Word: sovietizers
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...have enough worries about national security, Breach obliges us to think about the deeply weird (and by most of us half-forgotten) case of Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who for a couple of decades enriched himself by passing classified documents to the Soviet Union as well as to its heirs and assigns. When he was arrested in 2001, his case seemed to be just another of those fairly routine lapses in security that afflict all great powers. Some people will spy. Some of them will get caught. Life tends to go on. Who knew how entertainingly, if sometimes scarily...
...There is, however, a dark side to Hanssen's excellent adventure. As the film makes clear, a lot of American agents in the former Soviet Union lost their lives because of information he supplied. He may have been playing a game, but they, alas, were not. He seems never to have counted that consequence. Caught and convicted, he is being held in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison, allowed out of his cell for just one hour a day. Should one imagine him still chortling over his dark accomplishments? Or is he, at last, burdened by regret...
...election in 1996 only by turning the privatization of the Russian energy sector into a sleazy scam, trading oil and gas fields for campaign contributions. Meanwhile, ordinary Russians had to endure rampant inflation and unemployment. Small wonder Russia's geopolitical standing seemed to crumble during the 1990s. As former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact allies queued up to join NATO, the superpower seemed really to have become--as the cold war joke had it--Upper Volta with missiles...
...point is that Russia's geopolitical power has become a function of the value of its energy exports. As Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin has pointed out, the energy crisis of the 1970s helped the Soviet economy--even as it hurt the West--by bathing the ailing Soviet system in petrodollars. But as oil prices slid below an average price of $20 per bbl. from 1986 to 1996, Russian power slid too. It's no coincidence that the price of oil touched $11 in Yeltsin's miserable last year...
...will happen in summer 2008, according to Associate Provost of Art and Culture Sean T. Buffington ’91. The Lowell bells, the oldest of which dates back to the 17th century, were purchased by an American industrialist just as Josef Stalin was seizing church artifacts across the Soviet Union and melting them down to raw material. The industrialist, Charles R. Crane, gave the bells to Harvard in 1930—the same year the monastery was closed. “These bells serve as a link between the past and present of the Danilovsky Monastery...