Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1911): General view of the Church of St. John Chrysostom in Korovniki (from the mill) from the west.
It is a curious thing that one of the most important stories of the Russian Civil War doesn’t even have an English language entry in Wikipedia. Google results either lead to fleeting mentions in obscure history books, or to general interest articles about the history or tourist attractions of Yaroslavl, a 600,000-population city some 250 km northeast of Moscow, in the heart of the “Golden Ring” cluster of medieval Russian towns.
Which is all pretty strange, because this story has pretty much all the key components of a Hollywood blockbuster: A diverse cast of occasionally bickering but broadly sympathetic characters, who are united in their struggle against a dystopian regime; a people’s uprising against said regime that achieves success against all the odds, thanks in part to a femme fatale who distracts the baddies at the perfect moment; subsequent feelings of elevation soon turning into consternation, as storm clouds gather on the horizon; hope turning to grim despair, as the doomed heroes mount a last stand against the mustering forces of xenos darkness; and the final great betrayal, in which the moral heroism of the defeated transcends into spiritual victory, while the ostensible victors are condemned to pay their mite to cosmic justice.
This is the story of how, one century ago this month, the first of the great Russian uprisings against Bolshevik tyranny was crushed under a barrage of shells and waves of Latvian Riflemen. This is the story of Yaroslavl’s 16 Days of Freedom.
Part I: Revolt Amongst the Ruins
It was July 1918, and the once mighty Russian Empire lay in ruins. The economy had cratered, as the Bolsheviks criminalized private trade and confiscated everything from banks and factories to ordinary people’s windmills, workshops, apartments, and private savings. The first food brigades were being marshalled and sent out to requisition grain from a recalcitrant peasantry at gunpoint. Less than a year ago, there were Russian troops in Austria-Hungarian and Turkish territory, which had come within a hair’s breadth of knocking out two of Russia’s principal enemies out of the Great War; since then, the Bolshevik coup and unilateral demobilization of the Imperial Russian Army had collapsed the Russian front, and resulted in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed between the Bolsheviks and their German sponsors, which deprived Russia of 44% of its population and more than half of its industrial potential. The Japanese had occupied Vladivostok, and even the Chinese had sent more than a thousand troops into Siberia. Sean McMeekin in The Russian Revolution points out that even as Russia’s urban population began to collapse from hunger and cholera, Lenin’s government sat safe in the Moscow Kremlin, guarded by 35,000 Latvian Riflemen, whose salaries were directly paid by the German Embassy.
Unsurprisingly, discontent with the Bolsheviks, who had won less than 25% in the Constituent Assembly elections – the last free elections in Russia for more than 70 years – was at a fever pitch. Trotsky’s request to the Congress of Soviets to have opponents of German occupiers who resisted arrest “shot on the spot” was one of the last straws. On July 6, the Left SR’s mounted a revolt against the Bolsheviks in Moscow, yelling “Down with the Mirbach dictatorship!” and killing the hapless German ambassador. They were quickly put down by General Vatsétis’ Latvian Riflemen, the only Imperial Army unit that the Bolsheviks had not ordered demobilized.
That same day also saw the outbreak of rebellion in the simmering Volga basin north-east of Moscow. Soviet historiography has traditionally labeled it the Yaroslavl Mutiny (мятеж). In reality, as Russian publicist Egor Kholmogorov points out, it was nothing of the sort. A “mutiny”, especially in the Russian language, presupposes that the act of rebellion occurs in relation to a legitimate authority. However, this was a regime which had emerged as the result of the overthrow of the Tsar, an armed coup against the Provisional Government, the rejection of free election results in which they gotten less than a quarter of the vote, the forcible dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, and a treasonous treaty with an enemy Power. Such a regime could not be considered legitimate in any world. Consequently, it can only be known as the Yaroslavl Rebellion (восстание), and this was indeed how it was known during the 1920s, by both Whites and Reds. It was only during the 1930s, when the USSR transitioned into its totalitarian phase and the Communists established an absolute equivalence between themselves and the state, that the Rebellion was downgraded to a “mutiny.”
Part II: The People’s Front
Why Yaroslavl? One factor must have been just random luck. The Moscow and Kazan branches of the conspiracy had been uncovered and purged in May 1918. The persistent failure of White conspiracies was unsurprising in light of the fact that the officers who formed the core of the clandestine cells set up to oppose Bolshevik rule came from a society that had, at least until recently, been based on rule of law, not the rule of secret policemen. They were unaccustomed to the ruthless discipline and dissimulation needed to bring conspiracies to fruition.
Mikhail Davydov (2016): Twenty Years to the Great War. Russian regions by share of peasant households with passbooks (needed for savings accounts).
However, the socioeconomic and cultural particularities of Yaroslavl may have also played a certain role. Yaroslavl gubernia traditionally had the highest literacy rate of any ethnic Russian region apart from Moscow and Saint-Petersburg: 36% vs. 23% for European Russia in the 1897 Census, and 61% vs. 44% for the European part of the RSFSR and BSSR in the 1926 Census. Even today, intellectual ability tests show Yaroslavl oblast to have average IQ scores equal to the two capitals, and higher than any other Russian region. This early development of human capital also made it a decidedly bourgeois region by the time of the Revolution: As of 1913, fully two thirds of peasant families in Yaroslavl gubernia had a passbook (needed to open savings accounts), relative to 10.3% in the Russian Empire as a whole. Finally, in the Constituent Assembly elections of 1917, Yaroslavl voted 38% for the Bolsheviks (versus 43% for the Social Revolutionaries). This was higher than the all-Russian average of 24%, but was still one of the lowest figures in Central Russia – the most pro-Bolshevik region after the Baltics.
This perhaps explains why it wasn’t only the officers, students, and intelligentsia who went over to the rebellion in Yaroslavl, but also “blue collar” classes such as policemen, local peasants, and even the railway workers, 140 of whom joined the Rebellion as soldiers, and fitted out an armored train for the cause. Consequently, the Yaroslavl Rebellion was a true “popular front”, in which the entire city, from merchants and Black Hundreds, to Mensheviks and workers, came together as one against the Bolshevik regime.
This ideological diversity was reflected in the Rebellion’s leadership, which was headed by the Social Revolutionary and former terrorist Boris Savinkov, the head of the Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom (UDMF). After the Civil War, Savinkov would claim the USSR to be a continuation of the Tsarist monarchy in his 1923 book The Black Horseman of the Apocalypse:
I do not care who rules the country – the Lubyanka or the Okhrana, for he who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind… what, exactly, has changed? Only the words… They betrayed Russia on the front, with cigars in their teeth. They defile it now. They defile life, they defile the language, they defile the very name of Russia.
They boast that they remember not their ancestors. For them, the Motherland – is a prejudice. In the name of their own miserable welfare, they sell our inheritance to foreigners – not theirs, but ours. And these bastards rule from Moscow…
These are hardly the words of a hardcore reactionary (though you don’t exactly have to be one to question the equivalence between the Okhrana, which had less than 10,000 agents in the entire Russian Empire in 1900, and the Cheka, which employed 280,000 black leather jacket-clad thugs by the end of 1920). That said, it cannot be denied that Savinkov – like the Social Revolutionaries who refused Fritz Platten’s suggestion to accompany Lenin in his “sealed train” to Russia – was a genuine Russian patriot and lover of liberty.
Boris Savinkov’s political vision was augmented by the military talent of Colonel Alexander Perkhurov, a monarchist, who headed what would become the Yaroslavl Detachment of the Northern Volunteer Army.
He was supported in his role by the following locals in the Rebellion HQ:
- Ivan Savinov, a Menshevik railway employee, answered for the civic functioning of the city;
- The Mayor was V. Lopatin, a Cadet engineer;
- The city board included the merchant Kayukov, the Cadets Sobolev and Gorelov, and the Menshevik Meshkovsky;
- The Social Revolutionary Mamyrin visited outlying villages to drum up peasant support for the Rebellion;
- The former governor of the region under the Provisional Government, V. Dyushen, also supported the Rebellion.
Despite this class and ideological heterogeneity amongst the key protagonists of the Rebellion, they shared the fundamental goals of the UDMF, which boiled down to the following major three points:
- The overthrow of Soviet power;
- Restoration of lost freedoms, including rule of law and property rights, cancelation of restrictions on movement and trade, and reinstatement of private capital;
- Denunciation of Brest-Litovsk, and continuation of the war with the German occupiers.
All of these goals were fulfilled, however briefly, in what Russian writer Kirill Kaminets calls Yaroslavl’s “sixteen days of freedom.”
As we shall soon see, even the fact that the Rebellion formally considered itself to be at war with Germany would end up playing an ironic and tragic role.
It would go amiss not to mention the symbols under which the soldiers of the Rebellion fought. Here is what Perkhurov formally prescribed for military units:
Distinctive signs for military units answering to the Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom: Stripes on the left sleeve in the form of a corner from a narrow St. George’s ribbon (chevron).
The same color scheme to be used for flags and banners. They can be adorned with saints specific to the unit in question.
Yes, that’s the very same St. George’s Ribbon that was “rehabilitated” during the Great Patriotic War, and would later come to be synonymous with Victory.
More recently, it also came to be associated with the revolts against the Ukrainian authorities during the “Russian Spring” in 2014, and with Novorossiya supporters in the subsequent War in the Donbass.
Incidentally, Latvia tried to ban St. George’s Ribbon in 2015 – a most supreme irony, considering who crushed Yaroslavl’s dreams and secured Bolshevik power in the precarious early months of its power.
Part III: 16 Days of Freedom
In early July, almost 300 officers were concentrated in Yaroslavl – 200 locals, and 100 guests from Moscow, Kaluga, and Kostroma. On the night of July 6, Perkhurov gathered 105 officers in the Leontiev Cemetery; armed with just twelve revolvers, they proceeded to storm the main weapons dump in the city, which was half a kilometer away. A 30 man police detachment sent to investigate the disturbances defected to the Rebellion, and they were soon followed by the city police (this included its head, Falaleev, who would command a squad in the ensuing battles and die on the front).
The Leontiev Cemetery
Soon after, the insurgents – now numbering in the many hundreds – seized the telegraph, postal office, radio station, and treasury, as well as the local Bolshevik HQ. Although the latter was guarded by 200 Red Guards, most of them were locals who crossed over to the Rebellion. One reason for this smooth takeover was that the local Bolshevik bigwigs were distracted, having been invited to a party in the city center organized by the actress Valentina Barkovskaya, a local celebrity who sympathized with the rebels. Another reason was that ordinary citizens welcomed the rebellion, and the Bolsheviks – who had already managed to make themselves widely hated – were too demoralized to offer up more than token resistance.
Former Yaroslavl governor’s residence, where the Bolsheviks had made their HQ.
The military commissar of the Yaroslavl region, Semyon Nakhimson, and the chairman of the local ispolkom, David Zakheim – were summarily lynched, in the two confirmed cases of execution without trial or jury on the part of the Rebellion. However, it should be pointed out that this lynching, though standard practice for the Reds, was unequivocally condemned by Perkhurov: “We must remember that we are fighting these rapists for the principles of rule of law, for freedom, and for the inviolability of the person.”
The city was under the Rebellion’s control by midday. They published a public proclamation, which began with the following words:
CITIZENS! Bolshevik power in Yaroslavl gubernia has been overthrown. Those who several months ago seized power by means of deceit, and kept control of the genuine will of the people through unheard of violence and mockeries, those who brought the people to starvation and unemployment, who set brother against brother, who divided the contents of the people’s treasury amongst their own pockets – they now sit in prison, and await their retribution.
The prison in question was what Soviet historiography would later term a “death barge”. For a long time, the Soviets claimed that the rebels imprisoned 200 Communists on a barge in the middle of the Volga. Half of them starved to death, while 109 managed to escape when a stray shell cut the barge’s anchor line. However, documents uncovered after the Soviet collapse tell a rather different story. First, only 82 surnames are mentioned. Second, it was Red artillery from the opposite shore that made resupplying the famine-stricken barge an unfeasible endeavour. Perkhurov even ordered a volunteer officer to deliver food to the barge, but his boat was hit by a shell and capsized, and the officer himself was severely wounded. The only accurate part of this Soviet story was that an artillery shell did eventually sever the anchor line, freeing the barge to drift downstream to the Red forces.
In the first heady days of the Rebellion, the town was festooned with an enormous banner, which proclaimed, “Long live free Russia! Down with the Bolsheviks! Long live the Constituent Assembly!” People were called upon to save “our Motherland and our people from shame, slavery, and hunger” in leaflets distributed by the Yaroslavl authorities. On July 8, local self-government was returned, and the laws of the Provisional Government were restored. July 13 saw the formal annulment of all Soviet institutions and Bolshevik decrees.
Source: SelfSimilar/Sputnik & Pogrom. Map of the Yaroslavl Rebellion.
Perkhurov immediately declared a mobilization, though one that was only mandatory for the officers. Despite the lack of mandatory conscription, some 6,000 men would join the Rebellion’s military forces in Yaroslavl, a city of 135,000 people. Around 1,000-2,000 of these troops would be at the front at any one time. They included a battalion of five Garford-Putilov cars, which were armed with 76.2 mm cannons and a couple of 7.62 mm machine guns.
But the celebrations had hardly died down before storm clouds started appearing on the horizon.
The UDMF had planned a series of uprisings throughout Central Russia in early July. These were to form a concentric circle around Moscow, with Yaroslavl serving as a central lynchpin, its railway hub connecting the Urals and Siberia with the Russian North. With many of the Bolsheviks’ crack Latvian Rifle troops having been diverted south to put down the rebellion in the Kuban, the plan was to sap Bolshevik energies and hold out until reinforcements arrived. The French had promised Savinkov and Perkhurov that they would send down an expeditionary force from Arkhangelsk, while the Whites forces then consolidating control over Siberia and the Urals would advance from the east.
But one by one, the planned uprisings flickered out. The cells in Moscow and Kazan had been uncovered and liquidated back in May. The cells in Kostroma, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov, and Ivanovo-Voznesensk failed to ignite. The most successful uprisings outside Yaroslavl, the ones in Rybinsk (July 8) and Murom (July 8-10), were suppressed within a couple of days, though the defenders of Yaroslavl were late to learn about it because the Bolsheviks managed to intercept the messengers. Meanwhile, it became increasingly clear that aid was not to be forthcoming. The Allies would only disembark in Arkhangelsk in August, while the People’s Army in the east would only capture Kazan in August – far too late to synchronize with the Rebellion in both cases.
Jānis Lencmanis vs. Alexander Perkhurov.
In the meantime, the Reds – having awoken to the seriousness of the crisis – were mustering their forces with a panicked urgency. An Extraordinary HQ for the Liquidation of the Mutiny, headed by Jānis Lencmanis, was formed on July 9. The military operation was to be directed by Anatoly Gekker and Yury Guzarsky. The 7,000 troops that were gathered up to storm the defiant city every bit as “diverse” as their commanders: The 3rd Hungarian International Regiment, the 8th Latvian Rifle Regiment, the 1st Warsaw Revolutionary Regiment (which included a Chinese-Korean brigade), the 2nd Riga Latvian Rifle Brigade, and units of the 1st Riga Latvian Rifle Regiment.
Moreover, the failure of the Murom Rebellion left its massive artillery stockpiles, which the UDMF had counted on capturing, in the hands of the Reds. Controlling the heights above Yaroslavl, no less than ten artillery batteries and three armored trains unleashed their fury on the Rebellion’s lines. Around 80% of Yaroslavl’s buildings were destroyed and untold damage done to the cultural and architectural legacy of this thousand year old Russian city. Even so, the civil authorities continued functioning throughout the revolt, allocating shelter for people whose homes were destroyed and disposing of bodies in the local church cemeteries.
Source: Yaroslavl After a Century. Photos of the city after the Rebellion, compared to today.
Yaroslavl: Scenes of ruin and devastation in 1918 (part 1, 2).
Yaroslavl gained the “honor” of becoming the world’s first ever city to be subjected to a sustained bombardment from airplanes, which dropped 250 kg worth of explosives on the city (superseding Guernica by almost twenty years).
On July 16, the Red commander Yury Guzarsky telegraphed Moscow with an ominous request:
We urgently need 10,000 shells… as well as 500 incendiary shells and 500 chemical shells. I suppose that we will have to raze the city to its foundations.
In the event, only the strong winds and heavy rains that marked the last days of the Rebellion saved Yaroslavl from acquiring another dubious mark of global primacy: The first major city to be subjected to a chemical weapons bombardment.
A. I. Malygin (1930-35): Battle in the Center of Yaroslavl, 1918.
A. I. Malygin (1930-35): Battle in the Outskirts of Yaroslavl, 1918.
Facing an increasingly hopeless situation, the Rebellion decided to split forces. A detachment of 50 men commanded by Perkhurov would attempt to break out, which they accomplished by ferry on the night of July 15-16. Meanwhile, the locals elected to fight on under General Pyotr Karpov, hoping against hope that the revolts in the other cities had succeeded, and that the French would come after all.
But by July 20, the surviving fighters realized that there would be no dawn. Their ammunition was running out, and the end was only days away, at best.
On July 21, the defenders of Yaroslavl surrendered to their enemies: The Germans.
Part IV: Genesis of the Russian Genocide
It just so happened that Yaroslavl was hosting the so-called “German Commission of POWs #4” under Lieutenant Balk. They had been interned at the Theater of Fyodor Volkov for the duration of the Rebellion. This was a reasonable precautionary measure, since the Germans were functionally allied with the Bolsheviks. Consequently, the surviving Whites offered to surrender to the Germans, subsequent to Balk’s promise not to hand them over to the Reds – who were no longer at war with Germany after Brest-Litovsk, and thus had no authority to demand they surrender their prisoners.
Theater of Fyodor Volkov, Yaroslavl.
Balk did not keep his promise. After getting repeatedly harangued by the pugilistic Guzarsky, he gave in after a day and handed over his Russian POWs to the tender mercies of the Bolsheviks.
As the Chairman of the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars Konstantin Yurenev had promised a few days earlier:
The White Guard rebellion in Yaroslavl must be ruthlessly suppressed. Shoot the prisoners; nothing can stop or slow down the terrible punishment of the people against the enslavers. Terror against the local bourgeoisie and its lackeys, who yearn for the coming of the French imperialists, must be merciless.
At least in this case, the Bolsheviks were true to their word. The following days saw the first large-scale massacres of the Russian Civil War.
600 White soldiers had died to give Yaroslavl its 16 days of freedom. Soon afterwards, a further 428 were summarily shot, without trial or jury. The victims consisted of local officers, students, and Cadets, as well as the entire 57 person membership of the Rebellion HQ. In total, at least 5,004 people were recorded executed in Yaroslavl gubernia by the Bolsheviks from March-November. This does not include the hundreds of people killed “off the books” in the hours following the city’s capture, nor the hundreds of peasants shot during and after the Rebellion for provisioning aid to the rebels. The population of Yaroslavl fell from 135,000 in 1917 to just 75,000 by autumn 1918. It would take a decade to recover those numbers.
Defensive lines of rebel-held Yaroslavl.
In the larger picture, the Yaroslavl Rebellion failed to achieve its strategic goals: To cement the logistical lynchpin north-east of Moscow that would allow the Entente from the north and the People’s Army from the east to link up. However, by focusing Bolshevik attention closer to home, they did manage to smooth the way for the Whites to capture Ekaterinburg, Simbirsk, and Kazan (the defenders of the latter city, the 5th Zemgale Latvian Rifle Regiment, became the first ever Red unit to be awarded with the Honorable Order of the Red Banner).
These advances alarmed the Bolsheviks, who felt that the tide was going against them in July 1918. It is quite possible that the Yaroslavl Rebellion, occurring as it did in the Russian heartlands, is the critical event that spurred them on to order the murder of the Romanov family on July 16, 1918. In retrospect, this removed one of the last lingering psychological bulwarks against Red Terror. If the Bolsheviks could extrajudicially kill the Tsar, even a former one – now demoted to “simple citizen” Nikolay Romanov – then they could, in principle, kill any citizen. And they increasingly did just that.
In the event, the People’s Army’s gains turned to be fleeting. Kazan was recaptured as early as September 1918, and the Whites in the east would never again advance as far. The Bolsheviks occupied Russia’s demographic core, controlled its industrial center and central communications nodes, and had captured the great bulk of the collapsed empire’s gold, weapons, and ammunition reserves. In the future, there would be further, much larger-scale revolts, such as the Tambov Rebellion, which would be crushed by the Bolsheviks with even greater ruthlessness. But the Bolsheviks would be dealing with them from a position of strength. With Central Russia subsequently secure, and facing no more than symbolic opposition from the Entente – not enough to materially help the Whites, but just enough to smear them as Anglo-French imperialist lackeys – the Bolsheviks’ final victory must have become highly probable even before the final fall of Yaroslavl.
Alexander Perkhurov at his trial in 1922.
The Rebellion’s leaders paid the ultimate price along with their followers. Pyotr Karpov was shot on September 13. Lopatin was shot on September 26. Savinov was shot sometime in 1918. Perkhurov and his fifty good men broke through to the People’s Army in the east, where he fought for the Whites until he was captured by Soviet forces in the frozen taiga of Siberia in 1920. Confined to a concentration camp, he was freed in January 1921 and forced to work as a Red military specialist. It took them five more months to figure out his real identity as the leader of the Yaroslavl Rebellion, after which he was promptly re-imprisoned. After a show trial at the Cheka HQ of Yaroslavl, Perkhurov was shot in July 19, 1922. His remains may well be buried where it all began, at the Leontiev Cemetery.
Boris Savinkov left for Poland in 1920. In October 1921, the Poles expelled him, wishing to restore relations with Moscow after the end of the Polish-Soviet War. He settled in Great Britain, where he wrote his closing thoughts on the Yaroslavl Rebellion in his book The Struggle against the Bolsheviks:
[The Yaroslavl Rebellion] cannot be said to have been successful, but nor was it useless. For the first time ever, not on the Don nor in the Kuban, but in the Russian heartlands, not far from Moscow, the Russian people – without any help from anyone – rose up against the Bolsheviks, and proved that they there were neither prepared to tolerate the disgrace of Brest-Litovsk, nor acquiesce quietly to Bolshevik terror. Our honor was saved.
In the end, Savinkov did not manage to save his own honor. He was lured back to the USSR in August 1924 in a Soviet secret police operation, where he was sentenced to death. But this was later commuted to 10 years in jail, where he enjoyed hotel-level service. During this time, he wrote letters to the leaders of the White emigration, urging them to cease their struggle against the Soviet Union. It is not unreasonable to speculate that there may have been a causal relationship between these two developments. Savinkov committed suicide on May 7, 1925 after jumping out of his hotel window. Although there are suspicions that he was murdered by the secret police, it is perhaps likelier that he was filled with despair at serving a regime that he surely continued to secretly loathe.
The leaders of the Coalition of the Fringes that had broken Yaroslavl and sealed Russia’s 20th century fate also eventually paid their mite to karmic justice. Yury Guzarsky was shot on Trotsky’s orders in 1919 for disobedience. Anatoly Gekker was shot in 1937. Konstantin Yurenev was shot in 1938. Jānis Lencmanis was arrested in 1937 as a member of a “Latvian fascist-terrorist spy organization”, and shot in 1939. The Baltics were occupied by the USSR in 1940.
Part V: The Soviet Story vs. The Western Story
Source: Yury Uryukov. Monument to the Victims of the White Guard mutiny (1958).
For the next 70 years the Soviets only told their “politically correct” side of the story, replete with imperialist lackeys, death barges, and a “White reign of terror” that was only brought to an end by “workers’ detachments.” After the Soviet Union collapsed, this “Soviet Story” lost its ideological monopoly and institutional backing. Consequently, as in many other areas, more and more articles on the Yaroslavl Rebellion have been appearing from a non-Soviet perspective – that is, one where foreign mass murderers are not considered to be morally superior to ordinary Russians doing their best to organize a normal, humane society amidst a maelstrom of chaos and horror. One notable example is The Yaroslavl Rebellion: 16 Days of Freedom by Kirill Kaminets for Sputnik & Pogrom, whose title I borrowed with his permission. There has been a particularly good uptick in publications to mark its centenary this month. A list of some good Russian language articles about the Yaroslavl Rebellion, many of which I drew upon here, is appended at the end.
Nonetheless, much remains to be done. There is still no epic patriotic film about the Yaroslavl Rebellion, even though it has all the elements needed for a blockbuster. In the future Russian National State, many exhibits will be devoted to it in the yet to be built Museum of the Russian Genocide. Still, the path to reconciliation begins with small steps. While Yaroslavl hosts streets named after Chekist “martyrs” such as Nakhimson and Zakheim, it has no streets named in honor of Perkhurov or Falaleev; there has been a monument to the “victims of the White Guard mutiny” since 1958, but almost three decades after the collapse of the USSR, there is still no corresponding monument to the victims of the Red Terror in Yaroslavl, of whom there were three orders of magnitude more.
This “Soviet Story” has its mirror image in the “Western Story,” whose take on the Yaroslavl Rebellion is one of studied silence. As already mentioned, there isn’t even an English language article on Wikipedia, and Google results mainly lead to brief mentions in obscure history books or general interest articles about the city. But this isn’t too surprising, since the Western narrative is grounded on the conception that the USSR was but a continuation of the Russian Empire, based on Great Russian supremacism/chauvinism over the “prison of nations”/”Captive Nations” (plus ça change…). The spectacle of “European” commissars brutally crushing an ethnic Russian uprising of merchants, workers, and nobles in support of freedom and capitalism would automatically lead to all sorts of other, highly inconvenient questions. So of course there are almost zero trends in that direction, and considering the poisonous state of relations between Russia and the West, there is no good reason to expect that to change anytime soon.
In the meantime, we get to observe the incredible spectacle of the people who overwhelmingly voted for the Bolsheviks in the 1917 elections (72% in Latvia vs. 24% in the Russian Empire as a whole), and who then did more than anyone else to secure Communist tyranny in Russia during the first precarious months of its existence, now whining for three decades and counting about getting “occupied” by their own creatures and demanding reparations.
There can be no resolution to this idiot’s limbo until both the Soviet Story and the West Story, both equally fake and pathologically hostile to Russia and Russians, are replaced with the Russian Story – the story of Yaroslavl’s 16 Days of Freedom.
Sputnik & Pogrom: 16 Days of Freedom by Kirill Kaminets (2014).
Sources
Since there are almost no good English language sources on the Yaroslavl Rebellion, this essay is essentially a condensed summary of some the following Russian language articles:
- Kirill Kaminets (Sputnik & Pogrom, 2014): Ярославское восстание: шестнадцать дней свободы
- Yury Uryukov (2018): Как уничтожили Ярославль, или Цена двухнедельной свободы
- Dmitry Sokolov (Tsargrad, 2016): Ярославское восстание 1918 года: Cвобода под дулами пушек
- Alexey Alexeev (Kommersant, 2018): Бомбить Ярославль! Как было подавлено самое известное антибольшевистское восстание
- Evgeny Ermolin (2007): Комиссия Балка
- Yaroslavl Center (2018): Бомбежки, руины и горы трупов: архивные фото и видео в день столетия с начала ярославского мятежа
Russian merchants didn’t appreciate Communist tyranny, but Russian peasants (a much more numerous group in 1918) seemed eager to be its cannon fodder. Red Army numbered some 3 million soldiers towards the end of the Civil war. Collective armies of Whites never exceeded 500.000. Over the course of the Civil war Bolsheviks lost control of ethnically non-Russian borderlands, Siberia, Urals and the Ukraine, but they never lost Central Russia. Russian peasantry, the heart and soul of the country, was fully supportive (or should I say slavishly accepting) of the new regime.
What you are doing here is trying to reinvent Russian history to reconcile it with your American cultural bias. Similar to how Ukrainian history was reinvented in 20th century by its North American diaspora. As a student of Russian history, I prefer the truthful, non-romanticised version of it. Blaming Latvians for the triumph of Communism in Russia is kinda silly.
This obsession with the Baltic states that many Russian nationalists seem to have is incredibly petty imo. I don’t understand what motivates it, almost nobody outside the Baltic states themselves cares much about Stalinist crimes in the Baltic states, it’s a non-issue for the Western mainstream. The dominant view of Balts in Western media is one of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust co-perpetrators.
How do schools in Russia teach the Revolution and Civil War?
They loved the Bolsheviks so much they revolted against them many times?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambov_Rebellion
The peasants, in 1918 specifically, were apathetic towards the Bolsheviks. (They started turning hostile during the course of the war, culminating in the Tambov Rebellion, but by that point it was too late).
The motivated core of the Bolshevik forces in 1918 were Latvians, and to a much lesser extent, Russian workers from the central and Baltic cities. However, it was the Latvians who were already organized in existing units, with plenty of military experience, capacity for offensive action, and unyielding loyalty to the Bolsheviks. (To give a modern day example, they were what Hezbollah and Tiger Forces are to the Assad government). Who else was available to crush the Left SR uprising in Moscow? Or, for that matter, the Yaroslavl uprising?
The Reds were drawing from Russia’s demographic core. By drawing from, I mean conscripting, with the death penalty for desertion – you didn’t get to conscientiously object. Of course they were going to going to build up a bigger army than the Whites, given enough time. That is why those first few months were so crucial, and that is when the Latvians played their key role.
Thanks for digesting this into English.
AK: Thanks, fixed.
Some typos:
“As the Russia’s urban populations”
“needed to being conspiracies to fruition.”
“Black Hundreds, to Menshikovs” (???)
“refused to Fritz Platten’s suggestion”
Interesting bit of Bolshevik era history, I’m glad I learned something new about Russia today. I am not too familiar with European names, so maybe you can clarify some details for me. Guzarsky is Polish. Gekker sounds vaguely German. Yurenev is Ukrainian. Lencmanis is hard to identify for me but it could be vaguely Polish or Polo-German. I know a Hartmanis, a very similar sounding name and she is Polish. Are any of them Jews?
Amusingly enough, this has an interesting seque into the history of the Communist Party of China and how it too once enabled minority rule over the Han Chinese and how Mao ironically both was the cause of and solution to this problem.
When the Chinese Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949 and starting setting up party rule in recently “liberated” areas, what was to become the inner mongolian autonomous region actually already had a firmly established Communisty Party in place. The spillover from the Russian Civil War in the 1920’s had already Sovietized Mongolian society decades ago and thus when the Chinese Communist Party took control and enforced policy, it did so through a party apparatus in inner Mongolia that was entirely ethnic Mongol. Now while you may think fair enough, Mongolians only constituted about 10% of the total population of what is now Inner Mongolian in 1949 while the Han Chinese were around 85%.
The Mongolian “nationalists” of the era yearning to be free of the Chinese yoke when the Qing dynasty collapsed didn’t limit themselves to Mongolian independence. Like the quixotic Poles who after their newfound independence wanted to recreate the 17th century Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the Mongolians also weren’t content with what they had. The Soviet ambassador’s personal missives to Stalin noted that Choibalsan entertained some pretty delusional ideas oof reconstituting a new Mongol empire with coastal access that included most of Northern China. Basically he wanted to setup a “Soviet” system with Mongols at the top extracting rents from a Chinese proletariat who would do all the work. It wasn’t just limited to the Soviet side of the border. Inner Mongolians had the same idea, Prince Demchugdongrub, henceforth the Grub, wanted the same, though his backers were the Japanese rather than the Soviets. His efforts to take Suiyuan (a historic province that no longer exists and is part of Inner Mongolia) was because it was the economic and industrial heart of Mongolian irridentist claims. It also happened to have a 99% Chinese population.
Fast forward a few years and we find Mao sitting pretty in Beijing. The reason that Inner Mongolia exists in the form it does today is because of him and the ethnic Mongol nationalists cum Communists. Stalin wasn’t going to hand over North China to Choibalsan. The Japanese couldn’t. Mao can and did. Unlike the Finns, the Monogolian maximalists wanted land to the greatest historic extent and Mao obliged them, he also handed them a poison pill of an Inner Mongolia that was only 10% Mongolian, not that they cared because they had an ethnic stranglehold on the Communist Party in the region.
Fast forward a few more years to the start of the Cultural Revolution and things get interesting. As I mentioned elsewhere, the Cultural Revolution was an attack unleashed by Mao harnessing the power of the unadulterated leftist singularity and unleashing it against his enemies in the party bureaucracy itself. The Cultural Revolution was in and of itself, not particularly violent by Chinese standards and most Western Pozz overplay its non-political impacts and death toll. This was true for most places, but it wasn’t true in Inner Mongolia. Here you had an ethnic minority population who had a vice like grip on the local Communist party apparatus, with an ethnic majority population who had suffered for more than a decade under Communist rule being told it was now OK to criticize the Party. The results were unsurprisingly a blood bath with the lion’s share of the cultural revolution’s death toll coming from here as the Chinese proceeded to basically kill the entire Communist Party in Inner Mongolia and ethnic Mongols along with them. After the Cultural Revolution ended, the Communist Party in Inner Mongolia had to be basically reconstituted from Han cadres from elsewhere because the local party apparatus, along with a few percentage points of the ethnic Mongol population, were dead.
This also pretty much where Slavs being called subhumans comes from, they were so eager to serve the jews that they were seen like the colonized people of British and French empires. That however also applied to Ukrainians…
It might have been mentioned that as a result of July’s events the Germans seriously considered removing the Bolsheviks in early August. But a decision was postponed and the unfavourable course of the war as a whole soon excluded revisiting it.
One cannot speak highly of the intelligence of anti-Bolshevik forces who in that context insisted on treating Germany as the archenemy. It should have been obvious that whoever won the world war would find it hard to change the result of the civil war, and the latter would be much easier to win without German opposition.
Well, it wouldn’t matter very much except for the fact that they are in NATO and, being single-minded, have a greater effect on NATO’s decisions than they ought to. Spend some time on the net checking out pieces saying NATO has to protect the Baltics against so-called Russian threats. So, they are much more important than they ought to be. And you may think people in the West know the nazi and jew-killing part but ask around, you’re wrong. Two examples: the fuss in Canada that Russia is smearing Freeland’s grandfather (it’s not a smear, and it’s not Russia) or read this piece https://www.salon.com/2018/07/14/my-grandfather-didnt-fight-the-nazis-as-family-lore-told-it-he-was-a-brutal-collaborator?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral. Complete surprise to the author.
who’s Ukrainian. Diaspora Ukrainians may have some political influence in Anglosphere countries, Balts don’t as far as I know (not surprising, there are far fewer of them after all).
I already read that, AK recently linked to it. It actually confirms my point imo. The only time one ever reads about communist crimes in the Baltic states in Western media is in connection with such articles of the “But hey, the locals killed Jews, they kind of deserved what they got!” kind. I can’t recall ever having read a single piece in Western media that with full sympathy just reproduced the Balts’ view of their history.
Reading AK, one could sometimes get the impression Latvians run Hollywood and constantly churn out blockbustes about evil Russians perpetrating a Baltic genocide. That’s obviously not the case.
That was exactly my thought. Tbh I also don’t quite get what the insurgents expected when they surrendered to Lieutenant Balk (who was in charge of German and Austro-Hungarian pows in transit for repatriation and eager to get out of Russia, not a serious military force), did they really think he could have opposed the Bolsheviks? And they hadn’t given him much reason to do so, since they had explicitly declared they considered themselves at war with Germany and had put those pows under arrest.
The big weakness in AK’s interpretation of the events of 1917/1918 imo is his belief that Russia should have continued the war and was cheated of a great victory, including territorial annexations, by the Bolshevik takeover. The time for that was clearly well past already by spring 1917 and it would have been better if the provisional government had concluded a separate peace in mid-1917. It baffles me why someone like AK who in other contexts regards “the eternal Anglo” as one of Russia’s perpetual enemies thinks Russia’s alliances in a war that had clearly been exremely detrimental to Russia should have been sacrosanct.
Where do you think the word ‘pogrom’ comes from?
Pound for pound, they latter have done well. Anatol Lieven notes just one of numerous Aivars Slucis placed ads in The NYT op-ed section:
https://books.google.com/books?id=iz3NACNOpCAC&pg=PR34&lpg=PR34&dq=dr.+aivars+slucis+new+york+times&source=bl&ots=oMiTSgIjzA&sig=kIqOnfQuNFw6WjTj8Ov1be3y64U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiL-un__rrcAhUhmuAKHXi8D4AQ6AEwAXoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=dr.%20aivars%20slucis%20new%20york%20times&f=false
I doubt that the paper of record would accept a paid ad describing Jews as colonists who should leave the post-WW II created state of Israel.
I spoke with the then Latvian US ambassador, who said that his country neither approved of or criticized the bigoted Sluicis ads placed in The NYT.
A very interesting article. The Ukrainian parliament outlawed the Russian inspired St. George’s ribbon in 2017. It was correctly identified as being a symbol of the Russian backed separatists and 5th column activists. Actually the symbol goes back in time as an eyesore in Ukrainian history when its usage began around the time of the closing by Russia of the Zaprozhian Sich:
It’s interesting to note, that not only Ukraine but Belarus and several Central Asian countries have discarded this once universal, but now outworn symbol of Russian imperialism:
https://flashvideo.rferl.org/Videoroot/Pangeavideo/2017/05/7/7c/7c81ab0c-c827-4762-99af-6e3e3dd33b46.mp4
The book you linked to actually mentions “the clumsiness and stupidity of their [= Latvian nationalists] approach to Western public opinion”, which doesn’t sound like those ads (which were published in 1993, not exactly a recent event) met a favorable reception in the US public.
I think this is a matter of German_reader conflating the West with Germany itself, which obviously knows a lot more about Balts than other Western countries (besides Sweden and Finland) for historical and geographical reasons.
The attitude here is one of complete ignorance and indifference. Nobody knows or cares about the Balts at all, which given their irrelevance, is the appropriate attitude.
If memory serves correct, they ran over a course of a few years in the establishment NYT, without any US establishment condemnation – at a time following the Soviet demise and before Putin’s stint as president/prime minister of Russia.
That such bigoted ads even ran and without any establishment condemnation is a clear tell all of the blatant anti-Russian biases out there.
Related:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/twisted-history-against-russia-and-serbia/5390154
Excerpt –
A matter that Richard Sakwa has noted:
https://books.google.com/books?id=w1u0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA260&lpg=PA260&dq=%22Michael+Averko%22&source=bl&ots=yHw8ideEa9&sig=l6oa_TQJK3wXDxUdNo8OA61CL-4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUy7fHhbvcAhXr7IMKHcObBj44HhDoATAGegQIBBAB#v=onepage&q=%22Michael%20Averko%22&f=false
I don’t know why you’re now going on about Ukrainian Banderites (once again…does it always have to come down to this subject here?) and about Russophobic Cold war propaganda. My point was simply that the Baltic states are viewed with indifference or even hostility (due to WW2 issues) in the Western world, and that AK seems unduly obsessed with them.
Anyway, I don’t care that much about this issue and am not interested in a long discussion. Maybe you can talk with AP or Mr. Hack about Ukraine instead.
AK sees the Bolshevik revolution as the central tragedy of Russian history.
Not very surprising that he has beef with the muscle that made it possible.
The real problem was Alexander II. He’s the one who first admitted Jews to high schools and universities, and he rescinded military drill and discipline at universities.
His “emancipation” of the serfs was also useless virtue signalling and no one had any idea what to do about rural problems until Stolypin it seems.
Because they both directly relate to each other, regarding the Cold War and post-Cold War US establishment imagery which I’ve clearly detailed at this thread.
As I note (with the Slucis NYT placed ads as a reference), you’re incorrect about how the West has generally viewed the Balts.
Likewise, a major US cable TV aired documentary on the Lithuanian men’s basketball team had a very cherry picked overview of history, which glosses over the negatives that you bring up.
Denazification was so successful that Germans really internalized it, and the political elites who had used it to cement their power started to project it into nearby countries with nordic-looking populations.
Sweden was not really an option because they had already swallowed it more than the Germans. Some of the other small countries that were first invaded by Germans are not easy places to use the rhetoric on either. The Balts are a natural target though because they were first invaded by the USSR.
Zimmerman helped push the Bolsheviks into power. How bone-headed was he?
Well, he promised Mexicans Texas if they would invade the US during WWI. He seemingly did not realize that Texas won its own independence from Mexico, without US help.
I feel bad that I didn’t respond to Rosie’s question in the OT thread.
No Bannon and Trump are not collaborating to fight Soros in Europe. Bannon was kicked out of the Trump admin because he had alienated everyone and Kelly wasn’t going to allow him to stay. Plus Bannon was miserable.
…
I have to say that I really don’t get all the Soros hate. Soros has been behind the European refugee crisis and Black Lives Matter, both of which have been boons for the racist right. What’s not to like?
The problem isn’t stupid leftists like Soros, it is smart leftists like Obama.
To AK ( No 5 )
Especially after years of conflict, small minorities, organised and well-funded, can have decisive influence in civil wars, for example Cromwell’s Puritans. However, 100 years later ( 1760 ) they had no influence whatsoever. I fully expect the remaining Communists to go the same way ( 2091.)
Oh I’ve got an interesting Magnier update, by the way.
Mags said that Assad is willing to have Iran and Hezbollah leave Syria, but in exchange he wants all of Syria back, including the Golan. Putin is pushing for this but he knows that it isn’t gonna happen: the IDF would refuse orders to evacuate the Golan if such an order was ever given (this is something that literally everybody in Israel knows but apparently is unknown to moron Magnier) and Turkey is never leaving the part of Syria they occupy.
Since Putin knows that Iran is there forever, his main goal is to prevent a regional war between Israel and the Resistance Axis. Here’s where it gets interesting: Magnier says that Bibi proposed that the IDF destroy ISIS on the Syrian/Israel border and then establish a permanent buffer zone there. Putin responded by saying that he won’t attempt to stop Israel from doing that (Russia doesn’t have the strength in theatre do anything to the IDF and the Russian people don’t care about Syria) but that if Bibi goes ahead with such a retarded idea, he (Bibi) is on his own and not to come crying to Russia for help when the inevitable disaster results.
Did this conversation actually happen? On one hand Magnier likes to make up news, but on the other hand this does seem exactly like the sort of idiocy that Bibi would propose. It also is like Bibi to expect that Putin would actually be willing to go along with such a plan.
And now for the good news: Magnier is back to saying that Syria and Iran want war with Israel. Normally I would dismiss this as Magnier being Magnier, but in this case I believe that his Hezbollah and Syrian contacts really have told him that they now want war. By the end of the year they are likely to hold every part of Syria outside of the Turkish and US enclaves and that means that for the first time, Iranian soldiers will be right across the border from the IDF. The Resistance Axis was feeling bad a few months ago when they realized that Russia wasn’t going to be protecting them from the IDF, but now that they have successfully beaten some poorly armed Jihadist yahoos, they are back to the typical Arab delusions of grandeur.
Iran is being wracked by protests and economic hardship and they have suffered a humiliating defeat in Yemen that is likely to result in the full scale genocide of Yemen’s Shia population over the next several years. Most in Israel are expecting a large scale IDF massacre of Palestinians (we’re talking about at least 2000 dead, mostly civilians) in the next few months. Even cowards like Iran and Hezbollah at some point have to respond. Especially since the IAF is going to continue to kill Iranians by the bushel (even Magnier admits this).
In fact, things are now looking so good that Magnier is putting his non-existent credibility on the line and predicting full scale war between Israel and the Resistance Axis by the end of 2019. If you know Magnier, you would know that he would never write such a thing unless his Resistance Axis contacts told him to. He has never made such a prediction before.
Assad is gaining support among the wider Arab world, so there is even a chance that the upcoming war is not just Israel against the Resistance Axis, but also Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt was well. If Egypt is in, that means that the Saudis may also join the fun too so the war could be much more widespread and devastating than any of us had dared to hope.
Even if you don’t care about the ME conflict, it will be a great chance to see modern weapons systems in action.
Really this shows the power of prayer. The Jews and their allies have prayed fervently for war and now G-d is answering our prayers. Make sure to keep praying.
Regional war in 2019. Let’s do this!
I would like to agree with you here — but am having a real hard time believing that the O-guy was smart.
Solzhenitsyn’s chapter about Stolypine in The Red Wheel is, in addition to being one of the longest, also one of the most interesting ones of the entire opus, in particular because it gives a much different angle to a man’s action that typical reviling commonly done in liberal/western academia and history books.
I agree with you on the Jewies problem of course (who wouldn’t) but I think the Raskol is probably of at least equal importance, because it introduce a deep fracture between the imperial power and what seemed to have been the best part of Russia.
BTW you never responded to me in an another thread 🙂
This Russian National synthesis of yours is compelling. It avoids the likely psyop trap of over the top antisemitism by correctly highlight the essential German and Latvian role in the tragedy of the Tsarist overthrow. Anti-Soviet without being too anti-Soviet to still be pro-Russian.
Lieutenant Balk’s actions were understandable. However, the Bolsheviks had no authority to touch him, and he had given a promise, which tended to mean something back then, and which he apparently didn’t discount as entirely trivial (as evidenced by him holding out on Guzarsky for a day).
I’ll just lay out my position for future reference.
It was A-H that was close to suing for peace in late 1917, with a meeting scheduled for October 26 in Lodz to discuss terms. This would have freed 70 divisions (with better morale than the northern armies) to reinforce the German front, and probably accelerate its defeat by a few months.[AK: See here]. The Budenovka had been designed for the victory parade in Berlin and Constantinople.I am similarly bemused by German_reader’s belief that Germany – which had lost the war by November 1918 against the Western Allies – had a fighting chance against said Western Allies plus a Russia which hadn’t unilaterally shot its own foot off. Germany was in huge trouble after America’s entry into the war, even if the mutinies in France and Russia’s troubles concealed that fact. Russia’s collapse from November 1917 gave it a temporary reprieve.
The Eternal Anglo is a 4chan joke – just like the Happy Merchant, the Eternal Kraut, Remove Kebab, etc. 4chan things ≠ serious.
In the omniscient light of retrospect, of course it would have been better to sign a peace treaty with Germany in mid-1917. Almost anything would have been better than what actually happened, up to and including German victory in WW1 and something similar to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but without the Communists seizing power in Russia. So that’s not exactly saying much.
Even better if Kerensky hadn’t been an abject idiot who made countless mistakes (yet even so, mistakes which did not collapse the Russian war effort; that required direct Bolshevik sabotage).
Interesting, I had no idea. Regarding the victory parade in “Tsargrad” I am considering this an additional indication of the late Tsarist regime’s insularity to have entertained for so long the illusion (delusion?) that the English oligarchy would have ever allowed for Russia to control the Straits.
Is it really so? I find the Remove Kebab slogan to be both witty and effective at gaining the sympathy of fence-sitters.
There is indeed something of karmic justice in what happened to the Latvians later, at the end of the Bolches. And even more so, we could even say, for the Germans who initially set their Golem in motion in 1917, to meat the ultimate consequences in 1945 Berlin.
What’s the source for that? The Kerensky offensive had failed, and German forces were advancing in the Baltic area in fall 1917, capturing Riga. Sure, Austria-Hungary wanted to end the war, but I find it difficult to believe they would have contemplated just surrendering to Russia under those conditions, which would have meant the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary as eventually happened.
Germany certainly had no chance of winning the war in the sense of defeating the western allies, but if it had remained on the defensive in the west (instead of starting a futile offensive), it might have exacted such a high price that the allies would have been forced to consider a negotiated end to the war. Such counter-factuals are of course somewhat pointless though.
The Great War is a catalog of moronic moves on virtually all sides, and it doesn’t stand alone but is part of a continuum of political idiocy that carries on to this day, even through changed governments and borders.
That is why I don’t like the demonology explanation of WWII. Really the defining feature of that war like the earlier one was not evil but idiocy. Idiocy fed on idiocy. A lesson for today, mocked and lost, by those promoting further gross stupidities.
Lodz was occupied by the Germans in WW1…why would they have allowed the Austrian-Hungarians to hold talks for a separate peace with Russia there??? And anyway, Austria-Hungary couldn’t just have concluded a peace with Russia without also doing so with the other combatants like Italy. This seems quite dubious to me.
Boris Savinkov was hardly the saint that you paint him to be. Reading his novel “Pale Horse” (Конь бледный), it is difficult to think of him as anything other than a sociopath. His description of how he imagined that his Jewish lover would be if one of her bombs blew her up and his description of his murder of his Russian lover’s husband are pretty disturbing.
It is even worse when you realize that the novel is based off of his actual role in the assassination of the Tsar’s uncle. George = Savinkov, Erna is the bombmaker Dora Brilliant, the governor is the Grand Duke Sergey, Vania is the bombthrower Ivan Kalyayev.
Lencmanis is a Latvian name as is Hartmanis, probably the woman you know has Latvian ancestry.
The easiest way to identify Balts is to see if their name has an unusual ending (-skas, -evicius, -is, etc.)
Gekker might be either Jewish or German, but given that he was born in Georgia, probably he’s a German. Lencmanis’ Russian name is Yan Davidovich Lentsman, which may or may not be Jewish, so perhaps he did the same as Bela Kuhn.
Keep in mind how some names get changed at the end like that, which aren’t ethnically Baltic (Kowalskas, Bogomolovas, Averkas….).
To call a good-for-nothing village parasitic scum “the soul of Russia” – is an extreme form of Russophobia.
The Dual Monarchy’s negotiations with Russia were only a by-product of their attempts to make peace with the western powers, and like them were doomed to failure except if Germany’s were successful. Austro-Hungary had become entirely dependent on its ally and was no longer taken seriously by Britain or France.
Germany nearly did win the war in early June.
Good point. Hartmanis is from the Germanic name Hartman originally.
Incidentally, I’ve heard that Latvia and Lithuania have or had been pressuring some Poles and Russians living in those countries to ‘indigenise’ their names, do you know anything about this?
The democratic Russian revolution was in early 1917.
What happened at the end of 1917 was a coup of the minority, that is what bolsjewist means.
Mensjewist means majority.
Does anyone know the name Kerensky, the Russian prime minister during the short democratic period ?
The Young Turks understood how relatively easy it was to execute a coup by a small determined minority, they also succeeded.
Russians are fundamentally a peasant people. This is true even today. They may have moved to cities, but they’ve retained their peasant mentality and worldview.
Okay, I admit when I am wrong, and you are correct (99.99% likely) correct about this – I have tracked down the claim to a Moskovsky Komsomolets article by Igor Chubais. The claim is not independently repeated anywhere else, so it is surely false.
Igor Chubais is the brother of the far more famous Anatoly Chubais. Although an academic, he is a philosopher and sociologist, not a historian. He is also highly liberal.
A-H wanted peace, but it was still going to limp along until Germany concluded the war or until it was put out of its misery, it wasn’t going to make a separate peace with anyone.
Anyhow, I think my general point still stands: Russia wasn’t losing the war (though it wasn’t winning it either). A-H’s and Turkey’s offensive capacities had been reduced to zero. The Germans had captured Riga, but Russia had not invested a serious effort in its defense, with the army defending it retreating intact. The Baltic front and Saint Petersburg was secure. Meanwhile, the end of 1917 was precisely when the Americans began to disembark in large numbers in Europe, increasing making it now or never for the Germans in France.
The Second Battle of the Marne (July-August 1918) failed as it did, when the Allies and Germans had rough parity. No troops released from Russia — Germany could not have made the attempt in the first place (or they would not have come so dangerously close to Paris, anyway).
The English journalist Robert Wilton was deeply sympathetic to the Russian people. He wrote the book, “Russia’s Agony”.
https://canadiansituations.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/russias-agony-1918-and-the-last-days-of-the-romanovs-1920.pdf
Meanings reversed: the bolsheviks were the majority and the mensheviks the minority faction of the Social Democratic party (renamed “Communist” by the former after expelling the latter – and taking power). You’re correct that the bolsheviks (majority within the SDs) pulled off a minority coup, but that was against a different party which won elections: the Social Revolutionaries (SRs came 1st, SDs (Bolshevik) 2nd, SDs (Menshevik) 3rd, etc.).
Nonsense, that’s where the hotties are.
What if unpalatable generalization, like Grossman’s, that Russia is Great Slave- is at least partially, true?
Here, I part ways with the author. Life does change, at least incrementally. Nations too. Hope springs eternal.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51UZgeVBegL._SX311_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Really? It’s 100% modernist liberal along Anglo lines. I see no ‘heterogenity’ here whatsoever.
A profoundly anti-Russian slogan, and an invitation to be slaves to Anglo cuckoldry.
Bolsheviks were scum, but these “democratic” Anglo buttclowns are even worse.
Slaves don’t conquer 1/5 of the world. Try again.
Nothing reversed, as far as I know
And never mention the Jews!
On the contrary-most empires were built by slave mentality (Egypt, China, Babylonia, Persia, Incas ..in modern day Prussia & short-lived Nazi Germany).
What would you expect from a Grossman?
Of course, we all know who they are, dem hook nosed….:
https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x4brzkc
“Of course they were going to going to build up a bigger army than the Whites, given enough time. That is why those first few months were so crucial, and that is when the Latvians played their key role.”
Yes, “of course”. The Whites, the font of humanity, that shining light of freedom & justice. But we’ll use a microscope so there will be no doubt about White virtue.
I read some place that “Latvian” was really an euphemism for German. That these “Latvians” were ex-German POWs recruited to protect the Bolsheviks.
It’s interesting to think what would have happened had the US not entered the war. France and Britain would likely have sued for peace with Germany, with terms far more favorable for Germany (they would have kept all their pre-war territory, at the very least). And if A-H was truly on the verge of collapse against Russia, Germany might have used that to their advantage as well. Maybe A-H breaks up just as it really did, with the exception that Germany swallows up Austria and Bohemia in a much earlier Anschluss.
Grossman would count as a righteous Jew like Hannah Arendt. What can you say about the Russian ‘mind’ and ‘soul’, when the 32+% of that ‘soul’ think that Stalin was the greatest Russian?
Lentsman Yan Davidovich ‘may or may not be Jewish’
Well, he was a Jew.
“1904 JEWS DEPORTED TO ARKHANGELSK PROVINCE”
based on information from “Arkhangelsk North, Past & Present”—Michael Loschilova)
According to the article, the information “…is based on inventories of the archival fund of the office of the provincial government…”
All of the individuals listed below were accused of a variety of revolutionary, anti-government acts”.
@Jewish Gem’s Genealogy: Mining for Your Elusive Ancestors
http://yourjewishgem.blogspot.com/2014/07/1904-jews-exiled-to-arkhangelsk.html
Gekker was most likely Jew. There is nothing on him but “Jewish Encyclopedia of Russia. Surnames starting with the letter G” gives a:
GEKKER, Nakhman Levkovic (Naum Leontevich), b.1862 Bakhmut, Ekaterinoslav – d.1920 Odessa, Revolutionary.
https://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/misc/JewishEncycRussia/g/index.html
A little glitch. The list names him clearly: Lentsman Yan Davidovich
I recently got an earful from an Azerbaijani about the dread threat of Russian invasion, as evidenced by their recent invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea. When I pointed out that ethnic Russians in east Ukraine and Crimea seemed to have welcomed the Russian intervention and annexation, I was first branded a Russian lackey and then asked if my “angelic Russians” had not been the cause of much bad in the world. He told me he heard all the news in all languages and could discern propaganda, where I could not (despite Uncle Sugar schooling me in Russian).
This guy wasn’t old enough to have been born in the USSR much less experience life in it, so a lot of this enmity is based on word of mouth only, and it will not be easily tempered with a balanced examination of the history because there will be little local interest to do a blanced examination.
Russia wasn’t winning, it wasn’t losing etc. What Russia was doing was suffering from war exhaustion. People, soldiers were sick of it. Desertions, however inspired, we’re symptomatic.
The Bolshevik promise to end the war was popular.
And, I know you think Trotsky et al were the essence of evil etc, but maybe, during negotiations with the Germans, they realised a German defeat was a pretty good bet — & as such any German “gains” would be transitory, like a leprechaun’s gift of gold.
Absolutely. Idiocy & hubris.
Parasitic scum ? Peasants ? The people who worked the fields ? The people who were only a generation or two from serfdom ? The millions who sacrificed their lives in wars started by their aristocratic betters ? The mass of labourers, they’re the parasites ? Oh, yes Greasy W, LOL indeed.
Oh well, I did not know who he was by looking at his nose but in Wikipedia:
“Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Russian: Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман, Ukrainian: Василь Семенович Гроссман; 12 December (29 November, Julian calendar) 1905 – 14 September 1964) was a Jewish Russian writer and journalist, who lived the bulk of his life under the Soviet regime…
Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdychiv, Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education…”, but “it was Joseph Stalin’s post-war antisemitic campaign that cracked Grossman’s belief in the Soviet system… For years Grossman didn’t feel very Jewish. The campaign against cosmopolitanism reawoke his Jewishness”.
He is one of the fathers of the Holocaust mythology.
“He collected some of the first eyewitness accounts — as early as 1943 — of what later became known as the Holocaust. His article The Hell of Treblinka (1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence for the prosecution… In his article, Grossman claimed that 3 million people had been killed at Treblinka; the highest estimate ever proposed, in line with the Soviet trend of exaggerating Nazi crimes for propaganda purposes…
Grossman participated in the assembly of the ‘Black Book’, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the crimes of the Holocaust. The post-war suppression of the ‘Black Book’ by the Soviet state shook him to the core, and he began to question his own loyal support of the Soviet regime”…
“Grossman criticizes Christianity especially, deeming its attempt to create universal good through peace and love responsible for many of the world’s most horrific events. “This doctrine caused more suffering than all of the crimes of people who did evil for its own sake,” he writes”.
“dread threat of Russian invasion, as evidenced by their recent invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea. ”
There was NO invasion of Ukraine: weapons supply, yes – Intel, yes – volunteers, yes. Invasion ? No. You would have noticed it: the corrupt shithouse, the Ukraine would have collapsed in a day or two. As for Crimea: Russian troops were legally in Crimea. They enable the majority ethnic Russians to vote to return to Russia. Funny, the Crimean’s didn’t want to stay in the anti-Russian crypto-Nazi state of Ukraine. A real mystery….
Orthography detail aside, didn’t you write “menshevik” comes from “majority” and “bolshevik” from “minority”? That’s what’s backwards, it’s the opposite.
At face value, it’s even plausible that they were Germans from Latvia’s former upper caste – that most likely to want things to stay as they were. But every time a Latvian rifleman’s talked about, he has a fully Latvian name, while the Germans had German family names before Latvians had any.
More so, in fact, given the edicts on the abolition of the death penalty, allowing soldiers soviets, allowing Bolshevik agitators free reign to demoralize the Russian armies, all things unheard of in other militaries.
Russia could’ve won the war in the sense of how Italy or maybe France won. In other words, either very little gains (Italy) or just an important symbolic gain (Tsargrad? like Alsace for France), but no real war objective (dismantling of Germany – the British wanted to keep Germany not to upset the balance too much, they’d have wanted it even more if there was a strong Russia).
I don’t think the Russian win would’ve been a big thing, much like it didn’t matter much after 1814 either. Even Tsargrad would’ve meant a further war with Turkey, because the Turks weren’t going to put up with it.
France already found it difficult to keep the Ruhr occupied, and it should’ve been economically viable. How difficult would it have been to keep Eastern Germany or Tsargrad occupied? All in all, I think Russian weakness meant they weren’t going to reap the fruits of their enormous sacrifice.
Of course they’d have done better without the revolution.
The Germans suffered as well. The German army started crumbling after the Spring Offensives, and the German navy mutinied.
Noteworthy that the British army, which executed far more soldiers than any other major belligerent, never suffered such problems.
Nor did the Wehrmacht (15,000 executions for desertion in 1944-45) or Red Army (blocking battalions, NKVD troops, etc.) in WW2.
In fairness to the Bolsheviks, the Revolution did in fact spread to Germany.
Luckily for Germany, Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske decided to enlist the army in crushing it rather than dissolving the army.
Though they screwed up (from the SPD POV) by accepting the army’s “state-within-a-state” independence as a tradeoff, which ultimately made it possible for the Nazis to take power. In fact the amateurish Beer Hall Putsch had a chance of success if not for putting forth von Lossow (whom Reichswehr commander Hans von Seeckt despised) as Defense Minister.
Baltic Germans formed the Baltic Landwehr to defend themselves against Bolsheviks.
The idea that landed nobles and burghers would defend a Bolshevik state is absurd.
Furthermore while Germans weren’t particularly hostile to Balts, they were not interested in any kind of equality with Balts as would be implied by serving in Latvian units. After beating back the Bolsheviks the Baltic Germans attempted to conquer Estonia in order to perpetuate their seven-century long domination of the region.
This was not a civil war, this was a Zionist/communist/Bolshevik takeover of the Russia government by one of the most diabolical draconian group of mass murderers and thieves the world has ever seen and all funded by Zionist bankers in New York and London and Germany to name just a few of the felons involved.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that the Bolsheviks/communists/Zionists murdered 66 million Russians from 1918 to 1957 in Russia. This was a holocaust beyond human comprehension but it happened and the Zionist elites caused it to happen along with the murder of the Tsar and his family at the orders of the Zionist bankers in New York City.
Now the zionists are laying the groundwork to do the same thing here in America and anyone who thinks these are not the same stripe of zionists who killed the Russians , think about this the Zionists who rule Israel and the U.S. killed some 3000 Americans on 911 and got away with it and with this zionist mind set do not think they would not kill millions of goyim if givern the chance.
Read Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest and the Gulag Archipelago by Alexzander Solzhenitsyn and the Protocols of Zion.
If so, then a ‘slave mentality’ is a good thing.
GTFO stormfag
Ha, ha, ha – That awful peace and love. We really hate peace and love. Something has to be done about peace and love.
Why the Black Book was suppressed? Why in general Jewish Holocaust was underplayed in USSR and Soviet Block?
The 70% majority must do something about it. Unfortunately there was no equivalent of denazification in Russia.
“On the contrary-most empires were built by slave mentality (Egypt, China, Babylonia, Persia, Incas ..in modern day Prussia & short-lived Nazi Germany).”
You seem confused.
Most empires are based on a sense of superiority, destiny manifest, exceptionalism (the “shining city on the hill” stuff) and so on.
I believe the Russian Empire also had a kind of destiny manifest of its own.
By the way, Egypt, China and Persia are better described as “civilizations” rather than empires as opposed to, say, the British empire, created within the template of the Western Civilization.
Land area isn’t a very good metric for difficulty of accomplishment.
I know you listed sources, but you seem to cite this page almost verbatim: https://books.google.com/books?id=GNLuDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT248&dq
Of course-and this is bullshit. As Aleksandr Herzen observed, when a pompous stereotypical German says he is the best, he means his emperor is more powerful & can crush you, as he had, numerous times, crushed his own people.
Slave mentality.
I m very confused by your comment. The separate puppet state established in Inner Mongolia by Japan was even a bigger joke than the one in Manchuria.
Manchuria (yes, of course I know the kanji and readings), it took the Red Army invading to set up the place as the base for the CPC.
Anatoly may have posted LOL on your comment because it is total BS.
However, I do not know. Know much about the history of Manchuria, the battle of Nomonha, outer Mongolia, etc.
How were the minority of Mongol Commies in inner Mongolia able to set up rule under the puppet govt.?
After reading your post, have a strong suspicion that the inner Mongolian Mogolian Commies were a creation of smart people from japan, similar tactics were used elsewhere, even internally (although not under the name ‘Communist Party’, but similar).
Seriously, would appreciate a reply, your claims on it are very interesting.
Anatoly’s article is great, people commenting ‘oh, how could poor dear Balts have anything to do with the Bolshie coup d’etat‘ are either disingenuous or conscious liars. From my reading, though, Estonians had little to do with it.
Of course, I may be wrong there, but it seems to have been Latvians and Lithuanians.
… and of course, under mainly Jewish Bolshie direction, at least at the time, and until the end of WWII .
Who do you think made up the bulk of the political commisars with the ‘no retreat’ machine-gun nests and pistols (safe positions, I may add)?
Only a fool does not, or pretends not to, know.
WTF, Lev Bronstein (Trotsky) wasn’t even a Bolshie, but he sure was Jewish, and in command of the nascent Red Army in the time-frame Anatoly is writing about.
The last thing in the world I care about is impressing random Anglos and Western Europeans. What’s important is that they keep to themselves and don’t stick their noses into our business, and land area goes a long way towards that.
Yes, I mixed up the (actual-)Latvian hope for independence (and equality with Germans) with what I did say (wrongly). Thanks.
Yes, I got lazy with a couple of paragraphs. Looks like I got too carried away with paraphrasing not to leave a direct acknowledgement, which I just added.
Anyhow it’s a great book and I plan to review it sometime this year.
Not everything revolves around the Jews.
If all the Jews had vanished in 1918, the Bolsheviks would still have had good chances of taking over. Indeed, many Jews did not support the Bolsheviks initially – too bourgeois. However, if all the Latvians had vanished, it seems highly unlikely the Bolsheviks would have succeeded.
That’s an interesting thought.
Would the same apply to the British Empire and to the current one, or it does not apply to Anglo-Saxons and/or Protestants?
That Grossman (an interesting surname…..) idea is, well, what one could expect from a such type.
“Fatalistic”, though, could be closer to the truth.
But, then, what about Chinese and Japanese masses?
(Brown) Indians?
How about Philippinos? Never had an empire, but, perfect “human resources” today.
In any case, for anyone with a grudge against Russians and Soviets in particular feels good.
That’s important.
You are misreading what I wrote. I suppose it is my own fault because it tended to jump back and forth through time several years between paragraphs. There are disparate groups of Mongolians. First is the Communist Outer Mongolians directly under Soviet control, then the Communist Inner Mongolians under Soviet influence, and finally non-Communist Inner Mongolians made up of the Buddhist clerics and old aristocrats. What they shared in common as Mongolian nationalists was the idea that Mongolia should be “bigger” and that this bigger should be paid for by the Chinese. The Japanese controlled inner Mongolian puppet government during the war and under the “Grub” represented the last party. After the war was over, he fled to the first party under the hopes that because he was a Mongol they wouldn’t hand him over to the Chinese for retaliation for what he had done during the war. Relying on Stalin’s mercy is generally a foolish idea and he was sent back though the Chinese merely “reformed” him as they had done to Puyi and showcased him off as a model new citizen rather than putting two bullets in the back of his head as generally happened in Europe.
The inner Mongolian Communists came into existence via way of osmosis from the Sovietized Communist outer Mongolians. The Chinese Communist Party at its founding, like it’s European counterparts, was very much an upper crust affair. Rather than a party of urban workers, it was a party of wealthy sons of the gentry and intellectuals. It wasn’t as such a national party and most provincial parties were newly created after they had already seized military power. One exception is in inner Mongolia which via exposure to the Soviet Union already had a Communist Party. Because a Communist Party already existed in inner Mongolia prior to the Chinese Communist Party seizing military control, it ended up being rolled into it and left in charge, hence the expanded modern version of Inner Mongolia that also happens to be overwhelmingly Chinese and the dominance of ethnic Mongols in early PRC inner Mongolian history. However, because of the fact that the Party had become associated with a particular ethnicity, when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to attack the party bureaucracy, a political fight against the established order spiraled into a race war, which ended up with the Mongols getting slaughtered.
This is a good, if morbid example, of why Imperialism generally tends to suck for all parties involved especially the unintended disastrous consequences for the metropole. If Peter the Great had never bothered to take Livonia from the Swedes, the red Latvian rifles would never have existed.
Gospodin Karlin: Bolshoi spacibo!, for opening the windows and bringing in fresh air. Your expansive and enlightening coverage of this historical vignette is fascinating.
No. Germany was running out of munitions. Acetone had as much to do with 1918 as any Americans. And victory in Russia did nothing to deal with the British blockade.
Sick nonsense.
Russia swallowing Poland in 18 century ate the poison pill, Poland’s Jews.
And safe.
And comfortable.
“Problem” solved.
No need to think about that anymore.
Until the reality bites again.
Repeat…..
I can see how for you this is not a big deal (and your agenda is very transparent, I’m not going to interfere with your social experiment here, as I see the alt-righters and alt-lefties are eating it up like a tasty steak, but with these kinds of events, some color and some context would definitely help), but the non-video game version is that it was a catastrophe – the enemy was approaching, half of the population became refugees (couldn’t return to Curonia), all of the economy had collapsed, no shipping, no supplies for factories, everything was being evacuated (factories, schools, museums, all taken to Russia). The Latvian units had to fight on an open field called the Death Island – on one side they had the river (Daugava/Dvina), on the other side – the enemy. The enemy was using gas, the Riflemen had to wear gas masks.
There simply wasn’t enough re-enforcements from the Tsar. And as you rightfully point out – there was no danger to Petrograd. Yea, because the Latvian Riflemen who fought near Riga and suffered terrible losses, were in fact shielding Petrograd. For two years. Be careful about who you bash – if it wasn’t for the Riflemen who fought near Riga, the Fritz, your ancient enemy, would’ve already been on your doorstep.
In 1915, the Latvians were quite loyal to the Tsar, but those fierce Christmas battles of December 1916 proved crucial – in fact, rumors were circulating among the Riflemen that the Russians had betrayed us. I’m not claiming anything, because as one of the posters above noted, people were exhausted. The context for these events that unravelled so rapidly within a short period of time is total chaos and collapse of an empire. Anyway, I don’t blame the Siberian troops for the lack of motivation (to think about it, where is Latvia and where is Siberia! It’s a 7 hour flight these days from Riga to Khanty-Mansiysk or where ever these guys came from, to go all that way to fight for some Letts or “Kurlandia” (even if it is meant for the Tsar), must’ve been, like, p##ets, dude! And some of them were later executed for the lack of discipline, I know orders are orders, but how awful!). But the truth remains that you guys failed to help us fight the “Teutonic knights” properly and, of course, the retreat for the Russian troops was safe (after all those Riflemen had been killed). I’m not saying there was real betrayal but this is typical empire behavior – “be loyal, but we reserve the right to not show up when the sh**t hits the fan”.
So the original Riflemen who fought in Latvia, do not deserve this infamy that you’re trying to lay on them by swiping with a broad brush – every place that they fought for is an unforgettable, sacred place.
And of course the Red Riflemen (the ones later running around Petrograd, Belarus and Ukraine) were only a part of all Riflemen (in fact, what they did to our brother nations in Belarus and Ukraine is the worst!). There were also Riflemen who fought on the side of the anti-Bolshevik forces (the so called White Latvian Riflemen – белые латышские стрелки), many Latvian officers from the Tsar’s army among them.
And the Rifleman whom I admire the most, the absolutely amazing Colonel Briedis, who was already present in East Prussia and who did a great job building units for the Christmas battles, never sided with the Red Army.
Anyway, I’m not arguing against whatever points you’re making, just adding some color.
Well, yea, it’s a rather transparent attempt to create a narrative of how “these nasty little sh**ts deserve to be occupied again and again”. Meant for international audience, since the Russians themselves will not fully swallow that.
Not to downplay the fault of the Red Riflemen (esp. with regards to Ukraine where it did backfire terribly as a non-Bolshevik Ukraine or even a slightly stronger Ukraine would have been a tremendous gift from the Gods), but one has to agree with Felix that is is kinda silly (right, from one ditch into another – the Soviets :”Riflemen are heroes!”, Russian neo-imperialists: “The 70 year Soviet rule of Russia is the Riflemen’s fault!” lol)
Anyway, here’s a short timeline for the Latvian Riflemen (prior to the Revolution, to provide context):
In 1915 the Russian army retreats from East Prussia, under the cover of the Latvian units that completely annihilated (20K men).
German army invades Curonia and Semigallia, 100s of thousands of refugees have to leave their homes. Army has no reserves, two national guard battalions are sent to war and they stop the German advance.
People are bitter about the losses in East Prussia, the only hope for defending the rest of the country from the German invasion and for getting back into Curonia would be to form local units.
Conditions on the front are catastrophic and in 1915 the Latvian Riflemen battalions are formed (initially consisting of volunteers). 1905 is still fresh in everyone’s memories…
By November, 8 battalions have been formed. They go to the front to fight against the “Teutonic Knights” (they are close to Riga). First battles take place in October 2015.
Colonel Briedis has some success against the Germans.
Heavy battles continue in 1916 (the Riflemen eventually succeed at the Island of Death) until the collapse of the Russian Imperial army. The Riflemen are occasionally able to break the front line, but the Russian leadership is unable to provide any tactical support to take advantage of these successes.
December 1916, the Christmas battles (the Riflemen break through German fortifications, get no help from the Russians, bitterness against the Tsar’s leadership sets in due to the big losses that have been in vein)
March 1917, the Tsar is abdicated. Revolution begins, chaos continues. Disintegration of the Imperial army. The Riflemen units are some of the last units that maintain discipline and cohesion.
Taking advantage of the chaos, the Germans advance, the Russian army retreats chaotically, the Riflemen fight to allow the retreating 12th Russian army to avoid destruction. Thanks to the Riflemen the remaining population is saved, as they hold the front line for 2 years (allowing to lay the foundations for Latvian independence).
Eventually Germans take over, Riflemen retreat to Eastern Latvia.
October (November) 1917, Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. December 1917, first Riflemen units arrive in Petrograd.
Interesting posts.
Don’t know much about that period/place and there is, of course, a current agenda when revisiting history. Left, right, middle, whatever.
So, am I reading that right:
Latvian Army(?) fought, as a part of Russian Empire’s effort, against Germans till 1917?
Parts of that Army , then, fought for Reds from 1917?
Parts of that Army fought against Reds from 1917?
Those fighting for Reds were engaged in crushing the rebellion in the article?
If so, what’s really the issue here you are having a problem with I don’t get.
That’s how people in small countries along tectonic lines between big players have been doing since Babylon.
Latvian fighters, as always with those small countries, had the first (and only, actually) loyalty to own people.
Fighting for this/that big player was/is/will probably be secondary to that. That’s what was/is/probably be simply a fact of life and simply necessary for the survival of the people.
If the Riflemen of 1918 read Karlin they perhaps would double down on their resolve and commitment to support Bolsheviks. Whites were not giving them any promises about independence of Latvia. Now we know it was shortsighted just as Pilsudski’s refusal to cooperate with Whites was shortsighted. The Bolsheviks should have been nipped in the bud without any mercy and shot one by one. But Whites were even more unimaginative and shortsighted. I got the impression from Kholmogorof and Karlin that they were unhappy with Stalin that he retained Baltic Republics after the WWII. If Stalin was just a bit harsher and managed to deport all of them to Siberia so they would never come back both Kholmogorof and Karlin would be quite happy to inherit this part of Stalin’s inheritance and in this would not be much different from the sovoks they rightfully oppose. The problem is that Karlin is an amoral man, perhaps because he is young or perhaps because he has a sociopathic streak. Some of his proclivity points to the latter. Perhaps he should take the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) test to find out. He loves tests and believes in them.
It’s just a stereotype among Russians to associate Latvians (and Estonians) with Germans. Of course, they know the difference very well but Russians, when they feel like being rude, would occasionally call Latvians “gansi” (the Hans’ (a common German name), and it is derogatory). It’s kind of ironic and sad because we’re all r1a, share a similar language group, similar ancestral heritage (that isn’t Germanic). During the Tsar’s times, Russians recruited a lot of foreigners, including Germans. They also tried to source talent from the Baltic states (ethnic Baltic, not just Baltic German), partially considered “Western” by the Russians, as well as because literacy was more widespread among the Balts. You can’t run institutions (yes, that includes the Cheka, unfortunately), without literacy, right? Later the Soviet cinematography constructed a carefully cultivated “Nazi” image around Latvians, often using a tall and blond Latvian to play a “Nazi”. It’s pretty hilarious. 🙂
No, the original Riflemen were units formed in Latvia, by Latvian officers of the Imperial army, under Russian supervision. The Red Riflemen were a faction of those (see the timeline above, the ones who remained in Russia after 1920, were purged in 1938).
It’s interesting but I remember reading somewhere that there were in fact two Russian power centers at the time – one in Petrograd, and another closer to the front lines, lead by Russian generals who were in constant friction with the Petrograd group. These Russian Imperial generals supported the idea of Latvian units.
Oh, I’m absolutely convinced that many of them desire our extinction. No doubt about that. Don’t know what the percentage might be, and also, there are many very nice Russians out there who are quite friendly, they visit all the time (and thankfully most are indifferent). But I believe a compromise is possible. And, yea, you’re right in a funny way – it would have been just more of the hated Sovok territory. Some glitches in the video game, lol.
Again, not to take any blame from the Riflemen, the context is very important – and that was total chaos and exhaustion. The war was so devastating and it was not possible to do anything with military means (with just Latvian forces, since the Riflemen suffered tremendous losses and gained only some swampy areas). There was no way out of the catastrophe and the refugees had no hope to return home, so political means would have to be sought. By the end of 1917, the Latvian nation sought the exit from the war crisis. At first it was the Bolshies who promised peace, land, etc., so at first Latvians had hopes for them, but to see where those promises went, that the Brest Peace treaty was signed, where the Germans were given Kurland, the chaos in Russia, the answer was sought in the other camp – with the nationalist, with those who propagated independence and those who eventually won this independence.
p.s. Btw, utu, I’ve read your comments for a long time and have really enjoyed them. You throw some real exquisite pearls out there once in a while.
I have no issue, you are right, it is absolutely normal – the enemy is situational.
The song of the Legionaires goes: “We’ll be beating the Russians, then afterwards it will be the grey ones’ turn.” (about WW2).
The only issue I have is manipulation with context, by underplaying the circumstances. And the naming – Red Latvian Riflemen (in particular) as opposed to Latvian Riflemen in general.
Took a better look at the event.
So far, below:
Facts:
Of 135,000 people only 6000 joined, of which actually, best case scenario, 2000 were actual combatants. Something is amiss here.
Attacker/defender ratio is interesting. A tentative conclusion (from a cynic) would be that the actual number of defenders, as soon as situation became serious, dwindled. A LOT.
As for the attacker,one couldn’t, with that number of troops, effectively cut of the city in the first place, let alone cut it of and assault.
……
So…was there any actual assault on the city? Or the defense simply collapsed under bombardment?
If so…something, again, is amiss.
How?
Bombardment, sniping or assault->MOUT/CQB?
From Wikipedia (yes, I know…):
Looks as a siege to me, not an assault.
A BIG difference.
Anyone cares to clarify those pesky details?
I wouldn’t say that, but they (and other Eastern Europeans) should stop blaming Russians for the USSR and equating it with modern Russia
No, because it was first a nation-state, while Imperial expansion was, with all its peculiarities, riding on the wave of strongly entrenched Whig liberal Imperialism.
There were about 30,000 Latvian Riflemen at any one time during WW1. In comparison, the Russian military had 7 million under arms.
They were irrelevant in the big picture.
Again, nice try.
https://www.ljplus.ru/img/w/g/wg_lj/rekruts_ros.jpg
Russian recruits had surpassed 70% literacy by the early 1910s. There was no shortage of literate Russians in 1918.
Latvian percentage of commissars in the Cheka as of September 1918: More than half.
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/yroslav1985/28993233/74354/74354_original.jpg
Thank you for so bluntly stating your real agenda here.
utu is just butthurt there’s no good way to work his Jew obsession into this particular story.
Actually, 4% is an impressive mobilization ratio, especially given its short-notice and voluntary nature and the fact that in most Russian regions attitudes towards the Bolsheviks at this time were characterized by sullen apathy, not resistance.
It is also of course typical not to have all of your forces at the front at the same time. That would have especially made sense in light of the Rebellion’s limited ammunition reserves.
The attackers had heavy artillery and even warplanes, consisted of battle-hardened troops, and critically, had access to ammo resupply.
Well from what I read it was both. Bombardment, followed by the attackers pressing in, with the area controlled by the Rebellion steadily shrinking.
I found Chapter 10: Poles, Latvians, and Jews of Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen here http://publicism.info/history/stalin/13.html
and it is quite good on Latvians and Poles in Checka but when it comes to Jews the first sentence is:
So I keep reading to learn about the prominent roles of the Jews in the killings but all I find is the usual litany of how difficult it was to be Jewish and all the injustices and indignities Jews suffered in Russia, Poland and everywhere.
I do not conclude from the lack of elaboration on “The prominent role of Jews in the killings of 1918–21” in his book that he was a sociopath. I know nothing about the man. But by now I know quite a lot about you. And yes, it is tangentially related with your reluctance to tackle Jewish issues and Israel not because you are some philo-Semite or Zionist, which probably you are not, but because you are an opportunist with and acute sense of recognizing who is a top dog and who you can kick. The Latvians are not the top dogs. The chapter of Rayfield starts with the quote from Russian émigrés that the Russian revolution was “made by Jewish brains, Latvian bayonets, and Russian stupidity.” In your version of the history only Latvians are left.
I don’t think Utu is wrong, and I don’t mean that as an insult.
The closer you approach pure realism, the more sociopathic you are.
It takes a certain level of moral detachment to evaluate things objectively.
Not a bad thing though something one should be mindful of.
We’re wired similarly, as are a number of other commenters here.
Well, yes…and no.
Yes comparing to the rest (sullen apathy, not resistance).
No re actual numbers. 10 000 would be an appropriate figure for a city of that size against a regime of that type.
Feels as nitpicking by me, but just trying to figure out the level of support there.
That’s true, especially re later.
Well, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out.
My approach is very simple: hard facts about an engagement first. All the rest simply flows from it, agendas notwithstanding. Any engagement.
We are in essence talking about WW1 technology and tactics.
In that case 2000 motivated defenders, within own city, European style (brick, mortar, stone, CELLARS etc) against 7000 attackers should not be a problem.
It’s, IMHO, virtually impossible to successfully assault a decent multistory building then and there, defended by motivated riflemen. Not without heavy casualties. Heavy.
Any chance we could see the attacker casualty number, for example?
What was the type and caliber of artillery? How was it used (indirect or direct fire). Stuff like that…..
Even those planes. I mean, they were WW1 airplanes. My take bombs were like 152 mm shells, tops. Nothing such buildings could withstand with ease.
My take: something like that. In essence a tightening siege. Slow grinding out of defenders. Defenders not very good at what were doing (no active defense) At the end, collapse of moral and surrender.
A puzzling element though: they surrendered, and, apparently, got executed.
I feel had they known what’s going to happen after surrender they would’ve, at least, tried a breakout and, probably, succeed in significant numbers.
Any chance that “Lieutenant Balk” was in fact Hermann Balck?
http://www.historynet.com/the-greatest-german-general-no-one-ever-heard-of.htm
Well, in “my” version of the story, which is not actually mine but that of Yaroslavl in July 1918 specifically, it was a case of Latvian bayonets crushing the more intelligent Russians, with no particularly critical input from the Jews one way or the other (some of the Red commanders were Jews; but there were also some Jews amongst the defenders of Yaroslavl).
Reminder that in 1917-18, the most Jewish parties were the Mensheviks (moderate leftists who supported continuing the war, as did the Cadets and the Right SR’s) and the Left SR’s (who fell out with the Bolsheviks).
The Bolshevik leadership was a multicultural soup of Russians, Jews, and other minorities. They could have functioned without their Jewish brains. In the critical first year, their most (pretty much only) competent and battle-hardened fighting forces consisted of Latvians; the early Cheka was also predominantly Latvian. They could not have survived without their Latvian rifles.
The Jews did gradually “warm” to the Bolsheviks, reaching parity with Russians in leadership positions in the secret police by the early 1930s. Problem? Different time period.
Actually, I believe on Stormfront you could get banned for implying that Slavs were less than Aryan.
I don’t care about the Jewish role in the Bolshevik revolution because it has nothing to do with Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen; and that is the only issue that really matters. Having said that, I do have a question about it (cause I really don’t know much about this particular subject).
Is there any data on Jewish support for the Reds before and after the Whites and Deniken made it clear that they were going to kill every Jew in Russia as soon as they won?
I know that there were some Jewish industrialists who initially backed the Whites because they were worried about the Reds confiscating their factories and the Whites initially had some Jewish officers before Deniken purged them all in late ’18.
I assume that there must have been some Jewish sympathy with the Whites at first because of the Whites anti Poland and anti Ukraine position.
could? That was a guaranteed ban at least up until 2014 (when I stopped following). Although there used to be some hilarious fights on there between the Russian nationalists, who hated Putin, with the western Russophiles, who worshiped Putin. Sometimes the western Russophiles would even use google translate to pretend that they were actually Russians and then the Russians would call out the obvious grammatical mistakes.
Good times.
Does anybody even post on Stormfront anymore? It is so aughts.
………..???????????!!
Mensheviks were much more minority-heavy than the Bolsheviks. According to Richard Pipes, Great Russians composed 80% of the Bolsheviks and 35% the Mensheviks. Jews were 10% of the Bolsheviks and 20% of the Mensheviks.
I didn’t phrase that well. I meant that it is okay to hate Jews and blame them for the Bolshevik revolution and say that they deserved to be exterminated, but it is decidedly not okay to say something positive about “The Big 4”.
I was trying to say I have no dog in this fight so I can afford to be a dispassionate observer.
My guess is as good as yours. Because it never happened. I should have given the whole quote from Wiki:
“First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked with the Nazis as police. Then, in 1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely”.
Because “this ran contrary to the official Soviet policy to present it as atrocities against all Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the specific genocide of the Jews”. However much ‘Jewified’ the Soviets were, they did not buy the narrative of the ‘Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’ and American Jewry that the war was a war against the Jews and that the victory was a victory of the Jews who must be specially rewarded. The JAC emitted the pretension to have a Jewish Soviet republic in Crimea (reviving the projects for establishing a Jewish republic in the southern Ukraine or in the Crimea which have been proposed immediately after the revolution). It was too much even for Stalin, who certainly pointed out that they had such a republic in Birobidjan and inviting them to move there (that is the origin of the ‘rumors’ that Stalin, in access of furious anti-Semitism, was about to ‘deport’ them in the Arctic camps).
That is just what the Jews want you to think.
Russians were in an advantageous position on the Caucasian front and were heading towards Baghdad. The British were not too enthusiastic about, as they were not about a Russian control of the Straits.
” I don’t understand what motivates it.”
It’s not difficult to imagine that this kind of resentment against the Czar’s regime might transfer seamlessly to Stalin’s.
Today, I have acquaintances who are genuinely concerned that the Ukraine situation on the Black Sea might motivate Russia to annex the gap between Russia proper and Kaliningrad nearly a thousand miles away on the Baltic coast. I submit that’s a connection that can only be understood in the context of mutual association in the old Poland-Lithuanian commonwealth.
Ill-informed jokes are made about the Serbs celebrating Vidovdan, their national holiday commemorating their defeat at the Battle of Kossovo on 15 June, 1389. A few years back, anti-immigration demonstrators in Polish arenas hung banners with the date September 11 1683.
It might at first seem far-fetched to invoke historical memories extending back centuries to explain recent events, but they do seem to carry political force up to this day. Perhaps this extended time vision is one of the elusive cultural differences between Eastern and Western Europeans.
Evidently untrue since you felt the need to try and demonstrate to them that Russians did not have a slave mentality in your previous comment
I have just looked through (parts are available by google books) Marek Haltof’s “Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage” which is about making the first feature film about Auschwitz. The productions started in 1947 after Stalin’s blessings though Jakubowska with Gerda Schneider (German high raking inmate in Birkenau) began to write the screenplay already in late 1945 in Berlin and then had all kinds of difficulties before getting approval to have the firm made in Poland. But Stalin supposedly was moved to tears after reading the screenplay and the production was approved. Anyway, it was very important to deemphasize the Jews. Camps was supposed to international. The film was about several women inmates, each of different nationality with a prominent role for Russian women doctor.
Jakubowska spent only 3 weeks in Birkenau and rest of her imprisonment at experiment agricultural farm nearby where Germans were trying to grow some plants for rubber production. She tried to get German POW’s to play SS gourds but it was not approved but supposedly she interviewed ex SS guards. This is pretty interesting story. It is amazing how much it differs from the canonical story about the Holocaust that began to be formulated in late 1960s in the US.
https://books.google.com/books?id=L6RBDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Screening+Auschwitz:+Wanda+Jakubowska%27s+The+Last&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj37Ln9qr7cAhWJneAKHZJnCnYQ6AEIKzAA#v=onepage&q=Screening%20Auschwitz%3A%20Wanda%20Jakubowska's%20The%20Last&f=false
This made me think about what Karlin is trying to accomplish. Historical policy is something very important for every nation. Germans with a great effort and great expense on blood money are succeeding in separating themselves from Nazis. The Nazis became like foreigners on which everything could be blamed. They no longer talk about the defeat in 1945 bout about liberation from the Nazis as if the Nazis invaded them and enslaved them. So I am not surprised that Russians would try to accomplish a similar trick with respect to Bolsheviks to disassociate from the awful crimes of communism. Emphasizing foreign nationality of perpetrators makes much more sense for Russians than Germans. After all the role played by Jews and Latvians was great and indeed the invaders came from without like Trostsky and Lenin and their people. So I appreciate what Karlin is doing. Anything is better than the sovok’s narrative which combines denial, glorification and spiteful triumphalism.
Bullshit.
Have some Manischewitz and calm down, fam
Jewish “brains”. There, now I fixed it …..
what’s the bullshit? The Whites in the Ukraine at least were clear that they were killing every Jew they could once the war was was over and a lot of them weren’t even willing to wait until then. I can probably even dig up a link if if you want but there was one Jewish supporter of the whites (who was, like I said, afraid that the Reds were going to take his business) who asked Deniken to call of the pogroms and Deniken basically responded, “Nah”.
…
I don’t even have a problem with Deniken or the Whites. I’m a Palestine/Iran guy and this stuff doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.
It’s just history.
Go back back to your cuck Weekly Standard and listen to your “conservative” spokesman Ben Shapiro – goyim.
The two most important people in the Bolsheviks were Lenin and Trotsky, so it is safe to say that it was a jewish run organization.
nobody here deserves to be compared to or associated with Ben Shapiro.
For the record, according to Wikipedia, Lenin’s maternal grandfather was Jewish and had converted to Christianity, and his maternal grandmother was German-Swedish. Later in the same source his mother is described as an indifferent Lutheran. His father’s ethnic background is not entirely clear (Kalmyk, Mordvin, Russian, or some mix of those). He is described as a devout Orthodox Christian.
So Lenin, while a perfect psychopath, is not the face you want to put on your anti-Semitic poster. Trotsky on the other hand…
If Lenin were alive today he would qualify to become an Israeli citizen, so if it is good enough for the jews to define him as a jew, then that should be good enough to call him a jew.
Americans should be banned by law from commenting on the “old country”. Whatever comes out their mouths is too stupid for words.
No, I’m demonstrating to them that their flavor of sympathetic magic doesn’t work.
a) Russia (a country, that, if we’re being honest here, is low on human and natural resources and located in the ass end of nowhere) becomes one of the leading world powers over a space of several centuries.
b) Evidently, whatever the Russians are doing works.
c) Butthurt and afraid Anglos label this with some nasty slur (“slave mentality”, or “Putler’s dictatorship” or “Christian Taliban” or whatever; the exact slur used doesn’t matter), thinking that giving some phenomenon a nasty name will somehow invalidate it.
This is the same idea behind politically correct speech — Anglos think that renaming “niggers” to “blacks” to “African Americans” will somehow cancel out niggerly behavior by sympathetic magic.
Well, guess what, that doesn’t work. “Slave mentality” or not, whatever the Russians are doing seems to work, and it will continue working even if you invent a bad name for it.
Lazy minds don’t know a hoot about Russian long history. So, try to educate yourself on the topic:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51LZgtYCgsL._SX316_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51CPK13XKGL._SX376_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/518nciNl0rL._SX320_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Oh, I forgot…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a88ZRQ9K4Yo
“If Lenin were alive today he would qualify to become an Israeli citizen”
His Israeli passport would probably list his nationality as Russian. Just ask your favorite Russian “Jew” how the real Jews in Israeli feel about them and their diet of “little white cow”.
Look, I’m just saying that if you want to make a Russian version of the Ewige Jude, I think you’d do better to use Trotsky as your model.
By the way, what’s Stalin’s excuse? He couldn’t play the “I’m a historically victimized member of the intelligentsia from the Pale of Settlement so I have a right to torture Russian peasants” schtik.
Some might be lighter skinned compared to the typical swarthy semitic looks, but I doubt that this is what all jews there think, they know who is a jew and who is not.
As for Stalin, he wasn’t a true believer radical like the Bolshevik jews, he was interested in power and not too much interested in permanent world revolution, he just so happened to manage to inherit a state that had already enslaved its population and he probably thought that it was safer to keep it that way to keep his grip on power.
If the Tsarist regime had survived, could Britain have issued the Balfour Declaration?
It seems unlikely that Holy Russia would ever have agreed to give Palestine as a Jewish Homeland.
James H. Billington, Suzanne Massie and Orlando Figes lecture us about Russian culture.
“Let me tell you about your country”, the post.
By the way I just noticed that my auto-corrector had turned “tsarist” into “tartest” [AK: Fixed], but I am sure you will have understood what I actually meant in the first place.
Yes, the Russians were in advantageous position in the Caucasus before the revolutionary disaster, and yes indeed the British were not enthusiastic about it. Furthermore, the Americans (the “Eternal Anglo” connection so dear to many here) actively supported the Turks to regain control of the Straits, which finally resulted in the infamous Treaty of Lausanne. The fact that Constantinople is still a muzzle-occupied Christian city owes a lot to that POS Admiral (US Navy) Bristol and his WASP enablers in D.C. Why the Armenians would forget that and want to be Americans defies imagination.
As a rule of thumb, the swarthier the Jew, the lower down they are in the Israeli hierarchy. So Russian pseudo-Jews are somewhere in the middle. This is obvious if you visit.
You’ve never been to Israel, have you?
This sounds exceedingly unlikely. Any sources on how exactly Denikin “made it clear?”
Denikin did forbid Jews from serving as officers in his army, though this was on account of fellow officers’ antipathy towards Jews, not anti-Semitism on his part.
Big 4?
The countries you mentioned are all irrelevant.
And what’s wrong with saying something positive about any of them (other than Yemen, where anything positive would be objectively wrong)?
The Assman for instance rules. One of the world’s most tenacious leaders.
Just a reminder that the roads, trains, trainlines, sewage systems, modern science was all brought to the invented nation of “Latvia” courtesy of Russians and Germans, you twat.
The only ones who are rude and hateful of Latvians……are latvians themselves you cretin……huge population decrease both before and AFTER EU membership (serious, proper countries like Czech Republic,Slovakia and Hundgary have remained the same and actually have a natural heritage).
The fact is Latvia should be kicked ouf ot the EU, the UN and the civilised world for these scumbags cynical and indefensible citizenship policy,voting rights, language policy, historical revisionism and general stupidity
As for supposed “literacy” this stupidity is irrelevant given Russia’s size, nothing to suggest that at the time the literacy in Yerevan, Moscow,Tblisi, Saint Petersburg was lower or equal to that of any of the Baltic cities you cretin
Its the Nazi-Soros Latvians who have a persecution and sadistic complex you cretin. Without the Russian trade and the Russian population, Latvia completely collapses.
what I never got about this is weren’t Jews already prohibited from being officers in the Tsars army in the first place? Deniken purged his Jewish officers but by Tsarist law those officers shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
…
I’m having trouble finding the link but I remember this really well from my research on the 1919 pogroms in the Ukraine. The pogroms were overwhelmingly the work of the Whites, not the Ukrainian nationalists or the Poles. One wealthy Jewish industrialist White supporter managed to get a meeting with Deniken asking Deniken to stop the pogroms and Deniken’s response (paraphrased) was: “I don’t like your kind and the Jews deserve these pogroms but I’m not the one ordering them and I can’t stop them and don’t bother me about this again.”
Okay, so yeah, Deniken himself probably didn’t intend to kill every Jew in Russia but apparently most of his senior officers did. The Ukrainian pogroms were so massive that they could only have happened upon orders from guys at the top of the hierarchy.
…
You just gotta trust me on this one
you do know that LatW is a woman, right? You gonna talk to a woman like that?
It was not about whether Jews supported Bolsheviks, but about the role Jews played before, in and after the revolution, bourgeois or ‘arbeter’, ‘religious’ or atheists, Zionists or internationalists. It was not too pretty.
They did not vanish at all in 1918.
And yet I suspect you believe Russian over Ukrainian writers, or Russian over Baltic writers, when it comes to matters concerning these countries.
Correct. While Jews were over-represented among Bolsheviks they certainly did not dominate them. Lenin was the principal evil genius behind this project. Bolshevism certainly wasn’t a Jewish project, nor a Latvian project. It was the project of evil multinational renegades from within the Russian Empire, led by an “anti-Russian” Russian of mixed ancestry, largely financed by the Germans.
And you are correct that during this critical period, without Latvian Red Riflemen, the Bolsheviks would have lost power. Without their physical force, Bolshevism ends and millions are saved. I’m not so sure that a Bolshevism absent of Jews would have succeeded either, however. Trotsky was in charge of the Red Army. Would Bolsheviks have succeeded without him? Could he have played some kind of critical role in convincing the Latvians to help?
Thank you for these posts.
Dregs like you belong on stormfront or pol, not adult conversation, troglodyte
Stupid. For instance, the best Dostoevsky’s biography, absolutely unparalleled, was written by an American (and, as far as I know, it isn’t translated in Russian). Sometimes, “foreigners” know better than “natives” about whom they write. Not always, but sometimes….
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51-252gvvEL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51NjHntSt8L._SX332_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2BnDH5KRUL._SX337_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41L0ZDdwQ2L._SX325_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41L3beqAFSL._SX293_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Remind me again why I need to take orders from some random online cuck?
No I did not. Thank you for informing me of this ( these type of forums do tend to be overwhelmingly male)
Now knowing this ,I will talk in my usual calm and courteous manner
As Slezkine noted, the Jewish “verbal IQ” was certainly helpful in terms of persuading groups on the fence to join the Reds, so their influence can’t be reduced to numbers alone (though 10% of the Bolsheviks is still a massive over-representation). Trotsky himself was from a very assimilated background, I don’t think he even spoke Yiddish, only Russian and maybe Ukrainian.
Because you embarrass yourself, e.g. using “cuck” unironically like it’s 2015.
.
LOL…taking insidious retardedness and talking bollocks to new levels you absurd POS
you only get random English transcripts from shameful, loser scumbag American Canadian Bandera shitbag diaspora sites for your pseudo “evaluations” of Ukraine’s imaginary fake history you dumb POS…..not from any actual full scale reading, analysis and study of Russian and Ukrainian writers you idiot , like you might want to imply.
Baltic writers are absurdly stupid and nonsensnsical….only serve to hide their Nazi collaobration….nobody in Russia gives a toss if the Baltic elites were in favour or against communism……….as long as they don’t reinvent pre-soviet history and use idiotic nonsense to justify their obscene policy towards Russians and the Russian state post-1991.
Many of these Baltic writers are too retarded to know that countries like Lithuania owe 25% of their territoty to the kindmess of Stalin and Russians.
Lithuania, though , at least does have it’s own culture and history…..”Ukraine ” sure enough doesn’t ( hence why a demented nutjob troll with your algorithm is on here 24/7 doing billions of spam posts)
There is only Russian or Soviet writers (unless you can find me a “Ukrainian” writer who is about 470 years old you thick twat)no such thing as Ukrainian historians……..just Soros/state Department funded f*tards or diaspora Nazi scum who fled, with the CIA’s help, in the 1940’s and 50’s. They have zero value from any intellectual angle at all.
If anybody actually did take these morons seriously ( which they don’t) then amongst a million other things they would also have to explain away why Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic was pretty much totally peaceful and united from the late 40’s upto 1991 (and was hugely prosperous from 1947- the mid 70’s), how even now 5 of the most populous oblasts in Ukraine are the traditionally Russian areas, why Kiev is the most Russian city of all and why the rates of intermarriage between Russian and “Ukrainians” is extremely high, to the point that even Poroshenko/Valtsman’s son is married to one.
why pretty much everybody “Ukraine” claims are their stars are actually people revered by Russians for centuries/decades as their own….and viewed to the outside world are viewed as Russian
why even when Russian royalty is assassinated by a “Ukrainian”…the “Ukrainian” in question ( viewed by all the civilised world as Russian) had not even claimed any iota of Ukrainian separatist nationhood as reason for his assassination of Alexander, something that would never happen in a state with serious separatist sentiment.
Why the Ukrainian internet is nearly entirely in Russian language, why as the video from Rivne shows, “Ukrainians” speak a version of “Ukrainian” that is pretty much….Russian, why the most popular television and radio shows in Ukraine are done in Russian, and so on.
As of now the only “icons” of “Ukrainian” nationhood are Bandera,Shukheyevich and Chikatilo you spamtroll cretin.
Ted Bundy was a true American patriot, wasn’t he?
Russia has pretty good human resources in the most basic sense, since it has had for the last several centuries one of the world’s largest populations of Europeans. The position on the edge of Europe and next to a sparsely populated area is obviously very helpful for colonising lots of land.
It didn’t work very well for Russians themselves, who had a very poor standard of living compared to the rest of Northern Europe and less international power than one would expect given their population and resources. The colonisation of Siberia was carried out by Cossacks anyway iirc, so I don’t know how much it can be taken to demonstrate the success of Russian serfdom.
Actually the earlier slave mentality quote came from a Soviet Jew, no Anglos involved.
This whole comment is one of the most Russophobic things I’ve read recently.
More bullshit. The Russian Civil War era pogroms were initiated in Ukraine in Petliura held areas. To a considerable extent, this manner was greatly carried on by the locals there – after the Whites established a main presence there. While it’s true that some Whites supported such as well, others (including some at the top like Deniken and Wrangel) didn’t. Denikin is on record for saying such. As the Russian Civil War progressed, the Whites maintained better discipline against anti-Jewish and other violence.
In exile, Whites like Wrangel and Denikin steered clear from Nazi like behavior.
That’s the actual history. Related:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/25062018-remembering-richard-pipes-oped/
A good deal of related misinformation.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/09/21/getting-russia-wrong-again.html
The act of the matter is that Holy Russia was changing, with or without a Bolshevik coup.
S. Massie gets good reviews among people of a patriotic Russian background. She’s credited with getting Reagan to look at Russia more positively.
Ukrainian nationalist anti-Russian sources have that spin. Your above paraphrased is misinformation. Get Lehovich’s book on the subject. Denikin indicates a clear non-support for such violence, while at the same time being somewhat restricted in what he could do. Denikin’s successor Wrangel is credited for limiting that violence.
Should read as the fact of the matter….
If true (which it is not), speaks sadly of Russians, not having enough of their own stars.
So Russian fairytales now claim that Ukrainians are claiming this? Interesting.
None ever had a Russian majority.
LOL video completely in Ukrainian, no Russian.
Chikatilo was a Sovok like you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo#Adolescence
By his teens, Chikatilo was both a model student and an ardent Communist. He was appointed editor of his school newspaper at age 14[17] and chairman of the pupils’ Communist committee two years later. An avid reader of Communist literature, he was also delegated the task of organizing street marches.[18] Although Chikatilo claimed learning did not come easy to him due to headaches and a poor memory, he was the only student from his collective farm to complete the final year of study,[18] graduating with excellent grades in 1954.
This coming from a moron who used the word “stormfag”… I don’t think you understand the word irony.
I’ll respond in the next open thread.
Thank you very much for your informative reply.
It is something I still am wondering about, how were they in place at the time of the CPC vs. 国民党 civil war?
There must or may be a connection with the fnrmer puppet state, fnr sure, i am not knowing.
Only 300 men were shot for desertion by the British in WWI.
The German Army executed only 18 men for desertion during WWI.
Why bother with morons who deny the very existence of Ukrainian nation? I would just turn my back to them & leave them to their wanking.
Let them wank in peace….
my great grandfather left to dodge the draft for the war with Japan and for no other reason. My great grandmother left for economic reasons, like you said. My grandad told me that she had only been in one “pogrom” and that pogrom was in name only. Basically some Cossacks came into the shetl on their horses and walked around for a bit. They didn’t harm anybody, steal anything or even cause any damage. After a few minutes they left.
Hack’s Law.
During the WWI Germany executed 20 times less soldiers than combined F+UK+CAN+US.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-rights-human-capital-problem/#comment-2361219
It might be worse, if you calculate in horrendously stupid charges.
Regarding the US, its war leaders might have been responsible for the Spanish Flu outbreak in Europe. Although, flu is so contagious, it is difficult to say, if it could have really been contained.
Note that the young German officers at the time considered this to be an error that (in part) lost Germany the war. When they ran the Wehrmacht they made it a point to institute very harsh military justice.
The Wehrmacht executed 15,000 people for desertion, and it worked.
Between the wars Erich Raeder also made a point of introducing extremely strict discipline into the Kriegsmarine in order to prevent a recurrence of the 1918 mutiny.
I know someone of a White Russian background, who said that a family relation of hers commanded a group of Cossacks to put down pogroms.
The Fiddler on the Roof movie suggests that the pogroms were encouraged from the top. Contrary to that, are the instances of locals doing that violence without any plan from the top of the Russian government. It has been noted that some on the left instigated the pogroms as a way to achieve greater turmoil.
A few years back on RT’s CrossTalk show, a former Israeli official by the name of Gisin (I might be misspelling his name) said that his family left a good life in pre-Soviet Russia in eastern Ukraine to pursue a life in Palestine.
Awhile back, a Wiki entry was sent to me on a Jew who fought in the Russian Army against Japan. If I correctly recall, his honors included a St. George’s Cross. He later settled in Palestine.
Wow, I didn’t even realize it but my great-granparents got pogromed, too.
Now all we need is for some big brain Jewish academic to prove that pogrom trauma is inherited epigenetically and we can join the case for reparations.
That was Trumpledor. He said that nobody in the army bothered him about being Jewish. He also said that he thought the war against Japan was stupid and that the army was woefully unprepared for it.
The thread, as very often, shifted into “Dem Joss” with a “Russia/Ukraine” things.
I am more interested in this event, for a couple of reasons.
For example, one can find plenty of info about Eastern Rising.
Not so much about this, and found material appears contradictory.
For example:
https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Yaroslavl+Revolt+of+1918
Some parts:
And, this:
This gives a slightly different picture from the article here.
Only one regiment of regular forces and no mention of (in)famous Latvians. The bulk of besieging forces of the same (amateur) type as defenders.
No wonder re reliance of siege tactics with bombardments.
No surprise, of course.
The angle/agenda of the linked article can be seen from a mile.
Anatoly’s feels the opposite.
As this link:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3048314/posts
Some quotes:
Then, a bit of interesting information slips out:
with
and
This could be interesting too:
Magyars, Poles….no Latvians?!
As for air strikes (no wonder):
Impressive ordnance……………………….both in quantity and quality.
Then
So, bombardment.
Re gas attack(s):
And
.
This feels…….interesting.
And, this too:
Magyars ?!
Anyway.
Balance is always elusive in such events, and most, of course, don’t care.
Some do.
BTW, took me around 45 minutes to make this post, including Google search. Just to get my coffee. Flat white, medium, slow sip.
I have just looked through (parts are available by google books) Marek Haltof’s “Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage” which is about making the first feature film about Auschwitz.
You can download the whole book here:
http://www.oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=650641
Thanks!
Please explain yourself, coherently, if you can.
Thank you kindly.
Said article comes from:
You don’t say. Trusting a Soviet encyclopedia from the 1970s to say anything of worth about a revolt against Soviet power is ludicrous.
If you notice, I included that same link in the following sentence:
The Free Republic article, which I did come across, is a translation of the following 2007 article: http://www.gazetanv.ru/archive/article/?id=921
Most things are accurate (relative to Soviet historiography), but would not be as accurate on average as an article written more recently.
Re-Magyars:
Most sources agree that a few German, Austrian, and Hungarian former POWs participated, but all are in agreement that a solid majority were Latvians.
So BASED CHRISTIAN RUSSIA honors these two murderous bolshevik jews who were killed in the uprising but not the Christians who were exterminated when the bolsheviks reasserted control.
Just goes to show that the Soviet Union died in name only.
Women should be bullied off the internet.
Cuck.
No mercy for thots!
In case somebody’s interested, here’s a German book from 1919 (less than a year later) that has a section about the uprising in Yaroslavl:
https://archive.org/stream/imkommunistische00paqu#page/32
It’s strongly focused on the German/Austro-Hungarian pows in the city, but not completely unsympathetic to the uprising. It mentions the 1st Moscow Soviet regiment of Polish volunteers among the Red forces, and depicts the fighting as a siege.
Interesting detail is that it mentions lack of water as a potential problem for the besieged since the town’s main water supply was destroyed by artillery on July 10, though this was somewhat mitigated by heavy rain during the siege.
“S. M. Nakhimson, the chairman of the provincial executive committee”
“Actions of the Reds were headed Military Revolutionary Committee led by YD Lenzman”.
No Jews of any significance at Yaroslavl, right. Pigs fly.
They were not the ‘brains’ of the Latvians, but their commanders.
In the immortal words of Mel Gibson, go and get raped by pack of niggers.
Well….
YES and no.
YES for obvious reasons.
Little ‘no’ because in say, intelligence business one likes to gather as much info as possible. Sometimes one can find a very valuable piece of information in the most biased writing.
I approach these issues as,say, a captain in Brigade S-2. Get all scraps of information, sift through it and compose my own perception of reality. Is it correct or not, or, better, how much it is correct/incorrect depends on a lot of variables.
My own experience, in similar matters, is that people with agenda REALLY skew the facts and the resulting story is pretty much incorrect.
People without agenda, also tend to skew the facts because of own prejudices (we all have them) and, even subconscious, own bias towards sides in conflict (underdog, not liking one’s ideology etc.).
Before reading this article and a couple of comments I didn’t know anything about the event. That time period/place, for a couple of reasons, simply don’t interest me much.
What did make me curious,a bit, is that element of “uprising” vs “regime reaction”.
Concede, to really get all that event I’d need a spend a couple of weeks trawling Internet, putting together maps etc. Nahh…..
My…impression…..stays:
It was an honest attempt which failed, first and foremost, because of much wider situation; nothing to do with them. Just big players played their games in capitols, people on the ground died.
They also made a couple of fundamental mistakes, but, even if perfectly (tactically) executed, the uprising was destined to fail. It would’ve taken a bit longer with more casualties on the Red side, but that’s it.
They could’ve tried a breakthrough and escaped, but, then, again, that could’ve only prolonged the inevitable. Actually, they did the best in dire circumstances: surrendered to Germans. Again, big players made a deal; little players on the ground died.
Summary executions are the only thing that, sort of, shouldn’t have happened, but, well, we are talking Soviet Reds here. Enough said.
So far all understandable.
What appears to be a point of contention here is the composition of attacker forces, and especially the execution squads. My…impression..is that there is some beef re Latvians there.
I can’t say I understand that.
I, personally, see Latvians/Poles/Magyars……../Mongols/Eskimos……./Red Indians there simply as “Soviet Reds”.
I am missing something here?
@I am missing something here?
Paraphrasing Basil Fawlty: ‘Don’t mention the Jews’.
Re “vae victis”. The eternal fact of life and death when human conflict is concerned.
Re
what about
Reds executed hundreds of POWs. O.K.
And, there is a mention of some lynching of people participating in uprising after the defense collapsed. Did it happen? Who did the lynching? How many perished then?
How about Whites?
Did they “brutally kill many” before putting the rest on that barge? How many?
All those put on the barge survived or not? If some didn’t, well, how did they die?
Oh yes, they always know better, don’t they? Joseph Frank aka. Joseph Nathaniel Glassman.
“That Joseph Frank is repelled by certain aspects of Dostoevsky’s personality seems clear: His aggressive nationalism, for instance. As a Jew, Frank cannot be nonchalant about the primitive anti- Semitic elements in Dostoevsky’s writing… But Frank is not among those who try to cover up this painful saga”…”In his discussion of The Diary of a Writer, for example, Frank is obliged to acknowledge Dostoyevsky’s ”ugly anti-Semitism” and ”deep-rooted xenophobia”… But he attempts to mitigate them with the comment that Dostoyevsky was merely exhibiting ”the prejudices that prevailed in Russian society,” which were ”not particularly abusive if judged by the standards of his time and place.”
The IRS keeps sending me threatening letters
You are right, of course.
But the Luftwaffe was organized only later, and, even though a lot of its officers came from the Army and the Navy, it didn’t have this institutional memory to the same extent, and so it was way more lenient throughout the war.
So no Ukrainians (at least, no units of them) involved in imposing Bolshevism on Yaroslavl, as on the rest of Russia. They did nothing bad to Russia, and just wanted to be left alone on the lands where they were a majority.
Yet Russians were involved in imposing Bolshevism on Ukraine. Both local Russians and invading ones. This would make Russians Ukraine’s “Latvians” (though Latvians also imposed Bolshevism on Ukraine). So Russia can blame Latvia for its Communist horrors, and Ukraine gets to blame both Latvia and Russia.
I am being facetious, of course. No country is collectively to blame for this nightmare, because Bolshevism didn’t enjoy mass support in any of them. They hijacked Russia, after all, and never even came to power in Latvia during those times. But hopefully some of the Russians who are bitter about Latvians’ role in Russia’s misery can reflect upon why their western neighbors often feel as they do about Russia. I don’t mean you, AK, you are aware of such things.
Why?
There are a small number of women around here, most of them reasonable, including LatW who from her point of view is being quite moderate and representing her best interests. Greasy just doesn’t like her because she gets along with utu!
If we chase all of the women off alt sites, there won’t be a woman in the land who isn’t a conformist.
Besides, I thought all you alt-right dudes were crazy about that French chick who paints slogans on her boobs. Where would she be without the internet?
I don’t have a problem with LatW and if I did it would be for her saying that Kevin Love was handsome, not for her getting along with utu.
That seems to be the person I recollected:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Trumpeldor
Earlier at this thread I mentioned a White Russian, whose distant family relation commanded Cossacks to put down pogroms. In another instance, that same White Russian noted a NY based Lithuanian-Jewish attorney, who my family happens to know. That chap said that a family relation of his designed an imperial Russian coin. His family lore said that individual drank kosher wine with the czar.
The point being that Jewish life in pre-Soviet Russia wasn’t anything like Nazi Germany. Years ago, I noticed an imperial Russian certificate on the wall of a doctor’s office. It belonged to that doctor’s grandfather.
By the way, what’s a “thot”? Is that an insult against a woman’s virtue or her intelligence?
You rate guys too?
You are a man of many talents.
That Ho Over There, or thot. A slut.
Who is Kevin Love?
By the way, what’s a “thot”?
Urban dictionary: What guys call girls in schools that send out nudes and porn of themselves. An acronym for That Ho Over There.
Don’t know why Thorfinnson is so misogynist, but then again he trolls a lot so it is hard to take him too seriously at times.
The relatively few women commenters here should not be discouraged, so hopefully they will not take his rants against women as reflective of the common opinion here (or at least I hope it’s not the common opinion).
Does the Palestinian nation exist?
Probably not, although I’m not sure. They don’t have a standard language, historical national culture, clearly defined history & identity, socio-cultural differentiating traits. The same with Jordanian, Syrian, Egyptian, Pakistani, Indian….”nations”, and unlike Iranian or Ukrainian nations.
He is this pretty boy basketball player who LatW is obsessed with because he is supposedly “the ideal of Aryan manhood”.
https://factoryofsadness.co/2016/01/22/cleveland-cavaliers-kevin-love-should-be-an-all-star/
yes.
The internet is an inherently male and nerdy space. It belongs to us.
Women have nothing of value to contribute, at least where text is concerned.
LatW is fine. I wouldn’t even have known she was a woman until it was pointed out. That was also good enough for the Lutzow Freikorps and the American Civil War.
The problem is someone like Rosie, whom I keep seeing retards actually “debate” instead of just ignore or insult.
Every time you see a woman post, replace the text you see in your mind with, “Someone please pay attention to me!”
Women are conformists by definition. You don’t persuade women. You intoxicate them with your power. Any lover you take should fully assimilate your views by osmosis.
What an odd problem to have.
Kevin Love is handsome, if boyish.
I have no quarrel with LatW to be clear since she can pass for a man (her writing, I have no idea what she looks like). Anyone who is identifiably female in her writing however should be bullycided without mercy.
My comment was directed against white knighting in general rather than LatW in particular.
Which reminds me I’ve been far too soft on Rosie (probably because she’s boring).
Y’know I don’t think dogs should be allowed to vote or drive cars.
This must be because I HATE dogs.
Also opposed to allowing children to fly commercial airliners.
Because I HATE children.
I have a lot of women in my life and have great relations with them. And I don’t talk politics with them.
Politics is for men. If a woman can present as a man that’s fine. But if a woman goes into a male space on a male topic and presents as a woman, prepare to be bullycided.
To hate women is to hate in particular your mother, which is to hate yourself. It makes you weak. I would suggest that for someone who has a low opinion of women, it would be better to practice toward them a kind of Victorian idealization as a kind of homeopathic antidote to misogyny.
The Victorians were completely mixed up on women. They brainwashed themselves to believe women are agents of virtue and not even sexual beings, and they permitted women to promote harebrained reform movements.
Not that it matters, but like most of you I love my mother.
My mother, whom like any healthy person I love dearly, in fact voted for Trump on the grounds that both of her sons like Trump.
Great woman!
The problem is someone like Rosie, whom I keep seeing retards actually “debate” instead of just ignore or insult
Sorry, I generally refrain from personal comments, but this is just sick. Much of what you say is actually very useful and informative — in particular you seem to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge about lots of seemingly obscure things — but as you have pointed out before you are not an entirely “normal” person, and your attacks on Rosie (of which this is not the first) seem to bear that out.
I don’t take things personally, but your courtesy is appreciated.
Can you explain why you think this is sick?
Of course they were. Like homeopathy about health. But most of the time its harmless. My point is that beating up on women, even verbally, is a sign of weakness.
It wasn’t harmless at all. It led directly to women’s suffrage and widespread divorce. As well as Prohibition in America.
I’m not going to promote beating women, but you’ll find the typical woman beater is a (drunk) prole alpha sick of his woman mouthing off to him.
A better move is to simply leave.
I like Rosie in particular.
Even if that were all that’s going on, giving attention to women is one of life’s pleasures.
This would bore me to death. Why would I want to have children with a woman not intelligent enough to have her own opinions and to argue for them?
Give attention to women as women. Not thots invading male spaces and making our issues about them.
Great conversation fodder with women is relationships of any kind.
These women do not exist.
Women are conformists and struggle with logic and reason.
If a lover is not conforming to you, she’s conforming to another man’s ideas.
As Aristotle famously wrote:
Most internet content consists of conformist normies posting banalities on social networks or sites like Reddit.
Sites like this are very marginal.
Sorry to hear that the women are of such low quality in Wisconsin. Try Minnesota.
More seriously, though, under the reasonable hypothesis that the distribution of intelligence among men has slightly higher mean and variance than the distribution among women, you should expect highly intelligent women to be rare enough that most highly intelligent men must of necessity pair off with women somewhat less intelligent. It doesn’t follow though that such women never have any original or useful ideas to share with men.
Note also the mirror phenomenon: depending on the relative sizes of mean and variance, unusually dull women might of necessity have to pair off with even duller men. This certainly seems to be the case in my observation.
As for wife-beating proles, I’ve known a few of them in my time. In every case I’ve seen, they were frustrated with their own failures and taking it out on their wives.
Not the real internet. Social media “platforms” with the partial exception of Twitter are hugbox garbage for normies.
The true spirit of the internet, established in the Wild West of the late 90s, lives on in sites like this one.
Intelligent women are even more annoying as they’re more argumentative and want to be respected for their opinions. Their higher intelligence does not translate into any kind of independent thinking. It translates into being programmed by the Jew Dork Crimes instead of gossip on Facebook. Meyers-Briggs personality inventories instead of astrology.
There are practically zero women who have independent (let alone interesting) views and are capable of reasoning, and of the very few such women who do exist they’re generally Jewish lesbians and certainly not attractive.
There’s a reason that prior to the Victorian era that the idea of granting political rights to women was generally viewed as crazy. Because it is crazy.
And yes, assortative mating means people usually pair off with people of comparable SES, background, and intellect.
With my close view of proles it’s amusing seeing how many prole women are more intelligent than their husbands (and thus frustrated), which of course is the exact opposite case for those of us with right hand of the bell curve backgrounds.
I suspect that some Victorian-era feminism stemmed from the still extant noblesse oblige of the time and the observation that proletarian wives were often more intelligent, practical, and responsible than their husbands.
Almost like alcoholic proles with a penchant for violence are prone to failing in things.
Interestingly, in the cases with which I personally am familiar, alcohol doesn’t play a large role in the problem. In Fishtown or Uralvagonzavod not everybody is a drunk. With some men, the problem is that they are either not intelligent enough or too risk averse to adapt to new circumstances and are ashamed of themselves for failing in their manly duty to provide for the family, and people have a tendency to deal with low self-esteem by putting down others.
Maybe Jewish lesbians are over-represented in politics, and certainly in journalism. I work in theoretical science, and I would guess that women make up 1/30 th of my colleagues around the world. Some of them are Jewish. Some of them are attractive. Two or three of them I know to be lesbian, but I know many more that turned out to be just somewhat androgynous and eventually found a man nerdy enough to not care.
Interestingly, more egalitarian and feminist societies have fewer women in science.
Exhibit A:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani
By the way, do prole women tend to be smarter than their fathers and brothers, or are they marrying down?
Du beter dig och låter som en bög.
Maybe you need to do some more shoe shopping, some retail therapy might help calm you down.
Btw, all that PUA language makes you sound like a negro and is really repulsive in a white guy.
Kevin Love looks like a nice guy, but no, he’s not the “ideal of Aryan manhood”. I had never heard of him before until you brought him up since you yourself are obsessed with height, not I. LOL Is he Scots Irish by any chance?
I did work in science (I found the area, after some time, dull). I cannot comment on Jews & lesbians. But, I’d add some points:
females were good, but I’ve never met a brilliant female physicist. Most were normal, some very good looking. Generally down to earth, family-type women. Married with normal husbands.
very few females (including scientists) possess, in my experience, independent and/or inquisitive spirit outside of their chosen expertise. Even highly educated tend to be pragmatic & opportunistic. To illustrate what I mean: they can be good, perhaps sometimes great scientists, but cannot make even an average metaphysician.
That said, I don’t know many females from humanist sciences, arts… From what I’ve read, some female thinkers are brilliant & a few scholars are astounding. And, of course, all the talk about PUA childish ideology, female suffrage abolition etc. is worthless of discussion.
What shallow male approach seems to miss: female irradiance which can be mesmerizing & which entranced men like Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Jung or Nietzsche. As Goethe had put it appropriately at the end of “Faust”:
All that must disappear
Is but a parable;
What lay beyond us, here
All is made visible;
Here deeds have understood
Words they were darkened by;
The Eternal Feminine
Draws us on high.
So I guess it really is a woman
If any of us were normal, we wouldn’t be posting here. There is a great world of waiting for the next Hollywood movie and virtue signaling for fags we could be doing instead.
en bög
Interesting word from an etymological perspective!
The bougre/Bulgar etymology would correspond to English bugger.
All organizations are in tension. My experience with feminist organizations is that they all ultimately are overtaken by lesbians because lesbians are more ambitious and passionate; they basically have much purer virtue signaling being uncontaminated by any association with the “enemy.”
I have wondered if transexuals will eventually exceed them, though. I look forward to trans vs dyke fights.
It seems a bizarre thing to bring up but it’s easier to write randomly about fluff than to write something intelligent. I, for instance, am putting off, among other things, writing a reply on another thread which I have pretty much had written out already in my head a couple of days ago. Besides, Thorfinnsson’s not actually personally vicious.
Traditionally BBS and forums(pre-phpbb) was pretty hilariously wild and crazy, like here. Cyberpunk such as Shadowrun making references to nutsos(and criminal hackers) under names like “allYOURbase” writing long essays on philosophy or rambling in digital slang is basically accurate. 4chan mimics a lot of that in a modern sense.
You mentioned that you’re an academic – remember the old alt.newsgroups and gopher craziness?
I didn’t mean to instigate this conversation about women or to distract (it’s Greasy’s fault). I know this is a men’s site and I apologize for interfering – I apologize to all the guys here except the Thorfinnsson asshole.
The topics are quite interesting and sometimes trigger a reaction. And don’t worry – I’m not Jewish or a lesbian (no agenda that way), and, no, I’m not ugly, IRL I’m quite feminine and have a rather typical Northeastern European look. I try to be nice to minorities IRL, but have suffered for some of my political views. Does that sound good?
Anyway, I googled “Yaroslavl uprising” in Latvian and found a diary by a rather well known Latvian officer, Karlis Goppers, who fought for the Whites and in fact helped organize this uprising (he went back to Latvia later and was killed there in 1940 by the NKVD). He worked together with Colonel Briedis and with Boris Savinkov to establish the “Unit for Defense of Fatherland and Freedom” (an anti-Bolshie org). This org didn’t have success in Moscow, so they decided to move to some provincial towns near Volga and create a string of uprisings in different towns there. It’s one of those slightly dry historic texts that talks a lot about logistics (mostly about finding different White officers in different cities, about movement of different groups, weapons, conspirational activity, etc). But, yea, he mentions that initially there were about 600 Bolsheviks in Yaroslavl, some of them infiltrated by Whites. Yes, there was a strong Madyar group. He also mentions some Jewish guy who claimed to be a Latvian Rifleman. There were surprisingly many nationalities there.
The workers in Yaroslavl were angry at Bolsheviks but it was hard to organize them since they were heavily infiltrated by the Reds. It looks like the Whites simply didn’t have enough manpower, although the officers were talented and motivated. Btw, the Bolsheviks wanted to arrest them all the night before the uprising, but decided to wait for a better moment. The Reds sent in additional help. There was an interesting episode where he walked around the streets of Yaroslavl right before the uprising and noticed newly arrived, well dressed men, one of who approached him and started speaking to him in Latvian – he said his brother wanted to join the Reds, but it might be that he was gathering information. The problem was that they counted on more workers to join but they stayed neutral. Some farmers did show up but refused to take part in the uprising, instead just wanted to get some weapons so that they can later clean out their own villages from the Reds. The farmers were well disposed towards the Whites but were hard to organize — too much chaos. There are very technical descriptions of this battle, but yea, the Latvian Red Riflemen attacked fiercely from Vologda. He writes that the bombardment of Yaroslavl seemed to have been systematically planned and executed with great care as if someone “well experienced was doing it”.
Incidentally, there was also a hope to organize a rebellion in Vologda, just north of Yaroslavl. This is very sad, since the Vologda Russians are one of the few populations that retain the Baltic gene (LWb, 2%) so that means that essentially, yes, the Red Riflemen, in a kind of a far fetched way, were terrorizing a brotherly people.
The important thing is to understand: this is always the fault of the Happy Merchant.
It sounds very, very trashy. I’ve heard some Latvian guys who have started to parrot all that PUA language and talking points – it is complete ruin and degeneracy, it is extremely repulsive and off-putting. If you’re an EE guy, don’t do it.
If any of us were normal, we wouldn’t be posting here
Nothing wrong with not being normal — I’m sure I qualify too. I was only objecting to what I saw as his irrational rudeness to the few women commenters we have and whom I hope will not be driven away by his comments.
AK: Repetition.
This is incredibly trivial and I am almost ashamed to be posting it, but, as long as I happen to be here … it should be “who I hope will”, because the “I hope” is an observation on a clause in which “who will not be driven away”is the central phrase; “whom” is not an object of “hope”.
Would you be so kind as to post a link, here, to that material?
If she’s worth the effort, she won’t be driven away.
Thor is largely correct. The internet used to be overwhelmingly male: thus the joke about men, women, teenage girls and FBI agents. It was by and large, superior to the current setup. There were always a few women, and those were the ones that could handle the overall attitude.
Putting in effort to appease women has ultimately a toxic effort on community in my experience. It affects more than just in regards relating to them; it basically serves to “domesticate” conversation, and starts on the long road of “respectability” that leads us eventually to facebook inanity. Its the entire “Let’s be inclusive” attitude.
At what level? Experimental or theoretical?
Have you ever dined at Trinity College or the Institute for Advanced Study? These are places
where you see scientists side by side with historians, philosophers, and sociologists. I’ve known some Fachidioten, but on average I find people with a keen scientific mind have no problem holding their own in general conversation about someone else’s specialty. The converse is not true.
What does seem to be true is that as science has become ever more complex, scientists have less time to devote to other interests, so that you encounter fewer and fewer polymaths like von Neumann. Still, it is not unusual to meet scientists who speak many languages, play a musical instrument very well (occasionally even at a professional level), are well-read in history and philosophy, and unlike Einstein, are able to remember to put on their trousers before going out the door.
Nor have I. Most great physicists have outsized egos. The strongest women seem to thrive better in mathematics.
You’re absolutely right, a very embarrassing mistake.
When Hilbert was asked if Noether was a great woman mathematician, he replied “I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear.”
To my mind, that’s not what is being discussed here. No one is saying to change the topic of conversation or the way in which it is being discussed so as not to scare off women. Anyway, the women who do come around here can fend for themselves. Rather I at least am arguing that there’s no point in trying to deliberately scare off the women, and that anyone who is doing that is a loser.
It’s in Latvian (easy reading, but might not work well with Google translate):
https://www.historia.lv/raksts/iii-jaroslava
That’s the part on Yaroslavl.
The whole book (called “Four collapses”) starts at:
https://www.historia.lv/biblioteka/goppers-karlis-cetri-sabrukumi-riga-armijas-informacijas-nod-izd-1920-184lpp
He writes in the intro:
“All those events that took place at the second half of 1918, in the Near Volga region, but in 1919 in the Urals and Siberia and which ended with an unprecedented catastrophe of the Siberian army, are too complex to evaluate. Many of the most prominent members of this Civil War have died in battle, many of the living ones will not speak truthfully of their past activities, many springs that directed this movement in a certain direction, will remain forever hidden away in various diplomatic cabinets, so the historian looking at this period, even the most willing, will have a hard time collecting the necessary material for his work.”
It is in a way, though. Inevitably the frontier free for all had people who’d freak out and attack you for being female, for being straight, for writing with periods, for having not graduated from an Ivy League college, for not appreciating the ORIGINAL TRANSFORMERS(not the lulzmovies) or anything at all.
This sheer free for all is charming and should be preserved, is all I am arguing for. Too much of the internet already exists for this:
http://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/fragilefemme.htm
Its interesting, incidentally, going through that website: you can also see the older attitude of the internet there, the entire “its great to fight” and “we admire people for how well they emotionally hurt others” that was once pretty dominant.
Just for FYI – typically, I wouldn’t bother communicating with rude assholes, nor do I have any ambition to appear competent, “smart” or whatever (no, many posters here are much smarter than I), but some of the stuff Anatoly posts is quite interesting. This gender combativeness and the adversarial attitude is one of the most off-puting things about the American society. In Europe people are much more relaxed about these things. My advice is if you ever want to have a normal society at some point, would be to do something about it – not for my sake, but for your own and your childrens’.
Effeminate, overly hysterical behavior, was all I meant.
Thank you.
I shall take a look.
Of course.
My approach is simple, as mentioned in a previous post:
Like….I’ve been asked to present a topic “That Battle” to a group of fellow senior NCOs and officers in Brigade. Constant upskilling stuff, say.
I collect, within a reasonable timeframe, all material related to the battle and then work with it. As, in civilian life, any presentation, lecture, whatever.
The thing is with this, and any related event, more you know about the subject better you’ll be able to sift through a material and pick/recognize/decipher the facts.
Of course, whenever such event is …ahm….”discussed” in public (and I say PUBLIC) facts aren’t important.
The method is the opposite from that of mine above: one has an iron agenda and/or belief and then the facts are put together to suit that.
No need to get defensive now. We see that from top to bottom. Iraq 2003, anyone?
Both of those articles I pointed to above are very good examples of that.
Works 90 % of time.
I am more interested in those 10 %.
So…hehe…be back here re that material you posted.
Depends on what’s the wife’s agenda for today…….
Theoretical, quantum field theory & cosmology.
No, I haven’t been at that level. You are right that some have wider areas of interest; perhaps I was not clear enough. As far as I know, even best physicists, those who may be considered historical figures (Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, ..) were not original, even critical thinkers outside of their, sometimes crucial fields. No Descartes or Leibniz among them (which does not mean that some of them were more important as scientists). Now, string theory-much talked about in past 20-25 (or more) years- is mathematically engaging, but it is not more arduous than, say, hydrodynamics (which certainly is not a fundamental field). Novel ideas in string theory (or loop gravity or..) are, actually, not that novel nor universal.
Of course you’re right re wider areas of interests of some great scientists (Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, ..) or in different way Gell-Mann or Minsky. Just, I haven’t seen, among their published works & interviews, much thought-provoking ideas or intriguing concepts.
Don’t mind Thorfinnsson. He’s just practicing to be the President of the United States.
They’re smarter than their fathers, brothers, and sons.
This is surprisingly not that big of a problem as prole men are able to maintain status via skilled trades, mechanical arts, forestry, etc.
Your typical male prole is a handy jack of all trades with skills in welding, carpentry, agriculture, plumbing, heavy equipment operation, taxidermy, etc. A lot of them have CDLs (license to drive a semi-truck) “just in case”.
I hired a guy to cut down a dead tree in my backyard and he had it down and turned into neatly stacked firewood in under an hour.
It’s quite impressive honestly, and it greatly upsets me when SWPL metropolitan whites who can’t even put together IKEA furniture without assistance sneer at them.
Prole women, like women everywhere, lack the domestic skills of their grandmothers. However they’re quite practical and hard working and have thick skin. They’ll also literally fight other females for you, which is cool. I also admire that babies don’t terrify them and aren’t viewed as burdens.
Trust me. It’s completely rational. There can be no creative efflorescence in any endeavor with a large number of females. Once the number of females in any organization reaches a certain threshold, the original purpose of the organization is destroyed. Once females gain a majority the organization goes into irreversible decline and never recovers.
Did you know that being a secretary was once a prestigious job coveted by ambitious men?
Females must be kept out for men to flourish.
And part of the problem isn’t the women. It’s male dweebs who try to appease them or, worse, sabotage other men because they wrongly think it will get them laid.
But since women inevitably produce that dynamic and there’s no way to keep such men out of groups short of somehow restricting membership to alpha chads only, they must be kept out.
And as Daniel Chieh pointed out, some females will stick it out anyway and are fine. I for one welcome LatW’s posts about Latvia.
I can’t speak for Eastern Europe, but things aren’t much better in Western Europe in my experience except in the sense that men are arguably much more submissive about things – insert joke about pussy hats on men. But personally, at least in France, I’ve seen an university art class turn into basically a workshop for what would be called “radical feminism”; its essentially the same methodology used by North Korean brainwashing camps(!), where the students are graded by their adherence to write essays fitting feminist norms.
Combine a few things: Respectability being connected with credentialism(get a degree) and jobs not being very available(get an advanced degree, you don’t have anything else to do), and homemaking being both economically unwise as well as unrespectable, and academica being funded by grants specifically for feminists, and its hard not to see it as basically legal, formal brainwashing for all up-coming young women of some intellect.
I actually think that women have in many ways, been vast victims of the process of modernization. More than money, people seek meaning in life, and industrialization conveniently annihilated the domestic economy that once had higher importance and held great meaning: in Finland, I remember a custom where the female relatives would begin work on the wedding dress for someone in their extended family, sometimes years in advance. Such a thing would ultimately be a complicated work of art, but all work on it would hold special meaning: beauty, love, family, and even variations of modern “attention and fame” because it would eventually get exhibited before many. It would be a group effort, so it would hold social meaning, allowing for opportunities for engagement and gossip.
Now a wedding dress is just a piece of expensive cloth from a machine untouched by anyone you know. Women still dominate small crafts and art, but it all feels very much LARPing these days, and in some many way, it is.The baubles of the modern age are wealth, “education” and various ever-shifting fashionable virtues and in many ways, the only way that women will be able to get them is to invade male spaces(especially so since female spaces have either been annihilated, or overtaken by lesbians).
Its hard to say how normalcy will ever be attained; we do not live in a “normal” world anymore. But I do believe that understanding(and not going out of one’s way to create villains randomly) does help.
This is not the point. Would you expect some psychologists write about mathematics or philosophy. The point that these people should have sense of reality to understand what shelf do they occupy. But they don’t and this makes them arrogant. Their arrogance is irritating. If they just understood epistemology better the problem would be solved. So when Paul Feyerabend wrote:
he was most likely motivated by arrogance of the Feynmans, the Schwingers. And imo Einstein was not much better. Otoh, Henri Poincare perhaps was one of the last great ones who really understood epistemology. That’s why he was so deliberate and cautious. Comparing to him Einstein was a cowboy.
This concept “normal” does not exist.
All times and places in history – equally normal or not normal.
(Perhaps on some topics you can use “normal” to describe trends – e.g. “economic growth was normal in this era”).
But if you want to say our society now is less “normal” than Ancient China. Or that classical Athens was more “normal” than medieval India? 1980s Mexico is less “normal” than Aztec Mexico? It’s just meaningless.
If you just want to say “better” or “worse” – this is fine.
Obviously overall now is best time so far in world history, from logical perspective of average people and their life standard. But sure, in some areas, things are worse than in some recent history (music for example). Or in some particularly countries – Ukraine was better in standard of living in Soviet times. In terms of relationships between men and women, if you can talk generally about such a topic – it almost becomes meaningless. I’m not at all sure things were (generally) happier in the recent past (most of this viewpoint seems to be people romanticizing about the past, or religious people annoyed that people are mocking their superstitions).
To the contrary, it is one of the great things about American society.
It is probably one of the main reasons that the US continues to sometimes still achieve some great things, unlike the eurocucks.
All great innovators are essentially IRL trolls.
I think mainly going to high table, for dinner, not for conversation – food standard can be like a restaurant, and a lot of PhD students (which doing some teaching) also can attend and invite their friends for free dinner.
For the purposes of my definition, normal is a standard by which the organism has been able to adapt to a stable form. If you darken the skies, life will continue for most animals. If you lower the temperature, life will continue for most animals. If you lower the water level some, life will continue for most animals. But when an asteroid strikes Earth after the Cretaceous Age and does all of those simultaneously, then you have a mass extinction event and life does not continue for almost all animals.
In that sense, Aztec Mexico is in fact, more normal than 1980s Mexico.
I hold the Kaczynski view on this: the rate of change is excessive and driven with little forethought to consequences. This is likely unavoidable, but the consequences will not be good, and they have not been good. That “logical perspective” is silly on several levels, but the most obvious reply is that in the Calhoun Utopia Experiment, life was objectively better than for any other rat in the street(or other experiments, including struggle for food).
And then what happened to Rat Utopia?
Everyone died.
Utu supports a cautious and careful intellectual style and opposes bold and daring intellectual gambits (perhaps envy?)
Anatoly Karlin has nothing but disdain for such a timid attitude and supports boldness and daring in intellectual things.
Daniel Chieh laments the loss of an extra dimension of meaning beyond mere material comfort.
Dmitry says no such dimension exists and the era of greatest material abundance is objectively the best – our era.
What a diversity of viewpoints!
Perhaps they can be divided into groups – utu and Dmitry belong together in one group, and Anatoly and Chieh in the opposing group. Dmitry and utu are both in some sense “western”, while Anatoly and Chieh are in some sense “eastern”.
Interesting patterns…
I do hope you all continue as I take notes for my little psychohistory project…
I guess, um, we know which camp GR belongs to 🙂
And why is everyone going to die from the high material conditions we have now?
Rapid technological change of last couple of centuries has created some apocalypse scenarios – but mechanism is quite specifically concrete situations like nuclear war, or spread of possible epidemics with modern transport.
It’s related to specific technologies which have objectively dangerous consequences.
It’s not so much subjective issues like relationships in society between men and women, which are relatively minor and long-predicted changes anyway (things like allowing women equal rights – already discussed in 19th century and earlier texts), and not exactly going to end our lives either even if we think funny things like e.g. women are ruining the internet.
Rate of technological change is not quite something which is “driven” (implying someone consciously driving the change) – so I’m not sure we can easily complain about lack forethought, (for a mass process that is result cumulative of actions of millions of people).
Surely it would be good to give stronger government regulation in some sensitive areas – but it’ll only work if there is also international consensus as well, as there is in nuclear weapons.
For example, genetic engineering, once applied to humans – will be destabilizing and have some scary consequence. But once this allowed in one country, then the rival countries will be forced to allow it, if they don’t want to be placed in disadvantage. It would require a difficult international consensus to at best delay it, and even if they can delay it, it’s pretty inevitable to happen eventually.
Hmmm.
Suicide?
Maybe there will be mass suicides as the loss of meaning intensifies.
Can’t really think of any other reason people will physically die, though. You’re right, Dmitry.
Nietzsche thought that the Ancient World was on the verge of experiencing mass suicides but Christianity saved it from that.
So maybe the world will become Muslim or adopt some other religion.
I guess well just have to wait and see.
I am waiting for Rosie’s comments on the women question.
Well…gone through that chapter.
You were correct; Google translate wasn’t/isn’t quite good and the read could get rather confusing at some parts.
Not long, though: around 17 pages A4.
Long story short, an interesting reading for those wishing to get a viewpoint of the event from the White, leadership, side. Quite detailed, objective and professional too, IMHO, re preparation and execution of the uprising and its later defense.
It confirmed most of my initial understanding of the event.
The rats in Rat Utopia had great wealth to the end of their days. Behavioral sink killed them; arguably the same is true these days, childishness and lack of nuance is increasingly the norm, for example.
Obesity is a classic example of how giving people everything they want can have profoundly negative consequences. I’ve discussed this before, but the result of endless expansion of cancer, for example, is technically the greatest individual expression of each cancerous cell: to the detriment of the unifying body, and ultimately, to the destruction of the whole.
Technology, should, in theory be a servant of human guidance. It has become a blind master instead.
Again, my view is typically Kaczynski. As my own interest in technology can show, I do not actually fight it; the stage is set, and we play out the roles ascribed unto us. Nonetheless, we should be aware of the harm that may result, and only from cognition of it, can we perhaps even attempt to avoid catastrophe. My belief is that society is already disordered and in ruins, covered up simply with material wealth and other distractions; all this sexual discord(and others) is but a symptom.
I have my own ideas on how to ultimately try to solve the issues, but that’s for a different time and I wish to test on a micro scale first.
“In the immortal words of Mel Gibson, go and get raped by pack of niggers.”
I’m pretty sure Russians prefer donkeys when it comes to group intercourse, actually, so I should be okay.
Hmmm.
Humanity has shown great capacity in rationally directing its fate so I’m sure your plan has great chance of success. Being aware of the pitfalls of technology will surely help save us from them.
I can relax now.
Low-IQ Nazi can’t even make a coherent comeback. Sad!
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eXfgIzDC2KE/UWXhxUDTxTI/AAAAAAAAELA/m7mI6DvN6-w/s1600/A+pile+of+bodies+awaits+cremation+after+the+firebombing+of+Dresden,+February+1945.jpg
There are few sights in the world so beautiful as dead Nazis. I wonder how many of these roasted pigs are your relatives?
Wow, someone’s triggered.
You know what’s really funny? This graph:
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d24053e97715a369855e846e0cc50def
Great performance there, Boris.
Stalin and his slave army of illiterates, drunks, and all-around retards could barely handle the Germans on their own turf, even with billions of dollars and thousands of tanks and planes given to them by the Roosevelt regime. Pathetic.
Oh, also:
https://78.media.tumblr.com/bd0bd900dd262368f28db7392c59f1b3/tumblr_oo6ncsSOxb1vrtsxho1_1280.png
Seriously, that war was a meme.
The low-IQ Nazi communicates in old memes.
Finland lost. So did Germany – attacking under the cover of a non-aggression treaty, all the resources of occupied Europe to draw upon, and they still couldn’t win. Germans are simply an inferior race, as your gay Fuhrer admitted before he committed gay suicide.
At least Nazi women got to experience some loving from real men for once, though it wasn’t enough to breed out the autism and paedophilia that define the German character.
“Germany lost”
Let’s see.
Germany:
-GDP of $3.467 trillion
-$300 billion trade surplus
-economically dominates the continent
-was back on its feet a few years after WW2
-some of the most beautiful land in the world
-has a problem with Muslims but also a burgeoning nationalist movement
-has the greatest track record of artistic and scientific geniuses of any country in the world
-still produces some of the best tech
Russia:
-no economy to speak of
-produces garbage no one wants
-no worthy allies
-has a problem with Muslim migration but no nationalist movement to speak of
-dreary, cold landscape and rotting cities
-incompetent military
-some of the highest rates of abortion and HIV in the developed world (almost Africa-tier)
-entire population is drunk and used constantly as meme fodder
-“patriotism” based entirely on MUH GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR lies
-retarded populace that worships Stalin, the incompetent dwarf who slaughtered more Russians than the Germans did
-women trafficked by jews and auctioned as slaves to be raped in Israeli brothels by the thousands every year (how jews say “thank you” for Russians dying like flies by the millions to protect them)
-is basically a dystopic third world shithole with a dying populace
So much for your “victory,” dumbass.
Low-IQ, low-information Nazi flies into impotent tardrage. Many such cases!
Let me compound your misery by reminding you that however much you wish it, you will never be Jewish (the unspoken dream of all Nazis). You’ve got the neuroses for it, but not the IQ.
This is often true, unfortunately. In many colleges, the problem is the depth of the table, so that it is almost impossible to talk to people across form you. But lunch can better. I’ve never met Ph.D. students at high table, but nothing wrong with that either.
Ah yes the Slavs, whose name derives from “Slave”, known to die for the jews in the tens of millions – the true master race…
Even those more informed were rather shallow. For instance, no serious thinker could-with some exceptions- take this exchange seriously: https://www.edge.org/conversation/werner_heisenberg-science-and-religion
Sounds fun.
But to be honest, while it is admirable that Descartes and Leibniz thought about many things, and were able to pick much low lying fruit, I have a low opinion of their purely philosophical work.
I spent far too much of my youth reading “great” philosophers, and ultimately I concluded that for the most part “there is no there there”, and what was there would work better as poetry than philosophy. I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of Frenchmen: Descartes and Pascals. In terms of philosophy, I lean Pascal.
When I was a student, string-theorists always seemed to be on the verge of a crisis of faith, and there was even a rumour that Big Ed had dropped string theory and was working on Navier-Stokes.
I don’t know what you’re looking for. Possibly people are too modest or cautious to share their innermost thoughts. Even a mediocre intellect like myself spends a fair amount of time contemplating the spiritual meaning of, for example, entropy, but I don’t write books or even blog comments about it.
To be fair, did anyone since the dying of Nietzche’s God have anything deeper to say about this topic?
Well, let’s be concise.
you cannot prove or disprove a world-view. You cannot say that “all” is like this, and unlike that. If you check catalogues of all philosophies, religions, cultures… you’ll see that, give or take, there are, basically, 20-50 world-views (at most). Only parts of them can be (dis)proven as relics of the past- tales that Buddha had destroyed thousands of planets with the focused ray emanating from his third eye; that Yahweh was provoked into flood by human licentiousness etc. etc.
Human beings’ picture of the world depends of a few elements: his culture’s knowledge, his temperament, intelligence, his experiences, general values of a society he lives in, ..
So, main questions like, for instance:
is there some superior Intelligence, in some respects co-natural with human & at the same time “operating” the empirical world, the latter being a manifestation of more encompassing reality ?
are there supra-physical worlds?
are there superior ways of cognition of “all” (or “more”) that surpass our ways of thinking, both quantitatively & qualitatively (or- are there beings who, cognitively in the widest sense, are to us what we are to, say, frogs?
Etc. etc… remain unanswered.
One just cannot prove a world-view & most modern people, who speculate from time to time, think that we have amassed enough knowledge that all “old” world-views are definitely dated or wrong.
Well, they’re wrong.
Bourgeois fear of babies seems to me an especially American problem. When my daughter was a toddler, we spent a year in a certain famous university town in America. Being a theoretical scientist, I have a lot of freedom to work when and where I want, so I often took my daughter into town in the middle of the day. There were depressingly few children to be seen around town, and white bourgeois women whom we would meet would be surprised and rather uncomfortable. “Oh… how… cute…”
A love of children is why I find myself most at home in hippie circles. It’s that or become a Mexican.
Agreed. Nor do I have much patience for people who think they’ve understood what can’t be understood. But the smug atheist used to wear a toga, and now wears jeans and a t-shirt. I’m too old
to bother about these people.
Actually it is the other way round. The name ‘sclavus’ is derived from Slav. Slavic people have been the reservoir regularly raided by nomad bandits (Khazars, Mongols, Tartars) in order to take captives sold in the Muslim lands and the West. The name became common for designating servants (sclavus, Saqaliba in Arab lands).
Good post.
You should copy/paste it into that other, cell/intelligent design thread:).
Make excited atheists there even more….intense.
Waste of time. I’m satisfied with Jung’s shifting positions on these matters, along Valentinus’ ….
Let whoever thinks whatever he wishes…..
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Vsr38USJXFc/maxresdefault.jpg
lol, sorry if you’re so butthurt over the Master Race using you commies for target practice by the millions during WW2.
I suppose you could always take comfort in Russia’s vibrant culture, though.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7AzKuP7NNpM/maxresdefault.jpg
Or maybe jewish culture, in case you were projecting your jewishness, as they often do:
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2017/09/kapparot.jpg
You are seeming smarter by the day, whereas most other commenters here are seeming stupider by the day.
I appreciated it, and Robotix, too. I didn’t understand them much, though, because I could only watch them in English, and I couldn’t much speak the language back then when I was eight or nine years old.
Have you read Peter Watts, especially his Blindsight? (To a lesser extent Echopraxia and the Rifters trilogy.) He’s unfortunately a despicable leftist, but his views on our ability to survive the Singularity or the encounter with aliens are quite realistic. That is, dim.
Of course there is no solution within the current paradigm. The issue is that if someone stops pursuing technological progress, he will be destroyed by others continuing to do so. Of course, other than the Chinese and to a lesser extent the Russians, everyone pursuing technological progress is on a suicide path. And probably even the Russians, albeit somewhat slower, and even the Chinese, because they will eventually create a super-AI, which will be the death sentence of humanity. We can only hope that the advanced societies will self-destruct earlier than they can reach the singularity. Which is probably the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox.
On the other hand, I cannot really root for the African future of mankind, which would be the solution (i.e. the self-destruction of the developed societies), preferable as it is to the technological singularity. I don’t know yet the answer, but I’ve been working on it for the past decade or so.
Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.
(and the stupidity, no doubt, as well)
Ah, you too have been working on the answer – between you and Daniel Chieh I’m sure the answer will emerge any day now 🙂
I await your presentation to the World Council.
This singularity you speak about is the non- ironic singularity of the TED talks and Silicon Valley?
The most likely thing to happen is that no answer will be found. Your postmodern hippie spirituality won’t save us for sure. We’d need the Butlarian Jihad.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars
Published 1956….
Or something similar. Except that I think the supercomputers will have some bugs here and there. But because they will be so powerful due to their intelligence, the bugs could easily prove fatal to mankind, which means given enough time eventually they will be fatal. Mankind will no longer be mankind by then anyway.
The usual answer is that there will be many supercomputers keeping each other in check. Except it’s much easier to destroy than to protect.
Anyway, supercomputers are just one way in which technology could destroy us. Not to mention the slow destruction of our souls and will to survive Daniel Chieh was talking about.
Perhaps the search for an answer is the problem.
Hungarian immigrant, for your nerves’ and family life’s sake, You better stop worrying about unimportant things in this world: if the “computers” are to eat our brains out, there is nothing either You or me can do about it.
Just cheer up and think about your family.
You can even listen to our hippy babbler, he sometimes gives interesting advise.
there are no aliens. The chances of there being life elsewhere in the universe, let alone intelligent life, are essentially zero.
Germany lost. Fritz the homosexual surrendered and spent the years after the war labouring for his Russian masters like a good little nigra. Crying and tardraging will not change that, nor erase the shame you feel.
What makes you say that, given how incomprehensibly vast the universe is?
If intelligent life exists somewhere else, we’ll probably never know (and imo it’s an insane idea to deliberately try to initiate contact, at best a waste of resources, but possibly dangerous), but how can you be so confident about its non-existence?
I agree. It could be dangerous.
Utu, you agree, right?
I find the Singularity concept quite amusing in that how seriously it is taken by seeming intelligent people. I used to read sci-fi when I was young but in my generation the ideas from the books were tightly compartmentalized and did not leak into the actual reality. But guess what, even president Regan got spooked by the War Games movie. I also find it amusing that people can’t stop beating the dead horse of the Fermi paradox.
On the other hand, if we could convince the aliens to take you to some faraway planet where you can share your profound wisdom with their scholars, it might be worth it.
The universe is vast, but not infinite. For life to arise you need to be at the right part of the universe, with the right sized planet, with the right sized sun, at the right distance from said sun, with the right amount of water, with the right atmosphere.
We can’t even create life today in literal laboratory conditions so that gives you an idea of how unlikely it is for life to arise. The DNA coding for simple bacteria is more complex than the programming for the F-35. Life anywhere is like rolling a trillion 6’s in a row.
Actually I’ve been sent from another planet to impart my wisdom to you people here.
I shall check him out. Thanks!
https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1001440881705021445
The simplest solution is if humanity is sufficiently dispersed in the universe with travel time in between colonies, then any self-destructive tendencies will hopefully be limited to only one node.
We can’t even create life today in literal laboratory conditions so that gives you an idea of how unlikely it is for life to arise.
Yes, but how can be be sure that it arose on earth? I remember when those (e.g., Fred Hoyle) who suggested that life arrived on comets were ridiculed since life couldn’t survive the rigors of interplanetary travel, but it seems that the validity of this argument is no longer so clear.
Richard Wagner explained the illnesses of Nietzsche by his habit of masturbation. It reflects on his writings. Nothing profound. Platitudes.
I’m assuming you’re British. The Brits like to give us about as much credit for winning WW1 as us Americans like to give the Russians for winning WW2. Fact of the matter is you can’t discount the additional 2 million troops. Under a commander superior to anyone the British or French had, I might add. But hey, whatever it takes to justify the war that cost you your empire.
But my vision is actually more optimistic than any of you people.
Yes, all plans to change things will fail –
because more attempts to control won’t help. As Reiner astutely observes, you can’t change things from within the paradigm.
But the situation will resolve itself – in the meantime, the purpose of life isn’t to try and control the world.
What’s to worry about?
I was making an oblique reference to the composer John Adams, who said that “We all learned in college that tonality died somewhere around the time that Nietzsche’s God died.”
By the way, given the way he died, Nietzsche would have done better to stick to masturbation.
Britain and France, not to mention Russia, were at the end of their tether in 1917. The entry of America was the decisive factor in their eventual victory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OgPEI2MHx0
It’s a very minor and natural mistake; I’ve made worse. But to the topic of your post I don’t think T. will drive away worthwhile female commenters. There are really quite nasty people on the internet, but he comes across rather as silly here. As I said before, often it’s easier to write silly fluff than something intelligent.
It’s actually far more likely, I think, that people will get vicious about Yaroslavl, though with some few exceptions they don’t seem to have so far, despite mild anti-Lettism.
A lot of them had incredibly good writing and plotting, well beyond the original intent of the shows as “advertising material for toys.”
LOL…pathetic time-wasting moronism. Amazed anybody could type that garbage with a straight face. Obviously the list of Russian heroes in science, engineering,military, music composition, music performance, performing arts, sport, literature and so on is amazing you cretin.
It is true that “Ukrainians” false claim numerous stars as their own, when they are clearly only heroes of the Russian world, not “Ukraine” you twat.
So Russian fairytales now claim that Ukrainians are claiming this? Interesting.
hmmmmm…..
https://twitter.com/poroshenko/status/958654727889281024?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fvz.ru%2Fnews%2F2018%2F1%2F31%2F906106.html
you obviously don’t know who Kibalchich is you sick sack of faeces, but in addition to him ( big role in the assasination of Alexander 2, no “Ukrainian” separatist element in his actions at all), the whole list of people are pretty much Russians you idiot that the drunkard thief President is claiming as “Ukrainian”
errr…yes they do you POS
That beautiful video from Rivne ( that exact same story broke out in Russia within a few weeks…because “surprise” Ukrainians and Russians are one people with the same mentality and culture…..is definitive proof that there is no such thing as the “Ukrainian” language you prick
hahahahahahahahaha! My genius was in pointing out the tendencies of Banderatard Ukrop freaks to worship sadists,loser criminals as Bandera and Shukheyevich as national “heroes” for this fake country….this is where Chikatilo fits perfectly you thick moron.
The whole “Ukrainian” national idea revolves around the fact that a sick scumbag as Chikatilo is a Ukrainian….father a victim of the repressions, grew up in in the non-Novorossiya,Galicia regions, grewup in area occupied by the Nazi’s for some time, area affected by the fake Golodomor….he is the archetype of “Ukraine” you prick
Your further cretinous argument about his academic prowess is absurdly moronic considering how well as a Marxist Solzhenitsyn did growing up, practically all the Ukrainian elite and many of the politicians who have assumed power in Poland,Slovakia and the Baltic state . There are only Russian/Soviet people you dipshit
The only one here “tardraging” is you, untermensch.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b0/02/4e/b0024ecffa372a4a1e1756159850fa3b.jpg
Have we reached peak Anatoly Karlin blog?
It is indeed.
Too bad you weren’t able to read my words. I’ll bold them for you, maybe you can understand them better: “If true (which it is not), speaks sadly of Russians, not having enough of their own stars.”
Sovok can’t read 🙂
LOL, Poroshenko mentioned a bunch of Ukrainians involved in the air and space programs and he was mentioned for this purpose, not due to his role in the assassination of Alexander II.
Kondratiuk was a Ukrainian guy from Volynia.
Sergei Korolev was the father of the Soviet space program. He had a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father and grew up in Ukraine. His parents separated when he was 3 and he never again saw his Russian father; he was raised mostly by his Ukrainian grandparents.
Korolev’s bio:
http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/koroleva-n/otets/koroleva-otets-t1-2007.pdf
Typical Ukrainian/Little Russian elite background, Cossack officer family from Khmelnytsky times, with some Polish szlachta descent also, and even some Greek ancestry.
You are really desperate to claim he was a Russian. Blacks claim Obama is a black, even though he was half-white and raised by his white grandparents, so you are not alone in such behaviors. But Obama at least emphasized being black and looks not-white.
We have already seen that through your methods there is no such thing as a Polish language either.
Here is the link to how you tried to stupidly prove that Ukrainian, Polish and Russian are the same language:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/netanyahu-was-in-moscow-so-what/#comment-2334356
You had previously written “Yushchenko though doing something useful for once and proving that Ukrainian can’t seriously be considered a language but merely a dialect of Russian”
Yushchenko’s speech:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-43611547/viktor-yushchenko-ukraine-s-ex-president-on-being-poisoned
First sentence:
Ukrainian (Yushchenko) – “Koly ya pishov do domu, potsiluvavsya z druzhynoyu*..”
Russian would be”Kogda ya paishol domoy, potseloval zhenu”
Polish would be “Kiedy poszedłem do domu, pocałowałem żonę”
Every single word in this phrase is the same in Polish as in Russian. It is merely pronounced differently.
By your “logic”, Polish must be a dialect of Russian too!
🙂
He is an eastern Ukrainian, born 30 km or so from the Russian border who was a young fanatic Communist and who ended up moving to Russia as soon as had the chance. Typical Sovok background. If he was a lot younger he might have volunteered to fight against Kiev forces in the Donbas, like that puppy-killing guy.
He’s the type of Ukrainian who is one of your people, in other words 🙂
You should go back to youtube, although you’re at the wrong end of the bell curve even for youtube commenters.
A sane view of Nietzsche.
Bad news: AP is a woman as well.
nah, just kidding.
Would or wouldn’t?
This is important information.
Brest-Litovsk was a pyrrhic victory for the Germans, who in practice received a huge territory they could not control, and had to keep troops to support Skoropadsky’s puppet regimeas this journalistic material published in 1918 shows:
In addition, Brest Litovsk favored the allied cause by demoralizing the idea that a negotiated peace with the Germans would be possible.
“Brest-Litovsk : the forgotten peace, March 1918”, by John W. Wheeler-Bennett, 1938, remains the best analysis of the unintended consequences of the ‘Pyrrhic Victory’.
Nope, AK’s blog will continue to achieve a wider readership.
The Puritans departed to what is now the USA, where they were quite successful.