessity to give to our young people a Classical education in scientific method and in the fine arts. These six areas—which one could call LaRouche’s “Laws of the Noösphere”—were seized upon by sections of the Russian intelligentsia in a very spirited and energetic way.

On the notion of the sovereign nation-state: LaRouche had written many articles about the identity of Russia over its 1000-year existence since its Christianization. The way LaRouche put it in a major article was this:

The definition of Russia’s role as a nation of science is an essential, integral feature of its nature and efficient historic role as a sovereign nation-state personality at this juncture in world history.

That’s from an essay, titled “The Legacy of Mendeleyev and Vernadsky: The Spirit of Russia’s Science,” from 2001. LaRouche developed this in great depth: Just as we understand ourselves to be sovereign individuals, … so it is the case that an entire nation, with its culture, derives its sovereignty from its creative activity, from its world outlook, from its contribution to world culture as a whole. This is something which, to this very day, when I speak with ambassadors from Russia, they often go back to the idea:

Well, we, in Russia, comprise a sovereign nation. That, unfortunately, cannot be said about most nations, which are being so crushed by the collapsing monetary system, today.

Glazyev said, in a TV interview in February of this year:

What is required of the central bank today? Special refinancing instruments. That is, credit lines for targeted investment projects, for import substitution, government guarantees if you like, for special investment contracts. All of this to fill idle production capacity. Give enterprises earmarked loans at 2% to 3% per annum for 3-5 years, and they’ll flood our country with a huge amount of goods. What we cannot produce on our own, we do in cooperation with China, and by building production chains with the Eurasian Economic Union.

In March, this kind of approach was discussed at a conference of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (TPP)’s Council on Industrial Development and Russian Economic Competitiveness.

LaRouche’s principle that each and every sovereign nation must have a science driver for its economic advance, is a concept discussed in the extraordinary seminar addressed by LaRouche and by Professor Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov said that the production of “new, creative ideas” is the driving force of economic growth, resulting “both in the increase of material well-being, and an increase in the intellectual power of the human species.”

LaRouche’s discovery of the metric of “potential relative population-density” captivated the Kuznetsov group. In the Moscow journal Rossiya 2010, at the end of 1994, Kuznetsov explained his proposal of a new unit of account, “the LaRouche”:

Let us introduce the physical magnitude of “a larouche,” designated by La, which gives the number of persons who can be fed from 1 square kilometer, or 100 hectares, during one year…. We share LaRouche’s view that the magnitude of potential relative population can serve as an indicator of intellectual culture.

Taken as a whole, you see in the dialogue between LaRouche and these leaders, that the moral and intellectual development of a citizenry and of the productivity of an economy are one and the same process. This has been a major topic of discussion.

Infrastructure: In the United States, you talk to people about infrastructure, and it’s like talking to people about “buggy whips.” They, for the most part, don’t know what it is. No high-speed rail, collapsing highways, collapsing cities, virtually no new nuclear power plants, fusion energy research massively under-funded; no vision, no future.

LaRouche’s concept of infrastructure is very specific in nature. It is elucidated in the proposal of Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Lyndon LaRouche for the construction of a World Land-Bridge. Academician Alexander Granberg shared this vision. He was a Russian senior specialist on the economic integration of Russia’s Far East with all of Russia, and with the world. He was Chairman of the Council for the Study of Productive Forces (SOPS), the successor of Vladimir Vernadsky’s KEPS organization. In April 2007, Academician Granberg chaired the Moscow conference on “Megaprojects of the Russian East: A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait.” Lyndon LaRouche’s invited contribution was his paper, “The World’s Political Map Changes: Mendeleyev Would Have Agreed.” The paper was presented by one of LaRouche’s associates. One month later, in May 2007, Academician Granberg spoke at the 80th birthday celebration of one of Russia’s great economists and patriots, Prof. Stanislav Menshikov. In his toast to Prof. Menshikov, Granberg discussed the proposed completion of the Bering Strait tunnel:

Here’s the story. Three weeks ago there was a conference in Moscow on one of the mega-projects, namely the construction of an intercontinental route from Eurasia to America across the Bering Strait. This is a very old idea to link the continents and the entire rail network of the world. Sooner or later, this project is going to be built. Many generations have dreamed about implementing this project, and this conference three weeks ago occurred with the active participation of our government and of regional governors. And the idea, I can tell you, has gained support.

One of the speakers at the conference was introduced as a representative of Mr. LaRouche. Three weeks passed, and here today is Mr. LaRouche in person. There has been an opportunity to discuss what actually needs to be done to push this project ahead. These are very encouraging views. This railroad will be built! Thus, you have already taken part in this project. By the year 2027, according to the schedule, it will have been completed. Maybe just a bit of the tunnel will remain to be built across the Bering Strait. It’s only 100 kilometers. I hope to be able to have some influence on the design of this crossing, and we will try to name the station closest to the Bering Strait tunnel on the Russian side either “Stanislav” or “Menshikov.”

Yesterday, with your [Menshikov’s —ed.] forecast, we were talking about a lot of numbers, but I’m talking about a living, breathing station of national importance and named for you.

Professor Menshikov’s wife, the economist Larisa Klimenko-Menshikova, added,

And on the American side, there will be a station named after LaRouche!

‘A Joint Project for Teaching Children,’ or War

Lastly, the question of youth and the absolute necessity of a pedagogical system based on the Socratic method, on the Platonic dialogues, on the method of hypothesis. This was discussed at the 1994 colloquium led by Prof. Kuznetsov in a several-hour debate between LaRouche and Kuznetsov, who were getting to know each other philosophically. At the very end, LaRouche summed up with a few words, and then there was an indicative comment by one of the scientists. LaRouche concluded his part of the dialogue as follows:

Therefore, we need a global crash program for some good purpose which will give us the technology which through investment can save mankind from a disaster. I will conclude with the following observation, even though it is not complete; we could go on for weeks with this. Not only is this view of technology and the mathematical significance of this kind of notion of technology sound scientifically, but we have come to a point in man’s history at which this concept is a practical concept essential for human survival. And therefore, I am enthusiastic about the so-called “President’s program,” of which Kuznetsov is the leader—our host.

Then, one of the scientists added a comment, which I think is quite telling of the way in which LaRouche’s difficult, most challenging writings have been studied in fine detail, since the publication in Russian of LaRouche’s book, So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? This is Dr. Alekseyev speaking. He addresses LaRouche:

This meeting today has made a tremendous impression on me. I am speaking not only for myself, but for the school children in clubs in Moscow who study space. Your book, So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? in Russian translation, is one of the subjects we studied introducing the children to broad studies of space. My fifth-graders made Golden Section constructions using this book as a guide following your wonderful idea which is on page 61 about the Golden Section. Also, your presentation of self-similar spiral development is brilliantly, simply, and easily grasped by children from the 5th to the 9th grades. Using a straightedge and a circle, they construct the Golden Section. They construct logarithmic spirals; they study the rhythmic characteristics of sound. They rediscover the elliptical orbits of the planets in our Solar System. We find an enormous intellectual potential in these children.

I would like to say that I am very impressed by your proposal, and that the knowledge we are exchanging here, and the work proposed by Pobisk Georgiyevich Kuznetsov [should] be made, through our activity, a joint project for teaching children. I have another concrete proposal for which I request just three more minutes. Pobisk Georgiyevich spoke about the blind, deaf, mute children whose intellect our Russian scientists inculcated, who learned to draw, to invent fairy tales. And in those drawings and fairy tales by blind, deaf, mute children, my children, educated about the Golden Section according to your book, find the rhythmic characteristics of the Golden Section, negentropic processes, and the alphabet of the musical scale. As a concrete proposal, I’d like for an electronic mail connection to be set up as soon as possible between the scientists of Russia represented here, and those American scientists represented by you, who stand for negentropic scientific interests. Then, we will be able to exchange and share ideas with you, as well as possibilities for children to grasp ideas by Ockham’s principle, whereby we approach the idea of the Golden Section directly without prolonged theoretical discussion.

Thank you so much for your book, and the hope that we may have further creative collaboration among our scientists and organizations.

Today, as the boomerang of the illegal sanctions against Russia both devastates the physical economies of Western Europe and the U.S., and accelerates mass starvation in the Global South, a great shift in leadership in the West must be forced. The revolts within the populations have just begun. As LaRouche specified in Moscow in 1996, the United States must join with Russia and China in a new creative order.

Will America and NATO, instead, bring on a global holocaust of famine and nuclear war? We are at the time when LaRouche’s ideas, which we have reviewed here, are not an option; they have become a universal necessity.

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