Charles Bausman is old money Pennsylvanian and speaks fluent Russian because his father was AP bureau chief in Sixties Moscow and because he later worked in Russia as a journalist and financier. He was also, by unhappy accident, a witness of the January 6th “Insurrection.” He chats to James about all this and more, including in a particularly terrifying section on why the Bolshevik revolution really happened and the important lessons we are currently not learning from it.Twitter handle is Cbausman
The ArkAbout Russia by people who live here - geopolitics, Christianity, history, culture, society.↓
James and Dick’s CHRISTMAS Special 2025Featuring Dick. And James. And Unregistered Chicken. And possibly some other special guests.
Not included in ticket price but available so you don’t starve/die of thirst: nice pizzas out of wood-fired ovens; street food.Tickets - £40
VIP Tickets - £120 including bell-ringing lesson, walk with James, front row seats, church tour
Location is: My neck of the woods. Northants. Nearest stations, Banbury/Long Buckby. Junction 11 of M40.
Friday, 28th November 2025. Starts at 5pm
https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/?section=events#events
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xxx
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me James Dellingpole and perhaps you can tell from my attire that I'm about to tell you the exciting news of the date, the long-awaited announcement of the date of the Dick and James Christmas special.
Now, those of you who came last year will know that this is, as the name implies, it is a very special event.
It's conveniently located in the middle of England in a lovely venue.
And there is, not included, but it's very reasonable.
There's really good pizza and really good sort of like beef stew, I think, we had last year.
It was very good anyway.
And we have entertainment.
We have obviously the highlight of the evening is a live podcast with me and not my special guest, just my guest, Dick.
Dick and I on stage chatting our usual interesting, digressive rubbish.
But the main thing, and I expect that unregistered chickens will be playing and I expect we might be singing Jerusalem and there might be some Christmas carols.
But mainly, you know, it's about you.
What people always say is, actually, they don't say this, but I think they feel it.
They don't say, actually, James was crap.
The other stuff was good.
They don't say that.
But this is me telling you, even though I'm good, even though you'll love to come and see me with Dick.
The best part for me is just like everyone really gets on.
It's like if you haven't met them, then they are the best friends you've ever met.
There's a really good atmosphere, really good atmosphere.
I think you would be seriously missing out if you didn't come.
I anticipate massive demand for tickets.
They sold out last year and they probably want to get in there early.
I'm trying to encourage you this year to use cash.
Cash is king.
We love cash.
We want to support cash.
So if you can pay by cash, it's better.
Also, I think then the money doesn't go into sort of administration fees for whatever the other thing is.
Anyway, I hope to see you there.
There'll be VIP tickets.
This time I'm going to get it sorted.
There will be bell ringing for the special VIP guests.
We might go to a different church.
I don't know, depending on what the requests are.
And maybe a walk with James as well.
It'll be lovely.
And you're going to love it.
So the date, the date, November the 28th.
November the 28th, James and Dick's Christmas special.
Details below this advert.
See you there.
You're going to love it.
To the Dellingpot.
To the Dellingpot.
With me, James Dellingpot.
I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
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Welcome to the Dellingpod, Charles Bausman.
Charles, I'm missing you already.
I spent a great time with you.
James.
It's great to see you.
In Moscow, yeah.
We had a great time.
I mean, nothing happened since I left.
Yeah, no, it was a fantastic time.
It was really fun.
Yeah, I mean, I sometimes think, why do I do this?
You know, I earn a relative pittance and, you know, I'm a pariah, apart from among my followers.
Just occasionally, this podcast comes really good.
And one of them was when I got this letter out of the blue, that I've been invited by the Moscow Patriarchate on a trip to Russia.
I thought, whoa.
Anyway, it turns out that it was largely thanks to you because you're a Dellingpod listener.
I'm a sharkling, and I have been for like four years.
So hardcore.
And so I better.
I mean, I know you quite well now.
I know you like my brother from another mother because we spent a week together just doing stuff, traveling in buses and sitting through, what would you call them?
When you sit around a table and you've got a man with a beard at the end, an archbishop or a Russian minister or whatever.
And these are both.
Well, though, we never did go to the banya.
Well, yeah, there's so much actually you missed.
And you're just going to have to come back.
And you should bring a crowd with you next time.
I'd love to come back to Moscow.
And see the rest of Russia, actually, because it's quite a big country.
I've gleaned on my fact-finding mission.
But part of the problem is that in the West, they're making it really difficult for you to visit Russia.
I mean, the Russians don't make it easier either.
You've got those incredibly complicated immigration forms to fill in.
And then you've got at the airport, you think you're through.
Like, I got to the airport and I thought, I saw this line in the immigration queue to see the man in the uniform where you deal fingerprints and stuff.
And I thought, there's only two people in front of me.
This is fantastic.
Russia is so much better than the West.
It's so much freer, man.
And then, of course, I go into the booth and the guy, I give my fingerprints and stuff.
And I think, yeah, I'm through.
I'm through.
And he says, five minutes.
Five minutes of what?
Five minutes, like, where?
Where do I go?
And so I just sort of left and hung out outside, wondering what this five minutes meant and where I was meant to be.
Anyway, ten minutes later, another young guy in uniform comes and escorts me with my passport to this area where there are lots of other people from all sorts of parts of the world.
Some of them look like they're from Mongolia away, that kind of thing.
One of them is an Italian who speaks Russian and he's very cross.
And you just wait there for like an hour.
And you'd warn me that this might happen.
So I knew it wasn't scary.
But nevertheless, I suddenly realized that it's very easy to paint a rosy picture of places like Russia just because just because you know the West sucks totally and it's in decline and it's run by really evil people.
But it doesn't mean to say that in Russia all is roses and sunshine.
Yeah, well, you know, I should just say about that thing that, you know, the same thing happened to me and I arrived like a day before you did.
And it had never happened to me in 30 years of coming to Russia.
So it's very unusual.
And it's because of these security problems they're having in connection with the war.
And it's so easy for the Ukrainians to infiltrate into Russia.
And so they've come up with all these additional security measures.
But it's not typical, actually.
It's usually not a problem going through Russian customs.
And so you probably, you know, there was a reason God wanted you to experience that.
But it's not typical.
Don't scare your audience.
You know, the only inconvenient thing about coming to Russia is having to fly through Istanbul or someplace around there.
Otherwise, it's not that bad.
And, you know, there are travel agencies that can take care of the visa and all that stuff.
The reason it was a little bit inconvenient for you is because the patriarch had rushed this thing at the last minute.
And so they didn't have time to deal with the visas and everything.
But no, it's not that hard to get here.
That's actually a myth.
And plenty of folks come.
And it's a must-come place.
I mean, it really, you know, it's one of these great, great countries.
And I hope we can get into this whole Russian Revolution thing today because that is just, I think that's going to blow your audience's minds when you hear the story.
Do you know what?
I completely forgot we were going to talk about that.
I thought this is just going to be a kind of James's greatest hits of his Russian experiences.
We should do that again.
I mean, that's, yeah, but, no, can we talk about the revolution?
Because it's such a-No, we can.
First of all, I think such a rabbit hole.
It's such a red pill.
But anyway, yeah.
I agree with you.
I think we ought to put you in context first, though.
And you've got to tell me the story that I forbade you from telling me because I said, look, if you're going to tell me something interesting, you're going to have to talk about it on the podcast because I don't like having to feign surprise.
That's something I've heard before.
So obviously people can tell listening to you that you are American.
either that or you're a Russian speaker with a bloody good American accent.
Um, that, that, um, how did you, I mean, so what's your, what's your story?
What's your background?
Okay, so in a nutshell, after a privileged and completely wasted sort of elite education, I came to Moscow in the late 80s and worked in journalism for about three years.
And my family had a background with Russia, a love affair with Russia, because my dad had been the Associated Press Bureau Chief here from 68 to 72 in the flower of the Brezhnev years.
And yeah, and so I'd always had an interest in Russia.
George, can I just interrupt you there?
I say 95% of the listeners are going to hear the words AP Bureau Chief in Moscow and CIA.
I mean, come on.
Well, listen, we talked about this before.
I mean, you know, maybe my, listen, knowing my dad, he'd be the worst CIA agent, but, you know, maybe you did have to have some kind of like relationship with the agency to get a job like that.
But it's not the kind of thing you tell your kids, you know?
I'm kind of like a Tucker Carlson.
I'm like a Tucker Carlson person.
Like our fathers had similar careers.
Well, that's not going to reassure a lot.
They're just going to be digging deeper here.
Like a lot of people think Tucker Carlson's a spook as well.
I know that.
I know that.
But I don't think he is, actually.
Well, no, maybe he is.
But that doesn't mean that all spooks are bad, basically, right?
But I'm not a spook.
I'd be a great spook.
I probably sort of missed my calling.
Yeah, you would be a great spook.
Anyway, so what do your dad was AP Bureau chiefs, which is why you speak the Ruski very well?
I mean, you almost speak it like a native, don't you?
Yeah, but it wasn't really because of that, because we were very segregated from Russians.
We weren't encouraged to mingle with Russians or have Russian friends.
I didn't go to Russian school, and I never spoke Russian as a kid.
I'm just, I'm good at languages.
I can just pick up languages pretty easily.
And I've got a whole system for learning them and everything that I've developed myself.
So it's kind of like a gift.
Yeah, well, can you, I know you mentioned that.
Can you please rush out your system?
Because I do want to learn.
I'll tell you what.
It's not something I can explain in like five minutes or something.
I mean, if I had to just summarize it in a nutshell, I would say, just forget about everything else and memorize words.
Just crash cram words into your head.
And everything else comes by itself.
So I was never a grammar guy.
I hated grammar.
I never did it.
And what you really need to be able to understand and then start to speak a language is just a very large vocabulary.
So you actually could understand every word that's thrown at you.
And so that's the basis of the method.
But hey, listen, I would love to come back and talk about it some more because I'm talking to some programmers about rolling this out and making it available to the public.
And, you know, we're a couple months out, but I would love to tell you guys about it in more detail because it's fascinating.
I'm only interested for selfish reasons.
I don't care about anyone else.
I just want to be able to learn quickly.
Oh, James.
Anyway.
Listen, no question.
We'll teach you Russian.
we're really good at it.
By the way, you're looking quite, is it, is it, is it humid there?
Or are you just these Russian apartments are completely overheated.
It's a side effect of having basically free energy.
And so they've turned on the heat in the apartment.
It's warm.
That would drive me nuts.
Because I can't open the windows because of the sodding mosquitoes.
No, mosquitoes are gone.
I honestly think that the last mosquito in Moscow managed to find you, Jen.
It found my blood because when I splattered it on the wall, it definitely had blood in it.
You know how I feel about it.
He was on a mission.
He was on a mission.
It was a demon, actually, and he was trying to get you.
Well, that was one of the questions I asked one of the monks, wasn't it?
I asked the abbot of a monastery, because we were having dinner, supper, in this room.
It was fish.
It was smoked fish because it was one of the numerous days in the Orthodox calendar where you can't eat meat.
And I saw these mosquitoes on the wall.
And I had to ask the abbot, who lives a fairly rigorous life in cells, which presumably got lots of mosquitoes in him.
I said, can you confirm my suspicion that mosquitoes are agents, demonic agents, that they work in league with demons?
And he said, no, he didn't think that was the case.
Which is disappointing.
And I suppose just goes to show that even monks can be fallible, because I don't think he's right.
I think mosquitoes are.
They're like mini vampires, which are obviously agents of the devil.
That's true.
That's true.
Yeah.
So, okay, your dad, and you also were in Russia as well.
You worked at the journalist, but you were also there as a financier of some kind, weren't you?
Yeah, so I basically realized after a while that journalism wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
And I spent the next 20 years working in finance and investments.
And did that through the 90s, you know, through that whole horrible period, which didn't seem horrible to us because we were living high on the hog, you know, as these privileged Westerners.
And then through the 2000s.
And then in 2014, people don't remember this very much, but it really looked like a major war would break out between Russia and Europe.
And when the whole Crimea crisis happened and the Ukrainian events started in 2014.
So my business completely dried up because nobody was going to invest in Russia at the time.
And so I obviously was able to read and understand the Russian media perfectly well, explaining what was going on.
And it was clear to me that the Western media was just lying through their teeth about what was happening and what had caused it.
And so me and a couple other expats said, listen, we've got to do something because this looks bad.
This could be turned into a massive tragedy.
And we actually considered putting up a buying an ad in the New York Times.
You know how people do when they want to get like a message out, a full-page ad about something.
And then we said, you know, no, no, what we'll do is we'll start a website and we'll just write some articles and try and put people straight.
What's really going on?
And that's what we did.
We called it Russia Insider.
And we started that in September.
And, you know, by Christmas, we had gotten like 40 million views on the thing.
I mean, it was insane.
And it was really fun.
And it was just basically pro-Russian stuff, but from a much from a conservative Christian, much more kind of like hard-hitting angle, like than RT, for example, or sort of Russian, usual Russian stuff.
And it ended up getting really, really big.
It was so much fun that I said, well, this is way more fun than negotiating loans and investments.
And I did that for the next six years.
And the thing got absolutely enormous.
When we finally stopped doing it in like 2020, we tallied everything up and we'd gotten 1.3 billion views on all our platforms.
So we were like innovators in the information space, you know, in the sort of the whole new media world.
And we were a sizable player.
We were the second biggest source of news about Russia in the world after RT.
And we're actually doing a lot better than RT by many metrics.
And I got to be pretty well known because of that.
Did you make any money out of it?
No.
So that's why I eventually shut it down because, you know, it's funny.
I came from a finance background, right?
So I absolutely knew how to present businesses, sell them, market them.
I knew the people with the money, both in Russia and in the West.
And for the first two years, I must have spent 30% of my time raising money because I realized I had a hot potato in my hands, right?
And this could get really big.
And it turned out to be just politically impossible on both sides.
People were just scared to invest.
And I finally, you know, we did crowdfundings.
We did three crowdfundings.
We raised about $150,000 that way.
And there was serious excitement around it.
And people were really thrilled with what we were doing because it was like a brush of fresh air in the media space about Russia.
And then I finally said, look, this is just stupid.
I'm not going to waste my time raising money anymore.
And it's way more fun just putting out fantastic content.
So that's what we did.
And I just ramped the thing up and it got really big.
But I basically had to fund it myself.
And I basically, it was exhausting.
It was like 12 hours a day, seven days a week for like six years.
And I finally said, look, I think we've done our part here.
We're the good guys.
Yeah, I don't know anything about financing or monetizing, as you know, because we talked about this.
But I can infer, it's fairly obvious that when you're running a project like that, if you take money from the Russian state, you're instantly compromised as a kind of evil Russian bought and paid for propagandists.
And no American or no one in the West is going to back you because no one of any significance because we are de facto already at war with Russia, aren't we, in the West?
I mean, it's happening and no one's acknowledging it.
And so it's no good for any kind of big interests on this side, on the Western side.
So all you've got left is kind of the subscriptions model, which is never easy.
So I can see why you could, I mean, is that right?
Is that a fairest estimate of why you couldn't make money out of it?
Well, I wouldn't agree with that really, because I would have no problem taking money from Russian sources, be they government or private individuals, as long as there's no strings attached, right?
Yeah, if you retain control and somebody invests in your venture, but they're not telling you what to do, then who cares where the money's coming from?
I totally agree with that, but at the same time, you're always going to be open, even if there are no strings attached, you're always going to be open to the charge by your enemies that there are strings attached.
Yeah, but go ahead, I don't care.
They're also being paid by the nefarious sources, the USAID and all, you know, all this media is like propped up by their own governments and by the very worst elements of Western society and the worst, nastiest people in the Western government.
So listen, it's not so much important where your money's coming from as long as there's no strings attached.
And there are lots of examples of successful, you know, very desirable media properties that grew up like that, that way, like Zero Hedge and The Uns Review and many other websites, LifeSight News.
They all bootstrap their way up one way or another.
Yeah, you are quite like me.
You do have an innocent faith that if your motives are pure and if your watchword is the truth, then it doesn't matter what kinds of brickbacks the enemy slings at you.
Yeah, no, I think they're so full of crap, honestly, that they're the ones who are vulnerable to attack.
And this is my, like, what was my attitude throughout the whole venture was, you know, people just hold back way too much.
They're way too polite.
And you should just get out there and just rip them, you know.
I won't say it.
But anyway, and that's what we did, and that's why people liked us.
One of the things I noticed when I went to Russia, well, particularly during that meeting we had with the most senior Russian politician that we had a sort of round table with.
And I'll always remember it for two reasons.
One of which is that there were these delicious cake things on the table.
Like, what were they?
Those pie things.
Jams.
Yeah, and I didn't want to have one during the meeting because I was sort of focused on getting my question in and stuff.
And I wasn't that hungry.
I think we just had a sort of businessman's lunch or something.
And so at the end, I asked for a big cardboard container, a doggy takeaway.
And the secretary woman filled this thing with goodies.
And they were meant for me, or some of them were.
And that was the last I ever saw of them.
But the second reason I remember it is because you and I made a good case to this senior politician saying, look, your PR is really rubbish.
You have a very viable case for what's happening in Ukraine.
It's not as it has been presented in the Western media, which is pure propaganda.
As far as the Western media is concerned, Ivor Putler invaded innocent sovereign state Ukraine led by Hiro Zelensky, who has never played the piano with his penis or snorted a line of coke or been to gay parades in New York.
That's a complete lie.
This guy is a hero.
Ukraine is a model of democracy.
And the evil Russians have sent their tanks in because they're hateful and because they're led by Putnam.
So that's the Western.
Yeah, actually for no reason at all.
They just did it.
For no reason, just for the shits and giggles.
That's the kind of thing he does.
And he won't stop at after Kiev, Paris, London.
That's what Ivor Putner wants to do.
So this is the people at home are thinking, well, I better put a blue and yellow flag up my flagpole and outside my house.
Even though I couldn't place Ukraine on a map, I know it's the most important, beautiful, democratic country in the world.
And we should go to war with these bastards because they are so evil.
I mean, the Russians.
That's a person would think, wouldn't they, if they were told that story and they didn't have any other information?
They would think that.
Yeah, because, you know, I mean, it means they're good, decent people.
They hear that hard, horror, you know, that's true.
I can't really send my three democracy to die in a ditch, be droned to death for this country I've never heard of before, but and it's a flag I previously couldn't identify, but now I know it's blue and yellow, and I care so much.
I will kill my children for this country's freedom.
I suppose I do witness this, and it makes me quite frustrated, to say the least.
So I share, and I have shared in the past your desire to kind of make people aware there is at least a counter-narrative, that it's not quite as presented in the media.
So we were saying to this guy, we can mention his name, can't we?
Yeah, he was called Tolstoy.
Yeah, Pyotr Tolstoy, a relative of the great author.
The greatest novelist who's ever lived.
I had arguments about people, this, about Dostoevsky.
Tolstoy is a better novel.
Tolstoy.
Tolstoy ahead.
Tolstoy?
Hello?
Hello, Dostoevsky groupies.
He was good, but he wasn't.
Tolstoyevsky had better things to say, but Tolstoy was the better word painter.
Totally.
Another thing we agree on.
So we were trying to explain to this guy.
And there was a point where he said, I have tried it.
Obviously, he couldn't speak English.
He said, I've tried to explain this many times.
I have explained this to senators in America.
I have explained this to MPs in Britain.
And I said to him, hello?
These people are puppets.
They have no autonomy.
Whatever you tell them, of course they're going to go, net.
Of course they're not going to believe what you're saying because they're not interested, because their controllers demand that they're not interested.
If you want to get your message out, you've got to reach the people who are, you've got to bypass the politicians and bypass the mainstream media and speak to the internet, to speak on blogs and podcasts and things.
And I did this to a degree when I interviewed a Swiss intelligence guy called Jacques Bo, who briefed me on the causes of the colour revolution in 2014, people being burned alive in Odessa, the mistreatment of Russians in the Donbass by the new crowning incoming Ukrainian regime, which has been replaced by the magician.
And so on.
These are simple facts that you need to get out.
And do you remember the joke he told?
I don't.
What was it?
He told us a Russian joke, which for me was emblematic.
I told this to Dick, and Dick didn't understand it.
He said, yes, I will tell you a joke.
There are two Russian tanks.
They are riding into Kiev.
One tank commander says to another, what a shame we lost the information war, or something like that.
Or so we lost the information war.
In other words, as far as he's concerned, it doesn't matter because what will be what will be on the battlefield.
But that seems to be stupid.
That's incredibly stupid because it comes at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and vast wasted treasure.
So, no, that's silly.
But Russians like to do that.
That's a very common conversational technique is to answer with a joke.
Alleged joke.
Well, I can see the humor in that.
Like, who cares about the information war?
Look, we got tanks and rockets.
Like, you know.
He was really intransigent, wasn't he?
And what it made me realize was a point I've kind of made earlier in the chat, which is that it's very easy to project your fantasies on other countries.
So lots and lots of people who will be listening to this podcast.
I don't blame them either.
Will be thinking, oh, we love Russia.
It's got family values.
It takes its Christianity seriously.
It's got, well, as I discovered, it's got really good food.
And it doesn't spray the hell out of everything.
And there's lots of things to love about Russia.
But it's easy to go from there to, they're so based, they're so right about everything.
And what one has to remember is most people in Russia are normies too.
They're not awake.
They're normies.
They buy their propaganda.
Yeah, although I would say that just across the board, Russians are more awake than Westerners.
And, you know, Russia is that most rabbity holy place you can imagine.
They have a natural knack for conspirac and conspiracy thinking.
And they have this great, you know, soulful quality that they can sort of sense things and intuit things.
I just like that.
Remember that woman at that art academy who not having like even like spent much time thinking about the Charlie.
Oh, it was obviously like a just a.
I've got a choice.
I've got I've got to tell that story.
From my perspective.
So, it's our last day.
It's my last evening in Moscow.
And I've been denied the chance to go to a banyan because, as always in Russia, I imagine, an event that was supposed to last an hour has extended into three hours.
And it's all very nice because we've been...
So it's...
What's the art academy called?
The Glazonov Academy.
Which kept sort of the traditions of painting alive, actual life drawing and sculpture and things like that alive through the communist dictionary.
Classical drawing and painting as it was practiced until World War I. So while the CIA was busy funding avant-garde and post-modernism to undermine evil communists, ironically, in Russia, in defiance of the communists who hated everything, people like Glazonov's father.
Yeah.
What was he called?
Ilya.
Ilya Gloria.
Ilya Glazonov was keeping the traditions of keeping the canon of Western art alive and the traditions and stuff.
Anyway, so we went to look at this academy and I missed.
We both missed the gorgeous division.
The girl.
We were standing outside.
Oh yeah, there was just an absolute stunner down there, wasn't it?
Yeah.
In the building.
Yeah.
She went into the building and I said, well, I missed her.
I don't know what she was doing.
James, she was just the most beautiful.
And I kind of wanted to see one of these types of Russian beauty.
Just for aesthetic reasons.
And you and I Sneaked out for a fag Because we were being given a tour By each department And after a while it got quite exhausting We nipped off for a fag.
We got back, joined the others, and they said, you missed her.
What?
The girl.
The angel.
The girl was in the next place we were shown to.
And we saw her up close and she was just amazing.
And you were having a cigarette.
Anyway, so at the end, we went to raw milk here.
We're going to remind me to go back to the raw milk theme.
So we were in the dining room with these lovely bits of Russian folk art collected from far-flung parts of the former Soviet Union and oil paintings.
And it was just lovely.
And they brought out the Bellinis.
We didn't have vodka.
We had championski.
Well, we had, it was, what's the Italian stuff called?
Prosecco.
Prosecco, yeah.
I mean, anyway, and we're drinking toasts and stuff.
And a young man, about my son's age, said, and I was very sorry to hear about Charlie Kirk.
And I looked at you and I said, Charles, shall I tell him that I don't think he's dead?
It was all faked.
And you said, no, James, I don't think this is the time to bring it up because it's like, you know, it's too much.
And then, completely unprompted, the wife, our hostess, our hostess, who was a former actress.
She studied directing.
directing she said i don't believe this was completely i hadn't put in my top knee hate this This was unprompted.
She said, I don't believe any of it.
We said, why?
She said, well, as a director, you come to see when people are acting.
And this guy was clearly acting.
And I said, have you been put up to this?
And you write a lot of people.
The screenplay also.
You kind of like, you know, it's all like.
Yeah.
No.
So that is so Russian, right?
That is a typical Russian ability to see through the bullshit and have an innate distrust of authority and what's being told you from a pie.
And it served the Russian people so well so many times, especially during COVID, for example.
People were just like, this is bullshit.
We're not going to do this.
That's the thing, isn't it?
Because I learned that the Russians were no better than all the Western governments pushing it.
Yeah, the government was.
No.
It was the people who just came through.
People just weren't having it.
Yeah.
They were fancy.
So let it not be assumed.
No one is saying, oh, Putin was so based, he invented the Sputnik vaccine, which wasn't a vaccine, just a trick to save everybody.
No, he was pushing in the same old shit.
The difference was that the Russians yet not having this stuff coming out.
Yeah, yeah.
So they've got this very healthy, you know, kind of like immune system against bullshit and oppression.
And in a way, the United have been inoculated against it by their bitter, bitter, bitter experience under communism.
And that's something that's just not appreciated enough to this day.
just how horrific it was.
You know, it was...
It's important for the West to understand what Russia went through because they should realize this could happen to them.
That's the point.
That's the main thing.
It sounds like you're segueing into neatly into your analysis of what happened.
Actually, yes, that was a segue in a way.
Should we get into that?
I mean, listen, if you want to talk about the trip and everything, we can do the revolution thing somehow.
No, we can always weave it in my inimitable fashion.
Okay.
Let's do it.
Because it's super interesting.
And I can't do it justice in the amount of time we have here, but I can at least give a preview.
And then you'll get an idea.
But before you do, I might have to let you...
Dog?
I was going to see if the dog is letting in.
Um.
I'll tell you Charles, it is a bloody nightmare here.
You think you've got problems in Russia with your sweaty apartment, overheated apartment.
We've got, it's a nice day here.
It was really bad over the weekend because there was clear, you know how weather manipulation was blowing, It was like being in a wind tunnel.
It wasn't natural.
It was just created by harp and NexRAV and stuff.
Now we've got a nice, we've been allowed a nice day.
And the ladybirds are going mental.
And I had the back door open so the dog can go in and out of the garden, but the ladybirds were swarming in.
And I tried to get rid of them.
And I wanted to close the door because the chimney had come in, but I didn't want to squash them on the door jam.
So I was trying to this is why I was late starting this podcast.
I tried to retrieve them from the door jam.
And they more and more kept crawling.
It was like that Hitchcock film, The Birds, except with Lady Birds.
Tell me about the Russian Revolution.
Okay, so listen.
So the way I found out about this, it's important to realize that Russia's number two churchman in Russia.
And I call him that not because that's his titular status as number two.
He's just as a personality, he's sort of the most influential churchman in Russia after the patriarch.
And he's a guy named Bishop Tikhon.
Tikhun.
And he's kind of famous in the West too, if you know about Russia.
The FT has did a big profile on him.
A lot of the big media have written about him.
Does the West hate him?
Huh?
Does the West hate him?
Oh yes.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
They're always trying to demonize them.
Anyway, so he made this documentary film.
It came out in 2021, just completely turning everything that people in Russia and the West think about the revolution on its head.
And it's important to understand who this guy is.
So he became a monk in the 80s.
And then he had this meteoric career as a church person in the 90s.
And he wrote the best-selling book in Russian history after Tolstoy.
It's called Everyday Saints.
And it's just sort of a collection of stories of his impressions of orthodoxy in Russia, like in the 80s, when he was a young monk.
And it's a wonderful book.
But anyway, he became this massive celebrity because of this book.
And this book just really completely became a phenomenon in Russia.
And millions of people converted to Christianity because of it.
And it was published.
It was beautifully translated in English by a friend of mine, Julian Lowenfeld from New York City.
And so it's available and it's quite popular in the West too, especially in Orthodox circles, like Orthodox.
I don't want to get this book.
No, it's this book.
That's great.
I've got a copy of my mention.
See, Everyday Saints.
So anyway, so he became this celebrity.
He made a ton of money on the book.
They put him in charge of a monastery in Moscow where we went that time, remember, to meet with Mother Cornelia and Father Paul.
It's one of the first states.
What was it called?
Sratinsky Monastery.
And he became close to Putin, and there were some rumors that he was Putin's confessor.
And they have a very tight relationship.
They're very good friends for all these years.
And then from there, everything, he takes on these massive projects and he turns them into these incredible success stories.
Like that giant cathedral that was on the territory of that monastery, you know, the modern one.
I don't know if he went into it.
Anyway, it was right through that big picture window at the table we were sitting at.
There was this giant modern sort of thing there.
You know, an enormous thing.
And it's a monument to the new martyrs of Russia, which means the people who, the Christians who suffered under communism.
And, you know, getting something like that built is impossible in Russia and it costs a bomb and it's just whatever.
But he had no problem.
He managed to raise the money from the people and got tons of money from the government and wealthy people and they put up this enormous thing.
And sort of everything he does is larger than life.
And he's a real powerful influence.
There's nothing like it in the West.
I can't think of any sort of spiritual leader in the West that has this kind of like, you know.
It's just what, not even our new Archbishop of Canterbury.
This is Schwatfronner.
No.
Nothing like it.
So his latest thing is that he keeps having to be sent off to like different dioceses to sort of like keep him further away from power because he's too powerful already.
And so they sent him down to Crimea to be the bishop of Crimea.
And he has built this enormous reproduction of a Byzantine 1200 AD, you know, like the year 1200 Byzantine city on the shores of Crimea, right next to Sevastopol, the military base.
And it was entirely financed by the Russian army and built by the Russian army's construction unit.
And it's absolutely extraordinary.
It's like kind of like an amusement park, but that's like a bad way of describing it.
It's more like a historical theme park or something, you know, replete with like massive cathedrals and reconstructed Roman buildings and amphitheaters.
And there's people running around there in historic.
It's like Williamsburg, if you've ever been to America.
They like the bit of kitchen, don't they?
The Russians.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And anyway, so he's like, he does things on a grand scale.
So when he makes a film, it's a big deal, right?
And it was heavily promoted in Russian media, shown on all the main TV stations, you know, all over the internet and everything like that.
And anyway, and he turned the, it was just kind of mind-boggling because he turned the whole narrative on its head.
And he basically said, look, guys, Russians, you have to realize this.
Every single thing you've been taught about, told about the Russian Revolution is not just a lie.
It's an inverse of the truth.
And it's extremely important for you to understand this now because you're on the verge of making the same mistake Russian society made on the eve of the revolution.
And he was warning against them being seduced by Western propaganda, basically.
And so let me, I'll just run through the basic fairy tale that we've all been taught and told in our schools, in our movies, by our history, our professors at university and everything like that.
So the basic thing that we've been taught is that Russia was very backwards.
It was oppressive.
The ruling class were corrupt and incompetent.
And especially the Tsar himself was a weak guy who got pushed around by his wife and the dastardly Rasputin, who's kind of like one of the most demonized and defamed and lied about people in history.
And Russia was behind in literacy.
Russia was behind in medical care.
Their economy was not competitive and on and on and on.
And then you had these miserable proletarians in the cities and these miserable peasants, serfs, and the countryside being exploited by this miserable system.
And it was all rotten and it was all bad.
And then when World War I happened, of course, this incompetent and backward society couldn't handle a modern war, was practically defeated by the Germans in the first years.
This put so much of a strain on the Russian system that there were food shortages and soldiers at the fronts without bullets and riots in the streets and miserable poor people.
And they rose up in anger and overthrew this ridiculous system and welcomed the communists in.
So that's the basic lie that we're told.
Now, here's the thing.
Every single thing about that is not just not true.
It's an inverse of the truth.
It's exactly the opposite.
And what really happened in the revolution is absolutely mind-blowing.
So first of all, starters.
Russia was not backwards.
It was one of the, if not the most impressive and dynamic economies and societies and civilizations in the world.
And furthermore, they were on such a growth track that they were poised to become like the world hegemon.
There was like nothing that was, it didn't seem like anything could really stop them.
They led in technology.
They led in social reforms.
They had workmen's insurance and compensation before Western European countries, before America did.
They had very progressive legislation in that regard.
They had public schooling.
They were cutting edge in medicine.
And they were also cutting edge in technology in all kinds of industries.
They had the most advanced air force in the world.
Their scientists and their inventors were making sort of breakthrough after breakthrough.
And it really looked like it was going to be the country that was going to dominate Europe and dominate basically the world.
It was the only comparable country at the time was America in terms of its dynamism and growth potential.
And so it was led in this, you know, for 20 years before the revolution, or 25 years, by Tsar Nicholas II, who, by all accounts, was an extremely successful ruler.
And he was a strong man and a good man and sort of like just kind of like the ideal, the ideal of what a ruler should be, at once very competent, but also very fair, very decent, very pious, an amazing family man, and just a hero any way you look at it.
So and there were all sorts of things about Russia that were, you know, for example, there's this myth that, well, it was very repressive and they had the secret police and they had censors and they were shipping off decent, you know, democratically minded reform types to Siberia.
And that's not true either.
In fact, there was almost complete freedom of the press.
There was some censorship, but it was basically ineffective and impossible to enforce.
And there was a, you know, a lot of freedom of speech and there was a parliament and there were opposition parties and opposition newspapers and all kinds of people being able to say whatever they want and this relentless, relentless attacks and demonization of the Tsar from the yellow press, making up stories about Ras Putin and so on and so forth.
And most of all, Russia was a Christian country and a Christian government that put Christianity first.
It was the most Christian country in the world.
And the Russian people were the most Christian people in the world.
Let's see.
And so then we get to World War I. So what happened at World War I?
There were people in Europe who really wanted this war.
And they really needed Russia to come in on the side of England and France.
And the Russians were sitting on the fence.
And they had good reason, you know, they were doing great.
And they didn't need, they didn't want to get into some kind of massive war with Germany and Austria.
And so they held back and they held back.
And the British kept sweetening the pot.
And they kept saying, okay, well, come on, join us in our alliance.
We'll give you this.
We'll give you that.
We'll give you this.
And when they finally, it all ended when the English said, okay, here's what we'll do.
If we win this war, Russia will get Constantinople and control of the Dardanelles.
And this would have made Russia absolutely invincible as a world power.
Because I don't know if you know the whole McKinder, I don't know, I'm forgetting the name of the theory.
It's the idea that if you control the world island, you control the world.
I'm forgetting the name.
It's a sort of geopolitical theory from the 19th century.
And it was just almost too good to be true, because this is what Russia had wanted for centuries.
And England had struggled mightily to prevent Russia from getting with the Crimean War and similar things.
And Russia and Britain were at that time the great global rivals for the main sort of empires of the world.
And so the Russians, against the advice of Rasputin, who was clairvoyant and told the Tsar, if you go to war in this war, your entire family will be killed and your country will be awash in a sea of blood.
And the Tsar ignored him.
Well, he took him very seriously because he genuinely liked Ras Putin and valued his advice, but he just couldn't turn down this incredible offer.
So then what happened?
So then the war started, and the Russians did very well.
And they absorbed like, you know, literally half of the German military might and the Austrian might in those eastern offenses and gave up almost no land.
So this idea that Russia was doing badly during the war is completely wrong.
There were a couple of major battles which were setbacks, but they were exceptions.
And by and large, they had basically exhausted the Germans.
And the thing about Russia was it had this, because it had this enormous dynamic economy that didn't have, you know, that didn't have any sort of borders to the east, and unlimited manpower and huge amount of agricultural production, that they were in the best condition of all the belligerents in the war.
During World War I, there was serious food shortages throughout Europe, everywhere, including England, but also especially in Germany.
And by the third year of the war, the Germans were literally starving.
And I have a personal anecdote about that.
My grandfather was a teenager during World War I, and he was a typical, you know, blonde, tall, blonde, blue-haired German guy, six foot one, but he had small feet.
He had like size seven shoes.
And I asked him, Papa, like, why do you have small feet?
And he said, because we were starving during World War I. We literally had nothing to eat.
We ate, you know, soup made out of potato rinds.
And, you know, that it happened when my feet were growing.
So my feet never grew.
But anyway, so this is a real thing, right?
Well, guess what?
In Russia, there was nothing like that.
All the European countries had food rationing and problems with supplies and everything.
Russia never had any food shortages.
And there was plentiful grain and vegetables and meat and milk and honey and everything you could imagine.
And on the eve of the revolution, there was an article in one of the St. Petersburg newspapers complaining that the price of lemons had gotten a little bit higher than it used to be.
So that was the extent of the food problem in Russia at the time.
And what's furthermore is that Russia had completely militarized their economy, and it took them a longer time to do it than the West, but they eventually got it done by the third year of the war.
And they had raised an enormous army.
They had equipped it with the latest equipment.
hold on Sorry.
The kids got home.
And they were poised to march to Berlin in the spring of 17.
And the Germans knew it.
The Germans knew that their goose was cooked.
And it was very much sort of a foreplay of what would eventually happen in World War II.
And the German general staff, you know, their communiques and their telegrams survive and have been studied by historians.
And they basically said, they just said, look, we're done.
Russia's won.
There's nothing we can do to stop this.
They've got way more guns.
They've got 10 times more soldiers.
They don't have any supply problems.
They've completely militarized their economy.
And they can't be stopped.
We cannot stop them.
And so in preparation for this offensive, the Russian military created special uniforms that the soldiers were going to use in the victory parade in Berlin.
And they were those, I don't know if you know from those Russian Revolutionary hats that the soldiers wore, they were kind of like these peaked hats and they had the star on the forehead.
Well, what those peaked hats were were actually they were like stylistically like designed hats by Russian designers to symbolize Russian peaked helmets of like the Middle Ages, like when Alexander Nevsky was fighting the Teutonic Knights and so on.
And instead of a red star, there was supposed to be, they had made these double-headed eagles, a symbol of the Tsar.
And so everything was set, right?
And the English also realized, well, we're screwed now because we promised the Russians the dark now and a large part of Eastern Greece.
And basically, they're going to be able to control the whole Middle East and the whole thing.
We're done.
So they organized a color revolution.
They had been working on this for decades.
They had gotten all these Russian conspirators among the sort of wealthy elites of Russia.
And Your favorite guy, Lord Milner, shows up in Moscow at the end of 1916, and he goes to the czar and he says, Look, it was almost like a mafia kind of like shakedown, right?
He basically shows up and he says, Okay, what we need you to do is change your governing system, give up your autocracy, give power to a popular elected parliament,
put French and English generals in charge of all your armies, and basically give up power and become a titular monarch.
If you don't do this, we're going to take you out.
You're gone.
And he must have been, he must have been expecting a well, you're doing very well, Nicholas, in this war against the Germans.
Keep it up.
And instead, he gets just Lord Milner delivering this ultimatum.
Exactly.
And Nicholas II was very polite.
You know, he didn't fly into a rage or something.
He was a very decent, sort of good man, good, good, solid man.
And he just politely told Lord Milner that his demands were unacceptable and that he should head back to London.
And that's when the British put into operation their plan to depose the Tsar.
And so what happened when the actual revolution happened, it was a conspiracy by the top generals and a number of businessmen in St. Petersburg, and they faked a food shortage.
So they were the people who ran the trains and kept the provisions coming in and so on and so forth.
And they deliberately stopped that.
They went to the workers of the largest and best paid factories in St. Petersburg and basically did what happened in 2014 in Kiev.
They paid these people money to go out on the streets.
They'd been already sort of agitating and starting to push this idea of like we need to have like a Western system and so on.
And they handed out an enormous amount of free vodka and prostitutes.
And they basically ginned up like a fake riot, okay, and then faked the food shortages and spread rumors about food shortages.
And that's how that uprising in St. Petersburg happened.
And then at the same time, Nicholas's generals basically stopped his train out towards the front and told him that he had to abdicate.
And it's not clear that he actually did because there's no official abdication letter or anything.
And the only thing that was ever produced was this type piece of paper with a pencil signature that doesn't really seem like an official document.
And the thing is that Nicholas was in detention for every day after that.
And so he was never able to come out and say, hey guys, I never abdicated.
And he also might have been threatened, where they might have told him, listen, if you make a peep about the fact that you are still the Tsar and you did not abdicate, we'll just murder you and we'll murder your children, whatever.
So, yeah, so that's what happened.
It was a coup, it was a takeout, and it happened with 90% of the country being very, you know, loving the czar and being very positive about it.
And I should point out about this whole business about the, you know, the badly treated serfs and peasants and factory workers in the cities.
Well, that's not true.
The factory workers in Russia made better salaries than factory workers in England and had better standards of living.
And you didn't make it up to St. Petersburg, but there are blocks and blocks of these absolutely beautiful 19th century kind of like, you know, big apartment houses, ornate and nice and big apartments, you know, two or three rooms and so on.
Those were apartments of factory workers, of highly paid factory workers in Russia.
It wasn't uncommon for factory workers to have servants.
And anyway, so and this, and the peasants were the same way.
They were extremely prosperous and they were happy with their lot.
So then Tikhan asked the question in the film.
So, okay, so if everything was so great, then what was rotten?
Like, why did this amazing civilization, one of the greatest civilizations ever, right?
I mean, their achievements, as you well know, like in literature, were extraordinary, but it wasn't just literature.
It was theology, every kind of fine art, you know, ballet, painting, architecture, on and on.
Just go across the board.
Russia was this incredible, like, wonderful civilization.
It's like, well, what was so rotten?
And what was rotten was that for three or four decades before that, the Russian elite, the elites, had become wokeified by 19th century understanding of that word.
So their newspapers were full of lies about the Tsar, you know, how great Europe was compared to Russia, how Russia was backwards, how Russia wasn't as good as Europe, how it had all this scurrilous rumors and stories about Rasputin,
who was, you know, I listened to your podcast with Conrad, and you touched on the Rasputin thing, and Konrad was, well, I'm not sure, you know, I don't know the story on Rasputin.
Well, I know the story on Rasputin.
Rasputin was a great guy, and he was a hero.
And there are people in, there's a large movement in Russia that thinks he should become a saint.
And that is why they attacked him so.
And that is why they made up these stories about him.
And we could do like a whole rabbit hole on Rasputin and what actually happened around him.
But he terrified Russia's enemies because he really represented the greatness of Russian spiritual omniscience.
And he was giving fantastic advice to the Tsar.
He was somewhat clairvoyant and he basically saw through what was going on and was trying to improve and save Russian society.
And they realized that they had to get rid of him.
And so that's why they murdered him.
And he was murdered basically, again, by the British, who got some Russian aristocrats up to the job, but it was all directed out of the British embassy.
And anyway, yeah, and then the British embassy during the revolution was like revolution headquarters.
Like the British ambassador was basically sitting there, you know, on the phone all the time and like coordinating with these collaborators among the Russian elites who did this.
And so here's why this is super important.
Okay, so Tikhan made this movie as a warning to Russians.
He's like, don't repeat the mistake your forefathers did 100 years ago.
You're getting fed a bunch of lies from the West.
And, you know, Russians are easily taken in by this stuff.
And don't believe it.
Don't believe it because you're being sold a bill of goods and you're being sold a lie by people who want to destroy your country.
And so, you know, I watched that and I thought, wow, that's really interesting.
But what was important to me was, I was like, wait a minute, this is exactly what's happening in our countries.
This is exactly the same thing.
You have basically good people in the middle class and the working class.
And then you have these really evil, corrupt elites who are, you know, just destroying their own countries.
And what's so terrifying about this whole thing is that, and I was alluding to this before.
Okay, so like a lot of Russians have like gone back and gone over this history and looked at everything and said, well, wait a minute, how did this happen?
Because this was one of the most amazing civilizations ever and one of the most lovely societies that was so full of goodness and so full of like success and prosperity and everybody was doing well and things were getting better and it was beautiful and the churches were beautiful and the religion was beautiful and it was very Christian and it was all great.
And then literally within three or four years, the country turned into a complete hellscape with the most extreme evil and torment and terror being meted out on these Russian people.
Most of them were completely, didn't deserve it.
I mean, just the regular Russian people, the peasants and the workers and everybody else, the middle class and the intellectuals and everything.
And I don't think Westerners have still understood how bad it was in those first, you know, things got better after the war, but in the 20s and the 30s, it was just, it was just the only the only thing I've seen in my like studying as a journalist and the historian and so on and so forth is what's happening today in Gaza.
If you look at that just incredible, just brutal lack of humanity going on there and the behavior of the Israelis and what they're doing to the Gazan people, that's basically what happened to the Russians.
And it happened over about 20 years, 25 years until World War II.
And the suffering was just incalculable.
And the country was wrecked.
And do you know that the living standards of Russians did not return to the level of the years before the revolution until 1968?
And you could argue that, in fact, they weren't as good even by 1968.
And, you know, this horrible loss of life and everything like that.
So I think the message, what I realized about this film was like, oh my God, the West has to understand this.
The West has to see this film.
They have to realize what's going on.
Because it's almost like God sent a preview for the West.
He gave the West like a, look, study what happened in Russia.
You know, if you don't change course, this could very well happen to you.
And it might not be like this soft kind of totalitarianism that we sort of see like emerging, right?
It might very quickly turn into like literally people being like, you know, having their throats slit in basements on a mass scale and taking out behind and getting shot.
And yeah, so that's the message of that film.
And it's super important.
Well, anyway, so that guy you interviewed, Conrad, so I've been bugging Conrad for the longest time.
It's like, Conrad, you've got to get this film out somehow.
And by some sort of, again, I think divine sort of circumstance, we found a monk who speaks English in a monastery in provincial Russia who's like, okay, I will translate this into English.
And it's a four and a half hour documentary.
And so he did that.
And then Conrad and his show did an appeal to his audience.
And he says, okay, we've got this rough translation from this Russian monk, but we need like an editor to clean it up and get it out there.
And somebody came out of the woodwork, this wonderful Russian guy from a guy with Russian background from South Carolina.
And he did it and put the subtitles on the film.
And Conrad has released it on Substat to his paywall audience, but he's going to put it out for free on YouTube in like a few weeks.
So I just can't encourage people enough.
Watch this film.
And it's fascinating.
It's well done.
It has all the facts, way more than I could possibly give here.
And realize the message of it for the West, that we really have to do something, because it's not just this kind of soft kind of BS that we're experiencing now.
This could get really ugly and very bloody very quickly.
And so sorry to be such a black pillar, but I don't know that it's going to happen.
But I mean, look what happened to the Russians.
It was just incredible.
You know what's interesting about those Russian elites?
They even had this slogan at the time, abolish the police.
You know how that was a thing in America?
Like during BLM and all that stuff?
You know, the police dismantle them and get rid of them.
And actually, I think some cities did, and the result was, of course, a disaster.
Well, that's what the Russian elites did during the revolution.
Because the revolution happened in two phases, right?
So first it was the bourgeois revolution, which were these sort of like, you know, Russian millionaires who basically were trying to set up a parliamentary system where they could have the power, be the prime ministers and the minister of this and the minister of that, and so on.
And they did that for seven months.
And they ran the country so completely into the ground that the Bolsheviks then rolled in eight months later.
And so it's an amazing story.
And people, I think, would enjoy it.
I mean, huge truth.
The instant reaction of we know what norm is like.
And normans would go, yeah, but this is a story told by one of Putin's, by Putin's favorite priest.
Of course he's going to blame the West.
How can we trust this guy?
There were so many history books by eminent historians telling us the truth about what happened.
Okay, there's an answer to that.
Okay, so basically, Tikhon isn't coming up with this stuff on his own.
He's a churchman, right?
So all he's doing is he's taking sort of 30 years of revisionist historical work that has been done in Russia since the fall of communism.
And so there's an enormous amount of this stuff and books and publications and all kinds of things.
And he was just kind of summarizing it and saying, listen, we need to know about this more, like among the people, because among the Russian people, everybody went to school under communism and they were sort of drummed into their heads that fairy tale that I started with.
But it's a four and a half hour film and it's backed up with just a mountain of statistics and facts that make his arguments like irrefutable.
And oftentimes he's citing Western sources.
That is mind-blowing, actually.
That really is horrific.
Give me one second.
I've got to check this dog downstairs.
It's not meant to be upstairs.
To do.
Well Charles, that story is incredibly depressing.
It's...
Thanks for helping me make the most depressing podcast I've ever done.
And maybe the most important.
I mean, that is a story that needs to get up.
And I particularly commend you for stripping the story of it.
I mean, as soon as you, for example, you mentioned the religious stroke, ethnic identity of the of the Bolshevik, leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, or when you start talking about the things that I'm going to talk about, the sort of the battle between Christianity and Satanism.
I mean, it's not that it's not true, this stuff, but it does make it less accessible for people who are not fully on board with what's going on in the world.
So you've presented it in a way in which I mean power interests.
As you know, I wrote a piece about a book I'd read called Two World Wars and Hitler, Who Was Responsible by Jim McGregor and John O'Dowd.
I'm going to get them on the podcast sometime.
They don't know this yet, but I am.
But Lord Milner, the chap who delivered that ultimatum to the Tsar, figures quite prominently.
And he gave his name to the Milner group.
He wasn't really a sort of he wasn't really a big shot in himself.
He was more of a kind of the bad man for the big men in the same way that Henry Kissinger was.
Yeah, it's kind of one of these like you know great cardinal behind the scenes, but with enormous influence.
Yeah, but it was Milner who enabled the first concentration camps in that regard.
His whole collaboration with Cecil Rhodes and all that sort of thing, you know, just really a nasty, nasty guy.
Yeah.
You know, James, but you know, there's a reason why Russia had to be taken out, also, like a spiritual reason, because it was the Last great defender of Christianity.
You know, Christianity was still relatively strong in Europe in the sense that many people were still very Christian.
And it was even stronger in America.
But it wasn't this centralized Orthodox autocracy.
The Tsars were the descendants or the descendants of the throne of Constantinople, who were the descendants of the Roman Empire.
And it was in the Roman Empire that Christianity appeared and then was generally accepted and spread around the world.
So there's a whole spiritual dimension here.
And, you know, Conrad got into that a little bit with that murder of the Tsar.
But, you know, there's this whole backstory that he didn't have a chance to get into.
So the reason that if you believe the ritual murder thing and what eventually transpired is, anyway, there are no remains.
There are no relics.
Every single bone was like, you know, burned down or dissolved in acid and sprinkled on eggs and eaten by those people and so on.
And there's a very good reason why they didn't want any remains because they didn't want to have any possibility of there being relics that you could venerate in a Christian civilization.
And so what happened was after the fall of communism, so people started talking about this and talking about whatever.
And so the Russian government announced that the remains of the Romanovs had been found.
And they said, in fact, they were shot and then the bodies were tossed down these, like, into these pits or mine shafts or whatever like that.
Anyway, we were able to retrieve them.
And here they are.
Here's the bones of Nicholas.
Here's Alexander.
Here's this.
And they triumphantly took those bones to St. Petersburg, put them in Peter and Paul Fortress.
I don't know if you know what that is.
That's one of the main sort of historical buildings in St. Petersburg where the Tsars are buried.
And they were like, come, Russian people now and venerate these remains.
Well, a huge part of Russian believers were like, no, we're not going to, we don't think those are the real bones.
We think, we believe the ritual murder thing and that there are no relics and that this is a demonic trick to try and get us to venerate bones that have no legitimacy, you know, to sort of weaken our spiritual power and weaken the spiritual power of the Tsar who was subsequently made into a saint.
Look, I've got an icon of him here on my desk.
There he is.
That's the saint version.
And then this is the human version.
This is a bust of Nicholas II.
You can't see it with all this light.
Anyway, so, and it's so interesting.
I mean, this guy is a contemporary of ours in a way.
I mean, he's like, you know, he was like the generation of our grandfathers, sort of in between our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers.
He was a modern man.
He was kind of like us.
Anyway, so there's this huge schismatic debate going on in the Russian church.
And guess who's behind the people who want, who are insisting, no, those are the real bones and go up and pray to them in St. Petersburg.
And if you say anything else, you're promoting certain famous ethnic blood-libel tropes.
Yeah.
That's who's pushing that in Russia.
And then every time, yeah, and then every time the faith will rise up and say, no, it's the ritual murder story and there are no remains and everything.
And it's gotten to be such a thing that the church has just stopped talking about it.
Because the people have basically said, we'll go into schism over this.
If you try and make a final decision as the Russian church, whether those relics are real or not, and you come to the conclusion that they're real, we're out of here.
The Russian church is going to split in half because we're not going to go with that.
Yeah.
So it's a serious crisis.
And this is such a great example of really important stuff that happens in Russia that never gets reported about.
That was part of the reason why I wanted to do Russian Cider, because there are these amazing things going on here that people don't realize.
I really felt that.
I really felt like the West doesn't want its people to come and see what's going on in Russia.
doesn't want them to have access to it.
It's a bit like, there's been a kind of reversal of what happened in the communist era, where Russians were discouraged from visiting the rest world They've been prevented from visiting the West, but they were told you don't want to go there anyway because it's really rubbish.
It's not like you don't have all these benefits that we have in the marvellous Soviet Union.
And now we've got a reverse situation where the West, you don't want to get Russians.
It's a dictatorship.
The Russians, their economy is tanking.
The people have been conscripted into a war.
No one likes Putin, but at the same time, he brainwashes them with stuff like family values and stuff.
And they fools them into thinking that he's acting in their best interest.
So we get told all this stuff.
And they don't want us finding out that actually the Russian economy is doing pretty well.
And the food is great.
And Russia is huge fun.
And it's an amazing, like vibrant, lively, intensely human place, right?
But you know what makes Russia great?
Russia was great even under communism when it was so different, James.
Like all this sort of prosperity and like, you know, lovely public transport systems and playgrounds and parks and all these nice Chinese cars buzzing around.
You know, you have this veneer of prosperity here.
And it's true.
It's real prosperity.
This is what happens when your economy is set up in ways that basically helps the people, you know, and this is the kind of prosperity that would be everywhere if there wasn't this like giant sort of what did Matt Taibi.
Matt Taibbi was a journalist in Moscow when I was a journalist and we were friends.
So I remember this.
Remember he called the vampire squid, right?
There's this like vampire squid like wrapped around Western societies like sucking everything out of them, this financial sort of thing.
And everything's sort of turned into a rip-off operation.
Everything from like education, you know, healthcare, your mobile phone system, your TV like payments.
It's all like an effort to suck money out of you and rip you off.
Well, if you cut that out and you just let people get on with their lives and do good things and the government puts back into society a decent amount of stuff, people prosper and they do well.
And that's what's happening here.
But here's the thing.
Even in the communist years when that wasn't the case and Russians were leading very aesthetic lives.
And I remember this.
I saw this.
It was very much the case when I got here in the 80s.
And I remember it from childhood and what it was like, just the feel of it, the smell on the street, like the atmosphere and public places and everything.
It was a great country then because of this incredible Russian intensity.
And they're just so full of life.
They're just so human.
And you saw it.
Remember the characters we met?
You mentioned that bishop with the big beard and his mannerisms and so on.
They're just great personal.
Vlad, the bear.
Another one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're just fascinating, compelling, rich people.
I mean, rich in terms of their humanity and their human qualities.
And I think that's, you know, maybe it wasn't that Tolstoy was a genius.
Maybe he was just constantly surrounded by these Russian characters.
And you just couldn't help it.
He was just transcribing.
Paint these pictures, these personalities.
Before we go, your work is not yet done.
Because you never told me the story about how you got involved in the January 6th.
Oh, I thought you'd forgotten about that.
I was going to ask you if you wanted to, I should mention that.
Yeah, so anyway, so in late 2020 and into 21, I was working with Russian television because I'd recently come back from Russia.
We were living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where my family's been from since the early 1700s.
And so I told them, hey, I was like a Trump, I was a MAGA guy.
I was like a Trump activist.
I would go to like Trump rallies and I went to a number of them after the elections because I was convinced they were stolen and I felt that was the correct civic thing to do, like stand up for your rights and like all that stuff.
And I, anyway, and so I went to that January 6th one and I told my Russian friends, I was like, hey, I'm going to this like, this is supposed to be the really big one, like when even Trump himself said, y'all got to come.
Come on, we're going to go.
We're going to like turn this thing around.
And so I went to that thing and I went alone.
I got very cold.
It was unseasonably cold.
I was underdressed.
I got very bored.
And I decided, okay, I've had enough of these things.
And I went home and I was heading home.
And my car was parked off to the side of the Capitol building.
And I was sitting in my car eating a sandwich.
And somebody sent me a tweet.
And they're like, hey, there's like some fighting broken out.
Like there's like a riot going on in front of the Capitol building.
And so I was like, huh.
So I walked back towards the Capitol building and I saw that people were going up on the balcony.
You know how the belt, the Capitol is kind of a long thing with like a narrow edge and then the wide, you know, wide front and wide back.
So I was on one of those narrow edges and I saw people just walking up the hill there and going onto a balcony onto the top.
So I just walked up there with them and by that time there were a crowd of people at the door and a broken window that were they were going in through the broken window and going through and through the door.
And I was like, yeah, I'm definitely going.
This is fascinating.
So I went in there and I knew I had like the biggest story of my career on my hands.
I mean, I was in there before like there was any, there were no TV stations, cameras, anything like that.
And so I filmed as much as I could on my on my phone and then sprinted a few blocks up and to where there was a hotel with Wi-Fi and sent it to Moscow.
And it was big news in Moscow.
And they used all my material and it was really good.
I'm really, I'm actually very good with a camera.
So I got all this like really kind of dramatic footage and gave interviews and stuff.
And I thought I was like, this is my like lucky day.
I hit the jackpot, man.
I was like witnessing history.
I was there and I saw it all.
And I, and anyway, I, um, and then like a few days later, I, I was giving interviews and like, you know, basking in the glory of this like great journalistic like coup.
And I realized people were getting arrested for being inside.
And I was like, well, they're definitely going to arrest me because they hate my guts.
I mean, they hate my, you wouldn't believe the amount of, like, look me up on the internet.
I just was like, this is this river of like, you know, attack pieces and hit pieces from the Western media about me.
And everybody, SPLC and APAC and they all like, I'm like, whatever.
So we hadn't been to Russia in two years.
My wife really wanted to go visit relatives.
And I was like, honey, we're getting on the plane tomorrow morning.
We're out of.
And we thought, I thought, well, you know, it'll blow over.
We'll go for a month or so and visit Russia and come back.
And this is all stupid and it'll blow over.
Well, it didn't.
And it, you know, it dragged on and on and on.
And this kind of witch hunt against the J6ers went on and on and on.
The FBI got in touch with me in Russia.
The New York Times published a front page.
Get this.
The New York Times published on July 4th a front page article about me, like this major research thing.
You know how they do those long sort of in-depth sort of research things where they're trying to dig through like every little aspect of your life?
And in the print version of the New York Times, you know, that my sated parents read like Bible, like every single day of their life.
This is a big thing.
Thankfully, by that time, both my parents had passed away.
They probably would have, you know, it would have been too much for them.
Anyway, and so I had to stay.
We had to stay in Russia for four years until the great liberator Trump returned.
What did the FBI, did the FBI sort of indicate to you that you were going to get God if you came back?
No, because I don't think they say that to people, that they're pledging to arrest.
But I mean, I'm not an idiot.
It's obvious to me.
They were running around arresting grandmas and veterans and old fogies who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They would have definitely had a field day with me.
That's true.
What did the New York Times say about you?
That I was a loser, a CAD, an academic failure, which is true.
Let's see, all kinds of, you know, just I was like bad news.
And then they interviewed my sister who was dying of cancer at the time, and she was not entirely in her own right mind, and she's very liberal, or was very liberal.
Although we were very good friends, I mean, it's not a problem in our family to have different political opinions.
And yeah, it was bad.
It was low-class.
That must have been rightly.
It was scummy.
It was horrible.
Well, it didn't bother me that much because it was like the latest in like 20 similar articles.
I mean, we really did some serious damage to the bad guys, the people that, you know, the rulers of this world, sort of calling things out.
And yeah, they definitely had my number.
So they've been writing stuff about me for years.
And I take it as a badge of honor.
Like, great.
You know, make me more famous.
Make me sound more important than I am.
It's fine.
Well, well done.
I mean, I spent a week in your company, and I came away with the impression that you are kind of like the American Jane.
We have sort of similar-ish backgrounds.
And obviously, we work out about the same time, because if you were still pro-Trump at the time of January the 6th, and that's indicative to me that you weren't awake then.
Well, no, I was aware that Trump very possibly and very likely was full of shit, but he was still better than the alternative.
So my attitude is like, yeah, okay, like back the, you know, support the lesser of two evils, and then once that guy's in power, then push to try and, you know.
And honestly, I don't know why that's not happening now in the U.S. Like, you know, give Trump six months.
He's probably going to pull you down and stab you in the back and pull the rug because that's what he did last time.
And that's what he's done.
Let's not have any illusions.
But then you start pushing.
Then you say, okay, now we're going to organize and do something.
Because what we just sit here and accept this humiliation.
No.
Got it, like, organize, do something.
I think we ought to end, because I need a cup of tea.
And actually, my wife's made me some cake.
Well, I shouldn't be eating cake, but it's quite nice.
Apple cake.
We should talk about the milk.
Listen, there's so much we haven't talked about.
You want to talk about the milk, just briefly?
Well, yeah, we should maybe do another podcast sometime.
But yeah, I just, one of the astonishing places you took me to, you took me into a covered market, of which there are quite a few in Moscow?
Yeah, there's like, you know, dozens and dozens of them.
Oh, dozens of them, really?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There's something like, you know, 20 or 30 or something throughout this.
Because there's a covered market in Rome, which is fantastic, but it is the covered market in Rome.
It's not like you go into different, you go to Cestachia and there's one, you go to wherever there's one.
That is the covered market.
But if all the covered markets in Moscow are as good as the one you took me to, then that is mind-blowing.
Yeah, no, they are.
And it's a policy supported by the municipal authorities.
They especially create these places and encourage farmers and people like that to sell their wares there.
And it's not just Moscow.
It's in every Russian city, you know, medium-sized provincial cities all have these markets.
And it's lovely because, you know, there's still a substantial kind of like sort of a backyard garden economy.
They're mostly like little old ladies who keep cows and goats and chickens and grow vegetables and fruits.
And they sell them there.
And it's fantastic.
And it's the best food in the world.
I sort of dumb you, because you told me this before I came out.
I was thinking, yeah, right, he's painting a pretty picture of Russian food here.
And then I saw the fruit stools piled high with this glorious fruit.
And then I went to the dairy counter.
Well, I mean, I'm sure there were lots of dairy counters.
And you kindly bought me some raw milk because you said that raw milk would be very good for children with your health problems.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I tried this raw milk.
I mean, I drink raw milk at home when I can get a hold of it.
Actually, my friend Paul kind of gets it for me.
But this raw milk, your raw milk, was just like the raw milk of the gods.
Yeah, no, it's you know, I drink a lot of raw milk.
I'm from Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, which is really the heart, the heart, the heart of the whole Amish thing.
And so we're completely surrounded by these Amish farms, and you can get tons of raw milk there from these wonderful Amish people.
And it's delicious there, too.
So that's the only raw milk I'm familiar with, the Russian raw milk and the Amish raw milk, and it's equally good as far as I know.
But maybe it's not as good in England.
I don't know.
Also, the yoghurt in that Georgian restaurant you took me to was just like the best yogurt.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, Russians are great Sybarites.
They love the finer things in life, and they have sort of a genius for cultivating them and making them fantastic and everything.
Tell me one more thing before we go.
I've been trying to describe to people the magnificence of the black dumplings with cod and shrimp that we had in that Tchaikovsky restaurant.
Yeah.
I mean, why is it so, why was it so good?
I don't know.
It's just, you know, that's not a super fancy restaurant.
This isn't something what you'd call high cuisine.
You can go to restaurants in Moscow and spend like four or five hundred bucks for a meal.
That certainly wasn't that.
You know, it was a nice restaurant, but sort of upper middle.
Well, the waiter told me that people come from St. Petersburg, which is what, a four-hour train journey away, just for that dish.
And I can understand it.
Yeah.
So they've just got a great recipe there and they make the best of it.
But yeah, it's delicious stuff.
Oh, and about the raw milk, I would recommend, you know what I realized about, because it's so affordable here and it's so delicious, that I just start drinking it in quantity.
And I think that's what people maybe don't do.
Like they think, oh, I'll have like raw milk in my tea or I'll have like a little cup, you know, every other day or something.
And I think the trick in my experience, I just realized that the more I drank, the better I felt.
And it was almost like Asterix, you know, drinking the magic potion.
So I would recommend if anybody's like a fan of raw milk, experiment with drinking it in quantity, like a quart a day, you know, and see if that works for you.
Because I found it to be extremely beneficial.
Okay.
I've got to up my raw milk.
Like make it absolute delight chatting to you.
You've got a substat.
Substack, by the way, I think it's intelligence controlled, limited.
It could be.
It could be.
But you know what?
I'm like a veteran of these information wars.
And the bottom line is they can't control it.
They can try.
They can fiddle with substack algorithms and other things like that.
But put yourself in their shoes.
There's this technological revolution going on.
And they're like, stop, stamp out all those troublemakers.
And you can't.
It's like whack-a-mole.
You slow them down in one place and they start coming in the other place.
So I don't care.
I never had a problem getting information out.
And I mean, look what's happening in the American information scene.
It's incredible.
I guess it's not so much the same in Europe, but it still is.
I mean, I speak German and I follow the German media.
And that's a pretty crazy place, I would say.
Alternative media.
So it's hard to keep the truth down.
It really is.
It takes 100 times more effort to push a lie than it does to tell the truth.
So I think we've got advantages on our end.
Okay.
Good.
Well, thank you for thank you for that note of positivity in a podcast of otherwise almost unrelenting grimness.
Yes, I'm an optimist.
I'm an American optimist, an idealist.
Well, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Do you want to plug anything of any of your products?
No, I don't publish much on that Substack thing.
It's just an occasional thing.
But there are some good articles on there.
And I don't tweet much, but I do sometimes tweet.
And I will be tweeting about this film when it comes out.
So keep an eye on my Twitter, which is C.Bowsman.
And yeah, follow me on Twitter.
That's the best place to keep it.
Okay, cool.
Thanks.
Everyone else, thank you, my lovely viewers and listeners, for watching me.
I love you all, but I especially love the ones who become paid subscribers for obvious reasons.
Everyone has their favourites, and you are my favorites.
You're paying subscribers.
So if you want to become one of my favorite people, do consider contributing to the upkeep of this podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Try and get through the under the wire on Substack if you can.
They let you, they make it difficult, or buy me a coffee, or go to my website, jamesdellingpole.co.uk, which I think we've started to do a thing where you can sign up there and be a paid subscriber, I think.
I don't know.
Have a look.
Right.
Charles will applaud me for my marketing skills.
Yes, that's very well done.
Thank you.
Good.
Alright, um, um.
Global warming is a massive con.
There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition to my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us.
We've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that one.
Just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
