In order to understand what's happening, you need to understand Chekism.

[GliderGuider]

Most Americans may not be aware of what Chekism is, and the risk that a Chekist state poses to the West. Many of us still have a residual hangover from our earlier leftist days, when rapprochement first with the "Communist" Soviet Union and now with "Capitalist" Russia were considered desirable. Given what is happening now in the USA, an attitude adjustment towards Russia is urgently required. The notion of a "friendly Russia" needs to be put to rest once and for all.

In order to understand the danger, one must first understand what Russia has become since the ascension of Putin and the FSB: a fully Chekist state.

First, here are a few salient quotes from Wikipedia (assuming the article itself has not been tainted by Chekists...):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism

Chekism (from Cheka, the first Soviet secret police organization) is a term to describe the situation in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, where the secret political police control everything in society.

According to researcher on KGB subjects Evgenia Albats,most KGB leaders, including Lavrenty Beria, Yuri Andropov, and Vladimir Kryuchkov, have always struggled for the power with the Communist Party and manipulated the communist leaders.

"Putin's appointment is the culmination of the KGB's crusade for power. This is its finale. Now the KGB runs the country." Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites, has found that up to 78% of 1,016 leading political figures in Russia have served previously in organizations affiliated with the KGB or FSB. She said: "If in the Soviet period and the first post-Soviet period, the KGB and FSB people were mainly involved in security issues, now half are still involved in security but the other half are involved in business, political parties, NGOs, regional governments, even culture... They started to use all political institutions."

In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within a state. Now former KGB officers are running the state. They have custody of the country’s 6,000 nuclear weapons, entrusted to the KGB in the 1950s, and they now also manage the strategic oil industry renationalized by Putin. The KGB successor, rechristened FSB, still has the right to electronically monitor the population, control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. Putin’s Russia has one FSB-ist for every 297 citizens.

Moreover, the FSB has formal membership, military discipline, and an extensive network of civilian informants,[13] hardcore ideology, and support of population (60% of Russians trust FSB), which according to Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick makes it a perfect totalitarian political party.

With the ascension of Putin and the FSB, all aspects of Russia are now wholly under the control of the state security apparatus. No more power struggles between the KGB and the Communist Party - just a uniform application of state security principles from top to bottom, from wall to wall.

Now, how does this change affect the USA? One of the most informative sources I've found on this topic is ex-NSA analyst John Schindler. He now writes as a private citizen, and has been at the forefront of sleuthing out the hidden connections between the Trump Empire and the Chekists. Here's his primer.

Understanding Russia’s SpyWar Against Our Election

According to NBC News, our Intelligence Community has “a high level of confidence” that Russia’s president ”personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.” Putin’s motivation was revenge, according to unnamed senior IC officials, since he despises Clinton, plus the Kremlin sought to create confusion in the United States to make us appear an unreliable ally and an ailing global power.

The Russian president grew up in the KGB and long worked in counterintelligence. To his core, Putin is a secret policeman, what Russians call a Chekist—a term worn with pride in the Kremlin. It’s an easy bet that Putin was briefed on this most special intelligence operation daily; it was very likely the first item in his morning briefing from Russia’s spy services, a quotidian event that Putin—unlike our president-elect—takes seriously.

For a former KGB officer, humiliating the hated Americans by disseminating the embarrassing emails of our top politicians is the summit of glee. The takedown of Clinton, Inc.—and no matter the reality, this is unquestionably how it’s being sold, with smiles all around, by Putin’s inner circle—was by any standard a very successful operation. A century hence, it seems likely that Moscow’s spies will rank this achievement among their “greats” like the TRUST operation and the Rosenbergs.

Russians call this kind of nasty covert action scheme Active Measures, and Moscow’s spies have been doing it a long time. The only novelty here is that the Internet makes it devilishly easy to disseminate such disinformation, to use the proper term, quickly and anonymously. As the Internet has sped up our news cycle dramatically, it’s made spreading disinformation faster and easier, too.

The Kremlin has done this sort of thing many times to countries it dislikes or fears, indeed it’s old hat to a seasoned Chekist like Putin. But the Russians have never done anything quite this brazen to their “Main Adversary”—as they called America during the Cold War and today do again. To be clear, Putin ordered his spies to execute strategic Active Measures against the United States and top Democrats in 2016 because Moscow possessed enough stolen information to do so. He didn’t fear retribution.

Our biggest problem, however, resides in the Russian moles in Washington who haven’t been caught. There was one clear counterintelligence success on Obama’s watch, the roll-up of 10 deep-cover Russians spies in the United States in the summer of 2010. That operation, called Ghost Stories by U.S. counterintelligence, was a genuine coup, although it had been in the works for years, long before Obama moved into the White House. Putin was furious at our unmasking of his network of “Illegals” (to use the Chekist term) in America and he wanted revenge—which he got in 2016.

The most important aspect to Ghost Stories, however, was the dog that didn’t bark. In the course of the extended IC investigation of Russia’s Illegals network, it became obvious that Moscow had several moles in Washington, including inside our intelligence agencies—with one or more burrowed into the National Security Agency, our most important spy service—and Snowden wasn’t one of them. The evidence for their existence going back at least to 2007—and perhaps even earlier—is overwhelming to anyone who understands Russian spy tradecraft, what the Kremlin calls konspiratsiya (yes, conspiracy). Since no Russian moles in our nation’s capital have been unmasked over the last six years, it’s safe to assume they’re still active.

When viewed in this light, what America has been experiencing is revealed to be not a unique offensive event crafted by Aleksandr Dugin and Vladislav Surkov - as I've recently believed - but a long-standing covert war being waged by an increasingly talented, tentacled and emboldened Chekist state security apparatus. In this war, Dugin's geopolitical aims and Surkov's talent for reality-bending may simply be two pieces out of many they have in play.

With the revelations of Wilbur Ross' involvement with the Bank of Cyprus, and the note that the Chekist apparatus now controls all significant aspects of the Russian economy, the existential risk posed to the United States by this gang of thugs in Washington should be making everyone more than a bit queasy. I know I am.

[underpants]

1. Chekism - did not know that

Thanks

[jalan48]

2. It sounds like the secret government in Russia effectively took over the official government.

It seems we could have the same thing happen here if our secret government becomes the tool of a particular party or specific individuals like Trump. Perhaps this is why Trump wants an "overhaul" to the current intelligence community.

[GliderGuider]

3. The US has a long way to go before becoming a Chekist state

Russia has been practicing this mode of conduct since Stalin took over in 1924, and has a history of autocracies going back through the Tsars. The USA doesn't have the right psychology at this time to travel that path.

That's not to say that an autocrat couldn't attain a high degree of control, especially if they can bring the national policing agencies into line with such a policy. However, the degree of bloody-minded autonomy on the part of the states would keep it from going full-bore Chekist - unless of course the Constitution was somehow overturned.