Mokrie Dela

Our former enemies have not forgotten their old tricks. It’s such an elegant solution for political problems, especially to the simple minded kombinat apparatchik cursing in frustration at those damn journalists and their friends, over the day’s second bottle of vodka….

Note to ourselves: never go to a sushi restaurant with someone who has angered the former Soviet Bloc’s special services…

This, if nothing else, illustrates the importance of teaching intelligence history to the spooks and the political science and international relations types that would grow up into politicians. It also illustrates the difficulties (if not outright futility) in using the hammer of kinetic means for certain IO problems, particularly in ostensibly neutral European countries.

UPDATE: Lest the reader think this merely an exercise in nostalgia for the bygone Cold War and the immediate post-Soviet party of the 90’s, with its wonderful times with all the gangsters and their molls in clubs on Tverskaya, chateaus in Geneva, and casinos in Monaco; the following is a rather interesting political analysis of the current Russian scene that very much has greater implications for the future character of a particular type of great power politics: the politics of a state’s interests entirely divorced from it’s populations needs or desires, and behold to the rotten core of the kombinat.