Yuri Felshtinsky: Putin and the Russian secret service want to take over the world.

Russian-American historian Dr Yuri Felshtinsky wrote a book called Leaders the Mobsters, in which he described the Bolshevik party as a sort of mafia where "almost no one died by a natural cause". According to him, this included the poisoning of Vladimir Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Maksim Gorky by Genrikh Yagoda on orders from Joseph Stalin, and the poisoning of Stalin on the orders of Beria. I'd like to see the evidence for any of this.

In 1998 Felshtinsky returned to Russia, met Alexander Litvinenko, a lieutenant colonel in the FSB, and wrote with him Blowing Up Russia, a book that describes the gradual takeover of Russia by the security services and details the FSB's involvement in a series of terrorist acts. These culminated in the apartment house bombings of September 1999 in which more than 300 people died and which were blamed on Chechens. This could be true, incredible though it sounds. Intelligent, well educated people I spoke to in Moscow told me they believed it.

In November 2006, Litvinenko died in London of acute radiation syndrome and Boris Berezovsky, who sponsored the book, died mysteriously.

Dr Felshtinsky argues, in this interview, that the Cheka or NKVD or KGB or now the FSB was liberated in 1991 from the control of the Communist Party and follows its own policy. In 2000, by the election of Putin as president of Russia, it took over an entire country, the first time in history this ever happened and one with nuclear weapons.

He thinks the invasion of Ukraine is intended to secure Putin's grip over Russia and a goal of world domination. There seems to me to be no evidence to support this thesis. John Mearsheimer's ideas are at the other end of the spectrum and are much more plausible, but even if Putin's original motivation was to get his retaliation in first, before America continued to arm Ukraine for years, war aims change after wars begin.