The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together' w/ Dr Matthew Raphael Johnson - Part 101

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

52 MinutesPG-13Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is a researcher, writer, and former professor of history and political science, specializing in Russian history and political ideology.Pete and Dr. Johnson continue a project in which Pete reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together," and Dr' Johnson provides commentary.Borhy Splacheni Krovyu: The Foundations and Causes of the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022-2025Dr Johnson's PatreonDr Johnson's CashApp - $Raphael71RusJournal.orgTHE ORTHODOX NATIONALISTDr. Johnson's Radio Albion PageDr. Johnson's Books on AmazonDr. Johnson's Pogroms ArticleThe Unmentionable Genocide: New Khazaria, the Russian Revolutions and Soviet Legality in the 1920s by Dr. Matthew Raphael JohnsonWith Friends Like These. . . Patriarch St. Tikhon, General Anton Denikin and the Defeat of the White Armies, 1917-1922 by Dr. Matthew Raphael JohnsonThe Orthodox Nationalist: Karl Marx “On the Jewish Question” (1844)Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

If you want to get the show early and ad-free, head on over to the piquinones show.com. There, you can choose from where you wish to support me. Now listen very carefully. I've had some people ask me about this, even though I think on the last ad, I stated it pretty clearly. If you want an RSS feed, you're going to have to subscribe through substack or through Patreon. You can also subscribe on my website, which is right there. Gumroad, and what's the other one?

Subscribe Star. And if you do that, you will get access to the audio file. So head on over to the Pekignonez Show.com. You'll see all the ways that you can support me there. And I just want to thank everyone. It's because of you that I can put out the amount of material that I do. I can do what I'm doing with Dr. Johnson on 200 years together and everything else. the things that Thomas and I are doing together on continental philosophy.

It's all because of you. And, yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank you enough. So thank you. The Pekingona Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenison. This is episode 101. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today?

I promise I'll be on my best behavior. I promise you. It's going to be a struggle. It'll be a battle, an internal battle, but I think I could win this battle. So you have nothing worry about. All right. Here we go. New chapter, chapter 21, during the Soviet-German War.

After Crystal Knock 1938, the German Jews lost their last illusions about the mortal danger they were facing. With Hitler's campaign in Poland, the deadly storm headed east. yet nobody expected that the beginning of the Soviet-German war would move Nazi politics to a new level, toward total physical extermination of Jews. While they naturally expected all kinds of hardships from the German conquest, Soviet Jews could not envision the indiscriminate mass killings of men and women of all ages. One cannot foresee such things. Thus, the terrible and inescapable fate befell those who remained in the German-occupied territories without a chance to resist.

lives ended abruptly, but before their death, they had to pass through either initial forced relocation to a Jewish ghetto or a forced labor camp or to gas vans or through digging one's own grave and stripping before execution. The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia gives many names of the Russian Jews who fell victims of the Jewish catastrophe. It names of those who perished in Rostov, Sifaropol, Odessa, Minsk, Belostok, Kanas, and Narva. There were prominent people among them. The famous historian, S.M. Dubnov, spent the entire interwar period in exile. He left Berlin for Riga after Hitler took power. He was arrested during the German occupation and placed in a ghetto. In December, 1941, he was included into a column of those to be executed.

From Vilna, historian Dina Jofa and director of the Jewish gymnasium, Joseph Yershinsky, were sent to concentration camps. both were killed in Treblinka in 1943. Rabbi Shmul Bespelov, head of the Hossita movement in Bobrusk, was shot in 1941 when the city was captured by the Germans. Cantor Gershon Soroda, whose performance had once caught the attention of Nicholas 2nd and who performed yearly in St. Petersburg of Moscow, died in 1941 in Warsaw. There were two brothers, Paul and Vladimir Mintz.

Paul, the elder, was a prominent Latvian politician, the only Jew in the government of Latvia. Vladimir was a surgeon who had been entrusted with the treatment of Lenin in 1918 after the assassination attempt. From 1920, he lived in Latvia. In 1940, the Soviet occupation authorities arrested Paul Mintz and sent him to a camp in Krasnayr's cry where he died early on. The younger brother lived in Riga and was not touched. He died in 1941 at Buchenwald. Sabina Shirir, Dr. O'Roskirian, Dr. medicine, psychoanalyst, and close colleague of Carl Jung, returned to Russia in 1923 after working in clinics in Zurich, Munich, Berlin, and Geneva. In 1942, she was shot along with other Jews by

Germans in her native Rostovand Don. In chapter 19, we wrote about the death of her three scientists brothers during Stalin's terror. Well, let me just say what I said to you before. it isn't uncommon among Russian nationalists, very good ones, to take this point of view, generally speaking. Sultan Issen, of course, was in the Soviet army, but the propaganda at the time was that he was in the Russian army. He was defending Russia. And that's how these men were motivated. I think it was just, you know, accepting this view comes from the sheer number of Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, who were killed of all backgrounds.

And it started with this, with the German invasion, mechanics of which I'd like to talk about at some point. But in the fact that he was in, Solzniche was in the Soviet Army, that he, he was in the Soviet Army, that he was in a German POW camp. He wasn't treated poorly as far as I know. He never said he was. So the traditional point of view of all of this is accepted only because of what the invasion caused. It's not entirely, you know, it's not fully rational,

but that's the cause of it. I mean, Belarus lost half of its population. I can't believe it. It took three decades to recover again. So that makes some sense to me. And with this massive defeat, the Soviets experienced early on, they were able to come back. And I mean, there was a reason for that. But that's always impressive to people.

People like to hear those stories. So I think that's really where this comes from more than anything else. Yet many were saved from death by evacuation in 1941 and 1942. Various Jewish wartime and post-war sources do not doubt the dynamism of this evacuation. The example in the Jewish world, the book written in 1944, one can read, The Soviet authorities were fully aware that the Jews were the most endangered part of the population. And despite the acute military needs in transport, port, thousands of trains were provided for their evacuation. In many cities, Jews were evacuated

first, although the author believes that the statement of the Jewish writer David Berglson that approximately 80% of Jews were successfully evacuated is an exaggeration. Burglson wrote, in Chernigov, the pre-war Jewish population was estimated as 70,000 people, and only 10,000 of them remained by the time the Germans arrived. And Deneppropovsk, I can never pronounce that one. Yeah, neither can. Out of the original Jewish population of 100,000, only 30,000 remain when the Germans took the city. In Jitsimir, out of 50,000 Jews, no less than 44,000 left.

In the summer in 1946, issue of the bulletin Hayasa, Hayasa, E.M. Kulisher wrote, quote, there is no doubt that the Soviet authorities took special measures to evacuate the Jewish population. or to facilitate its unassisted flight, along with the state personnel and industrial workers, Jews were given priority in the evacuation. The Soviet authorities provided thousands of trains specifically for the evacuation of Jews, end quote. Also, as a safer measure to avoid bombing raids, Jews were evacuated by thousands of haywagons taken from Kolkos's and Sopkos collective farms and driven over to railway junctions in the rear. B.T. Goldberg, a law of Shalom al-ukham and then a correspondent for the Jewish newspaper Dirtog from New York

after a 1946 to 47 winter trip to the Soviet Union wrote an article about the wartime evacuation in Jews Dertog February 21st, 1947. His sources in Ukraine, Jews, quote, Jews and Christians and military and evacuees all stated that the policy of the authorities was to give the Jews a preference during evacuation to save as many of them as possible so that that the Nazis would not destroy them." And Moshe Kaganovich, a former Soviet partisan in his by then foreign memoirs, 1948, confirms that the Soviet government provided for the evacuation of Jews all available vehicles in addition to trains, including trains of hay wagons.

And the orders were to evacuate first and foremost a citizenry of Jewish nationality from the areas threatened by the enemy. note that S. Schwartz and later researchers, despite the existence of such orders, as well as a general policy of Soviet authorities to evacuate Jews and such. Yeah, he he disputes that. I don't know how, you know, this paragraph is very important to suggest that the Germans didn't have many, many Jews to worry about in the major cities that they took. in the early, you know, after June 13th, they were, there were a few Jews in the area. Now, I guess that they, what they did, they just brought them to the interior, be on the eurals or whatever. But can you imagine, you know, thousands of trains just for their, just for their purposes.

I thought, I thought Stalin hated them. I thought Stalin was this terrible anti-Semite. you know, these cities were depopulated to get them away from the German invasion. Oh, the Christians could go to hell, but these trains. And, you know, the truth is, and I tend to believe this because Stalin was so far superior to Germany in material of all kinds, in tanks, in weapons, in trains. You know, he was able to afford this, you know. So Hitler didn't have much Jews to really worry about.

But this, of course, you know, tends to contradict his previous couple of chapters. And I mean, if you want any other proof that Stalin was phylo-Semitic, well, here it is. You know, in the middle of wartime, would he say thousands of transomede? hundreds of trains my lord um that's almost an obsession nevertheless both earlier and later sources provide fairly consistent estimates of the number of jews were evacuated or fled without assistance from the german occupied territories official Soviet figures are not available all researchers complain that the contemporaneous statistics are at best approximate let us rely then on the works of the last decade a demographer m kovetsky

who used formerly unavailable archival material and novel techniques of analysis offers the following assessment. According to the 1939 census, 3,028,538 Jews lived in the USSR within its old, that is, pre-1939, 1940 boundaries. With some corrections to this figure and taking into account the rate of natural increase of the Jewish population from September 39 to June 1941, he analyzed each territory separately. this researcher suggests that at the outbreak of the war, approximately 3,080,000 Jews resided within the old USSR borders. Of these, 900,000 resided in the territories which would not be occupied by Germans, and at the beginning of the war, 2,180,000 Jews, Eastern Jews, resided in the territories later occupied by the Germans. There was no exact data regarding the number of Jews who fled or were evacuated to the east before the German occupation,

though based on some studies, we know that approximately 1 million to 1.1 million Jews managed to escape from the eastern regions later occupied by Germans. I think this is why Schwartz makes the claim that, no, they weren't given preferential treatment because the records are spotty. So anything that we talk about here is an estimate. It can be a well-educated estimate, but that's all it is. We don't have paperwork. But I think, and I think that that's Schwartz's argument. I think it's a dishonest one. But because there aren't clear records, therefore Stalin's policy didn't exist.

The truth of the matter is that they were given preferential treatment, as Schulteneaton said, and were removed from all of these cities in huge numbers. to the interior of the Soviet Union. There was a different situation in the territories incorporated into the Soviet Union only in 1939 and 1940, and which were rapidly captured by the Germans at the start of the Blitzkrieg. The lightning speed German attack allowed almost no chance for escape. Meanwhile, the Jewish population of these buffer zones numbered 1.885,000 Western Jews in June 1941.

And only a small number of these Jews managed to escape or were evacuated. It is believed that the number is about 10 to 12%. Thus, within the new borders of the USSR, by the most optimistic assessments, approximately 2.2,000, 26,000 Jews, 2 million Eastern, 226,000 Western escaped the German occupation, and 2.7,039,000 Jews, 1,080,000 Easterners, and 1,659,000 Westerners remained in the occupied, territories. Well, and that's what I was, this is what I was kind of waiting for here.

There was no Blitz Creek. Hitler was not capable of that. And when you read Suvarov, the best book isn't so much icebreaker. It's his 2008 book, the main culprit. Hitler was very compared to the U.S.S.R. Hitler was very bad off, militarily speaking. Typical German tank, and he had very few of them compared to the Soviets, had 100 horsepower engine. Soviets were using 4 and 500 horsepower engines. I mean, the Panzer 1 only had machine guns. Panzer 2 had a 20-millimeter cannon that couldn't penetrate even small or light. Soviet tanks.

The Panzer 3 and 37, and maybe they only had 75 of those at the time of the attack. Germany did not have a heavy tank at all. They said that it was one, but it wasn't. You know, the truth is, you know, they went into this battle. Hitler's invading army had 3,332 tanks. many of which were like that quite inferior. Stalin had 23,925, among them the most advanced in the world,

the powerful long-barrel cannons, wide treads for both road and snow conditions, very advanced anti-tank weapons defenses, diesel engines, all these improvements that Germany did not have, and Stalin was continually building them in huge numbers. Suvadov reminds us that Hitler had, a Sald had more amphibious tanks than Hitler had tanks in total. But when I read his book, what blew me away is that this was really a horse-drawn invasion.

Now, I've heard different estimates between 500,000 and 750,000 horses were dragging, you know, right behind there. some of these tanks only existed on paper so-called Blitzkrieg was made up of convoys of maybe 220 horses with carts following each tank you know about 153 divisions invaded maybe 17 could be called armored in any normal standard

and of course the Soviets were the exact opposite what kind of blitzkrieg can you have when you're dependent on horsepower literal horsepower this was no no blitzkrieg whatsoever and this is one of the reasons that when Hitler he got news of this invasion Stalin laughed Stalin knew Hitler's military capabilities very well because some of it was developed on Soviet soil

to get out of the Versailles restrictions and they were still trading up until this point this you know the main culprit absolutely blew my mind who he has plenty of citations for all of this It blew my mind how bad off the German invasion was compared to what the Soviet Union had. They were not fast moving. They couldn't be. And you didn't have, of course, you didn't have a long-range bomber.

I think in 1941 Soviets had roughly 6.5 million men under arms. No one in the cosmos could ever believe that he was going to take the country in just a few weeks or a few months. It was a suicide mission. Evacuies and refugees from the occupied and threatened territories were sent deep into the rear, with the majority of Jews resettled beyond the Ural Mountains, in particular in Western Siberia, and also in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The materials of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, E.A.K. contain the following statement.

Quote, at the beginning of the Patriotic War, about one and a half million Jews were evacuated to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other Central Asian republics. This figure does not include the vulgar, the Ural, and the Siberian regions. However, the Jewish Encyclopedia argues that a 1.5 million figure

is a great exaggeration. Still, there was no organized evacuation into Bureau Bidzon, and no individual refugees relocated there, although because of the collapse of the Jewish Caucasus, the vacated housing there could accommodate up to 11,000 families. At the same time, the Jewish colonists in the Crimea were evacuated so much ahead of time that they were able to take with them all livestock and farm implements. Moreover, it is well known that in the spring of 1942, Jewish colonists from Ukraine

established Caucasus in the vulgar region. How? While the author calls it the Irish, of nemesis. They were installed in place of German colonists who were exiled from the German Republic of the Volga by Soviet government, orders starting on August 28, 1941. All right. Well, let's be clear. And we've said this many times before. These were not necessarily farmers. The tiny, minuscule minority of Jews that were farmers anywhere. But, but they did you know control in one way or another the collective farms um but this is you know this is it's impressive that there weren't that many um uh jews that were remaining and this doesn't include because of the nature of the record you know we could guess certain things those who simply left on their

own they didn't wait for an official transport they simply just just left um So, but keep in mind something else too in what I was saying before. Because Stalin was going to invade Central Europe, he had a massive number of men, material very close to that border, the border with Poland, the border with Romania, etc. and Hitler was able to use that stuff, especially the fuel and things like that, the huge, you know, whole armies that were captured early on. But even with that, well, it's very difficult to do because they're not comparable systems,

but even with that, the initial invasion force stalled just before they got, to Moscow. They simply couldn't do it. They were exhausted. They took heavy casualties. And as far as I know, and I think this is pretty well known, Stalin practiced a scorched earth tactic. Stalin also announced that he wasn't going to follow the rules of war. He wasn't going to obey the rules of war here. So an invasion force under those conditions has to be briefed in a very different way. So that's the situation here with these so-called farmers and craftsmen. As already noted, all the cited wartime and post-war sources agree in recognizing the energy and the scale of the organized evacuation in Jews from the advancing German army.

But the later sources from the end of the 1940s began to challenge this. For example, we read in a 1960s source, quote, a planned evacuation of Jews as the most endangered part of the population did not take place anywhere in Russia, italicized as in the source. And 20 years later, we read this. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, quote, contrary to the rumors that the government allegedly evacuated Jews from the areas under imminent threat of German occupation, no such measures had ever taken place. The Jews were abandoned to their fate. When applied to the citizen of Jewish nationality, the celebrated proletarian internationalism was a dead letter.

The statement is, this statement, this is back to Solzhenitsyn's talking, this statement is completely unfair. Keep in mind at this point, decades after the war, is when the Stalin was an anti-Semite concept began to take off. I don't remember when that first flurry of articles and books in academia came out saying that. They had no choice but to deny this. And with the paucity of records, they could say it, and really it was very difficult to respond to them. But contemporary sources from the era show otherwise. No, it may not be the huge numbers that they say. I don't know.

But, and this is not, this is not an argument that destroys this statement, but, the claim that Stalin was an anti-Semite you had this stuff couldn't have happened and they had to deny it or say it wasn't for Jews like you know like like Schwartz did even though they were

they were the ones who but they could benefit from it but it didn't say Jews on the side of the train and because of that it was just for anybody you know those aren't rumors as far as I know and the citations that Shulton Isson Nizin gives and that I've come across over the years, you know, it is true.

But trying to create Stalin and blame all of the tyranny of the Soviet Union on one man who, of course, is an anti-Semite, is what caused these kind of reactions much later. Still, even those Jewish writers who deny the beneficence of the government with respect to Jewish evacuation do recognize its magnitude. Quote, due to the specific social structure of the Jewish population, the percentage of Jews among the evacuees should have been much higher than the percentage of Jews in the urban population." And indeed it was. The evacuation council was established on June 24th, 1941, just two days after the German invasion.

Schwernik was the chairman and Kasegan and Pervukin were his deputies. Its priorities were announced as the following, to evacuate first and foremost the state and party agencies with personnel, industries, and raw materials along with the workers of evacuated plants and their families and young people of conscription age. Between the beginning of the war and November 1941, around 12 million people were evacuated from the threatened areas to the rear. The number included, as we have seen, 1 million to 1.1 million Eastern Jews and more than 200,000 Western Jews from the soon-to-be-occupied areas. In addition, we must add to this figure a substantial number of Jews among the people evacuated from the cities and regions of the Russian Soviet-Federed Socialist Republic,

R-F-F-S-R, that is, Russia proper, that never fell to the Germans, in particular those from Moscow and Leningrad. Solomon Schwartz states, quote, the general evacuation of state agencies and industrial enterprises with a significant portion of their staff, often with families, was in many places very extensive. Thanks to the social structure of Ukrainian Jewry with a significant percentage of Jews among the middle and top civil servants, including the academic and technical intelligentsia and the substantial proportion of Jewish workers in Ukrainian heavy industry, the share of Jews among the evacuees was larger than their share in the urban and even more than in the total

population. This is kind of how we know that it really did happen, regardless of what Schwartz has to say and what others have to say. because of their control of certain, of these, of these industries and these regions, that's very important to keep in mind. I also think, you know, 12 million people, that's a huge number. And I think, let's say, let's say it's really 10 million. I don't know, whatever the real number is. My personal theory is that Stalin and Beria were worried that they were all going to join the Germans.

Of course, the Jews wouldn't. But, you know, Hitler had a tremendous Russian contingent that I don't think he treated very well. I have a paper that Eric Koch, the SS head of Ukraine, was actually working for Stalin. And I think it's true because of how he abused the allies and eventually turn them against them. As soon as the SS went in there, not combat SS, the others, they ended up ruining it in certain places. Nevertheless, you still had a substantial army of anti-Soviet Russians, never properly used. I think the most that Hitler ever gave was that they still have to have German. officers, which would be odd, because I don't know if they all spoke German, but, and I think

this is why he was getting people out of there. So, and I don't think he was worried so much about a German invasion as he was his own invasion of Central Europe, getting them out of there, and there's no blowback there. So, no, I do think it's true. I do think the number is probably correct. And another argument here, as we just said, that because of the Jewish presence in these heavy industries, including railroads, yes, it's going to make sense.

They're going to make sure that they get their people out of there as much as humanly possible. The same was true for Bailorussia. In the 1920s and early 1930s, it was almost exclusively Jews, but both young and old who studied at various courses, literacy classes, in day schools, evening schools, and shift schools. This enabled the poor from Jewish villages to join the ranks of industrial workers. Constituting only 8.9% of the population of Belarusia, Jews accounted for 36% of the industrial workers of the Republic in 1930. I think that's a very elastic definition of industrial workers.

I think the percentage of guys who were actually there, they're, you know, with a pick or in a steel mill or a foundry, were very low. But if they had a position just above them, they're still called industrial workers. In fact, Jews were all called proletarians as far as the Soviet system went, no matter what their position was. So I find that 36% extremely hard to believe. But Belarus was a huge Jewish, even more than Ukraine, huge Jewish population before the war. Quote, the rise of the percentage of Jews among the evacuees continues as Schwartz. It was also facilitated by the fact that for many employees and workers, the evacuation was not mandatory.

therefore many, mostly non-Jews, remained where they were. Thus, even the Jews, quote, who did not fit the criteria for mandatory evacuation, had better chances to evacuate, end quote. However, the author also notes that, quote, no government's orders or institutions on the evacuation specifically of Jews or reports about it ever appeared in the Soviet press. There simply were no orders regarding the evacuation of Jews specifically. It means that there was no purposeful evacuation of Jews. Just because it didn't show up in the press doesn't mean anything. Of course, we all know that press was tightly controlled in Moscow.

No matter where it was in the Soviet Union, it was controlled. The Russians would have revolted. Yeah, yeah, precisely. It would have been an outrageous, people would have been outraged being unbelief. Exactly. So they kept it out of the press. keeping in mind the Soviet reality, this conclusion seems ill-grounded and in any case formalistic. Indeed, reports about mass evacuations of the Jews did not appear in the Soviet press.

It is easy to understand why. First, after the pact with Germany, the Soviet Union suppressed information about Hitler's policies towards Jews. And when the war broke out, the bulk of the Soviet population did not know about the mortal danger of the German invasion posed for Jews. Second, and this was probably the more important factor, German propaganda, vigorously denounced Judeo-Bolshevism and the Soviet leadership undoubtedly realize that they gave a solid foundation to this propaganda during the 1920s and 1930s. So how could they now deliver openly and loudly that the foremost government priority must be to save Jews? This could only have been seen as playing into Hitler's hands. And that's another factor too.

But one thing that Suvorov brings out, and it's very important is that so much of his military, especially the heavier things, were built in the USSR, even right up to just prior to the invasion. That's one place he can go that they didn't have observers from, you know, from Western Europe to yell at them for. So, and so, and from, actually from the German side, it's very hard to condemn Judeo-Bolcivism while, God, they sold their most advanced battleship.

So to the Italians, although without guns, to the USSR, not that long before the invasion. And I don't have the name of it off the top of my head, but they weren't, you know, and it was, of course, Stalin's interest wasn't to support Germans or national socials or anything like that, but it was to make sure his concern regardless was that Western European powers would wear themselves out and although of course

he didn't have to look very far because the Italians made sure that whatever they did they needed rescue so the Germans had to go there and rescue North Africa in Greece everywhere they went they lost and they needed German assistance So wearing the mount wasn't very, wasn't going to be very difficult, which is another reason why you didn't have a Blitzkrieg in 1941. You had what I would call a suicide mission.

Therefore, there were no public announcements that among the evacuees, Jews were overrepresented. The evacuation orders did not mention Jews, yet during the evacuation, the Jews were not discriminated against. On the contrary, they were evacuated by all available means, but in silence, without perpetuated, press coverage inside the USSR. However, propaganda for foreign consumption was a different matter. For example, in December 1941, after repulsing the German onslaught on Moscow, radio Moscow, not in the Russian language, of course, but in Polish. And on the next day, five more times in German compared the successful Russian winter counter-offensive with the Maccabian miracle and told the German-speaking listeners repeatedly that precisely during Hanukkah week,

the 134th Nuremberg Division named after the city where the racial legislation originated was destroyed. In 1941, the Soviet authorities readily permitted worshippers to overfill synagogues in Moscow, Leningrad, and Karkov, and to openly celebrate the Jewish Passover of 1942. We cannot say that the domestic Soviet press treated German attractive. with silence. Ilya Arrenberg and others, like the journalist Krieger, got to go ahead, got the go ahead to maintain and inflame hatred towards Germans throughout the entire war, and not without mentioning the burning topic of Jewish suffering, yet without a special stress on it. Throughout the war, Aaronberg thundered that the German is a beast by his nature,

calling for not sparing even unborn fascists, meaning the murder of pregnant German women. and he was checked only at the very end when the war reached the territory of Germany, and it became clear that the army had embraced only too well the party line of unbridled revenge against all Germans. Yeah, revenge, of course, we know I don't think that's true. I understand Solton Eaton's position. You know I've been a big critic of Putin primarily on that. That's one big issue I have with him, how he just stresses this over and over again. But when Stalin rejected, and publicly in fact, stated the rules of war don't apply to my forces, this became a very different kind of a war.

This was going to be worse than World War I. And if you read various German memoirs of the era, you see exactly what it was. You see that the Soviets were always far better supplied than the Germans were even fairly close to the border. The only exception being when they took these huge Soviet stores of ammunition, including things like food and uniforms, there's a lot of myths about this invasion that hopefully we could take care of here, even if it's not entirely appropriate. However, there is no doubt that the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews, its predetermination and scope, was not sufficiently covered by the Soviet press so that even the Jewish masses in the Soviet Union could hardly realize the extent of their danger. Indeed, during the entire

war, there were few public statements about the fate of Jews under German occupation. Stalin in his speech on November 6, 1941, the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution, said, quote, the Nazis are as eager to organize medieval Jewish programs as the Tsarist regime was. The Nazi party is the party of medieval reaction and the Black Hundred pogroms. As far as we know, an Israeli historian writes, it was the only case during the entire war when Stalin publicly mentioned the Jews. On January 6, 1942, in a note of the Narcomindal People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, composed by Molotov and addressed to all states that maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

The Jews are mentioned as one of the many suffering Soviet nationalities and shootings of Jews in Kiev, Levov, Odessa, Komenetz-Poldosk, Deneppra Post, Vos, Maripal, Kirch were highlighted and the number of victims listed. Quote, the terrible massacre and pogroms were inflicted by German invaders in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. A significant number of Jews, including women and children, were rounded up before the execution. All of them were stripped naked and beaten and then shot by submachine guns. Many mass murders occurred in other Ukrainian cities and these bloody executions were directed in particular against unarmed and defenseless Jews from the working class. On December 19, 1942, the Soviet government issued a declaration that mentioned Hitler's special plan for total extermination of the Jewish population.

in the occupied territories of Europe, end quote, and in Germany itself. Quote, although relatively small, the Jewish minority in the Soviet population suffered particularly hard from the savage bloodthirstiness of the Nazi monsters, end quote. But some sources point out that this declaration was somewhat forced.

It came out two days after a similar declaration was made by the Western allies and it was not republished in the Soviet press, as was always done during newspaper campaigns. In 1943, out of seven reports of the Extraordinary State Commission for Investigation of Nazi atrocities, such as extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and the destruction of cultural artifacts of our country, only one report referred to the murder of Jews in the Stofferpool region near Minerilenevodi. And in March 1944 in Kiev, while making a speech about the suffering endured by Ukrainians under occupation,

and Krushchev did not mention Jews at all. You know, it occurred to me, as I've been saying, you know, the German military development, which really was not at the root of German redevelopment economically, much of it took place in the USSR. They were trading. It would be very difficult for the press to be blaring about German atrocities against Jews having just helped them build their military force,

which means Stalin was aware that they did not have the capacity to take, even if they tried anything, which Stalin said was as inconceivable to take or keep much of anything. My opinion is that these Jews and other people, Others were evacuated because this was a staging area. You had something like 3 million men being masked on the western borders of the USSR. It creates such a tremendous disruption in economic life. We had to get them out of there. That has more to do with it than any preparation or worry about a German invasion.

That was absolutely out of the question as far as. Stalin and his men were concerned. So, yes, it did happen, but for a very, very different reason. And it's also conceivable that Jews thought that a preemption was possible, as difficult as it would be. They just simply wanted to get out of there. But when you have this huge number of men, material tanks, everything, coming into the western areas, which is with Jewish areas,

then the one thing you want to do is get out of there. I think that was the cause, not a worry about the German invasion. Probably this is true. Indeed, the Soviet masses did not realize the scale of the Jewish catastrophe. Overall, this was our common fate to live under the impenetrable shell of the USSR and be ignorant of what was happening in the outside world. However, Soviet Jews could not be all that unaware about the events in Germany. Quote, in the mid-30s, the Soviet press wrote a lot about German

anti-semitism, a novel by Leon Fectwinger, the Oppenheim family, and the movie based on the book, as well as another movie, Professor Mamlock clearly demonstrated the dangers that Jews were facing. Following the pogroms of Kristallnach, Pravda published an editorial, quote, the fascist, butchers and cannibals in which had strongly condemned the Nazis. Quote, the whole civilized world watches with disgust and indignation, the vicious massacre of the defenseless Jewish population by German fascists. With the same feelings, the Soviet people watched the dirty and bloody events in Germany, and the Soviet Union, along with the capitalists and landowners, all sources of anti-Semitism

have been wiped out. Then throughout the whole November, Probda printed daily on its front pages, reports such as Jewish programs in Germany, beastly vengeance on Jews, the war of protests around the world against the atrocities of the fascist thugs. Protest rallies against anti-Jewish policies of Hitler were held in Moscow. Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilski, Tbilski, Minsk, Svardlosk, and Stalin. Pravda published a detail, was that style? Was there a city called Stalin?

I said there's probably Stalingrad. Stalingrad. Yes, there's a mispern. Pravda published a detailed account of the town hall meeting of the Moscow intelligentsia in the Great Hall of the Conservatory, with speech was given by A. N. Tulski, A. Cornich, El Sobelov, People's Artists, a Soviet title, Signifying Prominence in the Arts, A.B. Golden Vicer, and S.M. Mikuls, and also the text of a resolution adopted at the meeting. Quote, we the representatives of the Moscow intelligentsia raise our voice in outrage and condemnation against the Nazi atrocities and human acts of violence against the defenseless Jewish population of Germany's.

The fascist beat up, maim, rape, kill, and burn alive and broad daylight. People who are guilty. only of belonging to the Jewish nation. The next day on November 29th, under the headline Soviet intelligentsia is outraged by Jewish programs in Germany. Pravda produced a full coverage of rallies in other Soviet cities. So it was in the press, albeit maybe a little bit later. But prior to the invasion, they were condemning Germany while still trading with them, which gives it a tremendous amount of strength to the argument that Suvadov makes,

that they really wanted to build up Germany to fight the West, and then Stalin could take on probably all of Europe. That would make sense if this were true. And the same thing was going on, as you know, in the U.S. and, and Britain. So, you know, these rallies, I have the feeling were paid. I have the feeling these were organized by the party. And we know the fact is that it wasn't merely by belonging to the Jewish nation or there

were cases of that. You have to admit, Himmler said some bloodthirsty things. You know, I know this is off topic, but had Hitler won the war, I think that Himmler and the SS would have, he would have turned, they would have turned on each other. He created his own deep state, so to speak. He was a politician. Himmler was not. Himmler did say, you did have some people saying some nasty things.

Well, while Hitler was very friendly with Ensignoff and, you know, considered him like one of his greatest allies, the SS was working behind. is back with the Iron Guard to undermine Antonoff. There's truth to this, and that's worth getting into at some point. But these slogans here, and part of it is projection. Remember, the Soviets had just invaded the Baltics. They invaded Poland a few days after Germany did. and of course the Gulag camps were moved right wherever the Soviet Union was and all their enemies were sent there

so you know the Germany's biggest probably know this is this is remaining was their main source of fuel which could be taken in just a few hours by the Soviets but this kind of thing was not going to motivate Russian soldiers, which is why I think in the beginning it was kept out of the press. I get the impression that this was later in the, well, this he says, in the mid-30s, so, okay, just before, but not during wartime. So, so either way, it works. although I'm not seeing numbers here they don't talk about anything like you know well the things okay

never mind I have to be very careful here I'm struggling I'm struggling I think this is a good place to stop too I'm struggling yeah he's got it however and he's going to go into the um we're switching to to uh ribbon drop molotov pack so um we should save this for the for the next episode oh boy all right well um as i do at the end of every episode please go to the show notes and go to the description on the video and um donate to dr johnson's work um if you want please another great way you can do that is by picking up his new book and um yeah do that please and we'll be back in a few days for the next episode in this chapter. Increasingly, I need your support.

I may get injured by fighting cats. You never know what kind of bills I may incur from that is the last thing I need. So I appreciate you helping me out, my friend. No problem. So I'll see you in a couple days. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. All right, okay. Bye-bye.