SPECIAL POST!!! -"Why the SMO?": Spook Insider Explains How Putin and Friends Have Dismantled the War Economy Russia Needs to Fight This War!

The so-called "hidden hand" seems to not want Russia to start a war economy.

Today we are covering chapter 9 in our review of Why the SMO?

Here, Golovlev gives us a rundown of Russias industrial unreadiness for full scale war when they launched their GWOT model regime change operation in late February of 2022. There is a quite a bit of interesting stuff here that completely contradicts the ZAnon narrative of Russia being an autarkic economic war economy powerhouse. If you are a doomer who has accepted the premise that Russia is an LLC pretending to be a country you will have your suspicions confirmed by our disgruntled FSB oracle. If you still have a foot in the ZAnon camp than I hope this chapter destroys the last bit of hope that you might have been nursing in your heart that Putin will liberate you from LGBTyranny in your country.

I hate to be the herald of doom, but, well, someone has to be.

The “Import-Substitution” Scam

Those of us who have been following Russian affairs for a long time are familiar with the term “import substitution” and how the Kremlin is supposedly weening itself off of its dependence on Western equipment and products. Golovlev brings to our attention to the fact that there has been talk of import substitution going all the way back to 2008 after the war with Georgia. In regards to Russian dependency on Western industrial equipment and components for high tech products he writes:

"After the Ossetian campaign in 2008, Putins Munich speech and the subsequent worsening of relations with the West Russian Leadership drew some base conclusions. All of them entailed specific consequences".

(…)

"It had become obvious that the industrial sector, like the Army and Country in general was critically dependent on the West for material supplies and domestic components".

Due to very high oil prices, just buying these components and equipment from the West wasn’t a big deal and Golovlev would have us think that the Kremlin was just applying sensible Libertarian free trade principles for not moving towards autarky earlier:

"Any substitution constitutes a secondary process, imitating those who are already in market competition while imposing backlogs and creating enormous corruption risks".

Given Golovlev’s description of how the Kremlin actually tackled the problem I don’t think he actually believes that this was the real reason import substitution was never tried previously. As a matter of fact, as we will see going forward, the Kremlin used import substitution as cover to further line the pockets of its elite orbiters while not expanding economic autarky in any significant way whatsoever!

In other words: they pursued a worst of all worlds policy again.

The basic state of affairs in Russia with industry when the Kremlin ostensibly took its first steps towards import substitution all the way back in 2008 was the following per Golovlev:

"Industrial capacity is practically destroyed compared to Soviet internal and international capabilities".

His explanation is tough for me to put into plain English; what he means is that Soviet industry not only made more products for the domestic market but they also had more to export. Nowadays, the RF has more consumer products on shelves than were available in the USSR (from China) but the basic fact remains that Soviet industry produced way more than the RFs does now. The difference is that Russia is now hooked up to the global trade/finance system like China is. This was the result of the surrender of the USSR in the 90s after Yakovlev’s coup.

"The Soviet inheritance ended up in the hands of unreliable oligarchs or red directors and general constructers who monitorized their enterprises with the view to turning them into personal fiefdoms".

In 2008, very, very little of Soviet industry hadn’t been liquidated and what little remained was entirely in the hands of oligarchs who were almost always pornographers by ethnicity … or ex-Soviet chinovniks who kept the industry in their regions intact and then inherited them through voucher fraud and subsequently privatized them. The “privatization” voucher fraud scheme from the 90s is maybe worth an article in itself sometime and I can't cover it here without a massive derailing.

We continue:

"At that time it was possible to fulfill consumer demands on the external market. Net cost and domestic labour expenses are always higher than purchasing from abroad"

Russia was just trying to be like America in other words. Deindustrialized and buying everything from China. Just one cog in a totally globalized economy. Dependent on all other parts which are run by a globalized trade authority.

"The outcome was that it became necessary to take decommissioned industrial objects under control and consolidate them. Then came the appearance of holdings, sub holdings, and finally, Government Corporations".

Golovlev is seriously holding his punches here when he goes on to describe the utter failure of this plan on all counts. I know he knows that the “failure” was actually a smashing success for the people that implemented it and who took over all the wealth and assets. But let’s not judge him too harshly here. Let us simply be thankful for the information he does provide and not begrudge him trying to avoid getting the Strelkov treatment by putting up an ideological fig leaf and attributing to mistake what is clearly attributable to malice.

"Naturally, under such a plan (where industry is owned by sub-holdings) questions of industrial output as such became a secondary matter".

A very important point was just made.

The Kremlin operates like this: it hooks up a bunch of allied elites with contracts to recommission industrial sites, but the goal of these people the Kremlin is hooking up to lucrative industrial contracts was mutual profit, not output. We can already see where this is leading.

Make sure you have your vomit-buckets handy, fellow Stalkers:

"Even a surface level analysis of cadre decisions in industrial holdings and corporations shows that most decisions for top management go to employees of intelligence and security services, trusted financial managers and bankers whose main goal is obviously loyalty and a scheme of merge and acquire while (theoretically) developing meaningful material resources".

He is describing a merger between the oligarchy and the spook state. This is a common theme of this blog as well — that Russia is run by a coalition of “spooks and crooks”.

[NOTE: in Russia, businessmen are often approached by the FSB and are shaken down until they pay a tax-tithe to the FSB (racketeering) or forced to hand over their business for a buy-out (usually a pittance). Without a “krisha”, it is impossible to run a business because the state does NOT operate like the Leviathan of Hobbes should operate. If gangs and mafias are not destroyed by the state, then gangs and mafias are free to prey on citizens and their property. Worse, the state prevents Russians from re-tribalizing and arrests them for trying. Thus, hostile ethnic mafias and spook mafias are able to prey on the population and the state provides no protection to the citizenry while also actively preventing self-defense from the citizenry. In recent years, this term has come to be called “anarcho-tyranny” in dissident circles. However, it is simply a symptom of being ruled by a hostile ethnic minority … or several.]

And I wonder how this all turned out?

"At the same time the politics of industrialization boiled down to a scheme of just expending government stipends. The main goal of these policies was to form a restricted pool of influential government partners with so called industry leaders (spooks and bankers) and means of their government support".

Whats most surprising about that outcome is that nobody could have possibly predicted it! /sarcasm. According to Golovlev, the spooks and bankers running the government business holdings will actually build a new factory or recommission a Soviet factory or industrial operation, outfit it with foreign equipment and then ... simply do nothing with it because it is cheaper to keep doing what they were doing before which means importing everything. This way, they get the government grants, but then they avoid the cost of running the factory and paying the workers cuts into the spooks and bankers income and carries with it business risk.

Again: the whole point is income for the elites and not production in and of itself.

The “Hidden Hand” Of Economics Hates Russia

But what about accountability you ask?

"The government interested in import substitution compensates a significant amount of expenses with ritual words of partnership and strategy or just gives the business money directly for purchases, research, or design plans. Of course this all takes place with more ritual plans for the formation of the industrial corporation which frequently is only cover for fraud. Proper formation of the relevant documents and presentation has tuned into a whole art in itself and is the key to the whole process".

One has to have the intellectual capacity of an eggplant that is also slightly less reflective than the average eggplant to think that the Kremlin didn’t know that this is exactly what would happen before embarking on this policy of import substitution.

Of course, this book was published in early 2023 and he is discussing the state of affairs between 2008 and the fall of 2022. As for explaining the severe shortages that Russia had going into the SMO which we covered in previous chapters this import substitution scam Golovlev is describing has decent explanatory power for how such a state of affairs came to be.

Golovlev further discusses how the most important components of starting an import substitution business consist in knowing the right people. Said another way, “your network is your net-worth!” So, if you know the right "benevolent government bureaucrats" then there is no doubt that "the key to the heart of a government groom will be given. Furthermore the logic of this paradigm (profit first) assumes mutual profiteering with kickbacks.”

After preparing the necessary documents and getting approval from benevolent bureaucrats, our intrepid entrepreneurs than purchase the relevant equipment/components from abroad which will, in theory, allow them to start producing products 100% domestically ... after a period of research and development which they will also be handsomely compensated by the government.

Golovlev brings attention to the fact that our import substitution merchants need to have especially "reliable contact with foreign partners which will allow for maximally raising prices and subsequent maximum income".

So not only are Russias own merchants making maximum profit but so are their esteemed Western partners abroad! This way, everybody wins!!

Well, maybe not normal Russians, but it is their problem for simply not pulling hard enough on their bootstraps and not having the right chinovniks and foreigner business leaders in their network of friends. The important part here is that Golovlev reveals that the foreign components will keep being imported, even when supposed sanctions are imposed. No actual import substation is taking place here. Just palm-greasing and swindling of government funds.

But the fraud doesn’t end there though:

"By the way, agreements with research institutes and universities which are part of NIKOR (the body that sets standards for construction and industry in Russia) within the framework of certifying certain equipment and components as the most modern, for example nanotechnology, quantum, digital etc"

(…)

"Also certification of localisation can be granted. That is, confirmation that production took place in Russia. As the same time transfer of construction documents and the reality of that production are put in parenthesis (a very polite way of saying these certificates are forged and everyone knows it). The maximum that will actually be achieved is the unscrewing of name plates and replacing them with a made in Russia sign, usually on Chinese or Taiwanese products".

What more can we say folks? T

The “hidden hand of the market” just doesn't want anything made in Russia.

Golovlev explains the process through which the new firms avoid laws regarding competition and corruption but, in short, it all boils down to what he already told us.

Put simply: these firms are all headed by spooks and people who know the right people who can provide the necessary licenses and documents. Thus Russia is able to brag about all the new industries that are being created.

“A brand new successful firm under full federal budget financing. The only problem is they don't make anything".

Remember this, Respected Stalkers, there is a big difference between assembling something and producing something. The products are sometimes assembled in Russia, sure, but even then not in that newly opened government-funded factory owned by Putin’s spook friends by any means:

"In this case the products are assembled by workers laboring on old Soviet assembly lines using old equipment and working for low pay. Meanwhile the upper management will discuss new technological processes, digitalisation, automated production and what not. All with a complete absence of a series of domestically produced products which was the whole point of the federal subsidies".

Basically, a profit-maxing nihilism and economic sovereignty are mutually exclusive concepts. At best, the Kremlin was trying to hammer a square peg into a slot which only accepts six-pointed stars, if you get my drift [Note: what is he talking about???]. Of course, Golovlev makes a half-hearted in his explanations, but the man does need to tread a very fine line here.

And what of the new and refurbished facilities?

"Often large and impressive production facilities are built complete with beautifully arranged machines. But they are show rooms. Here, equipment loudly operates, someone is walking by checking something but nothing is mass produced here, all actual work is done in unsightly workshops on old equipment".

The Soviet Union gets grief for its “Potemkin villages” but this is a full-blown “Potemkin factory”. The USSR, in contrast, took its factories very seriously.

Of course sometimes not even that is necessary:

"Or management flys to China or Taiwan where local operations make the product but complete with Russian logos. Then the product is delivered to Russia and assembled with screw drivers under the guise of full domestic production, cheaper, simpler, and faster".

This is how the vast majority of import substitution works, according to Golovlev.

As for stuff like rifle magazines, helmets, body armor and other gear, Golovlev says these were almost barred from being produced at all simply because of the low profit margins. As I touched on in a previous chapter review, the US can pay inflated prices to manufacturers due to the infinity money supply that they have thanks to the petrodollar, reserve currency status, the FED and the ability to force the world to borrow American debt at the point of a gun, essentially.

In contrast, Russia can’t pay these inflated prices for weapons and gear. Certainly the government does not have enough to be able to share with the spooks and oligarchs so that they profit handsomely off the production. And if there is no profit for the spooks and crooks, nothing gets done in Russia. Thus, the slavic soldiers will need to loot magazines, armor and helmets off of dead comrades or simply buy their own. Seriously, there was a whole lot of that going on in the early part of the SMO.

[Note: I literally published the SMO war stories of a Russian contraktnik part of the Kiev operation who asked for help at the end of his posts to fundraise for weapons, drones, a helmet that fit and so on.]

And what about the Armatas, Zooparks, Terminator APCs and so on? These things do exist and in the case of the latter two, they have been successfully used at the front.

"Where did all the cutting edge examples of Russian equipment come from? Simple answer, they were made by so-called experienced minor constructers, specialists in making prototypes and small numbers of individual examples".

These ОКРОВ firms (the experienced minor construction people) are very, very expensive contractors and they don't mass produce anything. They are often used at trade shows to pretend that Russia still makes things. That's why we still haven't seen large numbers of Zooparks, digital tablets for artillery forward observers, and so on make their appearance among the soldiery in Donbass. The samples are all gone now and:

"The downside of this process is that under such an approach mass production is impossible"

Years ago, I saw some Russian Army officers on YouTube inspecting uniforms that were able to absorb a limited amount of artillery and grenade shrapnel and the soldier was still able run, jump, crawl more or less like normal. They probably aren't that comfortable but still, in a war where artillery is killing the most people and cluster rounds are regularly used, such a uniform would be both life-saving and a game-changer. This could have been a legitimate breakthrough in wartime technology with sweeping consequences for modern warfare as we know it. The theory books would have to be rewritten with such uniforms. But what happened to this new suit of armor?

Well, now I know where those proto-type uniforms came from and why they aren't at the front.

The Boutique Designer-Weapons Economy

The OKPOB firms also aren't designed to produce a steady stream of spare of parts, or train lots of specialist, or constantly restore damaged equipment or anything of the sort. They make fancy, futuristic prototypes at very high prices.

This isn't to say these prototypes don’t have lots of potential, as I touched on in a previous article. The Zoopark counter-battery system has gotten nothing but positive feedback from the troops lucky enough to have access to them. The Terminator APCs likewise have gotten positive marks from the troops. But they just aren't mass-produced and when they are, they are inevitably damaged or destroyed and don't reappear again.

Golovlev reiterates that all industrial operations in Russia are simply based on maximizing profit margins and to supply the needs of the SMO something else is needed.

The Kremlin can’t buy hundreds of thousands of helmets and body armor sets at a huge mark up like the military-industrial complex in the US does and the base profit margins on stuff like that are low without huge levels of graft being tolerated by the government to feed the MIC.

Nor is the Kremlin ideology open to the idea of nationalising industry.

Making lots of different cool prototypes of military vehicles and gadgets that will never enter mass serial production is much more profitable for all parties involved. The MoD researchers and engineers get a steady stream of federal money and no oligarchs have to take any risk by investing in opening factories capable of manufacturing and maintaining these high tech machines and gadgets working en mass. Why bother with all that silliness when you can simply invest in adding a fourth story to your London penthouse which will double in price within the next four years like all FIRE assets are. Better yet, you can instead count on the Kremlin just handing you another trillion rubles of taxpayer and natural resource money because your firm is doing important research on creating digital cattle tags or working on a new prototype tank like the Armata that will never enter serial production. It will never enter serial production because you plan on adding a fifth story to your yacht when you receive that trillion rubles instead of opening a factory.

In regards to the many different examples of cool Russian machines and gadgets that people like Martyanov and Simplicius thump their chests over:

"In Russian media prior to the SMO we frequently saw a wide range of different designs and prototypes (of military equipment). Such an approach is good for construction bureaus and the National Research Institute but a large number of different models of weapons and equipment requires different warehouses, different spare parts and trained maintenance specialist and staffing units in the formations where they will be used. Such practice is good for cycles of expending federal budget grants but not so good for the Army. The Army needs one basic Kalashnikov rifle, one tank diesel engine, one MI8 helicopter and so on and so fourth".

Stalkers, doesn't this sound like a bunch of parasites trying to replicate the US MIC/feeding trough model but without the infinity money glitch enjoyed by the US?

I think that this is exactly what is being described.

And what happened to the famed Russian/Soviet practice of making durable, reliable gear that can be easily mass produced and run off of vodka fumes and repaired with duct tape and pickle juice in a pinch? Judging by what Golovlev is revealing to us those days are receding farther and farther in the rear view mirror, to the joy and applause of bureaucratic/oligarchic parasites and to the misfortune of the troops sent to die in Donbass.

Golovlev spells out the result of trying to ape the US MIC model without printing presses that can “go brrrrrr” nonstop:

"At the front not only was there not enough armoured transport but even rifle magazines, helmets, body armour, radios and many other necessities were in short supply".

Golovlev contrasts this with the very generous and steady NATO supply of encrypted radios, battle management systems that gave Ukrainians full situational awareness down to the company level, precision munitions, strike and observation drones and so on and asks:

"With what should the Russian Army answer this with? A lack of equipment can't be overcome with the valour of Russian soldiers. The ancestors of many American Indians fought their whole lives fearlessly and with valour. The Samurai devoted themselves fully to the art of war and commitment to duty and honour but for all that they suffered catastrophic defeat against enemies equipped with technological innovations but less valour".

Golovlev advises his readership to just look at the state of affairs on the front and the answer to the question of whether or not Russian industry was prepared to supply the needs of the SMO becomes glaringly obvious. He asks, “are the troops generously equipped with drones for artillery correction, observation and direct attack”?

Golovlev asks, “is the air force dropping bomb analogues to Western JDAMs on the Ukrainians”?

Well, actually yes, this is one area that has significantly improved since 2023.

But are we seeing the Russian Army use its analogue to the HIMARS (and by many accounts a superior analogue) the Tornado-C which according to MoD was supposed to be in service already in 2017?

In early 2023, when this book was released, the answer would have been “no” on all counts. Today, a bit under a full year and a half of brutal war later the situation with drones and especially glide bombs has improved for the better, but if we want answers as to what was going on in the early days, well here they all are.

And, just like with the Army, if we look at the industrial system Russia went into the SMO with we can only again conclude that Russia was never intending to fight a serious war against anyone, let alone NATO to free the world from Anal-Globalisms. Golovlev also asks whether a new scheme for providing the Army with sufficient numbers of helmets, radios, body armour, medkits, night vision and so on has been implemented.

Well, if you back to October of 2022 and you will have no hard time finding Russian soldiers at the front looking like they had gone through a time portal to the battle of Kursk in ‘43. That isn’t a good thing.

Golovlev found the situation with protected transport particularly outrageous:

"In addition to typhoons armoured transport I have repeatedly talked about the development of a line of vehicles based on the US MRAP (mine resistant ambush protected) Mustang Sarmat-2 and so on. As it is now known, it is the losses from mines that were particularly widespread".

Golovlev doesn't mean that these vehicles, in particular, are being lost to mines. According to him, these vehicles just never made it to the front at all or only a few prototypes ever showed up.

"A huge share of personnel losses are directly related to the lack of such transport, it was the unprotected Urals and KAMAZ that the Ukrainian special forces destroyed while cutting off logistics at Kharkiv, Sumi, Kiev and Chernogovra. Ukrainian quadrocopters were repeatedly dropping grenades on unprotected vehicles".

To be fair to the Kremlin, they had other stuff going on after they launched the SMO.

Golovlev notes the irony of how the Russian Government was apparently focusing huge efforts to kick-start a domestic car market while it's troops were being shredded in unarmoured vehicles on the front:

"The most paradoxical thing is the titanic efforts of the Russian government for a multibillion-dollar state subsidized private car industry and complaints about the lack of a sales market due to the imposition of sanctions after the start of the SMO".

Clearly, the fate of the contrakniki was a low priority for them.

You can always get more soldiers, but what about muh car industry!

For real though, car sales in Russia haven't tanked yet because of sanctions, so in all likelihood the actual problem is that sanctions have made the practice of buying all the components abroad and assembling them in Russia and slapping a made in Russia label on the product much harder.

Assuming the domestic car industry plan was legitimate, we have yet more circumstantial evidence that the Kremlin was, in fact, taken by suprise when they sanctioned so heavily otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to set up this car scheme. They really didn’t have any plans for deviating from the pre SMO status quo at all.

2023 Onwards

So what has the Kremlin done to boost production after 2023?

Golovlev quotes a press release from Kirov oblast (Kirov is a cool little city btw, if you ever visit the robot dinosaur/water park there you have to try the fish wraps, seriously they were the best I’ve tasted in my life):

"From the head of Kirov oblast Sokolov, industrial operations in our region have commenced 3 shifts. In accordance with requests we have commenced night operations of city transport and extended working hours for schools and kindergartens so that workers aren't inconvenienced".

Golovlev asks:

"What is this text about? New technology? Or reconstruction of production lines? The reformation of civilian production potential to meet modern demands? The mobilization of industry and the economy? Of course not. It is about trying to live off the remnants of Soviet industry a little bit longer".

This is how the front has stabilized and Russia has managed to painfully claw forward a little bit since then — by revving up what is left of the old, rusted-out Soviet machine.

It is also why no grand army of a million or even say 700k equipped with the necessary gear is ever going to materialize.

The Kremlin simply added some extra shifts to the legacy Soviet factories that thankfully weren’t totally liquidated yet and they have re-started the few that can be restored and have them working 24/7. This where the FAB bombs, drones, and increased artillery rounds are coming from. It is nothing more than squeezing every drop of juice they can from their inherited legacy Soviet operations.

Nothing new, however, is being built besides show room factory floors which assemble but produce nothing in practice. I remarked in my previous article that Ukraine is the more Soviet society in a general sense, but Ukraine (Donbass) was also the most industrialized part of the USSR and, thankfully for Russia, they looted their Soviet industry even more thoroughly than the elites in Moscow did and are almost 100% dependent on Western support now. It is a small mercy that Russia has some leftover Soviet industry they can lean on unlike Ukraine, which has basically none. But milking every last drop they possibly can from Soviet legacy operations isn't the same as economic mobilization.

After the flood of complaints from the front in regards to chronic shortages of literally everything, an advisory council of high level officials were tasked with "coordinating organs and departments for resolving questions of material and technical supplies and logistics in the zone of the SMO". The advisory board includes the head Minister of Emergency Situations, the Head of the Tax Service, Minister of Finance and the Minister of Economic Development. The main advisor is the Prime Minister Mishustin himself and he is supposed to report to Putin every day about the group’s work.

As Golovlev points out this is nothing like Stalin’s GKO (state defense committee) which had absolutely unregulated authority to get things done. Mishustin’s committee is only tasked with provisioning the needs of the Russian Armed Forces and this can’t be done if it means stepping on important people’s toes or shaking up the status quo. No, Mishustin’s advisory board is supposed to make suggestions to Putin on how to provision the needs of the front without actually doing anything themselves. In Golovlev’s opinion, this advisory committee is more akin to "the Special Meeting Council of Defense" created during World War I in 1915.

As Golovlev also points out, that is not a comforting parallel.

The main question is this: will “advice” ever become serious concrete action to win the war?

Many critics of this advisory council wonder how a group of such highly-placed Chinovniks have so little to show for their work and here Golovlev is again pulling his punches with his explanations. He asks "why can't these people just talk to each other” (as in, make a real plan and see it through)? But, as I said earlier, the whole idea is to try and provision the front without making any sort of significant changes to the status quo or hurting the spooks + crooks bottom lines. When a choice has to be made between the needs of the front and maintaining the status quo, the needs of the front will always be secondary and Golovlev obviously knows that himself.

Furthermore, this advisory body doesn't have the authority to issue anyone commands, create or subordinate working apparatuses or anything like that. Again: totally unlike the Stalinist Committee for Defence and just like the impotent Tsarist one during WWI which had to rely on the goodwill of the aristocracy and shtetl-capitalists for its war needs.

In short it is purely ornamental.

Golovlev says that there is a second long-existing parallel government body in Russia in the form of the Military Industrial Commission that, in theory, could take relevant concrete steps to alleviate the shortages at the front. The Commission membership includes top representatives from the security services, industry and research institutes. The Commission’s whole purpose is to "organise state policy in the sphere of the defense industrial complex, the military technological provisioning of state security and law enforcement". So we have a government body who is supposed to organise state policy in regards to provisioning the military. In them, he sees a potential savior. Golovlev says:

"Its obvious that this body needs to find the strength to adapt itself to the realities of the SMO, creating working groups with a presence where operations are taking place at the front, focusing all efforts on solving pernicious problems caused by state policy divorced from reality".

What Golovlev is getting at is the need to create a feedback mechanism from the front to the Kremlin.

A cluster of high-level people with the Tsar’s ear and authority to act on his behalf who are constantly fine tuning the war machine and making sure state policy is constantly in line with the needs of the front. In WWII, Stalin had his circle of marshalls whom he trusted, who were constantly traveling along the front and accurately reporting on the state of affairs in regards to everything from morale to levels of munitions, the state of equipment and so on. If there was a shortage of something or just a need for more of something, Stalin would tell Beria who was in charge of industry to make that happen and regardless of Beria’s general villainy, he was an effective manager of industry with unlimited authority to make it work. This meant that the needs of the front were met in a timely manner and often there were surpluses. For example, by late 1944, boxes of artillery ammo were often stamped with a sign saying "do not economize".

Read My Lips: “No. Strong. Leaders. Ever.”

It is easy to sympathize with Golovlev’s views and recommendations, but this is all assuming similar conditions to the USSR that we know simply can’t be replicated in the modern RF. Rurik did an outstanding article back in the day that featured a young Putin telling the interviewer that the greatest threat to Russia was “Russians desiring a strong leader". He said that the goal of his government was to create a competitive and profitable LLC that would be integrated into the global trade/finance system. And he largely succeeded with his dream.

Thus, creating that WWII style feedback mechanism would require a strong leader obviously at the top of a very vertical power structure. Basically, that kind of mechanism for provisioning the front would amount to liquidating the conflicting, power-sharing, oligarchic political arrangement in the RF which is predicated on NOT having a strong leader so that no single oligarch or spook or NATO country feels threatened.

And this isn't hyperbolic.

Beria’s ability to facilitate the needs of the front very quickly was the result of a total nationalising of industry and its subordination to one final decision-maker who could not be vetoed by one “captain of industry” or another. These sort of changes would be outright revolutionary for the current RF and the Kremlin’s only priority is to try and change as little as possible for as long as possible. To put it another way, the Kremlin’s priority is preventing the creation of the sort of state that could actually win a war in a convincing and expedient manner.

This makes perfect sense because the goal of all the reforms from the late 80s onwards was to destroy the USSR as a potential threat to the hegemony of the NWO. And, if a Russian populist-champion should rise up and assume the reins of state with such a large military, economic, technological, nuclear base to draw on, it would be a huge threat to the NWO. Like Putin himself explained, essentially, the entire point of the current RF liberal occupation government is to prevent the rise of some sort of Russian nationalism. Also, they no doubt learned their lessons from the Weimar period in Germany and so they are always hunting for the next potential rebel chieftain who might launch a nationalist rebellion against Pax Trotskyia. In keeping with this, Putin’s FSB was very busy in the early years assassinating Russian generals with popular followings like General Lebed, for example. They are the enforcers of a colonial, satrap government, and thus they grow the spook state with each subsequent year as their occupation force, parasitizing more and more of Russia like a cancer eating away at the host body.

Moving on though, Golovlev goes over the dismal state of Russias microchip industry. To him it is simply a microcosm of everything wrong in Russia in general. Only 20% of Russias micro chips are made domestically.

"If we ask a basic question, what in a time of war are the most critical needs for industry, anyone with common sense would answer: machine tools and microchips. Machine tools are the means of production, they create everything from microwaves to airplanes, tanks and rifles. Microchips are the brains of the product. Strikingly, in Russia both of these (in terms of being made domestically) have been pushed to secondary importance".

Again: change as little as possible and the needs of the front are always secondary.

The existential fight to the death with the Anal Satanist New World Order is also secondary and sometimes not even that.

"The crisis with machine tools is deep and has no clear solution. The transfer of nameplates to foreign machines and Soviet mass production of obsolete products is the current reality".

The tech used to produce Iskander rockets is 70-years-old and the microchips they run on are now made in China. In a month, Russia produces about forty of them. That doesn't scream existential war, exactly, nor is that number anything close to what we would expected from a mobilized economy. The initial designing of the rocket started in the 80s, and whatever upgrades are made now come via Chinese microchips. So, this isn’t a fully a domestically-produced weapon and the legacy Soviet production capacity left over to produce them isn't anything to brag about either.

The basis for the Kinzhal rocket is the Iskander, and the scheme is no different.

They import the microchips from Taiwan and China and the rest is done on Soviet era assembly lines. Now, these rockets have been shown to work just fine in Ukraine. It is not the rockets’ fault that the Kremlin mostly launches them at the back up generator of the de-comissioned Soviet-era hula hoop factory in Lvov or the empty cup-holder container facility at the Odessa port. Occasionally, the Kremlin (or maybe GRU?) does plant them exactly where the need to go and we see obituaries for SBU and Ukrainian MVD spooks killed in missile strikes. This seems to be the real punishment being meted out for some of the more egregious Ukrainian missile strikes deep in the Russian interior. [NOTE: the Kremlin propaganda tries to hush up examples of them actually enforcing red lines and killing enemy spooks for some reason. Probably, they don’t want to scare their Western handlers.] The real issue is capacity and forty Iskanders a month seems to be the sum total of what Chinese microchip imports and legacy Soviet production/assembly lines can accomplish without shaking up the status quo that the Kremlin is dead set on maintaining at any price.

This dynamic applies to everything, in regards to the Navy, Golovlev quotes Dimitry Rozogin (former leader of the Rodina party of Russian National-Socialists):

"Examples (of import substitution problems) were given by the Ministry of Industry and Trade Andrey Dumov. According to him, about 60-70% of the cost of each warship falls on the online sale of products entirely from engineering and instrument-making companies. However, the entire elementary base in these devices — that is, the components of these products — is completely foreign. In all import substitution programs we find the same theme: what needs to be replaced and how to find partners who will reliably and efficiently supply these elements to Russia, and so on".

Forgive me this clunky translation, but we all get the idea I think.

So, 60-70 percent of the cost of building a warship is spent on buying foreign manufactured products or components and this is all occurring under a program of ostensible import substation.

It is enough to make you want to curl into a ball and just fucking die.

Anyway, Golovlev also mentions that as of January 2022, Russia had 102 satellites in orbit and the US had 2954. Again, the US has the infinity money glitch in their pocket and can buy more chips and components from China at will while comfortably giving people like Musk a generous cut so that he doesn’t make a fuss.

Again: the US can feed an incredibly corrupt MIC comfortably while still getting its war-products made.

Russia, on other hand, far from using its limited financial resources wisely under a regime of sanctions, is still mostly just doing the “feed corrupt bureaucrats and insider-elites” part while not recieving the amount of finished products that would be needed to fight what ZAnon propaganda claims is an existential war to the death against Anal-Globalism.

Potential Spook-Insider Sequels?

Golovlev is supposed to be working on another book right now and I hope he gives us a good summary of what has changed in the year + since his first book was published.

It looks like:

• the situation with drones is a little better,

• and the glide bombs are a lot better while,

• the situation with stuff like rifle magazines, helmets, and body armour seems to be stable but,

• the situation with radios and other secure-comms is still appalling and,

• we still aren't seeing many Terminators or Zooparks at the front in significant numbers at all.

So, we should expect a mixed review, for sure.

The apparent positives such as, the drones, bombs and having more basic infantry kit on hand can be explained by Soviet legacy industry being turned back on. The Kremlin’s inability to raise enough troops to win the war can be explained by that legacy industry being already being used to its maximum capacity. Buying microchips for drones can still be done. But buying Zooparks, Tornados, and Terminators directly from China can’t be done. The people who claim that China is a Russian ally and manufacturing weapons for their war effort ARE LYING. Nor can boutique manufacturers that made the prototypes produce them en mass.

That is my speculation for where things stand now.

Thanks again to all who read another installment!

Next, I want to translate a few chapters of Storm Z, which is a book written by a mobilized zek who fought at Rabotino during the Ukrainian counter-offensive last summer. The account of the tactics used by the Russian side with these convict-soldiers is harrowing and so grim-dark that it feels like it was ripped straight out of a Warhammer 40K novel with a characteristically over-the-top title like Deathfire Metalstorm Valor-Kill. Until then, fellow Angolan-Antifa-AnalSaxon freedom fighters!

[Final NOTE: Once again, the premise of the blog is that information from within Russia, almost always from the patriotic samizdat community, is provided to the English-speaking reader. This yeoman work is often labelled by spook-propagandists as “Fascism” and is suppressed by the powers-that-be. All this is to point out that some gratitude and appreciation for people like Livsci is in order. People willing to stick their neck out even the slightest bit and put in some work like this are few and far between. Would it kill you to just hit the share button below here on Substack, at least? Thanks.]