April 5, 2018
Volume 48 - No. 14
By Matthew Fabritius
There has been an incredible amount of news coverage dedicated in the last year to issues relating to the Russian government’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The primary cause for this concern relates to a joint report released on January 6, 2017, by the CIA, FBI, NSA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The report details the agencies’ collective judgment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered several espionage operations that sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election and collect information on both the Democratic The The Paper Paper -- 760.747.7119 760.747.7119
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and Republican parties. While this act of cyber espionage is a relatively new experience for the United States when dealing with Russia, the United States has been dealing with Russian espionage activities ever since the Bolsheviks took power in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Before the Russian Revolution, the United States and Russia had been on relatively friendly terms. Russia had been a hereditary monarchy for well over 300 years with the ruling Romanov family having complete control over every aspect of Russian society. The Russian Empire expanded from Eastern Europe, through
Russia itself and then all the way down through Kazakhstan and Mongolia to the northern borders of Afghanistan and China. Most of these tangential territories were then simply later absorbed into the early Soviet Union and expanded further in the Second World War during Stalin’s push farther west into Europe to capture Berlin. Most Russian citizens in the Romanov era were peasant farmers serving on rural plantations owned by Russian aristocrats with a smaller minority serving as either general merchants or factory workers in major industrial cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and
Novosibirsk.
While the United States operated as a constitutional republic and Russia as a feudal monarchy, there existed a certain friendly rapport between the two countries during the Romanov era since the U.S. government had purchased Alaska from the Kremlin for $7.2 million in March of 1867. The Russians and Americans had never been in any particular dispute over territories as a result of being physically isolated from each other, which meant that the political drama between the two countries had always been virtually non-existent.
The Russian Bear - See Page 2