Russia today

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blindpig
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Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 01, 2017 1:10 pm

NOT the Russian news outlet.

Russia has more communists than any nation after China a quarter century after the Party lost control of/surrendered the state.It seems that the Party leadership is horrible and compromised, yet there are many millions of Russians who have now experienced socialism and capitalism and can tell fish from fowl. The outbreak of socialist affinity at the beginning of the Donbass Revolt gives strong indication of this among the working class of the former USSR. I believe this was a considerable factor in Russia's disgraceful undercutting of the Novorussia's armed forces and the subsequent Minsk betrayals.We knew the Putin government was anti-communist but who knew that Russians could be pro-Nazi? Well, that's what we get for underestimating the weight of class.

In any case we should keep a close eye on Russia, the home of a Reserve Army which the Russian oligarchy fears more than it fears the USA.

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Anti-communist persecutions in Russia will not pass - Solidarity with Alexander Batov
Anti-Communism is a weapon of the capitalist system – It will not pass!

We, 26 Communist Youth Organizations from all over the world, sign the following resolution:
We condemn the arrest and detention of comrade Alexander Batov, a member of the Secretariat of the CC of the Communist Workers' Party of Russia and representative of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Union (bolsheviks) (also known as RKSMb) at the National Preparatory Committee of Russia for the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students.

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Cde. Alexander Batov.

Comrade Batov was arrested on 9th May, day of the Anti-fascist Victory of the peoples, with the falsified accusation of "civil disobedience", in fact for distributing the RCWP's leaflet about the actual content of the day, revealing the attempt to defame the content of this anniversary by today's Russian authorities. He was sentenced to seven days' imprisonment and after his release he has been receiving a series of threats in order to stop any political activity.
These acts, attacks and threats against the free political action of the Communists show the fear of the bourgeois governments of all states in front of the power of the Communists. For us, the young communists from all over the world, these actions result to the strengthening of our steadfastness and will to continue with greater determination our struggle against capitalism, for socialism-communism.
Anti-Communism will not pass! We express our solidarity with RCWP and RCYL (b) and we demand all persecutions to stop immediately.

Signed by the following Communist Youth Organizations:
1. Communist Youth of Algerian Party for Democracy and Socialism (PADS)
2. Communist Youth "Qemal Stafa" of Albania
3. Union of Communist Youth, UJC – Brazil
4. Advancing Communist Youth, JCA – Brazil
5. Young Communist League, YCL-LJC – Canada
6. Young Socialists of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Croatia
7. Communist Youth Union, KSM – Czech Republic
8. Socialist German Workers Youth, SDAJ
9. Communist Youth of Greece, KNE
10. Workers Party Youth, WPY – Ireland
11. Front of Communist Youth – Italy
12. Socialist Movement of Kazakstan
13. Federation of Young Communists, FJC – Mexico
14. Communist Youth Movement of the Netherlands, CJB
15. Communist Youth of Pakistan
16. Democratic Students Federation of Pakistan, DSF
17. Communist Youth of Palestine
18. Peruvian Communist Youth, JCP
19. Youth of the Communist Party of Poland
20. Young Communist League of Yugoslavia - Serbia
21. Collectives of Young Communists, CJC – Spain
22. Revolutionary Communist Youth, RKU – Sweden
23. Communist Youth of Turkey, TKG
24. Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine, LKSMU
25. League of Young Communists of USA, LYC USA
26. Communist Youth of Venezuela, JCV

https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/08 ... ussia.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 23, 2017 2:17 pm

'Anticapitalism 2017' was stopped at the root: Lakeev, Udaltsov, Limonov detained

By Dmitry Cherny

September 23: Today in Moscow, the "Anticapitalism-2017" march was to begin at at the Chekhovskaya Metro station, with an end rally planned at the monument to Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. The notice was filed on time with the mayor's office, but the mayor's office behaved strangely: it delayed with an answer, and when it refused, did not offer any other routes for the march.

The left forces, in turn, believed they had the right to hold a march in the form of a people's festival. They had to start right next to the Federal Agency for Mass Communications (it seems, this is the name of the agency housed where Rachmaninoff lived). Dozens of journalists and cameramen who came to the scene witnessed, however, something far from a people's festival, but people's repression.

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Sergei Udaltsov detained by police while crossing the street.

First detained was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the United Communist Party (OKP) Vladimir Lakeev. Then they detained Sergei Udaltsov, coordinator of the Left Front, without any reason at the pedestrian crossing, Eduard Limonov was detained a little later, and even though he is no longer the leader of the Other Russia movement, he had also planned to take part in the festivities. Other people even began to chant "Russia will be free!", which attracted policemen, as well as television cameras: Putin's gendarmerie demonstrated to the world how successfully they suppress freedom of speech. The presence of foreign journalists did not in the least embarrass the guards of bourgeois law and order, they "took the word" themselves – and began to loudly utter their mantras in a megaphone: "Citizens, do not succumb to provocations, remember the consequences" …


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Comrades of Communist Youth Union detained.

We well remember the consequences of capitalism and the murder of the USSR by those who handed power to Putin in 2000, that's why we came to the march. Yes, leftist and leftist-patriotic organizations were "beheaded," but the spirit of these organizations only grows stronger!

We offer this first report and video. At the detention of Udaltsov (in a brief film clip recorded by a member of the Left Front, Oleg Mokryakov) it can be clearly seen that there were no violations of the law, but a politically pre-established script was carried out by a policeman (who even knew the slang word "anticap"). We're going to the Tverskoy police department to help our comrades Udaltsov and Limonov there. The rest -- Lakeev, LF activist Aleksey Vorontsov and many others, are in the Basmanny police department.

https://redstaroverdonbass.blogspot.com ... ed-in.html
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:20 pm

On Russia, Today’s Liberal Luminaries Take Their Cues From Fascists
Posted on October 11, 2017

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Viktor G. Tsyplakov, “Facing a Firing Squad,” 1945

It’s unlikely that most American news consumers have ever heard of Ukrainian nationalist groups like the OUN-B, but these days, ideas espoused by these groups will have a familiar ring to New York Times readers.

As far as progenitors of anti-communism, Ukrainian nationalists (a designation which includes fascists, Nazis old and neo-, and other reactionary elements) have always punched above their weight class, with their stories providing a lot of right-wing grist for Washington’s propaganda mills. This has happened when US interests drive a surge of aggression against Moscow, specifically during three distinct periods. The first two were during the Cold War—first in the 1950s, then during the 1980s.

The third major period is happening right now. As the US establishment’s dreams of full-spectrum dominance over a unipolar world grind and howl against the Russian border, ideas popularized by Ukrainian fascists and their friends in Washington are en vogue to an unprecedented degree, particularly through highly publicized figures like author Timothy Snyder.

However, unlike during the first two Cold War-era periods, the current offensive is being driven primarily by the Empire’s “liberal” wing, a.k.a. the ruling class elements that coalesce around the Democratic Party. All this adds up to a bizarre scene in America circa 2017, and strangely enough, it was summarized most accurately by the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov in his 1935 text “The Fascist Offensive” (which could serve as an alternate title to this piece):

Let us take, for example, so important a country in the capitalist world as the United States of America. There millions of people have been set into motion by the crisis. The program for the recovery of capitalism has collapsed. Vast masses are beginning to abandon the bourgeois parties and are at present at the crossroads.

Embryo American fascism is trying to direct the disillusionment and discontent of these masses into reactionary fascist channels. It is a peculiarity of the development of American fascism that at the present stage it comes forward principally in the guise of an opposition to fascism, which it accuses of being an “un-American” trend imported from abroad… American fascism tries to portray itself as the custodian of the Constitution and “American democracy.”

This is an attempt to explain what’s going on with an “American fascism that at the present stage it comes forward principally in the guise of an opposition to fascism.” Or, as it’s become known since the 2016 election, the #Resistance. This spectacle, largely centering around a series of conspiracy allegations about Russia, draws upon decades of reactionary misinformation and is inspired less by traditional liberal heroes like Franklin D. Roosevelt than Ukrainian fascists like Stepan Bandera. This is the story for how and why America’s ruling elite chose to make Ukrainian fascism mainstream.

Chapter 1: Fascism and Anti-Communism: a Match Made in Hell – on Soviet anti-racism and the shared class interest between liberals and fascists.

Chapter 2: Goebbels, Hearst, Bandera, and McCarthy – Nazi propaganda makes its way to North America; the activities of Ukrainian nationalists during WWII; Ukrainian fascists come to America at the dawn of the Red Scare.

Chapter 3: Ronald Reagan and his Conquest – the Reagan administration’s plans for a gargantuan military buildup and propaganda offensive; Western intelligence agencies’ favorite “scholar” Robert Conquest; Ukrainian nationalists take up Reagan’s campaign.

Chapter 4: Washington Über Alles – Washington plunders a unipolar world; fascist advocacy groups and liberals promote Nazi lies; the birth of Cold War II.

Chapter 5: Timothy Snyder, Euromaidan, and the Fascist Offensive – Timothy Snyder brings fringe revisionist history into the mainstream; the specter of Stepan Bandera haunts Euromaidan; Democrats make friends with modern-day Banderites.

Chapter 6: #Resisting the Oriental-Bolshevik Menace – Democrats take up Ukrainian fascist propaganda; liberal luminaries manufacture an Orientalist hysteria; NATO threatens to unleash another Operation Barbarossa.



Fascism and Anti-Communism: a Match Made in Hell

It’s worth noting that contrary to the mainstream narrative, Western anti-communism wasn’t a response to Soviet aggression. It didn’t originate during the McCarthy period, or even the First Red Scare, but in the late 19th century. According to Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality, as early as 1880, Ulysses S. Grant was lionized as an eternal foe of “communism, lawlessness, and disorder.” A decade and a half later, “The great Pullman strike outside Chicago in 1894 was greeted with shrieking headlines like ‘MOBS IN CONTROL OF CHICAGO’ and ‘CHICAGO FACES FAMINE’ and was dubbed the ‘Debs Rebellion.’ At about that time, to whip up public alarm about radical disorder, the New York Tribune ‘discovered’ and alerted the readers to ‘ANARCHIST PLOT TO BLOW UP THE CAPITAL.’”¹

It’s important to note something else, in addition to the fact that official anti-communism predates the first socialist state by several decades. Equally important is that the tropes we hear today existed in the 19th century, and reality has little-to-no bearing on how, why, or when these narratives are deployed. Propaganda doesn’t have a relationship to facts, its relationship is to its intended recipient.

After all, whatever came of the Chicago Famine of 1894 inflicted by America’s socialists?

In 1917, the October Revolution established a socialist state in the middle of the Eurasian continent, and wealthy exploiters, royalty, and racial chauvinists worldwide saw their worst nightmare realized. Fearing that they would meet the same fate as the slaveholders of St. Domingue and the Romanovs, the armies of 14 nations invaded Soviet Russia. The allied expeditionary forces fought alongside the “White Russian” armies, commanded by those elements of Tsarist society whom the newborn socialist republic had divested of their privileges. In an evocative illustration of the class forces arrayed against one another, British planes allied to White Russian forces airdropped anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets over Russian cities to agitate against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” menace.

In America, official anti-communism exploded during this period, as recounted in Robert Murray’s Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920:

Anti-Bolshevik testimony was played up in the columns of the nation’s newspapers and once again the reading public was fed on highly colored tales of free love, nationalization of women, bloody massacres, and brutal atrocities. Stories were circulated that the victims of the Bolshevik madmen customarily had been roasted to death in furnaces, scalded with live steam, torn to pieces on racks, or hacked to bits with axes. Newspaper editors never tired of referring to the Russian Reds as “assassins and madmen,” “human scum,” “crime-mad,” and “beasts.” Russia was a place, some said, where maniacs stalked raving through the streets, and the populace fought with dogs for carrion.²

Reactionary émigrés fleeing Soviet Russia, and later the Soviet Union, were usually the primary sources for this and later propaganda campaigns against the USSR. The first major wave of émigrés was the White Russians; one of the major sources of anti-Communist material in this early period was a virulently anti-Semitic, 12,000-word pamphlet titled “Crimes of the Bolsheviks,” published in Munich in 1926. One of the fables concocted by the pseudonymous author “Dr. Gregor,” in the section titled “Fiendish tortures devised by the Jewish Cheka,” alleged that Soviet torturers forced rats to eat through the bodies of helpless Christians. This story about rats was later borrowed for the grim conclusion of George Orwell’s 1984. From then until now, the primary sources for anti-Communist agit-prop are fascists, whose stories are filtered out to various target audiences through different salespeople.

Anti-communism is, if not an expression of fascism itself, proximate to fascism. Orwell provides a perfect example. This might sound shocking to someone who only knows Eric Blair as the patron saint of the permissible left, but as could be expected of a lifelong anti-communist, he was a man of retrograde attitudes. In his infamous “Orwell’s list,” in which he snitched on suspected communists, socialist, and various progressives, he noted everyone he suspected of being Jewish (Charlie Chaplin earned a “Jew?” in the margins of Orwell’s list). Next to Paul Robeson, the black communist who fought for social justice alongside progressives of all races his entire life, Orwell wrote “very antiwhite.” Orwell believed the contemporary neo-Nazis slogan that “anti-racist” is code for “anti-white.”

This could be expected because contrary to anti-communist nonsense about “totalitarianism,” it is the liberal capitalist ideology that resembles fascism. As early as the 1950s, the Martinican political philosopher Aimé Césaire observed that fascism was colonialism imported to Europe from the periphery. The Nazis admired European colonialism, American Jim Crow, and Western eugenics, and sought to constitute white supremacist rule in Germany and create settler-colonies in Eastern Europe. The same categories of racial exclusion that are expressed most nakedly in fascism are immanent to the liberal worldview: John Stuart Mill claimed that “Civilization is the direct converse of rudeness or barbarism. Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life, the contrary of these constitute civilization.” Edward Said similarly observed that “Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs,’” with “their” savage world legitimizing “our” enlightened civilization.

Fascism and liberalism share a foundational class interest in maintaining capitalist enterprise, and from this springs the shared ideological view of a world divided between the enlightened and barbarians. In contrast, communism rejects all the ideological aspects of fascism, to the extent that it is an entirely opposed worldview. Here are how three observers characterized the differences between fascism and communism:

When speaking to several American journalists after the rise of the Nazi party, Germany’s Count Hugo von Lerchenfeld beamed that the Führer was a “prophet,” and characterized his agenda thusly:

Who is this man Adolf Hitler? The first and most important dogma in Hitler’s creed from the very beginning has been anti-Semitism… Like Mussolini he has unfolded the banner of nationalism. The spirit of the trenches, the spirit of unswerving fidelity to the Fatherland, must be revived in order to strengthen and unite the German people. Hitler looks upon Socialism and Internationalism as purely Jewish inventions.³

Fascism is based on extreme racial chauvinism—particularly against Jews (which it sees as the masterminds of Communism)—and the most vicious dictatorship of capital justified by a highly idealistic blood-and-soil mythos. In contrast, here is how journalist Edgar Snow discussed the Soviet perspective during World War Two:

It is true enough that Marxist ideology must reject the notion that the “German mind” exists as apart from class forces which shape it, or that the “German race” is biologically and congenitally incapable of human decency. It is also true that basic propaganda in Russia usually stressed the “anti-fascist” and “anti-Hitlerite” nature of the war, rather than the anti-German.

I remember seeing a big cartoon chart in a Soviet military school which showed the figures of a Red Army man and a Nazi soldier, side by side. There was little physical difference in the two figures. But above the Soviet fighter were slogans such as “racial equality,” “support of all freedom-loving nations,” “people’s ownership of production,” “international peace,” “highest development of the individual,” “international brotherhood,” to indicate the moral equipment which made him a good soldier. The top of the Nazi trooper’s skull was cut away, and inside it the contents were displayed: “false racial theories,” “ignorance,” “plunder of peace-loving peoples,” “Germany over all,” “reactionary Prusso-German militarist tyranny,” “moral filth,” and so on. You got from that cartoon the distinct impression that whoever drew it believed that if you emptied out the contents of that German skull and refilled it with the correct ideas, the man beneath it would not differ so much from the Soviet hero beside him.4

Describing the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, journalist Anna Louise Strong summarized the opposing worldviews of Hitler and Stalin: “its adoption was intended as a direct challenge to the theories and practice of Nazi fascism, which had risen to power in Berlin… While Hitler preached the view of ‘inferior and superior races,’ the Soviet Constitution made even the preaching of race privilege or inferiority a crime. Stalin directly challenged Hitler in what is perhaps the most sweeping statement ever made of equality: ‘Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural backwardness can justify national and racial inequality’.”5
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“Paul Robeson at Peekskill,” by V. Poliakov, H. Shatz & T. Radoman, 1954. In 1949, Paul Robeson and other musicians put on a concert in Peekskill, NY, which was attacked by a crowd of fascist thugs shouting “We’re Hitler’s boys” and “Go back to Russia, nigger.” The police allowed the mob to attack the progressives and send 140 to the hospital—Robeson claimed “perhaps no single event in the postwar anti-fascist struggle has had the same impact and importance as the incident of Peekskill.” Robeson had visited the USSR and claimed that he felt like “a human being for the first time” in his life.
This was as much a rejection of liberal capitalist governance as it was Hitlerism: in 1936, black Americans were de facto disenfranchised by a series of measures including de jure Jim Crow (the United States had only relinquished direct military rule over the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti in the last few years). Three-quarters of people governed by Paris lived under colonial rule; it was nearly 85% for British subjects. Indigenous people in the dominions of Canada and Australia were similarly barred from voting.

Anti-communists dismiss comments like Stalin’s 1934 reply to the US Jewish Agency as cant, but the Soviet commitment to anti-racism is confirmed by sources with no stake in defending the USSR, including explicitly anti-communist ones (it should be obvious that the following is not a claim that the USSR was “perfect,” nor that it was a “paradise,” nor that retrograde bigotries had been entirely eliminated).

A report published by the RAND Corporation in 1958 titled Smolensk Under Soviet Rule, and authored by Merle Fainsod (with the help of a young researcher named Zbigniew Brzezinski), claims that “Indifference toward the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments by worker Communists was singled out for special censure” by Soviet authorities. Smolensk also claims that between 1929-30, dozens of university students were expelled and one professor removed from his post for anti-social crimes including anti-Semitism. During one of the purges, a party functionary was reprimanded for failing to report that his wife had made bigoted comments against Jews.6

A survey conducted by Harvard University in 1950-1 among displaced Soviet WWII refugees asked subjects to describe differences between the country’s nationalities. The respondents claimed that there were no differences, except for the preferential treatment afforded to historically marginalized groups. According to the respondents:

There is no chauvinism. You can get ten years for it.

In the army, a soldier got seven years for calling a Jew ‘Zhid.’

All are alike. You cannot tell somebody that he is a Ukrainian and brag that you are a Russian or you would be arrested.

If you cussed out a member of a minority group, there was serious trouble.

Since Nazi-fascism was the most virulent form of white supremacy, which was invented and pioneered by West European colonists in North America, the USSR and Nazi Germany embodied two opposing systems. The capitalist West, which the Reich sought to replicate, shared Hitler’s goal of extinguishing the socialist system—a struggle that would both create the conditions for World War II and succeed that horrible conflict.



Goebbels, Hearst, Bandera, and McCarthy

Between the First and Second World Wars, business interests in both Europe and North America were resolutely opposed to the demands of communists, socialists, anarchists, labor activists and syndicalists around the world. During the fascist insurrection against the Spanish Republic beginning in 1936, the UK and US organized a non-intervention campaign in order to allow Nazi Germany and fascist Italy to crush the progressive government. According to Carl Geisler, an American who fought for the Republic with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:

Some American businessmen deliberately helped the fascists. When the rebellion occurred, Texaco had five oil tankers at sea fulfilling a contractual agreement with the Republic’s oil company, CAMPSA. Captain Thorkild Rieber, Texaco’s director, ordered all tankers to go to ports controlled by the fascists. Texaco, helped by Standard Oil, supplied three and one half million tons of aviation and truck equipment to the fascists and one half million tons of aviation and truck gasoline to the fascists that Germany and Italy could not supply, much of it on credit. While Hitler and Mussolini were able to supply 3,000 military trucks, General Motors, Ford, and Studebaker provided 12,000. These transactions were violations of the Neutrality Act and though known to Secretary of State Cordell Hull were kept secret.7

In late 1936, when it was clear that Germany and Italy would not observe the neutrality act, the Soviet Union and Mexico became the only two countries to aid the Republic. In contrast to the blind eye afforded to the fascists, France blocked materiel sent overland at the border. On March 20 1938, the US Ambassador to Spain Claude Bowers telegrammed Secretary of State Hull informing him that “Germany and Italy are acting openly on a very large scale,” that the legitimate Spanish Government “cannot compete,” and “this is all due absolutely to the non-Intervention scheme of the British which has tied the hands of France and the other Democracies while making no pretense to enforcing the agreement upon the Fascist Powers.”8 It stands to reason that Britain would take an active role against the Republic, since General Francisco Franco was an asset of Britain’s secret service, the MI6 (MI6 even chartered a plane to ferry Franco to Morocco in order to begin the rebellion).

Major newspapers, owned as they are by millionaires, were generally willing to oblige. Following the Luftwaffe’s infamous bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, The New York Times published a proto-hot take titled “The Ruins of Guernica. A Rival View,”which posited that Guernica’s destruction was largely the result of fires started by fleeing civilians. One Times correspondent in particular, William Carney, was an indefatigable supporter of Franco’s insurrection. A May 18th 1937 telegram from Ambassador Bowers to Secretary of State Hull said that an Italian propaganda station in Salamanca “solicits war correspondents to make propaganda speeches for them for from one to ten thousand lire… One American, Mr. Carney of the New York Times responded.” Carney concluded his broadcasts with the fascist motto Arriba España.9
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A discussion of the links between the Nazi regime and its capitalist supporters worldwide is outside the scope of this piece (check out this great Michael Parenti lecture for that), but one prominent example is industrialist Henry Ford publishing the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and subsequently receiving the Order of the German Eagle from the Nazi government. Along with the progressive activists in their own respective countries, reactionaries targeted the USSR. According to author Douglas Tottle, “German Nazis, defeated right-wing Ukrainian Nationalist exiles, European conservatives, neo-fascist millionaires like [William Randolph] Hearst—all wanted to isolate and bring pressure on the Soviet Union, to discredit and reverse socialist developments”10

As far as wealth, influence, and reach, fascists agitators like the Times‘ Carney and Father William Coughlin were manic street preachers compared to publishing impresario William Randolph Hearst. In the 1930, Hearst was known as “America’s number one fascist.” According to Tottle, Hearst employed Benito Mussolini; “for a long time his chief source of income was $1500.00 per week from the Hearst press.” The Hearst press frequently derided President Franklin Roosevelt as a “communist,” so one can imagine how he felt about actual communists.

When Hearst visited Nazi Germany in 1934, he met with Hitler personally, and Hearst, Hitler, and Joseph Goebbels struck a deal worth $400,000 for Hearst’s presses to cover the Third Reich. One of the Nazi party’s chief ideologists, Alfred Rosenberg, began publishing articles in the Hearst presses worldwide under his own name. A 1936 biography of Hearst claimed that he “derived a new political vision from his Nazi contacts,” which included both fulsome praise of Nazi Germany and “denouncing the Soviet Union in particular and Communism in general.”¹¹

The Nazi regime provided him with an idea that would be in the mutual interest of both European fascists and North American tycoons. From 1931-33, there was a serious famine in several parts of the USSR, including the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Western Siberia. According to Professor Mark Tauger, “[m]y research has shown that the famine resulted from drought, plant disease and pest infestations that caused two years of crop failures.” Tauger observes that extensive contemporary historical evidence attests to the fact that the Soviet government cancelled exports from and sent aid to the afflicted regions, even to the point of ceasing to pay foreign debt during the crisis. “Most of these points are also documented in easily available sources,” Tauger adds. “Soviet leaders made bad decisions that worsened the famine, but the regime also provided relief and helped peasants produce a larger harvest that ended the famine” in 1933. Tauger concludes: “The famine that took place was not limited to Ukraine or even to rural areas of the USSR, it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership to create such as disaster.”

Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, two prominent historians who dispute aspects of Tauger’s work, nonetheless conclude that “The authorities overestimated harvests and tried to impose high procurement quotas, but they also reduced those quotas when difficulties developed, and returned procured grain to villages for food and seed; they decided in the face of crisis to feed the cities as well as possible, but they also made significant efforts to support agricultural recovery, though this failed for millions of people.” In contrast to the genocide narrative pushed out by powerful reactionaries, Wheatcroft and Davies’ study of primary sources claims:

Soviet leaders, even if their actions contributed to the famine crisis, found it unexpected and extremely undesirable […] archival and published sources on high-level policy discussion and decisions in this crisis, including the formerly secret records of the Politburo and the now published correspondence of Stalin with some of his top lieutenants like Kaganovich and Molotov…decisively refute intentionalist explanations of the 1931-1933 famine. None of these sources contain any evidence indicating that Stalin or his officials intended or wanted to create a genocidal famine to suppress Ukrainian nationalism or any other such objective.

However, the Nazi regime and the Hearst press colluded to turn this serious crisis into a story about a Stalin-instigated “famine-genocide.” For the Nazis, this served two chief purposes. First, it laid the groundwork for the Nazis to claim they were acting in the interests of beleaguered minority groups—they conquered several nations while claiming to be defending German speakers, and during the war the Reich founded a “Committee of Subjugated Nations” to co-ordinate stay-behind terrorist armies. Second, portraying Moscow as genocidal augmented the Nazi propaganda ploy to claim self-defense (for this reason, the Nazis were frequent users of false-flag attacks, from the Reichstag fire to the Gleiwitz incident). The Reich’s propaganda initiative against the Soviet Union coincided with Hearst’s own red-baiting campaign: Hearst papers called for legislation requiring teachers to swear loyalty oaths, and “Hearst assigned ‘hundreds’ of reporters to ‘expose’ radical professors…and while taking a soft line on Nazi activities in Germany, Hearst launched his press attack portraying alleged ‘famine, misery, and brutality’ against the Soviet Union.”¹²

This section, discussing the origins of the “famine-genocide” myth, will draw heavily from Tottle’s Fraud, Famine and Fascism, which debunked the genocide narrative three decades ago. Those interested in learning how the smear campaign was carried out from the 1930s-‘80s should read the book in full [here]; in addition to being exhaustive, Tottle is very witty (especially given the subject matter), so the book is a quick read.

To summarize, the sources for the famine-genocide myth are the presses of Hitler-admirer William Randolph Hearst and propaganda from Nazi Germany. The initial Hearst campaign began with a man calling himself Thomas Walker, who claimed to have visited Ukraine and documented a famine (and providing photos). A few months later, the Hearst press began broadcasting stories about a famine which had killed 6 million people in Soviet Ukraine. Noting numerous discrepancies in Walker’s story, a reporter for The Nation named Louis Fischer investigated, and found that “Walker” was an escaped convict and career criminal named Robert Green, who entered the USSR in 1934, spent a week in Moscow, traveled to Manchuria, and then left, while never coming within hundreds of miles of the Ukraine. Tottle points out that the Walker photos used in publications pushing the genocide myth can be traced to Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary during the First World War, and the famine that resulted from the White Terror during the Russian Civil War. Many are obviously doctored or of dubious provenance. “Walker’s fake photographs are the most prominently displayed pictorial ‘evidence’ associated with post-war famine-genocide campaigns, despite the fact that this material was exposed as fraudulent immediately following its release in 1935.” However, “Despite the Thomas Walker fiasco, Hearst did not give up his famine-genocide campaign—it was part and parcel of his overall propagation of anti-Soviet, pro-fascist views.”¹³

“Simultaneously with Hearst’s 1935 famine-genocide campaign,” continues Tottle, “the Nazi press in Germany and similar papers elsewhere in Europe issued materials on the same theme. The Nazis had been flogging the issue as early as 1933, complete with fraudulently mis-dated photos.” The official Nazi party publication Völkischer Beobachter repeated and spread the stories of the Hearst presses. A 1935 book published in Germany was translated to English as Human Life in Russia the next year, and Tottle observes that Human Life in Russia set the tone for many publications pushing the genocide myth: “Documentation is minimal: footnotes are remarkably scarce and no bibliography is included.” The author, Ewald Ammende, attested to the authenticity of the photographs within, declaring that they are the work of “an Austrian photographer.” Like “Thomas Walker’s” photographs, those pictures that could not be identified as fabrications were of dubious origin. Tottle points out that many were first published in the German Nazi party’s organ Völkischer Beobachter.14

In other words, the famine-genocide narrative was debunked shortly after Joseph Goebbels and his fascist North American confederates like Hearst invented it. However, it would be a powerful propaganda myth for those whose interests it served, which included Ukrainian nationalists.

In the interwar period, the territory that today comprises Ukraine was partitioned into what were then 4 different countries; in 1922, eastern Ukraine became a union republic of the USSR. There were multiple competing schools of thought among Ukrainians and Ukrainian émigrés (which ranged from Communism to monarchism), but those who espoused fascist views are the ones germane to this discussion. One of the most prominent groups, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed an alliance with Nazi Germany. OUN leaders like Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk were recruited by Germany’s military intelligence, the Abwehr, for espionage, terrorism, and irregular warfare. The OUN’s motto was Slava Ukraini, slava heroyam! (“Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes”).

After WWII, many OUN activists and sympathetic chroniclers would present this as a marriage-of-convenience or an act of grudging realpolitik, but there was deep ideological affinity. Before the war, the OUN was preparing a plan for what it would do if it managed to rule Ukraine, and one historian explained its platform like this: “During the 1930s, the anti-Jewish, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian stance of the Ukrainian nationalist leadership hardened. The fascist tendencies of the movement flourished…the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) declared, ‘The Jews are guilty, horribly guilty, because they were the ones who helped secure Russian rule in Ukraine. […] Only when Russia falls in Ukraine will we be able to secure the Jewish question in our country in a way that lies in the interest of the Ukrainian people.’”15 Before the Second World War, the OUN had a vision for Ukraine that was almost identical to that envisioned by the Hitler regime.

In the United States, a constellation of reactionary émigré groups maintained a structure for advancing Ukrainian nationalist interests (in competition with pro-Soviet socialist émigrés). One group called the United Ukrainian Organizations of America (UUOA) organized demonstrations in late 1933 “save Ukraine from death by starvation.” In 1934, when the Nazi/Hearst campaign began, the UUOA adopted the famine-genocide theory and lobbied Congress to do so as well.

During this period, a monarchist organization called the Hetman Sich engaged in paramilitary activities. A pastor of the Ukrainian Catholic church in America praised the group for combating the “infection of socialism,” and the Chicago Sich enjoyed the sanction of the US government—as did many right-wing paramilitaries of the era. According to one historian, the Chicago chapter “bubbled with excitement,” proclaiming “By joining the American militia, we shall realize the main aim. i.e., to be the base and the beginning of the new Ukrainian army.” An informant reported the paramilitary activities of a different nationalist group to the FBI, including running “Nazi drills,” but the FBI cleared the group. In order to organize a “National Front against the Bolsheviks,” the Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU) staged an event in 1938 which brought OUN leaders (visiting from Nazi Germany) and 5,000 participants to New York. At the end of the rally, participants sieg-heiled and shouted Slava Ukraini, slava heroyam!16

On June 22nd, 1941, Nazi Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. [content warning: descriptions of Holocaust violence]

As Barbarossa began, it was Banderites who sounded the tocsin of what was to come.


Illustration from Pavel Ya. Kirpichev’s series “Malaya Zemlya – Novorossiyskiy Desant.”

On June 22nd 1941, via a German radio broadcast, “A young man in Trembowla [Ukraine] heard an important member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) demand ‘Death to Jews, death to Communists, death to Commissars, exactly in that sequence.’”17

Members of the OUN were incorporated into the Nazi command as the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions. Author Saul Friedländer explains what happened when these units began the Holocaust on the Eastern Front:

Bandera’s men led the OUN-B auxiliary units that marched into [the Ukrainian region of] eastern Galicia in June 1941 with the Wehrmacht. In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen-SS “Viking” Division, while Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding).

Aryeh Klonicki, a Jew from Kovel, described the events of June 1941 in Tarnopol: “On the third day of the German invasion a massacre lasting three consecutive days was carried out in the following manner. The Germans, joined by the Ukrainians, would go from house to house in order to look for Jews. The Ukrainians would take the Jews out of the houses where the waiting Germans would kill them…This is how some five thousand people found their death, mostly men.18

In his diary, Otto Korfes, a Nazi general in Ukraine, described a pogrom that took place on July 3rd 1941:

We saw trenches 5 meters deep and 20 meters wide. They were filled with men, women, and children, mostly Jews. Every trench contained some 60-80 persons. We could hear their moans and shrieks as grenades exploded above them. On both sides of the trenches stood some 12 men dressed in civilian clothes. They were hurling grenades down the trenches… Later, officers of the Gestapo told us that those men were Banderists.19

This was the beginning of Nazi barbarism on the Eastern Front. In May 1943, the SS declared the region of eastern Galicia Judenrein (“free of Jews”). At the first tribunal for Nazi war criminals, held in 1943 in Kharkov, Ukraine shortly after its liberation by the Red Army, presiding judge Major General A. N. Myasnikov summarized the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich as “crimes and atrocities whose magnitude and baseness far exceed anything inscribed in the blackest pages of human history.”20

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Aleksei M. Gritai, “A Traitor,” 1945

However, after the war, the capitalist West maintained the class interest that it had shared with Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill advocated re-arming Nazi armies and attacking the USSR before the war had even ended; in Greece, Britain implemented a small-scale version of this plan by massacring anti-fascist partisans to bolster the collaborationist regime. While pursuing a superficial policy of denazification, the Reich’s successor state in western Germany retained much of the Nazi state apparatus. This included hundreds of former Nazis in the Bundestag, putting Nazi general Reinhardt Gehlen and his clique at the head of the post-war intelligence service, an interior ministry that was “77% former Nazis” in 1957, and a clandestine Gladio-style stay-behind army comprised of 40,000 Wehrmacht veterans. Theodor Oberländer, who served the Nazi regime as both an adviser to the OUN-B’s Nachtigall battalion and an ideologue for the Holocaust, was made the FRG’s Minister for Refugees and Expellees for much of the 1950s (as well as an OSS/CIA advisor), where he found new careers for OUN-B members.

Image
Illustration from Pavel Ya. Kirpichev’s series “Malaya Zemlya – Novorossiyskiy Desant.”

Through the OSS and then the CIA, the United States opened countless “rat lines” to funnel fascist war criminals towards new jobs under Washington’s supervision. Through a network of programs including Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise and Project Bloodstone, the US imported thousands of former Axis personnel to work for the US government and stateside businesses. Through the Lodge Act of 1950, 200 Eastern European former Waffen-SS killers became the nucleus of the US Special Forces, and one of their advisors was Nuremberg war criminal Franz Six. As Harry Rositzke, a former head of CIA secret operations put it, “It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist.”21

The Congressional debate in 1948 over the Displaced Persons Bill noted that “No doubt every one of them [Eastern European Nazi collaborators] now bears a new name, passes [himself] off as a martyr of Soviet oppression, and answers to all the specifications of a political refugee.”22 If this description suits anybody, it fits the Ukrainian nationalists who joined the ranks of Washington’s allies.

In order to transmute their wartime experience from Holocaust perpetrators into genocide victims, Ukrainian nationalist émigrés fashioned the “double genocide” narrative. In North America, the fleeing fascists claimed to have been caught between Hitler and Stalin—though they presented the Soviets as the greater evil. In order to continue Hitler’s anti-communist crusade, Washington took up their stories about Bolshevik barbarism, a narrative that necessarily whitewashed Eastern European fascism and minimized the Holocaust.

But what of the OUN-B’s fabled anti-Nazi campaign? After all, this is an indispensable part of their post-war claim to heroism: they say that both the Nazis and Soviet committed genocide, and that the OUN consequently fought both equally. Much like the claim of Soviet genocide, the OUN’s fight against the Reich is largely a fraud. It is true enough that on June 30th, the OUN-B declared an independent state with Yaroslav Stetsko as its Prime Minister (the text concluded with an oath of fealty to Stepan Bandera and “slava Ukraini”). The OUN-B’s declaration stated that independent Banderite Ukraine would “work closely” with Nazi Germany “under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.” The OUN-B celebrated their newfound independence by initiating a pogrom that murdered thousands of Jews in Lviv over the course of a few days—a propaganda pamphlet written by the Banderite government told the region’s Jews “we will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet.”

However, while the OUN-B anticipated an independent fascist Ukraine under Hitler’s aegis, the Nazis wanted a subordinate puppet state. As a result, the OUN-B’s dream was short-lived. Though many OUN members ran afoul of the Reich, and some OUN-B leaders were imprisoned for several years, the latter received preferential treatment (including the ability to send and receive correspondence). One author explains that “Although Stetsko was under an ‘honorary arrest’ by the Germans because the creation of the Stetsko regime hadn’t been cleared by the Germans, he was still active in OUN-B affairs and even allowed to travel.”23 In 1943 and ‘44, Stepan Bandera and his OUN-B lieutenants Stetsko and Roman Shukhevich were formally recruited by SS commander (and future Mossad agent) Otto Skorzeny to fight the Soviets. At this point, they relocated to Berlin and rejoined the Nazi ranks. After the war, Bandera and Stetsko both lived comfortably in Munich, West Germany. This is a far cry from the fate which befell genuine enemies of the Third Reich like Ernst Thällman, to say nothing of the OUN-B’s Jewish, Polish, and Soviet victims.

As the Cold War began, Winston Churchill adopted Joseph Goebbels’ line about an “iron curtain,” and the Second Red Scare began. For the American ruling establishment, Ukrainian fascists were ideal collaborators—not only were they battle-tested killers, but they had come to America’s shore with ready-made anti-communist fables. In 1953-4, Ukrainian fascists living in North America assembled a compendium of Nazi lies into a two-volume work called The Black Deeds of the Kremlin. In 1959, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) invited the authors of Black Deeds of the Kremlin to contribute testimony about the “crimes” of Stalin and Khrushchev.

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A panel from the 1961 American anti-communist propaganda booklet “This Godless Communism” [source]

The first speaker was Lev Dobriansky, an OSS officer who had managed rat lines to smuggle Ukrainian fascists away from justice (CIA programs BELLADONNA, LYNX/TRIDENT, and many others). According to a CIA report, the Banderite network Dobriansky helped maintain was “primarily a terrorist organization” [original emphasis].
Dobriansky would play an outsized role in Western anti-communism for the rest of the century. Like the Nazis, he established fascist advocacy groups operating under a veneer of human rights, creating the National Captive Nations Committee and the Victims of Communism Memorial Fund (The Captive Nations Committee was a Washington-backed update of the Nazis’ Committee of Subjugated Nations). Dobriansky, Yaroslav Stetsko, and other Banderites also founded the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), to co-ordinate Nazi-aligned émigré groups and advance various fascist agendas; in the 1980s, the ABN “attack[ed] the Office of Special Investigations of the Justice Department, the branch engaged in prosecuting alleged Nazi war criminals residing in the United States,” according to authors Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. Dobriansky and his associates were a “central element,” in the words of anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory, of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a big-tent congress of seemingly every Nazi, fascist war criminal, anti-Semitic genocidaire, death squad leader, and right-wing terrorist that Washington could find from around the globe.

Petro Pavlovich, HUAC’s second speaker, repeated a series of claims that he had made in Black Deeds for the HUAC board. However, the Congressional record omitted that Pavlovich’s testimony in Black Deeds were a continuation of his earlier propaganda work for the Nazis. Working under the pen name Apollon Trembovetskyj, Pavlovich was the editor of a fascist publication and authored a text called Zlochyn U Vinnytsa (“Crimes in Vynnitsa”), which was printed and disseminated by the Nazi regime.

In Zlochyn U Vinnytsa, Pavlovich wrote: “Let [the massacre] strongly unite our people with the mighty strength of Germany, the liberator of Ukraine, let it unite [us] in the cruel and merciless struggle with the terrible enemy of mankind—Bolshevism.” Douglas Tottle continues: “By 1943 the Nazis had caused the death or transport for slave labor of millions of Ukrainians; still the Nationalist’s appeals continued. Proclaiming Hitler ‘the great humanitarian and savior,’ Trembovetskyj urges: ‘Only by hard work and our lives will we be able to repay our debt to Hitler, and defeat Judeo-communism.’ Zlochyn U Vinnytsa is riddled with anti-semitic slurs. Trembovetskyj calls upon Ukrainians to be steeled ‘in the greater and cruel struggle against Jew-communism.’” 15 years later, a man whose wartime propaganda missives often included the phrase “Stalin the Jew” was passed off by the US Congress as an objective and dispassionate witness.24

Another speaker, Mykola Lebed, was one of the OUN’s founders and was responsible for organizing the genocide of 100,000 Poles in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during the war. Lebed claimed that Soviet authorities subjected victims to gruesome bacteriological experiments and even crucifixion. Tellingly, with the former claim, Lebed was trying to pass off a barbarity practiced by the Nazis on concentration camp inmates as something done by the NKVD to Ukrainian nationalists—in other words, to supplant Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. The accusation that the Soviets crucified victims might sound like it originated in a lurid pulp novel, but it had a different provenance: one SS General claimed that, in order to motivate them, the Ukrainian invaders were told that the Soviets killed children and prisoners by “nail[ing] them to the wall.”25

With the testimony of these Ukrainian fascists at HUAC, Nazi lies invented to justify Barbarossa and the Holocaust became part of America’s mainstream historical record. Had he not gotten what was coming to him years before, Joseph Goebbels would’ve been proud.

https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2017/10 ... -liberals/ (Part 1)
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:27 pm

On Russia, Today’s Liberal Luminaries Take Their Cues From Fascists (Part 2)

Ronald Reagan and his Conquest

When Ronald Reagan and his clique moved into the White House, they drastically increased an escalation in armaments and subversive activities that began under Jimmy Carter. In 1981, the US began a massive rearmament campaign that included the MX intercontinental ballistic missile, the Trident II submarine-launched missile program, the cruise missile program, the B-1 strategic bomber, and countless others, including the quixotic, trillion-dollar plan to militarize space known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (or “star wars”). On August 6th, 1981—the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—the Reagan Administration announced plans to develop the neutron bomb.

In 1982, the US invaded Lebanon. The next year, it began moving nuclear-armed medium-range Pershing II and cruise missiles into Western Europe (capable of reaching Soviet targets in as little as 5 minutes). By 1984, the US was 5 years into Operation Cyclone (the proxy war in Afghanistan), and beginning the dirty wars in Latin America that would kill hundreds of thousands of people and devastate the region. The entire time, administration officials spoke about the feasibility of waging a “limited,” survivable nuclear war. White House figures, like Richard Pipes in a 1982 Time Magazine interview, explained that the goal was to destroy the Soviet economy through an arms race even if the two nations didn’t go to war. That same year, Reagan declared a “crusade” against communism “which will leave Marxism-Leninism in the ash heap of history.”26

In the 8 years that Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, the US spent over $2 trillion on its military. However, this massive overt buildup was accompanied by an explosion in American covert capabilities. One of the most influential Pentagon planning documents from this era, entitled “Fiscal 1984-1988 Defense Guidance,” planned for not only waging a “long nuclear war” and spending $1.6 trillion on the military in the next 5 years, but expanding psychological operations and irregular warfare capabilities. The Pentagon claimed that “We must revitalize and enhance special-operations forces to project US power where the use of conventional forces would be premature, inappropriate or infeasible, particularly in Eastern Europe.” The New York Times explained that “Special operations [means] guerrilla warfare, sabotage and psychological warfare.”

Concurrently with Pentagon plans to ramp-up psychological warfare capabilities against the socialist world, the Reagan Administration was expanding the CIA’s ability to carry out its own PsyOps. One historian explained that:

The Intelligence and National Security Affairs Office has been revived to coordinate all the special subversive activities of the US secret services. The new charter of the CIA introduced by the president’s executive order of December 4, 1981, lifts the restrictions on the Agency’s activities in the USA and, what is more, vitalizes its work against those whom Washington considers its opponents. The new charter reaffirms the doctrine of “plausible denial,” namely: “Special activities means activities conducted in support of national foreign policy objectives abroad which are planned and executed so that the role of the United States Government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly.”27

Consequently, the Reagan years were a good time for anti-communist fabulists. A prominent example was Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, which alleged that the Soviet Union was responsible for inspiring, funding, and/or coordinating most of the terrorism around the world. Sterling’s work, while fraudulent, was an excuse for covert actions and imperialist interventions around the world, as well as providing countless propaganda talking-points.

It was at this time that the CIA’s remit for disseminating “grey” and “black” propaganda was expanded, and the White House sought to weaken the Soviet Union by deploying PsyOps “particularly in Eastern Europe,” that Robert Conquest updated Ukrainian fascist propaganda for the 1980s.

Anti-communists will tell you that Robert Conquest is the “towering” anti-Soviet historian of the 20th century. Conquest served in the British military in WWII and then transferred to the Foreign Office in Bulgaria, before being expelled from the People’s Republic in 1948 due to what appears to be his involvement in espionage activities. He then joined the Information Research Department (IRD), a “‘propaganda counter-offensive’ unit created in order to ‘collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications.’ The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion.”

His most famous book was and is 1968’s The Great Terror, which he compiled mostly from reactionary émigré sources and which was written at the behest of the IRD. “In fact, the book was a re-compilation of articles Conquest had written when working for the secret services,” writes Professor Grover Furr: “The Great Terror was finished and published under the supervision, and with the help of, the IRD–at that time the chief anti-communist propaganda wing of the British political police. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger Press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources.”

Liberal historian J. Arch Getty had this to say about Conquest:

Sometimes, the “scholarship” had been more than simply careless. Recent investigations of British intelligence activities (following in the wake of US post-Watergate revelations), suggest that Robert Conquest, author of the highly influential Great Terror, accepted payment from British intelligence agencies for consciously falsifying information about the Soviet Union. Consequently, the works of such an individual can hardly be considered valid scholarly works by his peers in the western academic community.

Conquest (The Great Terror, p. 754) … makes the astounding statement that “Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.” And, further: “On political matters basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor.” He believes that the best way to check rumors is to compare them with other rumors–a dubious procedure given the fact that émigrés read each others’ works. Of course, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence in any other field of history.

Furr adds that “In 1980, I interviewed Professor John Hazard of Columbia University, at the time the world expert on Soviet law. Hazard told me that people in the Soviet studies field had told him that British intelligence was still doing Conquest’s research for him.”

Of course, when it comes to creating horror stories about the communist movement, the traditional rules for determining historical truth are inverted—as Getty says, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence in any other field of history. Think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the reactionary anti-Semite who was celebrated as a moral paragon. His wife Natalya Reshetovskaya explained that his most famous work was what we’d today recognize as “creative non-fiction,” writing:

that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted The Gulag Archipelago as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.” Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.” She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

Indeed, Timothy Garton Ash rhapsodized Conquest as “Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn.” In 1986, Conquest brought his talents as an anti-communist propagandist to the “famine-genocide” with the release of The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (now termed the “Holodomor” to both cement an analogy with and steal emotional impact from the Holocaust). As he did with his previous work, Conquest worked closely with reactionary émigrés, used specious methodology, and he did so at the behest of Western intelligence services.

Anti-communist academic Myron B. Kuropas beams that “Among the highlights of Ukrainian activity was the publication in 1986 of The Harvest of Sorrow by renowned Sovietologist Robert Conquest. His research was subsidized by the UNA [the Ukrainian National Association]. The UNA was also involved in having the US Congress appropriate money for the creation of The Ukraine Famine Commission. The Commission published a 524-page report to Congress in 1984, which concluded that ‘Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932-1933.”28

The UNA, which funded and provided testimony to Conquest, was identified as fascist and openly anti-Semitic by progressive journalist Albert E. Kahn in the 1940s. Conquest’s input was exclusively fascist, as he essentially plagiarized The Black Deeds of the Kremlin—comprised of Ukrainian fascist propaganda and Nazi lies—and added his academic imprimatur to a fringe work that reeked of the basest McCarthyism. As one academic put it, the two volumes of Black Deeds of the Kremlin “went virtually unnoticed by the scholarly community until the appearance of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow,” which slapped Black Deeds with a fresh coat of paint for the Reagan ‘80s.

Tottle observes that “It was not by accident that mass campaigns were funded across North America in 1983 to commemorate the ‘50th anniversary of famine-genocide in Ukraine.’ The main purpose of the resurrection of so dubious an issue was to elevate anti-communist sentiments and facilitate Reaganite Cold War aims. Unlike earlier ‘anniversaries’ which were limited to the periphery of right-wing Ukrainian exile circles, the latest commemoration was highlighted by mass media advertising, billboards, public rallies, and continuing attempts to include the Ukrainian ‘famine-genocide’ in school curriculum,” as well as a film (pretending to be a documentary) called Harvest of Despair, which was broadcast on PBS and the CBC.

The unprecedented public relations campaign was augmented by a push to put a scholarly veneer on long-debunked Nazi claims. According to Tottle, “‘Scholarly’ backing of the famine-genocide campaign reached unprecedented heights in the 1980s. ‘Credit’ for this is taken by Harvard University, as stated in a recent publication.” Prior to the Reagan-era push, the Holodomor theory “occupied a marginal place” in Western anti-Soviet academia, according to a statement by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, whose ranks included Robert Conquest and James E. Mace. Tottle observes that Harvard “has long been the center of anti-communist research, studies and programs, often in collaboration with US military and intelligence agencies.” Tottle points out that Harvard’s famine-genocide campaign was based on a post-war commission by the State Department’s Office of Policy Coordination—a CIA front.29 There is a long and inglorious history of collaboration between Langley and academia, with no less an authority than CIA Director McGeorge Bundy claiming in 1964 that “It is still true today, and I hope it always will be, that there is a high measure of interpenetration between universities with area programs and the information-gathering agencies of the government.”

However, the famine-genocide story was, ultimately, still based on Nazi fabrications, so the scholarly community remained largely unreceptive. One book that was promoted to North American schools, The Ninth Circle, was authored by a likely Nazi collaborator and first published in 1953 by the OUN-B: Canadian professor John Ryan observed that “Their brief is a polemic, devoid of any documentation, and the book, The Ninth Circle, is in the same category and lacks the essence of any scholarship.”30 One writer notes, with trademark academic circumspection, “Many of Conquest’s critics in the West rejected his argument…it was held by some that his position lacked subtlety, and that his contentions were far more geared towards popular appeal at a time of Cold War tensions.”

It would be accurate to say that Conquest’s claims were highly controversial: one searing 1988 critique by Jeff Coplon in the Village Voice calls the propaganda campaign “a fraud,” “the most cynical of swindles,” “a brash bit of larceny,” and “in the Goebbels tradition.” Coplon observes that it was the leading scholars of the era whom “most vehemently of all…reject Conquest’s hunt for a new holocaust. The famine was a terrible thing, they agree, but it decidedly was not genocide” [original emphasis].

Conlon observed that what “academic” support Conquest found was from the fascist fringes, because “here was a way to rehabilitate fascism—to prove that Ukrainian collaborators were helpless victims, caught between the rock of Hitler and Stalin’s hard place.”

To wit, this bit of psycho-journalism from the March 24 Washington Post, in a story on accused war criminal John ‘Ivan the Terrible’ Demjanjuk: ‘The pivotal event in Demjanjuk’s childhood was the great famine of the early 1930s, conceived by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a way of destroying the independent Ukrainian peasantry … Several members of [Demjanjuk’s] family died in the catastrophe.” Coupled with the old nationalist canard of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” faminology could help justify anti-Semitism, collaboration, even genocide.

How inspiring that as late as the 1980s, a writer in a mainstream publication could organically surmise both the fascist ideological content and political intent behind the “double-genocide” theory!

Not even Conquest, the arch-anti-communist, sustained the thesis that Stalin committed a genocide against the Ukrainians: according to historians R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, by 2003 Conquest noted via personal correspondence that he no longer considered “that Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine.” However, while Conquest’s book was disputed by many contemporary mainstream historians and loved by Holocaust-deniers, in the 21st century, the story created by Goebbels and pushed by Banderites would take root via Conquest: “his ideas on the subject were influential in conditioning attitudes towards that event.” Of course, Conquest wasn’t alone: the White House, the CIA and its academic lackeys, and Ukrainian nationalists pushed his work hard.

Conquest’s goal, as it had been throughout his career, was not to illuminate historical truth but to support the dictatorship of capital. In this case, he was providing cover for an offensive so extreme that it pushed the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Amidst the campaign, J. Arch Getty observed “We might profitably wonder about the resurgence of the intentional famine story just now… The not-so-hidden message behind the campaign coincides with long-standing political agendas of émigré groups: given that the Soviets could murder so many of their own people, might they not be willing to launch a destructive war in order to spread their evil doctrine? Because the Soviets are like the Nazis, we must avoid appeasement, maintain our vigilance—and stop deporting accused World War Two war criminals to Eastern Europe.”31

This mention of the deportation of war criminals refers to a controversy in the 1980s over prosecuting Nazis: specifically, the fact that the West maintained a policy of turning down extradition requests from the socialist countries. As early as the 1950s, Britain turned down a Polish request for an accused Auschwitz butcher, and “the British government announced that it no longer considered itself obligated to surrender war criminals and, over the course of the next decades, proceeded to reject five Soviet extradition requests.” In the 1980s, the British government “repeatedly pressed” Soviet authorities to release the imprisoned deputy führer Rudolf Hess (the Soviet government, lacking NATO’s soft spot for Nazis, declined, and Hess rotted in Spandau prison till his dying day).

It stands to reason that in this climate, a president so viciously opposed to socialism would take an unprecedented step to rehabilitate the Third Reich. This infamously occurred in 1985, when Reagan and Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Helmut Kohl added a visit to Germany’s Bitburg military cemetery to the president’s itinerary. Those interred at Bitburg included not only Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers but 49 Waffen-SS officers. At the time, the plan was out-of-bounds enough that 53 Senators and 101 Congresspeople sent letters to the White House imploring the president to reconsider. In the face of considerable controversy, Reagan doubled-down on his plan, saying that “there’s nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” Just as surely…

The next week, Reagan visited Bitburg and laid a wreath.



Washington Über Alles

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A panel from the GDR’s Eulenspiegel Magazine (Issue 22, 1975).

While the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies existed, anti-communists were limited in how brazen their slanders could be—see the backlash against Reagan visiting Bitburg. In 1982, when Susan Sontag called communism a variant of fascism, her audience booed and shouted at her. Back in the 1980s, according to one writer, “even the president of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Goldmann, had not adopted Tim Snyder’s nazi revisionist line:

To compare in any way the policy of the Soviet government with the Nazis is not only a hideous distortion, but highly unfair to Soviet Russia, which has saved hundred of thousands of Jews when they escaped from the Nazis at the beginning of the Second World War.

Things were different back then!”

And how! Things were different because the presence of a bloc of socialist states created an ideological and material basis for anti-racism and anti-fascism. The socialist countries produced counter-propaganda and funded countless proletarian historians—for much of the 20th century, the world’s largest publisher was the Soviet government. The global battle for hearts-and-minds also imposed serious constraints on how openly the NATO governments could valorize fascists. Both decolonization and the formal end of Jim Crow were inextricably linked to the presence of the socialist bloc.

“Soviet diplomatic pressure could turn even the most emollient émigré groups into a liability,” according to one historian. “In the case of immigrant or émigré groups on the right-wing end of the political spectrum, the contacts that existed between their predecessors and the Nazi regime were often publicized with much fanfare by the East German press in order to discredit the Federal Republic and its Western allies.”³² An anti-Communist Canadian author complains that “the liberal political and social environment in the 1970s in the west was conspiring against them [Eastern European nationalists]. The ABN [the Banderite “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations”] delegation in Canada, for example, complained bitterly about Prime Minister [Pierre] Trudeau’s policy of ‘flexibility’ with respect to the USSR.”33

In 1963, the British Marxist R. Palme Dutt observed that the Cold War was directed against the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies because they were “completely independent of American domination and control. The aims of American world domination required the overthrow of this independent power, just as the aims of the re-establishment of imperialist rule required the defeat of the advance of socialism and of popular democracy and colonial liberation.” Dutt’s words proved prophetic.

With the Soviet Union dismembered, the world’s wealthiest looked at the globe with ravenous eyes. The ruling class saw the opportunity for what it was: a chance to recolonize the globe. Their propaganda machine responded in kind. A 1993 New York Times Magazine headline hailed the dawn of the new age, announcing “Colonialism’s Back – and Not a Moment Too Soon!” The British historian Paul Johnson praised the “altruistic revival of colonialism,” explaining that in a world now riven by “extremist” governments, “there is a moral issue here; the civilized world has a mission to go out to these desperate places and govern.” The year of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, writer Barry Buzan boasted in the pages of Britain’s prestigious International Affairs journal that “West has triumphed over both communism and tiers-mondisme [third-worldism].” Linking the end of the socialist bloc with the defeat of post-colonial self-determination, Buzan beamed that “The deeper reality is that the centre is now more dominant, and the periphery more subordinate, than at any time since decolonization began.”34 In 1992, seeing the writing on the wall, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali declared “the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty…has passed.”35

The first target for plunder would be the former USSR. The new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin began a policy of privatizing everything in sight. Most importantly, Yeltsin and his clique opened up Russia to foreign exploitation, as the country’s wealth was vacuumed-up and its quality-of-life plummeted. Michael Parenti explains what measures the Yeltsin regime took to protect the wide-scale theft of Russia’s assets and cultural heritage:

In late 1993, facing resistance to his free-market policies, Boris Yeltsin forcibly disbanded the Russian parliament and every other elected representative body in the country including all the regional and city councils. He abolished Russia’s constitutional court, and launched an armed attack on the parliamentary building killing hundreds of resisters. Estimates are about 3,000, actually. Thousands were rounded-up and detained, opposition leaders went to jail without trial, hundreds of elected officials were placed under investigation; some are still in jail. Yeltsin banned labor unions from all political activities. He suppressed dozens of publications and television shows. He exercised monopoly control over all broadcast media. He outlawed 15 political parties. He re-wrote the constitution giving the executive nearly total power over legislation.

For these crimes he was treated as a defender of democracy and reform by US leaders and the media. What they most liked about Yeltsin was, to quote the San Francisco Chronicle, that “he has never wavered in his support for privatization of state-owned industries.” I think that really says it all.

In October 1993, when Yeltsin sent OMON troops to fire on the Russian Parliament, hundreds of people resisting the country’s privatization were taken to Presnaya Stadium and summarily executed. Yeltsin called President Bill Clinton, and according to White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, Clinton “felt reassured by the conversation… Yeltsin basically said the obstacles to democracy and [economic] reform had been removed.”36 Clinton approved, saying that Yeltsin had “no other alternative but to try and restore order.” In 1996, the US pumped millions into Yeltsin’s election campaign, and American spin-doctors gave him the Madison Avenue treatment to defeat Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov. US electoral chicanery was typical in the former socialist states: Bulgaria and Albania got their first taste of capitalist democracy when Washington didn’t approve of their choices and replaced their first “free” elections with coups. The Eastern European parties favored by Washington were (and are) usually comprised of society’s most retrograde elements in an alliance with the exploiters kicked out by the Communist parties decades earlier.

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An advertising billboard reads “Rendezvous with America” in front of the burned-out Russian Parliament. Moscow, October 1993 [source]

Anyone who wonders what Russia will look like if the NATO countries succeed in their plans to install a pro-Washington leader in the Kremlin need not speculate—we’ve seen what their designs look like.
According to the mainstream accounting, “With the fall of the Soviet Union, free-market capitalism had triumphed, and no one seemed badly hurt.” Naturally, the reality is starkly different. According to the most conservative figures from UNICEF in 2001, “There were 3.2 million ‘excess’ deaths in the period 1990-99 in the transition countries, deaths that would not have occurred had mortality rates stayed at their 1989 levels [emphasis added.].” The UNICEF report continues: “the number of children in poor families has increased sharply as real incomes have fallen, and inequality has widened,” “Cases of HIV/AIDS have skyrocketed in Russia and the Ukraine,” and “Tuberculosis has returned to the region with 50 per cent increases in incidence registered in poorer countries.” Higher estimates calculate 6 million “excess” deaths in Russia alone during the same period, with nearly 10 million throughout the former Eastern Bloc: the United Nations Development Program calls it a “demographic collapse.” One economist working for the agency says “the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest…killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars.” In other words, in order to pillage to socialist world, Western capitalists murdered between 3.2 and 10 million people between Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the 1990s.

This was the state of Russia when Vladimir Putin succeeded the cirrhotic Yeltsin in 2000. The US regime assumed that Putin would do as Yeltsin had done, and that he would choose to enjoy the benefits that redounded to Washington’s favored servants. When the George W. Bush administration took power and immediately decided to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (which had for decades been a cornerstone of strategic deterrence), the Putin government “made only pro forma complaints.”

Then the September 11th attacks handed the US regime the perfect casus belli to drastically expand its plans to re-colonize the world. Washington thought that Russia would remain compliant, as they had when NATO dismembered Russia’s last major European ally, Yugoslavia: Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer claims that “American could have had no better ally on September 11th than Putin and Russia.” In 2001, Bush famously claimed to look Putin in the eyes, “get a sense of his soul,” and determine him “straightforward and trustworthy.”

However, the contours of Washington’s endless global war soon became clear, and it proved to be too many infringements on and sacrifices for Russia’s bourgeoisie. NATO began a “new great game” with an endless occupation of Afghanistan; the US invaded Iraq, and added Iran, the D.P.R. Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Libya to an “axis of evil.” The hydrocarbon and mineral industries were heavily represented in the Bush administration’s ranks, and Washington sought to dominate oil and resources in the Caucuses, Central Asia, and the Balkans—Russia’s periphery. Under the pretext of its war in Afghanistan, the United States began building long-term military bases in the former Soviet Central Asian republics.

There was also the major issue of NATO accession: shortly before the end of the Soviet Union, the US and USSR were discussing the issue of German reunification; Gorbachev consented under the condition that NATO’s borders not expand any further (a reasonable demand if NATO’s purpose were actually to deter Soviet aggression). Secretary of State James Baker allegedly assented.

Though this account is disputed, it is indisputable that Moscow has always sought a barrier between its borders and armies that could impose another hellish maelstrom of war on its people (in a 1981 Nuclear War Strategy Hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator John Glenn ironized the Soviet sacrifice as “the 20 million they lost in World War II that they keep talking about in every speech”37). It is likewise indisputable that NATO began gobbling up former members of the Warsaw Pact (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), and then former Soviet states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the latter of which brought NATO forces to Russia’s borders. A Washington-backed color revolution overthrew the pro-Russian government of Yugoslavia in 2000—the same fate befell Georgia in 2004 and then Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine in 2005.

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“If Barbarossa Happened to the US” map, Russian War Relief, Inc. [larger]

Russia had always considered it indispensable to be bordered by a Ukraine that 1) was not a member of NATO and 2) respected the Russian military’s use of the Crimean port of Sevastopol. In the West, ruling class think-tanks, foundations, and government planners had long salivated over the prospect of a Ukraine firmly in the Western orbit, which is why Washington spent $5 billion on regime change in Kiev between 1991 and 2014. Every few years, one or another institution will fantasize about finally defeating and dismembering Russia once and for all: after the 2005 Orange Revolution, the private intelligence firm Stratfor (often called “the private CIA”) beamed that, “Without Ukraine, Russia’s political, economic and military survivability are called into question… To say that Russia is at a turning point is a gross understatement. Without Ukraine, Russia is doomed to a painful slide into geopolitical obsolescence and ultimately, perhaps even non-existence.” By the end of the Bush years, the Russian government’s insistence on being a peer rather than a colony had turned it into an enemy in Washington’s eyes.
Concurrently with this, anti-communists in Europe and North America made great strides in bringing specious “revisionist” historical theories into the mainstream. The surge in official anti-communism in the last decade served two purposes: first, it slandered the force that had undergirded decolonization at a time when Washington was recolonizing the world. Second, by resurrecting Nazi-originated stories of a “Red Holocaust,” Washington was both empowering the fascist proxies that it would use against Russia and defaming the USSR’s successor state. Resurrecting myths about Stalinist barbarism cast a now-capitalist Russia as putatively genocidal, which is Washington’s most treasured arrow in its imperial quiver.

This is as good a time as any to address a favored anti-communist talking point. Why oh why, they bleat, do these Stalinist tankie losers obsess over the history of the USSR? Why be chained to this millstone when we can just say: “yes, all the worst horror stories about socialism are true—but with that out of the way, please hear me out about this version that I came up with!” (or substitute “I” with some chauvinistic American anti-Communist mediocrity like Harrington or Bookchin).

Leaving aside how stupid it is to think that this sort of appeal would be compelling to anyone, there are a couple reasons why defending communist history is a worthwhile project, and to answer why, it’s easier to flip the question.

Why oh why are anti-communists obsessed with denigrating the records and minimizing the achievements of socialist states in the real world? Why did William Randolph Hearst obsessively re-publish Nazi propaganda? Why did the United States obsess over importing and hiring fleeing fascists and escaped SS killers, to the point that they made a whole new intelligence agency with that task as a substantial part of its remit? Why did Robert Conquest obsessively mine the testimony of Ukrainian fascists for his book, even though its thesis was mostly appealing to other fascists? Why does every “Left”-branded commentator manage to obsessively work in some dig at Communism (and especially the USSR), no matter how tendentious or poorly founded or nonsensical—from Noam Chomsky to Oliver Stone to career Freedom House operative Sarah Kendzior to newly minted celebrity Chelsea Manning (the latter of whom seemingly sprang from incarceration fully formed, like Athena emerging from Zeus’ head, as a catchphrase-spouting leftoid pundit conversant in esoteric anti-Communist Twitter-speak)?

This subject is so contested because theories about Soviet barbarism that contribute to the “double genocide” narrative are either contentious or not true, and the pursuit of historical truth is a worthwhile project. The USSR did not provoke Nazi Germany—Hitler enumerated the ideas for lebensraum in Mein Kampf. Hitler was probably the first to promote the idea that he was provoked: in an address the day that Barbarossa began, Hitler claimed “the Jewish-Bolshevist rulers in Moscow have constantly attempted to subject us and the other European peoples to their rule. They have attempted this not only intellectually, but above all through military means.” Here we have the other aspect of the “double genocide” theory: not only is it a lie, but it is a fascist lie, and as such it necessarily contains genocidal anti-Semitism at its core. Israeli-American Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff writes:

If Communism equals Nazism, then Communism is genocide, which it is not. If Communism is genocide, then Jews committed genocide because among the Communists, some of them were Jews. If Jews committed genocide, then obviously it does undermine the arguments of Jews against the peoples in Eastern Europe, who helped the Nazis mass-murder the Jews. In other words, this is designed to deflect the criticism of Nazi collaboration in Eastern Europe.

Zuroff touches on the final reason why anti-Communists are obsessed with revisiting and revising Soviet history. These narratives undergird wider propaganda offenses, which are deployed in order to serve larger agendas. In the case of this subject, those agendas are generally large imperialist offensives. According to Soviet historian Pavel Zhilin:

Imperialism’s ideologists have turned the historiography of the Second World War into a key instrument in the ideological struggle against the USSR and other socialist countries. Today the two main centers of spreading anti-Soviet fabrications are the USA and the FRG [the Federal Republic of Germany, a.k.a west Germany].

Much publicity is given [to] the time-worn thesis about the alleged existence of the “communist threat” to Germany before the war and that nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR was a forced, “preventive” measure…Their objective is clear: to give the Western reader a distorted picture of conditions in the Soviet Union before and during the war and to make certain circles…believe that nazi Germany’s defeat in the war against the USSR was an accident, and that now when Hitler, who had messed up the whole thing, has been replaced by “sagacious” US and West German NATO leaders such miscalculations will not occur and therefore, it is possible and even necessary to “refight” the war against the USSR.38

Much of the “revisionist” history about the USSR and the Third Reich originated in west Germany, not long after the Second World War, to serve imperialist interests. In the 1950s, some west German historians began rehabilitating the reputation of the Nazi command in order to make Hitler look like a rogue bad-apple elements amongst an otherwise honorable government: a typical historian wrote “Respectful admiration and love for the Fatherland command us not to impair the prestige of those names with whom we have grown accustomed to connect the victories of our army.” Zhilin explains “The purpose of this practice is clear. Today the exoneration of the ex-nazi generals is necessary both for the Bundeswehr, which is forming its officers’ corps entirely out of former Hitlerite generals and officers, and for the North Atlantic bloc as a whole. The revenge-seekers want to preserve the military cadres of nazi Germany for a future war.”39 Specious historiography to minimize the evils of Nazism served a concrete end: to justify the preservation of much of the Nazi state apparatus by Federal Germany.


A poster for the effort organized by the “Fight Atomic Death” campaign in the FRG. The text reads: “Albert Schweizer warns! Atomic weapons are a deadly experiment! So: no to atomic weapons!”

As Zhilin mentioned, these campaigns were nurtured in official circles when the NATO governments undertook policies of rearmament or imperial aggression. In 1958, the Federal Republic of Germany began plans for the Bundeswehr to take on NATO nuclear weapons, prompting protests given that this was only 13 years after Hiroshima and Auschwitz. In the face of an anti-nuclear campaign fronted by physicist Albert Schweizer, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer took up the frequently disproved thesis that the Third Reich had waged a “preventive war” against the USSR (as he did when addressing a Congress of the Christian Democratic Union in 1959).40

The idea that Nazi Germany was provoked by the Soviets into incinerating much of Europe is one part of a parcel of reactionary misinformation spread by anti-communists. Other tropes include the “double-genocide” theory (sometimes dubbed a “Red-Brown Holocaust,” or even just a “Red Holocaust” to erase the memory of the Shoah entirely), that the Nazis were more humane than the USSR, and that Hitler drew inspiration for the Holocaust from the Gulag system. These comprise the essence of a campaign to rehabilitate Nazism as a “lesser evil” to the Soviet bloc. One of the producers of the Harvest of Despair film, responding to the fact that the movie used Nazi collaborators as talking-heads, said “Just because they’re Nazis is no reason to doubt the authenticity of what happened.” This is a microcosm for the entire spectacle: liberals and their fascist friends wag their fingers at communists and say just because this is highly dubious Nazi propaganda doesn’t mean it’s not true! And only an evil thug would say otherwise!

These ideas used to be extraordinarily contentious. In his 1988 Village Voice piece on the fascist push to recognize the “Holodomor,” Jeff Conlon observed that what “scholarly” support Conquest’s book found was mostly from the fascist fringes: “In the latest catalogue for the Noontide Press,” wrote Coplon, “run by flamboyant fascist Willis Carto, The Harvest of Sorrow is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as The Auschwitz Myth and Hitler At My Side. To hype the Conquest book and its terror-famine, the catalogue notes: ‘The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been suppressed until recently, perhaps because a real ‘Holocaust’ might compete with a Holohoax.’ For those unacquainted with Noontide jargon, the ‘Holohoax’ refers to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.” In other words, the famine-genocide theory used to be the sole domain of fascists and other Holocaust deniers, and these remain its most vociferous proponents (The website “Holodomor Info” advertises it as “the Jewish ethnic cleansing of Europeans”; one of the more popular recent works of neo-Nazi agit-prop, which I will not be linking to here, spends a long time discussing the crimes of Stalin, beginning with the Ukrainian “Holodomor”).

Take the example of Ernst Nolte, a “revisionist” west German academic who situated French Jacobins and then Soviet Bolsheviks as the originators of the horrors of the 20th century. In 1974, Nolte published a book (Germany and the Cold War) arguing that until 1939, the “rule of law” prevailed in Nazi Germany, which he called “a liberal idyll,” compared to the Soviet Union under Stalin—a year after the Nazi regime’s Nuremberg laws and the Night of Broken Glass! In 1986, Nolte blamed Stalin for the Holocaust (and cast the Soviets as “Oriental”): “Did the National Socialists under Hitler accomplish an ‘Asian’ act perhaps only because they regarded themselves and their peers as potential or real victims of an ‘Asian’ act? Was not the ‘Gulag archipelago’ more original than Auschwitz? Was not the ‘class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and actual origin of the ‘racial murder’ of the National Socialists?.”

Nolte’s work was considered highly controversial, even fringe, so much so that his car was set ablaze outside the university where he taught. In response to an award given to Nolte in 2000, Harvard historian Charles Maier said “The award of the prize to Nolte was a clear political statement intended to promote the view that there is no particular stigma to Nazism in the light of what some Germans now call the ‘Red Holocaust’ in the Soviet Union… It’s exculpatory in the German context. It’s also really scandalous.”

In case the point isn’t entirely clear: an extremist position that was “really scandalous” as recently as 2000 (even to a Harvard historian, no less!) has been made mainstream—so mainstream that anyone questioning this heretofore “really scandalous” fringe idea is likely to be derided as some kind of amoral monster.

This is because over a decade of untrammeled American hegemony had taken root, and fascist lies in the mainstream were its fruit. The dissolution of the socialist bloc enabled a new stage in the campaign to revise the history of WWII. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Federal Republic of Germany annexed what had been the German Democratic Republic, and the victors inscribed their version of history as gospel truth in a continuance of a project begun largely by west German historians in the 1950s.

When Buchenwald concentration camp was in the GDR, one part of the camp was a museum dedicated to Nazi links to the FRG, anti-fascist resistance, and international solidarity. When the Federal government took over, it eliminated this exhibition in favor of a memorial to German inmates held at Buchenwald by the Soviets after the war. These inmates included Waffen-SS men, concentration camp guards and functionaries, and members of the Nazi Party and Hitler Youth. One Jewish survivor of the camp said “I have to assume that the majority of visitors will think that those who were inmates after 1945 were innocent little lambs.” Other measures were taken throughout Germany to erase memorials glorifying the victory over fascism and to otherwise elevate many “Hitler acolytes to a status on a par with the Third Reich’s victims,” in the words of a New York Times reporter summarizing the Buchenwald controversy.

At the same time, the Central Institute for Social Science Research at the Freie Universität in Berlin was dissolved, and its 230,000-volume collection was distributed to several smaller libraries and distributed to antique stores. According to journalist Klaus Hartung, this collection to be broken-up and sold contained 31,000 volumes on the “conservative revolution” that enabled the rise of the Nazis and 78,000 volumes on the history of the GDR. “No question, the connection between these three areas is imperative for German democracy,” argued Hartung, but the collection’s new owners were not interested in “the prehistory of national socialism.” According to Patricia Brodsky, “the well-documented continuity between the Third Reich and the political and industrial leadership of the Federal Republic has been dismantled,” as “part of a larger pattern, both in Germany and worldwide,” in which libraries “have been burned or emptied of books pertaining to GDR history, Marxism-Leninism, and the like.”41

By the George W. Bush administration, Lev Dobriansky’s Banderite Victims of Communism foundation succeeded in getting a Victims of Communism memorial erected in Capitol Hill, and similar plans went through in Canada several years ago. When Dobriansky died in 2008, Bush called the deceased “one of our nation’s greatest champions of freedom” (Lev’s daughter, Paula Dobriansky, was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century). Today, Victims of Communism has a series of billboards in Times Square.

Bourgeois authors followed suit; Anthony Beevor—a pop-historian who rarely encounters a Nazi talking-point he won’t include in one of his books—claimed in a 2002 work on the Battle of Berlin that “In many ways the fate of the women and the girls in Berlin is far worse than that of the soldiers starving and suffering in Stalingrad.”

The campaign was strongest in the former socialist states, where majorities or pluralities in most countries preferred socialism to capitalism (figures for Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, & Hungary). In the mid-2000s, to consolidate the rule of Western European and North American businesses, a slew of governments passed laws equating Communism with fascism and banning communist symbols.

In January 2006, the Council of Europe voted to condemn “the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes.” The “double-genocide” theory went mainstream in Europe in 2008, following the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism (signed by luminaries like Václav Havel) and the European Parliament’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. One Canadian journalist, objecting to Canada’s Victims of Communism memorial, observed that “Not only are [politicians pushing the “Red-Brown Holocaust” theory] engaged in Holocaust revisionism to diminish their own governments’ complicity in Nazi war crimes, they are doing so even as they honor politicians who were Nazi sympathizers or outright collaborators.”

To use just one example, Bulgaria’s “Victims of Communism” memorial includes tributes to Bogdan Filov, the wartime Prime Minister who sent 11,000 Jews to their deaths at Treblinka, and Hristo Lukov, a Jew-killing fascist general who is honored by Bulgarian neo-Nazis with an annual torchlight march. In 2002, Bulgaria’s Orthodox Church beatified the country’s “victims” of Communism as holy martyrs. Commemorating the victims of Communism and Nazism means simultaneously honoring the Holocaust’s victims and its perpetrators.

This is a feature, not a bug: as the bourgeois governments in the imperial core become more fascist, there’s a utility to having a “politically correct” form of Holocaust denial.

https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2017/10 ... -liberals/
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 16, 2017 6:00 pm

A series of reports from Sochi, Russia, by organizers and participants of the XIX World Festival of Youth and Students.

October 15, 2017

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Darya Mitina (United Communist Party-OKP, Russian Communist Youth League-RKSM), member of the Festival organizing committee:

The first people we saw when we left the train in Adler were young, wretched Italian communists, who, in torrential downpour, were waving red flags with the inscription Partido Communista and singing Bella Chao. Immediately the police went to them and demanded they stop singing, but the Italians pretended that they did not understand, when strange people in uniform want to talk to them, and they continued to sing, clap and chant. The police looked at each other in disgust.

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Delegation of the United Communist Party from St. Petersburg:

A small delegation of the St. Petersburg branch of the OKP is present at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Sochi. Here are the impressions of the comrades about the first two days of their stay.

Yesterday was the day of settlement. Organizational dislocations are so numerous that they give the impression of a specially organized chaos in which it is convenient to fish. This morning we got acquainted with the main sites, and in the evening we attended the opening ceremony.

The impression is that within the framework of one festival there are two, absolutely not rhyming with one another. One festival is the one held by the World Federation of Democratic Youth. The discussion on its platforms center on Che, Fidel, the October Revolution, the struggle against imperialism, national oppression and for social justice. The other festival is the one held by Russian officials, corporations and the young people selected by them. At this festival they play ping-pong, they build empty, useless stands with shiny pictures and a "presentation about the Russian regions,” hang around and listen to capitalists who talk about the technology of successful entrepreneurship and career growth. These two festivals belong to different worlds.

The same schizophrenia marked the opening ceremony. The head of the WFDY spoke about anti-imperialist solidarity and the Russian Revolution, the centenary of which we are celebrating. The rest of the ceremony is the presentation of Russia as a country of opportunity + an artistic and musical composition that can solve the problems of ecology, poverty, energy hunger, health services, school education in countries of general poverty by talented young "social entrepreneurs" or people inspired by humanitarian considerations. And without any revolutions and loud phrases. The presentation seemed quite primitive in thought, drama, and direction.

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Source

Alexander Batov, (Revolutionary Communist Youth League-RKSMb, Rot Front), member of the Festival organizing committee:

We're going to the media center. The situation past midnight:

1) Hundreds of delegates from India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, also from Africa and Latin America, have still not received accreditation, i.e. accommodation, food, access to the festival.

2) A plane with the Western Sahara delegation circled over the Sochi airport and turned back to Algiers. The Russian side refused to accept it, citing the lack of housing.

3) Milan Petković, an activist of the SKOJ (Komsomol of Serbia), was detained at the Sochi airport without explanation. The FSB [Russian Security Service] officers forced him to write a "voluntary refusal" of his visit to the Russian Federation, after which they put him on a return plane to Belgrade.

This is the “anti-imperialist” festival.

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In terms of logistics, chaos continues. Yesterday, in the Gorky Gorod hotel, all reservations were cancelled from October 14 and later dates. The Directorate is talking about the problems with the influx of delegates and promises to resolve things. There are dozens or hundreds of people have been excluded, including our comrades.

Transport is missing or something strange is going on. The shuttles are passing by. There were timid attempts by Russian delegates to block the road.

In an hour we have to start the seminars #wfys2017. But who's going to be admitted is unclear.

The photos are from the accreditation center yesterday. A Russian delegate with a monarchist flag is seen in one of them.

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Source

Yesterday was very tense, I was constantly going the between the media center and the accreditation center. Disputing with officials, resolving housing issues, negotiating with foreign comrades, communicating with journalists... a lot of things that were too stupid to write about.

Half of the delegation of RKSM(b) is still not accredited, including me. But maybe the situation will change today. So let's start with the good one. The “legal" part of the RKSM(b) delegation successfully went to the #wfys2017 space and started active work. At the first seminar on the 100th anniversary of October, our comrade spoke very well, explaining to the audience the nature of capitalism in Russia and the essence of the "official left,” problems of the revolution. They then rushed to a seminar on anti-imperialist, anti-war struggle but didn’t make it in time, it was over quickly. I was supposed to speak, but that didn’t happen [because Batov was not accredited].

In general, each of the comrades worked for two. This work will continue today. Welcome to the RKSM (b)!

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Source

Translated by Greg Butterfield

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 20, 2017 1:48 pm

19th World Festival of Youth and Students: Russian authorities tried to prohibit communist symbols!

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With an intervention to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Athens, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) protested the unacceptable behaviour of the authorities in Sochi towards members of the Communist Youth of Greece (KNE) who were participating at the 19th Word Festival of Youth and Students.

More specifically, as the 902 portal reports, the representatives of KNE faced unprecedented tight security measures and were prohibited from entering the festival venue because they had with them declarations for the 100 years of the October Revolution as well as communist banners with the sickle and hammer!

On Wednesday, the members of KNE were detained by security forces for 30 minutes, while today, the authorities prohibited the entrance to the representatives of KNE for almost 2 hours. The explanation by the Russian authorities was that "the sickle and hammer symbol is illegal and the declarations of KNE consist dangerous material"! Representatives from other Communist Youths condemned the behaviour of the Russian authorities and expressed their solidarity to the members of KNE.

Under the pretext of "security", the Russian government seems to have unleashed an attack to freedoms and rights, by criminalizing communist symbols (e.g. sickle and hammer) and prohibiting delegations of Communist Youths from entering the Festival.

In a letter addressed to the Russian Embassy, the Communist Party of Greece complained about the behaviour of the authorities in Sochi, mentioning that the incident undoubtedly tarnishes such a big and important event.


Video: Denouncing the incident during Festival's seminar



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The treasonous swine and thieves who rule Russia, friends of Nazis and catamites of capitalists, fear the symbols of communism as the vampire fears the cross. They know their crimes and they know the history.
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 20, 2017 2:10 pm

Communists in talks with ‘patriotic forces’ to propose single candidate for 2018 presidential race
Published time: 19 Oct, 2017 10:10


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Chair of the Communist Party's Central Committee Gennady Zyuganov (2 left) © Evgeny Biyatov / Sputnik

A senior figure in Russia’s largest opposition party – the Communists – has taken part in a conference of ‘national-patriotic forces’ seeking to find new allies and possibly agree on a single presidential candidate for next year’s election.

The conference was attended by representatives from a broad group of parties and movements that share a leftist-nationalist agenda. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was represented by Deputy Chair of its Central Committee Yuri Afonin.

“We are interested in forming a broad, patriotic coalition around the KPRF. We are working with a variety of ideologies,” he told the daily newspaper, Kommersant.

“There were some of our ‘antipodes’ at this conference, such as monarchists, but we build our relations on the basis of a common economic program.”

Regardless of the outcome of talks, the KPRF will be selecting a presidential candidate at its party convention in late December, Afonin told reporters.

Last February, representatives of the leftist-nationalist coalition Council of the Popular Patriotic Forces asked KPRF leader Gennadiy Zyuganov to run for the presidency in 2018, and to take personal responsibility if his performance in the race was poor.

Zyuganov rejected the proposal, asking his colleagues “not to predetermine” who the party would select to contest the election.

On this occasion, some of the Communists’ allies bluntly rejected the idea of Zyuganov running on behalf of their parties and movements. Head of the Novorossiya movement Igor Strelkov told Kommersant that he and his comrades would refuse to support the Communists if they nominated Zyuganov as a candidate.

In March, Izvestia quoted unnamed sources in the Russian presidential administration when it reported that Zyuganov did not want to run in 2018 because he would prefer to be remembered as a relatively successful politician, rather than finishing second again, as he did in 2012.

Zyuganov has not commented on the report, but the Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, Sergey Obukhov, called the rumors “a form of external pressure on the party.”

Few major figures have announced their intention to run for the presidency in 2018 to date. The most prominent of those who have are Liberal-Democratic Party leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky; Yabloko Party founder, Grigory Yavlinsky; and anti-corruption blogger-turned opposition politician, Aleksey Navalny.

Under Russian law, Navalny technically cannot run because he is currently serving a five-year sentence that will not expire before the next election, but the activist has vowed to contest this rule in the Constitutional Court.

Earlier this week, Russian journalist and celebrity, Kseniya Sobchak, announced that she planned to contest the presidential election but said that her purpose would not be to win, but to replace the ‘none of the above’ line on ballots, which she personally favors.

https://www.rt.com/politics/407169-comm ... patriotic/
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 02, 2017 2:54 pm

The 19th International Meeting of the Communist and Workers' Parties kicked off in Leningrad

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The 19th International Meeting of the Communist and Workers' Parties of the World started with the Working Group meeting on Thursday 1st of November in Leningrad (St Petersburg).

This year the 19th IMCWP is being held with the title: “The 100th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution: the ideals of the Communist Movement, revitalizing the struggle against imperialistic wars, for peace, socialism”.
The meeting will take place 2nd to 3rd November in Leningrad and then continue in Moscow between 5th and 7th of November.
In the meeting, the delegations of 103 parties are present. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) is represented by the Secretary General of the CC Dimitris Koutsoumbas, the Politburo member Giorgos Marinos, the member of the CC and head of the International Relations section Elisseos Vagenas and Danae Helmi of the KKE International Relations section.

The conference began with an opening speech of the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady A. Zyuganov. Addressing the participants and guests of the conference, Zyuganov reminded that a new stage in history heralded 100 years ago with the words of Lenin, genius of the Revolution, from Red Petrograd to the whole world and added that now it is the time for the third Russian revolution which will ensure the ultimate victory of socialism.

In his speech, Chairman Zyuganov also commented on the development of the meetings of the communist and workers’ parties, started with the initiative of the Communist Party of Greece 20 years ago. He reminded that the main task of the meetings were the restoration of inter-party ties that had been interrupted after 1991 and exchange of information on their activities. Zyuganov stated that over the years, valuable experience in preparing and holding such meetings has been accumulated and the number of parties participating in them has been constantly growing.
Source: 902.gr, ICP.

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The delegation of the KKE. First from the right, Secretary General Dimitris Koutsoumbas

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The Chairman of the CPRF Gennady Zyuganov delivering a speech.

https://communismgr.blogspot.co.uk/2017 ... ng-of.html
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 02, 2017 3:14 pm

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JB Stalin: He continues to sneak nightlife to Putin and bourgeoisie
FROM ATEXNOS3 TO NOV. 1, 2017 POLICY
Written by Nikos Mottas //

With Lenin's fear of waking up, Stalin's ghost is apparently asleep of the bourgeoisie of Russia. This is the only way to explain the new anti-communist-anti-Soviet show given by President Vladimir Putin, recently inaugurating the "Wall of Lips", a memorial dedicated to the victims of political persecution in various periods of the past.

"The Wall of Lypus" is another attempt by Putin's bourgeois government to tame the history of the Soviet Union and especially the period of Leadership of the Soviet Union. Stalin. To this end, the Russian government (with the "blessings" of Patriarch Cyril) remembered the period of "great persecution," a period in which bourgeois and opportunist historiography has made sure to "cook" in the end, with a lot of forgeries, distortions and of paratrophic paraphilology.

Vladimir Putin is based on this decade of anti-communist-contra-paralysis for decades, and he is trying to perpetuate with the "Walls of Silence" he launches. "Political persecution," Putin noted, " have been a tragedy for all of our people, for the whole of society, a hard blow to our people, its roots, culture and self-awareness " and, among other things, : "The very memory, the clear and unequivocal position in relation to these sad events is a powerful inhibitor so that they will not be repeated again" .

It is clear that Vladimir Putin's "premonstration" and the bourgeois political system of Russia are to spoil the Soviet Union and socialism in the conscience of the people. With a "vehicle" to anti-Stalinism, the bourgeoisie attempts to exorcise the ghost of socialism-communism that continues, 100 years after the October October Revolution, and 26 years after the counter-revolution prevailed, over their heads.

Both Putin and the bourgeois know very well that during the period of IB Stalin's leadership, the foundations for socialist construction came in, very important social needs were met, and a great impetus was given to humanity to take a step forward. This bothers them, and that's why Stalin is shaken. The Walls of Lust and Crocodile tears of Putin and the bourgeois about the "victims" of "Stalinist persecution" are a screen of smoke designed to prevent new generations from studying, learning, understanding the importance of the socialist past in order to make their own case the overthrow of the current capitalist barbarity.

Those "Walls" that will blow, as much as poison will pour, the flow of History forward will not hinder it.

https://atexnos.gr/stalin-synexizei-na- ... in-astous/

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 07, 2017 9:21 pm

Russian TV strangely ignores 100 year anniversary of the Revolution
November 7 , 2017 - Fort Russ News -
by Inessa Sinchougova

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In the news segment on Russia's state television, "Channel 1", the Red Square parade in honor of the heroic events of November 7, 1941 was broadcast.

Shamefully, the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution was disregarded, thus demonstrating a vivid example, of what can only be assumed, as the policy of amputating history in preference of the electoral cycle. Russians will go to the polls in less than four months time to vote for their preferred parties and president.

A social media user writes, "Really, is our Russia really a colony country now that does not have rights to its great history! Let me congratulate you with the 100th anniversary of the birth of the first socialist state, comrades!"

Another responded, "I, too, was born and grew up in the USSR. Now I know life in other countries - I have not seen one better than my Motherland [then.] "

Meanwhile, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China has been adorned with posters of the great Socialist leaders of the USSR. The Revolution plays an important role in China's state ideology - and they're not afraid to showcase it.

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http://www.fort-russ.com/2017/11/russia ... -year.html


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Moscow today
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