While the Russiagate scandal was a hoax, it does not follow that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s generational dictator, has been unjustly maligned. Despite what many leading voices on the so-called alt-Right and their gullible followers want to believe, Putin is no friend of traditional civilization or of Christianity. He is, and has been for as long as his nefarious career can be documented, an unreconstructed Marxist tyrant, extremely Stalinesque, instead of the latter-day Peter the Great that so many of his admirers want him to be. At The New American, we have been pointing this out for decades, even as the Western media first lauded Putin as a “reformer” before painting him, following the invasion of Ukraine, as a right-wing tyrant. In fact, Putin is neither. Russia’s swaggering supremo is committed to the reconstitution of the Soviet Union, of which Kiev and the unfortunate Ukrainian population were once involuntary constituents. The war of reconquest now unfolding in Ukraine was anticipated back in the 1980s, when a high-ranking Soviet defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, predicted the engineered collapse and subsequent reconstruction of the Soviet Union — the ultimate deception. Hundreds of millions in Europe and North America ought to have heeded Golitsyn’s warnings and our coverage of Putin. In this 2007 article and sidebar by William F. Jasper, we warned our readers what Putin and his communist puppeteers had in store for Russia and the world. Given widespread misinformation and naiveté about Putin, we have reprinted these two pieces as a reminder of who Putin really is — and what he intends to do.
— The editors