The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together' w/ Dr Matthew Raphael Johnson - Part 106

Episode Date: January 28, 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 2022-2025Communist Misrule in Soviet Kazakhstan: The Ideological and Ethnic Nature of the Goloshchyokin Genocide (1930-1933)‘Crushing the Resistance’ – Joseph Stalin’s Ukrainian Genocide RevisitedStalin the Eternal Philosemite: Soviet-American Joint Support for Zionism in the 1940sDr 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 part 106 of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenyston. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today?

I'm feeling pretty well, despite everything going on. with me, I'm feeling pretty well. I always like to celebrate my father's, today would be his 94th birthday. He was a good man and a good father, unlike my mother, not a good mother. He was a very good man, and I modeled my parenting after him, which is why I did very well in that department. It didn't scare me to become a father. I wasn't worried. I just, I'm going to do whatever he did. and I did and his legacy lives on he was a very good man

he almost you know I'm almost he almost died in Korea more than once so there's a chance that I would I'm not even shouldn't even be here what would the world be like without me you know he lost so much

one of the Chinese with their mortars in the Korean War one after another he got blown up so badly and then he lost so much blood he had a heart attack and they finally rescued him and they brought him back and finally the hospital in Japan

and otherwise I would not be here so but he barely made it out of Korea as a BAR man fighting fighting communist accord of course yeah

and fighting now I can't imagine yeah and I know the the cold there was unbearable for many you know, he only told me about it. He didn't tell my sisters about it. And he mentioned to me maybe five or six times. He used to tell me, you know how you spot a phony?

You know, this stolen valor crap? He said this many years ago. He said, if any guy just starts yakking about killing people to us anybody, you know they're lying. That was his big thing. And it happened quite often. And especially these days with the whole stolen valor thing. All right.

chapter here, chapter 22 from the end of the war to Stalin's death. You ready for this? Yes, sir, I am. All right, here we go. At the beginning of the 1920s, the authors of a collection of articles titled Russia and the Jews foresaw that all these bright perspectives for the Jews in USSR look so bright only if one supposes that the Bolsheviks would want to protect us. But would they? Can we assume that the people who in the struggle for power betrayed everything, from the motherland to communism, would remain faithful to us even when it stops benefiting them? However, during so favorable a time to them as the 1920s and 1930s, a great majority of Soviet Jews chose to ignore this somber warning or simply did not hear it. Yet the Jews,

with their contributions of the Russian Revolution, should have expected that one day the inevitable recoil of revolution would hit even them, at least during its ebb. Let's be clear. There was nothing non-communist about Joseph Stalin. His agenda was identical to Lenin's and Staling's and Engels, for that matter. As I've said a hundred times before, when books and articles in here, he just had a far more advanced bureaucracy to work with. Don't forget, you know, we just have read, chapters on Stalin where Jews thrived in most areas. But it's one of my big pet peeves is when people say that, you know, Stalin was the, less a problem, that he veered away from Marxism,

Marxism, Leninism. And he did no such thing. His agenda was no different than anyone else that preceded him all the way back to Marx himself. If you reject, he, he was a bit of, the market, you reject private property, then you have to have, by definition, a planned system. There's no other way to do it. So that implies that the party owns everything, controls everything, and that itself implies further totalitarianism. Beyond that, it also implies that enemies have to go. Enemies have to be destroyed wherever they go. So it's a very simple equation. So, you know, I've had to explain this to people. It's one of the reasons I'm happy I don't have Facebook anymore.

They got sick of explaining it to them. That somehow Lenin was this impeccable Marxist and Stalin ruined it. This is what we just read up here. And there's no such thing. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. And, you know, what he says in the future here, Shultz and Euston, in this book, Don't forget, he just got finished telling us about how well Jews did under Stalin's rule.

The post-war period became the years of deep disappointments and adversity for Soviet Jews. During Stalin's last eight years, Soviet Jewry was tested by persecutions of the cosmopolitans, the loss of positions in science, arts, and press, the crushing of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, E.A.K, with the execution of its leadership, and finally, by the doctor, his plot. Well, there was no need for the anti-fascist committee anymore. It wasn't crushed. It was simply disbanded. And as we have read many times in the past, it's one group of Marxist Jews doing this to other Marxist Jews. By the nature of a totalitarian regime, only Stalin himself could initiate the campaign aimed at weakening the Jewish presence and influence in the Soviet

system. Only he could make the first move. Yet because of the rigidity of Soviet propaganda and Stalin's craftiness, not a single sound could be uttered nor a single step made in the open. We have seen already that Soviet propaganda did not raise any alarm about the annihilation of Jews in Germany during the war. Indeed, it covered up those things, obviously being afraid of appearing pro-Jewish in the eyes of its own citizens. Well, remember, the camps were taken exclusively by by Soviet soldiers.

And of course, Nuremberg is coming up in the future here. So that's a bit of an exaggeration. And they controlled, Soviets controlled all the evidence of places like Alshut and the rest of it. They controlled every bit of evidence there. Hence, they had an interest in covering over their own crimes. The disposition of the Soviet authority

towards Jews could evolve for years without ever really surfacing at the level of official propaganda. The first changes in shuffles and the bureaucracy began quite inconspicuously at the time of growing rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler in 1939. By then Litvenov, a Jewish minister of foreign affairs was replaced by Molotov and ethnic Russian, and a cleansing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NKID, was underway. Simultaneously, Jews were brought. barred from entrance into diplomatic schools and military academies. Still, it took many more years before the disappearance of Jews from the NKID, and the sharp decline of their influence in the Ministry of Foreign Trade became apparent.

Don't forget, there was no such decree that Stalin wrote down, okay, Jews are going to stay out of this. Many groups were purrs. Many groups were removed. You know, after a victorious war, Stalin couldn't be touched. you know, there's something about the human brain that when a leader wins a major war like that, especially when they were on the defensive. He because there was no way he was going anywhere.

He was, he had a legitimacy, twisted, in a twisted legitimacy for being victorious. So he, but, you know, saying that Jews were harmed as Jews is a totally separate thing from what was all Nathan is talking about now. Because of the intrinsic secrecy of all Soviet inter-party moves, only very few were aware of the presence of the subtle anti-Jewish undercurrents of the Agitprop apparatus by the end of 1942 that aimed to push out Jews from the major art centers such as the Bolshoi Theater, the Moscow Conservatory, and the Moscow Philharmonic, where, according to the note which Alexandrov, head of Agit-Prop presented to the Central Committee in the summer of 1942,

quote, everything was almost completely in the hands of non-Russians, and Russians had become an ethnic minority, accompanied by a detailed table to convey particulars. Later, there had been attempts to begin national regulation of cadres from the top down, which essentially meant primarily pushing out Jews from the managerial positions. By and large, Stalin regulated this process by either supporting or checking such efforts, depending on the circumstances.

And not just supports what I've been saying, what so many Russian nationalist fighters have been saying for a long time, that Russia was simply exploited. I mean, the nation of Russia was exploited within the Soviet Union. It was an occupied entity. And so what he's talking about here is that he wants to even things out a little bit, a certain kind of affirmative action, Jews being just one group

but talking about, you know, in Russia, Russians weren't even in control of the party. As it says here, everything was almost completely in the hands of non-Russian. Stalin, you know, I don't know if we're going to talk about the Leningrad purge here at some point. But there was far more suspicion aimed at Russians than there were at Jews. But all groups were looked at suspiciously by Stalin, ethnically speaking.

And he was, I guess, being told maybe evening things out would be in his interest. I don't know. The wartime tension and the attitudes towards Jews was also manifested during post-war re-evaluation. In Siberia and Central Asia, wartime Jewish refugees were not welcomed by the local populace. So after the war, they mostly settled in the capitals of Central Asian. republics, except for those who moved back, not to their old schedels and towns, but into the larger cities. Well, I mentioned before in Kazakhstan, the Jewish dictatorship that Stalin established there and given great autonomy brought the population to before the war, maybe to a third of what

it was, and the Kazakhs became a minority in their own country because of it. destroying the economy, keeping food from various groups of people, destroying the nomadic, it was a nomadic society, Kazakhstan at the time. They couldn't handle that, so they had to destroy it and settle them, which never worked. And so clearly, Jews would not be welcomed in the Central Asian states. The largest returning stream of refugees fled to Ukraine, where they were met with hostility by the local population. especially because of the return of Soviet officials and the owners of desirable residential property. This reaction in the formerly occupied territories was also fueled by Hitler's incendiary propaganda during the Nazi occupation. Khrushchev, the head of Ukraine from 1943, when he was first secretary of the Communist Party and at the same time chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine,

not only said nothing on this topic in his public speeches, treating the fate of Jews during the occupation with silence, but he also upheld the secret instruction throughout Ukraine not to employ Jews in positions of authority. Secret instruction. So it was just whispered. It wasn't written down anywhere. And boy, you know, the Soviets, they love these long, pompous titles. It drives me crazy. You know, chairman of the council of the people's commissars of Ukraine, that's short in Soviet life.

But whatever incendiary propaganda that, you know, co-constra, people like that were promoting. They had also lived through a decade or more of the opposite. So whether the propaganda actually worked, whether it reached people, the Ukrainian nationalists wanted nothing to do with Jews, seeing them as part of the Marxist occupying power for a very good reason. But also don't forget that under the SS, Coke in particular, Slavs also were, the propaganda also was aimed at them.

And that's a, that's an important thing to keep in mind, with Jews and Slavs. The infantry, the Vermeck had no problem, loved the Slavs. We're going to organize all these armies and stuff like that, not when the SS got there, at least not in Ukraine. And that's when the anti-Slophic propaganda came in with people like, you know, Himmler and Koch and even Rosenberg. According to the tale of an old Jewish communist Russo Gaudas, who survived the entire Nazi occupation under guise of being a poll named Kemunaskaya and was later denied employment by the long-awated

communists because of her Jewishness, Khrushchev stated clearly and with his peculiar frankness, quote, in the past, the Jews committed many sins against Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We don't need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn't return here. they would be better to go to Biro Bidz. This is Ukraine, and we don't want Ukrainian people to, and we don't want Ukrainian people to infer that the return of Soviet authority means the return of Jews, end quote. Yeah, that was a very common sentiment. We've talked about Bada Bizdan already and why it didn't work.

It's such a weird project unless you realize that there was supposed to be mountains of gold underground. when that didn't pan out, no pun intended. It, you know, it wasn't successful. But even if there were, I'm not sure how many Jews really wanted to move there. It was such a long, you know, it's, what is it, eight time zones away on the border of China. The very different climate, I don't know. The bit of Bizdon thing is very interesting, but it only makes sense, thanks to the things that I discovered. concerning the gold deposit, but even if it would have proven itself, I don't think the majority

of Soviet Jews would have wanted to move there. In the early September 1945, a Jewish major of the NKVD was brutally beaten in Kiev by two members of the military. He shot both of them dead. This incident caused a large-scale massacre of Jews with five fatalities. There are documented sources of other similar cases. Well, you see, these are two totally different things. NKVD is a party police unit The infantry is the army That's the state

Anyone who studies the Soviet Union Has to realize that there was a big difference between the state And the Communist Party Now of course the party dominated the state But there were moments where the state didn't like that And this is an example here Again, as I mentioned with the Germans.

The German infantry had no problem. They liked the Slavs. The SS came in. Everything changed. But it never became, because of, you know, Sondland was considered the victor,

the Voivod, as they used to call him, that he was unmovable. But in the future, there was a deep state, NKVD, you know, and eventually became the KGB, that started asserting itself more powerfully.

There is a distinction there, and this distinction is what matters here. Socialist Dysheski Vesnik wrote that the Jewish national feelings, which were exacerbated during the war, overreacted to the numerous manifestations of anti-Semitism and so the even more common indifference to anti-Semitism. This motif is so typical almost a, as much as anti-Semitism itself, the indifference to anti-Semitism was likely to cause outrage. Yes, preoccupied by their own miseries, people and nations often lose compassion for the troubles of others, and the Jews are not an exception here. A modern author justly notes, quote, I hope that I, as a Jew who found her roots in place in Israel, would not be accused of apostasy

if I point out that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did not raised our voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea in the Caucasus. After the liberation of Crimea by the Red War. He's talking about Stalin's deportation of the Tartars, who are always very pro-Russian, still are. But it's easy to get lost here. We've got to look at the forest, not just the trees. Every group of people in the Soviet Union had suffered miserably. whether it be from the invasion, from the economy, or Stalin himself.

And after the war, you know, even as far as Jewish opinion was concerned, Stalin was untouchable. He defeated under Hitler. He did most of the legwork. He suffered most of the casualties, despite the fact that it was mostly the wrong men. Huge, you know, whole villages destroyed completely from the, this, you know, especially when the Soviet counterattack.

The Germans did not have the equipment or the fuel for any war of attrition. Didn't have the tanks for it, didn't have the planes for it, which is just, you know, shocking to me when I first read about that, and it's true. So, you can't get any of the Jews are just

are inward looking. But I also want to point out that I said this before, and I think I've said, knew this paper. Maybe I haven't. That Stalin was the key to the foundation of Israel, not just at home, but also abroad. After the liberation of Crimea by the Red Army in 1943, talk started among circles of the Jewish elite in Moscow about a rebirth of the Crimean project of the 1920s, i.e. about resettling Jews in Crimea. The Soviet government

did not discourage these aspirations, hoping that American Jews, would be more generous in their donations for the Red Army. It is quite possible that Mikuls and Feffer, heads of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, E.A.K., based on a verbal agreement with Molotov, negotiated with American Zionists about financial support of the project for Jewish relocation to Crimea during their triumphal tour of the USA in the summer of 1943. The idea of a Crimean Jewish Republic was also backed by Lazovsky, the then powerful assistant minister of foreign affairs. You know, I have searched in the Russian language

for any reference to Khazaria or new Khazaria and at this era during this point, and I can't find it. It may have simply been in the back of their minds, but Crimea, of course, ethnically made a hell of a lot more sense than the border with China in the far east. and there was another attempt to do the same before the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022, about which I have an excellent book. I do mention this.

New Qazadea was actually being built. It was destroyed. And now it seems that they're moving to Dubai. and that's where very wealthy Jews are going because Israel was flattened by the Iranians. But at the time, the Tartars had been removed, most of them, so maybe the Jews can have their own state there, yes, and it was something that was taken very seriously. The E.A.K had yet another project for a Jewish republic to establish it in the place of the former Volga, German, autonomous Soviet Socialist, Republic, whereas we have seen in previous chapters, Jewish settlements were established in the wake of the exile of the Germans. Esther Marquish, widow of E.A.K. member Peretz Markish, confirms that he

presented a letter concerning transferring the former German Republic to the Jews. In the Politburo, Molotov, Kaganov, and Viroszlov were the most positively disposed to the E.A.K. And according to rumors, some members of the Politburo were inclined to support this Crimea idea. On February 15, 1944, Stalin was forwarded a memorandum about the plan, which was signed by Mikuls, P. Feffer and Fishtin, according to P. Sudapladov, although the decision to expel the Tartars from Crimea was done what had been made by Stalin earlier, the order to carry it out reached Baria on February 14th. So the memorandum was quite timely. Stalin had no, he did this all the time. He removed all the Koreans from Central Asia.

Not sure if they were doing in Central Asia, but the removal of populations transfer was something that he did constantly. And it never worked out. A lot of people died. And he didn't care. but there was a sense that, okay, get rid of the Tartars who were way too pro-Russian, they still are to this day, and settle the Jews. It wasn't under the New Qazardia banner, but it was, as I said before, just a few years ago. That was the high point of Jewish hopes. G.V. Costorenko, a researcher this period writes, the leaders of the E.A.K. plunged into euphoria. They imagined, especially after Mekels and Feffer's trip to the West, that with the necessary pressure, they could influence and steer their government's policy in the interest of the Soviet Jews, just like the American

Jewish elite does it. But Stalin did not approve the Crimean project. He did not appeal to him because of the strategic importance of the Crimea. It did not appeal to him because of the strategic importance of the Crimea. The Soviet leaders expected a war with America and probably that thought that in such the case, the entire Jewish population in Crimea would sympathize with the enemy. It is reported that at the beginning of the 1950s, some Jews were arrested and told by the MGB, MGB investigators, the predecessor to the KGB, you are not going to stand against America, are you? So you are our enemies. Khrushchev shared those thoughts, and 10 years later, he stated to a delegation of the Canadian Communist Party that was expressing particular interest in the Jewish question in the USSR.

Crimea should not be a center of Jewish colonization because in case of war, it will become the enemy's bridgehead. Indeed, the petitions about Jewish settlement in Crimea were very soon used as proof for the state treason on the part of the members of the E.A.K. There is no way that they didn't say this tongue in cheek. I mean, the U.S. was all over the Soviet Union. After the war, all their debts were canceled. They rebuilt the West, rebuilt the country, especially, really the U.S. was all that was left of the West. The Marshall Plan for everybody else.

Well, the Soviets didn't accept it because they would have to turn over their books. which is why they wanted to, it was offered to them, their alleged enemy. But they said no, we're not going to turn over our books. So, you know, they're going to realize that we're fudging all these numbers. But instead, it was far better. They got massive amounts of investment, just like they had built the Workers' Paradise in the 20s. It was rebuilt. Anthony Sutton has detailed analysis of this.

after the war you know the debts that had been incurred during the war were monstrous and all of that was canceled and I can't imagine the Soviet support of Israel on the one hand and the fact that Stalin had defeated

Hitler on the other why would they be so paranoid about the Jews were they expecting an invasion they're not going to invade and destroy their very own capital. So this doesn't make any sense. I think this is a lot of psychological warfare here. By the way, you mentioned Anthony Sutton often, especially that book.

What's your take on his book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler? I was just thinking about that. I think about that on a regular basis. I've read it. I've read everything he's written. It's a very different type of book. Let me put it here this way. The multi-volume work on the West building the Soviet Union

was in great painstaking detail. Your eyes glaze over. Going down to the receipts itemized. That's not the case with the rise of Hitler thing. It's far more vague. It's far more indirect. I don't know if he was doing it just to kind of balance the scales. It's almost like another guy wrote it.

I love the guy. He has changed history with that multi-volume work on the U.S. How could the U.S. be anti-communist if they're building it? That means the entire history of the 20th century has to be rewritten. And then the Hitler thing being very, very different. The detail is gone. Everything seems to be very indirect. When I was at the Barnes Review, we ran at least one review of it.

I didn't write it, but it had to go through me. And more than one reader had responded saying that this is a very different Anthony Sutton. I don't know if he was under pressure to do it. But there's many authors on our side, Kerry Bolton, I believe is his name, who was completely destroyed Anthony Sutton's book, that particular book. but no one can touch the other ones, the Western investment in the Soviet Union, because they were so detailed.

There's no way to, how do you argue with it? You know, that's why a massive number of volumes because he wrote more volumes later on, but only been one relatively small volume on Hitler and Wall Street. It's too vague and indirect. It's like two different authors. And it's been refuted. Now, I think Kerry Bolton, oh, Kerry Bolton, is that what I said?

It's Kerry Bolton. Yeah. Is, again, one of my favorite authors just for that. And I've gone to him for that before to make sure I'm on the right track. And, yeah, he tears it apart. And he says the same thing I do. And if you go to Beandex and look up Kerry Bolton against that book, you'll find very powerful, very lengthy articles actually

far more detailed than what I could say here but it's hard it was hard to you know there's no question about the US was done anti-communists at least not the regime not the ruling class absolutely was not that doesn't make any sense

there was never it was always free trade so many Soviet scientists were educated at MIT and Harvard the one back to the Soviet Union and built. So, but Wall Street issue, there's so many holes in his argument. And it's not nearly, it's not even close,

it's a fraction of what he wrote on the investment in the USSR. And I always kind of wonder why he wrote that and wrote it the way he did. I've read it many times. And I was surprised. And Kerry Bolton, I think, added the detail that we needed. And he is an excellent refutation of that. So I just needed to, you know, with him, I wanted to make sure I was on the right track.

But I read him, I read him before on other things. And, yeah, it's always worse than I think. And it's kind of shocking, actually. It harms his reputation. But thank God he's best known for his massive number of volumes on, because he has a separate book on the weapons, American weapons going to the Soviet Union, the weapons technology. I forget the title.

Something like the betrayal or. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, betrayal at the enemy. National, was it national suicide, military aids for the Soviet Union? That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And that book goes, you know, way beyond here we're talking about here. advanced computer technology is being sent there all throughout, you know, the 60s and beyond. So that's just another volume.

So this is, you know, far more than the three volume work. Never again, really. I don't know if he touched that, the German topic ever again. But it is, I guess maybe some of the banking things are the closest he comes. but banking connections, but those were all severed. And it was Wall Street that screamed for war almost immediately. We're not interested in, you know, there were sanctions on Germany, but never on the USSR. So, my God, there were sanctions on Franco after the war, but not on the Soviet Union, never on the Soviet Union, except where the Jews were concerned much later.

So, yes, I think about that quite often. I mentioned Bolton in my book on the USSR, because this is a big part of it. And I've cited him many, many times in the past. But it's like two different people. By the end of World War II, the authorities again revived the idea of Jewish resettlement and bureau bids on particularly Ukrainian Jews. From 1946 to 1947, several organized echeliorals. and a number of independent families were sent there, totaling up to 5,000 to 6,000 persons.

However, quite a few returned disillusioned. This relocation movement withered by 1948. Later, with the general turn of Stalin's politics, arrests among the few Birodivision Jews, Jewish activists started. They were accused of artificial inculcation of Jewish culture into the non-Jewish population and, of course, espionage, and of having planned Biro Bidzen's secession in order to ally with Japan. This was the de facto end of the history of Jewish colonization in Biro Bidzen. At the end of the 1920s, there were plans to resettle 60,000 Jews there by the end of the first five-year planning period. By 1959, there were only 14,000 Jews in Bidzen, less than 9% of the population of the region. Generally speaking, yeah, there may have been a few arrests.

They were using Hebrew or whatever rather than Yiddish, but it was something that was continuously promoted. But the location alone, not that it was going to be, it's a port, Japan, but there weren't enough people there to matter. They were on the Chinese border. You know, so most of the people who went there realized that, man, the lodgings, the weather, This is southern Siberia. This is a very, very difficult place for them, at least, to live. You did have some Russians there. You did have some native peoples there. They made themselves very unpopular immediately. You know, they weren't going to work.

But certainly, you know, claiming that it was because they were going to be an ally of Japan in some way. Again, that's more propaganda. That wouldn't have mattered. they were quite a unless I don't know what Eric he's talking about here because it is on the border of Manchuria we're very close to it I'm not entirely sure

they would support Japan when you know but that's just a lot of propaganda that was not really the issue most of the people who went after the war returned and there's I think right now

there is a function synagogue there. I just came across an article about it as a rabbi there. Even today, they're still trying to make it work somehow. But it's just maybe, at its height, maybe it was 10% of the population or Jews. But it was such a bizarre project absolutely in the middle of, no, you can't get in more in the middle of nowhere than that. And that was way beyond what the Jews were capable of at any point in their history. However, in Ukraine, the situation. situation had markedly changed in favor of Jews. The government was engaged in the fierce struggle with Bandera separatist fighters and no longer catered to the national feelings of Ukrainians.

At the end of the 1946, the Communist Party started a covert campaign against anti-Semitism, gradually conditioning the population to the presence of Jews among authorities in different spheres of the national economy. At the same time, in the beginning of 1947, Kaganovich took over for Khrushchev as the official leader of of the Ukrainian Communist Party. The Jews were promoted in the party as well, of which a particular example was the appointment of a Jew, the secretary of Jinnemir Opcom. Well, what is it? Was it, was it a persecution of Jews or a campaign against anti-Semitism? Well, he's saying this in the same chapter. This is, this paragraph reverses everything that he's said already. Now, I say,

suppose when the nationalist movement rose. Now, I do have another book, which I highly recommend, simply called Ukrainian nationalism, which you can find on, which is actually quite sympathetic from, you know, I take, you know, Gowgli's point of view. I do believe that most of Ukraine should be independent, but in a close relation with Russia, kind of like Belarus is. That was Nikolai Gagel's point of view. And that's where I kind of got it from. but I loathe people trying to connect Bandera, whose works I've read, although it's been quite a while, to the government in Ukraine now. They're not even close. Bandera did not trust the West.

He certainly didn't trust the Americans. He knew that the Americans at the West were assisting the Soviet Union the entire time, that were not pro-American at all. And as I've always said, you know, every ethnic group deserves a state of its own if it so wants. But Bandera was in a very difficult position. And I suppose he had been around for a while. And there were many others, Milnick and many others were. I go in much greater detail in my book on Ukrainian nationalism on this topic. But given the fact that Stalin was immovable at this point, his fate was seen.

But once he, you know, and his numbers are iffy, I'm not sure. No one really knows. There's some estimates. But that was just enough to get the communists to need to recruit the Jews now. So either, you know, I can't, I can't tell if there were, sobies were anti-Semitic or they were fighting in favor of destroying anti-Semitism. Right in the same parametism. Which is it?

Bandera's forters weren't large enough to cause that much of a problem. You would think if the West was anti-communist, they would get some aid. No way. No way they were condemned by the West. They had no chance and they knew it. In the past, they had some fighters trained in Germany. Those years were over. Many of them ended up in the gulag.

But you can't say that Jews were being removed from everything. And then now saying that there's this war against anti-Semitism. We're talking about roughly the same period of time. So, but it would take a force like that, anything like that, that would get the Communist Party to realize that, okay, we have to go to our base. We all know what that base is. you know, Bandera, when you read him, he essentially was a national socialist. You know, he writes what most nationalists would say.

No different than any Russian nationalist, you know, just you change the, you know, he makes the same argument. You know, he was a guild socialist and his economic theory, so to speak. but and God, I just wince The worst part of this war in Ukraine is people talking about it in the media And the Russians, yes, of course I support their side But Bandera had nothing to do with any of the groups Fighting the Russians in Ukraine He would have he would have he would have rejected all of them

Despite them using his symbols and his his picture Benderra was more or less a national socialist of a kind and did not trust anything Western as well as the didn't trust anything Soviet. And he also did make a distinction between Russian and Soviet too, as did Milnick. So it's been a while since I've read Bandera. He didn't write very much, but what he did write is very interesting. And, of course, his movement was quite. He had no chance.

He had zero chance. And he was well aware that the Jews were the main support of the Communist Party, especially in Ukraine. And now all of a sudden, there's a shift in the mental. I forget the laws that London laid down for the execution of anti-Somites, they were never repealed. They weren't repealed right up until Gorbachev. This remained consistently. Jews saw Stalin as a savior against Hitler, regardless of anything else. So this is, you know, it's confusing, but you can't say both in the same paragraph. No, there was no, as I said, there was no order to destroy Jews in the USSR after the war, no such thing. And this

paragraph proves it. I'm going to do this last paragraph, and then after this paragraph, it changes to the founding of Israel. So that would be a good cutoff point. However, the attitudes of many Jews towards the government and its new policies were justifiably cautious. Soon after the end of the war, when the former Polish citizens began returning to Poland, many non-Polish Jews hastily seized this opportunity and relocated there. What happened after that in Poland is yet another. other story, a great overrepresentation of Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government among managerial elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences

for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts. Quote, the Jews had played a huge role in economic life in all of those countries, and though they lost their possessions under Hitler after the war when the restitution laws were introduced, they affected very large numbers of new owners. Upon their return, Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises that were not nationalized by communists, and this created a new wave of hostility towards them. I guess the only people who were allowed to own property were the Jews of Eastern Europe. Well, that would change pretty quickly, but it didn't matter. I noticed that, like in Hungary, in 56, the

the anti-communists and the anti-Stalinists and the pro-Stalinists were equally many Jews within both. But much of the productive capital, of course, was taken to the USSR to rebuild. These are the Western countries that, especially Poland, that this war was started over in 39, but the West had no problem giving it to the USSR. In fact, Stalin was very nervous about taking Poland. And he was very careful. This is why he didn't, you know, begin collectivization quite or full nationalization right away. Not a problem.

You know, it's like he got a pass for everything he did. But pretty soon, though, that this would be the case. There would be full nationalization. It would be more like the Soviet Union. Not the case in Yugoslavia. Very different story there. Not that is relevant, but that's the only place where it was a little different. And a little bit more humane, I would say.

But, yeah, Jews ran all of this. They ran the parties prior to the war, during the war, and after the war. And so when Hitler was defeated, they came back. You know, I winced when you said many non-Polish Jews hastily seized the opportunity and relocated there. And then, of course, the next few sentences, they were hated. Of course they were. Vermont was the head of the secret police in Poland, and it was particularly vicious. So it just, the West couldn't have been more pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin, pro-Khrushchev.

They couldn't have been. And people tell me, well, what about Korea and Vietnam? Well, and the answer is that is quite simple. The U.S. was worried about any empire growing way too large, especially after 1949, when Stalin, sorry, when China fell because U.S. abandoned Shanghai Shek, deliberately allowing him to fall. But any empire growing as large as the Soviet, it didn't matter what their ideology was, would be a threat to the U.S. The U.S. did worry about being cut out of economic deals. You know, the ruble being replacing the dollar, stuff like that.

And so that's why the fighting took place. It was not ideological at all. As the wars, as Korea and Vietnam were going on, there was advanced weapons trading going straight to the USSR. That went straight to Moscow and right down to Vietnam and right to to Hanoi, which is part of the reason why they, South Vietnam was very brave army, lost.

And of course, the U.S. also abandoned the ARVN2. But none of that, none of those wars cancel out the fact that the capital, including the weapon system, at this point, at least their foundation, were Western-based and there were massive investment within the Soviet Union. So much so, as I've said before,

that Stalin was worried about the Soviets losing their independence. So there was all these laws, the Americans, Westerners couldn't control, they controlled maybe 45%, 10%, whatever it is. So it's shocking. It should be shocking to anybody,

but it isn't. that Solon takes all of Eastern Europe and takes Poland, the country that the war allegedly started over. No problem. No sanctions, nothing. Franco told a different story. Sanctions all over the place.

It's just, as I keep saying, the 20th century history, and I taught this class at several universities, and I got into a lot of trouble because of it, The official history of the 20th century is nonsense. Well, the official history of everything is nonsense. But the 20th century is just one very obnoxious example. All right.

Be back in a couple of days to continue with this chapter, talking about the founding of Israel. I encourage everybody go over to the show notes and go over to the description of the videos. Donate to Dr. Johnson's work. We were just talking about Ukraine in this episode, and his new book on Ukraine is link there. It's another way you can support them. So thank you, Dr. Johnson, as always. And talk to you in a couple days. All right, my friend.

I'm glad you're healthy again. Thank you. All right, ma'am.