What Putin Really Wants Russia’s strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He’s really just a gambler who won big.
Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. Victor Minin, who has close ties to Russian intelligence, runs hacking competitions at universities all over Russia—his way, he says, of preparing future generations.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/
As Samuel Clemens cultivated his career as a successful writer and lecturer, he became more keenly aware of world politics. His attitude toward Russian monarchy shifted. Although he had devoted little attention to Russian politics between 1867 and 1881, a reading he delivered at the Hartford Monday Evening Club on March 22, 1886 indicates his opinion of the Russian aristocracy changed:
Power, when lodged in the hands of man, means oppression — insures oppression: it means oppression always: … give it to the high priest of the Christian Church in Russia, the Emperor, and with a wave of his hand he will brush a multitude of young men, nursing mothers, gray headed patriarchs, gently young girls, like so many unconsidered flies, into the unimaginable hells of his Siberia, and go blandly to his breakfast, unconscious that he has committed a barbarity …(2).
Clemens’s original manuscript indicates he was much more vehement in his call for assassination of the Czar than his published version. He urges Russian mothers to teach their children:
When you grow up, knife a Romanoff wherever you find him, loyalty to these cobras is treason to the nation; be a patriot, not a prig – set the people free (22).
http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/revolution.html#ref22
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INFLUENCE OF GEORGE KENNAN
A continued hardening of Clemens’s attitude against the Russian aristocracy, and indeed most of America’s, can be traced to a series of articles commissioned by Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.
http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/revolution.html
Boston Daily Globe, December 25, 1890, p. 3 CHRISTMAS GREETINGS … Mark Twain It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage, may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, escape [sic] the inventor of the telephone. MARK TWAIN. Hartford, Dec. 23
http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/DarkestRussiaPosterLOC.jpg