The Unknown Russia

First published more than a decade before the fall of Communism, this insightful article from Instauration is required reading for anyone who wants to understand that branch of White civilization centered in Russia.

THE BRITISH MEDIA have suddenly discovered that Russia is no longer Marxist, that the “revolution has been betrayed,” that the tone and tilt of the Soviet Union is more Hitlerian than Leninist. The authors of these “revelations” could have jumped their own gun seven years ago if they had read the first edition of The Dispossessed Majority (1972).

The Spectator entitled its article, “Russia’s New Fascists.” The New Statesman sported a cover of juxtaposed photos of Stalin and Hitler captioned, “Soviet Union Today, Anti-Semitism Institutionalized.” Its leading article was headlined, “The End of Marxism-Leninism.” Following servilely behind their British bellwethers came similar articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Review.

The source of all this hot “news” from Russia was a Russian-Jewish dissident named Alexander Yanov, who now holds forth in Berkeley, California. He has recently churned out two paperback studies, The Russian New Right and Detente After Brezhnev: The Domestic Roots of Soviet Foreign Policy, that add up to a frontal attack on Russia and everything Russian. Much like the propaganda attacks on Hitler by world Jewry before World War II, Yanov embroiders his tales with large and small servings of anti-Semitic scaremongering, knowing full well that this is what sells books to Jews and aficionados of Jews. Any academic that can’t make it any other way can always rely on the anti-Semitic bogey to pull him through.

Yanov, despite his claims to the contrary, is not an historian, but a pundit. The method in his madness is not to enlighten, but to darken our perception of the world. Why? Because he wants us to hate Russia, because he knows that by raising our hatred to the boiling point he and his genetic coterie may be able to push us into war against the Soviet Union, just as his predecessors helped to push us into war with Germany in World Wars I and II. World War III will be infinitely more disastrous to Americans and to the world, but Yanov never addresses this issue. Hate has its own optic and needs no justification. La haine a ses raisons.

In the time-honored practice of modern journalistic propaganda, finding something old and calling it new, Yanov has become the late-blooming oracle of a trend that started more than forty years ago. Anyone with one eye and half a synapse could have recognized anti-Semitism at work in Stalin’s great purges and great show trials in the 1930s. While all the famous Jews in Germany were safely fleeing to British and American sanctuaries, many of the highest-ranking Jews in Russia were being shot or worked to death in Russia’s cryogenic death camps.

Name one important Jew that Hitler killed. The reader cannot. Name the important Jews that Stalin murdered and the list will run off the paper. We might start with Trotsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, und so weiter.

Old Communist hands assign various reasons for the 1939 Russian-German Nonaggression Pact: Russia had been betrayed by the West; Russia needed more time; Russia wanted to foment a war between Germany, France, and Britain that would be the death knell of capitalism and the birth of Soviet world power. It cannot be denied that all these rationales have an iota of truth. But why omit anti-Semitism? Stalin’s daughter and some other Soviet dignitaries who should know (including Khruschev) claimed Stalin was anti-Semitic to the bone. How does anyone sign a pact with the world’s #1 anti-Semite without anti-Semitism being a factor?

Stalin certainly knew about the power of Jewry. He had conspired and worked with Jews all his life. He himself had helped to foster the pro-Semitic “world face” of Communists and Marxists. He had to know what he was giving up when he signed up with Hitler. He also knew what he was getting — half of Poland, the Baltic countries, and lots of other real estate. Stalin adroitly switched back to pro-Semitism when Hitler’s invasion scrapped the 1939 scrap of paper. World Jewry, as shown by its diligent efforts on behalf of the Kremlin, didn’t seem to hold any grudges.

But after the war was safely won, Stalin resumed his old ways. The massive purges of the leadership of the satellite countries (a purely kosher Red elite), the “anti-cosmopolitan” hatefest in the Russian newspapers (with Jewish names carefully spelled out), and the doctors’ plot — all these could hardly be described as happenstances. Taken together, they demonstrated anything but the warm and treacly pro-Semitism nourished in the governmental bosom of every “Western” power. Rumor even has it that if Stalin hadn’t died when he did, he would have unleashed the pogrom of all pogroms and had every living Jew in Russia shuttled off to the Gulag Archipelago.

While Russia applauded the creation of Isreal, Czechoslovakian arms enabled the Israelis to carry out their own pogrom of Palestinians. But from 1950 on Russian foreign policy turned anti-Israel and pro-Arab and remains so today. Zionism is more illegal than ever in Russia, and Pravda fulminates against Zionist machinations on a daily basis.

Such a torrent of propaganda is bound to decant anti-Semitism of an older and headier vintage. The Russians, who inherited the largest concentration of Jews on earth when they took over Poland in the 18th century, have had a great deal of firsthand experience with Jewry. Whenever Jews are numerous, anti-Semitism is present. Whenever anti-Semitism is present, it tends to increase to a point where Jews are ghettoized or expelled. This seems to be an iron law of history.

The death of Stalin produced the well-publicized Russian “thaw” which included a softening of Kremlin attitudes toward Jewry (the growth of anti-Semitism is never linear). Many Jewish zeks were released from their work camps, although they did not return as heroes. Their part in the Bolshevik carnage was not easily forgiven by non-Jews. Many applied for visas to Israel. A lesser number received them. An even smaller number reached the Promised Land. To the dismay of Zionists, many of the refuseniks with tickets to Tel Aviv ended up in Long Island, Miami Beach, and Beverly Hills.

Profitable Prophecies

Alexander Yanov arrived in the US in 1974 carrying with him a suitcase full of research on the Russian right wing. As a dissident he had not suffered terribly, having practiced his profession of roving journalism almost up to the day of his departure. In painting a grim picture of the Russia of the future, Yanov, like all smart pundits, covers his tracks. He admits what he is talking about is only a “conceptual reality,” at the same time agreeing that another “conceptual reality” might actually materialize. What he is trying to say is that Russia could go in two directions — toward a Western-style democracy or toward racial nationalism. It suits his prophetic pose — and his monthly paycheck from the University of California — to lean heavily toward the possibility of a fascist Russia.

Today, says Yanov in The Russian New Right, the existence of Russian nationalism is an open secret. On every corner, in front of every beer stand, in every store and every bus, a Ukrainian can hear the contemptuous epithet khokhol, a Jew — the annihilating zhid — a Korean, kosoglazyi (slant-eyes) — an Uzbek, ishak (ass).

To Yanov, racial slurs prove Western liberalism and democracy are not going to fill in the void left by the drying up and fading away of Marxism-Leninism, the teetering dogmatic prop of the graying Politburo. Yanov’s “great fear” is that the right wing will eventually join the present regime rather than attempt to destroy it. Such an event would mean the restoration of Stalinism, not a completely unexpected development to students of Russian history, which, according to Yanov, has been a cyclic seesaw of “soft” Brezhnev and “hard” Stalin periods of rule.

Yanov documents his hypothesis with some interesting writings that have not yet appeared in the West. One right-wing samizdat article by a Komsomol staff member named Valery Skurlatov contains the following: “There is no baser calling than to be a ‘thinker’ and ‘intellectual.'” A macho of machos, Skurlatov calls for “corporal punishment of women who give themselves to foreigners [and their] branding and sterilization …”

In the same vein, Yanov reports a meeting with an eminent scholar who told him that Africans and Asians are determined to destroy White civilization. The Jews, he went on, are an element of chaos, degeneration, liberalism, and capitalism and “a kind of agent of the yellow and black races.”

There was a terrible moment for the dissidents in 1970, Yanov explains, when the Politburo almost decided to replace Kosygin with Polyansky, the highest-ranking Russian nationalist in the government. At the last minute, however, this tragedy was averted and Polyansky himself was shipped off to head the Russian embassy in Japan.

In spite of Yanov’s dire forebodings, he asserts there is only one underground organization in Russia worthy of the name. It is called VSKhSON (All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People) and preaches the armed overthrow of the Soviet state. If it should come to power, it would establish as Russia’s ruling body a Supreme Synod, one-third of whose members would be from the Orthodox Church hierarchy. The result would probably be a semi-Tolstoyan regime that would return the land to the peasants and operate as a folk republic under a benevolent Christian government. Yanov criticizes the movement for talking about corporate legislative bodies (shades of Mussolini) and for proposing that the Orthodox Church take precedence over the faith of the Jews, Protestants, Muslims and Catholics (not to mention the faith of the atheists).

Yanov also claims that the work camps, presently full of VSKhSON members, are hotbeds of anti-Semitism. Many VSKhSONists, he fears, want to give Russian Jews the heads-or-tails choice of Israel or extermination.

Yanov devotes some space to the intriguing periodical Veche, whose editor is now in jail and whose publication is now forbidden. Veche had two faces, both of them anti-Marxist and anti-Communist. One could be described as Russian liberal, the other as “National Bolshevik.” The former looks back to the Russian Spengler, Danilevsky, whose book Russia and Europe (published in 1869) proposed that nations do not really exist, only “cultural-historical types” which are as separate from each other as different biological species. For this reason, “political formulas worked out by one people are suited only to that people.” Danilevsky, however, was no isolationist shrinking violet. He opted for the Russian conquest of the Ottoman Empire, so the Czars could rule unchallenged from the Adriatic (Turkey bordered it in those days) to the Pacific. Once the Sultanate was destroyed, Russia should remain within her frontiers until the West rots away and China sinks into senility.

The other face of Veche was even more Mephistophelian, at least to Russia’s neighbors. It gleamed with the messianic verve of Dostoevsky, the apostle of Slavic grandeur, whose ideas were being re-propagated in the publication by an activist-author named Antonov. Antonov not only despises the West as such. He hates the West in Russia, the Western-worshipping cosmopolitans of Moscow and Leningrad, most of whom are Jews. He wants a merging of Leninism with Russian Orthodoxy, after which Russians should retire inside their vast European shell and let the West stew in its own botulistic juices. To Antonov the West is an intellectual plague, which must not be allowed to infect his motherland. He speaks of the organic characteristics of England and Anglo-Puritanism, “which promulgate a false world view.” It is no accident, says Antonov, that “the founder of all contemporary Western philosophy — that religiosity without faith — was the Jew Spinoza.” It is also no accident that “the roots of the pronounced materialistic tendency in philosophy go back to the depths of the Jewish national character.”

The idea of merging Russian Orthodoxy with Leninism is not as impossible as it sounds, Yanov believes. Orthodox priests continuously held services for Stalin after Hitler’s invasion. No other Russian Communist leader ever had church bells rung for him.

Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn is a particularly difficult subject for Yanov. Like all Jews, he treated Solzhenitsyn as a hero when he was the great symbol of Russian anti-Communism and was providing most of the verbal ammunition for the worldwide liberal-minority-Zionist assault on Moscow. But after all the great hurrahs, after Solzhenitsyn had identified Jews as the bosses of Russia’s worst Gulags, after Solzhenitsyn had published his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, in which he revealed himself to be a hardline nationalist, Yanov and company had to do some quick semantic acrobatics. Their god had suddenly disclosed a cloven, semi-Fascist hoof. Yanov extricates himself with the glib casuistry that is the stock in trade of any accomplished racist who makes a living out of anti-racism. After praising Solzhenitsyn, he buries him with shovelsful of guilt by association, which liberals invented, but whose crimes they managed to lay on the late Joe McCarthy. Yanov even gets personal: “Why did a person who has done so much for me, afterwards betray me? And not only betray me, but damn me as a part of the Russian intelligentsia he curses?” It never occurs to Yanov that the betrayal might be the other way around.

Unlike many dissidents, however, Yanov does not condemn Solzhenitsyn as an outright apostate. He says there is hope in his authoritarianism, since it is “absolute,” but not “autocratic,” and therefore may at least lead in the direction of democracy. But he also quotes from Solzhenitsyn’s “Answer to Sakharov”:

The West has supped more than its fill of every kind of freedom, including intellectual freedom. And has this saved it? We see it today crawling on hands and knees, it will be paralyzed, in the dark about the future, spiritually racked and dejected.

Even worse, in an article, “The Smatterers,” Solzhenitsyn attacks dissidents like Yanov for their cowardice and calls for the creation of a new “sacrificial elite,” an appeal that obviously falls on the deaf ears of tens of thousands of Jewish dissidents now living comfortably — and safely — in Southern California, Israel, and parts north, west and south.

Lenin in Zurich was the work that made Yanov most suspicious of Solzhenitsyn. The hero or anti-hero is not Lenin, but Parvus, the rootless Russian-Jewish moneybags who finances Lenin and arranges his trip in a sealed train from Switzerland through wartime Germany to Russia. In fact, Parvus seems to be using Lenin for the purpose of making Russia a “basket case” in order to get revenge against Russian and Czarist anti-Semitism.

When he turns to Gennady Shimanov, Yanov and no doubt most of his readers quiver with ecstatic revulsion. Here is a genuine dyed-in-the-vodka anti-Semite, who is a uniquely Russian figure. Now working as an elevator operator, Shimanov has deliberately lowered himself into the lower depths — in his own words, “in the cellar, where it is damp, beside the garbage chute.” To Shimanov Russia and the West are both, in their own ways, rushing madly into chaos. Not only is God dead, he is deader than a doornail. Russia, caught between the putrefaction of the West and the military threat of China, is dangling on the edge of history’s deepest precipice. What must be accomplished, says Shimanov, is the destruction of Russia’s “national inferiority complex.” Christianity “has not succeeded” in saving the world. Catholicism gave birth to “the ulcer of Protestantism,” which begot the bourgeosie, which in turn has overwhelmed and sullied the human spirit “with the cult of profit and cold cash.” The momentous end result was socialism. Sticking close to the dialectical doggerel of Hegel (not a very appropriate model for a Russian nationalist), Shimanov has it all figured out: Christianity, the thesis, battled with socialism, the antithesis, and out will come the synthesis of a new Russia, purified by the most intense suffering that any people has ever been known to endure, a suffering that will not have been in vain. The gulags served a noble purpose, in the same way that Versailles serves Hitler. Who will be the midwife of the great rebirth? The Soviet regime itself once it rejects “rotten Western democracy.” The “kike-Masonic” program of the westernized Sakharov is despicable, so are the waverings of Solzhenitsyn who is a liberal in patriotic clothing. Unlike Solzhenitsyn who wants to end the state ideology, Shimanov wants to transform it. Under no conditions will there be any of Solzhenitsyn’s “free flowering of ideas.” That’s for the birds, or rather for a small bunch of Judaizing cosmopolites:

[F]or an ideocratic state to abandon its ideology means simply to commit suicide … The Marxist ideology … is the foundation of our state … [And] it is necessary to see, not that Marxism is mechanically discarded, but that it is transformed by life itself and … outlived.

It is time to abandon the ridiculous prejudice that a lukewarm atmosphere of “freedom and thought” and “freedom of creativity” is the best one for the maturing of truth and great art.

The Soviet Union is not a mechanical conglomeration of nations of different kinds … but a MYSTICAL ORGANISM, composed of nations mutually supplementing each other and making up, under the leadership of the Russian people, a LITTLE MANKIND … the beginning and the spiritual detonator for the great mankind.

Russia . . . has literally suffered through a NEW THEOCRACY… for it is quite obvious that we need a patriarchal structure of society different from the present one … and a new …mystical attitude towards the land … [This] task is not within the capacity …of Western democracy…, but then who can do it? I think … that the best instrument may prove to be that force which from the very beginning has made war on God — the regime that wrestles with God, which has decided to turn the whole world around in its own way: This force may serve the glory of God better than anything else. I am speaking, of course, of the Soviet regime…

As for the Jews, Shimanov, who takes great pride in his anti-Semitism, publicly declares that Jewry is “a decomposition of peoples into a dung.” He apparently agrees 100% with Dostoevsky, who felt, in the words of V. Grishin, “the Jews are preparing to seize power over the world …”

Luxus

Yanov begins his second book Detente After Brezhnev with a vivid description of his visit to the house of a member of the Soviet ruling class, one of the new elite, close to the top but not at the top. The house is located in a fashionable wooded Moscow suburb and has an imposing drawing room with parquet floors and a huge crystal chandelier. Antique furniture is everywhere. Paintings by old masters adorn the walls. Adjoining is a room in “21st century” modern — abstract art, modern furniture, a large-screen color TV that can pick up foreign programs. The walls of the den are hung with skins of wild animals and ancient hunting weapons. Logs sparkle and glow in a vast stone fireplace as the hi-fi plays a Bach chorale. The bar is stocked with bottle after bottle of rare French cognac. In the library are the banned volumes of Solzhenitsyn.

Yanov paints this picture of Soviet luxury, which he says is unequalled in the homes of American millionaires, to demonstrate that many highly placed officials would have a great deal to lose if there were a change in the Soviet government. Consequently, they comprise a solid bureaucratic roadblock to innovation. One way they reinsure their status is through the device of academic degrees, which act as a shield against demotion or disgrace. A degree protects the dissident Sakharov, the father of the Russian H-bomb and the husband of a Jewess.

As more and more of the offspring of the new elite crowd the universities, there is a sharp reduction in the number of students from the intelligentsia. As Yanov points out, this discriminates against Jews. The previous policy of favoring the sons and daughters of the intelligentsia discriminated against non-Jews. But this kind of discrimination does not interest Yanov.

Yanov compares old-fangled Russian imperialism — the Emperor Alexander riding into Paris on a white horse after Napoleon’s defeat — with the mystical politics of Dostoevsky. He quotes a Slavophile follower of Dostoevsky named Sharapov who at the turn of the century proposed a Russian empire strong enough to give Russia “absolute strategic domination over the West and thereby powerful enough to prevent any interference with Russian internal policies, particularly its method of solving the Jewish problem.” This odd mixture of isolationism and perimeter imperialism might serve America as well as Russia in the time to come.

Today Sharapov’s and Dostoevsky’s ideas have been reincarnated in the person of E. Yemelyanov, a Soviet ideologue, who spoke as follows in Moscow’s Central Lecture Hall on February 7, 1973:

There are four glasses of wine involved in the Jewish Passover ceremony. These glasses symbolize four promises supposedly made to the Jews by God. The first glass symbolizes the exodus from Egypt — that promise has been carried out and the glass is drunk. The Jews did reach Palestine, so the second glass is drunk. The third promise, the gathering of the Jews in Israel after being exiled, has also been carried out. The fourth glass symbolizes the promise to make it unnecessary for the Jews ever to work and to supply them with everything they need. That promise has not been carried out yet, so the fourth glass is not drunk. They are waiting. Who then, comrades, will provide the Jews with all these blessings? You and I, comrades! The Jews are to march to world domination by stepping on the heads of other peoples. It is well known that the Zionists plan to seize power in the entire world by the year 2000. Hitler at his peak held no more than 20 per cent. of the world economy, and the struggle against him cost our people 20 million lives. World Zionism now controls 80 per cent. of the world economy. Imagine what the struggle against them will cost us.

Yanov adds, “It is very difficult to convey to the foreign reader the electricity that runs from the lecturer to the audience and back again when such words are spoken from an official rostrum.”

Another modern member of the Dostoevsky and Sharapov school is Ivan Shevtsov, who wrote a cryptic novel in 1970 depicting an attempt by Zionists, the Russian code word for all Jews, to storm the last citadel of anti-Jewish and anti-bourgeois civilization — the USSR. Trotsky, according to Shevtsov, was the first Zionist to seek to destroy the Russian national consciousness. Stalin saved Russia, at least temporarily, from this menace. Today’s Soviet leaders have betrayed Stalin, as they try to coexist with Jewry. The only hope, the only solution, is to seal off Russia from the outside world. For this another Joseph Stalin is needed, not a Brezhnev.

Stalin is also an object of praise by many other nationalists, rightists, and “racists.” An anonymous author wrote this eyebrow-raising paragraph in the samizdat publication Novy Zhurnal:

Soviet power, by replacing the autocracy, accomplished what was most important — it deprived the Zionists in our country of the right to private ownership of the instruments and means of production. Perhaps some people are sick of hearing about that, but if it had been otherwise the year 2000 would have come for the children of Israel long ago.

Obviously, as the American reader looks at Russia through Yanov’s spectacles, he will get a distorted picture. Yanov is neither a Russian, a European, a Communist (any more), nor a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He has staked out a niche in his new country of residence as a prophet of doom. Since doomsayers necessarily have a great deal of their time and money invested in doom, their sensationalism usually outweighs their facts. Yanov’s scaremongering is worth listening to only insofar as it informs us of events and trends in Russia of which we are unaware.

Despite Yanov’s warnings, no great pogroms are likely to take place in Russia tomorrow, no massive attack on Western Europe, no imminent manifestation of a Red Napoleon on the Kremlin walls. The caution displayed by Brezhnev when China attacked Russia’s ally, Vietnam, is proof that the Politburo, at least for the moment, is not in a warmongering mood. If ever Russia had an excuse to go to war against China, Peking’s recent “punitive” invasion of Vietnam provided it.

The Politburo, however, was not afraid to invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia when the spirit moved it and not afraid to shoot down workers in East Berlin. Neither is it afraid to play power games in Africa with its Cuban mercenaries and to set up a New World base bristling with conventional and perhaps nuclear arms in Cuba. But Russia has been careful not to get too involved in the Middle East, a much more explosive area.

More importantly, the Russian leadership is not afraid to keep its huge population at little more than subsistence level, so it can continue its traditional policy of everything for the armed services. The day Russia flexes its vast military power against China or the West will probably be the day Moscow decides its preponderance of force is so overwhelming that its opponents will have no choice but to surrender. This is the most sensible, most effective, and most economical way to wage war and it seems to be the strategy Russia is following. If it were committed to the policy of isolation, the USSR would not need to keep on with its massive military buildup, despite its thousands of miles of frontier with the world’s most populous and most anti-Russian country.

The American Majority’s chief interest in Russia should be a racial one. At this moment in history, Russia is the only White nation with the strength and will to withstand and overcome the degenerating influences that have all but decimated the West. At the present speed-up of minority racism and minority birthrates, the US a hundred years from now, if it is still around, may be another Brazil. At the same time, the Western European population may be less than a third of what it is today and the survival of the unfittest through the mechanism of drugs, pornography, equalitarianism, environmentalism, liberalism, and feminism, will have reduced all Western European countries to fourth-rate powers.

The upshot is that today the White race is dying in the West. Unless there is an unexpected White racial resurgence in the US and Western Europe, the last great hope of the Whites will be the Russians. They are less innovative, less liberty-loving, less empirical, less self-reliant, and less Nordic than Western Whites, but they are also less decadent, less pacifistic, less effeminate, and less washed out. Paradoxically, they are also less brainwashed. In the main they are more skeptical of the Marxist ideology imposed on them by the Politburo than Americans are of the liberal-minority ideology imposed on them by the media and academia.

Certainly, the Russians are today in a far better position to fight the enemies of the West, both internal and external, than the West itself. Let us hope that the American Majority will eventually be able to slough off its own serfdom and win its own battles. But if it cannot or will not, it is better to have Russia as the guardian of the White race than to have no White race at all.

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Source: Instauration magazine, June 1979