Alexiey Shiropayev’s Prison of the Nation:
An Ethnonationalist History of Russia, Part 3

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Part 3 of 4

The Red Terror: Lenin and the October Revolution

Prison of the Nation presents an original view of the Communist Revolution in Russia in 1917. First of all, Shiropayev sees this as a change of the ruling elite of the Eurasian Project. The Byzantine Christians were simply replaced by Bolshevik Jews. Thus he does not see many reasons to support the ancien régime, which had already been realizing the multi-racial, anti-European utopia, only under a different banner. Secondly, he considers the greatest sin of the revolutionaries to be the destruction of the two most positive forces in tsarist Russia, which could have saved the country, namely the liberal populist reformers and the Germanophile circle of Rasputin and Empress Alexandra. Thirdly, the Revolution should not be considered solely in economic, geopolitical, or religious terms. The most important aspect of the Revolution was racial: it was a throwback to the bloodiest phases of the Project, analogous to Christianization of Rus’, the Mongol invasion, and the Muscovite struggle for autocracy. But this time it was the Jews (lead by a Jew-Mongol-white hybrid, Lenin) that were exterminating the white population of Rus’.

Shiropayev recounts the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks against the Slavs: the bloody extermination of whole families and villages, the torture of the victims, etc. It is often said that these atrocities are unimaginable and incomprehensible. They are from a “color-blind” economic or political perspective. But if we consider the Revolution an act of racial warfare — the extermination of a racially distinct population by a fanatical and bloodthirsty ethnic minority aiming at total domination — then everything becomes imaginable and comprehensible. Shiropayev quotes from leading Communists, who (using racial slurs) present their plans to create legions of “white slaves” serving the ethnic minority ruling this new dystopia.

The greatest crimes committed by the Commissars were, of course, the extermination through starvation of Ukrainian peasants (the Holodomor) and the system of extermination camps throughout the whole Soviet empire (the gulag). However, it must be stressed that there were numerous other uses of starvation as a weapon in USSR: for example, the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion and other peasant uprisings, as well as the suppression of Cossacks and other nations of the empire, who rose up to regain their lost freedom.

Soviet, Russian, and Western historiography tend to present the USSR as a cruel but nevertheless well-functioning totalitarian state, where, after a few bloody years, dissent has been suppressed and society remained rather peaceful. This picture is false. From the very beginning to the very end, the USSR was a bloody mess, in which various nations and groups rose against the government; dissenters were put in concentration camps, prisons, and psychiatric wards; organized and unorganized crime were rampant; and various party cliques conspired to take over the system. There were numerous assassinations and attempted assassinations of leading political figures, including Stalin himself.

Shiropayev sees an occult dimension to Soviet Communism, especially in its symbolism. For instance, the Red Star might have been chosen as a symbol of the Red Army as a reference to the Jewish rebels fighting the Romans. There have been reports of occult symbols found in places where the white nations of the empire were exterminated, including the site of the slaughter of the tsar and his family. The torture of victims can be likened to Jewish ritual murder. And the extermination of the Slavic population may be considered a bloody sacrifice to the Eurasian Project. Especially interesting is the cult of the mummified Lenin’s corpse, analogous to the cult of the incorruptible bodies of dead Orthodox saints. At the start of the war with Third Reich, Stalin has publicly made a vow to Lenin to wage a victorious war against Germany. Shiropayev presents this as a public incantation and the promise to sacrifice the “biomass” of Russian and German soldiers to the “ever living” mummy.

Shiropayev criticizes the “White movement.” He considers them tsarist sentimentalists, clinging to the previous phase of the anti-Rus’ Eurasian Project. Nevertheless, he gives them credit for facing the Bolsheviks in battle. On the other hand, had the Whites not been so fixed on keeping the old empire, with its unjust and outdated social structure, maybe they would have gained more popular support and eventually won. Interestingly, Shiropayev compares the emigre Russian Fascist Party, which has clung to the imperial understanding of Russia and Russians, to civic nationalism and Byzantine Christianity. For him the true opposition were the rising peasants and especially the Cossacks fighting for independence.

Rus’ Reawakens: Operation Barbarossa

Shiropayev sees Germany’s invasion of the USSR, Operation Barbarossa, as the last great chance to save Rus’ from the Eurasian Project. He maintains that Hitler’s strategy was the only right thing to do: to strike the beast before it attacked Germany and enslaved Europe. Prison of the Nation emphasizes the highly symbolic nature of these events: the invocation of the great emperor Barbarossa, the Sig runes of the SS, the attack on the day of the summer solstice, and soldiers marching under the banner of swastika. To him, this was a moment when the “banner of Wotan” flew over Rus’ again, just as in the times of the Varangians.

Hitler is often criticized, even by sympathetic historians and essayists, for his harsh treatment of the USSR. Shiropayev sees this issue in a completely different light. Germany was facing the most aggressive and bloody tyranny of all time and had the moral obligation to organize a preemptive attack. And this attack needed to be utterly fierce and ruthless to ensure victory.

Shiropayev does not see the USSR as a well-functioning totalitarian machine, but as a bloody, chaotic tyranny, which was always on the brink of collapse and civil war. And once the Reich’s armies attacked, this collapse actually happened. The Soviet armies suffered a great defeat, and the state was falling apart. The high officials started organizing a retreat into Siberia, including emptying all the archives in Moscow, which they believed would soon fall to the Germans.

War on the Eastern Front was cruel, but the Reich did not set those conditions. It was USSR that first massacred the native population of Russia and created an enormous state system of extermination. The Reich has only played on the terms set by the Soviets. It must be emphasized that right after German troops crossed the border with the USSR, a new wave of cruelty swept the land: Bolsheviks began to exterminate all political prisoners and persons suspected of political dissent, so they would not be able to collaborate with the Reich’s army or administration. Thus shooting commissars upon capture, killing party members, destroying all local administrations, etc. were justified means of countering communist violence and an act of rightful revenge on the exterminators of the white peoples of the USSR. The blood of the people had to be avenged with the blood of their oppressors.

For Shiropayev, the Second World War was a time when new heroes of Rus’ arose. Of course Soviet propaganda has branded them all as “traitors”: Ukrainians, Balts, Russians, Cossacks, etc., who decided to rise against the Soviets; all anti-communist local militias, soldiers who willingly surrendered to the Germans, and peasants who helped German soldiers. These were people who chose freedom over slavery. They betrayed Russia to save Rus’.

Interestingly, Shiropayev does not have a high opinion of Andrey Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army. He believes that Vlasov was infected by the Project and that all the doubts regarding him voiced by Hitler — namely, that the Russians would betray the Reich and try to create their own state — were true, as in the hour of trial Vlasov did actually switch sides and tried to cooperate with the Western Allies. However, he honors all the people of Russia who have risen in any way against Soviet tyranny.

The greatest heroes of this time are Bronislav Kaminski and the Russian National Liberation Army. Once his native Lokot was under German control, he actively cooperated with the new administration and created the Lokot Autonomous Republic. Shiropayev considers this political organism the last state of Rus’, which could have been the nucleus for rebuilding Rus’ on the ruins of the Project. Kaminski was an actual national socialist, unspoiled by the Project’s ideology, neither the Byzantine nor the Communist strain. He understood that after many centuries of the Project’s tyranny, Rus’ could only be rebuilt under the auspices of the great European visionaries ruling the Third Reich. The Republic had its own militia, which later became the Russian National Liberation Army and after that became the S.S. Sturmbrigade R.O.N.A. Other great heroes are the Cossacks who fought under Marshall von Panwitz.

Ultimately, the Project won the Second World War. Shiropayev gives all credit to Stalin and his clique. First of all, Stalin fooled the Russians into thinking that he represented their interests. He invoked the previous phases of the Project, playing on so-called “patriotic instincts” to make Russians obey his orders and die by the millions to protect their own concentration camp. Secondly, Stalin outmatched Hitler in terms of cruelty and ruthlessness. Had Hitler been even fiercer, even more determined, and killed even more commissars and party members — he would have won.

Shiropayev recalls the cruelty with which Soviet army treated Germans after invading the Reich’s territories: the murder, rape, and torture of soldiers and civilians alike. He considers this to be an act of racial extermination of whites by Asians and the hatred of Asiatic despotism and backwardness toward the freedom and civilization of Europe. The Soviets meted out the same treatment to their own rebellious subjects. Russians, Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Balts who were caught by the Soviets (or perfidiously handed to them by the Allies) were imprisoned and exterminated along with their families. It was the fulfillment of Genghis Khan’s dream: Asiatic hordes plundering Europe and murdering white people, having established the largest state in the history of the world.

Stagnation and Neo-Stalinism

The post-Stalin era was one of stagnation. The USSR was slowly decomposing and declining: economically, culturally, and socially. However, this does not mean that the Project stopped its struggle against Rus’. All political and social institutions were aimed at creating the Homo sovieticus: a racially mixed slave who was obedient to his masters and willing to defend his prison. Hatred of freedom, dignity, and the “rotten West” — this all remained intact from the times of the Mongol yoke until the era of Brezhnev. And it still exists in Russia today under Putin. Stagnation also did not mean an end to repression. Gulags still operated, and people were still imprisoned and murdered for their dissent views.

Soviet civic nationalism was just the latest version of the Eurasian Project. Just as anyone who was baptized in the Orthodox Church and accepted the rule of tsars could become a subject of the Russian Empire, anyone who believed in Marxism-Leninism and accepted the rule of the Kremlin could become a subject of the Soviet Empire. Like their monarchist predecessors, the Bolsheviks supported race-mixing and used the native white population of Russia as slaves to build the Red Empire, into which more and more territories and peoples were incorporated. As in Russia, the Soviet elite was an amalgam of nations and races. To some extent, the Soviets forced Russification on all subjects of their Empire, but tsarist Russification was already a universalist, globalist, statist, and mongrelizing project. All the Communists did was replace crosses with stars.

It is a paradox that the country that won the Second World War suffered the most severe losses and was unable to recover from them, while post-war Germany created an “economic miracle.” There was no comparison in the pace of development in the Western and the Eastern blocs. On the one hand the Soviets were building schools, roads, airports, etc. On the other hand, its exploited population was being devoured by alcoholism, corruption, and crime.

Finally the state collapsed. However, as Shiropayev points out, Russia was in such a bad condition in the 1990s, that there was no real alternative. Although the Project was weak and could easily have been overthrown, Rus’ did not awaken and assert itself. The only important forces were hard-line Communists who wanted to save USSR at any cost and post-Communists who wanted to change the Empire into a KGB/FSB-controlled oligarchy. The handfuls of pro-tsarist sentimentalists and pro-Western idealists were of no importance in the course of events.