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Category: Moscow

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2nd World War Moscow

The Führer’s monologues, 2

For the context of these translations click here,
for this monologue in German, here.

Führer Headquarters 5/6 July 1941, 11.30 a.m. – 1.50 a.m.

Conversation with [Nicolaus] v. Below[1] about whether we wouldn’t do well to publish pictures of the large-calibre gun, which had not yet been shown, now for once, for the moral shaking of the enemy. Long general discussion about car engines: the Führer’s first and later cars. [Hitler also said:]

The beauty of Crimea is made accessible to us by a motorway: the German south. Crete is hot and forestless. Cyprus would be nice, but we reach Crimea by road—Kiev. And our destination: Croatia. ‘I think there will be great joy after the war’.

Better than the railway, which is somewhat impersonal, the motor car will connect the peoples. What a factor on the way to the new Europe! Just as the autobahn [federal controlled-access highway system in Germany] made the inner-German borders disappear, the borders of the European countries will be abolished.

When asked whether it would be enough to have advanced as far as the Urals as a frontier, [I reply that] it will be enough to have advanced the frontier as far as there. Bolshevism must be eradicated; if necessary, to this end we would advance from there to wherever a new centre of resistance is forming. Moscow as the seat of this doctrine will disappear from the face of the earth as soon as the valuable goods are taken away. It won’t be possible for us to work with the Russians in the factories there. St. Petersburg [Leningrad] as a city is incomparably more beautiful than Moscow. This time, the art treasures of The Hermitage [Museum] would probably not have been transferred to the Kremlin—as in the [First] World War—but to houses in the countryside, unless they’ve been taken to the cities east of Moscow or by sea.

________

[1] Nicolaus von Below was Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, last in the rank of Major General.

Categories
2nd World War Communism Moscow Table talks (commercial translation) Third Reich

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 2

the-real-hitler 
Night of 5th-6th July 1941

What progress in the direction of the New Europe!

What matters is that Bolshevism must be exterminated. In case of necessity, we shall renew our advance wherever a new centre of resistance is formed. Moscow, as the centre of the doctrine, must disappear from the earth’s surface, as soon as its riches have been brought to shelter. There’s no question of our collaborating with the Muscovite proletariat. Anyhow, St. Petersburg, as a city, is incomparably more beautiful than Moscow.

Categories
1st World War Christendom Christopher Columbus French Revolution Inquisition Islam Israel / Palestine Judaism Karl Marx Leon Trotsky Mainstream media Moscow Napoleon Red terror Winston Churchill

Kemp on the Jews



Excerpted from
March of the Titans:
A History of the White Race
by Arthur Kemp:


The saga of the European Jews

Anti-Semitism—or, more accurately, anti-Jewishness—was not an invention of Hitler nor of his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Anti-Jewish sentiment has always stalked the Jews, where-ever they went: it seems as if their very presence always elicited a negative and hostile response from virtually all the nations in which they settled. Anti-Jewish sentiment existed long before Christianity, and the introduction of that religion and its distortions merely provided another means of expression for the latent anti-Jewish feeling which always followed the Jews like a shadow.

Origins of anti-Jewish sentiment. The origins of this original anti-Jewish feeling lie within the nature of Jewish society itself: exclusively ethno-centric with a binding religion and inward looking culture, the Jews always managed to maintain themselves as an isolated community in all of the nations in which they settled. This tradition has maintained itself to this day.

For this reason, Jews tended to live together in tightly knit communities in cities: these Jewish blocks came to be called ghettoes, and it is important to realize that the first ghettoes were entirely voluntary Jewish neighborhoods. This was then re-inforced by religious laws limiting membership of the Jewish community by race—only people born of Jewish women could be accepted as Jews. This is another practice which has survived to the present day—people of no direct Jewish ancestry can only become Jews with great difficulty, and even then a large section of the Jewish community, the orthodox Jews, will not recognize converts as true Jews.

Finally, the well-known Jewish propensity for business and the ability to accumulate vast amounts of money—a phenomena well known to this day—was the source of much original anti-Jewish feeling. Gentiles (or, Goy as the Jewish Talmud) refer to non-Jews of all races, with the literal translation of cattle—which in itself is an important insight of how the writers of the Talmud viewed the outside world.

The true origins of anti-Jewish feeling therefore lies in a combination of three major factors:

• the self imposed isolation of the Jewish people;

• the open hostility to Non-Jews as espoused in their ethno-centric and tightly binding religion; and

• the propensity of their financial dealings.

Thus it was that the first anti-Jewish outbursts occurred long before the introduction of Christianity. Christianity merely added to these emotions: as the wave of Christian fanaticism swept Europe, all sense of reason or rationality was lost, and, forgetting that Christianity itself had sprung from Judaism, the Christians gave vent to their long simmering dislike of the Jews by accusing them of being the killers of Christ to boot.

The hostility was however, reciprocated: the Talmud, which is a collection of rabbinical writings added to the Old Testament, contains many violently anti-Gentile remarks, comparing non-Jewish women to whores and providing specific instruction on how it is permissible for Jews to cheat non-Jews in business.

Both Christians and Jews then, altered their religious teachings in attempts to whip up hostility to each other in a bizarre semi-religious and semi-racial clash.

Jews occupy high posts in Moorish Spain and Portugal. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Jews started settling in larger numbers in Western Europe, with many Sephardic Jews crossing over from Africa into Spain. Hot on their heels came the Muslim Moors, who gave the Jews favored status in Moorish occupied Spain: Jews came to fill the highest position in the Moorish republic of Granada in Spain and owned one-third of all the real estate in Barcelona.

When the Moorish occupation of Spain was finally ended, the Christian victors did not take kindly to what they correctly saw as Jewish collaboration with the Moors. This led to the Spanish version of the inquisition, which was primarily aimed at Jews who had falsely converted to Christianity in an attempt to escape the revenge attacks on Jews carried out by the victorious Christian armies. Finally, the Jews were formally expelled from Spain in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas.

France. As avid supporters of the French Revolution, Jews were rewarded when the National Assembly enfranchised Jews in 1791, simultaneously stripping all restrictions which had been placed on them.

Napoleon Bonaparte was given much support by Europe’s Jews in his campaigns across Europe, for where ever he went he lifted whatever restrictions there had been upon the Jews. Once again, this was only good for Jews over the short term. The downside came when Napoleon was finally beaten: Jews were associated with the destruction that his military adventures had wrought; virtually all of the reforms he had instituted were reversed as a result.

However, by the 1860s, most of the Jewish communities in Western Europe had more or less been de-ghettoized, and Napoleon’s reforms had for the greatest part been re-instituted.

Jewish domination of media in the West. Whether by deliberate plan or accident, the situation has arisen whereby Jews have ended up dominating the mass media forms of both the USA, and to a slightly smaller extent, of Western Europe. The ownership of the mass media by a small group of Jews is well documented and full details are easily obtainable on the Internet.

This Jewish domination of the media can, and does, have serious consequences, so vividly illustrated by the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. These events were triggered exclusively by the unflagging US support given to Israel against the Palestinians.

The fact that the USA—and much of the West—continues to support Israel at any cost, including the deaths of thousands of its own citizens, is the surest evidence yet of the power of the Jewish lobby in both the mass media (which generates “public opinion”) and of the Jewish lobby’s famed control over the US government, and to a lesser extent, the governments of Western Europe.


The expulsion of the Jews

The Spanish Jews were amongst the first to feel the full effects of the fall of the Moors from power in Spain. In 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand formally expelled all Jews from that country, punishing the Spanish Jews for having actively collaborated with the Moors during their 780 year long occupation. The victorious Moors (who, because of their common Semitic ancestry with the Spanish Jews and the already poor relations between the Jews and the Goths) employed several Spanish Jews in their administration of Spain in some of the highest posts, even though there were occasional outbursts of anti-Jewish feeling amongst the Arabs themselves.

In the city of Grenada, the last to fall to the White armies, the Spanish were enraged to learn that the Moorish king’s prime minister and most of his leading advisors were Jews. A massacre of Jews in the city followed that discovery. This alliance between a number of Spanish Jews and the Moors inflamed the anti-Semitic feeling amongst the subdued Goths even further; a sentiment which would later flare up in the form of the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

The Inquisition. When Spain was finally liberated from the non-White Moors, the long suppressed anti-Jewish sentiment broke out in full fury. In that year all unbaptized Jews were expelled en masse from Spain, and the infamous Spanish Inquisition, set up to enforce Christendom, was used to persecute Jews, who, because of their collaboration with the Moors, were regarded as the implacable enemies of White Spain.

Earlier Isabella had obtained from the Pope in Rome a dispensation to establish the Inquisition in Spain, which soon turned into a fully fledged anti-Jewish campaign under the name of Christianity. The first hearings against the Conversos were held in February 1481 in Castile; it combined with the outbreak of the bubonic plague. Many Christian fanatics linked the outbreak of the plague to the start of proceedings against the Conversos, and the Jews were blamed for the plague as well as their other real or imagined crimes, which included accusations that they had betrayed the city of Toledo to the invading Moors by opening the city gates at a crucial junction in the siege of that city.

The leading Conversos held a secret meeting to resist the Inquisition with force. Isabella’s spies however found out about the planned rebellion and arrested the ringleaders, most prominent amongst them a rabbi named Diego de Susan. He, along with six other Jews, was tried for subversion, found guilty and executed by burning at the stake in late 1481.

The Conversos then broke rank in panic, and starting fleeing Spain in large numbers, some going to Italy, but many going to Muslim held Turkey, where they once again enjoyed special status. Much property belonging to the Converso Jews—who by some estimates made up as much as 20 per cent of Spain’s pre-Inquisition population—was seized by Isabella and added to the state treasury.

After the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews, Spain entered its Golden Age. It created a huge empire, and along with Portugal, became one of the most powerful nations in Europe.


The First Great Brothers’ War

The World Zionist movement, a nationalist Jewish organization founded by European Jews to create a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, saw an opportunity open up with the British occupation of Palestine, and persuaded the British foreign minister, Lord Arthur Balfour, to issue a public promise in 1917 to the effect that Britain would support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This public promise became known as the Balfour Declaration.

In return for this undertaking, the World Zionist Movement then promised Britain that it would marshal the world’s Jews behind the Allied cause and, more importantly, endeavor to use their influence to bring the United States of America into the war. In this way, considerable pressure was brought to bear on the American government to enter the war against Germany, although by this stage they hardly needed much prompting.

The United States enters the war. While the World Zionist Congress was actively working behind the scenes with the powerful Jewish lobby in the American government, the course of the war at sea presented the American president, Woodrow Wilson, with an opportunity to enter the war against Germany, despite his presidential election campaign having been specifically fought on a non-interventionist ticket.

In February 1917, the US broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and formally declared war in April. The timing of the US entry into the war—virtually simultaneously with the Balfour Declaration—is too good to be coincidental. By June 1917, more than 175,000 American troops were already in France; by the end of the war more than two million Americans had been deployed in France.

Waves of fresh American troops captured 14,000 exhausted and virtually starving German troops at Saint-Mihiel, and then pushed on through the Argonne forest, breaking the German lines between Metz and Sedan.

With this major defeat, the German government asked for an armistice in October 1918—this attempt to end the war failed when the American president Woodrow Wilson insisted on negotiating only with a democratic German government. The British then pushed home an attack in Belgium and Northern France and early in November American and French forces reached Sedan. By early November, the Hindenburg line had been broken and the Germans were in disarray.

The suppressed link – Jews and communism

The creation of the Soviet Union was to impact upon history for the greater part of the 20th Century—and an understanding of the sub-racial and ideological divisions it caused is crucial to understanding not only the events of that century, but also to understanding the flare up of anti-Jewish sentiment which culminated in the creation of the Third Reich in Germany.

For the Soviet Union’s best kept secret was that the Bolshevik elite had one outstanding characteristic: it had an inordinately large number of Jews in its controlling body.

Virtually all of the important Bolshevik leaders were Jews: they included the “father of the revolution,” Leon Trotsky (whose real name was Lev Bronstein: in an attempt to hide his Jewishness, he adopted the name Trotsky); Lev Kamenev, the early Bolshevik leader who later went on to become a leading member of the Politburo, was born with the surname Rosenfeld; Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Petrograd Soviet, was born with the surname Apfelbaum; and many other famous Communists of the time, such as Karl Radek, Lazar Kaganovich; and Moses Urtisky, (the head of the Cheka) who all changed their names for reasons similar to that of Trotsky.

The Bolshevik’s Party’s Central Committee chairman, Yakov Sverdlov, was also Jewish—and it was he who gave the order to the Jewish Soviet secret policeman, Yurovsky, to murder the Tsar—Yurovsky personally carried out this order.

As if the Russian Revolution was not enough, the originator of the Communist ideology itself, Karl Marx, was also a Jew, with his family name in reality being Levi.

The large Jewish role in the Russian revolution, combined with the fact that Marx had been born a Jew, was manna from heaven for the European anti-Semitic movement, and the link between Jews and Communism was exploited to the hilt, particularly by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) movement in Germany during the 1920s.

It was not only in Germany that the association of Jews with Communism was made: all over the world Jews became associated with radical political movements, sometimes justifiably so, other times not. Nonetheless, the presence of so many Jews in the creation of the Soviet Union played a massive role in justifying anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe prior to, and with, the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Directly after the First World War, there were another three specifically Jewish Communist revolutions in Europe itself:

• the German Jew, Kurt Eisner, led a short lived communist revolution in Munich, Bavaria from November 1918 to February 1919 (at the same time that Adolf Hitler was an unknown soldier in that city—the effect of being a first hand witness to a Jewish and Communist-led revolution helped to cement Hitler’s anti-Communist and anti-Jewish feelings);

• the short lived Sparticus uprising in Berlin (September 1918 to January 1919) led by the German Jews, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg; and

• the short lived Communist tyranny in Hungary led by the Jew, Bela Kun (Cohen), from March to August 1919.

These incidents all helped to identify Jews with Communism in the public mind: in this light it becomes perfectly explicable why the Nazi Party was able to win support on an anti-Communist and open anti-Jewish platform.

Jews in the later Soviet Union. Jews retained their leading roles in Soviet society until growing anti-Semitism within the Communist Party itself led to a change in policy. Trotsky was the first major Jewish casualty: he split with Stalin over the issue of international socialism and the need to spread the revolution: he was forced into exile in 1929. He was then assassinated in Mexico City in 1940, allegedly by a Stalinist agent.

By the middle 1930s, Stalin had started purging the Soviet Communist Party of other important Jews. The period immediately following the end of the Second World War and the creation of the state of Israel saw another rise in Soviet anti-Semitism: by 1953, Stalin had started purging all Jews in the Soviet hierarchy who were also Zionists.

The Communists, quite correctly, saw Zionism as Jewish nationalism and contrary to the interests of an international socialist brotherhood. Many leading Russian Jews were also fervent Zionists: and it was this group that was then targeted for persecution, and who became famous throughout the rest of the lifetime of the Soviet Union as the victims of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Zionism, as an expression of Jewish separatism was declared a crime against the Soviet state, and Zionist organizations were forced to close down their operations inside the Soviet Union. East Germany, as an official Soviet satellite, was forbidden by Moscow to make any reparations payments to the Zionist created state of Israel for the treatment of Jews by the Nazi government.

Not all Russian Jews were Zionists: those who were not, were generally left alone and some did achieve prominent positions within the post Stalin Soviet Union. Many thousands of Jews did however leave the Soviet Union—estimates putting the total number at over the one million mark, with most settling in Israel or the United States.

The Encyclopedia Judaica, published in Jerusalem, Israel, by Jews, is available at most large public libraries and is in English. This reference book for all things Jewish is quite open about the Jewish role in Communism, particularly early Communism, and contains a large number of admissions in this regard.

The Volume 5 of the 1971 edition of the
Encyclopedia Judaica, published in Jerusalem, Israel,
from where all of the extracts below have been taken.

Under the entry for “Communism”: in Volume 5, page 792, the following appears: “The Communist Movement and ideology played an important part in Jewish life, particularly in the 1920s, 1930s and during and after World War II.” On page 793, the same Encyclopedia Judaica then goes on to say that “Communist trends became widespread in virtually all Jewish communities. In some countries, Jews became the leading element in the legal and illegal Communist Parties.”

The Encyclopedia Judaica goes on to reveal that the Communist International actually instructed Jews to change their names so as “not confirm right-wing propaganda that presented Communism as an alien, Jewish conspiracy.”

The Encyclopedia Judaica then goes on to describe the overwhelming role Jews played in creating the Soviet Union. On page 792 it says: “Individual Jews played an important role in the early stages of Bolshevism and the Soviet Regime”.

On page 794, this Jewish reference book then goes to list the Jews prominent in the upper command of the Russian Communist party: these included Maxim Litvinov (later foreign minister of Soviet Russia); Grigori Zinoviev, Lwev Kamenev, Jacob Sverdlov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Karl Radek, amongst many others.

The organizer of the Revolution was Trotsky, who prepared a special committee to plan and prepare the coup which brought the Communists to power. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, this committee, called the Military Revolutionary Committee, had five members—three of whom were Jews. The Politburo—the supreme governing body of Russia immediately after the Communist Revolution—had four Jews amongst its seven members, according to page 797 of the Jewish Encyclopedia Judaica.

While many have alleged that Lenin was also Jewish, or at least of part Jewish origin, there is little concrete evidence of this. However, Lenin was ardently pro-Jewish, branding anti-Semitism (correctly) as “counter revolutionary” (Encyclopedia Judaica, page 798). A statement against anti-Semitism was made by Lenin in March 1919 and was “one of the rare occasions when his voice was put on a phonograph record to be used in a mass campaign against the counterrevolutionary incitement against the Jews,” according to the Encyclopedia Judaica, page 798. One of the first laws passed by the new Soviet Communist government was to outlaw anti-Semitism (Encyclopedia Judaica, page 798).

Winston Churchill on the Jewish role in communism. The preponderance of Jews in the inner sanctum of the Communist revolution in Russia was in fact well known at the time that the revolution took place: it is only in the post Second World War II era that this fact has been suppressed.

A good example of the contemporary awareness of the Jewish nature of early Russian Communism can be found in the writing of the young Winston Churchill, later to become prime minister of Great Britain, who, in 1920, was also working as journalist.

In 1920, Churchill wrote a full page article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920 detailing the Jewish involvement in the revolution. Churchill discusses in this article the split between Jews: some are Communists, he wrote, while others are Jewish nationalists. Churchill favored the Jewish nationalists, (and of course they indeed fall foul of the Jewish Communists, eventually becoming bitter enemies) and he appealed to what he called “loyal Jews” to ensure that the Communist Jews did not succeed. Churchill went even further and blamed the Jews for “every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century”, writing:

This movement amongst the Jews (the Russian Revolution) is not new. From the days of Spartacus Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kuhn (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and the reconstruction of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution.

It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities has gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from Jewish leaders.

Churchill also pointedly accused Leon Trotsky (Bronstein) of wanting to establish a “world wide Communistic state under Jewish domination” in this article.

Churchill was not the only journalist to note the Jewish role in the Russian Revolution: Robert Wilton, the chief correspondent for the London Times, who was stationed in Russia at the time, wrote in his book The Last Days of the Romanovs (Hornton Butterworth, London, 1920, pages 147, 22-28, 81,118, 199, 127, 139-148) that “90 per cent” of the new Soviet government was composed of Jews. The correspondent for the London Morning Post, Victor Marsden, went further and actually compiled a list of names of the top 545 Bolshevik officials: of these, Marsden said, 454 were Jews and only 23 Non-Jewish Russians (All These Things, A.N. Field, Appendix B pages 274-276).

The US Army’s telegrams . The American Army Intelligence Service had its agents in Russia at the time of the Communist Revolution, and the Jewish nature of that revolution is accurately reflected in those reports.

An American Senate subcommittee investigation into the Russian Revolution heard evidence, put on congressional record, that “In December 1919, under the presidency of a man named Apfelbaum (Zinovieff), out of the 388 members of the Bolshevik central government, only 16 happened to be real Russians, and all the rest (with the exception of a Negro from the U.S.) were Jews” (U.S. Senate Document 62, 1919).

[Kemp includes here photocopy images of these telegrams from official US National Archives, and then he adds:]

Both describe the domination of the Bolshevik Communists by Jews, using the words “Fifty per cent of Soviet Government in each town consists of Jews of the worst type.”

Copies of documents from the US National Archives are freely available to anyone from the Washington DC, USA, office.

However, none of these authorities quoted above dared to use quite the language of a US Military Intelligence officer, one captain Montgomery Schuyler, who sent two reports to Washington in March and June 1919, describing in graphic detail the Jewish role in the Russian Revolution. Both these reports were only declassified in September 1957 and the originals are still held in the US National Archives in Washington, open for public inspection.

The first report, sent from Omsk on 1 March 1919, contains the following paragraph: “it is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning, guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type”.

The second report, dated 9 June 1919, and sent from Vladivostok, said that of the “384 commissars there were 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number 264 had come to Russia from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.”

Both these American army military intelligence reports are freely available from the US National Archives in Washington DC. The importance of this information does not need to be overemphasized in the light of the crucial governing role the commissars played in the running the early Soviet society.

It therefore came as no surprise when anti-Semitism was duly entered into the Soviet law books as a death penalty crime.


Note:

For excerpts of all chapters of Kemp’s book see: here.

Categories
Ancient Rome Attila Crusades Demography Ethnic cleansing Genghis Khan Goths Huns Indo-European heritage Islam Jerusalem Kali Yuga Miscegenation Mongols Moscow Philosophy of history Racial studies Real men

Other darkest hours



Excerpted from
March of the Titans:
A History of the White Race
by Arthur Kemp:

The first great race war – Attila the Hun

The Goths and their racial cousins kept up a continuous localized war with the Romans for many years, and would have doubtless continued to do so for even longer had a new powerful racial foe not emerged which threatened to destroy the Goths, Germans, Romans and indeed all of Europe.


Alans – The first victims

Physically described by Romans as being “short, brown skinned and slant eyed” the Huns emerged from Central Asia and burst upon the easternmost Whites, a tribe called the Alans, in 372 AD. The Alans, a Nordic tribe still living in the ancestral homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas, were crushed by the Huns who had developed cavalry fighting to a fine skill. Remnants of the Alans fled south and west—to this day there are traces of this last Nordic tribe to be found amongst the present day inhabitants of the region.

The Alans who fled westwards sought refuge with the Ostrogoths, bringing with them the first news of the new Asiatic terror.


Ostrogoths fall before Hun invasion

If the Ostrogoths wondered what had befallen the Alans, they did not have to wait long to find out. Very soon the Huns swept even further west and invaded the Ostrogothic lands (in modern day western Russia) and defeated them as well.

The Ostrogothic king, Hermanric, committed suicide when the scale of the invasion became apparent, and his successor, Vitimer, was killed while trying to hold back the Huns. The Ostrogothic kingdom in western Russia disintegrated, and its survivors streamed further westwards, into the lands of the Visigoths and Slavs.


Above is a depiction of a scene which befell hundreds of thousands of Whites. A raiding non-White party attacks a Roman villa, killing the males and carrying off the White women for sexual slavery.



Athanaric, king of the Visigoths, engaged the Huns at the Dniester River in modern day Bulgaria, but the Huns defeated the Visigothic army as well. After this defeat, the Visigoths were forced to fall back and beg the Romans for permission to settle inside Roman territory.

This appeal was made all the more remarkable when it is borne in mind that the Romans and Visigoths had been at virtual constant war for near enough to two centuries. So when the Romans finally gave permission to the Visigoths to move into Roman territory, it was at a terrible price—the Visigoths had to surrender all their weapons and hand over large numbers of their women and children as hostages.

Crossing the Danube in 376 AD and settling in modern day Bulgaria, the Visigoths managed to gain a temporary reprieve from the ravages of the Huns. The conditions under which the Romans forced them to stay were such that it was not long before Visigothic resentment boiled over into open rebellion.

The Visigoths secretly re-armed themselves and launched a campaign against the Roman strongholds of Thrace and Macedonia in northern Greece. Finally, in the battle of Hadrianople (378 AD) in modern day Greece, a Visigothic army defeated a Roman army under the personal command of the Emperor Valens—who had been the one to impose the harsh conditions of refuge upon the Visigoths. Valens himself was killed in this battle.

The defeat was all the more ironic as a large number of the Roman army’s soldiers were in fact Gothic mercenaries. The Eastern Roman Empire then accepted the presence of the Visigoths in central Europe, and lifted many of the restrictions placed upon them by Valens.

While the Goths and the Romans were grappling with one another, the former Visigothic lands were being seized by the Huns.

By the time of the Battle of Hadrianople, the Huns had occupied most of Dacia, the land originally seized by the Visigoths from Romans (and which corresponds to the present day country of Rumania).

Europe almost entirely invaded

At this stage the racial balance of Europe could have swung decisively in favor of the Asiatic Mongolians—all the original White ancestral homelands had been either destroyed or occupied by the Huns.

In addition to this, the Huns also physically occupied large parts of western Russia and portions of central and eastern Europe, including entire portions of modern central Germany, Hungary and Rumania, turning them overnight into mini Asiatic states.

Not content with these conquests, the Asiatic Huns began pushing further westwards, causing entire nations to be moved and destroying virtually everything in their path.

In this way the remnants of the Alans, and many other minor Nordic tribes were forced westwards, in turn displacing other already settled tribes. It was this displacement which led to further migrations of assorted Germanic tribes into Spain and even as far as North Africa.

By 432 AD, during the reign of Roman Emperor Theodosius I, the Huns had increased their power base and stranglehold on eastern and parts of central Europe to the point where they actually collected a large annual tribute from Rome. (By this time Rome was totally dependent on “barbarian” or German and Gaulish mercenaries for its defense—the mostly mixed race population of Rome had long since lost any social cohesiveness and ability to provide recruits for the army).

Attila the Hun – brutal leader

In 433 AD, the Huns gained a new king, whose name would become a byword for the Asiatic terror—Attila.

The new Asiatic king established his headquarters at the village of Buda on the Danube River in 445 AD (Buda was later to combine with another village on the other side of the river, Pest, to become Budapest, the modern capital of Hungary).

By this time the Hunnish empire stretched from the Caspian Sea in the east right up to the North Sea. In all of the area the Huns carried out a vicious racial war of extermination against the Whites who militarily were too weak to resist. Countless White settlements were wiped out, with the women routinely being carried off into captivity.

In 452 AD, Attila began moving west again, with the intention of seizing France and finishing off all of Europe.

Hunnish blood enters eastern Europe

By this stage the Huns had started on a limited scale to physically integrate with sections of the peoples they had conquered. Traces of the Mongolian influence can still be seen amongst some peoples in eastern Europe (the so called “Slavic look” which in fact is not Slavic at all, but mixed Mongolian/Slavic.)

Possibly as a result of this limited integration process, the Huns managed to recruit some locals into their army, and units of various eastern European tribes found themselves in the Hunnish army which finally invaded France. They were dealt with extremely harshly by their distant racial cousins if captured. The vast majority of the Hunnish army were however Mongolian and under the ultimate leadership of the unquestionably militarily astute Attila.

The Huns stood poised to push through to the Atlantic Ocean—Europe stood on the very brink of extermination.

The Battle of Troyes – Whites unite to defeat the Asiatics

The threat of the Hunnish army finally forced the ever squabbling Romans and Visigoths into an united front. A Roman army, under the last of the Western Empire’s properly Roman generals, Aetius, joined up with a Visigoth army under their king, Theodoric I, and together they met the Hunnish army in central France near the present day city of Troyes in 451 AD.

In a day long battle, both sides inflicted heavy casualties on the other, with the Visigoth king, Theodoric, being killed in the fighting. By nightfall the combined White army had gained the upper hand over the Asians.

Attila was forced to retreat all the way across Europe as far as Hungary, exacting a terrible revenge in slaughter and looting from those White settlements unfortunate enough to be in his path of retreat.

Defeated in the west, Attila made one last attempt to destroy the Whites. In 452 the Asians invaded northern Italy and razed the city of Aqueila to the ground, massacring as many of the inhabitants as they could find (the survivors fled into the nearby marshes, there to later establish the city of Venice).

Suddenly in 453 AD, the sixty year-old Attila died—allegedly of a burst blood vessel incurred during his wedding night exertions following his marriage to a local German princess. (How much of that story is true is open to question: what is fact is that he took a blond German girl, named Hildico, as his wife, following an example set by many of his Mongolian warriors, whose genetic footprint can be seen on some faces in eastern Europe and Russia to this day.)

The Battle of Nedao – Germanics save the white race from extinction

Attila’s death was the signal for a revolt of the people subjugated by the Huns. In 454 AD, the Goths, Slavs and others in Europe who had managed to survive the nearly 70 years of cruel Asiatic rule, rose up and at the battle of Nedao in that year, defeated the Huns in a straight fight between a Mongolian and a Germanic army. The victory was total and the Huns were finally destroyed.

The battle of Nedao became one of the most significant battles in White history, for without it Europe would most likely have been completely overrun by Asiatics before 500 AD.

The Germans, as victors over the Huns, became famous amongst their Indo-European racial cousins, with the Icelandic word for German to this day translating literally as “peoples’ defender”.

Suffering total defeat at the hands of the Germans, the vast majority of the surviving Asiatic Huns then fled back into the Far East, to the Sea of Azov in Russia—fearing the retribution by the Whites that would follow (a fear which was fully justified, as the enraged and victorious Whites mercilessly put to death any bands of Hun stragglers they found).

The Hunnish legacy

However, the Huns left two significant things behind them—firstly they gave their name to the area which had functioned as their headquarters during their racial war, Hungary.

Secondly, some admixture of Mongolian genes occurred amongst the Slavic tribes which had been under the Asiatic Hunnish occupation for nearly 80 years. This was however by no means complete and only ultimately affected a small, but significant, number of the Indo-European Slavs.

The Slavs then expanded eastward into the regions of Russia which had been overrun by the Huns on their way west. There they also mixed with scattered remnants of the partly Hunnish, partly Slavic peoples the Huns had left behind.

All these mixes contributed towards creating the distinctive Russian “Slavic look” visible to this day in a small percentage of the eastern European population in Russia and elsewhere.

The greatest effect of the Hunnish invasion of Europe was however the extinction of the source of the Indo-European tribes from their ancestral homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas. Never again would this territory produce another Indo-European Nordic tribe—the fountain of new Nordic tribes was forever extinguished, one of the most significant acts of racial genocide ever seen.


The second great race war – the Crusades

• By 700 AD, Islamic armies had occupied North Africa and had destroyed what remained of the Gothic Vandal state.

• As the Crusaders approached Antioch [during the siege of that city], the Muslim defenders under Turcoman Yagji-Shah started killing all the remaining Whites in the city, along with any non-White Christians who had the misfortune to be present… By nightfall of 3 June 1099, the city was in White hands—and every non-White who had foolishly remained behind in the city was dead.

• By the time they [the Crusaders] got to Constantinople however, the wonder on the European faces must have been apparent—they appeared to have as little in common with the Byzantine Empire as with the Muslims, not only racially, but even in language. The Byzantine Christians did not recognize the Pope, spoke Greek instead of Latin and had distinctly Middle Eastern art and architectural forms.

Unlike the Hebrews’ ethnic cleansing policies recounted in the Old Testament, in the Crusades westerners committed the same mistake of all white conquests throughout history, even after capturing Jerusalem. Kemp writes:

However, the Crusader states did not try to change the population make-up of the region by enforced migration or expulsion—nor did they even try to convert the natives. So it was that the first European colonies were created: ironically in the areas where once their now very distant racial cousins had once walked… The Crusaders’ failure to majority populate the areas they conquered with their own racial kind led to their disappearance in a very short while—so that now only their vast empty buildings stand as monuments to the spirit and heroism of the times.

In the 2011, printed edition of his book Kemp adds this phrase about the Crusades:

Never a majority, the white Christian soldiers were overrun, and within three hundred years almost all trace was vanished.


The third great race war – the Moors invade Europe

The invasion of Western Europe by a non-White Muslim army after 711 AD, very nearly extinguished modern White Europe—certainly the threat was no less serious than the Hunnish invasion which had earlier created so much chaos. While the Huns were Asiatics, the Moors were a mixed race invasion—part Arabic, part Black and part mixed race, always easily distinguishable from the Visigothic Whites of Spain.

To give a flavor of the content of this chapter I will add some subtitles to the images that Kemp chose for this specific chapter—omitting the images:

• Above: A dramatic painting—based on actual events—showing Moors celebrating the fall of a White Spanish town, with White females captured alive. For several years the Moors demanded—and received—a yearly tribute of young White girls for use in their harems after the great Moorish victory of 711. This yearly tribute continued until 791 AD when the Whites had recovered their strength enough to break the terms of a treaty with the non-Whites.

• Above: Captured White prisoners about to be decapitated by Saracens: note how the Spaniards are depicted with blond hair.

• Above: The non-White Moorish advance into Europe seemed unstoppable when in 732 AD they launched a massive invasion of present day France. The king of the leading White tribe in that country, Charles Martel of the Franks (who had their headquarters in present day Paris) mobilized a counter attack. A great race battle took place between the towns of Tours and Poitiers in central France in October 732 AD. The battle was one of the most momentous in the history of the White race. Defeat would have meant that all of Western Europe might have fallen under the sway of Islam, and the mixed races from the East would have poured into continental Europe. Accounts have it that 375,000 Moors were killed—the White army was utterly victorious over the non-White army and the Moorish invasion of Europe was halted in its tracks. Charles Martel earned his name—Martel means “hammer”—at this battle—he personally bludgeoned to death a large number of non-Whites with his favorite weapon, a mighty hammer.



The fourth great race war – Bulgars, Avars, Magyars and Khazars

The lands making up western and southern Russia, Asia Minor (Turkey) and the southeastern Balkans were to be the scene of some of the most dramatic racial conflicts between various tribes of Europeans on the one hand, and various Asiatic, Mongol, and mixed race Muslim armies on the other.

These wars started around 550 AD, a century after the crushing of the Mongolian Hunnish invasion of Europe. They only finally stopped with the defeat of new Asian invaders some 400 years later, with the defeat of an Asiatic alliance known as the Magyars, in Bavaria in 954 AD.

This massive struggle against Asian and Mongolian hordes can rightly be grouped into one heading, even though different players acted in the drama.

If these combined Asian invaders had not been turned back, then it would most certainly have given the non-White Moorish invasion in Spain, which took place in the same time span, a far better chance of success. The White race might have been exterminated between the Asians and the Moors—but it was not.



The fifth great race war – Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan’s first raid was into Russia in 1221, when his army smashed their way through several southern Russian principalities who were taken completely unawares by the yellow-skinned Mongolians.

Soon a huge part of southern Russia was under the sway of Genghis Khan—and not even the efforts of the Russian tribes to the north could dislodge him.

The invasion of southern Russian was in fact the only invasion of White held lands in which Genghis himself took part. He died suddenly in 1227, and the Mongolian armies paused for several years in southern Russia while a successor to Genghis was chosen from amongst the leading Mongolian chieftains.

In the interim the Mongols instituted a grim reign of terror over the White tribes they had subjugated. Whole settlements were slaughtered en masse, with lucky survivors barely escaping to the north and west, bringing tales of terror from the new Asiatic invaders.

One tactic for which the Mongols became famous was to sack a town, leave and then a few days later send a rearguard party back to the sacked town to see if any survivors had made their way back—any such unfortunates were put to death on the spot. In this way entire regions were quite literally stripped of all living souls.

Finally in 1236, the Mongol armies moved again, striking westwards in such numbers and ferocity that they reached deep into the Balkans, Hungary, northern Russia, Poland and central Germany.

Under the leadership of one Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, the Asiatics resumed their westward invasions in 1237, sacking the Russian city of Kiev in 1240, continuing westward into Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the Danube River valley.


Whites defeated at battle of Leignitz

An alliance of Germans, Poles and Teutons under the command of Duke Henry II of Silesia formed a united White army and desperately tried to stem the Asiatic advance. They met the Mongols in battle at Leignitz in what was then Poland in April 1241, but were badly defeated. Henry was beheaded by the Mongolians and for several days afterwards his impaled head was carried around on a spear at the head of the Mongol army until it rotted away.

The southern Indo-European tribes, the Slavs, then put together a new White army and launched an attack on the main body of the Mongol army in southern Europe. The battle, fought just north of Budapest, at the Sajo River in April 1241, saw the White armies defeated once again. The combined defeats inflicted upon the Russians, Germans and Slavs meant that all of Europe lay open to the Mongols.

In 1242, the Mongol hordes penetrated into the suburbs of Vienna itself—at that critical moment the non-White invasion ceased of its own accord.

It was a quirk of destiny which saved Europe and its peoples from complete extermination at the hands of the Mongols. In December 1241, the Asiatic army had just started on their final drive westwards, marching across the frozen Danube River, when a messenger arrived from their homeland in Mongolia—the successor to Genghis Khan had died. Then and there, the Mongol army turned around and withdrew back to the east. Leaderless, they were never to penetrate into central Europe again.

Even though the Mongols withdrew from central Europe, all of eastern and southern Russia remained under Mongol occupation, where Batu created what became known as the Khanate of the Golden Horde—the name originating from an annual tribute of riches extracted from the northern Russians, who only escaped occupation by formally acknowledging themselves as vassals by paying a yearly tribute to the Mongol rulers in the south.

The only eastern European state which was not humiliated in this way was Baltic Lithuania. As Mongol strength slowly declined, the Lithuanians expanded, eventually occupying an area stretching from the Baltic right to the Black Sea in the south. Lithuania in fact became the most powerful state in eastern Europe.

By the early 1300s, the Mongol Empire in the south had been wracked by internal divisions, with rival claimants to the Mongol throne launching a series of fratricidal wars amongst themselves. Seizing advantage of the confusion in the Asiatic ranks, the Grand Duke Dimitry of Moscow led an army against a huge Mongol force at Kukikovo, on the banks of the Don River, in 1330. Although great casualties were suffered by both sides, the White Russians won: the first major reverse suffered by the Mongols since their occupation of southern Russia.


Ivan the Great

The Mongols were then further weakened by renewed internal dissension, with a new Mongol warlord, Tamerlane, conquering much of the original Mongol Empire in Russia in 1395. After Tamerlane’s death, his empire was broken into four independent khanates: Astrakhan, Kazan, Crimea, and Sibir.

So divided, the Mongols were at last weakened to the point where the Muscovite principality, under the leadership of Ivan III, took the opportunity in 1480, to refuse to pay the annual tribute to the Horde.

Ivan, called The Great, who ruled from 1440 to 1505, then followed up the refusal to pay the tribute with a series of localized wars which expanded the borders of his kingdom—some were against other White principalities while some were against local Mongol chieftains. In this way a succession of slow moves south, combined with a process of assimilation, saw the last of the Mongol states vanish another century later, although the names they gave to these regions still persist.

The first major White reconquest of the southern parts of Russia only began in the mid 1500s, when bands of Russian peasants, known as Cossacks, fleeing the autocratic fiefdoms of northern Russia, started settling along the banks of the Don River basin.

The Cossacks engaged in a large clearing operation lasting many decades against the Mongols. By the mid-1600s the majority of Mongols had been cleared from central southern Russia—the remaining minority were for the greatest part absorbed into the new population.


The Mongol legacy

In central Europe, the Mongols were not physically present long enough to have a lasting genetic impact upon the local population, although unquestionably a small amount of Mongolian genes did enter the bloodstream of a tiny part of the population. This took place mainly through the wholesale rape of White women for which the Mongols were also famous. The major impact of the Mongol invasion upon southern and central Europe was that they physically killed huge numbers of Whites in their path, numbers which were lost forever.

In southern Russia however, the after-effects of three hundred years of Mongol rule left a clear genetic imprint upon many of the peoples in that region. Many of the peoples of regions such as Kazakhstan are of clear mixed racial origin. It is these people who are today often mistakenly called Slavs. Even though they were originally the easternmost Indo-European peoples and as such part of the Slavic tribes, their racial identify was completely submerged by the Mongol invasion and it would be genetically incorrect to classify them as Slavic.


The sixth great race war – the Ottoman Holocaust

The Ottoman Empire was the longest lasting non-White invasion of European soil ever. Lasting from the beginning of the 13th Century right to the start of the 20th, this group of mixed race Middle Eastern Turks, driven by a fanaticism molded in their Muslim religion, occupied vast stretches of central and southern Europe, twice being turned back at the very gates of Vienna in their attempts to seize all of Europe.

The impact and legacy of the Ottomans upon central and southern Europe was therefore vast, and crucial to any understanding of the racial and cultural mix which has made south-eastern Europe the volatile place that it is.

After describing the rise of the Ottomans and their first landings and battles on European soil in the 14th and 15th centuries, including how white resistance failed in the battles of Nicopolis and Varna, Kemp writes about the Janissaries, or “stolen white children” who became the Ottoman elite:

One of the more remarkable ways in which the Ottomans kept their fighting strength up was through a unit of soldiers known as the Janissaries. The Janissaries were the Ottoman’s elite forces—and they were also White.

One of the Ottoman leaders, Emir Orkhan (1326-1359), who was the first to occupy European continental soil, issued an edict to the conquered Europeans in the Balkans that they must hand over to the Ottomans 1,000 White male babies “with faces white and shining” each and every year. The youths were brought before the Ottoman sultan, and the best of them—in terms of physique, intelligence, and other qualities—were selected for education in the palace school. There they converted to Islam, became versed in the Islamic religion and its culture, learned Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, and were compelled to serve the Ottomans, with their origins being concealed from them. They became the best and most trusted armed unit within the Ottoman Empire—a supreme act of irony.

This yearly tribute—reminiscent of the demand by the Moors for White virgins from the unfortunate Goths in Spain—was continued for an astonishing 300 years until 1648, during which time not only were 300,000 Whites absorbed into the Ottoman hierarchy (and for the greatest part also into the Turkish elite’s bloodstream) but the Janissaries became known as one of the most efficient army of soldiers in the world.

It is no exaggeration to say that they sustained the Ottoman Empire in Europe for much of its existence, playing a not inconsiderable role in many of the great victories of that Empire.

In 1574, the Janissaries had 20,000 men in their ranks—by 1826 the unit numbered some 135,000. The overtly racial make-up of the Janissaries always created problems of its own. Every now and then, the White soldiers would rebel against their Turkish masters—numerous rebellions are recorded, each being suppressed, until a famous rebellion in 1826 saw the unit finally disbanded, with a large number being killed and the rest dispersed into the broader Turkish population.

Kemp proceeds to explain how Jews were privileged under Turkish Rule; the fall of Constantinople; the war at sea when the Portuguese confronted the Turks; how Belgrade was captured in 1521 AD; the two sieges of Vienna; the Ottoman war with Russia, and finally the brutal destruction of Armenia in 1915-1923:

The region of Armenia, situated on the southeastern banks of the Black Sea, contains one of the most tragic and violent anti-White acts ever committed by the Ottoman Empire. Originally one of the earliest Indo-European homelands, Armenia has some of the oldest iron and bronze smelting and cereal grains sites in the world. Shaken by the flooding of the Black Sea basin around 5600 BC, Armenia was then occupied in quick succession by the early Indo-European Assyrians and Persians.

A period of independence followed, and under their great King Tigranes I (140-55 BC), Armenia established an empire which reached from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and parts of modern-day Syria. This empire ended with the invasion of that country by the Romans in 69 BC. Armenia then became the first Christian state in the world in AD 301.

Racially speaking, the inhabitants of the region had suffered slight genetic damage in terms of Semitic infusions, but the country was devastated by the 11th Century invasion by the Seljuk Turks, the forerunners of the Ottomans. The Seljuk Turks’ oppressive rule saw a huge number—possibly even a majority—of White Armenians fleeing the country.

The Ottoman Empire, which took over from the Seljuks, instituted an even greater reign of terror against the remaining Armenians, causing further waves of emigration right until the late 19th Century, with many Armenians settling in America.

Those who stayed in Armenia were subject to the most horrendous massacres and persecution, with hundreds of thousands of Armenians being massacred by Turkish forces, culminating in efforts by the Turkish government to move Armenians to Mesopotamia. Between 1915 and 1923 more than one million Armenians died due to the Turkish attempted forced migration.

armenians
The remains of Armenians massacred at Erzinjan

By this stage, the vast majority of White Armenians had either emigrated, or had been absorbed into the overwhelming numbers of non-Whites in the Armenia itself, so that today very few original White Armenians remain in the country.

Armenia was therefore a entire country and people who were physically wiped out by the Ottomans, one of the greatest hidden genocides of the Turkish Empire.


The Ottoman legacy

The Ottoman Turks were the last of the Asian invaders of Europe to use violence as their passport of entry, but they were also significant for another reason: the sheer length of the time of their occupation of the Balkans left a large number of the inhabitants of the Balkan peoples with Turkish blood in their veins, as can be seen to this day, as many inhabitants of the region are not only Muslim in faith, but are also distinctly darker than other Balkan residents.

♣

All of these racial wars when whites faced extermination are a fascinating read.

Although the racial wars recounted by Kemp don’t end there, I won’t quote more to invite readers to purchase a hard copy of March of the Titans, an updated 2011 edition of the old online edition I’ve been quoting here (recently removed from the internet).

The fact is that unlike other races whites as a people have been an endangered species more than once, and this has paramount importance to understand our times. Personally, I find it outrageous that so few “white nationalists” are truly interested in the history of the white race; proof of it is that books like this are no bestsellers in the community.


Note:

For excerpts of all chapters of Kemp’s book see: here.

Categories
2nd World War Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Communism Evil Gulag Archipelago (book) Joseph Stalin Moscow Red terror Socrates Vladimir Lenin

The Gulag Archipelago

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
8.- The Gulag Archipelago
(read in 1999)


The Gulag Archipelago, The Harvill Press, 1999. Abridged by Edward Ericson. No ellipsis added between excerpts:



Foreword to the Abridgement

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

Yet I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally. Therefore, I gratefully accepted Professor Ericson’s suggestion to create a one-volume abridgement of my three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn


Introduction

For a few decades the word Holocaust has served us well as a shorthand term for modern man’s inhumanity to man. In recent years a second such shorthand term has entered our working vocabulary: Gulag. This term comes to us not from a host of witness but from one lone man: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose very name has become a household word around the world.

Were The Gulag Archipelago to be even more widely read than it has been, it would, I believe, make an indelible impression on the modern mind and have a salutary effect on the whole world. Here we have the greatest horror story of human history—in quantitative terms, at least (the comparable toll in China having not yet been calculated)—and, although it happened during our lifetime, most of us do not even know about it.

This work was written especially for future generations of Russians. It is these readers in particular who need to know, in as much detail as possible, the truth of their history. This abridged text is designed for the general reader, not for the scholar.

At Solzhenitsyn’s own suggestion, I have eliminated much of his personal story, though parts of it I treasure too much to drop.

Needless to say, I take responsibility for any errors of omission or commission. I hope only that any mistakes which I have made do not interfere with the transmission of Solzhenitsyn’s words to an audience which I believe desperately needs to hear them.

Edward Ericson


Author’s Note

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.

In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names. If they are identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described.

This book could never have been created by one person alone. In addition to what I myself was able to take away from the Archipelago—on the skin of my back, and with my eyes and ears—material for this book was given me in reports, memoirs, and letters by 227 witness, whose names were to have been listed here.

What I here express to them is not personal gratitude, because this is our common, collective monument to all those who were tortured and murdered.


Chapter 1: “Arrest”

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? At ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they’ve never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under arrest.” The gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

It is an alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours. And nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of the locomotive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly dead child. The “jurists” dumped the child’s body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them.

For those left behind after the arrest there is the long tail end of a wrecked and devastated life. And the attempts to go and deliver food parcels. And this means once and for all: “No right to correspondence”—and that almost certain means: “Has been shot.”

They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest—just let him try! They’ll take you right off the operating table—as they took N.M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in 1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer—and drag you off to a cell, as they did him, half-alive and all bloody.

And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Vanya Levitsky: “Every honest man is sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and when I grow up they’ll put me in too.” (They put him in when he was twenty-three years old.) The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake. They’ll set things straight and let me out!” Others are being arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: “Maybe he was guilty…?” But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.

Once a person was arrested he was never released. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. (For, after all, we get no news from that other world, and we do not realize that from the very moment of arrest our fate has almost certainly been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot make it any worse.)

I myself lugged a fifth suitcase with no great joy since it contained my diaries and literary works, which were being used as evidence against me. My cellmates—tankmen in soft black helmets—hid nothing. They were three honest, openhearted soldiers—people of a kind I had become attached to during the war years because I myself was more complex and worse. All three had been officers.

“Out for toilet call! Hands behind your backs!”

I was bursting with indignation that some ignoramus of a master sergeant dared to give orders to us officers: “Hands behind your backs!” But the tank officers put their hands behind them and I followed suit.

Back of the barn was a small square area in which the snow had been all trampled down but had not yet melted. It was soiled all over with human feces, so densely scattered over the whole square that it was difficult to find a spot to place one’s two feet and squat. However, we spread ourselves about and the five of us did squat down. Two machine gunners grimly pointed their machine pistols at us as we squatted, and before a minute had passed the master sergeant brusquely urged us on:

“Come on, hurry it up! With us they do it quickly!”


Chapter 2: “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System”

Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one not even the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting.

Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930, the size of a good River Ob, which drove a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra. But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you and me as well) committed no crime more heinous than this. And after it there was the wave of 1944 to 1946. But in this wave, too, the people were of the simpler kind, and they wrote no memoirs.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archipelago people of position, people with a Party past, yes, educated people, around whom were many who had been wounded and remained in the cities… and what a lot of them had pen in hand!

It is well known that any organ withers away if it is not used. Therefore, if we know that the Soviet security organs, or Organs (and they christened themselves with this vile word), praised and exalted above all living things, have not died off even to the extent of one single tentacle, but, instead have grown new ones and strengthened their muscles—it is easy to deduce that they have had constant exercise. This action was, in fact, explained openly (Latsis, in the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918):

“We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeois class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of Red Terror.”

A decree of the defense Council on February 15, 1919 (the meeting was evidently presided over by Lenin), suggest that the Cheka and the NKVD take hostages among the peasants of those regions where “the cleaning of snow from the railroads does not proceed quite satisfactorily” and noted that “these hostages be executed if the cleaning is not completed.” In other words, free people were simply arrested and executed immediately…

The practice of arresting students began in 1921. In the spring of 1922 the Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two resounding trials were held, following by the execution of those who had publicized the Patriarch’s appeal. Metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and, as always, in the wake of the big fish, followed shoals of smaller fry: archpriests, monks, and deacons. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children. In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code.

In 1929, also, those historians who had not been sent abroad in time were arrested… It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other’s presence—who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water. One gold piece for a cup of water!

In sheer size this nonrecurring tidal wave (it was an ocean) swelled beyond the bounds of anything the penal system or even an immense state can permit itself. There was nothing to be compared with in all Russian history. It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic catastrophe.

This wave was also distinct from all those which preceded it because no one fused about with taking the head of the family first and then working out what to do with the rest of the family. On the contrary, in this wave they burned out whole nests, whole families, from the start; and they watched jealously to be sure that none of the children—fourteen, ten, even six year old— got away: to the last scrapings, all had to go the same road, to the same common destruction. (This was the first such experiment—at least in modern history. It was subsequently repeated by Hitler with the Jews.)

In 1941 the Germans went round Tagnrog, cutting it off so swiftly that prisoners were left in freight wagons at the railway station where they had been brought to be evacuated. What should one do with them? Certainly not set them free nor leave them to the Germans. Oil tank trucks were rushed to the station, and the wagons were drenched with oil and set on fire. All the prisoners were burned alive.


Chapter 3: “The Interrogation”

What had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catharine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles—not by one scoundrel alone, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

In 1952 Anna Skripnikova was undergoing her fifth imprisonment, and Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her:

“The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That’s too low you bitch! We’re going to drive it up to 340 so you’ll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We’ll just not let you sleep.”

She was in her fifties at the time. And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: “Open your eyes or I’ll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up.”

As early as 1921 interrogations usually took place at night. And there was an airtight cork-lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the prisoners. A participant in the Yaroslavl uprising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood begin to ooze through your pores.

Then in the years 1937-1938, in view of the extraordinary situation prevailing (the specified millions of admissions to the Archipelago had to be ground through the apparatus of individual interrogation in specified, limited periods, something which had simply not happened in the mass waves of kulaks and nationalities), interrogators were allowed to use violence and torture on an unlimited basis, at their own discretion. For the first time in human history the calculated torture of millions was being undertaken.

In the Novocherkassk NKVD, Yelena Strutimskaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything, did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not get up from. Six days! Just try to sit that way for six hours! People could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator’s office or the corridor for twelve, or even twenty-four hours. (The interrogator himself could go home, sleep, amuse himself in one way or another—this was an organized system; watch was kept over the kneeling prisoner, and the guards worked in shifts.) What kind of prisoner was most vulnerable to such treatment? It was a good method to use with women. Ivanov-Razumnik reports a variation of it: Having set young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the interrogator urinated in his face! And what happened? Unbroken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. Watch shows that the method also worked well on proud people.

Then there is the method of simply compelling the prisoner to stand there, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.

Sleeplessness, which they quite failed to appreciate in medieval times: They did not understand how narrow are the limits within which a human being can preserve his personality intact. Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright, light terror, and the unknown—what other tortures are needed?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own “I.” (As in Chekov’s “I Want to Sleep,” but there it was much easier, for there the girl could lie down and slip into lapses of consciousness, which even in just a minute could revive and refresh the brain.) A person deprived of sleep acts half-consciously or altogether unconsciously, so that his testimony cannot be held against him.

Sometimes, as a refinement, instead of making the prisoner stand up, they made him sit down on a soft sofa, which made him want to sleep all the more. (The jailer on duty sat next to him on the same sofa and kicked him every time his eyes began to shut.) Sleeplessness became the universal method of the Organs. The prisoners were forbidden to sleep even one minute. Whoever was undergoing interrogation got no sleep for at least five days and nights. The above method was further implemented by an assembly line of interrogators. Not only were you not allowed to sleep, but for three or four days shifts of interrogators kept up a continuous interrogation.

As long ago as 1933 this was one of the ways they tortured S.A. Chebotaryev in the Khabarovsk GPU. They locked him in a concrete alcove in such a way that he could neither bend his knees, nor straighten up and change the position of his arms, not turn his head. And that was not all! They began to drip cold water into his scalp—a classic torture—which then ran down his body in rivulets. They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for only twenty-four hours. It was awful enough at any rate for him to lose consciousness, and he was discovered the next day apparently dead. He came to on a hospital cot. They had brought him out of his faint with spirits of ammonia, caffeine, and body massage. At first he had no recollection of where he had been, or what happened. For a whole month he was useless for interrogation.

[The] bridling, also known as “the swan dive”: This was a Sukhanovka method—also used in Archangel, where the interrogator Ivkov applied it in 1940. A lone piece of rough toweling was inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking—and without water and food for two days!

Is it necessary to go on with the list?


Chapter 4. “The bluecaps”

“Just give us a person and we will create a case!” That was what many of them say jokingly, and it was their slogan. What we think of torture they think of as a good work. The wife of the interrogator Nikolai Grabishchenko (the Volga Canal Project) said touchingly to her neighbors: “Kolya is a very good worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time—and they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he confessed.”

You have a power over all the people in that military unit, or factory, or district, incomparably greater than that of the military commander, or factory director, or secretary of the district Communist Party. These men control people’s military or official duties, wages, reputations, but you control people’s freedom. From the moment you don that heavenly blue service cap, you stand higher than the publicly acknowledged power.

The girl is blushing all over and in tears. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the case,” she protests. “Yes, it does, speak up!” If you want, she’ll demonstrate with her body. She has no way out. In your hands you hold the punishment cell and her prison term.

To know what it meant to be a bluecap one had to experience it! Anything you saw was yours! [But] let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?” Twenty-year-olds, we marched in the ranks of those born the year the Revolution took place, and because we were the same age as the Revolution, the brightest of futures lay ahead.

It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools. It certainly didn’t derive from the lectures on historical materialism we listened to: it was clear from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task.

Still, some of us were recruited at that time, and I think that if they had really put the pressure on, they could have broken everybody’s resistance. So I would like to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD’s officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself! Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. Just how are we to understand that? As the act of an evildoer? What sort of behavior is this?

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past—Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens—inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I will drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How then, do we dare to insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear…

In that same period, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And still we choke with anger here. The fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn’t get us worked up at all, doesn’t touch us. That would be “digging the past.”

Meanwhile, if we translate 86,000 West Germans into our own terms, on the basis of comparative population figures, it would become one-quarter of a million. Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?

Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.


Chapter 5: “First Cell, First Love”

How is one to take the title of this chapter? Out of all the cells you have been in, your first cell is a very special one. All your life you will remember it… those days when you rethought your entire life. But it was not the dirty floor, nor the murky walls, nor the odor of the latrine bucket that you loved. For a week or a month you had been an abandoned waif, alone among enemies, and you had already said good-bye to reason and to life; and you had already tried to kill yourself by “falling” from the radiator in such a way as to smash your brains against the iron cone of the valve. Then all of a sudden you are alive again. And reason returned to you.

And that was the purpose of silent Sukhanovka: to leave the prisoner not a single moment for sleep, not a single stolen moment for privacy. You were always being watched and always in their power. But if you endured the whole duel with insanity and all the trials and loneliness, and had stood firm, you deserved your first cell! And now when you got into it, your soul would heal.

I had been dueling for four days with the interrogator, when the jailer, having waited until I lay down to sleep in my blindingly lit box, began to unlock my door. I heard him all right, but before he could say: “Get up! Interrogation!” I wanted to lie for another three-hundredths of a second. One night of undisturbed sleep was more important than all the fates on earth! And I lay there. Interrogation still pending over me, but how far it had retreated!

And there was no reason to be bored with my companions. They were people to listen and people with whom to compare notes. The old fellow with lively eyebrows—and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man—was Anatoly Ilych Fastenko. There was much in Fastenko I could not understand. In my eyes, perhaps the main thing about him, and the most surprising, was that he had known Lenin personally. Yet he was quite cool in recalling this. (Such was my attitude at the time that when someone in the cell called Fastenko by his patronymic alone, without using his given name—in other words simply “Ilych,” asking: “Ilych, is it your turn to take out the latrine bucket?” —I was utterly outraged and offended because it seemed sacrilege to me not only to use Lenin’s patronymic in the same sentence as “latrine bucket,” but even to call anyone on earth “Ilych” except that one man, Lenin.) Observing my enthusiasm, more than once Fastenko said to me insistently: “You are a mathematician; it’s a mistake for you to forget that maxim of Descartes: ‘Question everything!’ Question everything!” What did this mean—“everything”? Certainly not everything!

When, in the spring of 1943, recruiters from the first Byelorussian “legions” put in an appearance, some POWs signed up with them to escape starvation. Yuri went with them out of conviction, with a clear mind. Yuri became lieutenant in the German Army. In all, Yuri spent three weeks in our cell. I argued with him all these weeks. I said that our Revolution was magnificent and just; that only its 1929 distortion was terrible. He looked at me regretfully, compressing his nervous lips.

On May 2 a thirty-gun salute roared out. That meant a European capital. Only two had not yet been captured—Prague and Berlin. We tried to guess which it was.

That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.


Chapter 6: “That Spring” [The concealed history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union]

Along with them [a big wave of civilians that flowed into the Archipelago] were seized no less than one million fugitives from the Soviet government —civilians of all ages and both sexes who in 1946-1947 were perfidiously returned by Allied authorities into Soviet hands […]. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union.

That spring of 1945 was, in our prisons, predominantly the spring of the Russian prisoners of war. Not only war prisoners passed through those cells. A wave of those who had spent any time in Europe was rolling too: émigrés from the Civil War; the “ostovtsy”—workers recruited as laborers by the Germans during World War II. It was the war prisoners who constituted the bulk of the wave.

“The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland has forgiven you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers. It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred years of Russia’s existence as a state there have been, ah, how many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors? Then, under the most just social system in the world, came the most just war of all—and all of nowhere millions of traitors appeared, from among the simplest, lowliest elements of the population. How is this to be understood and explained? Capitalist England fought at our side against Hitler; Marx had eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in the same England. Why was it that in this war only one traitor could be found among them—but in our country millions?

The Vlasov men.

In addition, there were a few volunteer anti-Soviet units, made up of former Soviet citizens but under the command of German officers. The Lithuanians were the first to start supporting the Germans (understandably so: we had really hurt them beyond endurance in just one year!). Then the Ukrainians formed a voluntary SS division, and the Estonians joined a few SS units. In Byelorussia there was a people’s militia fighting against the partisans: 100,000 men. When the Germans conquered our southern regions, the number of volunteer battalions increased: there was a Georgian one, an Armenian one, a battalion of the Northern Caucasus peoples, and sixteen Kalmyk battalions. During the German retreat from the Don region, about fifteen thousand Cossacks followed the German army. The Briansk region had twenty thousand armed men. They called themselves “The Russian National Liberation Army.”

Vlasov made public appearances in the theaters of Smolensk and Pskov, both filled to capacity; he spoke about the goals of the liberation movement and then proceeded to declare openly that national socialism was unacceptable for Russia but that, on the other hand, it was impossible to overthrow the Bolsheviks without the Germans. Those were the last months during which millions of Soviet people were still out of Stalin’s reach and could fight against the Bolshevik slavery and organize their own independent existence.

But there was a gap between the Russian and the Western conscience which exist to this day. The West was fighting only against Hitler, and for this purpose all means and all allies were good, the Soviets above all. Not only could the West not concede that the Soviet people might have their own purposes which did not coincide with the goals of the Communist government; it did not want to admit any such thought, because it would have been embarrassing and difficult to live with. It is a tragicomic fact that on the leaflets which the Western allies were distributing among the anti-Bolshevik volunteer battalions on the Western front, they wrote: “We promise all defectors that they will be immediately sent back to the Soviet Union.” We soon discovered that they really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men.

The West simply has to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind. But the West did not understand at all. In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery. But nobody heard that squeaking. Most of the America military commanders were amazed to learn about the existence of Russians who were not Soviets; they thought it quite natural to hand them all over to the Soviet state. The ROA [Russian Liberation Army] not only surrendered to the Americans; it implored them to accept its capitulation and begged for one thing only: the promise that Americans would not extradite them to the Soviets.

In Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the agreement to repatriate all Soviet citizens, and especially the military, without specifying whether the repatriation was to be voluntary or enforced: How could any people on earth not be willing to return to their homes? The nearsightedness of the West was condensed in what was written at Yalta.

The English turned over the Soviet army command a Cossack corps of forty to forty-five thousand men which had fought its way to Austria from Yugoslavia. The extradition was carried out with perfidy which is characteristic of British diplomatic tradition. The Cossacks did not grow suspicious when they were asked to turn in their weapons, on the grounds that this was necessary in order to standardize their equipment. On May 28… [Chechar’s note: Solzhenitsyn describes in this paragraph how the Allied forces extradited these Russian people, against their will, to Stalin.]

They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death, since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones. The hearts of the British were not troubled, nor were their democratic minds. British tanks and soldiers arrived. The British soldiers started beating them with rifle butts and clubs, grabbing them and throwing them into the trucks, including the wounded, as if they were packages. Entire families sought death by throwing themselves into the river. Meanwhile, the British units in the neighborhood pursued and shot at the fugitives. (The cemetery where the people who were shot or trampled to death and buried still exists in Lienz.)

But even that was only the beginning. During all of 1946 and 1947 the Western allies, faithful to Stalin, continued to turn over to him Soviet citizens, former soldiers as well as civilians. It did not really matter who they were as long as the West could get rid of this human confusion as quickly as possible. People were extradited from Austria, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the American occupation zones, and from the territory of the United States as well.

Now, a quarter of a century later, when most of the Vlasov men have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy.

♣

For the other nine books see here.