How One Man Influenced The Republican Party’s Transformation Into The Grand Old Putin Party
Part 1 of a 10 part series: the Grand Old Putin Party
The Republican Party’s dramatic shift into America’s pro-Russian party and subsequent election of Donald Trump as President shocked the world.
An even more surprising development has been watching the Republican Party circle the wagons around a Donald Trump whose entire campaign has high level Russian contacts, and their slavish devotion to the President — a womanizing pathological liar — as he attacks everyone in the world with shameless lies, except Vladimir Putin
Trump has nothing but gushing bromance and tweets of praise for Putin.
One man isn’t surprised.
Dr. Edward Dmitrievich Lozansky.
The true story of a Soviet emigrant and his journey from anti-communist dissident to establishment to Putinist reveals a deeper truth about the Republican Party.
Edward Lozansky was most likely another one of “The Americans,” but plainly he was the big one who got away.
He literally wrote the book in Russian on how to lobby The Hill.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s company “International Relations” was Lozansky’s publisher.
His story tells how GOP has been ideologically captured by Russian oil money and a Trump campaign built upon Putinism — the politics of hate, oligarchy and lies, especially lies — all of which Dr. Lozansky fed the highest ranks of the Republican Party apparatus with the opportunity to do business in oil-rich Russia.
These are the Chapters of the Grand Old Putin Party:
1. Prologue — Continues Below
2. Putin’s Propagandist Eerily Predicted Trump’s Relationship With General Flynn and Dana Rohrabacher Last Year
3. Putin’s Favorite Congressman Secretly Met With Paul Manafort After The FBI Warned Russian Agents Were Recruiting Him
4. The GOP’s Favorite Russian Professor Spent Decades Building Conservative Ties To Moscow
5. American University In Moscow: Linked To Russian State, But Fake Like TrumpU
6. Here’s Lozansky Introducing Republicans To The Father Of Russian Foreign Intelligence — And Putin’s Mentor
7. Soviet Human Rights Activists Believed Lozansky Worked With Russian Intelligence
8. From Orange Revolution To “Stars And Stripes Revolution”
9. Opinion: Edward Lozansky’s Russia Lobby Compromised The Republican Party
10. Opinion: Without Ed Lozansky, Trump-Russia Could Not Have Happened
Prologue
Republican ideology and the party’s gradual Russification culminated in their turn towards Putin this year.
The roots of the GOP sea change didn’t happen overnight, and weren’t solely a product of Trump’s political machinations.
It was the product of GOP leadership changing direction after decades of radical ideology, and fueled by Russian state-connected oil money ever since super lobbyist Jack Abramoff began doing business with NaftaSib in the 1990s until his prosecution in the mid-2000s whereupon ex-Trump Campaign manager Paul Manafort clearly took over the reigns of his Russian oil driven, dark money empire.
Even the NRA suddenly changed into a pro-Putin group after some targeted courting with love from Russia’s fake NRA.
Gallup reported a seismic shift in Republican opinion towards Vladimir Putin in February 2017. They wrote:
A major reason for the overall rise in Putin’s favorable rating this year is Republicans’ more positive views of the Russian leader, from 12% in 2015 to 32% today. This comes at a time when President Donald Trump wants to improve relations with Russia, after somewhat frosty relations between the two countries during Barack Obama’s presidency. Independents’ opinions of Putin also have grown more positive in the last two years, but to a lesser extent than Republicans’. Democrats’ views have become slightly less positive, with just 10% viewing Putin favorably today.
He Formed The First Young Republicans Club In The Soviet Union, But Soured On America After Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
Russian emigrant Edward Lozansky became a Republican shortly after arriving in America with an improbable story that led to Capital Hill and a 40-year career which has evolved into him becoming the dean of the Putin apologist propagandists in Washington, D.C.
The anti-communist crusader emigrated from Moscow to the United States via Rome in 1977 and since then quickly managed to ingratiate himself into the highest level of American politics and stay there for four decades.
Today, he’s sharing space in Moscow with Vladimir Putin’s top propagandist in Eastern Ukraine with his fake university.
Within months of arrival, his Soviet-themed Romeo and Juliet story of family separation became the lever through which he made friends in western New York’s Jewish community and how his story was quickly carried to the floor of the United States Congress by his Republican representative in the House.
Just weeks later, even President Jimmy Carter was lobbying for the cause of reuniting Lozansky and his family on the world stage.
Two years later, he joined the Young Republicans, and his wife Tatiana formed the first Young Republicans Chapter behind the Iron Curtain — just after Senators Jack Kemp and Bob Dole enacted a marriage in absentia ceremony for the Lozanskys inside the Capitol.
After Republicans rejected Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Lozansky’s love story with the GOP took an especially bitter, tragic twist.
Russian propaganda — and very specifically Dr. Lozansky’s opinion — holds the United States responsible for Eastern European “color” revolutions which have overthrown oppressive regimes, oligarchies and kleptocracies like exiled Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych.
It’s a viewpoint which for good reason, has drawn quite vociferous American dissent.
The Republican Party’s thorough indoctrination into the right-wing of Russian politics didn’t happen overnight.
Lozansky’s World Russia Forum invited people to Washington, D.C. for decades, often into the Senate’s inner sanctum.
His issues were on the floor of Congress since the late 1970s.
Through his friendship Paul Weyrich, Lozansky was involved in the conservative movement nearby the one man who created of nearly every significant conservative group — from A.L.E.C. to the Council for National Policy to the Free Congress Foundation, Heritage Foundation and the Krieble Foundation — which started in the 1980s and consumed Republican political thought in the 2000s and to this day.
He was also close with the Cato Institute.
Through the years, his associates from Russia and his associates in the United States government came to a singular conclusion about first Lozansky’s activities, and later with the entire Russia lobby’s attributes.
They both realized that Lozansky leaned unusually heavily towards right-wing or Republican politics, and rarely if ever towards Democrats.
Disingenuously, Lozansky had blamed that bias on lacking access to the elite Clinton administration in 2000 when the Navy’s CNA Corp. sponsored the World Russia forum. His friend Paul Weyrich told C-SPAN during the coup which ended Soviet rule, that he had personally “trained” the Russian official in charge of privatizing — read: making his friends wealthy on sweetheart deals — state-run companies and assets for President Boris Yeltsin all the way through 1996.
In retrospect, it seems plain that Dr. Lozansky targeted the conservative movement and Republican party with his Russian propaganda efforts.
And the professor’s efforts to Russianize the Republican Party succeeded to a terrifying degree.
We asked Edward Lozansky for a response to a list of questions about this series of reports. His answers are below:
Here are Edward Lozansky’s replies and our discussion:
A series of investigative reports The Grand Old Putin Party — co-authored by Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson.
