Essay:The Russian Rule

Russian government and politics is characterized by duplicity and espionage, and has been for over a century. Vladimir Lenin hijacked the original 1917 socialist revolution, purging the Menshevik faction to make way for the rule of his Bolsheviks. Joseph Stalin silently and cleverly rose the the rank of premier, and regularly killed his closest advisers because he feared they were trying to take power away from him. He also killed millions of Russians because he thought they were a threat to his power (calling them counterrevolutionaries), and even killed Leon Trotsky and tried to kill Tito, the leader of another country, because he disliked them. An entire network of spies, the KGB, was set up to ensure no one lived to speak out against his actions. Nikita Khrushchev, a later premier, was forced out of office by the KGB and Leonid Brezhnev, who then took power for himself. When they announced this to the public, they described it as "voluntary" because he was in ill health. In 1991, the KGB again tried unsuccessfully to seize power in a coup attempt, again claiming that Premier Gorbachev had an "illness", saying "Over these years he has got very tired and needs some time to get his health back".

This Machiavellian streak has continued past the fall of the USSR to today. Vladimir Putin, himself a KGB agent, regularly uses these kinds of backstabbing tactics. He has his political opponents shot dead by armed gunmen right outside the Kremlin and he imprisons singers who speak out against him. He invades and annexes parts of a neighboring country, all the while denying it's happening and later confirming it a year later. Perhaps the most amazing example of this duplicity is the Russian doping scandal. To summarize what happened, the Russian government forced every single one of its athletes during the 2014 Sochi Olympics in Russia to inject anabolic steroids so they could win gold medals. Guess what? Russia won the most gold medals that year. Shocking. But the most salacious part is that the doping was facilitated and covered up by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency. This is not the first time they have done this: 2012 saw over dozens of Russian athletes use steroids, and in East Germany decades before, 10,000 athletes were forcibly given "vitamins" to help them do better.