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      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "discovering-the-love-of-god-for-the-first-time",
      "title": "Discovering the Love of God for the First Time",
      "body": "INTRODUCTION\n\nPeople have been wondering where I've been.\n\nI started this blog after a series of vivid dreams about a war between the United States and Russia, dreams that I can still recall in perfect clarity almost five years later. That set me on a path of learning about Russia, first from the perspective that Russia was the eternal enemy and then slowly to the realization that that was not the case. That was not unfamiliar to me.\n\nIn the mid 2000's for some reason I became possessed of the idea that I wanted to go on a cruise and a Caribbean cruise is what I was eyeing. I ended up finding a dirt cheap cruise to Alaska on a ship that was being decommissioned so I took it for fear that I would never find an Alaskan cruise that cheap again. I went by myself which some people would call crazy and it may have been crazy but I also knew, inexplicably, that it was what I needed to do.\n\nI fell in love with Alaska on that trip and I went back there to work seasonally for a few years. While there I read a book about bear attacks and it terrified me. I look back now and I recognize that that book was full of tall tales and propaganda that influenced me and I often wondered why we didn't just hunt these animals down and eradicate them but there was something in there about the intelligence and emotional lives of bears that hooked me and sucked me in. I kept reading and reading and eventually learned that many of those horror stories were exaggerated or were politically motivated (believe it or not, it's true) and I started writing about bears online with the intention of telling the truth about them and cutting through the demonization of them. The strength of that writing landed me a job as a keeper and trainer for captive 1,500 pound coastal brown bears at an orphaned cub sanctuary in Alaska, with no previous exotic animal experience. \n\nEventually I published my writings as a book and a few articles but I reached the point where I could no longer stand asking captive bears to perform tricks for tourists in exchange for treats and that ended that adventure. Not long thereafter I started having dreams about a war between Russian and the United States. This was right in the midst of all the \"Russia hacked the election\" hype and so I approached this newfound interest in Russia with the same mentality I initially did about bears: evil and murderous and we should stamp them out. \n\nJust like with bears I began devouring dozens and dozens of books about Russia, Russian politics and Russian history and, just like with my bear studies, I began to realize how much of what I read and heard were deliberate lies and propaganda. Growing up in the Mormon church I was raised with the idea that America was Zion, the beacon of Christianity in the world, yet after seeing the devastation caused in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. all for the purpose of globalization, along with the embrace by America and American churches of transgenderism versus Russia's embrace of traditional, Christian values a line was drawn in the sand for me and I began to see America as Babylon the Great.\n\nANGELS ON EARTH\n\nIn learning about Russian history, I learned about the last Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas II and his family who were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The photo below sums them up pretty well:\n\n\n![18287415._SX540_.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUPzfzYu5W16nkTNFhuxLHeMzX7hEgpGiFodQAphKPEVL/18287415._SX540_.jpg)\n\nI immediately felt a strong, inexplicable connection to Olga, the oldest daughter of the family. Something about her eyes sucked me in, like she could see to the depths of my soul and there was no judgment. It was almost love at first sight, like finally finding the puzzle piece that's been missing from my heart and spirit for all my days. In learning more about her, I've come to realize that there are maybe one and a half differences between me and her. I didn't understand it. I couldn't articulate it, but it was just the tip of the iceberg of my journey.\n\n\n![img_8517.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfPwAYRbwrh5FWQiRnvByaCZDAntKbzjZBdp5csozsnFV/img_8517.jpg)\nOlga\n\n![4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPbBvrHqurVZbybitxTkNKU2oeAVoixbajJBj7is8M7Q1/4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg)\nOlga's smile\n\nOlga was born in 1895 and was said by her teachers to have a soul pure as crystal. She was raised in a wealthy, royal family but she never had a sense of entitlement. She and her siblings were raised sparsely, sleeping on hard beds and getting cold baths so that they would never feel they were above anyone else and it worked in their favor. Olga, when she was 12 years old, felt so much sympathy for a young, disabled girl who lived on their property at the Alexander Palace in St. Petersburg that she volunteered to sponsor the girl and pay for the surgery she needed out of her own money. Visiting a toy store in St. Petersburg she chose the most modest toy she could find and when enticed with a fancier, shinier toy she rejected it saying \"That belongs to some other little girl. How sad she would be if she came here and found someone else had taken it.\"\n\nOlga had a natural talent for music and was a brilliant piano player. She could play an entire composition from beginning to end and could transpose a piece from one key to another without hesitation. Some remarked that had she been born under different circumstances she could have been world famous. But that was not her destiny. She was precisely where she needed to be.\n\nHer second oldest sister, Tatiana, was born in 1897 and was the natural-born leader of the siblings. Called \"the governess\" by her sisters, she was sent by the children as an envoy to their parents whenever they had a request and she oversaw the discipline of the younger children.\n\nTatiana followed the most closely in her mother's - the Empress Alexandra's - footsteps and was heavily interested in religious and theological readings. She was by far the rock of all five of the Romanov children.\n\n\n![2044e90be9314103c84d23353f8ad1d8.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmX7uoJm8hGvGZ2iWgKSmWhzx7XKFTF3zXELpiCGLQZesG/2044e90be9314103c84d23353f8ad1d8.png)\nTatiana\n\n\n![d4788d176f3095323f4a8f08992987a3.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRCgS6PPMb7Phz4kFcSSYBtBAi37TeixfaucWA5M2Y13H/d4788d176f3095323f4a8f08992987a3.jpg)\nTatiana as a little girl\n\nThe third sister, Maria, was born in  1899 and was the picture of humility and meekness. She often wrote to her mother that \"I just want to be good. Please tell me I'm good.\" When her baby sister Anastasia was afflicted with whooping cough, Maria was told to stay away from her, otherwise if the younger girl coughed on her she could catch the disease from her. Maria was later found standing in front of Anastasia saying \"Cough on me, baby, cough on me.\" When asked why she was doing that, Maria responded \"If I can take the disease from her maybe she'll get better.\"\n\n\n![9d0796b679e6d512a987e8ab88834ffb--photo-s-russia.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmciCHpqUoofvCgUtsZUrfEdPgR1BbivcZQ75s8fcDQTY2/9d0796b679e6d512a987e8ab88834ffb--photo-s-russia.jpg)\nMaria with kitten\n\n\n![21dd9c208e50b1e9d191b601dcaa91ab.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmce1o8G2fSaUmEnpE9gVUjjNUAmTL3XV6CAoCxTCWvyMB/21dd9c208e50b1e9d191b601dcaa91ab.jpg)\nMaria\n\nThe youngest daughter Anastasia (pronounced Ahna-Stah-See-Yuh) was born in 1901. Described as a \"blond-haired, blue-eyed whirlwind\", she was called \"the little imp\", the jokester and prankster of the family. The youngest and shortest of the four girls, and dubbed by some as \"the least important\", she had to make a name for herself and she did. A brilliant impersonator, she often performed hilarious imitations of pompous royal visitors to the palace, sending her family into hysterics.\n\nWhen Olga was 8 years old and taking French lessons, little Anastasia walked into the room with a picture book of exotic animals, plopped it down on the table and said \"I'm here to learn French.\" Pointing at the various animals in the book she asked \"What do you call this?\", \"What do you call this?\", etc. When she wanted something, she took it.\n\n\n![dbded559e3866487350257fe43428a47.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUvjSMGKopJLWfe8vUSsz1TL9ZYvMdE5v63YnsebNo6ae/dbded559e3866487350257fe43428a47.jpg)\nAnastasia as a little girl\n\n\n![th (3).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYVHZAx5CBzYP8UcgfpV4viGxHe6PMWSiqndVVW7RcLif/th%20(3).jpg)\nAnastasia as a young woman\n\n\n![605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXmGeLBiqFBcva4Kz1FkdS3fYoYKA647omyfvGzL1SFXS/605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg)\nAnastasia's experimental photography\n\nMuch has been written about the fate of the Romanovs and much of it is propaganda. The family was devoutly pious to the Russian Orthodox Church and many of the decisions made, and not made, by Nicholas II were based on the dictates of his faith and what he thought was right based on that. Secular historians can debate it until they are blue in the face but there aren't many arguments to be made against the prophecies made by Orthodox priests in some cases 70 years before any of the last Romanovs were even born. Take the time to watch the video below because it's important to the overall story.\n\nhttps://youtu.be/BzV2MJZaiOY\n\nUltimately the Bolsheviks took over Russia with the help of the West. Professor Antony C. Sutton proved how the United States government participated in the overthrow of Tsarist Russia by releasing all the information in U.S. State Department File 861.00/5399 located in Record Group 59, Central Decimal Files 1910-1929 box 9452 in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland in his book \"Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution\" and George F. Kennan, envoy to the Soviet Union from the US, exposed in his books \"Russia Leaves the War\" and \"The Decision to Intervene\" how the United States participated in the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, which left 20 million Christians dead, and how the U.S. launched an invasion of Siberia in 1919 to try to cover up their crime in front of the American people.\n\nThe Romanovs were among those 20 million murdered. Nicholas II was manipulated into giving up the throne by shady advisors in the midst of World War I and the family was driven into exile. Finally, in Yekaterinburg in July 1918, surrounded by boorish, drunken guards who regularly made lascivious comments to the girls, who took the doors off their bedrooms and bathrooms and watched everything they did, the family was awakened at 2 AM on the 17th and led down to the basement of the so-called Ipatiev house they were being held captive in and suddenly found themselves face to face with a firing squad. Nicholas, Alexandra and their son Alexei died the fastest but the four girls died the most brutally. They had taken jewelry owned by the family and sowed them into their undergarments in case they needed to sell them later. The jewelry deflected the bullets fired by the Bolsheviks, leaving the girls wounded but not fatally. Maria died from a gunshot to the back of the head while trying to open the basement doors. Olga and Tatiana died in each other's arms crying and screaming on the floor. Anastasia went into shock and collapsed, unconscious. She awoke screaming outside the building while being thrown into the back of a truck with the bodies of her family. She was dragged out onto the ground and bayonetted and beaten with rifle butts until she was dead. According to forensic reconstruction of the events going by the remains discovered, Anastasia, 17 years old, likely died choking on her own teeth and facial bones while drowning in her own blood. \n\nWith that in mind, watch this video. This is the service the girls performed for their fellow man, as part of their duty before God, during World War I. Ponder the evil that could do something so horrible to such precious souls.\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC-D1dZKoCI&list=LL&index=88\n\nTHE MIRACLES BEGIN\n\nThe Bolsheviks dumped the bodies of the Romanovs down the Ganina Yama mine ten miles outside of Yekaterinburg and there they remained until the Soviet government disbanded in the 1990s but even before that they refused to be silenced. Almost immediately after their deaths, there were reports of miracles occurring among those who had remained faithful to them. For years blood flowed from the bullet holes in the walls of the Ipatiev House's basement room and no matter how many times the holes were plastered over, the blood always returned. Stories were told of angelic singing coming from the basement during all of the major holy days of the church. People began to migrate there on pilgrimages, leaving flowers and icons; many reported having been healed of afflictions. This led the Soviet government to bulldoze the house for fear it would become a holy site. \n\nUnfortunately for them, on the former site of the Ipatiev House now sits a massive cathedral built in honor of the Romanovs after their canonization as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church and in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of their murder, more than 100,000 people from all over the world attended the all-night vigil and Divine Liturgy at the cathedral and then walked the ten mile pilgrimage out of the city to the old Ganina Yama mine, which is now the site of a monastery. Despite all attempts to erase this family from the face of the Earth, their popularity has instead grown and grown and grown, a phenomenon no other historical figures can boast today.\n\nTHE PRESENT DAY\n\nNow with all of that being said we rejoin my story. For months I had been reading stories of these miracles and hungrily scouring the internet for more. There were many tales far and wide of miracles and even visitations from people who had taken members of the Romanov family as patron saints. I had already developed an interest in the Orthodox Church through my Russian studies so I began to read about the concept of patron saints, i.e. a saint you choose (or who, in some cases, chooses you) to be your friend, guide and protector.\n\nBy February 2021 I was suffering brutal asthma attacks for hours night after night. Coughing, hacking, gagging and choking, these attacks would last for hours every single night and help from an inhaler and a nebulizer proved fruitless. By the time the attacks would subside, my body would be ragged yet it would be time to get ready for work and power through my tiredness. I began to dread the ending of the day, knowing the night was coming once again. \n\nFinally, lying in bed one evening, pondering the instant connection and deep feelings I had for Olga, I asked God to forgive me if what I was about to do was wrong, then, not knowing how to do it and not even knowing if I should do it, I addressed Olga by her full name, told her how I felt about her and asked, if it would be possible, for her to be my patron saint and help me with my asthma. Not knowing if I should end the request with \"Amen\" I simply said \"Thank you. I love you.\" Lying in silence I expected no response. A shot in the dark, a pointless cry into an empty void. No one was listening.\n\nBoy, was I wrong.\n\nWithin two to five minutes of \"Thank you. I love you\" a rush of energy surged through my body. My stomach dropped as the wave traveled through me. Dead center of my chest was the sensation of something warm bursting open and spreading through my entire body. It traveled through my head with a tiny almost electrical zap and then it left me. Lying on the bed stunned by the power of that rush of energy, I gasped out loud as it surged through me again, then again, and again and again. Waves of goosebumps washed across my body. It was almost like a fire burning through me but it felt so good! It repeated this for more than an hour before subsiding. In a state of complete relaxation after that experience, I slowly began to drift off to sleep. Just before I slipped into unconsciousness, I awoke with my lungs sucking in a deep, gasping breath of extremely cold air, drawing it in as deep as it could go, deeper than I've breathed in years, held it, then slowly released. Then they took in another breath, acting entirely on their own. This repeated half a dozen or more times. The cold air disappeared and I drifted off to sleep. That was nine months ago and it was the end of my severe attacks. Never again did I need the nebulizer and I went from going through one inhaler of 160 shots a week to one every three or four weeks.\n\nThe next morning I picked up a book of Olga's diary entries and flipped through them, reading her words and looking at her pictures. Silently I asked \"Was that you?\" Immediately the burst of energy surged through me again, this time twice as powerful as before and I was too stunned to even gasp out loud. For the rest of that day anytime I so much as thought\nabout her it would rush through me. I began to feel like something in my soul was coming to life, like I had been asleep for so long and was finally waking up. The world around me became so bright and beautiful that it was like I had never seen it before.\n\nI felt Olga's presence so strongly for so long. I felt her standing beside me so powerfully that I almost felt I could turn and speak to her. I felt her hands on my shoulders, on my back below my shoulders, on top of my head, the presence often accompanied by a light scent of roses. Sometimes when I suffered a much less severe and only mildly irritating asthma attack in the middle of the night, a pocket of cold air 30-40 degrees colder than the surrounding room would start swirling around me, allowing me to breathe it in and only fading when the issue was under control.\n\nI looked up the local Orthodox Church and when I saw it that powerful wave rushed me through me again. I emailed the priest and set up a meeting. Our talk went well and he encouraged me to get an icon of Olga to display at home. After a week of searching, I finally found one and ordered it. I had originally only intended to get an icon of Olga and one of Jesus Christ but then a beautiful, almost lifelike icon of Anastasia appeared on eBay and immediately captured my attention. Little did I realize my adventure had just begun.\n\nRESURRECTION\n\nIt's only fitting that Anastasia, whose name is taken from the Greek word \"Anastasis\" and means \"Resurrection\", the little girl who introduced herself into Olga's French lessons, would be next in line to come say hello. Her icon arrived first and I was struck by the beauty of it, her bright blue eyes, the faint hint of a mischievous smirk on her face. I displayed it and thought that I might had just opened a Pandora's Box. If there was any truth to what I had read that there is some connection between the image of a holy person on an icon and their spirit in Heaven, she would come here and just by the dictates of her nature she would have to mess with me at least a little. After suffering some traumatizing paranormal experiences in my youth, that thought kind of frightened me. I asked her to please just be gentle with me.\n\nHer icon arrived on a Friday afternoon. On Saturday night I was walking around, getting ready for bed, when I passed right through an overwhelmingly powerful fragrance of violets, perfume and a slight hint of something sweet like bubble gum. I stopped dead in my tracks, then turned and retraced my steps. I found the scent on the other side of the room and it wafted past me, heading back the way we had come. I turned and followed and it wafted away again. Searching for it, I found it near the closet, then it rushed away again and this time was by the chair. It rushed away again and this time was on the couch, then on the bed, then back at the closet, etc. By this point I was grinning from ear to ear and I felt like it was playing a game of hide and seek with me. When it disappeared and I couldn't find it, I stopped to study Anastasia's icon, wondering if the fragrance had been her paying me a visit. Suddenly the beautiful smell came right out of the icon into my face and resumed the game. At one point I went to the bathroom and she came right through the door. \"I'm in the bathroom,\" I instinctively blurted and the fragrance went right back out the door. I burst out laughing. It was Anastasia's MO to a T. Identity confirmed. What was most incredible to me was that it was not a general scent hanging in the air; it was localized in one place and it was moving, interacting with me and responding to me!\n\nWhen I went to bed, the fragrance began swirling around the room and every 30 seconds or so would wash over my bed like a wave until it lulled me to sleep. The beauty of that experience was like nothing I could have imagined, especially from an encounter with a spirit and she stole my heart that night but, alas, it could not last forever. Eventually the fragrance faded away and was gone.\n\nSomewhat sad and heartbroken that the beautiful scent had left, I stood one night before Anastasia's icon, illuminated by a candle and asked \"Are you still here?\" Immediately something inside me said \"Take a picture.\" I grabbed my phone, took a picture, saw something and when I zoomed it in the result stunned me.\n\n\n![0_PueRcqfc-RhPzx9s.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXfainXqfFa4dXe2xFwrTCoLdTNmVD3b2s7DdapyHkmqf/0_PueRcqfc-RhPzx9s.jpg)\n\nThis is Anastasia's icon as it normally appears. Take special note of her eyes, in particular her right one. Note the dark line of her eyelashes above the eye and the all flesh tone below it. What follows is the photo I took:\n\n\n![1_T0IQCracFoARVYT09-R0CQ.jpeg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQme9b9KMSqWVYfcNgPuQxZ9Vur35AA1n4teRjCbSfSvcjH/1_T0IQCracFoARVYT09-R0CQ.jpeg)\n\nNote the reversal of the eyelashes and flesh tones of the right eye and the luminescence under the left. Thinking it must somehow be a trick of the light, I retook the photograph from the same angle and lighting conditions dozens of times and never reproduced it. Since taking this photo I have found several pictures of Anastasia in life winking at the camera.\n\nAt this point I still had not attended an Orthodox service. I was still reading, learning, studying and trying to find time to go. Then one night while I was lying in bed wide awake, as clear as day an adult young woman's voice said \"Pascha.\" Looking up the word I found it is the celebration of Easter in the Orthodox Church according to the old calendar and is a late night service running from 11 PM to approximately 2-2:30 AM. It was also one week away. I felt I was being told that that's when I should go and so I did. The service was so powerful, so beautiful and so unlike anything I had ever seen before that I couldn't sleep for the rest of the night I was so wired. I felt like I had seen true worship for the first time. I was beginning to think I had found my home.\n\nTHE ATTACKS BEGIN\n\nInevitably, experiences like this are bound to attract unwanted attention from the dark side and something began to manifest itself. One evening while addressing Olga and asking her to pray for me for various matters, my roommate began loudly screaming every vile, profane thing imaginable to call a woman. It succeeded in pushing my buttons but before my anger took control, that feeling of something warm bursting in my chest and spreading through my body returned and immediately calmed me down. \"Don't listen,\" I felt a voice say. \"Keep going.\" When I later asked my roommate about this incident, he had no memory of it.\n\nOn another occasion, again while talking to Olga and asking her to pray for me, a loud BANG on the outside wall scared me so badly that I rushed through the remainder of my prayers, asking to be protected from evil in all ways. Then the nightmares started, one of Olga's icon melting, one of her icon falling over and punching a hole in the icon of her sister Maria, one of all four of the girl's icons smashed to pieces all over the table. Something was very angry with this situation and with those girls, Olga in particular.\n\nAt this point I had asked all four of the girls to be my patron saints, was reading the Bible cover to cover for the first time, had set up a daily prayer routine and often asked my saints to give me the qualities they have that I admire: Olga her empathy, unconditional love, patience and forgiveness; Tatiana her courage, strength and steadfastness to help me overcome my anxiety; Maria her meekness, goodness and humility; and Anastasia her physical stamina, joy and laughter. The prayers never fail to give me exactly what I need when I need it. Daily prayers for protection in mind, heart, body and spirit from all forms of evil finally quieted the dark, angry force.\n\nOlga returned on my birthday and resumed the stunning surges of energy coursing through me. I took it as a \"happy birthday\" from her. This was followed by a strong smell of fresh mint that also moved around and followed me everywhere I went, though not as quickly or as playfully as Anastasia. When I went to bed at night it draped over me like a blanket and stayed with me all night, never moving. Eventually it, too, faded.\n\nThe final fragrance to visit me came the two days before the Romanovs feast day (the anniversary of their death) and was a powerful mixture of jasmine and lilacs, musky but sweet and very lovely. This scent repeated the same pattern as Anastasia had, only without the game of hide and seek. It moved around the room and followed me everywhere I went. When I lit candles in front of my icons and sat, enjoying them, the fragrance stayed right by my side throughout. Going to bed it washed over me like a wave every two minutes for an hour. My breathing had been getting heavier due to persistent wildfire smoke and the pattern of the waves was like a breathing exercise. On their feast day, at the exact time in Russia when they were led underground to their deaths, the whole room filled with the mixed scent of roses, jasmine, lilacs and violets. It swelled and swelled for about thirty seconds and then faded and, thus far, has not returned. It felt like an expression of love and thankfulness for my patronage of them. When I was shortly thereafter gifted recreated samples of the perfume they wore in life - roses for Olga, jasmine for Tatiana, lilacs for Maria and purple violets for Anastasia - they were a perfect match. The mint is still a mystery, though with the girls' penchant for spraying floral scented perfume on the letters they wrote in life, one of them maybe thought it would just be a pleasant treat to give me. \n\nMIRACULOUS ICON\n\nBut this doesn't mean they left me in any way, just that the nature of what was happening was changing. When the nightmares started again, some too awful to even mention, I had to find ways of adjusting my prayers to block it out. When it found another way in I had to readjust to counter it. Holy oil blessed and consecrated over the relics of the Romanovs and given to me by a monastery finally managed to keep it out of my dreams so it resorted to another tactic: whispering in my ear and putting untrue thoughts in my head. Sometimes these thoughts would pile on me with such weight that I would get lost in them and Anastasia's icon would then wake me from it by suddenly falling off of her stand.\n\nOnce when I was beating myself up for not being able to focus or concentrate through one of my prayers, I asked her to help me not take things too seriously and she immediately fell over, prompting me to bust out laughing. Point taken. Lighten up. Once when I was lost in thought about the mysterious Rasputin, she promptly fell. Point taken. We won't have that conversation. Once when I was watching videos of them in life and in a state of mourning and grieving, her icon came off her stand in such a slow, methodical, exaggerated way that my jaw hit the floor. Point taken. I'm not dead. I'm right here. Talk to me. When I realized that the strange manner in which she came off the stand was to avoid knocking a lit candle off the table and into a cardboard box, I knew it couldn't possibly be a coincidence. Once when I was lost in thought, worried about a particular issue, she immediately fell over. Point taken again. You're worried, bring it here in prayer. I asked her to pray for me and the issue was resolved. And, the very next day, I had wanted to make it to church but couldn't for various reasons. I began to feel not just bad, but guilty, ashamed in front of those four girls who had shown me something so powerful only for me to squander it. \"You're pathetic,\" I felt something say. \"Look at you. They are so ashamed of you. Why would they want to be patrons for something as worthless as you?\" I started judging myself and condemning myself, slipping further and further into this dark place. \"God should just send me to hell,\" I thought. \"It'll be easier.\" Suddenly a loud WHACK! startled me so badly I jumped back and hit the wall. I looked up and Anastasia had come completely off her stand and was lying on the table. My hands were shaking. I knew I had to talk to her but I wasn't sure what her message was. Trembling, I approached her and poured everything out over the next several minutes and as I did I felt all of the darkness being sucked out of me, as if by a vacuum cleaner. I felt like a million dollars. I picked her up, kissed her, thanked her and set her back on her stand. She's sat there like a champion ever since.\n\nCONCLUSION\n\nI spent so much time wondering why this was happening to me. I have heard many amazing stories of patron saints but nothing like this. Even the priest at church sat stunned for a minute or two after I finally had the chance to tell him everything you just read above. Not just why did something so powerful happen to someone as unworthy of it as me but why was I given something that meant so much to me? I spent a lifetime praying and almost never getting an answer. Now every single prayer is answered, particularly when I ask my saints to take something before the Lord on my behalf. Why? Well, one day I had an epiphany. I've always believed in God and Jesus Christ but I never felt motivated to follow. I guess I just never cared and never felt like I had a good enough reason. When I realized that God gave me this experience - the greatest miracle of my heart - because that was the depth of His love for me, I broke down crying. He wanted me to come home so badly that there was nothing He wouldn't do, nothing He wouldn't give me, to persuade me to follow Him. Those four girls have been my heart and soul for so long and He put them right in front of me because He knew I would never be able to look away from it. That realization finally gave me something I had never known before: a deep, real love for God.\n\nTwo weeks ago I met with the priest at church, told him the entire story, told him that it had brought me back to God and told him that this church is where I wanted to be. He said I would have to be made a Catechumen, a student of the church's history and theology, and the first step toward baptism and that I should let him know when I felt it was time to do that. That night as I was saying all of my prayers, I stood in front of Olga's icon and asked her to help me know when it was time. I felt her put her arms around me. Okay, I thought. It's time. That Sunday I was given the ceremony of the Catechumen and my baptism will likely be at the next Holy Pascha midnight service. The peace and excitement I feel right now is beyond any I've known before.\n\nI look back at the path of my life, a series of inexplicable events that all led me right here. I wonder if God knew exactly what He was doing all this time. I wonder if the connection I long felt with Olga was because she, and her sisters, had already chosen me long before I would choose them. I can't say for sure. I just know I don't believe in coincidence.\n\nNovember 15th was Olga's birthday. That night I watched a tribute video made in honor of her and I bawled my eyes out. Only this time the tears were not of despair and loss but of love, gratitude and hope.\n\nhttps://youtu.be/aMnnyw4U3kY\nMy personal tribute to Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, made for their feast day.",
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      "body": "For anyone who has read this article, and has spotted the obvious mismatches between what the article's author claims to have been doing in Alaska, suggesting he's American, and how not american the nuances in his writing are, I urge to read the following enlightening article about where such articles originate at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-inside-russian-troll-house Stay alert to Kremlin trolls; they haven't gone away.",
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      "permlink": "is-pasha-the-beginning-of-war",
      "title": "Is Pascha the Beginning of War?",
      "body": "@@ -419,16 +419,17 @@\n ates Pas\n+c\n ha, Orth\n@@ -624,16 +624,17 @@\n ar%E2%80%99s Pas\n+c\n ha servi\n@@ -911,16 +911,17 @@\n aid %E2%80%9CPas\n+c\n ha.%E2%80%9D One\n@@ -3930,16 +3930,17 @@\n o is Pas\n+c\n ha it? T\n",
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      "body": "![th (8).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmerBVw98DP1XgMck8snbawmPgR9b53gT11YwpFQtfh4KR/th%20(8).jpg)\n\nIn my last post I spoke of the Romanov family and the profound effect certain members of that family have had on my life. In some ways this post is a follow-up because my experience with them — and my years of reading about Russia — led me to a curiosity in the Orthodox Church. On May 1st-2nd the church celebrates Pasha, Orthodox Easter according to the old calendar. It is an all-night service and something that I have heard all Christians should experience at least once. I’ve made up my mind to attend this year’s Pasha service and see it for myself.\n\nA few weeks ago, shortly after the amazing experiences I wrote about having with certain members of the Romanov saints I awoke late one night and after lying there for a short time, as clear as day an adult young woman’s voice next to my bed said “Pasha.” One would expect to be startled but curiously I wasn’t. I drifted off to sleep again wondering what that could have meant. This was shortly before the current standoff between the US/NATO/Ukraine and Russia.\n\nToday Vladimir Putin gave his annual version of the State of the Union Address in which he primarily outlined Russia’s future of embracing tradition, family and the church. The last ten minutes of his speech was devoted to foreign policy in which he addressed the current tensions between Russia and the west. He stated that Russia does not want to burn bridges but that if certain forces in the world do they will be met with a proportionate response. He then went on to name every weapon in Russia’s arsenal and said that crossing their ultimate red line would not be tolerated. Meanwhile, Russia has stepped up their efforts to get people out of war-torn Ukraine, offering passports to anyone wanting to escape into Russia.\n\nBut now tensions have escalated again with the planned assassination of Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, and his entire family (eerily reminiscent of the Romanovs) by the Belarus Armed Forces with the backing of the CIA during the May 9th Victory Day Parade celebrating the defeat of the Third Reich. Two conspirators met with Belarussian military officers in a Moscow restaurant but were being surveilled by the Russian FSB, who just last week foiled the assassination attempt and evidence of the CIA’s involvement (discussed by the men during their surveillance) was given to the US government. The response has been silence in the west. No media coverage at all, which reeks of complicity. Since then the US Ambassador to Russia has been ejected from the country.\n\nThis is nothing new. The CIA has overseen the assassination of world leaders and replacing them with fascist dictators who will do the US’s bidding for decades. This is what they ideally want to do with Russia but by either tremendous incompetence or the protection of God, they can’t seem to get it done. (For a real mind warp research Operation Gladio, a joint operation between the CIA, the Italian mafia and the Vatican that eventually resulted in Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s rise as Pope Francis I).\n\nWhy Ukraine? Because of the rich oil fields that flow through it. Hence the desire to stop the construction of the Nordstream 2 oil pipeline between Russia and Germany. With the completion of that pipeline, Ukraine fades into oblivion and the US loses a vital resource. A joint pipeline between Russia and Syria established in the late 2000’s is part of the reason why the US went to war there to topple Assad, then why they toppled Ukraine and now why they tried and failed to topple Belarus. Currently the Nordstream pipeline is 95%-97% complete with Russia wanting to complete it by the May 9th Victory Day celebrations. That leaves a very narrow window of time for the US/NATO/Ukraine to do something incredibly stupid and provoke the 150,000 Russian troops amassed at the border.\n\nSo is Pasha it? The beginning of the great war? Or the escalation of events that could start it? Or something else? I don’t know. I just know that hearing that word spoken that night and the confusion it brought up in me suddenly feels more and more clarified. Could something happen? It could. Let’s hope and pray that it doesn’t.\n\nAs for Ukraine, the country has become a war-torn hellhole, very much like Russia in the 1990s after the end of the USSR and its only chance for survival may be to reintegrate with Russia because the west seems content to bleed it dry. Maybe it’s time to swallow your pride and go back to where you came from.",
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      "title": "\"It was our destiny to love and say goodbye\": Remembering the Romanov Family",
      "body": "@@ -1087,19 +1087,16 @@\n rincess \n-of \n Alix (Al\n@@ -1852,16 +1852,32 @@\n n Earth:\n+ Left to right -\n  Young O\n@@ -2908,16 +2908,20 @@\n . In my \n+few \n years of\n@@ -2967,27 +2967,27 @@\n of Olga \n-immediately\n+have always\n  stunned\n@@ -4090,21 +4090,17 @@\n ader\n+,\n  taking \n-more \n afte\n@@ -4168,13 +4168,12 @@\n ss%22 \n-among\n+from\n  her\n@@ -6263,26 +6263,23 @@\n  family \n-considered\n+thought\n  him to \n@@ -6504,16 +6504,17 @@\n volution\n+,\n  an inte\n@@ -7069,22 +7069,23 @@\n cially t\n-orment\n+erroriz\n ed the d\n@@ -7224,22 +7224,19 @@\n f their \n-tormen\n+cap\n tors rep\n@@ -7713,16 +7713,48 @@\n l alive \n+after being shot multiple times \n and were\n@@ -7928,15 +7928,15 @@\n ily \n-was dea\n+had die\n d wa\n@@ -8285,17 +8285,16 @@\n 1998 the\n-y\n  remains\n@@ -8356,20 +8356,23 @@\n ervices \n-with\n+holding\n  icons o\n@@ -10859,16 +10859,165 @@\n sheet.%0A%0A\n+Some years later Alexandra visited another monastery and one of the residents rose from her bed and proclaimed %22Behold, the Holy Martyr Alexandra!%22%0A%0A\n Since th\n@@ -11238,20 +11238,26 @@\n some of \n-kill\n+the murder\n ers of t\n@@ -11355,16 +11355,72 @@\n this day\n+ and the Russian Orthodox Church was all but stamped out\n . Intere\n@@ -12148,16 +12148,17 @@\n also on \n+a\n  level s\n@@ -13702,16 +13702,37 @@\n l words \n+written in her diary \n at only \n@@ -13939,16 +13939,17 @@\n ve%22, and\n+,\n  most to\n@@ -13956,16 +13956,17 @@\n uchingly\n+,\n  %22Give m\n@@ -15480,17 +15480,16 @@\n at clear\n-s\n \n+\n  up many\n",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"romanov\",\"saints\",\"martyrs\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUPzfzYu5W16nkTNFhuxLHeMzX7hEgpGiFodQAphKPEVL/18287415._SX540_.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRCrwT6hoEFUEZGZNtEuC6WqCteMgj416aoiyP4q9scRp/s-l1000.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfPwAYRbwrh5FWQiRnvByaCZDAntKbzjZBdp5csozsnFV/img_8517.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbtZT5PaEwzmEdt9srrD5KQ1KQGTqPf3oEU6D4YvL8JHQ/olga-1.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPbBvrHqurVZbybitxTkNKU2oeAVoixbajJBj7is8M7Q1/4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNwKdEXPNDXPae7dq8UyRi5XzCrTWk7V3w6p6eBk6eC39/add4181415d5f2d4bdf0713ef69006d4--grand-duchess-olga-familia-romanov.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQjPDb6G19rdi6pi9ibF3Ngh4X52daEUpc4YsFDU9w7Jm/unnamed.png\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNg37V4693EM9w2mLkNNbHhJEHEqy1CkhdQJkSNPFtvUA/th%20(1).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUgk3tWb2Am4nxYbYiBGFvTuY5oKRgDDxvSnpGxSMMEfu/19060470.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQGEqiJ8SQhUNHHwPkCzuPsLiqvicW5gMWRtaQs2R2WQp/th%20(2).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYQsVsJrBV45pecKEtgoPtNYsUSswM65qbmVJQhcqGGpw/th.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYVHZAx5CBzYP8UcgfpV4viGxHe6PMWSiqndVVW7RcLif/th%20(3).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXmGeLBiqFBcva4Kz1FkdS3fYoYKA647omyfvGzL1SFXS/605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZgPxzEHpZzsqBzZ7wKhTQ2HYZP54wfvmsERucie1uM16/th%20(4).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTykju3Phsadie1L629XfE7PGSEcvzcWBGJhXTKYQpsio/th%20(6).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmP4yC1KxvskeWNpTyUiv5wsxWz5vZrrgcvShbw6S8zm9J/%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%8F%D0%BC%D0%B0_1.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmb6xjkx9j4GKJPftzkJD2wyFomBpHXFk2dqXLqUvw3hen/20210419_165142.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcHJjvVQx2EP5pNeBzdvknE8KPg2xPisrPtUfj1JgWoPd/20210402_160851.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTLuWEBocAkks6yPkFmRybZiKbT2uoipxhhfCPHyJwLu2/20210419_205421.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTTNiVEgMajWAwwUiurazAXHTJZYHuJvPosrJqCimHB5w/791-tatiana-romanov-portrait-ak-24-800-455x600.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQu9BdUHD6CZzybmqD9QhJkSfP45srWFG7Mu7TyEjYDsx/744-maria-romanova-portrait-ak-24-800-458x600.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaPg5AocNX2gq7vSNkT2WcNy8tTuFrsfSuxmqj1wj9YJf/s-l1600%20(2).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYK1aJ838HiThYZ3JHvCw2toVEuFS9wwcVWhZ75QkmsV4/s-l1600%20(1).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQhmt7FHSoSozutphY3Y5rzP1EZS1s6UiSczLgpwsBesk/holy_royal_martyrs.jpg\"],\"links\":[\"http://fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/nicholas_ii_e.htm\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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  "trx_id": "e94909108647d97ee79f00adca89211341d85832",
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-21T02:54:42",
  "op": [
    "comment",
    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "it-was-our-destiny-to-love-and-say-goodbye-remembering-the-romanov-family",
      "title": "\"It was our destiny to love and say goodbye\": Remembering the Romanov Family",
      "body": "![18287415._SX540_.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUPzfzYu5W16nkTNFhuxLHeMzX7hEgpGiFodQAphKPEVL/18287415._SX540_.jpg)\n\nFew historical figures have been so unfairly maligned as Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. Most of the writings on the Imperial family have been well-meaning but slanted, others extremely critical and some outright slanderous. Called \"weak\" and \"feckless\" by most historians, none of these interpretations have considered the man through the light of his Orthodox faith and how that instructed his actions.\n\nNicholas was born on May 6, 1868, the day the Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of St. Job the Long-Suffering, an almost prophetic omen of the sufferings and trials that would be faced by Nicholas and his family. Raised a pious Christian, despite his high position and his wealth, he lived frugally and gave everything he could to those who were less fortunate. He imparted this lesson to his own children, teaching them that \"the higher one's position in life, the greater their responsibility to their fellow man.\"\n\nIn 1894, Nicholas married Princess of Alix (Alexandra) of Hesse (Germany) who converted to the Orthodox faith. In May of 1896, Nicholas was crowned Tsar of Russia and immediately displayed his love and care for the Orthodox faith by giving much money to the building of monasteries and churches. He considered it his sacred duty given to him by God to restore Russia's ancient traditional culture which had been abandoned in favor of more \"Western\" styles. He also considered it his sacred duty to produce a male heir to the throne who would one day succeed him. These attempts instead resulted in three beautiful daughters who would become the pride and joy of Imperial Russia.\n\n\n![s-l1000.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRCrwT6hoEFUEZGZNtEuC6WqCteMgj416aoiyP4q9scRp/s-l1000.jpg)\nAngels on Earth: Young Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (correctly prounounced \"ahna-stah-see-yuh\")\n\nThe girls had individual personalities and strikingly different characteristics but all were truly innocent. Even their father-confessor said that they had no concept of sin and he often couldn't help but chuckle at the minor trivialities of which they felt so compelled to confess.\n\nThe oldest daughter, Olga, was a highly sensitive personality, emotional and a dreamer. She often said that the sun, moon, sky and stars were her favorite things because they \"made me happiest\". Her Russian, English and French teachers said her soul was as pure as crystal and that her enhanced emotions often left her overwhelmed by the slightest of things. During World War I she and her sister Tatiana volunteered as nurses in a Red Cross hospital tending to wounded soldiers. Their devotion to their patients was such that they often would rush off to the hospital in the middle of the night upon learning that one of their patients had been asking for them. In my years of reading Russian history, the pictures of Olga immediately stunned and captivated me, almost like seeing someone I knew but couldn't place and definitely like someone I understood in a profound way, being a highly sensitive person myself.\n\nJust look at the pictures, that smile and - especially - those otherworldly eyes:\n\n\n![img_8517.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfPwAYRbwrh5FWQiRnvByaCZDAntKbzjZBdp5csozsnFV/img_8517.jpg)\n\n\n![olga-1.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbtZT5PaEwzmEdt9srrD5KQ1KQGTqPf3oEU6D4YvL8JHQ/olga-1.jpg)\n\n\n![4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPbBvrHqurVZbybitxTkNKU2oeAVoixbajJBj7is8M7Q1/4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg)\n\n\n![add4181415d5f2d4bdf0713ef69006d4--grand-duchess-olga-familia-romanov.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNwKdEXPNDXPae7dq8UyRi5XzCrTWk7V3w6p6eBk6eC39/add4181415d5f2d4bdf0713ef69006d4--grand-duchess-olga-familia-romanov.jpg)\n\n\n![unnamed.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQjPDb6G19rdi6pi9ibF3Ngh4X52daEUpc4YsFDU9w7Jm/unnamed.png)\n\nThe second oldest, Tatiana, was more headstrong and a more natural leader taking more after her mother Alexandra, earning her the nickname \"the Governess\" among her sisters. Often considered the undisputed beauty of the family - and no doubt she is beautiful - she doesn't have the almost mystical hold over me that Olga does.\n\n\n![th (1).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNg37V4693EM9w2mLkNNbHhJEHEqy1CkhdQJkSNPFtvUA/th%20(1).jpg)\n\n\n![19060470.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUgk3tWb2Am4nxYbYiBGFvTuY5oKRgDDxvSnpGxSMMEfu/19060470.jpg)\n\nThe middle daughter, Maria, was the most easygoing. A person who loved the simple things in life, she yearned to be a mother and a homemaker, not royalty and would have excelled at both had she been allowed to live.\n\n\n![th (2).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQGEqiJ8SQhUNHHwPkCzuPsLiqvicW5gMWRtaQs2R2WQp/th%20(2).jpg)\n\n\n![th.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYQsVsJrBV45pecKEtgoPtNYsUSswM65qbmVJQhcqGGpw/th.jpg)\n\nThe youngest daughter, Anastasia, was the prankster, the mischief-maker. Always in trouble for something, she nevertheless perfected her own style of photography, including creating double negatives to look like ghostly images, an amazing feat for the technology at the time.\n\n\n![th (3).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYVHZAx5CBzYP8UcgfpV4viGxHe6PMWSiqndVVW7RcLif/th%20(3).jpg)\n\n\n![605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXmGeLBiqFBcva4Kz1FkdS3fYoYKA647omyfvGzL1SFXS/605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg)\nAnastasia's experimental photography\n\n\n![th (4).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZgPxzEHpZzsqBzZ7wKhTQ2HYZP54wfvmsERucie1uM16/th%20(4).jpg)\nDouble negative image of ghostly Nicholas standing over Anastasia\n\nFinally Nicholas and Alexandra did produce a male heir, Alexei, who was cursed with hemophilia, an illness passed down from Alexandra's bloodline. This led to the family's involvement with the peasant mystic Rasputin, who seemed to have an otherworldly effect on the boy, calming him in his moments of fear and somehow managing to heal his bleeding by the laying on of hands. The daughters loved Rasputin and considered him to be a good friend but relatives of the family considered him to be a demon, possibly even the devil himself, come to tear down Imperial Russia and murdered him in 1917. \n\nMaybe, to some extent, this wasn't entirely untrue. With the western-backed Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution an international conspiracy was able to create such tremendous unrest in Russia that Nicholas was duped into abdicating his throne to make the strikes and riots stop but to no avail. Not only did they not stop, they increased in violence and the Imperial family was forced into exile. With Lenin's overthrow of the Provisional Government, nothing was off the table. By this time the Romanov family was ensconced in the infamous Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg where they were kept under house arrest and daily tormented by their Bolshevik captors, who especially tormented the daughters by carving lascivious images on the wall. Nevertheless, the Romanovs remained faithful to God until the end and even many of their tormentors repented of their actions just by witnessing their pious, forgiving nature. \n\nSadly, in July 1918 Lenin ordered the entire family murdered. Their captors led them downstairs into the basement of the Ipatiev House late one night and opened fire on them. The daughters had taken many of the jewels that belonged to the family and sown them into their clothing so they could later be sold if need be and this only served to deflect the bullets. Some of the daughters were still alive and were bludgeoned and bayonetted to death. Anastasia's little dog was beaten alongside her. From the time the first bullets were fired to the time the last member of the family was dead was twenty minutes. It took three days to clean all the blood out of the room. Masonic images were carved into the walls suggesting a ritualistic killing.\n\nThe bodies were dumped in a mine nine miles outside of town and not discovered until the 1970s. After the break up of the USSR in 1991 the bodies were finally retrieved and identified. In 1998 they remains were laid to rest and many mourners who attended the services with icons of the family reported that the icons began to bleed from multiple different points representing gunshot wounds. This coupled with the pious nature of the family and the multitude of miracles, healings and even visitations - including a bright white light and singing voices emanating from the basement of the Ipatiev House - reported by people who had called on them for help and for prayers is largely why the Russian Orthodox Church canonized them as saints in 2000. To this day miracles and spiritual experiences are still reported by Christians who take them on as patron saints.\n\nThe Ipatiev House was bulldozed in the 1970s by Boris Yeltsin who said that he did not want people to venerate it as a holy site in the family's honor. Joke's on him because it is now the site of a massive cathedral and the burial site north of town is home to a monastery in their name. On the 100th anniversary of their murder, July 2018, over 400,000 people from all over the world attended the all-night Divine Liturgy in their honor in Yekaterinburg and then a procession of mourners several miles long walked the nine miles outside of the city to the monastery for another service. Doubtless there are few other Christian saints who have received such love and veneration.\n\n\n![th (6).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTykju3Phsadie1L629XfE7PGSEcvzcWBGJhXTKYQpsio/th%20(6).jpg)\nThe Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, the former site of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg\n\n\n![Ганина_яма_1.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmP4yC1KxvskeWNpTyUiv5wsxWz5vZrrgcvShbw6S8zm9J/%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%8F%D0%BC%D0%B0_1.jpg)\nGanina Yama Monastery, the former mine site where the bodies were dumped\n\nThe question now becomes whether the Romanovs knew what their eventual fate would be. Shortly before his death in 1833, Seraphim of Sarov wrote a letter, sealed it and addressed it to \"the Tsar in whose reign I shall be glorified\".  The letter was held for seventy years and ultimately given to Nicholas II in 1903 when he insisted that Seraphim of Sarov be canonized by the Orthodox Church. While the exact contents of the letter are unknown, Nicholas was left shaken. The family later visited St. Seraphim's Convent where Blessed Pasha (Parasceva) the Fool-for-Christ spoke to them for several hours and and it is said that she foretold their martyrdom and the collapse of Holy Russia. When they left the monsatery they were as white as a sheet.\n\nSince the murder of the Romanovs the effects have been catastrophic. Russia was plunged into the iron grip of the Soviet Union and the brutality of Stalin, the Spanish Flu epidemic swept the world and claimed the lives of some of killers of the Romanov family. World War II and the Cold War left psychological scars that permeate to this day. Interestingly, with the burial of the Romanov family and their canonization as saints, Russia has steadily regained its strength and power, which grows more and more as the country returns to full Christianity.\n\nAll of this to say that in February I reached a point where I needed a little extra help in personal matters so just on a whim and expecting no result I addressed Saint Olga Nikolaevna Romanova and asked for her prayers in certain matters. Not only did I have a profound spiritual experience that I could never put into words within minutes of asking, but each of the things I asked for were answered. Since then she has become my patron saint and now by default her three sisters. The effect has been dazzling but also on  level so deeply personal that it could never be communicated in words. I have since obtained an Orthodox icon of St. Olga as well as of her little sister Anastasia. With them has come a sweet perfume/flower fragrance that permeates the room where I've displayed them and that tends to follow me wherever I go. Soon to arrive are the two middle sisters and the rest of the family.\n\n\n![20210419_165142.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmb6xjkx9j4GKJPftzkJD2wyFomBpHXFk2dqXLqUvw3hen/20210419_165142.jpg)\nSt. Olga's icon, dressed in her nurse's uniform\n\n\n![20210402_160851.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcHJjvVQx2EP5pNeBzdvknE8KPg2xPisrPtUfj1JgWoPd/20210402_160851.jpg)\nSt. Anastasia's icon\n\n![20210419_205421.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTLuWEBocAkks6yPkFmRybZiKbT2uoipxhhfCPHyJwLu2/20210419_205421.jpg)\nTwo sisters by candlelight\n\nUpcoming icons:\n\n\n![791-tatiana-romanov-portrait-ak-24-800-455x600.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTTNiVEgMajWAwwUiurazAXHTJZYHuJvPosrJqCimHB5w/791-tatiana-romanov-portrait-ak-24-800-455x600.jpg)\nTatiana\n\n\n![744-maria-romanova-portrait-ak-24-800-458x600.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQu9BdUHD6CZzybmqD9QhJkSfP45srWFG7Mu7TyEjYDsx/744-maria-romanova-portrait-ak-24-800-458x600.jpg)\nMaria\n\n\n![s-l1600 (2).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaPg5AocNX2gq7vSNkT2WcNy8tTuFrsfSuxmqj1wj9YJf/s-l1600%20(2).jpg)\nThe family\n\n\n![s-l1600 (1).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYK1aJ838HiThYZ3JHvCw2toVEuFS9wwcVWhZ75QkmsV4/s-l1600%20(1).jpg)\nThe Resurrection of Jesus Christ\n\nSt. Olga's final words at only 22 years old are still just as relevant today, if not more so: \"Remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love\", and most touchingly \"Give my love to all who remember me.\"\n\nOh, Holy Romanov Royal Martyrs, remember us as we remember you. Rest in peace and pray for us.\n\n\n![holy_royal_martyrs.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQhmt7FHSoSozutphY3Y5rzP1EZS1s6UiSczLgpwsBesk/holy_royal_martyrs.jpg)\n\n\nSources and recommended reading:\n\n1. \"Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses\" by Helen Rappaport, 2014\n2. \"The Forgotten Tutor: John Epps and the Romanovs\" by Janet Epps and Gabriella Lang, 2014\n3. \"Thirteen Years at the Russian Court: A Personal Record of the Last Years and Death of the Tsar Nicholas II and his Family\" by Pierre Gilliard, reprint 2016\n4. \"Journal of a Russian Grand Duchess: Complete Annotated 1913 Diary of Olga Romanov, Eldest Daughter of the Last Tsar\" by Helen Azar, 2015\n5. \"The Diary of Olga Romanov: Royal Witness to the Russian Revolution\" by Helen Azar, 2015\n6. \"Tatiana Romanov: Daughter of the Last Tsar, Diaries and Letters, 1913-1918\" by Helen Azar and Nicholas B.A. Nicholson, 2015\n7. \"Maria Romanov, Third Daughter of the Last Tsar, Diaries and Letters, 1908-1918\" by Helen Azar and George Hawkins, 2019\n8. \"Anastasia's Album: The Last Tsar's Youngest Daughter Tells Her Own Story\" by Hugh Brewster, 1996 (Note: Anastasia's letters should be published by Helen Azar in 2021)\n9. \"The Romanov Royal Martyrs: What Silence Could Not Conceal\" by St. John the Forerunner Monastery, 2019 (Hands down the BEST book on the Romanovs. Includes new sources recently released from the Russian archives that clears up many of the misconceptions and lies about the family. Includes 56 pages of colorized photos).\n10. http://fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/nicholas_ii_e.htm",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"romanov\",\"saints\",\"martyrs\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUPzfzYu5W16nkTNFhuxLHeMzX7hEgpGiFodQAphKPEVL/18287415._SX540_.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRCrwT6hoEFUEZGZNtEuC6WqCteMgj416aoiyP4q9scRp/s-l1000.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfPwAYRbwrh5FWQiRnvByaCZDAntKbzjZBdp5csozsnFV/img_8517.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbtZT5PaEwzmEdt9srrD5KQ1KQGTqPf3oEU6D4YvL8JHQ/olga-1.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPbBvrHqurVZbybitxTkNKU2oeAVoixbajJBj7is8M7Q1/4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNwKdEXPNDXPae7dq8UyRi5XzCrTWk7V3w6p6eBk6eC39/add4181415d5f2d4bdf0713ef69006d4--grand-duchess-olga-familia-romanov.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQjPDb6G19rdi6pi9ibF3Ngh4X52daEUpc4YsFDU9w7Jm/unnamed.png\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNg37V4693EM9w2mLkNNbHhJEHEqy1CkhdQJkSNPFtvUA/th%20(1).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUgk3tWb2Am4nxYbYiBGFvTuY5oKRgDDxvSnpGxSMMEfu/19060470.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQGEqiJ8SQhUNHHwPkCzuPsLiqvicW5gMWRtaQs2R2WQp/th%20(2).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYQsVsJrBV45pecKEtgoPtNYsUSswM65qbmVJQhcqGGpw/th.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYVHZAx5CBzYP8UcgfpV4viGxHe6PMWSiqndVVW7RcLif/th%20(3).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXmGeLBiqFBcva4Kz1FkdS3fYoYKA647omyfvGzL1SFXS/605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZgPxzEHpZzsqBzZ7wKhTQ2HYZP54wfvmsERucie1uM16/th%20(4).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTykju3Phsadie1L629XfE7PGSEcvzcWBGJhXTKYQpsio/th%20(6).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmP4yC1KxvskeWNpTyUiv5wsxWz5vZrrgcvShbw6S8zm9J/%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%8F%D0%BC%D0%B0_1.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmb6xjkx9j4GKJPftzkJD2wyFomBpHXFk2dqXLqUvw3hen/20210419_165142.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcHJjvVQx2EP5pNeBzdvknE8KPg2xPisrPtUfj1JgWoPd/20210402_160851.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTLuWEBocAkks6yPkFmRybZiKbT2uoipxhhfCPHyJwLu2/20210419_205421.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTTNiVEgMajWAwwUiurazAXHTJZYHuJvPosrJqCimHB5w/791-tatiana-romanov-portrait-ak-24-800-455x600.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQu9BdUHD6CZzybmqD9QhJkSfP45srWFG7Mu7TyEjYDsx/744-maria-romanova-portrait-ak-24-800-458x600.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaPg5AocNX2gq7vSNkT2WcNy8tTuFrsfSuxmqj1wj9YJf/s-l1600%20(2).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYK1aJ838HiThYZ3JHvCw2toVEuFS9wwcVWhZ75QkmsV4/s-l1600%20(1).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQhmt7FHSoSozutphY3Y5rzP1EZS1s6UiSczLgpwsBesk/holy_royal_martyrs.jpg\"],\"links\":[\"http://fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/nicholas_ii_e.htm\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-20T23:29:03",
  "op": [
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    {
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      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "it-was-our-destiny-to-love-and-say-goodbye-remembering-the-romanov-family",
      "title": "\"It was our destiny to love and say goodbye\": Remembering the Romanov Family",
      "body": "@@ -12598,231 +12598,8 @@\n on%0A%0A\n-%0A!%5B20210416_224625_resized.jpg%5D(https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPwBGXPcaWBzoBD1DUuXL1NK4yFeqg1RQ3mhu4Nc3tpcn/20210416_224625_resized.jpg)%0AA shot of Anastasia by candlelight. Is it a trick of the light or is she winking?%0A%0A%0A\n !%5B20\n",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"romanov\",\"saints\",\"martyrs\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUPzfzYu5W16nkTNFhuxLHeMzX7hEgpGiFodQAphKPEVL/18287415._SX540_.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRCrwT6hoEFUEZGZNtEuC6WqCteMgj416aoiyP4q9scRp/s-l1000.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfPwAYRbwrh5FWQiRnvByaCZDAntKbzjZBdp5csozsnFV/img_8517.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbtZT5PaEwzmEdt9srrD5KQ1KQGTqPf3oEU6D4YvL8JHQ/olga-1.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPbBvrHqurVZbybitxTkNKU2oeAVoixbajJBj7is8M7Q1/4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNwKdEXPNDXPae7dq8UyRi5XzCrTWk7V3w6p6eBk6eC39/add4181415d5f2d4bdf0713ef69006d4--grand-duchess-olga-familia-romanov.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQjPDb6G19rdi6pi9ibF3Ngh4X52daEUpc4YsFDU9w7Jm/unnamed.png\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNg37V4693EM9w2mLkNNbHhJEHEqy1CkhdQJkSNPFtvUA/th%20(1).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUgk3tWb2Am4nxYbYiBGFvTuY5oKRgDDxvSnpGxSMMEfu/19060470.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQGEqiJ8SQhUNHHwPkCzuPsLiqvicW5gMWRtaQs2R2WQp/th%20(2).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYQsVsJrBV45pecKEtgoPtNYsUSswM65qbmVJQhcqGGpw/th.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYVHZAx5CBzYP8UcgfpV4viGxHe6PMWSiqndVVW7RcLif/th%20(3).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXmGeLBiqFBcva4Kz1FkdS3fYoYKA647omyfvGzL1SFXS/605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZgPxzEHpZzsqBzZ7wKhTQ2HYZP54wfvmsERucie1uM16/th%20(4).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTykju3Phsadie1L629XfE7PGSEcvzcWBGJhXTKYQpsio/th%20(6).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmP4yC1KxvskeWNpTyUiv5wsxWz5vZrrgcvShbw6S8zm9J/%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%8F%D0%BC%D0%B0_1.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmb6xjkx9j4GKJPftzkJD2wyFomBpHXFk2dqXLqUvw3hen/20210419_165142.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcHJjvVQx2EP5pNeBzdvknE8KPg2xPisrPtUfj1JgWoPd/20210402_160851.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTLuWEBocAkks6yPkFmRybZiKbT2uoipxhhfCPHyJwLu2/20210419_205421.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTTNiVEgMajWAwwUiurazAXHTJZYHuJvPosrJqCimHB5w/791-tatiana-romanov-portrait-ak-24-800-455x600.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQu9BdUHD6CZzybmqD9QhJkSfP45srWFG7Mu7TyEjYDsx/744-maria-romanova-portrait-ak-24-800-458x600.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaPg5AocNX2gq7vSNkT2WcNy8tTuFrsfSuxmqj1wj9YJf/s-l1600%20(2).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYK1aJ838HiThYZ3JHvCw2toVEuFS9wwcVWhZ75QkmsV4/s-l1600%20(1).jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQhmt7FHSoSozutphY3Y5rzP1EZS1s6UiSczLgpwsBesk/holy_royal_martyrs.jpg\"],\"links\":[\"http://fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/nicholas_ii_e.htm\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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{
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-20T23:27:39",
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    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "it-was-our-destiny-to-love-and-say-goodbye-remembering-the-romanov-family",
      "title": "\"It was our destiny to love and say goodbye\": Remembering the Romanov Family",
      "body": "![18287415._SX540_.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUPzfzYu5W16nkTNFhuxLHeMzX7hEgpGiFodQAphKPEVL/18287415._SX540_.jpg)\n\nFew historical figures have been so unfairly maligned as Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. Most of the writings on the Imperial family have been well-meaning but slanted, others extremely critical and some outright slanderous. Called \"weak\" and \"feckless\" by most historians, none of these interpretations have considered the man through the light of his Orthodox faith and how that instructed his actions.\n\nNicholas was born on May 6, 1868, the day the Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of St. Job the Long-Suffering, an almost prophetic omen of the sufferings and trials that would be faced by Nicholas and his family. Raised a pious Christian, despite his high position and his wealth, he lived frugally and gave everything he could to those who were less fortunate. He imparted this lesson to his own children, teaching them that \"the higher one's position in life, the greater their responsibility to their fellow man.\"\n\nIn 1894, Nicholas married Princess of Alix (Alexandra) of Hesse (Germany) who converted to the Orthodox faith. In May of 1896, Nicholas was crowned Tsar of Russia and immediately displayed his love and care for the Orthodox faith by giving much money to the building of monasteries and churches. He considered it his sacred duty given to him by God to restore Russia's ancient traditional culture which had been abandoned in favor of more \"Western\" styles. He also considered it his sacred duty to produce a male heir to the throne who would one day succeed him. These attempts instead resulted in three beautiful daughters who would become the pride and joy of Imperial Russia.\n\n\n![s-l1000.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRCrwT6hoEFUEZGZNtEuC6WqCteMgj416aoiyP4q9scRp/s-l1000.jpg)\nAngels on Earth: Young Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (correctly prounounced \"ahna-stah-see-yuh\")\n\nThe girls had individual personalities and strikingly different characteristics but all were truly innocent. Even their father-confessor said that they had no concept of sin and he often couldn't help but chuckle at the minor trivialities of which they felt so compelled to confess.\n\nThe oldest daughter, Olga, was a highly sensitive personality, emotional and a dreamer. She often said that the sun, moon, sky and stars were her favorite things because they \"made me happiest\". Her Russian, English and French teachers said her soul was as pure as crystal and that her enhanced emotions often left her overwhelmed by the slightest of things. During World War I she and her sister Tatiana volunteered as nurses in a Red Cross hospital tending to wounded soldiers. Their devotion to their patients was such that they often would rush off to the hospital in the middle of the night upon learning that one of their patients had been asking for them. In my years of reading Russian history, the pictures of Olga immediately stunned and captivated me, almost like seeing someone I knew but couldn't place and definitely like someone I understood in a profound way, being a highly sensitive person myself.\n\nJust look at the pictures, that smile and - especially - those otherworldly eyes:\n\n\n![img_8517.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfPwAYRbwrh5FWQiRnvByaCZDAntKbzjZBdp5csozsnFV/img_8517.jpg)\n\n\n![olga-1.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbtZT5PaEwzmEdt9srrD5KQ1KQGTqPf3oEU6D4YvL8JHQ/olga-1.jpg)\n\n\n![4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPbBvrHqurVZbybitxTkNKU2oeAVoixbajJBj7is8M7Q1/4accb6ceae0b91f31a465866e7f42723--romanovs-grand-duchess-olga.jpg)\n\n\n![add4181415d5f2d4bdf0713ef69006d4--grand-duchess-olga-familia-romanov.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNwKdEXPNDXPae7dq8UyRi5XzCrTWk7V3w6p6eBk6eC39/add4181415d5f2d4bdf0713ef69006d4--grand-duchess-olga-familia-romanov.jpg)\n\n\n![unnamed.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQjPDb6G19rdi6pi9ibF3Ngh4X52daEUpc4YsFDU9w7Jm/unnamed.png)\n\nThe second oldest, Tatiana, was more headstrong and a more natural leader taking more after her mother Alexandra, earning her the nickname \"the Governess\" among her sisters. Often considered the undisputed beauty of the family - and no doubt she is beautiful - she doesn't have the almost mystical hold over me that Olga does.\n\n\n![th (1).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNg37V4693EM9w2mLkNNbHhJEHEqy1CkhdQJkSNPFtvUA/th%20(1).jpg)\n\n\n![19060470.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUgk3tWb2Am4nxYbYiBGFvTuY5oKRgDDxvSnpGxSMMEfu/19060470.jpg)\n\nThe middle daughter, Maria, was the most easygoing. A person who loved the simple things in life, she yearned to be a mother and a homemaker, not royalty and would have excelled at both had she been allowed to live.\n\n\n![th (2).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQGEqiJ8SQhUNHHwPkCzuPsLiqvicW5gMWRtaQs2R2WQp/th%20(2).jpg)\n\n\n![th.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYQsVsJrBV45pecKEtgoPtNYsUSswM65qbmVJQhcqGGpw/th.jpg)\n\nThe youngest daughter, Anastasia, was the prankster, the mischief-maker. Always in trouble for something, she nevertheless perfected her own style of photography, including creating double negatives to look like ghostly images, an amazing feat for the technology at the time.\n\n\n![th (3).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYVHZAx5CBzYP8UcgfpV4viGxHe6PMWSiqndVVW7RcLif/th%20(3).jpg)\n\n\n![605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXmGeLBiqFBcva4Kz1FkdS3fYoYKA647omyfvGzL1SFXS/605px-Anastasia_Nikolaevna_of_Russia_fooling_around_(original).jpg)\nAnastasia's experimental photography\n\n\n![th (4).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZgPxzEHpZzsqBzZ7wKhTQ2HYZP54wfvmsERucie1uM16/th%20(4).jpg)\nDouble negative image of ghostly Nicholas standing over Anastasia\n\nFinally Nicholas and Alexandra did produce a male heir, Alexei, who was cursed with hemophilia, an illness passed down from Alexandra's bloodline. This led to the family's involvement with the peasant mystic Rasputin, who seemed to have an otherworldly effect on the boy, calming him in his moments of fear and somehow managing to heal his bleeding by the laying on of hands. The daughters loved Rasputin and considered him to be a good friend but relatives of the family considered him to be a demon, possibly even the devil himself, come to tear down Imperial Russia and murdered him in 1917. \n\nMaybe, to some extent, this wasn't entirely untrue. With the western-backed Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution an international conspiracy was able to create such tremendous unrest in Russia that Nicholas was duped into abdicating his throne to make the strikes and riots stop but to no avail. Not only did they not stop, they increased in violence and the Imperial family was forced into exile. With Lenin's overthrow of the Provisional Government, nothing was off the table. By this time the Romanov family was ensconced in the infamous Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg where they were kept under house arrest and daily tormented by their Bolshevik captors, who especially tormented the daughters by carving lascivious images on the wall. Nevertheless, the Romanovs remained faithful to God until the end and even many of their tormentors repented of their actions just by witnessing their pious, forgiving nature. \n\nSadly, in July 1918 Lenin ordered the entire family murdered. Their captors led them downstairs into the basement of the Ipatiev House late one night and opened fire on them. The daughters had taken many of the jewels that belonged to the family and sown them into their clothing so they could later be sold if need be and this only served to deflect the bullets. Some of the daughters were still alive and were bludgeoned and bayonetted to death. Anastasia's little dog was beaten alongside her. From the time the first bullets were fired to the time the last member of the family was dead was twenty minutes. It took three days to clean all the blood out of the room. Masonic images were carved into the walls suggesting a ritualistic killing.\n\nThe bodies were dumped in a mine nine miles outside of town and not discovered until the 1970s. After the break up of the USSR in 1991 the bodies were finally retrieved and identified. In 1998 they remains were laid to rest and many mourners who attended the services with icons of the family reported that the icons began to bleed from multiple different points representing gunshot wounds. This coupled with the pious nature of the family and the multitude of miracles, healings and even visitations - including a bright white light and singing voices emanating from the basement of the Ipatiev House - reported by people who had called on them for help and for prayers is largely why the Russian Orthodox Church canonized them as saints in 2000. To this day miracles and spiritual experiences are still reported by Christians who take them on as patron saints.\n\nThe Ipatiev House was bulldozed in the 1970s by Boris Yeltsin who said that he did not want people to venerate it as a holy site in the family's honor. Joke's on him because it is now the site of a massive cathedral and the burial site north of town is home to a monastery in their name. On the 100th anniversary of their murder, July 2018, over 400,000 people from all over the world attended the all-night Divine Liturgy in their honor in Yekaterinburg and then a procession of mourners several miles long walked the nine miles outside of the city to the monastery for another service. Doubtless there are few other Christian saints who have received such love and veneration.\n\n\n![th (6).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTykju3Phsadie1L629XfE7PGSEcvzcWBGJhXTKYQpsio/th%20(6).jpg)\nThe Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, the former site of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg\n\n\n![Ганина_яма_1.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmP4yC1KxvskeWNpTyUiv5wsxWz5vZrrgcvShbw6S8zm9J/%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%8F%D0%BC%D0%B0_1.jpg)\nGanina Yama Monastery, the former mine site where the bodies were dumped\n\nThe question now becomes whether the Romanovs knew what their eventual fate would be. Shortly before his death in 1833, Seraphim of Sarov wrote a letter, sealed it and addressed it to \"the Tsar in whose reign I shall be glorified\".  The letter was held for seventy years and ultimately given to Nicholas II in 1903 when he insisted that Seraphim of Sarov be canonized by the Orthodox Church. While the exact contents of the letter are unknown, Nicholas was left shaken. The family later visited St. Seraphim's Convent where Blessed Pasha (Parasceva) the Fool-for-Christ spoke to them for several hours and and it is said that she foretold their martyrdom and the collapse of Holy Russia. When they left the monsatery they were as white as a sheet.\n\nSince the murder of the Romanovs the effects have been catastrophic. Russia was plunged into the iron grip of the Soviet Union and the brutality of Stalin, the Spanish Flu epidemic swept the world and claimed the lives of some of killers of the Romanov family. World War II and the Cold War left psychological scars that permeate to this day. Interestingly, with the burial of the Romanov family and their canonization as saints, Russia has steadily regained its strength and power, which grows more and more as the country returns to full Christianity.\n\nAll of this to say that in February I reached a point where I needed a little extra help in personal matters so just on a whim and expecting no result I addressed Saint Olga Nikolaevna Romanova and asked for her prayers in certain matters. Not only did I have a profound spiritual experience that I could never put into words within minutes of asking, but each of the things I asked for were answered. Since then she has become my patron saint and now by default her three sisters. The effect has been dazzling but also on  level so deeply personal that it could never be communicated in words. I have since obtained an Orthodox icon of St. Olga as well as of her little sister Anastasia. With them has come a sweet perfume/flower fragrance that permeates the room where I've displayed them and that tends to follow me wherever I go. Soon to arrive are the two middle sisters and the rest of the family.\n\n\n![20210419_165142.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmb6xjkx9j4GKJPftzkJD2wyFomBpHXFk2dqXLqUvw3hen/20210419_165142.jpg)\nSt. Olga's icon, dressed in her nurse's uniform\n\n\n![20210402_160851.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcHJjvVQx2EP5pNeBzdvknE8KPg2xPisrPtUfj1JgWoPd/20210402_160851.jpg)\nSt. Anastasia's icon\n\n\n![20210416_224625_resized.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPwBGXPcaWBzoBD1DUuXL1NK4yFeqg1RQ3mhu4Nc3tpcn/20210416_224625_resized.jpg)\nA shot of Anastasia by candlelight. Is it a trick of the light or is she winking?\n\n\n![20210419_205421.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTLuWEBocAkks6yPkFmRybZiKbT2uoipxhhfCPHyJwLu2/20210419_205421.jpg)\nTwo sisters by candlelight\n\nUpcoming icons:\n\n\n![791-tatiana-romanov-portrait-ak-24-800-455x600.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTTNiVEgMajWAwwUiurazAXHTJZYHuJvPosrJqCimHB5w/791-tatiana-romanov-portrait-ak-24-800-455x600.jpg)\nTatiana\n\n\n![744-maria-romanova-portrait-ak-24-800-458x600.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQu9BdUHD6CZzybmqD9QhJkSfP45srWFG7Mu7TyEjYDsx/744-maria-romanova-portrait-ak-24-800-458x600.jpg)\nMaria\n\n\n![s-l1600 (2).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaPg5AocNX2gq7vSNkT2WcNy8tTuFrsfSuxmqj1wj9YJf/s-l1600%20(2).jpg)\nThe family\n\n\n![s-l1600 (1).jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYK1aJ838HiThYZ3JHvCw2toVEuFS9wwcVWhZ75QkmsV4/s-l1600%20(1).jpg)\nThe Resurrection of Jesus Christ\n\nSt. Olga's final words at only 22 years old are still just as relevant today, if not more so: \"Remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love\", and most touchingly \"Give my love to all who remember me.\"\n\nOh, Holy Romanov Royal Martyrs, remember us as we remember you. Rest in peace and pray for us.\n\n\n![holy_royal_martyrs.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQhmt7FHSoSozutphY3Y5rzP1EZS1s6UiSczLgpwsBesk/holy_royal_martyrs.jpg)\n\n\nSources and recommended reading:\n\n1. \"Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses\" by Helen Rappaport, 2014\n2. \"The Forgotten Tutor: John Epps and the Romanovs\" by Janet Epps and Gabriella Lang, 2014\n3. \"Thirteen Years at the Russian Court: A Personal Record of the Last Years and Death of the Tsar Nicholas II and his Family\" by Pierre Gilliard, reprint 2016\n4. \"Journal of a Russian Grand Duchess: Complete Annotated 1913 Diary of Olga Romanov, Eldest Daughter of the Last Tsar\" by Helen Azar, 2015\n5. \"The Diary of Olga Romanov: Royal Witness to the Russian Revolution\" by Helen Azar, 2015\n6. \"Tatiana Romanov: Daughter of the Last Tsar, Diaries and Letters, 1913-1918\" by Helen Azar and Nicholas B.A. Nicholson, 2015\n7. \"Maria Romanov, Third Daughter of the Last Tsar, Diaries and Letters, 1908-1918\" by Helen Azar and George Hawkins, 2019\n8. \"Anastasia's Album: The Last Tsar's Youngest Daughter Tells Her Own Story\" by Hugh Brewster, 1996 (Note: Anastasia's letters should be published by Helen Azar in 2021)\n9. \"The Romanov Royal Martyrs: What Silence Could Not Conceal\" by St. John the Forerunner Monastery, 2019 (Hands down the BEST book on the Romanovs. Includes new sources recently released from the Russian archives that clears up many of the misconceptions and lies about the family. Includes 56 pages of colorized photos).\n10. http://fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/nicholas_ii_e.htm",
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-15T19:32:12",
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    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "biden-declares-national-emergency-over-russia-enforces-sanctions-expels-10-diplomats-war-is-looking-inevitable",
      "title": "Biden declares National Emergency over Russia, enforces sanctions, expels 10 diplomats. War is looking inevitable!",
      "body": "![Screenshot_20210415-130215_Chrome.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQVLdUSaKTuehTBAycABwpm4ZxQAc4WZR46gffmxyEcBW/Screenshot_20210415-130215_Chrome.jpg)\n\nTwo days after Biden spoke with Putin on the phone and offered to meet in person to talk things out, he then today turned around and slapped new sanctions on Russia, expelled ten Russian diplomats from the United States and - most shocking - declared a National Emergency over Russia's actions. Reasons given include persecution of journalists, election interference, cyber hacking and not recognizing the territorial sovereignty of other nations, basically projecting all of the U.S.'s crimes onto Russia. When you have over 1,000 military bases around the world and are silencing whistleblowers like Julian Assange, then you have no moral authority to tell anyone else their business. Another reason given was the story several months ago that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers, a story that was subsequently blamed on Iraq and then China, a story that the US intelligence community suddenly walked back today after the sanctions were imposed. Will the sanctions now be lifted to make up for this? I doubt it.\n\nJust days ago Russia vowed retaliation in the event of new sanctions and today they called the US Ambassador in Moscow in for questioning and shot down Biden's request to meet. Since then they have closed the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea for the next six months for \"military exercises\", prompting Ukraine's demands that they reopen the strait. Meanwhile social media is reporting that the ethnic Russian population in Donetsk is once again being shelled by Ukrainian military.\n\nAnd speaking of the Black Sea, the US canceled the Navy ships that were inbound through the Turkish straits. They denied having ever sent any but Turkey ratted them out and said they canceled with no explanation. At first glance, this might seem like de-escalation, the Empire getting cold feet and realizing they are outmatched but in reality it could have been to stoke the fires even further and then protect their assets because war is exactly what they're planning on.\n\nWith this new national emergency declaration, it's hard to imagine this situation cooling down. The US is clearly insane and delusional and Russia is fed up with being bullied. A conflict is inevitable. War is imminent. Meanwhile in America, most people still have no clue. As I posted on Twitter earlier today:\n\n\n![IMG_20210415_123915_885.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmSggXutf59ypX2qczWszRqxK1xmDXff7L41kVDbKn2iqg/IMG_20210415_123915_885.jpg)\n\nThe sad truth.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"russia\",\"war\",\"biden\",\"putin\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQVLdUSaKTuehTBAycABwpm4ZxQAc4WZR46gffmxyEcBW/Screenshot_20210415-130215_Chrome.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmSggXutf59ypX2qczWszRqxK1xmDXff7L41kVDbKn2iqg/IMG_20210415_123915_885.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-14T00:47:36",
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    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "russia-declares-the-us-an-adversary-the-situation-is-going-hot",
      "title": "Russia declares the US an adversary. The situation is going hot!",
      "body": "![Blank-1200-x-630-2-9.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTfJoghgTSv9XXF7YRVGFwybCAprw3wPWzSXULWiPgFgL/Blank-1200-x-630-2-9.jpg)\n\n\nOver the weekend, the situation between Ukraine and Russia (and thus by default the U.S./NATO and Russia) has deteriorated rapidly. After Ukrainian president Zelensky apparently called for a peace between Ukraine and Russia, Donetsk was rocked Friday night by explosions that destroyed meat processing and packing plants. Saturday April 10th, the Russian FSB foiled a terrorist plot to unleash bombing attacks all across Crimea. By Sunday, Turkey - a NATO member - had violated the Montreux Treaty which gives them control over the Bosporus and Dardanelle straits but forbids the passage of warships not belonging to countries bordering the Black Sea by allowing the United States to send naval warships through the straits and into the Black Sea. Russia then closed all its borders and travels to Turkey. Simultaneously, NATO began war games of 40,000 troops  on Russia's borders. Dubbed \"Defender-Europe 2021\" the war games simulate an invasion of Crimea and a nuclear strike on Russia itself. Russia has responded by launching war games simulations in 101 training locations across the country and some Russian towns have begun preparing for mass burials of the dead.\n\nOn Tuesday April 13th, Russia dropped its previously diplomatic language of \"our American friends\" and \"our American partners\" and the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and the Minister of Defense declared America an adversary, an enemy. They warned the U.S. Navy that if they planned to enter the Black Sea they had best keep their distance if they \"know what's good for them\", otherwise every plane and drone will be shot down and every ship sunk.\n\nFor someone who only four short years ago had such vivid, powerful dreams about a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia, this current situation is surreal and terrifying. Time may be short. Do what you need to do now.\n\nI'll leave you with this video of Tulsi Gabbard on Tucker Carlson talking about the danger of this situation. This is why she ran for president in the first place but sadly she was shouted down as a Russian apologist and a Kremlin agent. Wait until the Mach 8 (over 2700 miles per second) missiles start raining down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywKH60NUGg&t=27s",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"russia\",\"war\",\"ukraine\",\"nato\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTfJoghgTSv9XXF7YRVGFwybCAprw3wPWzSXULWiPgFgL/Blank-1200-x-630-2-9.jpg\",\"https://img.youtube.com/vi/iywKH60NUGg/0.jpg\"],\"links\":[\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywKH60NUGg&t=27s\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-11T04:14:48",
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    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "hysterical-russiagate-headlines",
      "title": "Hysterical Russiagate Headlines",
      "body": "@@ -3531,19 +3531,16 @@\n o, this \n-is \n one coul\n",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"propaganda\",\"media\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmP4yzzB1Xz5wzvoHaph3dyEkVuXtVGAPWpFjwQX8DmkNi/EyJx8kjWYAYVju9.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmd8LQoTSf7wvxnrj3nDnSvZCZkzciVn2dtJQhobwvSM7m/EyJ0yTiWEAMGk_r.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaMVwVppeGD67T2BkL976Npb8PJMNGCFy4CNi5eCzQAeG/EyJ1SpBXAAI4T22.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcbZ9bS9sSkt5JMQTJ8U1XDsNEdKPfKxkVM5JjF2YV6gW/EyJ5b1DXEAEDBtd.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUYXsVYWoicqAaLb7Ei8SnZhvRwpWYN2dZfxSQsaTqBcf/EyJ5FipW8AYmVLM.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVPpyHViV8R4JNnP6iUK3GgjAoMwx63D2w74QjDvnCZzU/EyJ6SI9WQAQX4sD.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmSHbuSPJ8bBKpQmknezs2BQdVZrsgCMuVnNDcDh9aftjo/EyPEOExXMAEOLWt.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfGM29omeUiWjzeQRHf7bxxyMAjbPMZM8AzwWHFpAZoiq/EyJ66XXWQAA-uBI.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmeW8m91nGkunxDYWwy6PFzCfkfTnZSGaDnpx1QehtX3Sf/EyJyEhwXAAEkAYS.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaJvoZZ41m72FrYxfJVp3YseqkkmMTXm511nmGgQ91QV6/EyJyJw1WYAA39xz.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbeVTJCJTxsTPX2SJntdZ5YLE9XDH47D97mP5yf2Jkna7/EyMHZgCXEAEOm5o.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYHNKcV5oR5LN9G9RvHTiNUkfaWHCAhR2UAy38nJK8vK1/EyJ5pSEWUAIkGFz.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZUTRXA66Nh5pKciMCrDCcNun3rmvSQXcw3uftvaBHrpM/EyJ8H4bXIAUPGnx.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbK2wEFkCJNjtTSJo2fsbmc3tgP6mefgGgpk17dC9mTEY/EyKDVBHXAAIOE-R.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXnGUHmG4LTzYeEh68xvvwd4JUf8v2zW3xLgjWDfqXrNR/EyPEw5OXMActsmd.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRnXgBiVnVrxvXpkms8UoVyAof4CmjrLRZaTsFkZ1kY9Y/EyMJ_qdWQAIQxMR.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQEyBPeZ5S7vbMgkUZnLFLNhJbkPowKewozsaXvQp7K3s/EyPF50BWQAcPcO6.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfFwGtZ6fJR8h1EPqMMpHZKJy8XdQYD3gW2feRd6JH6sp/EyJ7JFXWgAkD_lk.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbm8U6quWfshxdB7mLFP9xruLBs8Py3CTevZbHjLdnk65/EyPFw1fWgAAiCJj.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRNAh425rZRp1cLmh9cXESPAFN24tdRNT5Co9k9tE696Q/EyJ7VQPWQAYEXkX.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbffXXyoetQMJnRaf2vmi1xD1NaF4tgZq6Ach78GoNzzE/EyJywqAW8AY7c4V.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQ12wEnBMTHXHWNpbWAWBjqWHRZ3TJwSwu4EvHJywvD9P/EyMGNlZXMAAEEWH.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcN5CwAzQDHwPA93FnC4dy55B7mD6XwzM9j55KJB3HEDj/EyMHIMBWgAAx6Yi.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmceA5RUYzZgvnK8XNGgEWugvXa7qty4nqk3YfsMUDyePe/EyMIpCJXAAAJzJp.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaHX7rTzxUTiLfRXQGn9UA7n6prSGCQwTfopzV6148EUA/EyMIsQNWgAIevaC.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcHfuJ79h42z4duifM4h4rDdRyZmau8LpWeDcQYzzHSaB/EyML2AhWEAA6H89.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZcdSuBNQ7vBYJ5XGpCPEhUTA58dMxmipRZfRiBYfNimR/EyMNXhLWUAEy9kn.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaaULarn4e1JQVW6BQj4ZLQvaav1AsYeNQ9kgitgpzDUK/EyMKrivWEAACIXa.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWRoSTWrxLMnSHFYsSYHZ74sekPjviRRhxNxBr6E5sT2o/EyPFQIUWYAQVB6b.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYZPdsddyp7MbgixM2b3gAzyz7KqrUMdAfaKikF9ETq4p/EyJ9rAQW8AEyCrN.jpg\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPc9pHPh56g39NkQWtS2MLacx7NqKGsVeKumS2fwKdn6b/Screenshot_20210410-185755_Chrome.jpg\",\"https://img.youtube.com/vi/cr2SmniV0HY/0.jpg\"],\"links\":[\"https://twitter.com/27khv\",\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr2SmniV0HY\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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{
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-11T04:03:54",
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    "comment",
    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "hysterical-russiagate-headlines",
      "title": "Hysterical Russiagate Headlines",
      "body": "With the current state of affairs in the United States, the endless propaganda against Russia and the American people's almost zombie-like devotion to their television sets and the mainstream media, I thought it would be appropriate to present some of the more outrageous anti-Russian propaganda headlines that have surfaced over the years. These come courtesy of Bryan MacDonald, an Irish journalist based in Russia, who recently compiled all of these on his Twitter page. The fact that none of these were written as satire and are believed by the majority of Americans is horrifying. Yet for those of us in the know, we can get a good laugh (even if it's until we cry) out of it. So let's begin:\n\n\n![EyJx8kjWYAYVju9.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmP4yzzB1Xz5wzvoHaph3dyEkVuXtVGAPWpFjwQX8DmkNi/EyJx8kjWYAYVju9.jpg)\n\nI don't even know what to say.\n\n\n![EyJ0yTiWEAMGk_r.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmd8LQoTSf7wvxnrj3nDnSvZCZkzciVn2dtJQhobwvSM7m/EyJ0yTiWEAMGk_r.jpg)\n\nBeware those breathtaking Russian girls, they will sweep you off your feet and steal your heart in a hot second.\n\n\n![EyJ1SpBXAAI4T22.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaMVwVppeGD67T2BkL976Npb8PJMNGCFy4CNi5eCzQAeG/EyJ1SpBXAAI4T22.jpg)\n\nI took Skype lessons from a girl in Siberia. If you have a good teacher, it's not that hard.\n\n\n![EyJ5b1DXEAEDBtd.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcbZ9bS9sSkt5JMQTJ8U1XDsNEdKPfKxkVM5JjF2YV6gW/EyJ5b1DXEAEDBtd.jpg)\n\nUm...\n\n\n![EyJ5FipW8AYmVLM.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUYXsVYWoicqAaLb7Ei8SnZhvRwpWYN2dZfxSQsaTqBcf/EyJ5FipW8AYmVLM.jpg)\n\nUhh...\n\n\n![EyJ6SI9WQAQX4sD.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVPpyHViV8R4JNnP6iUK3GgjAoMwx63D2w74QjDvnCZzU/EyJ6SI9WQAQX4sD.jpg)\n\nGood grief.\n\n\n![EyPEOExXMAEOLWt.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmSHbuSPJ8bBKpQmknezs2BQdVZrsgCMuVnNDcDh9aftjo/EyPEOExXMAEOLWt.jpg)\n\nSay what?\n\n\n![EyJ66XXWQAA-uBI.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfGM29omeUiWjzeQRHf7bxxyMAjbPMZM8AzwWHFpAZoiq/EyJ66XXWQAA-uBI.jpg)\n\nAre you serious?\n\n\n![EyJyEhwXAAEkAYS.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmeW8m91nGkunxDYWwy6PFzCfkfTnZSGaDnpx1QehtX3Sf/EyJyEhwXAAEkAYS.jpg)\n\nNow you're just messing with me.\n\n\n![EyJyJw1WYAA39xz.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaJvoZZ41m72FrYxfJVp3YseqkkmMTXm511nmGgQ91QV6/EyJyJw1WYAA39xz.jpg)\n\nOr you're not.\n\n\n![EyMHZgCXEAEOm5o.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbeVTJCJTxsTPX2SJntdZ5YLE9XDH47D97mP5yf2Jkna7/EyMHZgCXEAEOm5o.jpg)\n\nWhat?\n\n\n![EyJ5pSEWUAIkGFz.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYHNKcV5oR5LN9G9RvHTiNUkfaWHCAhR2UAy38nJK8vK1/EyJ5pSEWUAIkGFz.jpg)\n\nGo home, you're drunk.\n\n\n![EyJ8H4bXIAUPGnx.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZUTRXA66Nh5pKciMCrDCcNun3rmvSQXcw3uftvaBHrpM/EyJ8H4bXIAUPGnx.jpg)\n\nThis is just not right. The country who suffered 27 million losses and single-handedly beat the Nazis all the way back across Europe is weaponizing World War II? Blasphemy.\n\n\n![EyKDVBHXAAIOE-R.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbK2wEFkCJNjtTSJo2fsbmc3tgP6mefgGgpk17dC9mTEY/EyKDVBHXAAIOE-R.jpg)\n\nDon't laugh, you're weaponized!\n\n\n![EyPEw5OXMActsmd.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXnGUHmG4LTzYeEh68xvvwd4JUf8v2zW3xLgjWDfqXrNR/EyPEw5OXMActsmd.jpg)\n\nSeriously, stop laughing!\n\n\n![EyMJ_qdWQAIQxMR.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRnXgBiVnVrxvXpkms8UoVyAof4CmjrLRZaTsFkZ1kY9Y/EyMJ_qdWQAIQxMR.jpg)\n\nIf you're only reading this because you're bored, then you're also weaponized.\n\n\n![EyPF50BWQAcPcO6.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQEyBPeZ5S7vbMgkUZnLFLNhJbkPowKewozsaXvQp7K3s/EyPF50BWQAcPcO6.jpg)\n\nYou mean her incompetence? If so, this is one could actually be right. Compare her disastrous interview with Oliver Stone's brilliant 4-part The Putin Interviews, which demonstrates how journalism should really be done.\n\n\n![EyJ7JFXWgAkD_lk.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfFwGtZ6fJR8h1EPqMMpHZKJy8XdQYD3gW2feRd6JH6sp/EyJ7JFXWgAkD_lk.jpg)\n\nSigh.\n\n\n![EyPFw1fWgAAiCJj.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbm8U6quWfshxdB7mLFP9xruLBs8Py3CTevZbHjLdnk65/EyPFw1fWgAAiCJj.jpg)\n\nSeriously, does it get worse?\n\n\n![EyJ7VQPWQAYEXkX.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRNAh425rZRp1cLmh9cXESPAFN24tdRNT5Co9k9tE696Q/EyJ7VQPWQAYEXkX.jpg)\n\nIt gets worse.\n\n\n![EyJywqAW8AY7c4V.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbffXXyoetQMJnRaf2vmi1xD1NaF4tgZq6Ach78GoNzzE/EyJywqAW8AY7c4V.jpg)\n\nAnd worse.\n\n\n![EyMGNlZXMAAEEWH.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQ12wEnBMTHXHWNpbWAWBjqWHRZ3TJwSwu4EvHJywvD9P/EyMGNlZXMAAEEWH.jpg)\n\nAnd dumber.\n\n\n![EyMHIMBWgAAx6Yi.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcN5CwAzQDHwPA93FnC4dy55B7mD6XwzM9j55KJB3HEDj/EyMHIMBWgAAx6Yi.jpg)\n\nAnd worse.\n\n\n![EyMIpCJXAAAJzJp.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmceA5RUYzZgvnK8XNGgEWugvXa7qty4nqk3YfsMUDyePe/EyMIpCJXAAAJzJp.jpg)\n\nAnd worse.\n\n\n![EyMIsQNWgAIevaC.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaHX7rTzxUTiLfRXQGn9UA7n6prSGCQwTfopzV6148EUA/EyMIsQNWgAIevaC.jpg)\n\nAnd worse still.\n\n\n![EyML2AhWEAA6H89.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcHfuJ79h42z4duifM4h4rDdRyZmau8LpWeDcQYzzHSaB/EyML2AhWEAA6H89.jpg)\n\nCan this really still be happening?\n\n\n![EyMNXhLWUAEy9kn.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZcdSuBNQ7vBYJ5XGpCPEhUTA58dMxmipRZfRiBYfNimR/EyMNXhLWUAEy9kn.jpg)\n\n????\n\n\n![EyMKrivWEAACIXa.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaaULarn4e1JQVW6BQj4ZLQvaav1AsYeNQ9kgitgpzDUK/EyMKrivWEAACIXa.jpg)\n\nOkay...\n\n\n![EyPFQIUWYAQVB6b.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWRoSTWrxLMnSHFYsSYHZ74sekPjviRRhxNxBr6E5sT2o/EyPFQIUWYAQVB6b.jpg)\n\nGive me a break.\n\n\n![EyJ9rAQW8AEyCrN.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYZPdsddyp7MbgixM2b3gAzyz7KqrUMdAfaKikF9ETq4p/EyJ9rAQW8AEyCrN.jpg)\n\nHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!\n\nAnd, finally, the Pulitzer Prize winner has been saved for last:\n\n\n![Screenshot_20210410-185755_Chrome.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPc9pHPh56g39NkQWtS2MLacx7NqKGsVeKumS2fwKdn6b/Screenshot_20210410-185755_Chrome.jpg)\n\n\nAnd that's that. Welcome to hell.\n\nFollow Bryan MacDonald on Twitter for real, no-nonsense on the ground reporting on what's really going on in Russia: https://twitter.com/27khv\n\nAnd check out this hilarious video from The Jimmy Dore Show lambasting these idiotic headlines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr2SmniV0HY",
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{
  "trx_id": "3669ca7619aba8eb8b9507e800b2d7f0b71eb13d",
  "block": 52664001,
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  "timestamp": "2021-04-06T23:00:06",
  "op": [
    "comment",
    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "war",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "emergency-post-war-with-russia-may-be-imminent",
      "title": "Emergency post! War with Russia May be Imminent!",
      "body": "![6578290b-27d6-4c9d-9a2a-ffd306ecbac3.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQxDtAD4wLGofgpUDatXFBxiXU18uAwypXY21HuK9HaRr/6578290b-27d6-4c9d-9a2a-ffd306ecbac3.jpg)\n\nJoe \"Weekend at Bernie's\" Biden just keeps walking us into a tighter and tighter spot. After his insane and ridiculous comments about Putin being a killer, he makes an equally wreckless comment that Crimea belongs to Ukraine. Try telling that to the people of Crimea, who voted over 90% in favor of seceding from Ukraine and rejoining Russia after the war of 2014 and the rise of neo-nazis who waged a massacre of Ukraine's ethnic Russian population with the backing of the U.S. government, specifically Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and John McCain. Among the many crimes perpetrated by these so-called \"freedom fighters\" was the crucifixion and immolation of a 12 year old Russian girl. Anyone who still believes and supports the official media narrative after that has a special place in hell waiting for them.\n\nNow on March 24, 2021 Ukrainian president Zelensky issued a statement declaring that Ukraine will retake Crimea by whatever force necessary, ostensibly declaring war on Russia. To put this into the appropriate context, one must understand that Crimea has always been a part of Russia. It is considered Russia's holy place, the land where Russia was baptized into the Orthodox faith. Crimea and the Russian empire - with Kiev as its original capital - existed long before there ever was a Ukraine, so from the Russian perspective they would be fighting for God and for Christ. And considering that last month a wood carving of the crucifixion of Christ in a church in the Saratov province began to sprout live, pink blossoms from the thorny crown, they may be right to think that.\n\nOver the past week Russian military movements to the Ukrainian border have been massive, prompting Ukraine to appeal to NATO for membership as soon as possible to de-escalate the conflict. Unfortunately, NATO cannot accept a country undergoing \"territorial disputes\", which is how it would regard the Crimea situation and the battle between Ukrainian forces and the remaining ethnic Russians of the Donbass, who are being shelled by the Ukrainian military on a daily basis, so NATO would therefore have to declare war on Russia on behalf of Ukraine, a possibility that is becoming terrifyingly more and more likely.\n\nI have been studying Russia for fours years. It began with dreams of a major war between the United States and Russia. Since then I have slowly watched this conflict come closer and closer to reality but nothing has prepared me for what I've been seeing for the past week. This is by far the most frightening situation imaginable and the fact that the mainstream media in the U.S. is not reporting it is even more alarming. If Russia is attacked by Ukraine, NATO, the U.S., the E.U. or any other involved forces they will defend themselves and the media will spin it as \"Russian aggression\", an \"invasion\" and \"assault\" on Ukraine, none of which is true, but which will be used to isolate Russia from the international scene, stop the Nordstream 2 pipeline and prevent the European Union from acquiring the Sputnik V vaccine, all of which is designed to give the United States - a collapsing empire - a geopolitical advantage. Frankly they could probably care less if Ukraine goes down in flames so long as they propagandize it against Russia. This has led independent Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer on Monday April 5th to declare that a major European war or World War III could begin in three to four weeks which would line up with the Orthodox Church's celebration of the Great and Holy Day of Pascha on May 2nd.\n\nI'm not going to lie, I'm very deeply shaken by this. More so, I'm terrified. This is serious, this is real and this is dangerous. If you're of the praying persuasion, do so fervently. If you're not, it may be time to start.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"war\",\"russia\",\"ukraine\",\"crimea\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQxDtAD4wLGofgpUDatXFBxiXU18uAwypXY21HuK9HaRr/6578290b-27d6-4c9d-9a2a-ffd306ecbac3.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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  "timestamp": "2021-03-21T23:47:18",
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      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "war-with-russia-in-2021",
      "title": "War with Russia in 2021?",
      "body": "@@ -1722,17 +1722,17 @@\n ey simpl\n-e\n+y\n  brief t\n",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"cold\",\"war\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRV7EstvakidzLA9b7ijf9kgiHdfu4UWoMLn6LbWt6j7o/Cold-War.png\",\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfEaigT5xvpzPzKdWigLK8T5o8d1RTWmqzsw1mY7iPbpA/nucscale.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.2\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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{
  "trx_id": "15ae50ae3754faf256a65c3b6a9acf52d9f141dd",
  "block": 52206533,
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  "timestamp": "2021-03-21T21:57:48",
  "op": [
    "comment",
    {
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "war-with-russia-in-2021",
      "title": "War with Russia in 2021?",
      "body": "![Cold-War.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRV7EstvakidzLA9b7ijf9kgiHdfu4UWoMLn6LbWt6j7o/Cold-War.png)\n\nJust when it seemed like the tensions between the U.S. and Russia couldn't get any worse, they did. As if it wasn't bad enough that the Biden Administration leaked to the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that they were preparing a series of cyberattacks on Russia over three weeks targeting energy, infrastructure, transportation, military and government (never mind that leaking this to one of the biggest media outlets in the world would make it public knowledge all over the world), Joe \"Weekend at Bernie's\" Biden then had to go and publicly call Putin a killer on national television. Now I'm someone who initially bought into all of the propaganda about Russia, that they were an existential threat trying to take over the world and that Putin was a killer who eliminated all of his enemies and critics. After four years and thousands of hours of study, a lot of it devoted to trying to find just that evidence, I've found none and the recent Russian indifference to Navalny just clarifies to me that all of this rhetoric is just that...rhetoric. Even worse a British publication claims to have received \"Putin's hit list\", including six British nationals he intends to kill. Unfortunately for them, reporters in Russia - not all of whom are sympathetic to Putin - quickly pointed out that the language of the hit list was not Russian but Ukrainian and very amateur Ukrainian at that, to the point where it was almost certainly faked.\n\nIn response to Biden's undiplomatic bullshit, Russia recalled their ambassador to the United States. A lot of speculation is flying about where this could go. Will they simple brief the ambassador on a new course of relations or will they cut off relations with the U.S. completely? What does this mean for Americans (like me) who are against the psychotic actions of the U.S. government and who would love to get a visa and abandon this sinking ship as soon as possible? Are we doomed to go down with the Titanic or does a harsher fate await us?\n\nA few days ago Russia launched a submarine dubbed \"the quietest in the world\", a vessel capable of carrying 200 cruise missiles. Two days ago a U.S. spy plane was tracking it just off the coast of Israel. As they were watching, the sub disappeared off their radar yet NATO forces were still picking up transmissions between the sub and the Russian military. For hours the spy plane circled and circled and circled but was unable to relocate the sub. This caused quite a panic among U.S. and NATO forces who consider themselves technologically superior. A Russian sub that can not only carry 200 cruise missiles but that can disappear off radar? If I could ask one question to the U.S. military and to NATO it would be this: \"Are you scared yet?\"\n\nDeep down I hope this would be a much-needed smack in the face for those who really need it but I know that it likely won't be. To admit that we have bitten off more then we can chew (and are continuing to do so) would be to ruin the myth of America, the ideal of an exceptional nation chosen by God to conquer the world and subdue all the inferior peoples and would reveal that the Emperor truly has no clothes. For that reason I expect a lesson will not be learned and that the escalations will continue.\n\nIn the spring of 2017 U.S. submarine tracker planes were circling for days off the coasts of California and Florida, apparently searching for something. A few days later a video surfaced of a general of the Russian military issuing a statement that the east and west coasts of the United States had been lined with nuclear drones that bore down into the ocean floor and lie dormant until detonated. The Kremlin commented on this saying \"it sounds strange\" and that the video may have been mistranslated. It very well could have been and used as propaganda to push for more trillions dumped into the U.S.'s already idiotic military budget but it would be naive to think that Russia did not have a contingency plan in effect to take down the United States in the event they are attacked and crippled. An invisible submarine packing 200 cruise missiles is certainly a force to be reckoned with.\n\nLet's also take into account the fact the Vladimir Putin is an Orthodox Christian who continually adopts the Biblical stance of \"turn the other cheek\" while himself being continually slapped and beaten. This has brought up a lot of criticism towards him from members of the Russian government and the military, many of whom want to see Putin gone because of his more diplomatic stance and a stronger warning sent to the west. Putin himself has commented that Russia's firepower is entirely defensive and will not be used unless they are attacked first. Not all who surround him agree with this stance. Some of those may be willing to go renegade.\n\nThe largest nuclear detonation in history was a 50 megaton bomb in the Soviet Union in 1961. The mushroom cloud was 40 miles high and the heat was intense enough to cause third degree burns 60 miles from the blast site. Currently Russia is in possession of the even bigger 100 megaton warhead, a weapon so powerful it would incinerate everything in a 2,000 square mile radius. That's what the unhinged lunatics in D.C. are playing with and they either don't understand the danger or they genuinely want to die.\n\n\n![nucscale.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfEaigT5xvpzPzKdWigLK8T5o8d1RTWmqzsw1mY7iPbpA/nucscale.jpg)\nThe Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (1 and 2) compared with the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba (\"Ivan\") of the USSR.\n\nIt's time for the American people to turn off the TV and take a stand, only this time for the right reason. Screw Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Qanon or whatever the new fad is this week. Russia, China and Iran are not the real threats. The real threat is right there in Washington, D.C. The real threat has barricaded itself off from the rest of us. The real threat locked down the country and barely paid out anything for people to live on while every other country has been doing it every month for a year. The real threat thinks your $1,400 stimulus check will last through July. The real threat is using your future, your children's future and your grandchildren's future like dice in a Las Vegas casino. Something has to be done because war in 2021 is looking more and more likely.",
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      "permlink": "a-final-word-on-alexei-navalny",
      "title": "A Final Word on Alexei Navalny",
      "body": "![2553.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZQZEBBrxzCP8c7jY1ZGytxZnzrDdFdZ7K33Ek2cvbeUR/2553.jpg)\n\n\n\nI am consistently amazed by the many unexpected directions my life has taken me. After a few seasons of working in Alaska, I began studying bears, an animal I originally believed to be a fierce man-eater only to realize they were intelligent, complex and not so easily defined. My writing on the subject came at a time when a national interest in bears suddenly surged after a biologist in Minnesota placed a webcam in a black bear's den, showing the world for the first time that bears are not true hibernators and that mothers with newborn cubs spend most of the winter awake but groggy, tending to their young. This set my own work on a path to popularity that I never would have believed had you told me five years earlier that's where I was headed. But, as always, waves eventually fade and other priorities come to light.\n\nIn the winter, spring and summer of 2017 I had a series of vivid dreams about a war between America and Russia. I seldom remember my dreams but now, four years later, I can still recall every detail of each with perfect clarity. The final one haunts me the most: in it, a brief shooting war had taken place between the two countries and the U.S Government was crippled. Russia offered asylum - including full housing and financial assistance - to any Americans who wanted to flee the U.S. before the final attack occurred, destroying every major city. I had an argument with my dad who was born and raised during the Cold War era over the evacuation. I made it clear I was going; he made it clear he was not and never would. Afterwards I recall being in a church in Russia and hearing the news about the attack. I looked at my watch and hurried outside into the alley. I asked someone for directions and got into a cab. I vividly recall looking out the window of the cab as we drove and seeing the Soviet-style buildings lining the street on either side. The cab stopped at a marina and I got out. I was looking out over the ocean at a large volcano rising up into dark storm clouds and I knew it was Mt. Fuji in Japan and that I must be in Vladivostok (though Mt. Fuji is obviously not visible from Vladivostok). I heard a car pull up behind me and turned around to see another cab. My dad got out of the backseat with a smile on his face. End of dream.\n\nThis dream came back to me in a big way when Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, in mid-January, appeared on a Russian talk show and stated that she was receiving dozens upon dozens of messages from Americans asking for some way to flee the U.S. and move to Russia. She said the Russian government was very concerned about the recent domestic terrorism bill in the U.S. and the potential for human rights abuses through it. She said that a response was being prepared and that \"everything will be done, we are getting ready.\"\n\nIs Russia preparing a way out for Americans to flee the U.S.? Asylum? A fast-track to citizenship? Russia has recently condemned the push for new immunity passports and mandatory Covid vaccinations, as it was long expected they would, potentially making travel easier once borders reopen. Whatever their strategy the slow-motion train wreck that is U.S.-Russia relations is finally nearing its end with the ongoing saga of Alexei Navalny.\n\nI've written about Navalny before and frankly he's barely worth mentioning but we have to at this juncture, though hopefully for the last time. In the west Navalny is lauded as a hero, as Russia's opposition leader bravely standing up to the \"horrors of the Putin regime\". In truth he's a 44 year old anarchist who was never had a job but still has access to large financial resources. He has only 2% public support in Russia and most of that consists of the Communist Party, which is the real opposition in Russia and something that very few there want to see come back into power, yet he is a darling of the Western powers. Never mind the fact that he is an avowed racist, not just toward other skin colors but toward non-Slavic whites. Never mind that he called Muslims of the Caucasus area cockroaches that should either be smashed with a shoe or shot with a gun. Never mind all that, the West loves him and the reason why should be clear. In August Navalny was allegedly poisoned with Novichok, the deadliest nerve agent in the world, one that kills within ten to thirty seconds, yet he survived and no one else around him was affected. When Germany insisted on conducting their own investigation, Russia gladly stood back and allowed him to be flown out of the country. Enter Mike Pompeo, who demanded Germany punish Russia for this outrageous behavior by backing out of the Nordstream II gas pipeline between Germany and Russia. Germany refused, much to the U.S.'s fury.\n\nDuring Navalny's \"recovery\" Russia insisted he return to the country by a certain date otherwise he would be held in violation of parole. Navalny did not respond, returned after the deadline and was subsequently arrested. Almost immediately protests broke out against the arrest and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was caught red-handed posting on their website the locations and routes of the protests. The Russian government has demanded they answer for this provocation but I am so far unaware if they actually have. Meanwhile children on Twitter said they were paid by a Ukrainian man to join the protests thinking it was a party but when asked about Putin they responded that they support him 100%. \n\nThis begs the question of who Alexei Navalny is actually working for and how a 44 year old man who has never had a job has access to so many resources. There isn't a clear answer but there are some who claim that Navalny is paid and propped up by the CIA. Others who claim to have inside info say that he is funded by forces in the Kremlin who want to destroy the current government. Either way Navalny is clearly part of an ongoing coup against Russia, one that began with the Bolshevik Revolution and that has never ended, no matter how many times it gets overturned. So why not just kill him? If the Putin government really is the mafia state the U.S. government claims it is (something I have found no evidence of in the past four years and 1,000+ hours of research I've done) why not just eliminate him? Pop a bullet in his head in the middle of the night since apparently the deadliest nerve toxin in the world is such an ineffective killer. Nope. They don't do it. Yet we decry Putin's government as thuggish and murderous while considering granting full immunity to Mohammed bin Salman for the brutal murder by bonesaw of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. We cry about human rights abuses in Russia yet ignore Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, calling such criticism \"anti-semitic\". What's the difference? The U.S. loves to prop up real dictators who are our financial allies and hurl the term \"dictator\" at those who don't want to play our game by our rules. \n\nOne thing that I have learned in four years and 1,000+ hours of study is how much Russia and the United States have switched places. While America has been actively fighting against the traditional family unit, Russia has been offering financial incentives to families, with those incentives increasing with each subsequent child, including paid maternity leave for mothers and fathers. While America is having drag queen story time for kindergartners, Russia has added God to its Constitution. While America is tearing down churches to build military bases, Russia is tearing down Communist statues to build statues of Jesus Christ. The Bible says any nation that forgets God will go straight to the grave. Right now we are watching the full collapse of an Empire as the United States sinks into a grave of its own making, becoming more and more with each passing day like the Soviet Union.",
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      "title": "What is the Reason for America's Animosity Toward Russia?",
      "body": "@@ -33808,12 +33808,236 @@\n  Books, 2019\n+%0A28. %22Army document: US strategy to 'dethrone' Putin for oil pipelines might provoke WW3%22 by Nafeez Ahmed%E2%80%8A-%E2%80%8Ahttps://off-guardian.org/2018/03/11/army-document-us-strategy-to-dethrone-putin-for-oil-pipelines-might-provoke-ww3/\n",
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      "body": "@@ -22930,16 +22930,17 @@\n g Russia\n+n\n  troops%0A\n",
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      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "what-is-the-reason-for-america-s-animosity-toward-russia",
      "title": "What is the Reason for America's Animosity Toward Russia?",
      "body": "In September 2005 the Russian government gifted a ten-story sculpture to the United States in memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks with the names of all 3,000 dead inscribed at the bottom. Dubbed the \"teardrop\" memorial for the 40-foot nickel-surfaced teardrop that hangs in the middle of a jagged opening split down a 100-foot bronze-clad tower, the memorial was quietly hidden out of site across the Hudson River in Bayonne, New Jersey. Foreign Policy magazine called it one of the world's ugliest statues, while the New Yorker said that it looked like \"a giant tea biscuit\" from a distance and Pro Arts Jersey City called it \"an insensitive, self-aggrandizing piece of pompousness by one of the world's blatant self-promoters.\" Apparently when it comes to memorializing thousands of lives it's not the thought that counts. At least not when it comes from Russia, that is.\n\n\n ![220px-Tearsofgriefbayonne.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmb5h2spYvUhrYMHwKrMavR7uppeqgiBTdttm6QxPR2e5c/220px-Tearsofgriefbayonne.jpg)\nTeardrop memorial.\n\nWhy the intense animosity toward Russia that permeates our culture and in particular our government? One cannot seriously study Russia for any period of time without noticing it and one cannot express one's findings and views on the subject without being subjected to it. It's more than just \"great power competition\" or a spat between \"adversaries\". It is a vicious, venomous hatred that cannot be explained away so simply. Of the estimated three million Russian-Americans living in the United States, nearly half have reported experiencing discrimination due to the mainstream media's almost psychotic anti-Russian rhetoric that they have spewed for close to 5 years. Yes, in America we are vehemently opposed to racism...unless it's toward Slavs and, increasingly, Asians. Again, why? Why this deranged level of xenophobia? It is a question I have grappled with and sought for years. Now, after almost four years and thousands of hours of study, I think the answer has become pretty apparent. What follows is my attempt to put this puzzle together into a clear picture. But I don't merely want to show you the picture. I want you to find the means to put the picture together on your own and to keep adding to that picture as history is being written right in front of us. I STRONGLY suggest that you explore the sources I will provide at the end of this article.\n\nWhile it may come as a surprise to some, Russia and the United States were not always adversaries. In 1863, during the\nAmerican Civil War, Russian battleships were sent to the ports of New York and San Francisco to protect the Union from\nhostile actions by Britain and France. Parades were held in the streets in honor of the Russians and their assistance, a \nfact that has mostly been scrubbed from the history books. Unfortunately, Russia also represented not only the most \nformidable challenge to American industrial and financial supremacy with its incredible landmass but also a vast\nuntapped market, something that no doubt posed a threat to certain capitalist corporations and industries. The solution: turn Russia into a puppet state, take the market captive, break the country into multiple regions and turn the country into a colony to be exploited by a few high-powered financiers and the corporations under their control.\n\n        \"You must understand. The leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. \n        They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a \n        shred of human remorse. The October Revolution was not what you call in America the 'Russian Revolution'. \n        It was an invasion and conquest over the Russian people. More of my countrymen suffered horrific crimes at \n        their bloodstained hands than any nation or people ever suffered in the entirety of human history. It cannot be \n        understated. Bolshevism was the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant \n        of this reality is proof that the global media is itself in the hands of the perpetrators.\" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, \n        author of \"The Gulag Archipelago\", an account of the persecutions suffered and witnessed by Solzhenitsyn in the \n        Gulag system.\n\nAlthough it may sound like elaborate conspiracy theory, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was largely financed by Wall Street and many banks, billionaires and corporations, among them J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, National City Bank, Guaranty Trust Company, American International Corporation and General Electric among others. The Red Cross mission to Russia during World War I even served as a cover for some who wanted to stoke the fires of revolution in the country. All of this is backed up by U.S. State Department File 861.00/5399 located in Record Group 59, Central Decimal Files, 1910-1929 box 9452 at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland and documented in Professor Antony C. Sutton's book \"Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution\" (widely available for free pdf download online). One of the primary goals was to keep Russia in the war against Germany and with the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II and his family (and their tragic murder in 1918), and the establishment of the Provisional Government (which the United States was quick to officially recognize), that goal seemed to be accomplished. \n\n![18287415._SX540_.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUPzfzYu5W16nkTNFhuxLHeMzX7hEgpGiFodQAphKPEVL/18287415._SX540_.jpg)\nNicholas II and his family.\n\nGermany itself, wanting Russia out of the war, threw a spanner in the works. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Vladimir Lenin, also wanted Russia out of the war, believing that the damage the country would then suffer from German forces would stir up more civil unrest, so the German government gave Lenin funding, transportation and cover to get back into Russia and overthrow the Provisional Government. \n\nBut the West had their own agent they would soon maneuver into place. In 1916, Leon Trotsky was expelled from France, escorted across the Spanish border, arrested in Madrid, taken to Cadiz, then to Barcelona and finally placed on board a Transatlantic ship to New York City. According to Trotsky's own autobiography, \"My Life\", his only profession in New York was writing occasional articles for \"Novy Mir\", the New York Russian socialist journal. Yet we know that he paid rent on his apartment three months in advance and had a private chauffeured limousine. The only funds Trotsky admits to receiving in 1916 and 1917 are $310 and he says that he distributed the $310 among five immigrants who were returning to Russia. Trotsky's income is estimated to be about $12.00 per week, yet on his return to Russia he was arrested in Halifax, Nova Scotia and found to have $10,000 on his person. Where did the money come from? Trotsky writes of having a wealthy donor, who he identifies only as \"Dr. M\". \n\nWith the U.S. State Department, in their own words, \"Exercising special care in issuance of passports for Russia\", President Woodrow Wilson provided Trotsky with a new passport, complete with a Russian entry permit and British transit visa, but by the time he arrived Lenin had already taken control of the Bolsheviks, overthrew the Provisional Government and taken Russia out of the war.\n\nThis caused quite a shake up back home. George F. Kennan, former U.S Ambassador to the Soviet Union, documented these events in his books \"Russia Leaves the War\" and \"The Decision to Intervene\". According to Kennan, Americans had long been told how their country was \"exceptional\", how democracy was the greatest form of government, how free market capitalism was the best \"ism\" and how the \"backwards\" countries would automatically become free market capitalist democracies overnight when their governments fell. When this did not happen after the overthrow of the Provisional Government, the American people began asking questions, which made the US government very nervous. Although Kennan attempts to apologize for the US government's actions in his books, they still remain some of the best works documenting the culmination of these events and all the players involved. To save face with the American people and to try to reverse this unexpected turn of events, the US government sent troops to Siberia to fight the Red Army. Dubbed the \"Polar Bears\", this mission of some 5,000 American troops against Russia is largely unknown among citizens of the United States but still remembered and taught in Russia today.\n\nThe plan with this invasion - other then to cover their butts with the American people - was to assassinate Lenin and replace him with a puppet who would do the U.S.'s bidding and get Russia back into the war. Who this puppet would have been is unknown but it isn't too much of a stretch to consider it could have been Trotsky, considering the evidence. Unfortunately for the plotters, the rise of Joseph Stalin sabotaged these plans. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin seized the reigns of Bolshevik power and expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929, eventually having him killed in 1940.\n\nDespite what many believe, Lenin and Stalin were not two sides of the same coin. The two men did not generally like each other. Lenin considered Stalin to be rude and unstable and prior to his death he warned his fellow Bolsheviks to not allow Stalin to come to power, that he would destroy everything they had built. What did Lenin see in Stalin that disturbed him so? Was it simply the man's personality and desire for power or was there something else that Stalin had taken great pains to conceal?\n\n\n![220px-Eremin_letter.gif](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmeQNJB8in3XQqKmEos31wbFBUQm3FWRMSLSbbLV2JtPMD/220px-Eremin_letter.gif)\nThe Eremin Letter, which claims Stalin was an agent of the Tsar's secret police.\n\nBorn Joseph Djugashvili in Gori, Georgia, the man who would become known to history by one of his many aliases was said to be a brilliant poet with a beautiful singing voice. He also lived a rough life on the streets and had numerous close brushes with law enforcement before ultimately joining the revolutionary movement in Russia and slowly working his way up the ranks of the Bolsheviks. In recent years, much has become known about Stalin's background and his youth but there is one question mark that yet hangs over his story, a question mark that some call only conspiracy theory while others claim there is evidence to support, a question mark that one cannot completely verify but cannot completely rule out: that at some point in the early 1900's Stalin was recruited by the Tsar's Secret Police to infiltrate the Bolshevik movement and rat out its chief agents to law enforcement. Indeed, Stalin was involved in many \"coincidences\" that are difficult to explain otherwise. How was he able to help fellow Bolsheviks smuggle printing presses and other illegal equipment by rail only to be the only one not apprehended by authorities? Why did he conveniently leave his comrades at their safe house one evening to go for a walk minutes before the house was raided by police? How was it that he personally got to know many civilians who were illegally providing housing and shelter for Bolshevik radicals and the only one of them to not get taken down by the police was one woman who Stalin wrote that he had more respect for than any other person he had ever known? What about the Eremin Letter, purportedly written by Colonel Eremin, a high-ranking member of the secret police, that names Stalin as one of their operatives, along with a detailed (and accurate) history of Stalin's background that was then unknown? Many historians have written this document off as a forgery, but is that really the case? What about the fact that all of those whom Stalin later killed were either Bolsheviks, family members of Bolsheviks or Bolshevik sympathizers? Was this to avenge the murder of the Tsar and his family? Of course this is not to excuse Stalin's brutal actions but he wasn't incorrect by accusing the Bolsheviks of being foreign influencers who committed a crime against the people and the state. The book \"The Young Stalin\" by Edward Ellis Smith details a large number of these strange coincidences, to the extent that it is difficult to argue with their validity.\n\nStalin's power grab and Trotsky's failure sent ripples of concern through the ranks of those members of the U.S. government who were in the know, as documented by George Kennan, as well as Stalin's reversal of Lenin's centralization to a system of industrialization. Is it any wonder then that the same Wall Street banks, billionaires and corporations who financed the Bolsheviks also financed the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich? Are you experiencing cognitive dissonance yet? Again, this is not conspiracy theory and is extensively documented by Professor Antony C. Sutton in his follow-up book \"Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler\", also widely available for free pdf download. Considering that one of Hitler's main goals was to conquer the Soviet Union and overthrow Stalin, should we consider this Plan B of the financiers or just write it off as another one of those pesky \"coincidences\"?\n\nEither way, the Nazi siege against the Soviet Union was a spectacular failure. At the cost of 27 million lives, Russian forces beat the Third Reich all the way across Europe and demolished them at their birthplace in Berlin. \n\nOne of the most popular concepts in so-called \"conspiracy\" circles is that of the New World Order, a one-world government. This is a somewhat fantastical interpretation of a not so conspiratorial idea. The notion of a one-world government is something that likely can never and will never be fully realized. There are too many countries with too much firepower who value their sovereignty too much for such a thing to be so easily accomplished. The actual reality of the New World Order is the centralization of the financial and military assets of all the nations under the control of a dominant super power government (in this case the United States) that all other nations would then be beholden to. The U.S. government has been actively attempting to construct such a world order for decades, more actively so in the last twenty years. Attempting to link Iraq with 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction, only to later backtrack those claims, for the purpose of installing a puppet government and building oil pipelines was part of that agenda. As were the attempts to install Juan Guido as president of Venezuela over the elected president Nicolas Maduro and the attempts to overthrow Assad in Syria while giving cover and funding to ISIS fighters simply because Assad chose to build a joint oil pipeline with Russia rather than selling to the United States. And Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government had planted malware in the infrastructure of Japan. If at any point Japan no longer considers itself an ally of the United States, a push of a button and it's lights out for the whole country. How many other \"allies\" does the U.S. have in such a tight spot?\n\nAfter the fall of the Nazi party, the United States proposed the first official steps toward such a world order via the United Nations General Assembly as a world parliament. The Soviet Union recognized that the United States would control any such parliamentary vote and insisted that authority be vested in the Security Council with the right of veto for permanent members. Between 1946 and 1969, the Soviet Union cast 80 vetoes. As of July 2020, the USSR/Russia had cast a total of 116 against the U.S.'s 82. A second attempt at the creation of a post-war new order rested with the US proposal to internationalize atomic energy under United Nations aegis, outlined in the Baruch Plan. The USSR said no, again preventing the creation of a world state. \n\nIronically it was George F. Kennan, author of the two books mentioned above that heavily document American involvement in the Bolshevik movement, who crafted the idea of \"containment\", essentially surrounding the Soviet Union with weapons systems and military bases. With the establishment of NATO, the true New World Order was finally born and with the Soviet Union rapidly becoming a major power, an arms race began and the Cold War that had secretly been raging since the early 1900's became official. \n\nWe know the story after that. Increased tensions, nuclear weapons, doomsday drills in schools, the Cuban missile crisis; two superpowers duking it out, one for control and one for sovereignty from the others control. Flash forward to 1991 and the arms race had had the desired effect on the Soviet Union: the overspending, overextending and resultant collapse of America's only true rival in the world.\n\nWith the Soviet Union gone, the West moved quickly to prop up Boris Yeltsin, a drunken clown of a president who would become America's best friend while allowing the West to bleed Russia dry. The United States imposed \"shock therapy\" on the country, a financial theory that sudden, dramatic change in national economic policy can turn a state-controlled economy into a free-market one. The result in Russia's case was disastrous. The economy crashed while Yeltsin gave cover to a number of Western-backed oligarchs who plundered and pillaged the country of its money and resources, funneling an enormous amount of wealth overseas. In 1996, despite Yeltsin's abysmal approval ratings, the U.S. rigged the Russian elections and helped usher Yeltsin in for another term, a fact celebrated by Time Magazine and committed to film in the 2003 comedy \"Spinning Boris\". \n\n\n![get.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUNTFUNevfnGD5WWH4cUYh7X56jDqpU5EFeQWyKjybHAE/get.jpg)\nTime Magazine - July 15, 1996\n\nWhile Yeltsin became the darling of the West and the U.S. crowed about Russia's newfound \"freedom and democracy\", the country itself was actually imploding under the weight of the West's increasing plunder. With the crash of the ruble, many employers no longer paid salaries in money but in every day items such as light bulbs and batteries that could be bartered for goods. Stores stocked rotten food and many people ate that food out of desperation. Millions were dead by the end of the 1990's. Tanks roamed the streets. Gangs and organized crime came to power everywhere from the halls of government to the police to even the media outlets. Moscow, previously one of the safest cities in the world, was rocked by almost 2,000 homicides a year.\n\nAs the 90's came to a close, Yeltsin's approval rating hit rock bottom at 2%. The oligarchs backing him persuaded him to take $7 billion dollars in IMF money to refurbish the Kremlin. The funds were wired to an unknown company in Switzerland, then steered through Bank of New York. At this point, oligarch Edmond Safra, a Lebanese/Brazilian banker, instructed his bank to report to the Feds that Bank of New York had just conducted a money laundering event.  The oligarchs then hung this over Yeltsin's head, threatening to expose him of the theft of $7 billion unless he not run for president in 2000 and instead appoint notorious oligarch Boris Berezovsky as President of Russia. Apparently realizing he was set up, Yeltsin turned to the little-known Vladimir Putin, who was rising in the ranks of Moscow politics after serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, and appointed him successor with one request: save Russia. Putin accepted and offered Yeltsin immunity from criminal charges for what he had allowed to happen to the country.\n\nMany of the oligarchs and politicians in the West were initially excited by Putin's appointment, believing he could be controlled, but Putin quickly proved them wrong. He turned on them and began the long, slow process of releasing the country from their grasp. Many were imprisoned and many were exiled from Russia and banned from ever returning. Some of the less notorious were allowed to remain in Russia but with no further political involvement. Yukos Oil, which was funneling money from oil sales to Lord Jacob Rothschild, was liquidated and the money nationalized into the Russian economy. Putin had officially declared war on some of the most powerful people in the world. The Western media, which had previously been enamored with Putin as a \"sober Boris Yeltsin\" who would allow the plunder and pillage to continue, quickly turned to viciousness and slander. The corrupt, criminal element in Russia was so all pervasive that it forced Putin to seize control of all forms of government and society, including the media, to choke oligarchic money and control out of those areas. Ironically this prompted cries of \"authoritarianism\" from the West and ever since the U.S. government and media have railed about the \"freedom of the Russian people from Putin's iron grip\". Meanwhile in Russia Putin's popularity rating has stayed consistently in the 70%-80% range. The Russian people know the reality of what Putin has done - and continues to do - and as much as some of them may tire of always having the same president, they also fear what may once again happen to them if he were gone.\n\nIn the early 90's Mikhail Gorbachev was promised by the George H.W. Bush Administration that NATO would not expand one inch further east. Since then NATO has expanded right up to the borders of Russia and has deployed weapons and armaments in strategic locations along the Russian border that are identical to the buildup of Nazi armaments deployed by the Third Reich prior to the surprise attack on the Soviet Union. This psychological replay of the Nazi buildup is one of the dumbest and most dangerous strategies in history: Russians do not view war as something \"cool\" or patriotic or a video game as it's often viewed in the United States but as hell on earth and something that must be avoided at all costs and fought, if need be, to the last man. If NATO - the current iteration of the New World Order - thinks they stand a chance against a nuclear-armed Russia then they are every bit as insane as they appear.\n\nAttempts to suck Georgia and then Ukraine into NATO were catastrophic failures. In 2008, Western-backed Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili made a move to recapture the separatist region of South Ossetia, resulting in the deaths of Russian peacekeepers and a subsequent military response from Russia. The Bucharest Summit that same year, in which NATO promised that Georgia and Ukraine would become members of the alliance did not help the situation and relations between the United States and Russia, which had seemed to be on the mend in the wake of 9/11, began to collapse, particularly with the U.S. media blaming the war on a Russian invasion of Georgia. \n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlmkC4dZFuM\nFox News cuts American child for thanking Russia troops\n\nThe war in Ukraine in 2014 was a much more complicated affair. With the birth of Ukraine as an independent country in 1991, the peninsula of Crimea, which had long been considered Russian in origin, petitioned multiple times to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Each time it was denied. When the government of Ukraine removed the \"Hero of Ukraine\" title from nationalist and Nazi sympathizer Stepan Bandera, ultra right-wing neo-Nazi groups plunged the country into violence and overthrew the government. Part of this violence was the \"purging\" of ethnic Russians, including the crucifixion and burning alive of a twelve-year-old Russian girl. The United States and NATO saw a strategic opportunity and took it. John McCain, Joe Biden, and Secretary of State Victoria Nuland were all there and are all on video handing out supplies to the neo-Nazi groups, which included Right Sector and Svoboda and Trident, and delivering stirring speeches letting them know they were backed by the United States of America.\n\nRecorded telephone call and transcript between Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing the re-structuring of the Ukrainian government: \nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k\n\nUkraine on Fire, an excellent documentary showing the truth about the war in Ukraine and depicting the involvement of Nuland, John McCain and Joe Biden:\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHH10jIRJmQ&t=189s\n\nReally paints the Hunter Biden Ukraine scandal in a new light, doesn't it?\n\nWith the neo-Nazis closing in on Crimea, which was over 90% ethnic Russian, and the violence toward ethnic Russians increasing, the people of Crimea voted in a referendum with over 90% support to leave Ukraine and rejoin the Russian Federation. President Putin accepted and the rest is history. Considering the presence of a Russian naval base in Sevastopol by treaty, one can see how this could not only be a sensitive issue for Russia but why the absorption of Ukraine and the seizure of that base would be so tempting a prospect for NATO. Of course, the spin in the Western media was that Russia started the war in Ukraine and also invaded and conquered Crimea. This in spite of the fact of the recorded Nuland/Pyatt phone call and the video of U.S. politicians on the ground in Ukraine offering support for the neo-Nazis. Hence why I'm fond of calling Americans the most propagandized, brainwashed people in the world.\n\nIf all of that were not enough, in the spring of 2018 the upper echelons of the U.S. Military released over 200 documents\nto the public proving the existence of \"Operation Beluga\", a joint U.S./U.K. operation to demonize Vladimir Putin and\ndestabilize the Russian Federation. This demonization can take many forms, including the assassinations of critics and\npolitical rivals, which should make us re-evaluate the murders of Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko and Boris\nNemtsov as well as cast further pall on the ludicrous \"Russiagate\" 2016 hacking allegations. It was only a matter of days \nbefore this story began to spread to multiple media outlets but was swept quickly off the internet with the convenient Skripal poisoning in the U.K. and the allegations of Russia's involvement. \n\nTop French Intel Boss Reveals Operation Beluga:\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18tW6iza1x8&feature=emb_title\n\nThe existence of this operation should give us pause whenever we hear more anti-Russian propaganda on the news media and should make us wonder about the role played by certain figures such as Pussy Riot, Alexei Navalny and of course Bill Browder. Browder himself was one of the earliest oligarchs who entered Russia in the 1990's. Initially a fan of Putin's, Browder's attitude changed once he found himself targeted for laundering billions of dollars. An American businessman, Browder renounced his U.S. citizenship and moved to London to avoid unpaid taxes in the United States, yet he still holds power over the U.S. Congress and helped them create the Magnitsky Act, the means by which the United States imposes a neverending packtrain of sanctions on Russia. Sergei Magnitsky was Browder's accountant under investigation for tax fraud who later died of natural causes in prison. Browder twisted the story to claim that Magnitsky was actually his lawyer and had been beaten to death for investigating corruption, the story that gave him the fuel for the creation of the Magnitsky Act. A Russian filmmaker, seeking to document these events as a true story, soon found himself making a documentary as his investigation of the events slowly unraveled the lie. The resulting film \"The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes\" has been heavily suppressed and every theater that dares pick it up sued out of business by Browder's people. It still turns up occasionally online but very infrequently before disappearing again. Right now the film is currently available here: https://swprs.org/the-magnitsky-act/\n\nWith Russia's more recent moves to curb U.S. globalist meddling in Venezuela and Syria, it should be quite apparent that the reason for the West's war with and hatred of Russia is that Russia has been consistently blocking the West's attempts to construct their New World Order and establish global control. For decades, Russia and its leaders have stood up for their own sovereignty and considering their power on the global stage and Putin's habit of openly calling out the New World Order and its draconian aims, it's pretty apparent why he and Russia have such a large target drawn on their backs.\n\nIf one is of a religious persuasion, then one could argue that there is also a spiritual component to this war. Many  believe the United States was founded on Christian principles and has been a defender of those principles around the world, but now with the U.S. abandoning those principles left and right and even recognizing the Church of Satan as a legitimate religion, the stance the U.S. is taking in the world must be questioned. Meanwhile, just this past summer, the Russian people voted over 70% in favor of new additions to the Constitution, including adding God to the Constitution, not banning gay marriage but not legalizing it either and not legalizing abortion except under extreme measures. The U.S. is building more military bases while Russia is tearing down Communist monuments to build more churches. It's almost as if the two countries have completely switched their former ideologies. This, too, could go a long way in explaining the animosity of Russia being fomented by the U.S. government and media.\n\nNow with the tearing down of all the missile defense treaties preventing both countries from engaging in a new arms race, the U.S. has sent a very clear and ominous message to Russia, one they can only interpret as open hostility. For all of Donald Trump's talk of wanting a better relationship with Russia, he has taken our already very sour relations and pushed them to the brink. Now with warmonger Joe Biden entering the presidency, stocking his cabinet with Bush-era neocons, taking foreign policy advice from Dick Cheney and eyeing Hillary Clinton for a role as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., the drums of war are pounding again and the future is looking very bleak indeed.\n\n*****\n\nSources and further reading:\n\n1. \"To the Struggle Against World Terrorism\" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Struggle_Against_World_Terrorism\n2. \"Almost half of Russians in US have experienced discrimination alongside ‘unfair’ portrayal of country in media – survey\" - https://www.rt.com/russia/506028-discrimination-russophobia-presidential-election/\n3. \"Russia Leaves the War: The Americans in Petrograd and the Bolshevik Revolution\" by George F. Kennan - Princeton University Press, 1956\n4. \"The Decision to Intervene: The Prelude to Allied Intervention in the Bolshevik Revolution\" by George F. Kennan - Princeton University Press, 1958\n5. \"The Lenin Plot: The Unknown Story of America's War Against Russia\" by Barnes Carr - Pegasus Books, 2020\n6. \"Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Communists\" by Antony C. Sutton - Clairview Books, 1974\n7. \"Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler\" by Antony C. Sutton - G S G & Associates, 1976\n8. \"The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America's Forgotten Invasion of Russia\" by James Carl Nelson - William Morrow, 2019\n9. \"The Great Conspiracy Against Russia\" by Michael Sayes & Albert Kahn - Proletarian Publishers, 1946\n10. \"The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary\" by Edward Ellis Smith - Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967\n11. \"Stalin's Great Secret\" by Isaac Don Levine - Coward-McCann, 1956\n12. The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life\" by Roman Brackman - Routledge, 2000\n13. \"Report: Stalin was a secret police agent in czarist era\" - https://apnews.com/article/a8ac08b41cd72d9d500b7e1629d7a6ef\n14. \"Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia\" by Stephen F. Cohen - W.W. Norton & Company, 2001\n15. \"The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism\" by Naomi Klein - Picador, 2008\n16. \"The Great Conspiracy Against Russia: What is Really Behind the Campaign Against Putin?\" by Dr. Kerry Bolton - https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/the-great-conspiracy-against-russia-what-is-really-behind-the-campaign-against-putin\n17. \"Putin Expels the Families\" by The Ist for The Saker Blog - http://thesaker.is/putin-expels-the-families/\n18. \"How the U.S. Caused the Breakup of the Soviet Union\" Sean Gervasi 1992 Lecture - https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-how-the-u-s-caused-the-breakup-of-the-soviet-union/5619579\n19. \"So Who Really Tried to Blackmail Yeltsin & Takeover Russia – NSA-CIA-or Investment Bankers?\" by Martin Armstrong - https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/uncategorized/so-who-really-tried-to-blackmail-yeltsin-takeover-russia-nsa-cia-or-investment-bankers/\n20. \"The Plot to Scapegoat Russia\" by Dan Kovalik - Skyhorse, 2017\n21. \"Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order\" by Richard Sakwa - Cambridge University Press, 2017\n22. \"Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands\" by Richard Sakwa - I.B. Tauris, 2016\n23. \"The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert\" by Ron Ridenour - Punto Press, LLC, 2018\n24. \"The View From Moscow: Understanding Russia & U.S.-Russia Relations\" by Natylie Baldwin - Double Eagle Publishing, 2020\n25. \"Putin's Praetorians: Confessions of the Top Kremlin Trolls\" by Phil Butler - Pamil Visions, 2017\n26. \"Operation Beluga: A US-UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize the Russian Federation\" by William Dunkerley - https://www.opednews.com/articles/Operation-Beluga-A-US-UK-by-William-Dunkerley-Antiterrorism-Database_France_Litvinenko_Putin-160327-385.html\n27. \"War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate\" by Stephen F. Cohen - Hot Books, 2019",
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      "permlink": "professor-stephen-f-cohen-in-memoriam",
      "title": "Professor Stephen F. Cohen: In Memoriam",
      "body": "![Professor-Stephen-F.-Cohen-photo-in-Chronicle-of-Higher-Education-by-Vladislav-Dokshin.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfGshSSFdooC3QZ1bQAf7ZqgDrWnmzBP453zaT2Eceta7/Professor-Stephen-F.-Cohen-photo-in-Chronicle-of-Higher-Education-by-Vladislav-Dokshin.jpg)\n\n\nOn the morning of Saturday September 19, I awoke to the awful news that Professor Stephen F. Cohen, a man I greatly admired, had passed away the day before. The news hit me like a ton of bricks and I couldn't breathe for a few minutes. Although I had never personally met or corresponded with Professor Cohen, I still felt as if I had lost a teacher and a mentor.  It was because of him that I woke up to the reality of what was happening between the United States and Russia. It was because of him that I was inspired to start writing this blog, to do my part in advocating for peace and sanity in an insane world. \n\nProfessor Cohen has long advocated for rationality between the two countries. During the Cold War he frequently advised Ronald Reagan on his dealings with the Soviets and was a regular guest on the nightly news where he was praised for his views and expertise on the Soviet Union. In recent years, he was only invited onto mainstream media if he could be paired against someone who made fun of him and hurled insults at him, calling him names like \"Putin apologist\", \"Kremlin stooge\" and \"Putin's puppet\".  Professor Cohen came from a time when it was okay to love Russia and to advocate for a better relationship, to tell the government they were wrong and they needed to change their strategy. His day ended in a time where it was no longer okay to say those things, a time when the mainstream media chose to present propagandists as analysts rather than actual experts. It's not inconceivable that this stress and mass delusion in society may have contributed to his death.\n\nIn recent days the persistent thought occurred to me to email Professor Cohen and thank him for the stance he took and for remaining strong in his convictions in spite of the criticisms from less learned individuals. I wanted to thank him for inspiring me to write when I knew I needed to do something but didn't know what to do. I never sent that email, a regret that I will carry with me for a very long time. \n\nMatthew 5:9 says \"Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.\" Professor Cohen was truly one of the great peacemakers, worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, and whether he knew it or not he devoted his life to doing the work of God. With his passing the world feels a little darker, a little colder, a lot less intellectual and a whole lot scarier. All we can do now is carry on the torch and keep fighting the good fight.\n\nRest in peace, Professor Cohen.\n\nAnd thank you.\n\n****\nLinks:\n\n\"Stephen Cohen Has Died; Remember His Urgent Warnings Against the New Cold War\" by Caitlin Johnstone: https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/20/stephen-cohen-has-died-remember-his-urgent-warnings-against-the-new-cold-war/\n\n\"We Have Lost a Real Giant (Stephen F. Cohen Has Died)!\" by The Saker: http://thesaker.is/we-have-lost-a-real-giant-stephen-f-cohen-has-passed-away/\n\n\"Rethinking Putin: A Talk by Professor Stephen F. Cohen\": https://www.thenation.com/article/rethinking-putin-a-talk-by-professor-stephen-f-cohen/\n\n\"Nuclear Crisis: How America Lost Post-Soviet Russia\": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIHbGKRdAG4",
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      "title": "Dramatic Escalation of Tensions in the New Cold War",
      "body": "@@ -7559,12 +7559,249 @@\n tml#comments\n+%0A%0A%22Operation Beluga: A US-UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize the Russian Federation%22 - https://www.opednews.com/articles/Operation-Beluga-A-US-UK-by-William-Dunkerley-Antiterrorism-Database_France_Litvinenko_Putin-160327-385.html\n",
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      "permlink": "dramatic-escalation-of-tensions-in-the-new-cold-war",
      "title": "Dramatic Escalation of Tensions in the New Cold War",
      "body": "![EhEOml3WkAAIHoC.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbbFCRZStwU3vhoCWyU6SYypJepK9qmCeyexq2j5u18yn/EhEOml3WkAAIHoC.png)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn September 3, 2020 three U.S. Air Force B-52 nuclear bombers skirted the Crimean peninsula, brushing right up against Russian air space. The Russian military responded by launching eight fighter jets to intercept and escort the bombers away from Russian air space. Also lurking in the area were several US and UK intelligence-gathering planes and ships, apparently analyzing Russia's radar and air defenses over Crimea, as well as their response. This comes one day after NATO called an emergency meeting of all its member states to discuss a possible move against Russia, a meeting at which they concluded that so-called Russian \"opposition leader\" Alexei Navalny was poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok, concurring with the statements of German doctors who treated Navalny. That incident, of course, came on the heels of the United States sanctioning the Russian Defense Ministry Research Institute for its work in developing a Covid-19 vaccine and is now culminating with a push to break Germany away from Russia's Nordstream 2 pipeline project.\n\nWhat a mess. And what an increasingly dangerous series of provocations. It can hardly be considered a surprise though as Mike Pompeo earlier this summer declared that the United States will \"do everything\" in its power to stop Nordstream 2. While the pressure is being applied to Germany to break their agreement with Russia over the Navalny poisoning, the big question becomes what really happened to Navalny and what does sanctioning Russia over the development of a coronavirus vaccine have to do with it?\n\nIn the West there is great distrust over Bill Gates and his coronavirus vaccine and with good reason. Gates has advocated for reducing the global population by 10-15% to reduce co2 emissions through new vaccines, healthcare and reproductive services (abortions) (see this link, 4:10-4:27: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero#t-269275). Gates is not even a scientist or a doctor yet suddenly he's an expert on vaccines and vaccinations. To throw a spanner in the works of a potential global vaccine program, Russia actually banned Bill Gates and all Microsoft products in October 2016, with Gates also being placed on a Federal Security Services watchlist in that country due to \"concerns over security and reliability\".\n\nThe fact then that Russia appears as if it will be the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine must enrage the West to a ridiculous extent, hence the clearly jealous sanctions placed on the Russian Defense Ministry Institute for helping create it. But there's more. The Russian vaccine clearly has some things going for it that the US vaccine doesn't: 1. Bill Gates is not involved. 2. The Russian Government has already let it be known that their vaccine will not be mandatory to continue normal life, unlike the US vaccine which is heavily tied to ID 2020 (www.id2020.org, an organization partnered with Microsoft.) 3. Early peer reviews of the Russian vaccine show that it does produce an immune response and has no side effects. The purchase of this vaccine by other countries would greatly upset any \"New World Order\"-style plans to mass vaccinate the global population with a specific formula. \n\nWith the vaccine agenda facing this new problem, the alleged poisoning of Alexei Navalny becomes the next step. Despite the assertions of Western media, Navalny is not an opposition leader in Russia, nor is he all that popular. With only 2% public support among Russians and no seats in the Duma, Navalny is the furthest thing from opposition you will ever find and he certainly poses no threat to Putin, the Kremlin, or any other powers that be. What little public support he has gained has been from anti-corruption activities, yet even many of his supporters admit being disturbed by his intense racism - not just towards those of a different skin color but against anyone who is not Slavic. On August 20, 2020, Navalny fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Omsk where he was rushed to a hospital. Navalny's spokeswoman afterwards said that Navalny had fallen into a coma and had only drank tea at a cafe at the airport in Tomsk, suggesting his beverage must have been tampered with. Other sources allege that Navalny had spent the entire night before drinking moonshine with friends and then drank several energy drinks the next morning. Navalny, being diabetic, then went into diabetic shock. Whether this is true or not, some legitimate questions do arise: 1. If the state or Putin had poisoned Navalny, why was he allowed to be flown out of the country? 2. How would the state or Putin know where Navalny was, what airport he would be flying from, what cafe in the airport he would be stopping at and at what time in order to poison his tea? 3. Why wasn't the scene of the crime or the cup Navalny drank from analyzed and investigated? Why weren't employees at the airport cafe questioned? These should have been the first things to happen.\n\nDoctors in Russia claimed to find no traces of poison in Navalny's system, yet doctors in Germany claimed he had been poisoned by Novichok, the same substance the Skripals allegedly were poisoned with in London in 2018, the nerve agent so toxic that saying the very name of it out loud would kill a thousand people instantly, yet that failed to kill the three people poisoned with it in the past two years. The coronavirus of the poison world. Had Navalny actually been poisoned by this substance, most everyone he came in contact with would likely be dead, yet like the Skripals the details don't fit the narrative. Now the Skripals have been disappeared, their intended purpose served (attempting to sabotage the FIFA World Cup in Russia). Will Navalny now also be disappeared? Either way, the screws are being put to Germany to leave the Nordstream agreement with Russia and we're all waiting to see the outcome. Mike Pompeo's declaration to stop the pipeline may prove to be more prophetic than anyone at the time realized.\n\nNow this insanity of B-52 bombers buzzing the Crimean peninsula, one day after NATO declares that Russia must answer  for Navalny, and the intelligence gathering of Russia's radar, communications and defense response near that region. Why would anyone want that information unless one were looking for a weak point or a blind spot? This is not simply the usual harassment that we've seen before. This is an insanely dangerous escalation and what appears to be the preparation for an irreversibly reckless action. With the Open Skies treaty canned and more and more missile systems treaties between the US and Russia being thrown out the door, we are inching closer and closer to a point of no return.\n\n****\nFurther reading: \n\n\"Russia scrambles EIGHT jets to intercept three US NUCLEAR CAPABLE B-52 bombers testing Crimean borders over Ukraine & Black Sea\" - https://www.rt.com/russia/499908-b52-bombers-intercepted-crimea/\n\n\"Putin Bans Bill Gates And Microsoft From Russia\" - https://voiceofpeopletoday.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/putin-bans-bill-gates-and-microsoft-from-russia/?fbclid=IwAR0S4L9xGnix5KI3w-NV-eO0RygB68MIHDyWxFDvvZ7ripCw8RSPFph7m6w\n\n\"The Back And Forth About Navalny's Posioning\" - https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/08/the-back-and-forth-about-navalnys-poisoning-.html#more\n\n\"Navalny Gets Skripaled\" - https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/09/navalny-gets-skripaled.html#comments",
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      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "russia",
      "author": "nunnallyc",
      "permlink": "putin-checkmates-the-russian-deep-state-western-media-goes-berserk",
      "title": "Putin Checkmates the Russian \"Deep State\"; Western Media Goes Berserk",
      "body": "![vladimir-putin-awesome-photos-29-570x380.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVZpn9poy1yS1TvXhqYTo1vdSG8hH5x64En683tUAuLTP/vladimir-putin-awesome-photos-29-570x380.jpg)\n\nWednesday January 15 was a seemingly ordinary workday for me until my phone began blowing up with text messages and emails from people wanting to know my thoughts on some major event that had just taken place in Russia. Quickly checking my phone I saw the news that Vladimir Putin had just delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly, an event that usually takes place in the spring, and that he was apparently stepping down after his current term ends in 2024, that he had announced sweeping changes to the Constitution and that the Russian government had resigned in response. My jaw was on the floor the rest of the day. News reports began filtering in from Western media outlets performing the mental gymnastics needed to conclude that \"dictator Putin\" had just solidified his power, but with what I knew of the Russian government I was hopefully optimistic this would be a much-needed change. \n\nIn my previous post we analyzed the disaster that befell Russia in the wake of the end of the USSR and the invasion of corruption, crime and foreign interests that moved in to fill the vacuum and claim the country's wealth and resources. I speculated that perhaps Putin is still fighting against factions of the oligarchic system that remain very much entrenched in the Russian government. Putin has on many occasions openly berated the government for spending more time talking than acting, for not keeping him abreast of pertinent information and for failing to implement many of his reforms across Russia's vast regions. One member of this remaining system is Prime Minister Dmitry Medevedev who has been surrounded by suspicions of corruption. Medvedev represents the faction of the government that wants to integrate Russia into a global system whereas Putin represents the faction that wants to maintain Russia's independence as a sovereign nation outside of globalism. This began with shared power between the two - Medvedev's faction controlling the economic block and Putin's controlling foreign affairs and defense - until Medvedev (who became President in 2008) approved the US's brutal overthrow of Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011, plunging Libya into the control of a slave trade. Furious at Medvedev, Putin reclaimed the presidency as a result in 2012, sparking the \"Putin as dictator\" rhetoric that has become so commonplace in the west. Imagine being one of these \"integrationists\" during the Federal Assembly address when Putin announced:\n\n\"I suggest formalizing at the constitutional level the obligatory requirements for those who hold positions of critical significance for national security and sovereignty. More precisely, the heads of the constituent entities, members of the Federation Council, State Duma deputies, the prime minister and his/her deputies, federal ministers, heads of federal agencies and judges should have no foreign citizenship or residence permit or any other document that allows them to live permanently in a foreign state.   The goal and mission of state service is to serve the people, and those who enter this path must know that by doing this they inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances.  Requirements must be even stricter for presidential candidates. I suggest formalizing a requirement under which presidential candidates must have had permanent residence in Russia for at least 25 years and no foreign citizenship or residence permit and not only during the election campaign but at any time before it too.\"\n\nWhat a difference it would make if, in the United States, such a directive were passed and all the officials with dual US/Israeli citizenship were no longer allowed to serve in the US government. Imagine the change it would bring not only within the US itself but especially to US foreign policy and the state of endless war. This is the exact reform that led to the resignation of Dmitri Medvedev and his entire cabinet.\n\nBut Putin wasn't done yet. In 1993 Boris Yeltsin ushered in a new constitution that diminished the power of the parliamentary system and strongly increased the power of the president. This is the system Putin inherited, not one he created, and he used it effectively for his 20 years in power to solve the various crises plaguing the country. One could convincingly argue that strong, centralized power is necessary when dealing with a crisis of chaos. Putin apparently feels this time is over and the system no longer needed as he announced increasing parliamentary powers and dramatically decreasing the powers of the president. Amendments were also proposed ensuring that future presidents of Russia can only hold office for two terms, no longer. Putin here is essentially acknowledging that he has been in power for too long and is making sure no one else ever can stay in office as long as he has. Yet the media and those suckered in by it cry and scream that he has actually solidified his power. The fact that he reduced his own power for the next four years is a fact they conveniently miss. \n\nOther proposed reforms include:\n\n* The abolishment of Article 14.4 of the Russian constitution which reads in part: \"If an international treaty or agreement of the Russian Federation imposes rules that are contrary to (Russian) law, the international rules shall be applied.\" This creates a loophole in Russian sovereignty allowing foreign bodies to overrule Russian law. This has long been one of the footholds of the oligarchy and it's a loophole that will now be closed.\n\n* The State Council, which until now has been an extraconstitutional advisory body, will now be written into the Constitution and endowed with certain constitutional prerogatives. Likely that is where Putin will move to once his current term as President expires, there to serve as an elder statesman and an arbiter between various levels and branches of government. The State Council could plug a major gap that currently exists between the federal and the regional levels. There are numerous problems that cannot be addressed effectively at the regional level but, given the vastness of the land, cannot be addressed effectively at the federal level either. The State Council would be in a position to deal with those problems. \n\n* Putin also addressed increasing wages and pensions so everyone regardless of station could afford good living conditions. Currently the average wage of $1,600 per month in Moscow has the same purchasing power as $6,000 in Chicago. There are also proposed changes to what's called \"maternal capital\" to make having more than two children financially attractive.  All of these proposed amendments will be implemented not at the decision of the Duma or the President but by the citizens voting in a referendum. \n\nIn the restructuring of the new Russian government the entire \"sovereignist\" faction remains intact while the \"integrationist\" faction has either been demoted or moved to positions with less power and influence. Dmitry Medvedev has been granted a technical position as Vice Chairman of the Security Council, an organization that will be subordinate to the new State Council. \n\nAs much as the media and so-called \"experts\" in the west try to twist these events to fit their established narrative, Putin seems to have secured his place in history.  While Donald Trump vowed to \"drain the swamp\" but has instead been more than happy to swim in it, Putin actually did it without violence or Stalin-like purges and shadowy executions. It just took a long forward-thinking game of chess.\n\n****\n\nSources and further reading:\n\n\"Russian Government 101: How Does It Work and What's About to Change?\" by Egor Efimchik: https://sputniknews.com/russia/202001151078046470-russian-government-101-how-did-it-work-and-whats-about-to-change/\n\"Life After Putin\" by Dmity Orlov: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2020/01/life-after-putin.html#more\n\"Putin Proposes Changes to Constitution, Medvedev Resigns: What's Going On?\" by Natylie Baldwin: https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/19/putin-proposes-changes-to-constitution-medvedev-resigns-whats-going-on/#comments\n\"Could this (finally!) be the end for the Atlantic Integrationists?\" by The Saker: http://thesaker.is/could-this-finally-be-the-end-for-the-atlantic-integrationists/\n\"The new Russian government: a much needed evolution but not a revolution\" by The Saker: http://thesaker.is/the-new-russian-government-a-much-needed-evolution-but-not-a-revolution/",
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      "title": "Assessing Vladimir Putin: James Bond Supervillain or Misunderstood Reformer?",
      "body": "@@ -20836,16 +20836,139 @@\n imakova%0A\n+%22The Power of Impossible Ideas: Ordinary Citizens' Extraordinary Efforts to Avert International Crisis%22 by Sharon Tennison%0A\n The Puti\n",
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      "title": "Assessing Vladimir Putin: James Bond Supervillain or Misunderstood Reformer?",
      "body": "@@ -1789,16 +1789,30 @@\n  Poltava\n+, date unknown\n %0A%0AVladim\n@@ -1897,26 +1897,399 @@\n nst \n-the Nazis. He took\n+Hitler. His father was wounded on the front lines, his maternal grandmother killed by the German occupiers of the Tver region, his maternal uncles disappeared at the war front and his younger brother died during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Growing up as something of a wild child, Putin was well versed in the ways of the streets but developed a strong sense of self-discipline after taking\n  up \n@@ -2305,16 +2305,34 @@\n al arts \n+of sambo and judo \n at the a\n@@ -2343,18 +2343,16 @@\n f 12\n- and spent\n+. During\n  his\n@@ -2366,17 +2366,19 @@\n ime \n+he \n devour\n-ing\n+ed\n  sto\n@@ -2793,64 +2793,20 @@\n ts. \n-As a result, Putin resigned from the KGB in disgust over\n+Disgusted by\n  the\n@@ -2834,16 +2834,45 @@\n the coup\n+, Putin resigned from the KGB\n . It was\n@@ -3521,16 +3521,17 @@\n nsacking\n+,\n  hoping \n@@ -3559,16 +3559,17 @@\n he prize\n+,\n  and tra\n@@ -7696,36 +7696,59 @@\n and \n-was surprised to be suddenly\n+served in several different capacities before being\n  app\n@@ -7877,16 +7877,27 @@\n ith the \n+unenviable \n task of \n@@ -10199,16 +10199,286 @@\n  murder.\n-\n \n+ Putin later commented: %22Her influence over political life in Russia was minimal. And in my opinion murdering such a person certainly does much greater damage from the authorities' point of view, authorities that she strongly criticized, than her publications ever did.%22\n %0A%0AOf all\n@@ -14178,16 +14178,22 @@\n tadt\n- (+1908)\n+, date unknown\n %0A%0AIn\n@@ -14362,204 +14362,690 @@\n my, \n-paying off IMF debts, increasing GDP and increasing the quality of life have been monumental feats in what was a country that appeared at one time to be doomed. And the improvements are continuing\n+he payed off not only Russia's IMF debts but also the debts of all the former Soviet countries. The overall quality of life has improved with life expectancy among adults increasing by more than 7 years between 1994 and 2016 while the mortality rate among children under 5 decreased nearly 60%25. Premature deaths caused by smoking decreased 34%25 over the same time period; deaths due to alcoholism decreased 43%25 between 2000 and 2016. These are monumental feats for a country that appeared at one time to be doomed. And the improvements are continuing. %0A%0AMassive new infrastructure overhauls are taking place with stunning new international airports being built all around the country\n . In\n@@ -15650,16 +15650,197 @@\n olished.\n+ US sanctions have done very little to hurt Russia; in fact, they've boosted the economy, forcing the country to stand on its own two feet rather than rely on imports from the west.\n  In late\n@@ -16753,16 +16753,17 @@\n nfluence\n+,\n  all the\n@@ -17636,14 +17636,15 @@\n re w\n-ere\n+as\n  no\n+ o\n ne i\n@@ -17885,16 +17885,54 @@\n en given\n+ and that sent me down the rabbit hole\n . Now I'\n@@ -19236,16 +19236,73 @@\n eading:%0A\n+%22The Key to Understanding Vladimir Putin%22 by John Evans: \n https://\n@@ -19369,16 +19369,86 @@\n n-82391%0A\n+%22For Wall Street, Russia Has Become 'Bulletproof'%22 by Kenneth Rapoza: \n https://\n@@ -19550,16 +19550,306 @@\n bd26ffd%0A\n+%22Russia: Increases in Life Expectancy, Decreases in Child Deaths, Use of Alcohol, Tobacco%22 by Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-08-russia-life-decreases-child-deaths.html%0A%22Russians Sober Up Under Health-Conscious Vladimir Putin%22 by Henry Foy: \n https://\n@@ -19904,16 +19904,65 @@\n 9dc6d84%0A\n+%22Manufacturing War With Russia%22 by Chris Hedges: \n https://\n@@ -20084,16 +20084,118 @@\n 04.html%0A\n+%22Army Document: US Strategy to 'Dethrone' Putin For Oil Pipelines Might Provoke WW3%22 by Nafeez Ahmed: \n https://\n@@ -20304,16 +20304,74 @@\n e-ww3/?%0A\n+%22Rethinking Putin: A Talk by Professor Stephen F. Cohen%22: \n https://\n@@ -20450,16 +20450,93 @@\n -cohen/%0A\n+%22Russia Isn't Getting the Recognition It Deserves on Syria%22 by Scott Ritter: \n https://\n@@ -20839,25 +20839,42 @@\n kova%0AThe Putin Interview\n-\n \n+s - Showtime Film\n s\n",
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      "title": "Assessing Vladimir Putin: Great Leader or James Bond Supervillain?",
      "body": "@@ -1160,16 +1160,647 @@\n %0ACHAOS%0A%0A\n+%22You ask me about the near future and about the last times. I do not speak on my own but give the revelation of the elders. And they have handed down to me the following: the coming of Antichrist draws nigh and is very near. The time separating us from him should be counted a matter of years and at most a matter of some decades. But before the coming of Antichrist, Russia must yet be restored - to be sure, for a short time. And in Russia there must be a Tsar forechosen by the Lord Himself. He will be a man of burning faith, great mind and iron will. This much has been revealed about him.%22  - Archbishop Theophan of Poltava%0A%0A\n Vladimir\n@@ -12298,16 +12298,1206 @@\n EBIRTH%0A%0A\n+%22There will be a storm. And the Russian ship will be smashed to pieces. But people can be saved even on splinters and fragments. And not everyone will perish. One must pray, everyone must repent and repent fervently. And what happens after a storm? There will be calm. At this everyone said: 'But there is no ship, it is shattered to pieces; it has perished, everything has perished.' It is not so. A great miracle of God will be manifested. And all the splinters and fragments, by the will of God and His power will come together and be united and the ship will be rebuilt in its beauty and will go on its own way as foreordained by God.%22 - St. Anatole the Younger of Optina, 1917.%0A%0A%22I foresee the restoration of a powerful Russia, still stronger and mightier than before. On the bones of these martyrs, remember, as on a strong foundation, will the new Russia be built - according to the old model; strong in her faith in Christ God and in the Holy Trinity! The Church will remain unshaken to the end of the age and a Monarch of Russia, if he remains faithful to the Orthodox Church, will be established on the throne of Russia until the end of the age.%22 - St. John of Kronstadt (+1908)%0A%0A\n In the a\n@@ -17453,21 +17453,20 @@\n only be \n-given\n+done\n  from a \n@@ -18415,16 +18415,114 @@\n -cohen/%0A\n+https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/02/russia-isnt-getting-recognition-deserves-syria/%0A\n %22Putin: \n",
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      "permlink": "assessing-vladimir-putin-great-leader-or-james-bond-supervillain",
      "title": "Assessing Vladimir Putin: Great Leader or James Bond Supervillain?",
      "body": "![putin-raptor-russe.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNySLu63FjSNjDXhAwyb6zLQQEohHvudPAvtiP4kUNsjf/putin-raptor-russe.jpg)\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nWhether you like him or not, Vladimir Putin is one of the world's most influential and important leaders, but who is he? For years magazine covers and documentaries complete with scary music and ominous visuals have hyped Putin as a terrifying mastermind bent on global domination through a rebuilt Soviet Empire and the destruction of the west. Hillary Clinton has compared him to Hitler, John McCain called him a \"thug\" presiding over a \"gas station masquerading as a country\" and the mainstream media in the US is dominated by Putin fearmongering, yet he has been in power for the better part of two decades and has held a consistent 70-80% popularity rating throughout. Western \"experts\" scratch their heads over this and pontificate over \"Putinism\" and what demonic superpower Putin possesses  to manipulate the Russian people into supporting him. But these questions decry a lack of understanding of history and considering the past informs the present, history is a crucial piece in the puzzle that is Putin.\n\nCHAOS\n\nVladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in 1952 to a family devastated by the war against the Nazis. He took up the martial arts at the age of 12 and spent his free time devouring stories of spies and secret agents. As much as he wanted to be one of them, he ultimately settled on law school at Leningrad State University. In 1975, he joined the KGB and was assigned as a translator to East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down.\n\nIn the final days of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev was overthrown in a coup led by Boris Yeltsin, a group of hardline Communists and a number of KGB agents. As a result, Putin resigned from the KGB in disgust over the part they played in the coup. It was only a matter of months before the Soviet Union was ultimately dissolved. Putin went to work as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg where he developed a reputation as one of the only Russian officials who did not demand bribes for his services. Even this tiny speck of nobility received high praise from entrepreneurs and businessmen as the country slowly collapsed into corruption and transformed into a criminal empire.\n\nUnder the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, chaos reigned. Rich businessmen and corporations from the west flooded Russia and began to plunder and pillage the country's natural resources. Russian business owners joined in the ransacking hoping to claim a piece of the prize and transferred millions of dollars out of Russia into offshore accounts. These men are known as oligarchs and some of the most notorious are Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Bill Browder, who is still operating today.\n\nAs this mass theft was occurring, Boris Yeltsin became the West's favorite drunken goofball and the United States proclaimed that Russia had finally achieved freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, riots and civil war plagued Russia. Tanks and gangsters roamed the streets. Terrorists from Chechnya launched waves of terrorist attacks. Moscow, previously considered one of the safest cities in the world was rocked by 2,000 homicides a year. Yeltsin's popularity rating fell to only 2% but, assisted by election rigging from the United States, nonetheless won another term. By the end of the 1990's employers could no longer afford to pay money and instead paid their employees with household items such as light bulbs and batteries that could be bartered for goods. Food disappeared from the shelves and what remained was often molded and rotten. People died from starvation, disease or from eating rotten food out of desperation. Russia was a dying country and on the verge of disappearing into the dust.\n\nOn August 9, 1999 Islamist fighters from Chechnya infiltrated Russia's Dagestan region and declared it an independent state, calling for a jihad until \"all unbelievers\" had been driven out. The following month four apartment blocks in the cities of Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk were hit by a series of explosions, killing more than 300 and injuring more than 1000, sparking a second war with Chechnya.\n\nThese bombings remain a point of contention in some circles. A suspicious device resembling the explosives used in the bombings was found and neutralized in an apartment block in Ryazan and three FSB agents arrested for planting the device. The head of the FSB later stated the operation was just an anti-terror exercise and that the device was a non-explosive containing only sugar. The presence of security services agents has led many in the west to proclaim Putin was responsible for the bombings as a means of ushering himself into power. Former US Foreign Service officer John Evans, who knew Putin during his time in St. Petersburg, offered his point of view on this in a memorandum to Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott. In his article, \"The Key to Understanding Vladimir Putin\", Evans writes:\n\n\"The Chechens, Sunni Muslims with a history of fiercely resisting the Russians in the 19th century, under their leader, the Imam Shamil (actually a Dagestani), as the Russian Empire subjugated the Caucasus, were a disturbing presence in European Russia in the 1990s. Chechens ran the Mercedes dealership in Petersburg, where lots of stolen vehicles changed hands, but very few if any new ones. During the first war, they targeted me personally, on account of the position taken by the U.S. Government in support of Russia’s territorial integrity. Right after the bombings of the two apartment buildings, our Defense Attache in Moscow reported that the inhabitants of at least one of the buildings were dependents of military personnel. It seemed to me then, as now, that Vladimir Putin would never have sanctioned the sacrifice of those innocent people in pursuit of political goals. But, in my view, there was one person who just might have, and happened to have a connection to the North Caucasus: (oligarch) Boris Berezovsky, who was then serving as National Security Advisor to Yeltsin, or “the Family,” as Yeltsin’s wife and daughter and son-in-law were then known.  \n\nThe Family was concerned by the prospect of parliamentary elections scheduled for December of 1999, and by the potent alliance recently forged between Yevgeniy Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov. They were searching for a way of postponing the elections, and it had occurred to them that the Chechen war and attendant terrorism could provide justification for such a move.\"\n\nWhen St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak lost his re-election campaign, Putin was left without a position. He moved to Moscow and was surprised to be suddenly appointed Prime Minister. With Yeltsin's handling of the Second Chechen War under heavy criticism, Putin found himself left with the task of waging the war. His military campaign was stunningly successful and his approval rating skyrocketed. Yeltsin's time was over. Whether he asked Putin for immunity from criminal charges in exchange for his resignation or that was the offer Putin put on the table largely depends on who you ask, but on December 31, 1999 Boris Yeltsin resigned and handed the presidency to Putin.\n\nSweeping into power, the west initially saw hopes in Putin's presidency, hopes that he would allow the plunder begun under Yeltsin to continue. But Putin turned out to be nothing like Yeltsin and began a dramatic wave of reforms to rebuild the Russian economy and cut the head off the corrupt system. Top oligarchs Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky were removed from power and others imprisoned or deported. Ultimately Putin struck a deal with the least powerful oligarchs that they could keep their money provided they stayed permanently out of politics. \n\nThis realization that Putin was a patriotic nationalist unwilling to sell out his country made him enemy number one in the west. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff lamented his disappointment that Putin did not turn out to be \"a sober Yeltsin\".\n\nASSASSINATIONS\n\nOn October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday,  journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her Moscow apartment. Working for Novaya Gazeta, an investigative newspaper long known for its criticisms of Russian political affairs, Politkovskaya was critical of the Russian government's handling of the Second Chechen War and subsequent terror attacks, particularly the disastrous Beslan school hostage crisis. While investigating cases of human rights abuses in Chechnaya, provoking a series of death threats, Politkovskaya labeled Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov \"the Chechen Stalin of our days\". In response, Kadyrov told her \"You're an enemy. To be shot.\" Although many maintain Putin ordered her assassination as a birthday gift to himself, I personally find this take nonsensical. Putin comes across to me as someone far too intelligent to do something so stupid. It is, however, something one might do to try to frame someone else. In either case, Politkovskaya's colleagues at Novaya Gazeta  do not believe to this day that Putin or the Russian government were involved in her murder.\n\nOf all the mysterious assassinations for which Putin gets the blame, none is more of a twisted web than that of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who blamed Putin for the Moscow apartment bombings and even called him a pedophile before dying of severe radiation poisoning in London in November 2006. Just before his death, Litvinenko named Putin as the man behind his murder. Was he? Obviously one cannot prove or disprove the allegation either way but there are some strange connections and a lot of questions. Aside from the fact that, once again, it would be a really stupid move on Putin's part to assassinate someone who posed no threat to him what are we to make of the fact that Litvinenko's own wife later testified that he had been recruited by and was working for MI6? What are we to make of the fact that Litvinenko had ties to Chechnya, to Khodorkovsky's Yukos Oil, and worked for Boris Berezovsky? Why was Polonium 210, the radioactive substance that killed Litvinenko, found in Berezovsky's office and residence? I don't have an answer but there are certainly questions - and connections - that should be looked at more closely.\n\nLast on our list is politician Boris Nemtsov, gunned down on February 27, 2015 while crossing a bridge over the Moscow River in sight of the Kremlin. Nemtsov was a sharp critic of Russia's reunification of Crimea, believing the western reports that Russia had attacked Ukraine and taken Crimea by force. Nemtsov being a former first deputy prime minister, Putin's ex-boss and a onetime potential successor to Boris Yeltsin, the Kremlin reacted in shock. They had considered Nemtsov to be more of a kindred spirit than an enemy. Putin denounced the murder and disappeared from the public for a significant amount of time, prompting rumors that he now feared for his life. When he finally resurfaced it was with no fewer than fifteen body guards. A number of Chechen suspects were arrested. One confessed to his involvement, others maintained innocence and one blew himself up with a grenade when the police came for him. But, of course, Putin got the blame for the murder. This was yet again someone who posed no threat to Putin and killing him outside the Kremlin walls would have been an incredibly stupid move, so why would he have done it? Could the killing be interpreted as a warning or a threat to Putin? Is the more likely conclusion that Putin is an irrational murderer or that he is still very much battling a system of corruption that wants him gone? \n\nREBIRTH\n\nIn the almost two decades since Putin came to power, he has returned Russia from the edge of the abyss. Choking off corrupt money and putting it back into the economy, paying off IMF debts, increasing GDP and increasing the quality of life have been monumental feats in what was a country that appeared at one time to be doomed. And the improvements are continuing. In 2010 Russia was ranked at an abysmal 124 on the Ease of Doing Business scale and in 2019 it skyrocketed to 28. In preparation for the FIFA World Cup, a sweeping system of changes were put into place including overhauls of the metro stations, signs posted in English and Russian and the abolishment of authoritarian legislation such as laws forbidding large public gatherings, resulting in large and loud celebrations in the streets and even soccer games in Red Square. Critics warned that those laws would be put back into effect after the games ended but a year and a half later they are still abolished. In late 2018, Resonance, an international consulting company, ranked Moscow as one of the top ten cities with the best living conditions in the world, a long way from the hellhole of 1999. Press freedom has increased with Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and The Moscow Times voicing alternative points of view without interference from the Russian government; in fact, sometimes with partial funding from the Russian government. While western media outlets claim Russia is a dying power and that Putin's days are numbered, Forbes in November 2019 declared the Russian economy to be \"bulletproof\", probably the only one that could withstand a global recession.\n\nWhile some of the Russian people are ready for someone new they also know there is no one else. The Communist Party is the second largest political power in Russia after Putin's and they've managed to score some seats in the Duma giving them more influence all the while staging protests and riots in the streets. This is why Putin wins every election and why his approval rating remains so high. His consistent thumbing of the nose to the globalist movement in favor of Russia's independence and sovereignty has made him one of the top populist leaders on the planet. The globalist powers in the world hate him for this and make him the phantom bogeyman of all their ills. But they don't dare directly challenge him. At least not yet. For all those who lament that they've only ever known Putin in power, they also fear the day he's gone.\n\nAs for me, after starting my exploration of this subject following a series of horrifying dreams about nuclear war, I fell for the propaganda about Putin. I believed he was Hitler and Stalin or worse and that he intended to conquer what he could and destroy what he couldn't. I thought there were none in the world more frightening than him. It was Oliver Stone's excellent series The Putin Interviews that began to change my mind. Here was a well-educated, well-spoken, rational, thoughtful statesman who did not fit the image he had been given. Now I've done a complete 180 on my view of Putin. No longer fearing him, I now wonder if he might be one of the last hopes left in the world. Despite his own military and members of his own government demanding he launch a strike against the western powers, he refuses. Regardless of the provocations, regardless of the threats and slander he holds his ground and shrugs it off as \"just politics.\" For whatever else he is, he may be the only adult in the room keeping things from completely falling apart.\n\nFor thousands of years Russia has existed under either authoritarianism or outright dictatorship. The shock therapy of the 1990s to convert the government into a democratic system overnight was a nightmare. While Putin has reintroduced some brand of old authoritarianism he has also been slowly whittling that down into a more democratic system, despite the opposition he faces from within. A full assessment of Putin can only be done from a point in the future looking back but with the opening up of Russia to the world for the FIFA World Cup and the gushing, enthusiastic responses from the fans who attended - many of whom were terrified to go to Russia - history may just find that Russia needed a firm hand on the wheel to guide it through the storm.\n\n****\n\nSources and further reading:\nhttps://nationalinterest.org/feature/key-understanding-vladimir-putin-82391\nhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/11/18/for-wall-street-russia-has-become-bullet-proof/#7eb05bd26ffd\nhttps://www.opednews.com/articles/Manufacturing-War-With-Rus-by-Chris-Hedges-Election_Gorbachev_Intelligence_Putin-190603-404.html\nhttps://www.thenation.com/article/rethinking-putin-a-talk-by-professor-stephen-f-cohen/\n\"Putin: Russia's Choice\" by Richard Sakwa\n\"Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft\" by Alan C. Lynch\n\"First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait\" by Vladimir Putin, Nataliya Gevorkyan and Natalya Timakova\nThe Putin Interviews",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"putin\",\"russia\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNySLu63FjSNjDXhAwyb6zLQQEohHvudPAvtiP4kUNsjf/putin-raptor-russe.jpg\"],\"links\":[\"https://nationalinterest.org/feature/key-understanding-vladimir-putin-82391\",\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/11/18/for-wall-street-russia-has-become-bullet-proof/#7eb05bd26ffd\",\"https://www.opednews.com/articles/Manufacturing-War-With-Rus-by-Chris-Hedges-Election_Gorbachev_Intelligence_Putin-190603-404.html\",\"https://www.thenation.com/article/rethinking-putin-a-talk-by-professor-stephen-f-cohen/\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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