The USSR has emerged from reorganization a leaner, weaker, yet growing version of its former self. It is run by former KGB officers. The West tends to dismiss power not evidencing brute political-economic supremacy. That is error.

What does this mean, and how did it happen?That former KGB officers grip Russia means there is an anti-Western chip on Russia’s shoulder. The chip isn’t exclusively Cold War ice. The Putin regime owes some start-up momentum to the NATO bombing and policing of traditional Russian ally Serbia.

As U.S. internationalism crossed party and sovereign lines, Russia’s mood toward the West darkened after 1999, energizing Putin’s powerbase.Western researchers should reassess known and possible Russian covert operations against the U.S., European nations, and the E.U. since the Andropov years. Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen and other KGB victories (and losses) should be reassessed in light of Russian developments.

Governments should also reassess the Moscow Patriarchate’s activity abroad also, especially Germany, France, Canada and the U.S.. How Mikhail Gorbachev made it out of Russia alive, why the coup and countercoup were relatively bloodless, Gorbachev’s access to Western leaders, and his investment in Novaya Gazeta should be dispassionately reviewed. The pendulum effect of trustworthy and untrustworthy defectors over time should also be reviewed. Any unresolved inconsistencies in Robert Hanssen’s debriefings call for follow-up.

While no changes in understanding may arise, well-researched reports across Western press services and the muted Novaya Gazeta have given us a “Who’s Who” in today’s Russian secret police state.

What a reversal. Whether or not the “fall” of the USSR was a “Ushiro Sabaki” in Judo terms, a controlled backward move, the U.S. was set up to underestimate it. Is it so serious? Put another way, would Jill Carroll still be with us had she been reporting from Russia facts about Chechnya?

An anti-Western premise about Putin explains why Russian intelligence agents spied from within U.S. command tents and fed information to the Iraqis, however ineffective. And following the Iraq invasion, the Bush Administration accused Russian firms led by Putin cronies of supplying insurgents with weapons used against U.S. troops.

It seems KGB minds would see fair turnabout in covertly supporting al-Qaeda and the Taliban against NATO in Afghanistan. There, Russia has the ability to dilute Western resources, check NATO in the Eastern Hemisphere, and give as good as the USSR got when the boot was on the other foot in the 80’s.

Critics say the U.S. has neglected Asian affairs since 9-11-01, as if that explained the USSR reloaded. It does not explain 1991 through 2001. Besides, political blame has been part of the problem. Understanding errors relating to Russia is more important than blaming.

If NATO expects to succeed in Afghanistan, the EU wants independence from authoritarians, and the U.S. does not want to be a siege-state, governments should carefully reassess the beginnings of the KGB strategy and tactics working today under new acronyms and map out their variable mutations, reversals and outcomes.

There is wealth behind the Bear now, and less imperial expense. There is also nearly no accountability at the top.Western ignorance, vanity and obduracy in the world since the “collapse” of the USSR are part responsible for KGB-Russia. However, so is every Russian who can think, read, remember, and pray.

Here is the Russia with over 900 years of Orthodox Christian tradition teaching humility as the path to God’s protection yet following a KGB regime and Patriarch preaching national pride.

Nationalist parties rooted in ethnic pride tend to get bloody, eventually. And like the situation in Germany in the late 1930s, the current Russian nationalist partisan movement has commandeered the sentiment of a major national Church. It did so by persuading the masses to national pride through the USSR's political capstone left in place over the Russian Orthodox Church's illegitimate patriarchate.

Hopefully, Russian freedom will quietly dispossess itself of the Putin regime’s radical nationalist agenda.

Civilization is still warped by the Cold War's permeation of its domestic fiber. The US and Russia have evolved into versions of their former Cold War selves, seeking dominance and power maintenance in the world.

Civilized standards became something else in the Cold War.

Curing poverty became a means of proving one’s economic ideology superior, not a goal in its own right.

A rise in domestic crime became a propaganda football and an exploitable weakness.

Space exploration was a way of proving superiority through engineering.

Education became an investment in superiority over the enemy.

Psychology became a means of searching out ways of reading and manipulating the enemy and its leadership, or deciding who was a good worker to help build a superior superpower.

And Cold Warriors used science to manufacture superbugs and chemicals capable of mass destruction. These distortions became forgotten truisms and I think an extension of the undermining ideology I'll call "EN" ideology: Evil Necessitated.