Ivan Suhkov writes in the Moscow Times:  Crimea symbolizes revenge — in the Soviet, political and negative sense of the word. A more accurate word is “restoration” — a restoration of the state and its rights that were allegedly violated.

By reinstating the Soviet anthem, imposing a power vertical, giving greater social and political importance to siloviki structures — particularly the secret police — and reintroducing Crimea into the country’s daily weather forecasts, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, has symbolically restored the Soviet Union.

However, advocates of restoration tend to miss one important point: both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union ended in failure and collapse — the former in 1917, the latter less than a century later in 1991.

The search for a new doctrine did not end unsuccessfully because it never really began.

To appreciate that this process did not begin with the absurd ban on the “falsification of history” or the “new historiography” trumpeted by Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky, just peruse the preamble of the Russian Constitution.

It speaks of “historically established state unity,” “revering the memory of ancestors who have passed on to us their love for the fatherland” and “reviving the sovereign statehood of Russia.”

On Nov. 19, an Investigative Committee task force teamed up with riot police in an attempt to detain a citizen allegedly involved in the criminal withdrawal of a huge sum of money. The person’s name is not as important as the fact that the police staged the operation in the center of Moscow in broad daylight against the backdrop of an unprecedented level of excitement over the revival of the Russian state.

The police operation was a complete failure.

To better understand the circumstances, note that the figure sought by police is Ramzan Tsitsulayev, whom Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov named one year ago as that republic’s envoy to Ukraine. The men who managed to thwart the sting operation were Chechens, and the region where Tsitsulayev is hiding out — and from where he mocks the Moscow police — is, of course, Chechnya.

That is the same republic where Moscow began operations 20 years ago to “restore constitutional order.”

Two weeks ago Moscow police detained and drove off with Magomed Aliyev, a young native of Dagestan who had come to visit his sister.  Aliyev resurfaced at a detention center in Stavropol, a regional center and a sort of outpost of the federal authorities in the North Caucasus. Aliyev was urgently hospitalized on Nov. 26 after he was repeatedly beaten and someone jabbed a pen in his eye.

Regardless of any crime the young man might have committed, the actions of the siloviki far overstep the bounds of legal procedure. It might seem that Stalinist terror and a failed state are at opposite ends of the spectrum. But terror, by definition, is an act that bypasses the rule of law and so indicates the failure of the state.

In one way or another, former Soviet leader Josef Stalin is the focus of many current leaders’ ideas concerning “restoration.” They erroneously quote Churchill — namely, that “Stalin came to power when Russia had only a wooden plow, and left it in possession of atomic weapons.”

It so happens that the world has never had to cope with a failed state holding a nuclear arsenal large enough to destroy all of humanity several times over. The world barely managed to avoid such a threat in 1991, but only with some intense diplomacy, significant financial outlays and a whole lot of nail-biting.

Russian fans of “reconstruction” would like a replay of those times. And despite blithe assurances from the Defense Ministry that the command and control structure of the country’s nuclear arsenal has been fully modernized, there is no guarantee that the final act in this dark drama will end as peacefully as it did the first time.

Ellen Brown writes:  Did the G20 know what they were doing when they whisked into Brisbane, posed for their photo ops, approved some proposals, made a show of roundly disapproving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and whisked out again. It was all so fast, they may not have known what they were endorsing when they rubber-stamped the Financial Stability Board’s “Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution,” which completely changes the rules of banking.

Deposits are now “just part of commercial banks’ capital structure.” That means they can be “bailed in” or confiscated to save the megabanks from derivative bets gone wrong.

Rather than reining in the massive and risky derivatives casino, the new rules prioritize the payment of banks’ derivatives obligations to each other, ahead of everyone else. That includes not only depositors, public and private, but the pension funds that are the target market for the latest bail-in play, called “bail-inable” bonds.

“Bail in” has been sold as avoiding future government bailouts and eliminating too big to fail (TBTF). But it actually institutionalizes TBTF, since the big banks are kept in business by expropriating the funds of their creditors.

It is a neat solution for bankers and politicians, who don’t want to have to deal with another messy banking crisis and are happy to see it disposed of by statute. But a bail-in could have worse consequences than a bailout for the public. If your taxes go up, you will probably still be able to pay the bills. If your bank account or pension gets wiped out, you could wind up in the street or sharing food with your pets.

In theory, US deposits under $250,000 are protected by federal deposit insurance; but deposit insurance funds in both the US and Europe are woefully underfunded, particularly when derivative claims are factored in.

Kept inviolate and untouched in all this are the banks’ liabilities on their derivative bets, which represent by far the largest exposure of TBTF banks.  tt is estimated that American banks have some $280 trillion in derivatives on their books.

All this fancy footwork is to prevent a run on the TBTF banks, in order to keep their derivatives casino going with our money. Warren Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction,” and many commentators warn that they are a time bomb waiting to explode.  When that happens, our deposits, our pensions, and our public investment funds will all be subject to confiscation in a “bail in.”