Born in crime, 'New Russia' flouts western conventions

Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was in Moscow, talking to our respected and well-informed American ambassador about the future of that long-tortured nation.

"How many 'free rubles' are there in Russia today?" I asked Ambassador Jack Matlock, referring to the rubles not controlled by the official Soviet state, but those which were in private hands.

"Billions," he answered.

"And in whose hands are they?"

"The Mafia's," came the hesitant answer.

"And so the Mafia is going to buy up Russia?" I asked.

I remember how the ambassador looked at me that December of 1988, almost with sadness, just a year before the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet empire began to disintegrate. Then he answered: "Yes!"

His answer forms the basis of all you really need to know about the predecessor regime in the Russia that is so tormenting President Trump today. At that crossroads between a failing past and a dangerous future, the Russian economy passed not into the hands of even reasonably responsible citizens, but into those of criminals, who then hooked up with former KGB agents like Vladimir Putin for total power in the "New Russia."

It is this criminal Mafia state - which has no relationship with the Italian Mafia - that is behind:

1) President Trump's worries about, but also his fascination with, Russia; 2) the Mueller probe's interest in the president's business contacts, or possible "collusion" with Russia; 3) the bizarre poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in England, which poses a major problem for the entire West because it says, "We Russians can strike anyplace we please"; and 4) the strange case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the data-collecting organization under intense observation for claims it supplied Putin with data on American voters that enabled him to influence the 2016 American elections.

Let us start with the poisoning. It occurred in a small English town. But behind the bucolic Englishness looms "Londongrad," the disgusting nickname given by those Mafia-type Russians to their notion of our longtime ally. Yet, as the well-informed Anne Applebaum wrote in The Washington Post: "For two decades, the British establishment has agreed not to think too hard about where the Russians got their money - how cash was stolen from the state, recycled in the West, then used to help bring Vladimir Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues to power."

And in The Wall Street Journal, the expert Russia-watcher David Satter writes of the sheer brazenness of this new attack: "It was undertaken to murder a former double agent and to assert Russian power and defiance of Western efforts to restrain Moscow's lawlessness."

Which is similar, albeit in different ways, to Russia's "power and defiance" against the United States: the hacking of our cyberspace. The wooing of President Trump with loans for his failing businesses. The in-your-face attitude and the what're-you-gonna-do-about-it threats to the U.S. and NATO. Russia's all but direct attacks on American troops in Syria.

Russia's bluster might seem curious when one notes that it is immensely weaker than the U.S. or Europe. In its heyday of the 1980s, the Soviet economy was about one-third the size of America's. Today it is 1/15th the size of the United States'. But then one realizes that Russia is responding to its own weakness through various attacks on its own geographical margins and on the psychological margins of enemies like America.

There are many things the United States can do to stand up to Russian meddling. But before that, we still have to answer these outstanding questions: What does Donald J. Trump really feel about Russia? Why is he always so adoring of Putin? And what exactly might the Russians have on him?

Until we know these things, we won't ever really know the true Trump/Russia story. Maybe Bob Mueller will tell us? Maybe Comey or Tillerson? Who knows: Maybe in the sweaty heat of passion, Trump whispered something to Stormy Daniels, and that's why she has that odd Mona Lisa smile on her face as she outsmarts The Donald at every turn.

And wouldn't THAT be something!

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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