Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - December 27, 2023


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

Topics
Blood on the Snow Russian Revolution de-kulakization press propaganda
Hosted by
Jack Posobiec
Mentioned
Vladimir Lenin Stalin Tsar Nicholas Petrograd Romanovs Antifa Kyle Rittenhouse Chiang Kai-shek Queen Victoria Walter Durante Pyotr Rangel Blake Neff John Birch Duma Prince Alexei Fat Rozenko Has Sent George Floyd Peter Stolle Carl Nichols Darren Beattie and 20 more
EPISODE 634： CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — THE FRENCH TERROR EPISODE 636： CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — THE LAST CRUSADE

Episode Stats


Length

48 minutes

Words per minute

178.72

Word count

8,680

Sentence count

637

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

27

sentences flagged

Hate speech

50

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Jack and Blake discuss one of the bloodiest revolutions in history, the Russian Revolution, and the impact it had on the rest of the world. They are joined by Jack's co-host, Blake Neff.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:25.060 Totally free.
00:00:25.780 The Poso Daily Brief.
00:00:30.000 This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
00:00:40.640 A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
00:00:46.960 This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
00:00:50.100 Deliver us from evil.
00:00:52.320 All right, Jack Posobiec, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's Human Events special,
00:00:56.820 Chronicles of the Revolution.
00:00:58.320 On today's installment, we are going to be covering possibly one of the bloodiest of these
00:01:03.720 revolutions.
00:01:04.540 Of course, they're all extremely bloody.
00:01:07.360 This one, perhaps one of the most personal.
00:01:10.480 Today's installment is titled Blood on the Snow, the Russian Revolution.
00:01:15.940 And we are joined once again by my thought crime co-host, Blake Neff.
00:01:20.200 How's it going, Blake?
00:01:21.540 Jack, good to see you.
00:01:23.060 Not a fun topic, though.
00:01:24.840 This is the big one.
00:01:26.100 This is this is the goriest one, probably, probably the most unfortunate in terms of its impact
00:01:32.480 on the wider world.
00:01:33.820 And I don't I don't think that'd be super controversial to say even.
00:01:37.320 Well, and this the Russian Revolution is something that I think is completely misunderstood.
00:01:42.060 I really all of these revolutions, I think, are greatly misunderstood by the West and in
00:01:47.780 particular, the conservative movement.
00:01:49.360 I mean, we kind of say, you know, oh, well, communism is bad, right?
00:01:52.880 Communism bad.
00:01:53.540 And we sort of understand that.
00:01:54.640 And we, you know, I think we all generally agree on that.
00:01:57.100 But I don't think people quite realize that the historic time period that we live in now,
00:02:04.320 in the West, in the 21st century, the early stage of the 21st century, is we always make
00:02:10.040 these these analogies to World War Two.
00:02:13.080 We say it's 1939, it's constantly 1939 in the conservative movement, when there's actually
00:02:18.680 something that is a little bit perhaps more applicable to our current moment and our current
00:02:25.780 circumstances.
00:02:26.360 And that might be 1917.
00:02:29.640 So, Blake, walk us through a little bit.
00:02:31.520 Just give us a little of the context of what led up to the Russian Revolution.
00:02:36.560 I think people know that's a little thing called World War One, but set the stage for
00:02:41.840 this communist coup.
00:02:44.280 You're getting in, you're biting off more than you can chew, Jack, because we're going
00:02:48.280 we're going way before World War One.
00:02:50.160 So, oh, boy, obviously, oh, boy.
00:02:52.780 Well, stop me if I go too far.
00:02:54.740 But so we've got the Russian Empire.
00:02:57.060 It's, you know, modern day Russia, even bigger than it is today. 0.98
00:03:00.740 It has all the territories the USSR would have. 0.54
00:03:04.280 So it has and even more than that, it has Ukraine.
00:03:07.480 It has Belarus.
00:03:08.700 It has most of modern day Poland or a lot of it.
00:03:11.980 It has Finland.
00:03:13.000 Finland was a part of the Russian Empire.
00:03:15.160 A huge state, massive number of people, massive geopolitical importance.
00:03:20.420 Yet it's it's the most reactionary regime in the world.
00:03:24.800 Not even controversial to say that it's still an absolute monarchy under the czar.
00:03:29.300 And it has up until the 1860s, it still has a widespread practice of serfdom.
00:03:34.660 And serfdom is not exactly slavery, but it's pretty close to it. 0.94
00:03:38.360 It is a system where common people lack most basic freedoms that we would take for granted.
00:03:45.060 And they lack like control over their own lives.
00:03:47.720 They can literally be bought and sold much like slaves were.
00:03:51.420 And the system only goes away in the 1860s.
00:03:54.600 But it's still this very reactionary, relatively oppressive government.
00:03:59.400 It's Russia was not a place where an ordinary person got much of a voice.
00:04:04.560 And they were not good.
00:04:05.540 By the way, don't by the way, don't bury the lead in terms of its its expanse at this point,
00:04:11.540 because this extends all the way throughout the eastern hemisphere and also includes a particular territory in the western hemisphere.
00:04:19.960 Yes.
00:04:20.340 At this point, doesn't it?
00:04:21.460 They only have Alaska.
00:04:23.360 They have Alaska.
00:04:24.280 All of Alaska was part of the Russian Empire at this point.
00:04:27.900 Yep.
00:04:28.200 Until about 1870 or so.
00:04:30.560 I know Seward.
00:04:31.460 Yeah.
00:04:31.700 Seward's fall.
00:04:32.380 It's post-Civil War.
00:04:33.420 Yeah.
00:04:33.840 Post-Civil War.
00:04:34.380 Just after the Civil War, we buy it off them for a couple million dollars.
00:04:37.980 But a good deal.
00:04:39.460 Good deal overall.
00:04:40.200 But just think about that, folks.
00:04:42.180 All the way from Finland and Poland, all the way across.
00:04:47.420 So you get to the Urals, and that's really where European Russia kind of ends.
00:04:52.840 And the Urals will come up later in this story, folks.
00:04:54.800 And then Siberia begins, and it goes all the way across to the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is essentially the neighbor of Japan, and Vladivostok, which abuts North Korea, and then includes all of Alaska all the way up to the Yukon.
00:05:15.800 This is how large this state is.
00:05:17.380 And think of how incomprehensibly huge this is.
00:05:19.720 You know, the railroad barely exists, certainly out in all these places.
00:05:23.260 There's no airplanes.
00:05:25.060 There's no satellite photography, so they even know exactly what they have.
00:05:29.000 It's just this truly massive expanse that's barely understood that they've become these masters of.
00:05:35.880 So it's this enormously powerful country.
00:05:38.400 And it's a country a lot of other people fear.
00:05:40.340 A major cause of World War I.
00:05:42.820 You know, a lot of people know the story of the Archduke gets shot, and there's all these alliances.
00:05:48.160 But sort of the big picture background to this that makes the war break out is that Russia is this huge country, a ton of people, and they're behind the ball compared to everyone, but they're finally industrializing.
00:05:59.460 They're getting these big cities.
00:06:00.540 They're building the factories that other countries have.
00:06:03.020 And Germany, which is hostile to them, has this realization where they just think Russia is going to be terrifyingly powerful.
00:06:11.180 It's a lot like how people talk about China in the U.S., maybe.
00:06:14.480 You know, this country that is just so huge that it's eventually going to be very strong.
00:06:18.740 And so in the U.S., you'll have war hawks who will sometimes say, you know, we should fight China before they're too strong.
00:06:23.780 And that was an attitude that existed towards Russia.
00:06:26.180 But Russia, it turns out, was a very fragile and a very weak system.
00:06:36.580 It has this superficially, this very autocratic monarchy where Tsar Nicholas II is, you know, the heir of this dynasty that goes back 300 years, has this enormous power, all this prestige.
00:06:50.360 And yet it's sort of rotten on the inside.
00:06:53.180 It's been this elite, it has this elite nobility that is very comfortable, very wealthy.
00:07:00.240 They used to have this sort of principle in Russia that being an elite member of the nobility required service to the state.
00:07:06.260 So you'd have to serve in the diplomatic corps or in the army.
00:07:09.440 And this had some meritocratic elements.
00:07:12.340 But by this point, even that was gone.
00:07:14.400 So you just had these very regressive nobles who did not do a lot to earn their status.
00:07:20.180 And this made it very easy for people to hate them.
00:07:23.200 And so Russia is also just not well run.
00:07:25.760 They still have famines far later.
00:07:28.100 After most of Europe has put those behind, Russia still has, you know, a bad harvest and 500,000 people will die.
00:07:34.460 And so this makes it very easy for people to dislike the regime.
00:07:37.340 And they're oppressive in other ways.
00:07:38.820 Russia has a very large share of the world's Jews at this time.
00:07:42.680 And they encourage anti-Semitic policies.
00:07:45.400 That's why that's, in fact, why so many Jews come to the United States is they're not leaving Poland or Germany.
00:07:50.840 They're fleeing Russia at this time because it's so unpleasant to be there.
00:07:54.740 Yeah, pogroms.
00:07:55.280 Yeah, that's I can't remember what language it's from, but it's probably a language in Russian.
00:07:58.840 And so they're fleeing all of these.
00:08:03.380 And this, again, is also like a lot of the world is very wary towards Russia.
00:08:06.700 So Russia in 1905 actually has their first pass at revolution.
00:08:10.760 They pick a fight with Japan over Manchuria. 0.98
00:08:14.220 And Japan, much to everyone's surprise, kind of kicks their butts. 1.00
00:08:18.780 Because Japan has just gone through the Meiji Restoration. 0.96
00:08:21.540 Yeah.
00:08:22.020 And Japan is rapidly industrialized before Russia.
00:08:25.340 Yeah, you know, yeah, they're this Asiatic country that people think, oh, you know, they're not European, they're not modern.
00:08:31.820 And they were closed off to the world all of 40 years ago.
00:08:35.340 And then this country just comes in and just beats the tar out of Russia really badly. 0.99
00:08:40.220 And this is so shocking that in Russia it causes a sort of abortive revolution, you know, kind of compared to like a George Floyd type thing where there's a lot of rioting.
00:08:50.160 People shoot at the rioters.
00:08:51.480 A lot of people die.
00:08:52.340 But it doesn't overthrow the government.
00:08:53.580 Instead, you get these concessions.
00:08:56.060 They agree to create the Duma, which is to this day now the Russian parliament is named that.
00:09:01.440 And you get some concessions.
00:09:04.000 And then they try for about a decade to get things under control.
00:09:08.260 And they're not doing well at it.
00:09:09.660 Like Russia is a very politically unhealthy country.
00:09:11.920 All these people get assassinated.
00:09:13.860 You know, the Minister of Interior is always getting shot at.
00:09:16.500 The Tsar gets assassinated in the 1890s.
00:09:19.100 That's before the revolution.
00:09:20.260 But that's the background.
00:09:20.980 Blown up, actually, right?
00:09:21.860 Blown up, blown up.
00:09:22.860 Sorry, Alexander.
00:09:23.700 Peter Stolipan is one of the last prime ministers of Russia before the revolution.
00:09:28.760 He gets assassinated.
00:09:30.080 It's a very violent country that's sort of bubbling.
00:09:33.260 But they probably would have held it together.
00:09:35.040 And then they get into World War I.
00:09:37.280 And this really exposes all the vulnerable.
00:09:40.100 And they throw out, in that Russia-Japanese war, that is the first time and really one of the only times that you see an Asian power defeating a European power.
00:09:50.400 Yeah, and it's kind of not even close.
00:09:54.120 They have a naval battle.
00:09:55.120 The Russian Baltic fleet sails all the way around the world.
00:09:59.060 It takes them, like, eight months to do it.
00:10:01.260 Maybe long.
00:10:01.760 Maybe even a year.
00:10:02.680 It takes them a very long time to do it.
00:10:04.540 And they finally arrive.
00:10:05.960 And they get blown to smithereens in a matter of minutes by the Japanese navy.
00:10:10.740 It's hugely humiliating.
00:10:11.980 And so they go into World War I.
00:10:16.180 And it just exposes all their problems all over again.
00:10:18.540 The Germans beat them really badly on the battlefield.
00:10:21.820 They take millions of losses.
00:10:24.400 It's hugely stressful on the home front.
00:10:26.980 And that's where the tragedy kicks in, is it empowers radical actors who would have been on the fringes, even, of the Russian sort of revolutionary society.
00:10:35.440 But they're able to rise.
00:10:37.000 And it sort of comes out of nowhere.
00:10:38.660 A funny joke is, in Britain, they have this 26-episode documentary about World War I.
00:10:45.000 And their episode on the Russian Revolution is titled, Fat Rozenko Has Sent Me Some Nonsense.
00:10:51.060 And that's the telegram that the Tsar gets, where they're saying, hey, there's riots in St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, they called it then, because St. Petersburg was a German name.
00:11:00.120 So they changed it.
00:11:01.380 So Petrograd, they're having these riots.
00:11:03.200 There's workers in the streets.
00:11:04.300 The soldiers are joining them.
00:11:05.620 And so this guy in the government says, hey, Tsar, they're overthrowing the government.
00:11:10.120 There's a revolution.
00:11:11.060 And it's, like, unthinkable to them that this would be happening.
00:11:14.360 And yet, in a matter of days, the Tsar realizes it's all over.
00:11:18.520 He abdicates.
00:11:19.860 He tries to pass it off to his brother.
00:11:23.260 His brother says, no, this situation's too far gone.
00:11:26.180 He rejects it.
00:11:26.820 And it's almost like, in the span of a week, monarchy in Russia just vanishes.
00:11:32.020 And this is where things get really upsetting.
00:11:34.240 And by the way, actually, one key point of that, you mentioned the British, but at this time in World War I, and of course people know this, but, you know, just for those who don't, that all of the, really, the ruling families of Europe at this point are interrelated.
00:11:49.080 And there have been weddings where they've all gone together, and so Tsar Nicholas, so the Romanovs, of course, are the ruling family of Russia, Tsar Nicholas even makes an impassioned plea to his cousin, who is the king of England at this point, asking for the British to send some kind of relief to them so that he can flee.
00:12:08.420 And the British actually say no.
00:12:10.860 They refuse to allow this.
00:12:13.460 He says, no, I'm not going to get your family out.
00:12:15.200 We're not going to get involved.
00:12:15.860 You can look this up.
00:12:16.560 They look almost identical.
00:12:18.900 They're almost identical.
00:12:21.000 So I believe they're, off the top of my head, I believe they share their grandmother as Queen Victoria.
00:12:26.200 Yeah, Queen Victoria was the grandmother of them, and I believe of Kaiser Wilhelm.
00:12:31.960 Yeah.
00:12:33.180 Yeah, she's the grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm or the aunt, Antus of Wilhelm.
00:12:38.620 I believe she's also the grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm.
00:12:40.740 I want to say she was the grandmother of three of the monarchs in World War I, and it was those three.
00:12:45.580 Right.
00:12:45.760 And specifically, those two look almost identical.
00:12:50.260 We'll put it in post, the photo that we're talking about, where they just look almost identical.
00:12:55.280 And it was one of the earliest photos, of course, is of the Tsar and the King.
00:12:57.980 But he refused to send them out.
00:12:59.540 And now the Germans, right, so Russia's up against the ropes, and they've taken the brunt of it in World War I, the way they took the brunt of it in World War II.
00:13:06.660 And they're really up against the ropes, these, as you say, their failure to industrialize early on plays a huge role in this, where, of course, the Germans, you know, as industrious as ever, are slamming them. 0.90
00:13:19.640 And to mention something, though, that people have heard of, another reason they have so little credibility.
00:13:26.600 This is the famous Rasputin, the Russian mystic from the countryside.
00:13:32.040 He's the...
00:13:32.480 I thought he was just the guy from the disco song.
00:13:34.800 Yeah, he is also the guy from the disco song.
00:13:36.880 Probably not the lover of the Russian queen, but what matters is a lot of people thought he was the lover of the Russian queen.
00:13:43.120 And so that...
00:13:44.540 Right, so he's a sort of mystic who's deep in the Romanov fort.
00:13:46.780 Almost like a Vedic, you know...
00:13:49.020 Yeah, he's doing these...
00:13:50.620 The Tsarina... 0.84
00:13:51.880 The Tsarina trusts him because she thinks he can cure their son's hemophilia.
00:13:57.520 And so you have this weird, smelly, country mystic guy who's hanging around the royal palace, and people think he controls the government.
00:14:04.140 And to a substantial degree, he does. 0.81
00:14:06.320 He has a lot of influence over it.
00:14:08.420 And it's things like this that make it possible for monarchies to get overthrown.
00:14:12.760 When everything's nice, it doesn't happen.
00:14:15.400 When there's a war, and it seems like a crazy man is running things.
00:14:19.500 So this is also when, and of course, and it has been said many times, that Vladimir Lenin, who had been living in exile after the previous revolution, failed revolution, he had been in Switzerland at the time.
00:14:31.220 And it's actually the German high command that plays a role in putting him and the Bolsheviks on a train car, essentially, and getting them back to, and I think at the time it was still Petrograd.
00:14:44.020 But getting them to Petrograd, where he basically launches in 1917, what becomes the Russian revolution.
00:14:51.080 Exactly. So after the Tsar leaves, there's what's called the provisional government, and they promise all the things that early revolutions promise.
00:15:00.900 You know, we're going to have democratic elections, and we're going to have a constituent assembly that will set a constitution for Russia.
00:15:06.980 They make a lot of fine declarations, but there's all these strains of radicalism within the government.
00:15:13.140 And one of the things that happens as part of the overthrowing the Tsar is they create a thing, they create these things called Soviets.
00:15:19.560 And Soviet basically means council, and they're sort of like ad hoc unions in various organizations.
00:15:27.180 So you could have a Soviet in a factory, a worker's Soviet. 0.92
00:15:30.260 You could have a Soviet within an armed force, within a military unit, like a soldier's Soviet.
00:15:36.900 And these exist, and they're distinct from things like the Duma or the provisional government that's been created.
00:15:44.840 And what Lenin does that makes him kind of a genius, to be honest, he's very radical.
00:15:49.780 He's on the most radical fringe of the radical, you know, revolutionary party in Russia.
00:15:55.460 I think it's the Russian Social Democrat Party, and the Bolsheviks that he's a part of are a faction of this.
00:16:01.240 He shows up, gets off the train, and he has a simple platform.
00:16:04.180 He says, all power to the Soviets.
00:16:07.020 And then he says that he's going, he demands that land, he demands an end to the war with Germany, and he demands land for the peasantry.
00:16:17.460 And it's like a very simple platform that really appeals to people.
00:16:20.600 The Russian peasantry, the vast majority of the country at this point, they've always wanted the land.
00:16:25.800 This is one of the fatal flaws they did, is they emancipated the serfs, but they still allowed the landholders to hold the vast majority of land in Russia. 0.66
00:16:34.300 And they had a sort of long-term plan to change this, but they didn't, they basically didn't complete it in time.
00:16:40.080 And so you have all these Russian peasants who want land. 0.99
00:16:42.200 And, of course, the war is unpopular, and the provisional government is promising to keep fighting the war to try to get support from the allies, whereas Lenin says, I'm going to end the war.
00:16:53.620 And then he just says, all power to the Soviets.
00:16:55.600 And it's the sort of three planks of this platform that make them so powerful, because even though we know their ultimate plan is we're going to confiscate all the land and have a horrible collectivist government, it's an incredibly appealing thing to ordinary Russians. 0.95
00:17:11.040 And so just like you had in France, as we discussed the other day, in France, you had this mass outburst of violence in the countryside sort of unleashed by the revolutionary fervor.
00:17:21.200 The Bolsheviks enabled this. 0.99
00:17:22.600 There's a huge amount of violence across the Russian countryside as essentially peasants hear the sky saying, give them land.
00:17:29.740 And they decide to take the land.
00:17:31.600 And so it turns into Lenin not just saying, we'll give you land, but also saying, we'll let you keep what you've taken after you've murdered this aristocrat.
00:17:39.000 And so there's just this conflict.
00:17:41.800 And so to just throw in there that, you know, you also have another parallel to the French Revolution in that you sort of have this initial government that gets set up that's somewhat moderate, but doesn't really have total control.
00:17:55.460 And so the Russian Revolution, people understand this when you study it, it's actually two revolutions in one.
00:18:00.360 There's one that's brief and then one that goes much longer.
00:18:04.160 So the moderates, that's called the French Revolution, or excuse me, of course, that's called the February Revolution.
00:18:10.640 And the February Revolution.
00:18:11.460 And as the name suggests, as the name suggests, it took place in March.
00:18:15.680 Took place in March, right.
00:18:16.840 And this is because, which, by the way, same as the October Revolution, which takes place in November.
00:18:20.500 Which took place in November.
00:18:21.480 Of course, these dates are based off of the Julian calendar as opposed to using the-
00:18:31.180 That's kind of how backwards the Russian government was.
00:18:34.640 They were still using the Julian calendar.
00:18:35.680 Which here, at this point, they're still using the Julian calendar.
00:18:39.020 And this is the 1900s.
00:18:40.080 The Gregorian calendar was a popish plot.
00:18:42.440 They're not going to follow along with this popish plot.
00:18:44.620 Of course, of course, as a proud papist, I will confirm.
00:18:50.980 But so, right, you have this initial provisional government.
00:18:53.940 And the provisional government does, when Tsar Nicholas abdicates, they do arrest him.
00:19:01.720 So I want people to understand that when I say they're moderate, I just mean they're more moderate than the Bolsheviks, right? 0.91
00:19:07.440 So they still, you have the Mensheviks and you have others, but then it's October, right? 0.57
00:19:12.880 And the October Revolution, where things turn extremely violent.
00:19:17.420 It is.
00:19:17.700 And it's one of those things you feel really sad reading about, I will say, because it-
00:19:22.500 Yeah.
00:19:23.340 It's the Bolshevik Revolution is one of those events where it was almost certainly, this is like a one, there's not a 1% chance of happening.
00:19:31.480 And it happened to hit because they needed to get so lucky.
00:19:34.820 The Bolsheviks are a tiny faction.
00:19:37.220 If anyone other than Lenin was leading them, they almost certainly lose, because Lenin is a true political genius, it has to be admitted.
00:19:45.040 And Lenin talks this tiny Bolshevik cabal into saying, we should take over the Winter Palace.
00:19:50.560 That's where the government is headquartered in Petrograd.
00:19:53.540 And they basically just do it overnight.
00:19:55.400 They storm the Winter Palace and they take over this little organ of government.
00:19:58.640 And, again, it's like the French Revolution, where anything that happened in Paris was just massively more important.
00:20:06.740 They take over in St. Petersburg or Petrograd, and they have enough of these Soviets in the area who support them that they keep hold of Petrograd. 0.82
00:20:14.840 And for a huge amount of the country, it's like, well, okay, Petrograd's in control of these new guys, so now they're the ones in charge.
00:20:23.640 And they almost sort of like very – it's surprising how easy it is for them to suddenly take control of this larger revolutionary mass.
00:20:31.820 And then, even then, this is the sort of thing that could have easily been stopped by the Germans. 0.98
00:20:36.900 It could have easily been stopped by the Allies, especially once World War I ends a year into this.
00:20:41.460 You just send, like, 100,000 men into this completely chaotic country, and you just sort of snip its head off. 0.79
00:20:47.960 But it never happens.
00:20:49.120 And instead, they're just able to get more and more momentum.
00:20:51.740 They get a huge amount of peasant support because they say, we'll give you this land.
00:20:56.240 And the peasants want land, so they get on board with it.
00:20:58.520 And there's also a lot of fatalism.
00:21:01.960 You have Russian conservatives.
00:21:04.180 There's one –
00:21:04.860 Well, they are Russians to begin with. 0.99
00:21:06.500 Yeah.
00:21:06.960 Well, there's one, General Brusilov.
00:21:08.500 He is the most successful Russian general in World War I.
00:21:11.260 He wins this huge victory over the Austrians. 0.87
00:21:13.420 Conservative, devout Orthodox Christian.
00:21:17.300 And as the Reds gain momentum, he just thinks, well, they're the ones who are in charge.
00:21:22.540 I'm a Russian patriot, so if they're running Russia, I will support Russia.
00:21:26.260 And he does that fatal mistake so many people do with radical revolutionary regimes. 0.92
00:21:30.980 He thinks there's no way they can last that long because they're so crazy.
00:21:35.960 So he thinks the Reds will have to chill out or they'll be replaced by someone more moderate.
00:21:40.900 And then Russia will – you know, we won't bring the Tsar back, but we'll be a normal country. 0.74
00:21:45.240 And so he helps them.
00:21:46.020 He allies with them to fight enemies of the revolution.
00:21:48.700 And, you know, they don't shoot him later, but he does basically die in isolated disrepute because that is, in fact, not what happens.
00:21:58.280 They are able to win the civil war.
00:22:00.540 The different enemies of the revolutionary government could have probably pulled it off, but they couldn't collaborate very well.
00:22:07.900 They didn't have enough support from abroad.
00:22:09.840 And a lot of them just didn't care for each other.
00:22:12.640 They had competing agendas.
00:22:14.560 One of the fantastic books that gets through this where it shows how Lenin pitted those people against each other all the while while he was making these sort of provisional agreements with external actors or various forces around the –
00:22:29.840 because remember, as you say, the empire is sort of falling apart at this point, and he's basically going to, you know, the Kazakh nationalists and saying, oh, we'll work with you and we'll put you in power.
00:22:39.840 And he goes – he's going around to all these different disparate areas.
00:22:42.940 And so they all pledge support to the Bolsheviks. 0.64
00:22:47.780 And then you do – but the great book that I want to point out is Always With Honor, the memoirs of Pyotr Rangel.
00:22:54.420 And he became this – he was a sort of a junior general, a junior in terms of not leading the remnant of the imperial army or the – or I guess I would say the army that remained loyal to the czar.
00:23:08.740 And the leader originally was General Denekin, Rangel, a Baltic German, huge guy, like 6'5", just enormous figure, true natural-born leader, remains loyal, and then actually does very late in the civil war begin consolidating some of those forces and just says instead of calling ourselves like the anti-Bolshevik, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we're just going to call ourselves the Russian army.
00:23:34.580 And so the Russian army and people start joining it, he does institute – so they have southern Russia and Crimea at this point.
00:23:40.600 He does institute the land reform.
00:23:42.580 But at this point, as you say, the Bolsheviks, they've just been going through and systematically wiping out any opposition, slaughtering prisoners, POWs, priests, nuns, again, just like in the French Revolution, anyone who's an intellectual who stands against them. 0.57
00:23:59.560 And I actually wanted to mention, though, to get into the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, for about the first year, year and change, are still alive.
00:24:09.040 And they become sort of a – sort of almost like a MacGuffin in the sense that it's the whites, the Russian army, are always trying to save the Romanovs. 0.68
00:24:18.900 So they're always being – you know, planning out their campaigns towards where the Romanovs are. 1.00
00:24:22.980 So at first, that is St. Petersburg.
00:24:25.580 And so – and at one point, the whites actually do get pretty close to St. Petersburg.
00:24:30.020 And there's this huge argument, you know, should we go to St. Petersburg?
00:24:32.780 Should we go to Moscow?
00:24:34.160 And they say, well, because the Romanovs are in St. Petersburg, that's why the army marches towards there.
00:24:40.160 And originally, they had been kept – they had been – you know, the Romanovs had been kept pretty safe throughout all this time.
00:24:46.140 But because the whites, because the Russian army, the Imperials are getting close, that's when they throw them on the train out to the Urals. 0.94
00:24:53.560 And that's why they exile – you know, take them all the way away, still in captivity, to a place called Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, all the way – basically bordering Siberia.
00:25:05.180 And it is there where they're taken and put in this building called the House of Special Purpose.
00:25:12.020 Yeah, and the Special Purpose is not very good.
00:25:15.780 And that is what ends up happening is another group of Russian whites gets – within about a day or two of where they're being held, and they just decide, yeah, this is too much of a problem. 0.99
00:25:27.940 And so they shoot the whole family.
00:25:30.180 And that's – I think that's a very important aspect of the Russian Revolution to highlight is it really is monstrously violent in a way that few revolutions are.
00:25:40.900 And, you know, we mentioned in yesterday's episode, you know, how mendacity is this core aspect of Marxism.
00:25:47.120 And it's really the Russian Revolution where that stands out, that these are, at heart, very bad and vicious people. 0.74
00:25:55.160 So, you know, they don't just shoot the czar and his wife. 0.98
00:25:57.920 They shoot all of his kids.
00:26:00.120 I think they had – what was it?
00:26:01.100 I actually pulled the – so I pulled before the episode, did some research, pulled the names and the ages.
00:26:07.200 So, Czar Nicholas at this time, he's only 49.
00:26:10.880 And the Tsarina, Alexandra, she's 47.
00:26:14.420 The oldest daughter is Princess Olga.
00:26:17.000 She is 22.
00:26:18.960 Then there's – and then there's – so there's four daughters, right?
00:26:21.640 Everyone knows the four daughters. 1.00
00:26:23.080 Then there's Princess Tatiana, 21.
00:26:25.220 Princess Maria, 18.
00:26:27.220 Princess Anastasia, 17.
00:26:29.540 And Prince Alexi, who is 13.
00:26:31.820 And as you mentioned before, he's quite sickly.
00:26:33.740 And Princess Anastasia, of course, we know there's a lot of popular culture surrounding her.
00:26:41.140 And for a long time, there was this popular theory that she may have secretly escaped.
00:26:47.320 But 80 years later, after the murders, when the government of Russia finally started – the new government of Russia finally started examining this and exhuming the site, they did actually find the bones of the family, including the bones of the children.
00:27:03.940 They were able to use DNA analysis because it was now available.
00:27:06.760 And they did confirm that all five children were there.
00:27:10.620 And the story that you – that people hear about this, it's actually quite horrific.
00:27:18.300 So the family is being kept in this house of special purpose.
00:27:22.460 And again, they're prisoners.
00:27:23.940 They've not done anything at this point.
00:27:25.940 But they serve as that sort of symbol of what could be the restoration of Russia, what could be the restoration of the empire.
00:27:34.600 And so to the Bolsheviks, they play this role of considering a threat because they're creating a massive motivation for the white forces, for the imperial army, the imperial remnant, to save them. 0.74
00:27:47.160 And then potentially something that could rally the people towards them.
00:27:50.860 And for folks to understand, they are a Christian dynasty.
00:27:54.260 So when they take them down to this basement bunker, they tell them to get dressed.
00:28:01.940 And it's said that when they first opened fire that the czar and his wife – the last thing they did was actually make the sign of the cross.
00:28:10.580 And that it said that they weren't even able to finish making the sign of the cross before the bullets struck them, according to some accounts.
00:28:18.340 But because the guns they were using were particularly smoky and this bunker was so small, there was so much gun smoke in the area that they couldn't tell what was going on.
00:28:27.580 And so the Bolshevik murderers say, cease fire.
00:28:31.960 And when they do cease fire, they realize that only the adults – and there's some retainers and other adults that are there as well.
00:28:38.640 It's not just the family members.
00:28:39.680 All the adults are killed, but the children are all still alive, including Prince Alexei, because he had been sitting down because I'd said, again, he was sickly.
00:28:47.220 Then the Bolsheviks give the order – after the smoke dissipates and they realize the kids are all still alive, they give the order, fix bayonets. 0.92
00:28:57.500 And so they charge them with the bayonets on the rifles to all the princesses and to little Prince Alexei.
00:29:04.740 But – so they kill Prince Alexei very quickly.
00:29:08.120 And then with the girls, though, because their gowns have those sequins and the diamonds on them – so these are the crown jewels of Russia –
00:29:16.220 they actually can't pierce the dresses because they're protected by these essentially diamonds. 0.98
00:29:23.680 And then at that point, they order them to pull their side pieces out, the Bolsheviks, draw their side pieces, and just walk up to all the children and shoot them in the head. 0.85
00:29:35.880 So this is sort of the foundational moment. 0.95
00:29:39.200 It took them 20 minutes to do this. 0.74
00:29:40.280 It took them 20 minutes to kill this helpless family.
00:29:41.320 Sort of the foundational moment of the USSR. 0.71
00:29:43.380 Of just brutally slaughtering an innocent family.
00:29:48.300 It's like this throughout.
00:29:49.720 Or at least a defenseless family.
00:29:51.960 Some of this is also – it's like the inheritance of being in Russia. 0.92
00:29:55.940 So Russia has this massive secret police operation as the Tsar when it's still an empire.
00:30:03.000 And what the Bolsheviks do is they kind of just roll in and take it over. 0.95
00:30:06.420 They replace the people at top with their own guys, and they go back to the same old methods, and they just make them a lot more lethal.
00:30:14.500 And what's terrifying with the Bolshevik revolution is relative to pretty much any other revolution I know of is they're very ruthlessly efficient about killing people that they mark as a threat.
00:30:26.300 And this becomes a defining feature of the Soviet regime for basically 30 years.
00:30:33.400 You know, they kill a ton of landowners.
00:30:35.680 They kill a ton of priests.
00:30:37.340 Stalin does it, but, you know, it didn't start with Stalin either. 0.65
00:30:40.940 Correct.
00:30:41.340 So early on, they try all these radical ideas.
00:30:45.780 The Cheka, the Troika, the NKVD. 0.78
00:30:48.500 It culminates in the KGB. 0.76
00:30:49.560 Yeah, they change all these different –
00:30:50.720 There are many organizations prior to this.
00:30:53.380 Stop buzzing in my ear about the boring people at your office.
00:30:57.080 I'm trying to listen to the new human events with Jack Pozovic.
00:31:02.560 Yeah, NKVD, you know, it's just anytime they roll in anywhere, the number of people who die is enormous.
00:31:09.060 In World War II, Soviet Union notably splits Poland with Germany, and the NKVD rolls in, and they arrest a ton of officers in the Polish army.
00:31:20.140 They also take some priests, other intellectuals, and they deport them.
00:31:25.080 They send a ton of them to Siberia.
00:31:26.700 They take about 20,000 of them to the Moscow area, and then they just decide after about six months, it's too dangerous having these guys around, and they just shoot all of them, and they never speak of it again.
00:31:38.700 It's actually a forest called Katyn, the Katyn Massacre.
00:31:42.400 And actually, it's the Germans. 0.79
00:31:44.640 It's the Germans who find this. 0.99
00:31:47.380 And the Germans put out the word, and the Allies say, oh, well, that's just Nazi propaganda.
00:31:52.820 And for years, it was considered that the Germans did that.
00:31:56.560 And, you know, and for decades, it was sort of the position of the Soviet Union was it didn't happen, and if it did happen, the Germans did it.
00:32:03.420 Yet, as the history book I just read pointed out, it was sort of the only Nazi crime the Soviet Union would not talk about too much, so everyone could read between the lines.
00:32:11.840 And this is just how they are really from the start.
00:32:16.960 It's a very vicious ideology. 1.00
00:32:19.940 It's also very dumb. 1.00
00:32:21.120 Bolshevism is just very stupid at its outset. 1.00
00:32:23.720 They briefly try abolishing money. 1.00
00:32:26.180 They try all these, like, very strange communist wackadoodle ideas.
00:32:29.780 And then things are going bad enough that, as an emergency measure, they implement what's called the new economic policy.
00:32:36.200 And spoilers, the new economic policy is called capitalism.
00:32:39.820 And they just, as a temporary measure, allow capitalism to happen.
00:32:44.800 And incredibly enough, it works.
00:32:47.380 Then, oh, the food system fixes itself, and goods start to appear again.
00:32:52.000 The economy starts to function.
00:32:53.900 And then a few people get rich doing this.
00:32:56.440 They're called the NEP men.
00:32:57.380 And then Lenin dies.
00:32:59.060 You have Stalin gradually accumulates power within the party.
00:33:02.580 But, you know, one of the things he pushes through is called de-kulakization. 0.99
00:33:06.260 And what was a kulak? 0.99
00:33:08.660 Originally, in Russian, it means fists.
00:33:11.460 And it used to mean this sort of disreputable middleman in the Russian village.
00:33:16.280 And they repurpose it.
00:33:18.080 So it's important to understand that facet of it, is that they were taking a word that already existed
00:33:23.360 and redefining it to apply to a much greater number of people.
00:33:28.320 And they essentially made it so it applied to any successful peasant, any peasant who, like, owned a mill or some sort of production facet.
00:33:36.760 And eventually, it just applied to anyone who also defended these people.
00:33:41.420 And you get this revolutionary campaign in Russia called de-kulakization. 0.51
00:33:45.780 And the bluntest way to describe this is kill everyone who is more successful than you and you're resentful of it.
00:33:53.580 And these are not, you know, old-hand people who are – these are not old aristocrats. 0.96
00:33:58.620 The aristocrats are dead or fled.
00:34:01.260 These are just peasants who had it slightly more put together.
00:34:05.060 You know, the equivalent in America would be small businessmen.
00:34:08.840 It would be the sort of person –
00:34:10.360 Small business owners, yeah.
00:34:10.800 Small business owners.
00:34:11.900 You know, the guy who owns a car dealership.
00:34:13.960 The guy who owns, you know, a successful restaurant.
00:34:16.660 The guy who owns five McDonald's franchises in your local metropolitan area.
00:34:21.160 Wait, wait, wait. So you're talking about the specific exact same people that Antifa and BLM targeted throughout 2020?
00:34:29.340 Exactly, exactly.
00:34:30.700 Like the exact target.
00:34:31.300 It's kind of funny how that works, isn't it?
00:34:33.060 I wrote an article. I'm going to shamelessly show myself here.
00:34:36.220 I wrote an article for Darren Beatty's Revolver News a couple of years ago.
00:34:39.620 It didn't have my name on it at the time, but spoilers, I read it.
00:34:42.680 And it was like, are you –
00:34:43.640 Self-docs, self-docs, folks.
00:34:45.800 Are you ready to be an American kulak? 0.93
00:34:47.960 And the comparison is really jarring.
00:34:51.300 You'll get these essays that the left will write where they'll say, yeah, guys, you know, we say the problem is these billionaires like Donald Trump.
00:35:00.900 But really the regressive force in America is – they call them the American gentry. 0.98
00:35:06.200 And it's just what you'd say is ordinary rich people or well – upper middle class people who are not in big cities.
00:35:13.660 So it's your local successful residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, of Meridian, Idaho, of Platt, Nebraska.
00:35:23.180 It's normal people who have not concentrated in the – in these blue cities.
00:35:28.220 It's not even your upper class.
00:35:30.520 It's your – it's not even your elites.
00:35:32.080 It's just your upper middle class.
00:35:34.320 So anyone who's got that sort of like –
00:35:36.120 People who are financially well-off – it's financially well-off but not remotely near the nerve centers of power.
00:35:42.900 They are fundamentally – because these people are fundamentally conservative.
00:35:46.020 People who are – who own their own businesses, who are not closely tethered to, you know, some central political regime, they're fundamentally conservative people.
00:35:55.820 They have a good amount but they also have a lot they can lose.
00:35:59.340 They benefit from the existing system and they don't see a lot of reasons to radically change it and they're not on board with like weird ideological projects.
00:36:08.440 And these people are always marked as enemies of a radical revolutionary regime.
00:36:13.740 And so in Russia, things were crazy enough that they would just round up and shoot these people and then collectivize their agriculture. 0.72
00:36:21.300 And if you want to know how well that went, you know, ask someone in Ukraine.
00:36:24.820 It doesn't go great.
00:36:26.380 That's what they call them more.
00:36:27.600 Yes, yeah, you know, a terror famine in Ukraine. 0.58
00:36:31.320 But this is what's really horrifying with, you know, the Russian Revolution is it was, for all of its violence, it was enormously successful at totally remaking Russian society.
00:36:42.760 When you think of what defines Russians today, it's very different from what defined Russians stereotypically, you know, before the revolution.
00:36:52.300 There is that authoritarian strand throughout it.
00:36:54.680 But, you know, if you look at a poll, Russians are far more likely to take this very cynical view of morality.
00:37:01.220 They're not idealistic at all.
00:37:03.160 They're very, even, even like religious Russians, it's almost like it doesn't always take with them their attitudes on what's right or wrong. 0.97
00:37:10.780 And it's a lot of this is just that the Soviets messed them up in the head so much. 0.97
00:37:15.700 And they created these very sinister systems.
00:37:18.380 So rather than just entirely destroy the Orthodox Church, they would do things like they would just appoint KGB assets to be the heads of the Orthodox Church. 0.52
00:37:27.380 And, you know, OK, you guys have confession as a sacrament.
00:37:31.360 Make sure whatever gets confessed, you know, gets folded over to the KGB's files.
00:37:35.900 And I don't think I need to belabor at length the sort of psychological impact this has on people to have institutions that are designed to deceive you and trick you and take something that, you know, whatever its merits in the past is now used against you in a very ruthless way.
00:37:55.580 They have this whole system of everyone informing on everyone else.
00:37:59.520 That's that's really what defines the great terror.
00:38:01.980 It's not that they just shoot everyone at random.
00:38:03.960 They create a situation where you get denounced and it's very easy for anyone who gets denounced to be killed very quickly.
00:38:11.640 And the scale of this is enormous.
00:38:13.820 Stalin, probably in the kind of terror before World War Two in the 30s, he I want to say the estimates are he shoots about two million members of the party just outright.
00:38:24.040 They just get purged for some ideological offense or just because the NKVD had to hit a quota of state enemies and defenders of socialism or communism will always say this is just Stalin being Stalin and that's not an indictment of communism.
00:38:41.360 But it's just not true.
00:38:43.940 You know, I brought a book last time.
00:38:45.880 I brought a couple of books this time if anyone wants to read more.
00:38:48.900 This one is A People's Tragedy by Orlando Fijas.
00:38:52.220 And another good one is Russia under the Bolshevik regime by Richard Pipes.
00:38:59.000 And a key thing is the Stalin is very violent and he kills a lot of people for being suspected enemies.
00:39:07.260 But he didn't invent the concept.
00:39:09.300 They did this during the revolution.
00:39:11.380 They did it under Lenin.
00:39:13.180 There's a lot of really bloodthirsty killers.
00:39:16.440 The head of the Cheka is a super violent guy. 0.93
00:39:18.760 Trotsky is a super violent guy who supports shooting people. 0.83
00:39:22.220 And there's a ton of these people. 0.63
00:39:24.120 And these are the sorts of people who really revolutionary ideologies appeal to radicals who hate everyone.
00:39:30.900 This would be like if, you know, and we use Antifa as kind of a punchline now.
00:39:38.420 And, of course, the original Antifa, by the way, was set up by the people we're talking about now.
00:39:43.820 So you can't say they're like Antifa.
00:39:45.620 No, they created Antifa.
00:39:47.100 Antifa, the original one, of course, was in Germany in the 1930s as the street fighting unit of the Communist Party of Germany, of Deutschland.
00:39:54.640 But, you know, it would be like if you took the most violent, you know, communist Reddit page and the people who say those just completely insane, unhinged screeds about how they want to wipe out all the class enemies.
00:40:10.880 Or these days, of course, they would say the race enemies and the gender enemies and, you know, certainly me and Blake and pretty much everybody else on on any of our programs.
00:40:22.040 But if you took those complete nut jobs and put them in charge of one of the most powerful countries in the entire world, certainly one of the most powerful state apparatuses in the world.
00:40:31.760 And they tried, of course, to export this around the world.
00:40:34.080 This is where you get the the common turn, the communist international.
00:40:37.400 But, Blake, and just as we close out here, we have a couple of minutes.
00:40:40.900 Talk to us a little bit about how at so many points this just could have been stopped if someone had just come in and and crushed them.
00:40:49.880 And yet you had this idea that, number one, that it won't last very long.
00:40:54.560 It'll collapse on its own. 0.96
00:40:56.380 It's better for us to just call out their hypocrisy.
00:41:00.000 It's better for us to just point out the double standards of them and how so many people.
00:41:06.420 And there's this line in Always with Honor where he says social life continued on its usual course as if the people involved in the sort of the social scene he's describing in St. Petersburg
00:41:18.380 would not become victims of the horror soon to befall them.
00:41:30.060 You know, when the Reds first take over Petrograd, they control, you know, a couple cities.
00:41:36.060 And it's the sort of thing that could get squished.
00:41:38.180 But, you know, when it's weak, it looks weak so you don't need to do anything.
00:41:41.880 And no one ever is really just willing to take the extra step of, oh, this is actually a huge problem that these people are so radical and them controlling this huge country would be a big deal.
00:41:53.560 And obviously World War I plays a role here.
00:41:57.700 If this if the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia out of the blue, like if 1905 had turned into this type of revolution,
00:42:04.800 I think beyond all doubt other countries would have intervened to stop it.
00:42:09.300 They would have seen how terrible it was.
00:42:11.120 But World War I, it just happened.
00:42:13.500 Everyone's very exhausted.
00:42:15.280 You know, 15 million people or however many are dead.
00:42:17.720 And it's very it's very hard sell in the West to say, oh, let's send even 100,000 men to Russia to just stop this.
00:42:26.300 It's just not popular.
00:42:27.520 Well, of course, this plays into this plays into, as we talked last year when we did the China files, this is very similar because just, you know, about 30 years later after and the Chinese model very, very much follows.
00:42:38.800 So obviously Communist China became the Soviet Union's most successful export in terms of exporting the ideology of communism because World War II ends.
00:42:47.720 The Maoists could have been stopped.
00:42:49.080 World War II ends.
00:42:49.900 You have all these people that are sitting in, you know, in in China.
00:42:56.580 John Birch, by the way, the actual John Birch, being one of them, a military officer, saying, look, you know, just provide some more some more weapons to these to these nationalists in Chiang Kai-shek.
00:43:07.380 And you can you can put them out of business.
00:43:09.020 You can completely destroy these communists.
00:43:11.920 And it just never happens. 0.68
00:43:14.240 Yeah.
00:43:14.340 The last thing I would want to highlight is how throughout this, the Bolsheviks always benefited from just the most rigged, lying press support of all time. 0.86
00:43:25.620 Yes.
00:43:26.300 They always have the press in the West, especially in Britain.
00:43:29.780 They always have government operators simping for them.
00:43:32.420 So they'll always, you know, I would say, you know, the czar probably I don't know if I want to say he deserved to get murdered, but he did not earn his hold on power.
00:43:41.760 But everything after that, you'll read like.
00:43:45.700 So in the 30s, Stalin's doing terror famines and shooting all these people.
00:43:49.400 And so The New York Times sends Walter Durante to Russia to say, oh, it's all above board.
00:43:55.320 The British Walter Durante, who later goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the establishment of the Soviet Union.
00:44:05.660 And so people are always covering for them.
00:44:08.940 And this just continues for decades.
00:44:10.740 So during World War Two, you have the press repeating the Soviet narrative on everything about why they had to invade Poland, why they had to invade Finland, why they had to absorb all these countries, why all these people missing is totally OK. 0.95
00:44:23.300 And then continuing after it, there's another book.
00:44:26.900 I can't remember the author, but the book's title is Stalin's War.
00:44:29.880 And it just points out that the reputation in the West of Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Chinese nationalists, is that he was so incredibly corrupt, so bad.
00:44:39.540 You know, he anyone else might have been able to win the Civil War, but this guy was just so bad.
00:44:43.280 So it made sense that the communists would win.
00:44:45.740 And the reality is just that that's the Soviet propaganda against him.
00:44:49.820 Maybe there was some corruption, but it's not like he's super exceptional in this regard.
00:44:55.900 Yeah, because Chairman Mao is such a shining example of incorruptibility.
00:44:59.980 And you're just repeating a narrative that is put up in these ideological actors who just like communists.
00:45:05.920 Well, this is where we get the phrase fellow traveler. 1.00
00:45:09.440 And useful idiot. 1.00
00:45:10.860 Useful idiot is also one from them. 1.00
00:45:13.640 Which, and there's a very strong, in the current era, by the way, there's a guy by the name of Jamal Khashoggi, who some would say might fit that bill. 0.98
00:45:23.140 And a final thing from, Lenin had strength for some turns of phrase.
00:45:27.860 And another one that's useful to remember is he gives a speech at some party event after they've taken power, where he says the key question of, you know, the modern political struggle is not, you know, one of theory or whatever.
00:45:43.940 It is fundamentally, who will overtake whom?
00:45:47.320 And this is sometimes abbreviated, who, whom?
00:45:49.860 And you'll see this online today.
00:45:51.280 And it's a very useful frame, I believe, for understanding left-wing politics, is the left will always be able to bring up some ideological reason.
00:46:02.420 Okay, we don't like the police because of this thing about oppressing black bodies, systemic racism.
00:46:10.880 Okay, if we do this policy, this will lead to greater egalitarianism.
00:46:14.640 Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:46:15.420 You've all heard it.
00:46:16.260 But what a lot of left-wing politics can easily be reduced to is who, whom.
00:46:21.640 There are groups that they like, and there are groups that they dislike.
00:46:25.300 And certainly in America—
00:46:26.500 For an enemy distinction.
00:46:28.080 Yeah, in America, you can very easily tell who they want to be on top and who they want, especially, to be on the bottom.
00:46:35.880 And it's like, in the left today, they will always be able to find a reason to explain why, you know, if you're one of these opposed groups,
00:46:45.260 like, you know, America's Kulak class, why anything bad that happens to you is okay, why it's okay to loot your store, why it's okay to ruin your community, why it's okay to discriminate against you in colleges.
00:46:57.660 And yes, if necessary, like, why it's okay for you to be, like, violently killed by some mob.
00:47:02.340 And you're not, you know, anyone can say whatever they want about you.
00:47:07.100 You can't say anything in defense.
00:47:08.820 That's always going to be hate speech or some sort of way too extreme rhetoric.
00:47:12.860 And it always just—it reduces to who, whom.
00:47:15.400 You know, think of Kyle Rittenhouse.
00:47:16.780 You can find leftists on the internet today who think that because Kyle Rittenhouse was this white teenager, that it was eminently fair that Antifa should be allowed to just hunt him down and just shoot him in the streets of Kenosha.
00:47:30.740 And, you know, it's a very communist ideology that Lenin would have been proud of that take.
00:47:35.120 Right, and so this is the—and you take people with this communist ideology, you put them in charge of a country, and then they decide who can live, they decide who dies, they decide who's in power, they decide whose power is taken away.
00:47:49.460 This is where you get the system of gulags that Solzhenitsyn wrote about.
00:47:53.520 This is where you get the system of the systemic killings that went on all the way from the Red Tower, really up all the way until the end of the 1990s and the collapse of the entire system.
00:48:03.040 You know, they—and Solzhenitsyn, of course, you know, he's good to read, not so much at the start of the revolution, but how things ended.
00:48:09.780 But they did ask him once at the very end of all of it, if you could sum up all of this in one phrase, how could all of this have happened?
00:48:19.620 And Solzhenitsyn said, we forgot God.
00:48:22.520 We forgot God.
00:48:23.740 Blake Neff, thank you so much for joining us today on Blood on the Snow, the Russian Revolution, this installment, Chronicles of the Revolution.