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Dec. 27, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec

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EPISODE 635: CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — BLOOD ON THE SNOW

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	- - This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare. - - A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
	This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
	Deliver us from evil!
	All right, Jack Posobiec, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's Human Events special, Chronicles of the Revolution.
	On today's installment, we are going to be covering possibly one of the bloodiest of these revolutions.
	Of course, they're all extremely bloody.
	This one, perhaps one of the most personal.
	Today's installment is titled, Blood on the Snow, the Russian Revolution.
	And we are joined once again by my ThoughtCrime co-host, Blake Neff.
	How's it going, Blake?
	Jack, good to see you!
	Not a fun topic, though.
	This is the big one.
	This is the goriest one, probably.
	Probably the most unfortunate in terms of its impact on the wider world, and I don't think that'd be super controversial to say, even.
	Well, and the Russian Revolution is something that I think is completely misunderstood.
	Really, all of these revolutions, I think, are greatly misunderstood by the West, and in particular, the conservative movement.
	I mean, we kind of say, you know, communism is bad, right?
	Communism is bad, and we sort of understand that, and I think we all generally agree on that.
	But I don't think people quite realize that the historic time period that we live in now, in the West, in the 21st century, the early stages of the 21st century, is we always make these analogies to World War II.
	We say it's 1939.
	It's constantly 1939 in the conservative movement.
	When there's actually something that is a little bit, perhaps, more applicable to our current moment and our current circumstances, and that might be 1917.
	So Blake, walk us through a little bit, just give us a little of the context of what led up to the Russian Revolution.
	I think people know that's a little thing called World War I, but set the stage for this communist coup.
	You're biting off more than you can chew, Jack, because we're going way before World War I. Oh boy!
	Stop me if I go too far.
	So we've got the Russian Empire.
	It's modern-day Russia, even bigger than it is today.
	It has all the territories the USSR would have, and even more than that.
	It has Ukraine, it has Belarus, it has most of modern-day Poland, or a lot of it.
	It has Finland.
	Finland was a part of the Russian Empire.
	Huge state.
	Massive number of people.
	Massive geopolitical importance.
	Yet it's the most reactionary regime in the world.
	Not even controversial to say that.
	It's still an absolute monarchy under the Tsar.
	And it has, up until the 1860s, it still has a widespread practice of serfdom.
	And serfdom's not exactly slavery, but it's pretty close to it.
	It is a system where common people lack most basic freedoms that we would take for granted and they lack like control over their own lives they can literally be bought and sold much like slaves were and the system only goes away in the 1860s but it's still this very reactionary relatively oppressive government it's russia was not a place where an ordinary person got much of a voice and they were not good by the way don't um
	by the way don't bury the lead in terms of its uh its expanse at this point because um this extends all the way throughout the eastern hemisphere and also includes a particular territory in the western hemisphere at this point doesn't it All of Alaska was part of the Russian Empire at this point.
	Yep, until about 1870 or so.
	I know Seward, yeah, Seward's falling.
	It's post-Civil War.
	Yeah, post-Civil War.
	Just after the Civil War, we buy it off them for a couple million dollars.
	But a good deal.
	Good deal overall.
	But just think about that, folks.
	All the way from Finland and Poland, all the way across.
	So you get to the Urals, and that's really where European Russia kind of ends.
	And the Urals will come up later in this story, folks.
	And then Siberia begins, and it goes all the way across to the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is essentially the neighbor of Japan.
	And Vladivostok, which abuts North Korea, and then includes all of Alaska all the way up to the Yukon.
	This is how large the state is.
	And think of how incomprehensibly huge this is.
	You know, the railroad barely exists, certainly out in all these places.
	There's no airplanes.
	There's no satellite photography, so they even know exactly what they have.
	It's just this truly massive expanse that's barely understood.
	Uh, that they've become these masters of.
	So it's this enormously powerful country, and it's a country a lot of other people fear.
	A major cause of World War I, you know, a lot of people know the story of the Archduke gets shot and there's all these alliances, but sort of the big picture background to this that makes the war break out is that Russia is this huge country, a ton of people, and they're behind the ball compared to everyone, but they're finally industrializing.
	They're getting these big cities.
	They're building the factories that other countries have.
	And Germany, which is hostile to them, has this realization where they just think Russia is going to be terrifyingly powerful.
	It's a lot like how people talk about China in the U.S.
	maybe, you know, this country that is just so huge that it's eventually going to be very strong.
	And so in the U.S., you'll have war hawks who will sometimes say, you know, we should fight China before they're too strong.
	And that was an attitude that existed towards Russia.
	But Russia, it turns out, was a very fragile and a very weak system.
	It has this superficially, this very autocratic monarchy where Tsar Nicholas II is, you know, the heir of this dynasty that goes back 300 years, has this enormous power, all this prestige, and yet it's sort of rotten on the inside.
	It's been this elite, it has this elite nobility that is very comfortable, very wealthy, They used to have this sort of principle in Russia that being an elite member of the nobility required service to the state, so you'd have to serve in the diplomatic corps or in the army.
	And this had some meritocratic elements.
	But by this point, even that was gone.
	So you just had these very regressive nobles who did not do a lot to earn their status.
	And this made it very easy for people to hate them.
	And so Russia is also just not well run.
	They still have famines far later.
	After most of Europe has put those behind, Russia still has a bad harvest and 500,000 people will die.
	And so this makes it very easy for people to dislike the regime.
	And they're oppressive in other ways.
	Russia has a very large share of the world's Jews at this time, and they encourage anti-Semitic policies.
	That's in fact why so many Jews come to the United States, is they're not leaving Poland or Germany.
	They're fleeing Russia at this time because it's so unpleasant to be there.
	These are the pogroms.
	Yeah, pogroms, yeah.
	I can't remember what language it's from, but it's probably a language in Russian.
	So they're fleeing all of these, and this again is also like a lot of the world is very wary towards Russia.
	So Russia in 1905 actually has their first pass at revolution.
	They pick a fight with Japan over Manchuria and Japan, much to everyone's surprise, kind of kicks their butts.
	Because Japan has just gone through the Meiji restoration and Japan has rapidly industrialized before Russia.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	They're this Asiatic country that people think, oh, you know, they're not European, they're not modern.
	And they were closed off to the world all of 40 years ago.
	And then this country just comes in and just beats the tar out of Russia really badly.
	And this is so shocking that in Russia it causes sort of abortive revolution, you know, kind of compared to like a George Floyd type thing where there's a lot of rioting, people shoot at the rioters, a lot of people die, but it doesn't overthrow the government.
	Instead, you get these concessions.
	They agree to create the Duma, which is to this day now the Russian parliament is named that.
	And you get some concessions.
	And then they try for about a decade to get things under control.
	And they're not doing well at it.
	Like, Russia's a very politically unhealthy country.
	All these people get assassinated.
	You know, the Minister of Interior is always getting shot at.
	The Tsar gets assassinated in the 1890s.
	That's before the revolution, but that's the background.
	Blown up, actually, right?
	Blown up, blown up.
	Tsar Alexander, yeah.
	Peter Spalipin is one of the last prime ministers of Russia before the revolution.
	He gets assassinated.
	It's a very violent country that's sort of bubbling, but they probably would have held it together And then they get into World War One, and this really exposes all of the vulnerabilities.
	By the way, I'd throw out, in that, in that Russo-Japanese war, that is the first time and really one of the only times that you see an Asian power defeating a European power.
	Yeah.
	And it's, it's kind of not even close.
	They have a naval battle, the Russian Baltic Fleet sails all the way around the world.
	It takes them like eight months to do it.
	Maybe even a year.
	It takes them a very long time to do it, and they finally arrive, and they get blown to smithereens in a matter of minutes by the Japanese Navy.
	It's hugely humiliating.
	So they go into World War I, and it just exposes all their problems all over again.
	The Germans beat them really badly on the battlefield.
	They take millions of losses.
	It's hugely stressful on the home front.
	And that's where the tragedy kicks in, is it empowers radical actors who would have been on the fringes even of the Russian sort of revolutionary society, but they're able to rise.
	And it sort of comes out of nowhere.
	A funny joke is, in Britain they have this 26-episode documentary about World War I, and their episode on the Russian Revolution is titled, Bat Rogenko Has Sent Me Some Nonsense, and that's the telegram that the Tsar gets.
	Where they're saying, hey, there's riots in St.
	Petersburg, or Petrograd, they called it then, because St.
	Petersburg was a German name, so they changed it.
	So, Petrograd, they're having these riots, there's workers in the streets, the soldiers are joining them, and so this guy in the government says, hey, Tsar, they're overthrowing the government, there's a revolution, and it's, like, unthinkable to them that this would be happening, and yet in a matter of days, the Tsar realizes it's all over.
	He abdicates, he tries to pass it off to his brother, His brother says, no, this situation's too far gone.
	He rejects it.
	And it's almost like in the span of a week, monarchy in Russia just vanishes.
	And this is where things get really upsetting.
	And by the way, actually one key point of that, you mentioned the British, but at this time in World War I, and of course people know this, but You know, just for those who don't, that all of the, really, the ruling families of Europe at this point are interrelated, and there have been weddings where they've all gone together.
	And so Tsar Nicholas, so the Romanovs, of course, are the ruling family of Russia.
	Tsar Nicholas even makes an impassioned plea to his cousin, who is the king of England at this point, asking for the British to send some kind of relief to them so that he can flee, and the British actually say no.
	refuse to allow this.
	He says, no, I'm not going to get your family out.
	We're not going to get involved.
	You can look this up.
	They look almost identical.
	They're almost identical.
	So I believe they're off the top of my head.
	I believe they, they share their grandmother as queen Victoria.
	Yeah.
	And Victoria was the grandmother of them.
	And I believe grandmother of your color.
	Yeah.
	And.
	Is she the grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm or the auntess of Wilhelm?
	I believe she's also the grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm.
	I want to say she was the grandmother of three of the monarchs in World War I, and it was those three.
	Famous last words of her.
	Specifically, those two look almost identical.
	We'll put it in post, the photo that we're talking about, where they just look almost identical.
	One of the earliest photos, of course, is of the Tsar and the King.
	But he refused to send them out, and now the Germans, right, so Russia's up against the ropes, and they've taken the brunt of it in World War I, the way they took the brunt of it in World War II, and they're really up against the ropes.
	These, as you say, their failure to industrialize early on plays a huge role in this, where of course the Germans, you know, as industrious as ever, are slamming them, along with the Austro-Hungarians.
	To mention something, though, that people have heard of, another reason they have so little credibility, this is the famous Rasputin, the Russian mystic from the countryside.
	I thought he was just the guy from the disco song.
	Yeah, he is also the guy from the disco song.
	Probably not the lover of the Russian queen, but what matters is a lot of people thought he was the lover of the Russian queen.
	And so you have this mystic who's deep in the Romanov fort.
	Yeah, he's doing these Zarina The Tsarina trusts him because she thinks he can cure their son's hemophilia.
	And so you have this weird, smelly, country mystic guy who's hanging around the royal palace and people think he controls the government.
	And to a substantial degree, he does.
	He has a lot of influence over it.
	And it's things like this that make it possible for monarchies to get overthrown.
	When everything's nice, it doesn't happen.
	When there's a war and it seems like a crazy man is running things.
	So this is also when, and of course, and it's, it's been said many times that, um, Vladimir Lenin who had been living in exile after the previous revolution failed revolution, he had been in Switzerland at the time.
	And it's actually the German high command that plays a role in putting him and his, the Bolsheviks on a train car essentially, and getting them back to, uh, and I think at the time it was still Petrograd, um, getting them to Petrograd where he basically launches in 1917 what getting them to Petrograd where he basically launches in 1917 what becomes the Russian So after the Tsar leaves, there's what's called the Provisional Government, and they promise all the things that early revolutions promised.
	You know, we're going to have democratic elections, and we're going to have a constituent assembly that will set a constitution for Russia.
	They make a lot of fine declarations, but there's all these strains of radicalism within the government.
	One of the things that happens as part of the overthrowing the Tsar is they create a thing, they create these things called Soviets.
	And Soviet basically means council.
	And they're sort of like ad hoc unions in various organizations.
	So you could have a Soviet in a factory, a worker Soviet.
	You could have a Soviet within an armed force, within a military unit, like a soldier Soviet.
	And these exist, and they're distinct from things like the Duma or the provisional government that's been created.
	And what Lenin does that makes him kind of a genius, to be honest, he's very radical.
	He's on the most radical fringe of the radical, you know, revolutionary party in Russia.
	I think it's the Russian Social Democrat Party, and the Bolsheviks that he's a part of are a faction of this.
	He shows up, gets off the train, and he has a simple platform.
	He says, all power to the Soviets, and then he says that he's going, he demands that land, he demands an end to the war with Germany, and he demands land for the peasantry. - Okay.
	And it's like a very simple platform that really appeals to people.
	The Russian peasantry, the vast majority of the country at this point, they've always wanted the land.
	This is one of the fatal flaws they did, is they emancipated the serfs, but they still allowed the landholders to own the vast majority of land in Russia.
	And they had a sort of long-term plan to change this, but they basically didn't complete it in time.
	And so you have all these Russian peasants who want land.
	And, of course, the war is unpopular, and the provisional government is promising to keep fighting the war to try to get support from the Allies, whereas Lenin says, I'm going to end the war, and then he just says, all power to the Soviets.
	And it's the sort of three planks of this platform that make them so powerful, because Even though we know their ultimate plan is we're going to confiscate all the land and have a horrible collectivist government, it's an incredibly appealing thing to ordinary Russians.
	And so just like you had in France, as we discussed the other day, in France, you had this mass outburst of violence in the countryside sort of unleashed by the revolutionary fervor.
	The Bolsheviks enabled this.
	There's a huge amount of violence across the Russian countryside.
	as essentially peasants hear the sky saying, "Give them land." And they decide to take the land.
	And so it turns into Lenin not just saying, "We'll give you land," but also saying, "We'll let you keep what you've taken "after you've murdered this aristocrat." And there's this conflict. - And so to just throw in there that, you also have another parallel to the French Revolution in that you sort of have this initial government that gets set up that's somewhat moderate, but doesn't really have total control.
	And so the Russian Revolution, people don't understand this, when you study it, it's actually two revolutions in one.
	There's one that's brief and then one that goes much longer.
	So the moderate, that's called the French Revolution, or excuse me, of course, that's called the February Revolution.
	And as the name suggests, took place in March.
	Took place in March, right, and this is because, which by the way, same as the October Revolution, which takes place in November.
	- Which took place in November. - This of course...
	These dates are based off of the Julian calendar as opposed to using the...
	That's kind of how backwards the Russian government was.
	They were still using the Julian calendar.
	At this point, they're still using the Julian calendar.
	The Gregorian calendar was a Popish plot.
	They're not going to follow along with this Popish plot.
	Of course, of course, of course.
	As a proud Papist, I will confirm.
	But so, right, you have this initial provisional government, and the provisional government does, when Tsar Nicholas abdicates, they do arrest him.
	So I want people to understand that when I say they're moderate, I just mean they're more moderate than the Bolsheviks, right?
	So you have the Mensheviks and you have others, but then it's October, right, and the October Revolution where things turn extremely violent.
	It is, and it's one of those things you feel really sad reading about, I will say, because the Bolshevik Revolution is one of those events where it was almost certainly, this is at a 1% chance of happening, and it happened to hit, because they needed to get so lucky.
	The Bolsheviks are a tiny faction.
	If anyone other than Lenin was leading them, they almost certainly lose, because Lenin is a true political genius, it has to be admitted, and Lenin Talks this tiny Bolshevik cabal into saying, we should take over the Winter Palace.
	That's where the government is headquartered in Petrograd.
	And they basically just do it overnight.
	They storm the Winter Palace and they take over this little organ of government.
	And again, it's like the French Revolution where anything that happened in Paris was just massively more important.
	They take over in St.
	Petersburg or Petrograd and they have enough of these Soviets in the area who support them that they keep hold of Petrograd.
	For a huge amount of the country, it's like, well, okay, Petrograd's in control of these new guys, so now they're the ones in charge.
	And they almost sort of like, very, it's surprising how easy it is for them to suddenly take control of this larger revolutionary mass.
	And then, even then, this is the sort of thing that could have easily been stopped by the Germans, it could have easily been stopped by the Allies, especially once World War I ends a year into this.
	like 100,000 men into this completely chaotic country and you just sort of snip its head off.
	But it never happens.
	And instead, they're just able to get more and more momentum.
	They get a huge amount of peasant support because they say, we'll give you this land.
	And the peasants want land.
	So they get on board with it.
	And there's also a lot of fatalism.
	You have Russian conservatives, There's one.
	Well, they are Russians to begin with.
	Yeah.
	Well, there's one.
	General Brusilov.
	He is the most successful Russian general in World War One.
	He wins this huge victory over the Austrians.
	Conservative, devout Orthodox Christian.
	And as the Reds gain momentum, he just thinks, well, they're the ones who are in charge.
	I'm a Russian patriot.
	So if they're running Russia, I will support Russia.
	And he does that fatal mistake so many people do with radical revolutionary regimes.
	He thinks, There's no way they can last that long because they're so crazy.
	So he thinks the Reds will have to chill out or they'll be replaced by someone more moderate.
	And then Russia will, you know, we won't bring the czar back, but we'll be a normal country.
	And so he helps them.
	He allies with them to fight enemies of the revolution.
	And, you know, they don't shoot him later, but he does basically die in isolated disrepute because that is in fact not what happens.
	They are able to win the Civil War.
	The different enemies of the revolutionary government could have probably pulled it off, but they couldn't collaborate very well.
	They didn't have enough support from abroad.
	And a lot of them just didn't care for each other.
	They had competing agendas.
	One of the fantastic books that gets through this, where it shows how Lenin pitted those people against each other all the while while he was making these sort of provisional agreements with external actors or various forces.
	Around the because remember, as you say, the empire is sort of falling apart at this point.
	And he's basically going to, you know, the Kazakh nationalists and saying, oh, we'll work with you and we'll put you in power.
	And he goes, he's going around to all these different disparate areas.
	And so they all pledge support to the Bolsheviks.
	And then you do it.
	But the great book that I want to point out is Always with Honor, The Memoirs of Pyotr Engel.
	And he became this, he was a sort of a junior general.
	Junior in terms of not leading the remnant of the Imperial Army, or I guess I would say the army that remained loyal to the Tsar, and the leader originally was General Denikin, Rangel, a Baltic German, huge guy, like 6'5", just enormous figure, true natural-born leader, remains loyal, and then actually does
	Very late in the Civil War begin consolidating some of those forces and just says, instead of calling ourselves like the anti-Bolshevik, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we're just going to call ourselves the Russian Army.
	And so the Russian Army and people start joining it, he does institute, so they have Southern Russia and Crimea at this point, he does institute the land reform.
	But at this point, as you say, the Bolsheviks, they've just been going through and systematically wiping out any opposition, slaughtering prisoners, POWs, priests, nuns, again, just like in the French Revolution, anyone who's an intellectual who stands against them.
	And I actually wanted to mention though, to get into the the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, for about the first year, year and change are still alive.
	And they become sort of a sort of almost like a MacGuffin in the sense that it's it's the whites, the Russian army are always trying to save the Romanovs.
	So they're always being, you know, planning out their campaigns towards where the Romanovs are.
	So at first, That is St.
	Petersburg.
	And so, and at one point, the whites actually do get pretty close to St.
	Petersburg.
	And there's this huge argument, you know, should we go to St.
	Petersburg?
	Should we go to Moscow?
	And they say, well, because the Roman officer in St.
	Petersburg, that's why the army, army marches towards there.
	And originally they had been kept, they had been, I think the Roman officer had been kept pretty safe throughout all this time.
	But because the whites, because the Russian army, the Imperials are getting close, That's when they throw them on the train out to the Urals, and that's why they exile, you know, take them all the way away, still in captivity, to a place called Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, all the way, basically bordering Siberia, and it is there where they're taken and put in this building called the House of Special Purpose.
	Yeah, and the special purpose is not very good, and that is what What ends up happening is another group of Russian whites gets, within about a day or two of where they're being held, and they just decide, yeah, this is too much of a problem.
	And so they shoot the whole family.
	And I think that's a very important aspect of the Russian Revolution to highlight, is it really is monstrously violent in a way that few revolutions are.
	And we mentioned in yesterday's episode how mendacity is this core aspect of Marxism.
	It's really the Russian Revolution where that stands out, that these are, at heart, very bad and vicious people.
	So, you know, they don't just shoot the czar and his wife.
	They shoot all of his kids.
	I think they had, what was it?
	I actually pulled the, um, so I, I pulled before the episode, did some research, pulled the names and the ages.
	Uh, so czar Nicholas at this time, he's only 49.
	Um, and the czarina Alexandra, she's 47.
	Uh, the oldest daughter is princess Olga.
	She is 22.
	Then there's Prince and then there's, so there's four daughters, right?
	Everyone knows the four daughters.
	Then there's Princess Tatiana, 21.
	Princess Maria, 18.
	Princess Anastasia, 17.
	And Prince Alexei, who is 13.
	And as you mentioned before, he's quite sickly.
	And Princess Anastasia, of course, we know there's a lot of popular culture surrounding her.
	And for a long time, there was this popular theory that she may have secretly escaped.
	But 80 years later, After the murders, when the new government of Russia finally started examining this and exhuming the site, they did actually find the bones of the family, including the bones of the children.
	They were able to use DNA analysis because it was now available, and they did confirm that all five children were there.
	And the story that you You know, that people hear about this, it's actually quite horrific.
	So the family is being kept in this house of special purpose.
	And again, they're prisoners.
	They've not done anything at this point.
	But they serve as that sort of symbol of what could be the restoration of Russia, what could be the restoration of the empire.
	And so to the Bolsheviks, they play this role of, you know, considering a threat because they're creating a massive motivation for the white forces, for the imperial army, the imperial remnant, to save them and then, you know, potentially something that could rally the people towards them.
	And for folks to understand, they are a Christian dynasty.
	So when they take them down to this basement bunker, They tell them to get dressed and it said that when they first opened fire that the Tsar and his wife, the last thing they did was actually make the sign of the cross and that it said they weren't even able to finish making the sign of the cross before the bullets struck them according to some accounts.
	But because the guns they were using were particularly smoky and this bunker was so small, there was so much gun smoke in the area that they couldn't tell what was going on so the The Bolshevik murderers say cease fire and when they do cease fire They realize that only the adults and there's some retainers and other adults that are there as well.
	It's not just the family members All the adults are killed but the children are all still alive including Prince Alexei because he had been sitting down because I'd said he again he was sickly and Then the Bolsheviks give the order, after the smoke dissipates and they realize the kids are all still alive, they give the order, fix bayonets.
	And so they charge them with the bayonets on the rifles to all the princesses and to little Prince Alexei.
	So they kill Prince Alexei very quickly.
	And then with the girls though, because their gowns have those sequins and the diamonds on them, So these are the crown jewels of Russia.
	They actually can't pierce the dresses because they're protected by these essentially diamonds.
	And then at that point, they order them to pull their side pieces out, the Bolsheviks, draw their side pieces, and just walk up to all the children and shoot them in the head.
	So this is sort of the foundational moment.
	It took them 20 minutes to do this.
	It took them 20 minutes to kill this helpless family.
	Sort of the foundational moment of the USSR.
	Of just brutally slaughtering an innocent family.
	Or at least a defenseless family.
	Some of this is also, it's like the inheritance of being in Russia.
	So Russia has this massive secret police operation, as the Tsar, when it's still an empire.
	And what the Bolsheviks do is they kind of just roll in and take it over.
	They replace the people on top with their own guys, and they go back to the same old methods, and they just make them a lot more lethal.
	And what's terrifying with the Bolshevik revolution is, relative to pretty much any other revolution I know of, is they're very ruthlessly efficient about killing people that they mark as a threat.
	And this becomes a defining feature of the Soviet regime for basically 30 years.
	Stop buzzing in my ear about the boring people at your office.
	They kill a ton of priests.
	Stalin does it, but it didn't start with Stalin either.
	Correct.
	So early on, they try all these radical ideas.
	The Cheka, the Troika, the NKVD.
	It culminates in the KGB.
	Yeah, they change all these different things.
	Many organizations prior to this.
	Stop buzzing in my ear about the boring people at your office.
	I'm trying to listen to the new human events with Jack Pozovic.
	Yeah, NKVD, you know, it's just anytime they roll in anywhere, the number of people who die is enormous.
	In World War II, Soviet Union notably splits Poland with Germany and the NKVD rolls in and they arrest a ton of officers in the Polish army.
	They also take some priests, other intellectuals, and they deport them.
	They'd send a ton of them to Siberia.
	They take about 20,000 of them to the Moscow area and Ben, they just decide after about six months, it's too dangerous having these guys around, and they just shoot all of them, and they never speak of it again.
	It's in a forest called Katyn, the Katyn Massacre.
	And actually, it's the Germans, it's the Germans who find this, and the Germans put out the word, and the Allies say, oh, well, that's just Nazi propaganda.
	And for years, it was considered that the Germans did that.
	And, you know, and for decades, it was sort of the position of the Soviet Union was it didn't happen, and if it did happen, the Germans did it.
	Yet, as the history book I just read pointed out, it was sort of the only Nazi crime the Soviet Union would not talk about too much, so everyone could read between the lines.
	And this is just how they are, really, from the start.
	It's a very vicious ideology.
	It's also very dumb.
	Bolshevism is just very stupid at its outset.
	They briefly try abolishing money, They try all these very strange, communist, whack-a-doodle ideas, and then things are going bad enough that as an emergency measure, they implement what's called the New Economic Policy, and spoilers, the New Economic Policy is called capitalism.
	And they just, as a temporary measure, allow capitalism to happen, and, incredibly enough, it works!
	Then, oh, the food system fixes itself, and goods start to appear again, the economy starts to function, and then, A few people get rich doing this.
	They're called the NEP men.
	And then Lenin dies.
	Stalin gradually accumulates power within the party.
	But, you know, one of the things he pushes through is called dekulakization.
	And what was a kulak?
	Originally in Russian it means fist.
	And it used to mean this sort of disreputable middleman in the Russian village.
	And they repurpose it.
	So it's important to understand that facet of it.
	Is that they were taking a word that already existed And redefining it to apply to a much greater number of people.
	And they essentially made it so it applied to any successful peasant, any peasant who like owned a mill or some sort of production facet.
	And eventually it just applied to anyone who also defended these people.
	And you get this revolutionary campaign in Russia called dekulakization.
	And the bluntest way to describe this is Kill everyone who is more successful than you and you're resentful of it.
	And these are not, you know, old hand people who are... These are not old aristocrats.
	The aristocrats are dead or fled.
	These are just peasants who had it slightly more put together.
	You know, the equivalent in America would be small businessmen.
	It would be... Small business owners, yeah.
	Small business owners.
	You know, the guy who owns a car dealership.
	The guy who owns, you know, a successful restaurant.
	The guy who owns Five McDonald's franchises in your local metropolitan area.
	So wait, wait, wait.
	So you're talking about the specific exact same people that Antifa and BLM targeted throughout 2020.
	Exactly, exactly.
	It's kind of funny how that works, isn't it?
	I wrote an article.
	I'm going to shamelessly shill myself here.
	I wrote an article for Darren Beatty's Revolver News a couple of years ago.
	It didn't have my name on it at the time, but spoilers, I read it.
	And it was like, are you ready to be Are you ready to be an American kulak?
	And the comparison is really jarring.
	You'll get these essays that the left will write where they'll say, yeah, guys, you know, we say the problem is these billionaires like Donald Trump, but really the regressive force in America is, they call them the American gentry.
	And it's, you know, it's just what you'd say is ordinary rich people or well, you know, upper middle class people who are not in big cities.
	So it's, Your local successful residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, of Meridian, Idaho, of Platte, Nebraska.
	Normal people who have not concentrated in these blue cities.
	It's not even your upper class.
	It's not even your elites.
	It's just your upper middle class.
	Or it's people who are financially well off.
	It's financially well off, but not remotely near the nerve centers of power.
	They are fundamentally, because these people are fundamentally conservative.
	People who own their own businesses, who are not closely tethered to, you know, some central political regime.
	They're fundamentally conservative people.
	They have a good amount, but they also have a lot they can lose.
	They benefit from the existing system, and they don't see a lot of reasons to radically change it.
	And they're not on board with, like, weird ideological projects.
	And these people are always marked as enemies of a radical revolutionary regime.
	And so, in Russia, things were crazy enough that they would just round up and shoot these people and then collectivize their agriculture.
	And if you want to know how well that went, you know, ask someone in Ukraine.
	It doesn't go great.
	That's what they called it in war.
	Yes, yeah, you know, a terror famine in Ukraine.
	This is what's really horrifying with, you know, the Russian Revolution, is it was, for all of its violence, it was enormously successful at totally remaking Russian society.
	When you think of what defines Russians today, it's very different from what defined Russians stereotypically, you know, before the revolution.
	There is that authoritarian strand throughout it.
	But, you know, if you look at a poll, Russians are far more likely to take this very cynical view of morality.
	idealistic at all.
	They're very, even like religious Russians, it's almost like it doesn't always take with them their attitudes on what's right or wrong.
	And it's, a lot of this is just that the Soviets messed them up in the head so much, and they've created these very sinister systems.
	So rather than just entirely destroy the Orthodox Church, they would do things like they would just appoint KGB assets to be the heads of the Orthodox Church.
	And, you know, okay, you guys have confession as a sacrament.
	Make sure whatever gets confessed, you know, gets folded over to the KGB's files.
	And I don't think I need to belabor at length the sort of psychological impact this has on people.
	To have institutions that are designed to deceive you and trick you and take something that, you know, whatever its merits in the past is now used against you in a very ruthless way.
	They have this whole system of everyone informing on everyone else.
	That's really what defines the Great Terror.
	It's not that they just shoot everyone at random.
	They create a situation where you get denounced, and it's very easy for anyone who gets denounced to be killed very quickly.
	And the scale of this is enormous.
	Stalin, probably in the kind of terror before World War II in the 30s, I want to say the estimates are he shoots about 2 million members of the party just outright.
	They just get purged for some ideological offense or just because the NKVD had to hit a quota of state enemies.
	And defenders of socialism or communism will always say this is just Stalin being Stalin and that's not an indictment of communism.
	But it's just not true.
	You know, I brought a book last time.
	I brought a couple books this time if anyone wants to read more.
	This one is A People's Tragedy by Orlando Feijus, and another good one is Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by Richard Pipes.
	And a key thing is, Stalin is very violent and he kills a lot of people for being suspected enemies, but he didn't invent the concept.
	They did this during the revolution, they did it under Lenin, there's a lot of really bloodthirsty killers.
	The head of the Cheka is a super violent guy.
	Trotsky's a super violent guy who supports shooting people.
	And there's a ton of these people.
	And these are the sorts of people who really revolutionary ideologies are killed to. - These are like, this would be like, this would be like if, you know, and we use Antifa as kind of a punchline now.
	And of course, the original Antifa, by the way, was set up by the people we're talking about now.
	So you can't say they're like Antifa.
	No, they created Antifa.
	The original one, of course, was in Germany in the 1930s as the street fighting unit of the Communist Party of Germany, of Deutschland.
	You know, it would be like if you took the most violent, you know, communist Reddit page and the people who say those just completely insane, unhinged screeds about how they want to wipe out all the class enemies or these days, of course, they would say the race enemies and the gender enemies and, you know, certainly me and Blake.
	And pretty much everybody else on any of our programs.
	But if you took those complete nut jobs and put them in charge of one of the most powerful countries in the entire world, certainly one of the most powerful state apparatuses in the world, and they tried, of course, to export this around the world.
	This is where you get the Comintern, the Communist International.
	But Blake, just as we close out here, we have a couple of minutes.
	Talk to us a little bit about how, at so many points, this just could have been stopped if someone had just come in and crushed them, and yet you had this idea that, number one, that it won't last very long, it'll collapse on its own, It's better for us to just call out their hypocrisy.
	It's better for us to just point out the double standards of them and how so many people, and there's this line in Always with Honor where he says, social life continued on its usual course as if the people involved in the sort of the social scene he's describing in St.
	St. Petersburg would not become victims of the horror soon to befall them.
	You know, when the Reds first take over Petrograd, they control, you know, a couple cities, and it's the sort of thing that could get squished.
	But, you know, when it's weak, it looks weak, so you don't need to do anything.
	And no one ever is really just willing to take the extra step of, oh, this is actually a huge problem that these people are so radical, and them controlling this huge country would be a big deal.
	And obviously, World War I plays a role here.
	If the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, out of the blue.
	Like if 1905 had turned into this type of revolution, I think beyond all doubt other countries would have intervened to stop it.
	They would have seen how terrible it was.
	But World War I, it just happened.
	Everyone's very exhausted.
	You know, 15 million people or however many are dead.
	And it's very, it's a very hard sell in the West to say, oh, let's send even a hundred thousand men to Russia to just stop this.
	It's It's just not popular.
	Well of course this plays into, as we talked last year when we did the China Files, this is very similar because just, you know, about 30 years later, and the Chinese model very much follows, so obviously Communist China became the Soviet Union's most successful export in terms of exporting the ideology of communism.
	Because World War II ends.
	The Maoists could have been stopped, World War II ends, and you have all these people that are sitting in, you know, in China.
	John Birch, by the way, the actual John Birch, being one of them, a military officer, saying, look, you know, just provide some more weapons to these nationalists in Chiang Kai-shek and you can put them out of business.
	You can completely destroy these communists and it just never happens.
	Yeah, the last thing I would want to highlight is how Throughout this, the Bolsheviks always benefited from just the most rigged, lying press support of all time.
	Yes.
	They always have the press in the West, especially in Britain.
	They always have government operators simping for them.
	So they'll always, you know, I would say, you know, the Tsar probably, I don't know if I want to say he deserved to get murdered, but he did not earn his hold on power.
	But everything after that, you'll read, like, So in the 30s, Stalin's doing terror famines and shooting all these people, and so the New York Times sends Walter Duranty to Russia to say, it's all above board.
	So the British Walter Duranty, who later goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the establishment of the Soviet Union.
	Yeah, and so people are always covering for them, and this just continues for decades.
	During World War II, you have the press repeating the Soviet narrative on, you know, everything about why they had to invade Poland, why they had to invade Finland, why they had to absorb all these countries, why all these people missing is totally okay.
	And then continuing after it, there's another book, I can't remember the author, but the book's title is Stalin's War, and it just points out the reputation in the West of Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Chinese Nationalists, is that he was so incredibly corrupt, so bad, you know, Anyone else might have been able to win the Civil War, but this guy was just so bad, so it made sense that the communists would win.
	And the reality is just that that's the Soviet propaganda against him.
	Maybe there was some corruption, but it's not like he's super exceptional in this regard.
	Yeah, because Chairman Mao is such a shining example of incorruptibility.
	And you're just repeating a narrative that is put up by these ideological actors who just like communists.
	This is where we get the phrase, fellow traveler.
	Useful Idiot is also one from them.
	And there's a very strong, in the current era by the way, there's a guy by the name of Jamal Khashoggi who some would say might fit that bill.
	And a final thing from, Lenin had strength for some turns of phrase and another one that's useful to remember is he gives a speech at some party event after they've taken power where he says the key Question of, you know, the modern political struggle is not, you know, one of theory or whatever.
	It is fundamentally, who will overtake whom?
	And this is sometimes abbreviated, who whom?
	And you'll see this online today, and it's a very useful frame, I believe, for understanding left-wing politics, is the left will always be able to bring up some ideological reason, okay, we don't like The police, because of this thing about oppressing black bodies, systemic racism.
	Okay, if we do this policy, this will lead to greater egalitarianism.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	You've all heard it.
	But what a lot of left-wing politics can easily be reduced to is who whom.
	There are groups that they like, and there are groups that they dislike.
	And certainly in America... It's an enemy distinction.
	Yeah, in America, you can very easily tell who they want to be on top and who they want, especially
	To be on the bottom, and it's like, in the left today, they will always be able to find a reason to explain why, you know, if you're one of these opposed groups, like, you know, America's Kulak class, why anything that bad that happens to you is okay, why it's okay to loot your store, why it's okay to ruin your community, why it's okay to discriminate against you in colleges, and yes, if necessary, like, why it's okay for you to be, like, violently killed by some mob
	And you're not, you know, anyone can say whatever they want about you.
	You can't say anything in defense.
	That's always going to be hate speech or some sort of way too extreme rhetoric.
	And it always just, it reduces to who whom.
	You know, think of Kyle Rittenhouse.
	You can find leftists on the internet today who think that because Kyle Rittenhouse was this white teenager, that it was eminently fair that Antifa should be allowed to just hunt him down and just shoot him in the streets of Kenosha.
	And that, you know, it's a very communist ideology that Lenin would have been proud of that day.
	Right, and so this is the, and you take people with this communist ideology, you put them in charge of a country, and then they decide who can live, they decide who dies, they decide who's in power, they decide whose power is taken away.
	This is where you get the system of gulags that Solzhenitsyn wrote about.
	This is where you get the system of the systemic killings That went on all the way from the Red Tower, really up all the way until the end of the 1990s and the collapse of the entire system.
	And Solzhenitsyn, of course, he's good to read.
	Not so much at the start of the revolution, but how things ended.
	But they did ask him once, at the very end of all of it, if you could sum up all of this in one phrase.
	How could all of this have happened?
	Solzhenitsyn said, we forgot God.
	We forgot God.
	Blake Neff, thank you so much for joining us today on Blood on the Snow.
	The Russian Revolution.

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