The Human Tragedy of Osteuropa
Recounting
the past hundred and some years of Eastern Europe is one of unrelenting
tragedy. In 1900, Russia and Ruthenia were still struggling to adapt to
modernity such as it was then. The former Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth was torn between three empires, and
Russia was the last absolutist type monarchy still kicking. The other
monarchies had given much power to technocrats and parliaments as ways of
coping with public opinion and scale. What has changed since then? It’s worth
trudging through the events of that day and of ours to see.
Nicholas
II had to deal with an attempted revolution and assassination attempts early in
his reign. By 1905, on the heels of a war with Japan that went sour he found
the first signs of failure ringing in the Russian regime. Most of the European
powers had counted Japan as easy prey since they were a joke and still using
swords and matchlocks fifty years before. But by 1905, they were thoroughly
modern, gave the Russians a bloody nose and got territorial concessions to boot.
Russia and European observers had made the classic mistake of overestimating
themselves and underestimating the enemy. The Russian Army put the revolt down
and the royal family was kept safe, but at a cost. Things clearly were not all
well and good. At the outbreak of hostilities and the dissolution of the
Bismarckian diplomatic system in August 1914, the regime felt safe for a time.
War keeps the energies of the masses occupied and gives focus to some who would
otherwise be shiftless or unemployed.
As
a brief aside, Bismarck had likely counted on a few things to keep the system
going. First that the diplomats and statesmen would shift the terms of
alliances to keep them relevant and stability and balance focused in efforts to
maintain peace. Second that statesmen (and diplomats) would have continued to
be better stuff, and clearly we see a degeneration even at the time of the
outbreak of the Great War where they could not comprehend how to maneuver
within Bismarck’s system or how to properly reshape it. Thirdly, he assumed
that all powers would be motivated to avoid costly and ultimately suicidal wars
such as they ultimately plunged into and hence to maintain a similar balance of
power. Lastly, he likely believed that monarchs would continue to be more influential
than they ended up being in fact, and that the mutual ties of the royal
families through blood and marriage would have been sufficient to give pause to
war. In fact the last point counted little in the final analysis, as war plans
required precise execution with weeks or months of preparations and no party
was willing to delay their plans and risk defeat for the sake of family ties.
With
the Great War, Russia felt strong at first as she bit into the East flank of
Germany and grabbed a bit of Prussia, but with the battle of Tannenberg they
were thrown on the back foot again and Russia began hitting an unending series
of setbacks and defeats. At a point, it became clear that all they could do was
try to give aid to the Serbs and otherwise distract the German Army. With the
Serbs surrendering in the latter half of 1915 and the failure of the Italian
entry to prove decisive, the Russians would reel for two years as they lost
land, supplies and men under German pressure.
In
1917, a first revolution ousted the monarchy and demanded a new government
headed entirely by a restructured Duma. They would keep fighting in the Triple
Entente. This government lasted for less than a year, after which Germans
shipped Lenin and his comrades to the east via Switzerland, and the October
Revolution swept it away and put the Bolsheviks in charge and in control of the
royal family. The Bolsheviks were defeatists and wanted out of the war, even at
the cost of the terms set out in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (and it turns out the
Western Allies would undo those terms for them). They of course would kill the
royal family and many of the Russian aristocrats who didn’t have the good
fortune to get out in the early days of the Russian Civil War which would start
a few months after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was concluded. It’s worth noting
here (but not dwelling) that the Bolsheviks were heavily Jewish in the early
days, and this Jewishness was heavily biased toward the top of the hierarchy,
to the intellectual-revolutionary class, and to the secret police (NKVD and
Cheka). This is something discussed by Russian authors, including Solzhenitsyn
and the Jew Slezkine.
The
Baltic countries which were part of the Russian Empire would break off during
the Russian Civil War. The Civil War of course ended with a Red victory after
the Reds secured key infrastructure and port cities. The Reds were getting
material support from Western (often Jewish) sources the entire time while the
whites were largely relying on lesser sources of funding, or smaller payments
from governments which did not want the Reds to win. The Whites themselves were
a motley crew of social democrats and monarchists, but they were all opposed to
Bolshevik power; nonetheless the mythology that survives is the Red mythology, that
of Reds triumphant against the world. Anthony Sutton addresses the Red
mythology, and discusses people like Jacob Schiff, the Rothschilds, and
Warburgs who were all financiers and supporters of the Reds at various stages. Trotsky
had himself spent time in New York and was tight with many American
cosmopolitan and Jewish socialites, and many of these people would become the
intermediaries which bound Trotsky and the Reds to the financiers.
This
is also when Finland, Estonia, and all the rest gained independence for the
first time in hundreds of years. Many of these countries would be swallowed up
again after the Second World War. Ruthenia would remain part of the empire,
constituting a junior SSR under the Russian SSR. Poland and Czechoslovakia
became independent following the war as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Finland
was the only country who would retain independence after the war, but they held
it at the price of treading a fine line. The Reds demanded a say in their
government, and demanded neutrality at any rate.
The
following years between the wars would have war communism and four year plans,
famine and Holodomor, purges and severe repression. The Communist International
(Comintern) was established by Lenin in the early ‘20s to help push the vision
of internationalism. Some people prospered during the Soviet era, and even
during the early part of the Soviet era, but the average Russian or Ruthenian
peasant had a hard life under the Tsar and their life often worsened. Some did
reap the benefits of industrialization by gunpoint and not all of those people
were apparatchiks. Things did improve for the average Russian (or Soviet
citizen generally) by the ‘60s and ‘70s, and this latter period even though
there were still usually drawbacks and austerity measures, paints a wholly
different picture to the earlier period where famine, gulags, and NKVD or Cheka
death squads were familiar sights. It is in fact the latter period which colors
the Soviet era as a whole and gives some who lived through it, or whose parents
lived through it, a sense of nostalgia.
With
the invasion of Poland in September 1939 came the Second World War and a whole
new wave of suffering. Poland would suffer the highest per capita losses of
human life in Europe. Her cities would be ruined, her population decimated, and
at the end, the Polish people would suffer the indignity of being thrown to the
dogs and to live under the Soviet yoke despite the war guarantee being the
pretense for why the Western Allies declared war on Germany in the first place.
Ukraine would ‘enjoy’ three years of sort-of war time independence. After their
experience for the prior fifteen years, it is easy to see why even German war
time occupation was preferable for many to Russian Soviet domination. East
Germany, Bohemia, and the Baltic States would be occupied by the Soviets as
well until 1990. Kaliningrad (formerly Koenigsberg) is to this day a Russian
city. Is Kaliningrad the better city, or was Koenigsberg?
Shortly
after the partition of Poland, the Soviets made a decision to invade Finland,
and this became the Finnish Winter War. It backfired with the Soviets incurring
horrible losses and the war ending in stalemate, and this dismal performance,
in combination with the recent officer purges and general dysfunction in the
Soviet system, led Hitler to conclude they were ripe for the taking. The USSR
was hanging on tenuously at the outbreak of World War Two, and in some sense
the war was a mixed blessing. Comrade Stalin placed far too much faith in the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. According to the Suvorov thesis, Stalin and the other
big players in the Communist Party wanted to attack Germany, but they wanted to
invade later and likely by 1943 or ’44. Operation Barbarossa pre-empted that
attack according to this idea. This is of course disputed by conventional
historians.
However,
Stalin did spend the remainder of 1941 goading the generals to make defenses,
getting his apparatchiks to reorganize industry and make fallback plans
including retreating to the Urals if necessary, and finally convincing the
Americans to establish the lend-lease program and to enter the war at the
soonest moment. While the Stalin line failed and most of the armies on that
line were encircled and destroyed, everything else worked marvelously, and the
majority of vital Soviet industry was saved while they engaged in scorched
earth to deny vital infrastructure to advancing German soldiers. The diplomatic
missions to the US worked better than he could have possibly hoped, as FDR had
communist sympathies and many of his staffers were themselves Reds or fellow
travelers, but even Churchill who disliked communists apparently hated the
prospect of German hegemony on the continent more and was willing to accept
Soviet Russian hegemony. By the beginning of 1942, things did not look good for
the Red Army despite that the German advance stalled and they had their own
bleeding wound at Stalingrad. At the same time the next year, the Germans were
increasingly desperate for manpower, materiel, and strategic supplies, and
there is little likelihood of a German win at that stage.
The
way in which the Red Army won was with a great tide of blood, and with great
support from the Western Allies. In some sense, the other Western allies used
them as the bludgeon with which Germany was weakened, and by the time the front
in France was opened up in June of 1944, defeat for Germany was certain and it
was a question of when and what the terms would be like. As I’ve said
elsewhere, by the end of 1945 and with the conclusion of the Nuremberg Show
Trials and the victor conferences at Yalta and elsewhere, it became clear that
the Western Allies had decided to leave Eastern Europe to hang in the jaws of
the Reds. The pretense of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ was all
bluster and bullshit, and always has been, and always will be, and anyone who
is riled into war on those terms by plutocrats is an unfortunate dupe who has
been used by pathetic shills. ‘Free Belgium’ and ‘independent Poland’ were the
‘our democracy’ of their day – cosmopolitan-Jewish buzzwords meant to rally the
idiots.
Following
the war, Stalin’s rule over Russia was notably more subdued than in the
interwar period. He didn’t have to resort to such brutal repression, because
although the gulags persisted (and the atrocious death rates did as well) and
they housed dissidents, White Russians, Russians who surrendered to the Axis
powers, German prisoners of war, and political prisoners, the numbers of people
put through the gulag system dropped over time. In the ‘30s, it was a near
death sentence to be sent to the gulag; by the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was bad and
fairly deadly, but by far more survivable than earlier. The struggle with
America and Western power generally, and the myth of the Great Patriotic War served
to provide sufficient regime stability in lieu of the prior harsh measures. The
Soviets threw their support behind other communist regimes outside the Eastern
Bloc, especially in South America and South Asia and during the Korean War, all
the while maintaining sufficient distance that they didn’t get dragged into
wars themselves. Indeed the United States installed the USSR (and eventually
the PRC) on the UN Security Council.
Stalin
also began a program of purging elite Jewish influence with the rise of Zionism
in the post-war period; this led to a turn of opinion by world Jewry over time.
While Jews often remained faithful to the Soviet Union during the whole of
Stalin’s reign and through Khrushchev, between the Six Day War and the Yom
Kippur War, and the removal of Jewish influence started under Stalin but
continued by later General Secretaries, world Jewry had all but flipped on the
matter by 1973-74 and no longer voiced overwhelming support for the Soviet
Union. At first, Jews were not allowed the right to leave, same as most
citizens, but by the 1970s the ban was lifted under pressure. The caveat during
this early period is that many of them had to pay a head tax to leave. By the
late ‘80s and ‘90s, this tax was no longer a requirement, and thus most of
Eastern European Jewry left for either the US or Israel.
Khrushchev
proved a capable head of the Communist Party and of the Soviet Union generally.
He began a program of publicly softening the image of the Communist Party, and
this involved distancing themselves from the legacy of Stalin and many of his
policies. He inherited the top position in the country in 1954 and held that
until 1964. This period contained no major wars, and the USSR watched as the US
took over from the French in Indochina and decolonization efforts continued
from the mid-‘50s in Africa and South Asia. Yet things spiraled out of control
to some degree in ’62-63, and other Party members were discontent with the fact
that he allowed conflict with the US over minor strategic posturing to escalate
to the point of nearly trading nuclear warheads.
Brezhnev
was the final head of the Communist Party to sit during a relatively stable
period and for a long time. He oversaw things from 1964 to 1982. Internally,
things were mostly secure and improved materially; however, the USSR inserted
itself into Afghanistan in 1979 following a communist coup the year prior and
the ten year war there became a proxy war which was exploited by Americans and
Arabs to weaken the USSR and to promote Salafist and Wahabbist ideology. CIA
liaisons funded and armed mujahedeen forces through Pakistani intelligence
intermediaries (ISI). Russians were aware of this network but, without
expanding the scope of the war to neighboring countries, as it was supposed to
be a counter-insurgency action on behalf of a friendly communist regime, they
could not effectively police the porous Afghan-Pakistan Hindu Kush border
region. Brezhnev held the Soviet Union together, including the various Eastern
Bloc members, and expanded the military power and prestige in his tenure.
However, his successors found it increasingly difficult to navigate a world
where the Soviet Union seemed stagnant and outdated against the (apparently
plastic and fake) prosperity of the 1980s, and where they had to compete with
NATO military industry and NATO budgets.
Andropov
and Chernenko both had short tenures and their style of rule both reflected
Brezhnev. Gorbachev became head of the party in 1985, and by 1987 the Soviet
Union was clearly in decline economically and politically. Many wanted to go a
more conservative direction and keep everything together as long as possible.
There was no solid ground to walk on, and nothing was assured. Things were
rapidly shifting and Gorbachev and the Communist Party had to deal not just
with one large country, but with something more like 20 different countries as
well as outside subversion from foreign powers, criminals, and money interests.
Gorbachev was convinced to head in a more liberal direction, and started the
policies of glasnost and perestroika which would be carried through Yeltsin. The
cost of openness is regime stability, especially if there are certain fairly
popular anti-government sentiments under the surface. The cost of
‘restructuring’ and ‘open markets’ is putting oneself out for thieves and
pickpockets. More on this later.
Per
capita GDP of the Soviet Union went from a low of about $1200 (1990 USD) in
1915 to $2700 in 1950 and finally climbed to $7000 in 1980 where it remained
until the years leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw
Pact. The fundamental nature of the Soviet economy was similar to Russia today,
heavily leaning on extractive industries and military-industrial complex,
though various SSRs and members of the Eastern Bloc were net food exporters
intermittently, especially of grain, in order to fund capital development. By
the Marxist conception, Russia never went through the mode of capitalist
economic production except in its most basic and earliest phases before the
founding of the USSR, and in some sense skipped from a heavily agrarian economy
with more craft workshops than factories, to a centrally planned economy with a
large degree of industrial production. Collectivization of food production was
a given in every major socialist country within the Soviet sphere. [1]
When
the Reds occupied a country, they did not simply leave it. Depending on its
strategic value, at the minimum they would keep KGB (or NKVD/Cheka if it was
before 1954) and politburo people as well as the normal embassy crew. Part of a
fully staffed embassy are official cover spies; the functions of modern embassies
are basically threefold, one to provide services to one’s citizens in the host
country, two for diplomats to operate from, and three as a base of operations
for spies. More strategically important countries would have more KGB assets in
country as well as Soviet divisions to ensure that they remained loyal.
Ultimately what kept the Soviet system running as long as it did was force and
intimidation of all the other partner countries, a communist party hegemony,
and occasional bribes to leaders. Once the Red Army lost the will to enforce
that system at home and abroad, it fell apart rapidly. Russian human
intelligence was among the best in the world, though in SIGINT and EW they fell
far behind the Western powers. HUMINT enabled them to keep closer pace
technologically and economically than they otherwise would have, being that
substantial amounts of intelligence were devoted to things like industrial
espionage not only for military industries but for general purpose production
too.
Chernobyl
was an interesting event which held a mirror to Soviet society. What happened
there, in the north-central part of Ukraine, was an accident that resulted from
a comedy of errors. They stress tested a reactor with a critical design flaw,
where the reactor would increase reactivity in the fuel rods as it ran and thus a
positive feedback loop leading to greater heat and steam output. Western
reactors for safety reasons do the opposite, so the rods are designed to cool
as quickly as possible if a fault is detected. Systems are also made to have
multiple redundancies in the West, which was not true in all Soviet reactors.
Additionally, the containment building was wholly inadequate for sealing a
steam or hydrogen explosion. No one outside the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact
knew this had happened until days later when Scandinavians began picking up
relatively high amounts of atmospheric radiation in wind currents. The Soviets
were fundamentally unable to build a safer and more stable reactor design
because of their budget and resource constraints, and their response to the
disaster was hampered because of regime security concerns. [2]
While Chernobyl was the largest
incident, there were many ecological disasters and toxic waste dumps in the
Soviet Union. One couldn’t compile an exhaustive list here due to brevity, but
the human and environmental cost of Soviet policies was high, and while
plutocrats in the West were not saintly and there are plenty of environmental
disasters all around the various Western nations, the fact is the Soviet era is
littered with a disproportion of these events. Modern Russia and post-Soviet
states suffer everything from routine oil spills to the after-effects of
nuclear tests and deforestation to tens of years of improper disposal of
hazardous waste. [3]
I
noted elsewhere that Perestroika was basically a loot-and-pillage operation by
American Jews in Harvard and the State Department in conjunction with Jewish
criminals in Russia. Anyone familiar with the deep history of Russia in the
‘90s knows this; unfortunately, the Russians usually blame Gorbachev and
Yeltsin (‘the two drunks’), and ‘the Americans.’ The looting operation didn’t
actually happen until Yeltsin, but Gorbachev set in motion the final domino
that would collapse the USSR – which, to be fair, was a difficult situation to
tangle with, and he had a fairly tight space to maneuver with if he wanted to
maintain the institution without resorting to tactics like Comrade Jughashvili
(Stalin). The platonic American and frankly 97% of Americans have as much to do
with the State Department and Jewish criminals as 97% of Russians have with
oligarchs and criminals. Just the same, Perestroika functioned
in effect to sell large portions of Soviet state assets into private and almost
entirely Jewish hands (6 of 7 of the oligarchs were Jewish in a country where
Jews were less than 1% of the population to give some indication), and the
profits were reaped by these people until between 2005 and 2012 as Putin began
‘anti-corruption’ measures where he was gradually cracking down on some of
these oligarchs and seizing their assets. One should note this had no impact on low-level corruption. [4]
Russia’s
economy experienced substantial decline in the post-Soviet period from 1991
until 1998 where it stabilized and began to recover. [8] Sovereign debt was
high during the early period, and they were navigating a fiscal crisis where
the Ruble had crashed following the end of the USSR; citizens who had been
given shares of state corporations as part of Perestroika were forced to sell
them simply to make ends meet as jobs and good money were both scarce. This
resulted in the consolidation under oligarchs, many of whom had been criminals
in the Soviet period and all of whom had ample amounts of foreign credit or
cash reserves with which they could buy those assets. Inflation is fairly high,
but per capita GDP standards have climbed to match or exceed 1988 levels,
however there is the problem of greater corruption and fraud both at the lower
and upper levels of Russian society. The value of the Ruble today is highly
dependent on commodities which Russians trade in volume, especially oil,
natural gas, and minerals. Arctic oil is still too expensive to tap if oil is
less than $100/bbl. [9]
In
1994, in the midst of economic hardship and most of the minor republics
breaking off of Russia, Chechnya attempted to form its own breakaway republic.
This resulted in a nearly two year war, at the end of which Chechnya was an
independent state or oblast within the Russian Federation. Between both sides,
estimates place fighting dead between 10,000 and 18,000, and between 35,000 and
50,000 civilians killed. The Second Chechen War was fought primarily after
August 1999 until April the following year, though counter-insurgent action
lasted until 2009. The cause of the second war was essentially criminal and
terrorist activities emanating from the Caucasus. The Russian government
succeeded in removing the Chechen government and installing a Russian puppet
regime. Military dead on both sides was about 23,000, and civilians killed
amounted to as many as 50,000 or more. Islamic separatists from the Caucasus
republics have been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks in the Caucasus
as well as Russia proper since the First Chechen War.
Ukraine
after the end of the Soviet Union has been a string of broken promises. It
forms yet another tile in the mural of human tragedy of Eastern Europe in the
20th and 21st century. They handed over their nuclear
stockpiles to the Post-War International Order, with William Clinton as its
face, under assurances that they would be given security and perpetual peace.
Turns out they should have read Kipling poems. Clinton and globohomo allowed
them to stay in the Russian sphere of influence, where they remained as
Russia’s faithful puppet until about 2014. The Russians of course promised them
prosperity and other things of silver and gold and never delivered. Their PPP
climbed from a rock bottom post-Soviet low of $4451.55 USD in 1998 during the
dog days of Perestroika while Putin was getting his grasp on power to a rough
plateau of $8000 in 2007 where it has stayed since. The Russian puppet and many
wealthy Russians enjoyed fancy dachas on the Black Sea while the lay Ukrainian
worker remained in grinding poverty.
Russians
for their part overpromised and under-delivered, a classic problem which
isolated them from this strategic neighbor. They also took their homey
Ruthenian neighbors for granted, as though they would stay in their sphere of
influence out of habit or necessity. This turned out to be false. Globohomo is
likely overpromising the Ukraine as well, but they will probably get more from
their partnership with a degenerated West than with a fairly anemic and still
struggling Russia. I didn’t touch on White Russia, Belarus, but it’s a small
place (far smaller than ‘Little Russia’) and it’s stayed firmly in the Russian
sphere with no intentions of moving. They are, for all intents and purposes,
joined at the hip with Russia proper.
The
events of 2014-15 of course were not purely organic. The CIA and US State
Department saw legitimate unrest and discontent with Russian power in Ukraine
and decided to exploit the opportunity. The protests likely would not have
succeeded in upsetting the Russian puppet regime without CIA and State
Department assistance, but even if they had the following events would have had
a totally different character. At this stage, no matter who wins, the White
Race and Eastern Slavs lose – at least in the short run. Ukrainians have the ‘option’
of rule under the thumb of Russian lackeys who will siphon off what little they
have and expose them to corruption and graft for little to no gain, or Jewish
CIA/State Department plants like Zelensky. Zelensky who conveniently works in
media and has essentially been campaigning for the job for 4 or 5 years since
Euromaidan. He is only one of a cabal of creepy Jewish plutocrats who’ve
stormed to power with the CIA-State Department coup after Euromaidan.
Despite
the accusations leveled by Russians on the internet however, both sides owe at
least some debts (or fealty) to Jews, as there are still influential and
wealthy Jews (‘oligarchs’) present in Russia and frankly Jewish criminal
elements whom Putin and the Russian state must appease and work with. Most
states have a criminal element and many states end up co-opting that element,
as the US did with the Syndicate and as Russia did with their Russian Mob, the
real shame in either case is the massive exploitation of vulnerable people, of
the poor and of children by intelligence services and criminals in the US and
Jewish and Israeli criminals in Russia and Eastern Europe. I think delusion in
either account for Westerners or Eastern Europeans blinds one to the color of
this human tragedy which has taken place over the past hundred years where
creepy elites and their clients have been allowed to ruin working class
families through social engineering and then literally rape (and in some cases
murder) their children. The largest human trafficking networks in Europe aside
from those involving smuggling invaders (which also involve heavily Jewish
NGOs) have largely been in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Ukraine and
Russia.
Russians
see themselves as personally invested in this war in the Ukraine. They started
that war of course and they see the objective as strategically vital, so it’s
easy to see why. The purpose is to state forthrightly that breaking out of the
Russian sphere of influence comes at a price, and the price is in blood and
land. They see hundreds or thousands of caskets streaming back from the war
without honors and without decoration as one normally receives for dying in war
on behalf of one’s country, because the need to maintain the lie is all
present. That is maskirovka. So thick is the lie that Russians can’t even admit it to themselves. Everyone knows that the
seizure of Crimea was with Russian Spetsnaz and regulars, and that Russian men
and materiel bolster the local forces in Donbass. Even so, to admit as much
would be admitting to blatant aggression on this old neighbor and former
friend, and Russia prefers that this proxy war have a different character to
their 1980s Afghanistan war. The locals hope each ceasefire is the last and
peace will follow but are usually let down to find one side or the other
starting things again. Parties in both the Russian camp and the CIA have a dog
in keeping the fighting going.
A
good resolution would be to affirm Russia’s claim on Crimea, but to refuse to
yield any further land and instead to offer a transfer of those who would
prefer Russian citizenship a one-time deal to move to Russia with some small
sweetener added. The sweetener would be a small financial incentive to offset
moving costs and the burden of relocating, but not enough to make fraud or
moving itself lucrative. The point of that would be to get rid of problems.
Hopefully, the zealots move to Russia, but most people stay behind because they’re
not ideologically committed. Following this, every effort would be made to
fortify the Ukrainian-Russian border on the Ukrainian side to prevent
“irregular” incursions from easily slipping past. If the Ukrainians were to
yield Donbass as the Russians are asking, the temptation for the Russians to
try and chip off more territory would be overwhelming and they would be back at
it again within a few years. Protection guarantees from the West would have to
be tangible, and it would have to include at a minimum help with outfitting
their forces. Even if a defensive agreement had to include clauses that kept
Ukraine from attacking for irredentist claims or whatever reason, or for
maneuvering to have the other side attack (false flags or Pearl Harbors), it
would be sufficient to give the Russians pause in the future.
Of
course, I’m thinking there from the Ukrainian view. From the US perspective,
there is little geopolitical or strategic interest except in breaking off a
piece of the Russian sphere. Since they’ve reclaimed the Black Sea ports in
Crimea, one is only applying pressure to a geopolitical foe and a foe which, as
I’ve stated in past, is not as capable or dangerous as China. While Russia does
a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting in weapons R&D for the China-Iran-Russia
[very loose] counter-American partnership, there really isn’t any way Russia
could go toe-to-toe with Chinese regular forces and win.
The
dead of WWI from Russia and Serbia alone totaled about 4,000,000 to 5,000,000,
and the number of Slavs killed under the Central Powers likely totaled around 1.7
million (my own estimate, 8.5% of Imperial Germany and 73.05% of
Austria-Hungary assuming proportionality based on 1900 census data). [5] It is
likely over 10 million died in the USSR during the interwar years. In WWII,
about 5.7 million died in Poland, ~25 million in the USSR, 1.3 million in
Yugoslavia, 1.3 million in Hungary and Romania, 600,000 in the Baltics, and
300,000 in Bohemia. [6] The deaths in the war in Eastern Ukraine currently
stand at about 13,000 as of 2019. Deaths are a very stark way of measuring the
human costs of things – it is not always accurate, but when people are dying
off generations at a time, it’s worth taking a gander at. (For the record, I
consider Bohemia and the west parts of Poland to be more properly Mitteleuropa, but I put them here just to be thorough.) None of this counts deaths in
the interwar and post-war years to famine and regime repression, or the Russian Civil War, and that
number is easily over ten million when one considers the Ukrainian Holodomor
and the destruction of the Ostdeutschen. Though obviously not Slavic, the
ghastly treatment of Germans by all of the victors, but especially by the
Soviet Union and her puppets following the close of the war is one of the enduring
crimes of the 20th Century made worse because of how preventable and
unnecessary it was. These figures also don’t take into account the suffering
and indignity people faced in other terms but which didn’t lead to death;
grinding poverty, police state repression, environmental waste, socio-cultural
dislocation and ruin, and things like that.
Now
we shall get to the Warsaw Pact and the other Eastern Bloc countries. Post-war,
Poland and the other Eastern Bloc states had to contend with a disproportionately
Jewish class of commissars and other miscreants heading their governments. The
dominance or disproportion of Jews would fade in most of these countries by the
‘70s, and Jews had no lasting effect in places like Poland and Hungary as most
of the major Jewish communities which existed there before the Second European
Holocaust (WWII) were substantially reduced and those who were left tended to
move to Israel or the West after the war. Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia,
and Hungary were all subject to permanent Red Army garrisons. They also had
similar stories economically.
Most
of Eastern Europe was devastated after the war. East Germany, despite capital
outflows (largely to Russia) and industrial controls in 1945-48, became one of
the most prosperous parts of the Eastern Bloc. Czechoslovakia had roughly the
same living standards as East Germany, and higher than most of the rest of the
Comblock. The whole Comblock all had programs to build domestic industry,
improve infrastructure, train workers, and improve literacy. These programs had
a checkered impact across all of the communist states, with some achieving
better results on some counts; literacy and basic sanitation were usually two
areas which improved dramatically from 1947-1980, especially in more formerly
rural regions. Most countries began developing heavy industry for steel
production, weapons and automobile manufacture, machinery, and textiles.
Industry was often wasteful and inefficiently allocated, and by the mid ‘90s
much of it would be in disrepair, and frequently sold off if useful or simply scrapped.
Autarky within the Soviet sphere was the goal, though it was never really
attained. [7]
Hungarians
in 1956 revolted against Soviet rule. It was the result of student protests
boiling over after students were shot dead by soldiers, both local and Soviet.
Students and local citizens fired back on soldiers, and the revolt began on the
23 of October; by the 5th of November, Soviet forces were conducting
mop up operations in Budapest. Czechs had a similar reaction over ten years
later, though the reaction to Soviet rule evolved as a process of
liberalization and softening was allowed to take place from within the
government. This ‘Prague Spring’ lasted from 5 January, 1968 until shortly
after 21 August, 1968 when the Soviet and other Warsaw Pact members invaded.
Other Eastern Bloc countries had similar but lower level resistance to Soviet
occupation and rule. It’s worth noting in passing here the reason for that: the
‘Socialist Worker’s State’ they somewhat morbidly called themselves would
gladly snuff out hundreds of students or workers at a whim if these poor sods
were threatening regime stability or simply spoke out too much. Despite that
the humanitarian veneer of the hypermodern West is a lie concealing rotten
truth, the patronizing and friendly socialist face on the Marxist-Leninist
beast was equally hideous.
Western
Slavs are fairly hopeful on the surface. They have opened themselves largely to
the West and joined the EU in this day. We will see whether that proves to be a
mistake, and whether they can hold onto tradition and join modernity at the
same time. I think that is a dubious prospect, and I think in the long run one
is better off being slightly poorer but keeping one’s society intact than
becoming somewhat richer and losing everything (including one’s spiritual
strength). Still, the Western Slav is a decent person; they are
not, on average, as good as a Western European in terms of trust or some other
cognitive-behavioral traits, but they are still quite wholesome people. I will
say that Baltic and Western Slavic women look far more natural and feminine
than Western women tend to, and that is decidedly a mark in their favor.
One
of the problems with mediocre (or worse) people is a tendency to see things
through lenses of nostalgia and symbols. This is of course only true of
Europeans and East Asians, as it requires still some semblance of higher
ability however degraded it be to be able to process symbols and hindsight.
Cthonic people are invested as the term implies not in metaphysics, or spirit,
or ideals, but in that which is embodied
in the world. Higher things are unknown. Many of them still believe in
magic, indeed the Cthonic man thrown into modernity sees science and technology
as a form of magic brought forth from the aeons to its highest art. Cthonic
“art” is not about elevating man but about status games and mincing words about
purely earthly desires.
But
our people will hark to a prior era, for example [white] Americans to the ‘50s
if they are present disaffected youth, or to the ‘70s and ‘80s if they were
boomers and grew up in those times, failing to realize that the
world-historical events and general socio-cultural rot of those periods led to
the present condition. The solution to present problems, and the most vexing
issues, are largely symbols and symptoms rather than the deep issues. There is
an inability to grapple with the data or with socio-cultural realities. Eastern
Europeans have a similar pathology with the Soviet Era. Even with this lament,
we can say at least they are not Cthonic, though one should note that the
influence of hypermodern entertainment is to move them and our people in that
direction.
The
modern Eastern Slav stares at you generally with dead eyes. They are a
fundamentally broken people, having lived through the worst of times with
longing and maybe the slightest glint in their eye only to have their hopes
dashed continuously. What is left is a husk, gloomy and doom-speaking, brimming
with contempt for the rest of the world and filled with a head which can no
longer tell truth from lies. In this way, we see that there is a convergence
between the Eastern Slav and the Western Man in fact; the Western Man once stood
astride the world, but those whom he has allowed to rule over him – the
Cosmopolitan-Jewish elite – have brought him low and he is starting to suffer
similar afflictions as the Eastern Slav. Hopelessness, despair, nihilism, and
the inability to speak or discern truth are all infesting their way into the
Western Faustian man.
(There
is a lot out there on the Soviet economy. What the second source says is
essentially fair; the Soviet economy was neither the green pasture painted by
hacks like Paul Samuelson nor the hellscape painted by anti-communists. It was
a mediocre centrally-planned industrial economy which, unlike later hypermodern
[relatively] centrally planned economies of which the modern US and EU members
are examples, the USSR didn’t have the benefit of hundreds of years of
institutional and capital accumulation which they could burn up. The industrial
economy is fundamentally one based on iterative processes, bootstrapping, and
the use of chemical energy to substitute much of what draft animals and men once
did.)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9266764
(Most
of them are surface-level sources but together it paints a fairly grim
picture.)
I
should note that I include South Slavs and Hungarians in the total of ‘Slavs’
for both wars, and I include Hungarians because they are essentially Slavic by
blood if not by tongue. Finns and Estonians by contrast though speaking a
related tongue to Magyars are actually more closely related to Baltic people
well as to Scandinavians. Virtually everyone native to Europe shares a deep
historical blood tie however, relating to both the Indo-Europeans as well as to
pre-Aryan hunter-gatherer groups.
https://www.kas.de/en/web/ddr-mythos-und-wirklichkeit/economy
https://www.britannica.com/place/Poland/Economy
(I’m
sure there are good books on this subject, but sadly I think Wikipedia and
Britannica are actually two of the best free and easily available sources on
this subject.)
[9]
https://knoema.com/vyronoe/cost-of-oil-production-by-country
As
a final footnote, the purpose of this is to give a quick overview of Eastern
European history with enough analysis to be interesting, but not so much detail
that one gets bogged in the weeds. For more detail I recommend one pursue books
on the subject matter. For instance – I skim through the first 50 years of
history fairly quickly despite that entire volumes have been written
(justifiably) on the period from 1900 to 1920, and similarly from 1930 to 1945.
These are both pivotal periods, and arguably in Eastern Europe the ‘20s are
pivotal as well while in the Western world they had some importance but were
somewhat subdued. Frankly I don’t see the point of getting into the thick of it
of describing maneuvers and inserting diagrams when there are tomes which
detail that topic far better than I could here.
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