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A Scientific Strategy for
Eurasian Development

by Dr. Yuri Gromyko

Dr. Gromyko is a member of the Moscow Academy of Culture and Educational Development. On Jan. 12-13, he was among the 40 or so participants in an EIR seminar in Berlin based on Lyndon LaRouche's two breakthrough documents, "A Dialogue of Eurasian Civilizations: Earth's Next Fifty Years" (EIR, Jan. 7, 2005) and "Toward a Second Treaty of Westphalia: The Coming Eurasian World" (EIR, Nov. 29, 2004). Continuing our coverage, which began with our Jan. 28 issue, we publish here the text of Dr. Gromyko's presentation, which he titled "A Scientific Strategy for Eurasian Development Could Save Russia from the Approaching World Financial Tsunami, and Social Tsushima at Home." Footnotes are the author's, unless indicated otherwise.

The Geopolitical Fault Line From Beslan,
to the Transfer of Ukraine's 'Orange
Revolution' Into Russia

After Beslan[1] and the alleged "orange revolution" in Ukraine, Russia is very close to the brink of geopolitical catastrophe—geopolitical disintegration. We do not have stable border areas, around the entire perimeter of the Russian Federation. We have the Caucasus, which has exploded, and turmoil between Georgia and North Ossetia, between Georgia and the self-proclaimed independent state of Abkhazia, and—on Russian territory—the smoldering conflicts in Chechnya, and instability in Ingushetia and Dagestan. The instability and conflicts in Dagestan, a country of many ethnic groups and many languages, are the key factor for smashing and breaking up all of Russia as a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional entity.

We have instability near our eastern borders, where there are a huge number of territorial claims from Japan and China. It was decided to concede some of these claims, without even any coverage in the mass media. And right now, for example, in the Amur Region and Sakhalin Island, and in the Primorye Region, we have continuous protests by public groups against Russian foreign policy.

Russian foreign policy today is organized as a two-faced Janus: very redoubtable and stern, with a patriotic flavor, for domestic consumption; and very shy, modest, and humble towards the outside audience. The only problem is not to allow somebody to perceive these two sides of the face simultaneously, and be shocked by the two disparate facial expressions. It is noteworthy that exactly in the period when the reins of government are in hands of the so-called Petersburg group, we are very close to the total annihilation of the achievements (geopolitical exploits) of former generations, including Peter the Great. And in Ukraine, very soon, if there is a conflict between the inhabitants of the eastern regions of Donbass, Dnipropetrovsk, and Crimea (who supported Yanukovych[2]) and the inhabitants of the western regions (backing Yushchenko[3]), it may be decided by the EU leadership and the NATO Council that the government of Ukraine is unreliable and that it is necessary to deploy NATO troops in these territories. So, this would be a NATO invasion of Russian geopolitical areas. It is exactly what Karl XII [of Sweden] tried to execute in the period before the Battle of Poltava.[4]

Of course this first, complete inner ring (no longer merely an arc) of instability around Russia's perimeter is coordinated with an outer surrounding zone of smoldering and burning conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and Kosovo. We are currently facing terrific possibilities of the exacerbation of continuous war without end in Iraq, and its transfer to Syria, with Israeli participation, or even a new war in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. As Lyndon LaRouche constantly stresses, because the whole world is approaching very near to a financial tsunami, petroleum reserves are very important for delaying an inevitable disaster for some period of time.

We in Russia live under the pressure of preparation for the next terrorist attack after Beslan, which is a key element of the war declared against Russia, as Vladimir Putin has emphasized. If the Beslan terror attack is compared with the atrocities committed in a Russian theater during the Nord-Ost show,[5] we can see that the message of this attack has changed addressees. The attack in the theater was directed against Muscovites, and the content of message was the following: "You won't have safe shelter and peace in Moscow, which strives to be a European capital, until Putin withdraws troops from Chechnya."

The message of Beslan had a very different content. It was simultaneously addressed partly to a Western audience and partly to the Russian population. The meaning of this message was the following: "The Russian government is a group of cruel, terrible persons, who can't change their policy in the North Caucasus even for the sake of children's lives, for the life of a future generation." And so, the next attack could involve the capture of a nuclear power plant or a recycling plant for nuclear waste or hazardous chemicals. And the message of this attack would be addressed only to the Western audience, with the following content: "The Russian government and Russian Presidents are not reliable authorities, so it is necessary to deploy Western troops (gendarmerie) to defend a civilized social order." This terror attack, which is right now in preparation, would be directed against Vladimir Putin personally.

A Social Tsushima?

When recalling memorable dates in 2005, it's good to mention that this year is the centennial of the huge defeat of Russian troops in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, for example in the naval battle between the Russian and Japanese fleets near Tsushima. And also we have the 60th anniversary of victory over Hitler in the Second World War. Such anniversaries certainly have an effect on the national sense of identity. So, it is very important to steer the ship of state by the beacon of the victory in the Second World War, rather than to run aground upon the rocks of Tsushima. The Russo-Japanese War was not a local war, as is assumed according to the so-called conception of "overture" wars. The British-Boer War, the Spanish-American War, and the Russo-Japanese War, according to this theory, were preludes to the real show, the First World War, beginning in 1914.

The Russo-Japanese War was the first episode of world war in the 20th Century, with the participation, for example, of English and American banks in support of the Japanese side, and Russia, in turn, being backed by the French intelligence community.[6] Study of the Russo-Japanese War makes it clear that the background of this war was shaped by financial oligarchical British-Dutch groups, associated with some American banks and with the Japanese military elite, which had a strong interest in stopping Russia's advance in China. This advance was based on Sergei Yu. Witte's approach. Witte's approach was a continuation of Dmitri Mendeleyev's legacy, and was connected with the development of railroad transport corridors. So it is possible to assume that the Japanese-Russian clash was deliberately orchestrated, to stop the industrial development of Eurasia in that period.

The defeat of the Russian Navy near Tsushima, together with the treacherous surrender of Port Arthur by its commandant, Stessel, were very specific events that demonstrated the weakness and the total wreckage of the Tsar's administration, and served as a stimulus for the first Russian Revolution, in 1905. "Tsushima" entered the language as a common noun, designating a social catastrophe.[7] And we are very near, at the moment, to a social tsushima in Russia.

The underlying reason for this has to do with the timing of certain social reforms, elaborated by the [Prime Minister Mikhail] Fradkov government. The Russian people today, most of all, detest the very word "reform," because it was under the aegis of His Majesty Reform, that the Russian population was raped and robbed two or three times over. Those devastating reforms destroyed the industry and scientific research institutions of the Soviet Union, forcing Russians to yield their leadership in these areas. Now, however, we are coming nearer and nearer to the end point of this liberal experiment with our national identity. In our Russian national tradition of hard drinking, we have a saying: "Drink, old boy, drink, but don't squander your own mind on drink." Because after this squandering, you totally destroy yourself. And, indeed, we are now on the brink of ruining our very identity, and simply renouncing the possibility of teaching future generations, undertaking new research for the acquisition of new knowledge, or producing new spacecraft that astonish people in other countries. If science, industry, and education are ruined, we won't be able to do anything in Russia.

Today, as if someone deliberately concocted this, we have simultaneous, drastic anti-social changes in public health, education, science policy, and social and municipal services. Contrary to all the good declarations and intentions, with which the road to Hell is paved, the main idea of all these reforms is austerity: not to produce, but only to try and make ends meet. It is proposed to cut federal expenditures and shift them onto regional governments. For example, in education these reforms will deprive many universities in different regions of their federal status. Under the concept of health reform, many hospitals will disappear, because they won't have federal status, so they won't get federal money. At the same time, people will have to pay more for electricity, central heating and other municipal services. And so all of these measures are directed to destroy social security. The reason for these so-called reforms is not clear to our population, because we have a budget surplus, with a huge amount of money earned last year from oil. Why don't the government financial specialists want to invest the "oil money" in the productive economy, instead of using it to support foreign financial institutions?

But the smoldering discontent of the Russian population is connected less with the reforms as such, than it is with Putin himself, because after the Duma and Presidential elections [of 2003 and 2004], he really has complete power and thus bears all the responsibility for the intended changes. United Russia—the party of Parliamentary majority—personifies Vladimir Putin and acts on his behalf. People remember very well that it was United Russia that voted up the so-called monetization of benefits, which is the direct cause of the current social turmoil.

Why do we have such a situation? What exactly is the landscape in which we are situated?

First of all, because people in government are totally incompetent, they don't understand the investment process or the way a productive national economy functions. They are against physical economy, which has to do with the increase of material and technological goods, and they are in favor of the financial alchemy of Mr. George Soros. They are skillful players in a game of short transactions, organized like a poker game. Nobody wants to invest money in long-term projects. But those are precisely the type of projects that could provide a possibility to increase jobs and also to reinvigorate our science and innovative industry. So the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, was correct when he said that the Russian federal government had not, in the entire period of Putin's Presidential tenure, proposed one single nationwide project. It means that the Russian people don't have mission for their lives.

Our dangerous sharp turn towards a social tsushima is connected not only with incompetent government, but also with the absence of a sound political party system. So far, we have no opposition party that could represent the interests of those in the population who disagree with the reforms. The lack of such a party is connected with moral and political corruption. The so-called opposition party Rodina (Motherland) was, from the very beginning, a design of Mr. Vladislav Surkov, who works in the Kremlin administration. Surkov intended to have a manageable and controllable opposition. There are a great number of talented and clever people in Motherland, but this party can't function effectively as a political force, as became clear most recently after an "anti-Semitism" scandal around a letter written by some members of this party to the newspaper Rus Pravoslavnaya.

We are approaching an understanding that there is an urgent need to cancel Putin-Bush personal deals as the basis of Russian-U.S.A. relations. It is not known precisely, if this habit of deals began with the Kursk submarine disaster, during the Clinton Administration, when, after a collision of Russian and American submarines, the leaders didn't want to destroy the fragile sympathy between the peoples of Russia and the U.S.A. But in the situation with Afghanistan and Iraq after the events of September 11th, it became clear that relations between V. Putin and G. Bush were regulated by a special "mutual understanding." This personal deal consists in non-interference by Russia in Afghanistan and Iraq, as payment for American non-interference in Chechnya, the North Caucasus, and other territories of the former Soviet Union. We don't mention the result of such an international policy: We allow the Bush Administration to recast the world order, in exchange for Bush's promise not to interfere in our internal affairs. But after the participation of American private foundations (George Soros) and some official persons in organizing the liquidation of the Shevardnadze and Kuchma regimes in Georgia and Ukraine, and after suspicions that some people close to Cheney advised the terrorists on how to organize the operation in Beslan, it became clear that the Bush Administration had been continuing to interfere, and to act according to its own geopolitical interests.

What To Do When Breezes
From the Oncoming Financial Tsunami
Touch Your Face

Here it is important to say what is at stake, in a situation of the possible disintegration of Russia. What is at stake, is nothing less than the planetary development of the entirety of Eurasia and the whole world, which is connected with a Russian policy for Eurasian development, not yet declared by Russian officials. This policy of Eurasian development is even more important in a period of huge financial crisis that the world financial elite is trying to hide. From this point of view, we must return to the brilliant Ivashov-Primakov[8] geopolitical plan that consists in the organization of close cooperation among Russia, India, China, and Iran in Asia, and with Germany and France as the pivotal geopolitical axes in Europe. This cooperation must be organized not against the U.S.A., but together with patriotic intellectual groups in the U.S.A., to develop Eurasia. Russian leadership in the world is necessarily connected with Eurasian development. And this leadership is greatly needed for planetary development.

The key elements of this Eurasian Russian policy are knowledge management and resource management. But first we must, as the great Chinese thinker Confucius said, "cheng ming"—to correct names, and to correct concepts.

So-called resource management is not a form of the "innovation economy" that is currently a trendy word in the lexicon of [Minister of Economic Development and Trade German] Gref and other members of the Russian government. This trendy buzzword means simply the commercialization of scientific discoveries that were made earlier, in the period of outstanding Soviet science, by the older generation of scientists. And now it is proposed that Russian scientists should stimulate the interest of private corporate bosses in paying for the new use of these old fundamental discoveries. Such a science policy means the suffocation of Russian breakthrough fundamental science. Very often the protagonists of this view speak about venture funds as a special financial instrument for giving Russian scientists incentives to propose technological solutions that could be interesting for private companies. But the problem is, how to organize new breakthrough scientific research programs, to create technologies to work with new types of energy, new transportation systems and vehicles, or new machine tools.

In the context of Eurasian development, knowledge management must be connected with two core elements: the organization of cooperation around the most important breakthrough scientific research programs in different spheres, and the promotion of technology transfer.

In China's northern provinces, it has been declared that there will be re-industrialization, and special resolutions have been prepared to allow the investment of money in the development of industry. The question is, what kind of participation there might be from the Russian side. Are we ready to take part in new economic development, together with our neighbors?

Our large firms are interested in acquiring assets in China. But this interest very often is connected with rather primitive business schemes, based on access to cheaper labor than is available in Russia. Much more interesting business plans involve decisions to organize the transfer of new technologies from one industrial system to another, to upgrade the whole industrial platform. In the steel industry, for example, the so-called cast-strip technology is now being developed. It makes it possible to cast steel, not first in the form of slabs and then to roll out the slabs into sheet, but rather from the very beginning to cast the steel in sheets. Through this technology it is possible to reconstruct all the old-fashioned steel plants in China, India, and Kazakstan, which represent the results of Soviet industrialization. With such types of technologies, it is possible to have not exactly industry, but a meta-industry dealing with old-fashioned technological systems that need to be modernized.

According to the meta-industry approach, the goals of meta-institutional decisions cannot be reduced simply to outsourcing, to destruction of the Ford industrial system, and the total de-industrialization of regional economies, but rather they have to do with the organization of advanced manufacturing systems. It is possible to do this in every sector of industry, with every technological platform. To manage technological development on the scale of Eurasian development, we must have a list of such possible breakthrough technological products, as well as itineraries for the transfer of advanced technologies from technological centers to their use points.

When we speak about resource management, it doesn't mean simply taking advantage of speculative oil and gas prices for the sake of monetary profit. Rather, it has to do, first and foremost, with the estimation of what amount of resources and energy we have in Eurasia that could be used to organize high standards of living in different areas. Resource management means, above all, energy resource management, but the demand for energy must be satisfied by building new nuclear power stations to produce cheap energy. Also very important is energy production on the basis of renewable resources, above all water. But of course it is very important to manage all renewable resources: for example, bio-resources (fish, timber, and so forth). But Russian hydroelectric power is simultaneously connected with energy management, water management, and industrial development. Russia's riches for the 21st Century are not only gas and oil, but also the fresh water in our rivers. But members of our government don't understand that hydroelectric power could be the locomotive of economic development in Russia. So, for example, they don't understand why it is necessary to invest money in rebuilding the hydroelectric power sector, building new turbines (and thereby upgrading the national machine-making industry), reproducing engineers, and reinforcing the banks of rivers, water reservoirs, and water storage pools.

We must have a satellite system for the whole of Asia, to manage the raw materials resources. Russian satellite engineers are working in Indonesia to monitor forest fires, but it is possible to organize prospecting for resources for the entirety of Eurasia. It is also necessary to elaborate new geological models of raw materials resources, because in the northern and eastern provinces of Russia (for example, in Norilsk) we are still using models of geological processes that were elaborated in the 19th Century. So resource management and knowledge management are interconnected, of course, as they were interconnected in the works of the outstanding [18th-Century] Russian scientist M.V. Lomonosov.

It is very important to continue to populate Eurasia and simultaneously to increase the standard of living. It is very important, that Russian people have experience in organizing life in cities above the Arctic Circle, where there is permafrost. We currently have an exodus of the population from such cities in Russia, because it is impossible to live there after the liberal reforms. It is necessary to artificially construct life-support systems for living under permafrost conditions. In building them, we introduce indispensable standards for human life, which must not be distorted, because the result of distorting them has genocidal effects. This work prepares us to populate not only regions of permafrost and desert, but also the floor of the world ocean and extraterrestrial space. As the great Russian scientist Pobisk Kuznetsov stressed, it is very important to construct life-support systems on a scientific basis, to extend the phenomenon of life into new spheres.

Not Benchmarking, But a Real
Workbench of Eurasian Development

How is it possible to achieve the implementation of Eurasian development? We must develop a general vision of Eurasian development as a system of technology and knowledge transfer corridors, and simultaneously elaborate concrete scenarios in correspondence with this global vision for different macro-regions. From this point of view, the global development of Eurasia must be understood as interconnected macro-regional scenarios, in the implementation of which representatives of different sovereign nation-states participate. For example, we currently have a group of scientists at Vladivostok University and at some other institutions in the region, who together with Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and American scientists are elaborating different scenarios for the development of the northeast macro-region. Such scenarios must be proposed for the different parts of Eurasia. From this point of view, we have macro-regionalization, as opposed to globalization. But who will implement these scenarios?

For this we need an international university named after Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov, to prepare young people from all over the world to organize Eurasian development, in opposition to the financial collapse. The main idea of such a university must be connected with a scientific revolution in different scientific disciplines and spheres of activity, on the basis of Vernadsky's program. For Russia such a university could be a real tool for organizing contact between the older generation of scientists, and young people of the whole world, who are interested in organizing global Eurasian development. Young people educated at this university must be able to understand just what are the frontiers of the next technological breakthrough and how it is possible to organize this new scientific-technological-humanitarian revolution in accord with how they define the mission of their generation. These young people could go back and forth around the whole Eurasian continent, to master and assimilate the cultural, historical resources of different countries, in order to elaborate new projects and specific plans, and then to implement such scenarios in contact with different scientific groups in different countries.

How can we organize intercultural, intercivilizational dialogue between different nations of Eurasia, so that they will have deep trust in each other? Unless we discuss the global dominance of the Anglo-Dutch liberal financial model, all dialogue between cultures and civilizations will be reduced to trivialities. So we must understand, as Lyndon LaRouche emphasizes, and demonstrate to our politicians and people, that this financial architecture is doomed and it is necessary to exit from this financial institutional order. We can come to understand and discuss the real essentials of Eurasian anthropological and cultural development, which are closely guarded and not always apparent to the outside observer, only on the basis of a shared resolve to restructure the existing financial order and get rid of the Anglo-Dutch financial dominance. Because first we must acquire mutual confidence and trust, in order to organize cultural exchange and gain access to the real cultural treasures and patterns that are basis of different spiritual traditions. This access is very important. At the moment, we don't know many things about cultural genesis—the origin of thought and language. Because to understand such things, we must have knowledge about the thought and cultural development of different nations, and we also must understand the spiritual endeavors of all the people of Eurasia. As in the case of resource management, we must elaborate a global vision—multifaceted, but at the same time integrated—of the thought, language, and societal development of all the nations of Eurasia.

I would like to give just two examples about this very intriguing subject. Alexander Kudakin, who is Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Russian Federation in India, writes: "Not long ago I had a conversation with a Brigadier General of the Indian Army who several years back had been posted to Moscow as Assistant Military Attaché; off-duty he is a keen student of history. The gentleman told me that he was much amazed when during his official trips to the Khanty-Mansy Region, he discovered that the indigenous peoples of the Russian North, living in Siberia in the Ob River basin, have much in common with the inhabitants of ancient and modern India in terms of mythology, religion, and worship. Once retired, he half-jokingly suggested to devote himself to studying this phenomenal historic and cultural connection between the two great Eurasian civilizations. These field observations are to some extent corroborated by the findings of professional historians, both Indian and Russian. It was in 1903, that Bal Gangadhar Tilak published his work The Arctic Home in the Vedas, where, having analyzed the Rigveda and other sacred Hindu texts, he asserted that the Aryans originated from the Arctic region, much farther North than historians had previously reckoned. In our country this paradigm is upheld by a well-known Indologist Dr. N.R. Guseva."[9]

The work of our group with educational leaders of the Khanty and Mansy peoples proves this vision, because the development of categorical thinking and religion among these peoples is very close to that of the Vedic people of India. From other side, the very interesting Chinese philosopher Xiong Shi Li demonstrates in his books that Chinese thought is a kind of reflection on the interconnection between the geometry of processes that was developed in the I ChingThe Book of Transformations—and Chinese hieroglyphical language. But the same could be said about the genesis of thought in ancient Greece. In the works of Plato, the Pythagorean numerical structure of thought (the one or the many) collides with the categorical representation of thought processes. And only through the deliberate comparison of such endeavors, made in different cultures by outstanding thinkers and spiritual leaders, to reveal the interconnections between the schematical-visual representation of thought processes and the metaphorical-conceptual reproduction of thought in communication, can we approach the enigma of the genesis of thought and language.

These ideas are presented in detail in my book A Panoply of Scenarios: A New Agenda for the President, Moscow, 2004.


[1] Beslan is the town in North Ossetia, in the Russian North Caucasus, where an armed band seized a public school on Sept. 1, 2004, taking more than 1,000 people hostage in a siege that ended with hundreds dead. (Editor's note.)

[2] Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych claimed victory in the October-November 2004 Presidential election in Ukraine, but the results were overturned after mass protests. (Editor's note.)

[3] Victor Yushchenko won the re-vote of the Ukrainian Presidential election and is now President of Ukraine. (Editor's note.)

[4] The Battle of Poltava, on July 8, 1709, was a turning point in the Great North War (1700-21), when Peter the Great's Russian forces repelled the Swedish invasion of the Russian Empire. (Editor's note.)

[5] An armed band of Chechen separatists took the cast and audience hostage during a Moscow performance of the musical Nord-Ost, in October 2002. Russia special forces broke a stand-off in a raid during which all the hostage-takers and officially 129 hostages died. (Editor's note.)

[6] See a forthcoming book The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero: Edited by John W. Steinberg, Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David Wolff, and Shinji Yokote (Leiden: The Netherlands) now in preparation for publication; for example Chapter 14 "Intelligence Intermediaries: the Competition for Chinese Spies," by David Wolff, who has kindly allowed the use of the pre-publication proofs of this material.

[7] For example, we could call the Yeltsin-Grachov war in Chechnya a real new tsushima.

[8] Yevgeni Primakov is a former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of Russia, who today heads the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Gen. Leonid Ivashov formerly headed the International Department of the Russian Ministry of Defense and is now a geopolitics analyst. (Editor's note.)

[9] See http://www.bmatch.ru/showart.php3?nomerst=1465
&lang=russian%D0%A0%D0%8E%D0%B2%D0%8 2%D1%99

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