INDEX: Special Topics on the Soviet Union

I have several obscure texts, not read by westerners because not English, with particular insights on the USSR. Not to bash the Slavic populations. They suffered through much turmoil.

Way before knowing of Substack, I endeavored to better understand Asian and Russian people with a large translation project digging into the Soviet Union. Principally, I wanted to know why it collapsed with what seemed like an unexpected swiftness. After reading, I determined that there were no single nor tight group of related causes, but there was always an inherent poison in how the USSR was being run, (from the methods of the very beginning).

That takes you back to Lenin, Trotsky, and the whole Politburo, and even further back to Marx and Engels. Marx is still used by some people as an exemplar of “basic human truths”. But how could an untested theory ever approach any acclaim of a “truth”?

Essentially, Bolshevism was an experiment in an untried ideology; and a tragic experiment on what will be the outcome of a massive civil war. If society is divided into the rich and powerful who own everything, and those who own next to nothing, and if you say let’s confiscate all that wealth, what will happen? Quite obviously, I think to everyone, there will be an endless bloodbath. They say 10 million dead, and countless invalid, tortured, homeless, and starving.

The Communist Revolution used the Russian nation merely as a battering ram to demolish the resistance of the ruling classes. Russian peasants, soldiers and the working class were pushed into the conflict with the Russian gentry, clericals and military. The maestro slogans that Lenin had come up with — Land to peasants! Factories to workers! Peace to the nations! — were none other than cynical devilish deceptions. What Russians had really been dealt in the end was this Civil War, instead of promised peace, and enslavement, instead of freedom. The International Revolution part of the ideology, was even more devastating to Russia.

I have never published on the Soviets, (or anything other than pre-modern history), because western (English) readers, already have fixed ideas. The texts I have collected here are first-person views (to be judged as biased, or not), and revelations from the declassified archives, much of which cannot be doubted. I do not intend to upload these complete books. And as of yet I have not digested all of this material.

I see that Marx, Engels, and also Lenin and Trotsky hated czarist Russia and held Slavic people as an expendable commodity for their ideology, to be consumed or killed indiscriminately, really in the millions. It becomes obvious that any ruthless methods used, become embedded in the end result. The means ARE the ends. These are the seeds of the Soviet Union, that I think never had been overcome, even through Yeltsin.

It is said that a nation need its myths, and that Marx, Lenin and Stalin are all Russian myths. We know some things that they accomplished, but many of the methods have been swept under the rug, methods which continued to haunt and be implemented in Russia, even to this day.

Russian people were like a piece of clay from which fat chunks were taken for molding the statehood of “the juniors” (the neighboring nations that were joined to the USSR). “The Big Brother” was labelled a “slave master in the prison of nations” (that was how the Bolsheviks used to refer to Tzarist Russia), and it was supposed not only to agree with unprecedented redistribution of its indigenous territory, but also pay for all these “reparations and contributions” to benefit other ethnic groups.

Because Marxism and Leninism generally disliked Russia and the Russian people; and the fact that socialism had been established in Russia for the long seventy years, is to be regarded as a paradox and an irony of history. The contempt with which Karl Marx refers to the Slavic nations is simply astonishing. According to him Czechs, Bulgarians and Croatians were barbarians and Montenegrins were thieves. Marx writes with irony about Slavic lands, at the time occupied by the Turks:

“This magnificent territory has the misfortune of being inhabited by a conglomerate of various races and nations of whom it is difficult to say which one is the least adapted to progress and civilization.”

Here is another curious quote from Marx: “Slavic barbarians are natural counter revolutionaries and the particular enemies of democracy.”

Engels wrote in Neue Rheinische in 1849: “The next world war will erase from the face of the earth not only the reactionary classes and dynasties, but the entire reactionary nations.” The Russian nation, naturally, had been the first in line. In 1882 Engels confided in his correspondence to Karl Kautsky: “You could ask me if I do feel any sympathy towards the Slavic nations. I will tell you — damn little.”

There are more of the astonishing revelations by Engels: “Merciless deadly struggle against counter revolutionary Slavdom is necessary… obliterative war and unrestrained terror.”

No less remarkable were the recommendations offered by Marx during the 19^th century Crimean War, when Russia was heroically defending her land in an unfair fight with several European powers: “… if the plan is implemented insistently and with perseverance, Kronshtadt will fall… if Finland is freed and the enemy is by the gate of the Russian capital, and should all Russian rivers and harbors be besieged, what would Russia be without Odessa, Kronshtadt, Riga and Sevastopol? An armless and eyeless giant…”

Throughout the Crimean War, Marx and Engels published a series of articles full of spite for Russia in Neue Order-Zeitung. They passionately wished for her defeat, at the same time also expressing a desire that all the European powers would be defeated by a revolution. Frustrated by Russia’s success, Karl Marx wrote: “…the mask of the Western European civilization has fallen off the Russians, and revealed a Tatar beneath”, and that the Russian Army was “a sample of guards’ parade training”. Echoing an article by Engels (The Crimean Campaign, 27 December 1854) almost word by word, Marx and Engels expressed anger at the British and the French troops for their failure to obliterate Russians; they excitedly described various scenarios of Russia’s defeat in the event of an assault on Kronshtadt or a military involvement by Austria.

As time went by, the hatred that the internationalism theory founders felt for Russia took pathological forms. Engels developed an idea that had also been one of Marx’s: Pan Slavism “puts Europe before an alternative: either to be conquered by Slavs, or to destroy the center of its offensive force — Russia — for good”.

In 1866 Engels wrote in the British paper Commonwealth of “the old position of democracy and working class on a rights of large European nations to a separate and independent existence”.

Notably, all references are only ever about rights of the European nations. Russians were constantly left out of the list of nations entitled to self-determination. Engels wrote furthermore: “… acknowledgement of, and sympathies for the national aspirations have been related only to the large and clearly defined historic nations of Europe: Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary, France, Spain, England, and Scandinavia, have not been divided or under a foreign governance, and so have only an indirect interest in the cause; as concerns Russia, it can be mentioned merely in her capacity of a proprietor of the great volume of stolen assets, which she will have to return on the day of reckoning”.

These texts provide a clue as to why the Soviet political leadership demanded that Soviet students and scholars memorized only certain selected quotes from Marx and Engels out of context, and the in-depth academic studies of their written work were not encouraged. Anti-Russian and anti-Slavic revelations were concealed in the works of both classics of communism, the sheer volume of which had been enough to put off anyone with a grain of common sense. In the Soviet Union these sanitized texts were available to all; one can imagine the revelations that were contained in the classified historical documents buried in the archives. (We will see some of it.)

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A Russian historian Anatoly Latyshev was on a temporary parliamentary committee in September-November 1991 where he was allowed access to the Lenin Fund of the Communist Party Central Archives in Marxism-Leninism Institute of the CPSU Central Committee. Latyshev has since published the most fascinating book entitled Lenin Uncovered, (Lenin Declassified), as well as a series of articles based on his research at the time. He could not discover too much in such a brief period of time, however, what he had found out was enough.

[I have this Latyshev book, available in Russian, and translated here, and I will share excerpts from it.]

Among the macabre of Lenin’s documents, Latyshev discovered the orders to exterminate multitudes of the Russian people. For example, there were orders “...to take hostages behind-the-line, to position them in front of the advancing Red Army troops, to shoot them in the backs; to send the Red Army soldiers to the areas where ‘the greens’ act; pretending to be ‘the greens’.

It's a great plan. Finish it with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of the "greens" (we will later blame them), we will go 10-20 versts and hang the kulaks, priests, landlords. The bounty is 100,000 rubles for each hanged man." (CPA IML, f.2, op.2, d.380).

^ Above is the exact translation from Lenin’s handwritten order, (which was carried out). He put a wholesale bounty on each corpse brought in. Not on a man brought in for trial; but it was the resort to pure terrorism. With no proof who these dead were, you could get 100,000 for killing all your enemies and antagonists. These several handwritten orders in the book, prove the authenticity of the charges.

Lenin sent a telegram to the Caucasus: “We will cut out everyone”. He demanded “the total extermination of Cossacks” directed to Mikhail Frunze, Chief Commander of the Red Army. By the way, the Cossacks in the Caucasus numbered about one million at the time.

A letter dated 19 December 1919 sent by Lenin to Felix Dzerzhinsky ² contained more of the same. In reply to Dzerzhinsky’s suggestion to execute the captured Cossacks. Lenin wrote a brief resolution: “Shoot down every single one”.

Lenin chose the Russian Orthodox Church as his main target in his terror against Russia. In his letter of 19 March 1922 addressed to Molotov ¹ for the attention of the Politburo, “the Great Leader” (Lenin), insisted on organizing a mass starvation in the country in order to put church valuables into requisition citing the need to help the starved as an excuse. The same letter issued instructions to arrest as many as possible of “the reactionary clericals” who would express their discontent.

On 1 May 1919, Lenin gave the following instructions to Dzerzhinsky: “… it is necessary to finish off with priests and with religion as soon as possible. Everywhere priests must be arrested and shot down mercilessly as counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs, and as many of them as you can find. Churches are to be closed. Church premises are to be sealed and later used as warehouses”.

“It is very probable that someone needs to intimidate Europe with communism that is emerging in Russia, and thus to cause infuriation for Russia in Europe.” Dostoevsky made such an ominous remark in his A Writer’s Diary. Now we know whom the great Russian writer had in mind when he wrote those words.

Possibly, no foreign aggressor has ever caused Russia as much damage as the devilish trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

As soon as the Bolsheviks seized power, they granted “immediate freedom” to Polish and Finnish peoples in accordance with the guidance of the Marxist International “classics”. The Leninists realized that in their struggle against Tzarism they could and must use the potential of these two large nations adjacent to Europe, while understanding that chances of making these nations join the socialist kingdom of Bolshevist Russia were remote. At the same time, the Soviets were not seriously bothered about the short-lived tumults of the peoples of the Caucasus and Privolzhie. The Bolsheviks allowed the local people in these areas to “let off some steam” by using Cossacks as scapegoats (Cossacks were subject to real genocide during the Revolution, Civil War, and in the years to followed), and brought back to the Communist bay, endowing them with the so-called “limited statehood”.

Just how false and ludicrous were the claims of Communists that the Russian Empire was “the prison of nations”? Some prison it was, in which not a single ethnic group, however small, and not a single ethnic culture of Eurasia was allowed to perish into oblivion!

The Baltic region that Russians had been developing since primordial times (an Estonian town of Tartu founded under the name of Yuriev by Prince Yaroslav the Wise in the beginning of XII century is one example), changed hands several times in the past, being repeatedly passed over between Sweden, Prussia and Denmark. The Baltic nations were saved from total extinction only under the Russian Crown, when they gained conditions for local education not in Swedish, Danish, or Prussian dialects but in their native languages. This allowed the Baltic people to assume their national identities and form into Latvian and Estonian nations during the Middle Ages.

Stalin’s national policy that formed the basis of the 1936 Constitution largely cemented the general line followed by the Bolsheviks on the issue of nationalities of the Soviet Republics. World history does not know any other empire in which the mother country handed out parts of its indigenous territory to former colonies. This was how the Bolsheviks and their successors in power paid to their supporters during the Revolution and Civil War, at the expense of the Russian people.

Of course, Stalin the tyrant could not have imagined in his wildest dreams the sort of crowd that was to run Russia in the end of the 20^th century. Stalin did not have enough time to transform the Soviet Union into a single unitary state before he died. Thirty years after “the Great Leader’s death the superpower that he had built started to fray along the borders “on paper”, drawn out by Stalin himself and formally separating the Soviet Republics.

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The books I intend to utilize to demonstrate these views are the above:

✓Anatoly Latyshev, Lenin Declassified

I don’t know if I will go into the Trotsky Archive, although many suppressed letters in the Lenin documents are uncovered with Trotsky. Then I want to take another view of the early Politburo with:

✓Stephen F Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution

I have the complete 2-year course from the Moscow State University, ✓History of the Soviet Union.

✓Sego Beria, Beria – My Father – Inside Stalin’s Kremlin. Lavrentiy Beria led the Cheka in Georgia, (National Security Agency), and later became the NKVD Police Chief in 1938 for Stalin. Sego Beria the son, has a first-person view of Stalin, since as a child, he had heard much of the workings of Kremlin intrigues. You could say his book is a cover-up for his father, but there are many missing details.

I also want to detail ✓Dmitri Rogozin’s first book, Enemy of the People, 2009. He covers the Yeltzin/Gorbachev years. It is also a “first-person” view. He demonstrates the terrorism all the way back to Lenin is still active in the Russian Federation (as of 2009).

We have talked of Rogozin’s other book, the Hawks of Peace. Some of the Hawks chapters are a direct duplication of the Enemy of the People. We’ll see.

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Perhaps this is the biggest project that I ever contemplated. I would be gathering material from 5 books, (maybe more), where usually I concentrate on one book at a time, and upload the compete version. Then it is only a matter of taking the next 25 pages, and proof-reading them for the last time.

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