Episode 40 - Post-Soviet Russia: America's "Colony" to #1 Enemy

Empire Files

News

4.9 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The increased aggression towards Russia from US politicians and media is made more clear when taking into account the real history of the post-Soviet period. The hidden story of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency explains how deeply the US government, along with Western capitalist institutions, cheered, shaped and exploited the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, paving the way for the political system they all condemn today. To uncover just how much the US Empire has interfered in Russia’s political evolution, Abby Martin interviews Mark Ames, an American journalist who spent a decade reporting from Yeltsin’ and Putin’s Russia and witnessed the country’s transformation from an American “colony” to it’s “number one threat.” FOLLOW // http://twitter.com/empirefiles LIKE // http://facebook.com/theempirefiles

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of
0:06.3	the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empirefiles.tv.
0:16.0	Anti-Russian hysteria is at a new peak, with the political establishment in corporate media jointly accusing Russia of interfering in the recent U.S. election.
0:28.6	While some politicians have gone so far as to treat the alleged hack as an act of war, this fear-mongering doesn't engage with the actual history of U.S.-Russia relations.
0:39.1	Beyond just influencing elections in Russia, the U.S., along with Western capitalist
0:44.2	institutions, set the stage for the entire political system they now condemn.
0:49.0	To learn more about U.S. interference in Russia's political and economic affairs, I spoke with
0:53.6	American journalist Mark Ames,
0:55.4	who reported for nearly a decade in Boris Yeltsin's Moscow. Ames co-founded the exile in 1998, an English-language
1:03.1	newspaper critical of the Russian state. Putin's government shut it down in 2008. Ames remains a prominent
1:09.9	author, journalist, and eminent voice on Russian
1:12.4	politics. So you've said that you don't necessarily rule out Russia's role in the hack of
1:18.3	Podesta and the DNC, but every time the establishment presents evidence, it feels like we're just
1:23.2	being conned. It's certainly plausible. Russia has motive, which is everything we've done to that country
1:29.8	since the late 1980s, which is meddling in their democracy, was putting it very mildly.
1:36.0	We basically restructured their entire political economy and left it in a complete shambles.
1:43.7	And then we've meddled in other ways since then, you know, funding opposition groups and so on and so forth.
1:48.0	So they certainly have the motive.
1:50.0	There's no ideological reason. I mean, Putin and the Kremlin, they're not, you know, Quakers.
1:55.0	There's no reason why they wouldn't.
1:57.0	They have the means. The reasons they wouldn't do it would be for practical reasons, right? Practically it would create these kind of problems if they got caught and so on and so forth.
2:05.6	What has really been strange to me has been the awful reporting and the atrocious intelligence reports,
	...

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