The Red Terror in Kiev
A Warning from a Century Ago
Part 2

Another rough day at the office, drawn by a guard.

2,875 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

No Russian Leaders

The London Morning Post correspondent then tried to determine who the Bolsheviks were who had terrorized Kiev. His findings were:

In the first place, as Kiev knew the Bolsheviki, they are utter aliens — Letts, Finns, internationalized Jews, Rumanians, anything except actual Russians. Rokowsky, the nominal head of the Bolshevist Government in Kiev, was a Jew, born a Bulgarian, naturalized as a Rumanian; Latsis, head of the Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counter-Revolution in Kiev, and in reality the master of the city, was a Lett — a Lettish Jew — and there were a few Jews in the movement who had been in America long enough to obtain citizenship.

This corroborates what I’ve heard about a small wave of remigration from New York City that occurred when the Russian Revolution began. Apparently contact with America’s democratic values didn’t leave much of an impression. In any event, it seems that diversity wasn’t Russia’s greatest strength.

Other than that, none of the Bolsheviks were from Kiev. The local proletariat didn’t rush to the Red banner. Whatever hopeful optimism any of the laborers had in Communism was dispelled by its results. As for the takeover:

Professor Kraynsky told me that about 200 strangers came into the city to enforce the communistic order, that these aliens had about 5,000 troops at their command, and that they could incidentally call upon something like 500 other persons in Kiev.

The local lounge lizard Rosa Schwartz apparently started out in this final category, but became a Cheka agent. As the following shows, these 500 hangers-on were members of what Marx would’ve termed the lumpenproletariat. He considered them to be too unreliable to be revolutionaries. In this instance, it’s correct that they weren’t in it for the politics, but Marx’s pessimism was overestimated, since they were put into service as needed:

These other persons were not laboring people at all, nor were they persons with any definite trade. In the main, they were shop assistants, economic ne’er-do-wells, rolling stones of industry, who saw in the Bolshevist invasion a chance that the normal ways of life did not offer. Latsis used them, but precisely in so far as they served his ends. They were, according to all testimony, unwitting dupes of the movement, and the only actual Kiev residents in the smallest way involved.

As for the Bolsheviks themselves:

Three professors of the university escaped with their lives because they were medical men. I have it upon the testimony of all three of these: First, that with the exception of a very few of the prime leaders, like Latsis, those who exercised control in Kiev were syphilitic; second, that a considerable number were addicted to the use of drugs; third, that they were alcoholic. In short, there is responsible testimony that there was very little normality in the entire Bolshevist Government of Kiev. The head of the Government, Rokowsky, was a fop and a fool and a laughing stock.

It’s likely that many of these Untermenschen were recognizably mattoid types — or as Edward Dutton has put it, spiteful mutants.

Wrapping up

You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right here.

The last subsection is “Two Irishwomen’s Story.” As gruesome as the above was, the details here are too disgusting to repeat. The article concludes with the following:

The Reuter correspondent who transmitted this statement estimated the total number of Bolshevist victims in Kiev at more than 4,000.

That estimate represents an average of 20 politically-motivated summary executions per day. That’s an ambitious bit of thuggery, of course, though much worse was to come in later years. Torture by the Cheka continued, and continued to be perpetrated by its successor organizations.

It turns out that the White victory in Kiev was short-lived. The Reds overran the city again in December.

All told, we have a fairly good picture of the situation in Kiev at the time via multiple accounts. In round numbers, these include:

• Cheka members such as Martin Latsis and a few subordinate officers who were strongly ideologically committed and well-versed in Marxist theory. Despite their remarkable sadism, they were relatively clear-headed compared to their subordinates, insofar as they weren’t drug-sodden or syphilitic.
• 200 rank-and-file Bolsheviks, largely ethnic minorities, none of whom were from Kiev. They were typically syphilitic, generally suggesting certain character traits, and neurological degeneration would have been taking place in those in the tertiary stage. Many were also alcoholic or drug-addicted. They were generally uneducated, so their understanding of Marxism likely didn’t go very deep. Their degree of ideological commitment likewise probably varied considerably from those with strong feelings about it. Some were probably only involved in the revolution for the kicks.
• 5,000 soldiers, including some Chinese (perhaps mercenaries). They were loyal to the Bolsheviks, yet probably had little understanding of what Communism was all about, unless a political officer was assigned to give them instruction.
• 500 local lumpenproletariat, not ideologically committed but “useful idiots” available to be called upon as needed.
• 200,000 citizens who did not support Communism.

This made for about one Bolshevik or one of their allies for every 35 citizens. Why didn’t the people rise up and fight back? Despite this lopsided ratio, the Reds maintained control even with “only a most slender garrison at their command” through the following means:

• The citizens “were constantly in a state of semi-starvation” — it’s unclear if this resulted from the prevalent siege conditions or was deliberately engineered, as the later famine of 1932-33.
• Gun-grabbing.
• Terror tactics — summary executions and torture — per the script formulated in Moscow.

The lesson here is that if conditions similar to these were to recur, it’s a clear warning as to what might be in store. Was there a way to stop the Red Terror? Years later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had some ideas on this as he related in a footnote in The Gulag Archipelago:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [paddy wagon often disguised as a delivery truck] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

That much should be self-explanatory.

Further analysis

The episode of the Russian Revolution pictured at the head of this essay is discussed in Lothrop Stoddard’s Revolt against Civilization, and Kerry Bolton has provided further discussion of it here at Counter-Currents. The Rohrberg Commission of Enquiry corroborated the account, describing their findings:

All the cement floor of the great garage (the execution hall of the departmental Cheka of Kiev) was flooded with blood. This blood was no longer flowing, it formed a layer of several inches: it was a horrible mixture of blood, brains, of pieces of skull, of tufts of hair and other human remains. All the walls were bespattered with blood; pieces of brains and scalps were sticking to them. A gutter twenty-five centimetres wide by twenty-five centimetres deep and about ten metres long ran from the centre of the garage towards a subterranean drain.

That’s just the beginning; more is described there regarding the condition of the mutilated cadavers. This was a tragic occurrence during the Red Terror. Bolton concludes:

Such atavistic savagery goes even beyond mass murder. It is the psychosis of a Jeffrey Dahmer, or Edward Gein, rationalised as a political ideology with noble ideals, that continues to have adherents with respectable positions in academia.

This is a good point. Although politics provided the pretext, hacking people to bits in a blood-encrusted dungeon isn’t really about trying to develop a socialist economy or developing the first Five-Year Plan. If I’m missing the point about their motives, then it seems they had some remarkably curious notions about progress, socialist brotherhood, and building a better world for the masses.

Degenerates on the rampage

Archetypes Of The Left: The Abomination

In a series of videos on Leftist archetypes, Morgoth had some observations regarding certain degenerates, which he here calls abominations:

They’re usually physically repulsive. They’re usually morbidly obese, or they’ve got some kind of weird skin disease which makes their skin flake off, or they’ve got weird, dodgy sexual interests. They’re just genuinely sort of sewer people; they’re just horrible. And what you’ll find with them is that they know they are repulsive as well. They know that they disgust people. They know that their activities are disgusting to people, and they revel in it.

Given their personal characteristics, they typically naturally gravitate toward radical Leftist politics. The kind we’re most familiar with include the usual sort of crybullies and wretched social justice warriors who try to get people censored or fired merely for saying something politically incorrect. But sometimes these dregs can ascend to prominence by making themselves useful to the powers-that-be. If they’re put in a position of authority, they can unleash their pent-up resentment toward normal society:

And it’s because in a healthy society, the archetype of the abomination would be living in the gutter begging for scraps of bread. But when your culture, when your politics, when your civilization has been utterly corrupted, what you’ll find by a hostile elite, what you’ll find is that the degenerates, and the freaks, and the cruel people, the perverts, and the weirdos have been elevated into positions of power and influence over the normal population. And it’s not that they’re all these ideological fruitcakes; it’s that they’re of a certain character type that The System recognizes will be vindictive and malicious. And so they elevate them to positions of power over the normal population in order to bully them and to hate them and to rile it up.

Morgoth further points out that abominations aren’t necessarily very ideologically motivated. Even so, they’ll tenaciously defend the system that’s made them useful. If it were to suffer a reversal of fortune, not only would they become the dregs of society again, they’d have to face justice for what they’ve done.

Present-day warning signs

The United States was gripped by months of rioting during the Long, Hot Summer of Floyd in 2020, when hordes of urban orcs were supported by mobs of Leftist detritus. The Lügenpresse effectively fanned the flames by spinning a false narrative about the career criminal who died of heart failure and a fentanyl overdose during police custody. The presstitutes likewise covered for the rioters, best symbolized by the Clinton News Network reporter who famously characterized the mass vibrancy as “mostly peaceful” while standing in front of a blazing building.

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Police forces were often unable or unwilling to restore order, and were sometimes given “stand down” orders — or worse, were ordered to kneel to the troglodytes. Of the rioters who did get arrested, hordes were later let off scot-free by politically-motivated prosecutors whose elections had been promoted by Leftist non-governmental organizations. Since this was occurring during 2020’s ongoing Operation Get Trump Out of the White House, military intervention was prevented by General Mark Milley. He got on remarkably cozy terms with the ChiComs too, but that’s another story.

Early on, major corporations — America’s de facto ruling class – virtue-signaled their support of the orc hordes by issuing indignant statements on their websites. This was, of course, despite the fact that a corporation’s business is to sell products, not meddle in politics. Some also saw fit to e-mail their customers with such statements — and I’ve permanently stopped doing business with those that sent me openly anti-white messages. Worse, some huge corporations showered Black Lives Matter with donations — to the tune of about $1.5 billion.

There was simultaneously a massive outpouring of anti-white bile by the presstitutes, academia, public figures, and so forth, as if they were in a contest to outdo one other. Statues were vandalized and destroyed, typically with impunity, and any past figure who had expressed ideas that were out of sync with Current Year Leftist sentiments was fair game. In one instance, the enraged snowflakes even targeted a statue of Abraham Lincoln. (What did he ever do for blacks, anyway?) A skintellectual professor in Britain actually received a promotion in 2020 after saying that white lives don’t matter. Years prior, Jared Taylor — one of the coolest cats on our side — was banned from YouTube for calmly describing average IQ differences between the races, one of countless channels that was sent down the digital memory hole.

The mass tantrum wasn’t stopped by the country’s powerful institutions, either. They either backed the orc hordes, or in many cases were indifferent at their top levels. (I was expecting a mass defection by principled white liberals who were disgusted by all the violence and chaos. Perhaps some others might have realized that the anti-white agitation applied to them, too. But I haven’t heard from a single one of them.) What finally took the piss and vinegar out of the Long Hot Summer of Floyd was the Kyle Rittenhouse affair. That finally showed the violent Leftists that if you play stupid games, you might win stupid prizes.

A warning to the present

Just a decade ago, scenes similar to those that had occurred in Kiev in 1919 would have been unimaginable in the US. Lately, that’s not so certain. Marxism-Leninism isn’t the force that it once was, but a spinoff ideology, cultural Marxism, is a mind virus plaguing the Western world. In some ways it’s even more dysfunctional than Marxism-Leninism, since it’s a subversion strategy rather than a plan to create a socialist economy. A dozen critical theory professors afflicted with cranio-rectal impaction aren’t worth one Czechoslovakian central planner who tried his best to keep the economy moving.

Political dynasties don’t last forever, and the Deep State is no exception. Deep cracks are emerging in its formidable edifice, largely due to shortsightedness and misrule, thus hastening its inevitable downfall. Even so, The System remains dangerous, much like a wounded animal. They know that their power stands on shaky ground. The Bidet junta’s repressive measures — the surreal inauguration ceremony, the ideological purge of the military, gulag treatment for the January 6 protesters, etc. — can be interpreted as lashing out in an attempt to shore up their diminishing power.

The situation either can get better or worse. Obviously, it’s preferable if things get better. One way for that to happen would be a seismic shift in the Deep State, in which they see the error of their ways, sideline the worst of the swamp creatures, stop acting like a hostile elite at war with their own population, and start running things like a responsible ruling class. Better yet would be an orderly transition back to constitutional rule as intended, leaving the adults in charge. (The first scenario is possible but hardly a sure bet; the second is improbable, since people in power like to stay in power.) On the other hand, the Bidet junta’s trajectory could continue indefinitely, doubling down on anarcho-tyranny and anti-white agitation until everything finally falls apart. The worst case is Leftist wack jobs overthrowing the weakened government somewhere during the downhill slide.

The same types of people who carried out a months-long murderous rampage in Kiev a century ago are hardly in short supply lately. Are there radicalinskis with their brains marinated in Leftist ideology who can act as leaders? Every year the university system produces a new bumper crop of graduates indoctrinated to believe their society is the ultimate embodiment of evil. Until they grow out of it, presumably some are serious enough to act on their incendiary programming if given the chance.

To provide the second tier, are there neurotic types and other mental defectives who aren’t mere political theoreticians but who are fanatical and resentful enough to conduct the wetwork? Plenty of today’s social justice warriors are abominations afflicted with volcanic spite, and would become complete monsters if allowed free rein to lash out against normal society.

Could a paramilitary force be recruited for the third tier grunt work? The Long Hot Summer of Floyd showed that howling mobs of easily-agitated urban orcs can be activated as needed. In the event of a future worst-case scenario, if a lineup such as these were deputized as political enforcers, trouble would surely then follow.

The future hasn’t yet been written. We can hope for the best, but the worst is a possibility. We should therefore be prepared accordingly for every possibility.