The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together' w/ Dr Matthew Raphael Johnson - Part 99

Episode Date: January 3, 2026

51 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.

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Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenyson. This is episode 99. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? Why would anyone go to a music festival? Like, you know, the big ones, like the six figures, like 250,000, 300,000 people? What possible enjoyment is there in any of that? It seems completely disgusting to me.

It's that these are people who, you know, want to lose themselves in a mass, lose their entire personality. I can't I just it's the whole concept seems gross to me they're always most of them lose money uh toilets are always clogged up I mean I what is the point of it music festivals are just absolute

you know absolutely disgusting things they're real big ones anyway that's what I've been thinking recently how you doing? Doing good you would have you would think that it would have died with it's dying with the boomers because

is for some reason, like, people idolize Woodstock. Like, I think there were 250,000 people at Woodstock, but when they take polls, like more than 5 million people say they were there, but they lie about the fact that they were at a place that, I mean, just imagine the smell. Right, right, and the mud and everything else, and the bad drugs. And probably the only good thing about it was, was Carlos Santana, but otherwise it, well, and the who, maybe. And the good thing about that is that is when Pete Townsend hit Abby Hoffman over the head

with his guitar, so that was kind of cool, but otherwise. That was anti-Semitism. A total. I thought the who's all about. All right. Moving on. We are talking, well, social news. is talking about the gulags and about the gulags and um this is without a doubt his most personal

chapter in this book this particular jewish national contract between free bosses and inmates is impossible to overlook a free jew was not so stupid to actually see an enemy of the people or an evil character praying on the people's property in an imprisoned jew unlike what a dumb-headed Russians saw in another Russian. He in the first place saw suffering tribesmen, and I praised them for the sobriety. Those who know about terrific Jewish mutual supportiveness, especially exasperated by the mass deaths of Jews under Hitler, would understand that a free Jewish boss simply could not indifferently watch Jewish prisoners flounder in starvation and die and not help.

But I am unable to imagine a free Russian. employee who would save and promote his fellow Russian prisoners to the privileged positions only because of their nationality. Though we have lost 15 million during collectivization, we are still numerous. You can't care about everyone, and nobody would even think about it. Well, it's very much like white people in the West, or especially in the U.S., while other groups you know blacks especially are very very racially motivated whites have to be completely universal in their in their thinking

and they're the first ones to condemn each other if they dare think in racial terms and I think at this point the terror leads to suggestiveness It's been going on since, you know, World War I essentially, and Russians were falling into propaganda, and yet this goes to show just how powerful ethnic cohesiveness is. That's why this is a natural way of things. Ethnic cohesiveness is a barrier to propaganda. It's about self-sacrifice.

That's what nationalism is, and you're seeing it here. It's very enviable. you know and when you see yourself as a member of a group with a very almost like a family with a similar experience and similar sufferings real or imagined you know you tend to sacrifice for one another and the gulag was run not by Jews at the upper levels but also just in as far as the camp itself was run

in the camps in the east that the Soviets liberated at the end of World War II the Jews also were doing the same kind of thing they were the police force there weren't that many guards there the Germans couldn't spare spare any a man so yeah I'm sure they prayed on one another on occasion but not like the Russians did it's it's no different than being white in America We're the only ones who cannot think in racial or ethnic terms. Sometimes when such a team of Jewish inmates smoothly bands together and being no longer impeded by the ferocious struggle for survival, they can engage in extraordinary activities.

An engineer named Abram Zistman tells us, quote, in Novo and, arch, is that archangelesk camp, in our spare time. In our spare time, we decided to count how many Jewish pogroms occurred over the course of Russian history. We managed to excite the curiosity of our camp command on this question. They had a peaceful attitude towards us. The Nakhlag camp commander was Captain Grimman, Anne Gershul, a Jew, son of a tailor from Joblen, Jlobun. He sent an inquiry to the archives of the former interior department requesting the necessary information. And after eight months, we received an official reply that 76 Jewish programs occurred from 1811 to 1917 on the territory of Russia with a number

of victims estimated at approximately 3,000. That is the total number of those who suffered in any way. The author reminds us that during one six-month period in medieval Spain, more than 20,000 Jews were killed yeah i don't i'm i'm not liking a few things here um with with solstinitin but you know you're not going to agree with everything i don't agree with myself on everything um but but he's he's saying that to make a broader point um as we've already said these pogroms led to the deaths of far more russians than than jews or anyone else and it was only allegedly uh against uh against and it's it's uh but you have people like solomon swartz who were saying that it occurred afterwards now the soviets couldn't admit that but what they consider a victim is you know it

continues to expand over time that definition and the numbers you know i've heard i've heard i've heard, you know, 100,000, 200,000, 500,000 over the years, and so far as killed, Jews killed in programs. It's, you know, it takes a lot of life of its own. And bringing up the fact that so many Jews were involved in running the camps, which is, you know, he says this in the archipelago, the two volumes, he, you know, he got into a lot of trouble. This is why, you know, despite winning Nobel Prize, the regime turned to other people. The ruling class turned to others, more liberal dissidents from the USSR after the 1970s. Because remember, very importantly, at the 1970s, the Jews disengaged from the Soviet Union

to a great extent over Israel and its connection with the U.S. and its victories over Soviet client state, Syria and Iraq, and Egypt sometimes, that we're free on depending on the year. And so you had Russian Jews and the Russian Soviet government on two different sides of that very important issue. And so Jews were pulling themselves away from the USSR. And the USSR changed radically. a result so but at this point there's no way they could admit pogromes after 1917 but the way that a pogrom is defined the way that the word victim is defined is so ridiculous and in Schwartz you know we've been we've talked about

him many times that anything even name-calling on the job was considered a pogrom or something like that but as far as a government at this point in time needed to say they couldn't say it had ever happened after 1917 because you know paradise had come to earth a plot like atmosphere emanates from the recollections of joseph berger a communist about a highly placed snitch lev ilich injure a former menshevik arrested in 1930 he immediately began collaborating with the gp u fearing reprisals against his family and the loss of his apartment in the center of moscow he He helped to prepare the Menshevik trial of 1931, falsely testified against his best friends,

was absolved and immediately appointed as a chief accountant, Bella Morstroy. During the Yeshoshina, he was a chief accountant of the gulag, enjoying the complete trust of his superiors and with connections to the very top NKVD officials. Injury recalled one Jewish NKVD veteran who interlarded, his words with aphorisms from Talmud. Sure. He was arrested later again, this time on the wave of anti-Yeshov purges. However, Inshir's former colleagues from the Gulag favorably arranged his imprisonment. However, at this point, he turned into an explicit snitch and provocateur, and other inmates

suspected that the plentiful parcels he was receiving were not from his relatives, but directly from the third department. Nevertheless, later in 1953, in the Teichette camp, he was sentenced to an additional jail term, this time being accused of Trotskyism and of concealing his sympathies for the state of Israel from the third department. You know, I do, okay, there's a lot going on here.

Clueda Yezhov, a Jewish background, ran the camps for a while. A snitch. I don't know whether. he means a snitch against other Jews or against everyone else but of course

those people are well taken care of it's not like in the American prison system where you'd be murdered immediately you have to go to protective custody I wasn't I don't think that was the case here but this was a network which included prisoners

Judaism wherever you know whether in the party the state prisoners in the economy anywhere this was one large network and if you did the right thing as far as the state was concerned

you were part of that network you could plug into it and you wouldn't have to suffer very much clearly this guy didn't suffer very much now in 1953 that was I don't know if that was before or after Stalin's death, he died that year.

But Trotskyism and sympathy for the state of Israel, that wasn't an issue at the time. I'd like to get deeper into that because the Soviet Union created the state of Israel in 1948, as I mentioned many times. The U.S. was iffy about it because they didn't want to alienate the Arabs and the oil companies and everything. the Soviets were all for it, but this seems to be too early. It wasn't until much later that, unless, you know, unless I'm underestimating it, maybe it was much earlier, or the Jews began to slowly move away from the Soviet Union. Although when Khrushchev took over, there was a brand new program against the church, far more intensely because it had grown

during and after World War II but I do question the sympathies for the state of Israel I don't know I don't know if that was a thing so early but I could be wrong of worldwide infamy Belba log absorbed hundreds of thousands

of Russian, Ukrainian and Middle Asian peasants between 1931 and 1932 Opening a newspaper issue from August 1933, dedicated to the completion of the canal between the white and Baltic seas, we find a list of awardees. Lower ranking orders and medals were awarded to concreters, steel fixers, etc. But the highest degree of decoration, the order of Lenin, was awarded to eight men only, and we can see large photographs of each. Only two of them were actual engineers. the rest were the chief commanders of the canal, according to Stalin's understanding of personal contribution. And whom do we see here? Yenric Yagoda, head of the NKVD, Madveh Berman, head of Gulag.

Sevin Firen, commander of Belbautzlaug. By that time, he was already the commander of Mittlaug, where the story will later repeat itself. Lazzar Kogan, head of construction, later he will serve the same function at Vago Canal. Jacob Rappaport, deputy head of construction. Naftali Frankl, chief manager of the labor force of Bella Morstroy, and the evil demon of the whole archipelago. Yeah, and these are references to various camps, smaller than the ones that Shultanitsa normally talks about. the canal was accomplished almost entirely by prison labor and the number of deaths is in the hundreds of thousands

especially in the early years it was they froze to death they never got sufficient amounts of food and they were doing tremendous physical labor early on that canal was was just coated in blood and here you have the awards going to

this group of Jews who never touched a shovel or a hoe or anything else like that in their entire lives these were political guys not even engineering guys

let alone workers you know with picks and shovels which is pretty much all they had for a long time these are some of the most evil men of the 20th century and no one's ever heard of them and that that goes to show Jewish power from top to bottom

these men are the causes of the death of a million or two just in this short period of time is a canal what canal white sea canal was being done this is freezing temperatures this is just barely in the arctic circle and it's and it's conditioned even in the best of conditions it's bad because it's swampy up there so they get assaulted by mosquitoes there's so much standing water it's it's a living hell you think you know frankl or rapaport never once stepped foot in this area as anything other than a manager this is what this is why i said from the very beginning

Bolshevik Revolution had nothing to do with labor. It never did. The concept of proletariat did not mean what most people think it means. These guys were proletarians, which would be considered, you know, an oligarchy. Actual workers were treated with utter disgust and contempt. And it proves that under Stalin, and we're talking about, you know, early on,

that Jews were everywhere. and they dominated especially in those areas that tormented the Gentiles, the torment of the Russians. And they're giving these awards to guys who never left the office shows you the very nature of how the Soviet system worked, what Marxism really is. Their conception of worker or a proletarian

has no bearing on what kids learned in college or even in high school today. And all their portraits were enlarged and reprinted again in the solemnly shameful book, Bellamor Canal, a book of huge scriptural size, like some revelation anticipating advent of the millennarian kingdom. And then I reproduced these six portraits of villains in archipelago, borrowing them from their own exhibition and without any prior editing, showing everybody who was originally displayed. oh my god what a worldwide rage has surged how dared i this is anti-semitism i'm a branded and screwed anti-semit at best to reproduce these portraits was national egotism russian egotism and they did and they dared

to say it despite what follows immediately on the next pages of archipelago how docile how dossily coolock lads were freezing to death under their barrows where were their eyes in 1933 when it was printed for the very first time? Why weren't they so indignant then? This is a typical, very common reaction. It's almost a form of displacement, psychologically speaking. You know, Solzhenitsyn, without really doing it on purpose, is laying out the people who ran these torture centers.

Remember, this is long after World War II. and the publication of the book, of course. It's a miracle he got the Nobel Prize with all of this because Jewish names are all over the place in it. It's been a while since I've read both volumes, but the fact that he's simply laying out who ran it and who were the direct causes of the deaths of a million, at least a million,

Russians Cossacks especially same thing for under Peter the Great Ukrainians and Belarusans that was enough to get him condemned when he when he was thrown out of the country

the FBI followed him everywhere you didn't have the same with Jewish dissidents you did have it with Russian Orthodox dissidents like or believers dissidents like

Solzhenitsyn, how he got that, the Nobel Prize, really, that was nothing short of a miracle given the power the Jews have over that process. But even mentioning their names, showing their pictures, not even saying that they're Jews, that was sufficient to get the entire Jewish world against Solzhenitsyn when that was published. Let me repeat what I professed once to the Bolsheviks. One should be ashamed of hideosity, not when it is disclosed to the public, but when it is done. A particular conundrum exists with respect to the personality of Naftali-Frankel, that tireless demon of archipelago, had to explain his strange return from Turkey in the 1920s.

He successfully got away from Russia with all his capitals after the first harbingers of revolution. In Turkey, he attained a secure, rich, and unconstrained social standing, and he never harbored any communist ideas. And yet he returned. To come back and become a toy for the GPU and for Stalin, to spend several years in imprisonment himself, but in return to accomplish the most ruthless oppression of imprisoned engineers and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of the decoulocised? What could have motivated his insatiable evil heart? I am unable to imagine any possible reason except vengeance towards Russia. If anyone can provide an alternative explanation, please do so.

Well, we know we're not going to hear it. What he's referring to is the need, the connections as I mentioned, the Jews had amongst one another, even non-communists, so long as they were leftists of some kind, if they can serve the USSR in one way or another in this period of time were permitted entry and even social standing, depending on what he can offer. And, you know, he probably didn't have a political ideology at all except, you know, Zionism itself, Jewish power. He wasn't too loud about that. but again that that comes up in the in the archiparago book too uh this is about uh jewish control a jewish cohesiveness

where it didn't matter what you were if you were a jew and you can contribute you were brought in and given a crazy job you had no competence with and and was one of the men who is responsible for the death of god knows how many we're talking about uh and of course and it comes directly from hatred, a hatred of Russia based on their mythical conception of Russian history. We've gone through the real connection of what history of the Jews in Russia. We've been through it early on in this book. But you're not going to hear that elsewhere,

which is why I think this show, this series is so important. But those lies are, have a, have a real impact. They motivate someone like him to come to the USSR and use its anti-Russian, anti-Orthodox mentality for the sake of the Jews and Jewish power, regardless of what his ideology was. There is no other explanation. And so here he's saying, even under Stalin, the Jewish community was the main element ruling the empire

regardless the ethnicity came before anything yeah there were plenty of criminals in the gulag you know theft of of government property was a big one and also keep in mind I want everyone to notice that

when Khrushchev engaged in his anti-Stalinist polemics later on, the gulags weren't taken down. The gulags continued to exist right up until Gorbachev. They functioned the exact same way. And, of course, the U.S. was well aware of it, and victims were continuing to free use of death and everything else in these gulags. That was, the economy really couldn't function without them at this point. It's not just what we would call blue-collar labor. It's white-collar labor, too. And the destruction of the engineering congeys is one of the reasons that the Soviet Union became so dependent on American capital and American engineering power, which in and of itself completely destroys the main myths of Marxism and Leninism. But Jewish nationalism was the main issue here.

and it was motivated by these mythical conceptions of so-called oppression, which they then used to quote-unquote exact vengeance towards Russia. And it led to the deaths of millions. And as you know, in parts of Europe, you bring that up, you're going to prison. What else could be revealed by someone with a thorough understanding of the structure of the Camp Command? The head of the first department of Bella Morstroy was one wolf. The head of the Dimitrov section of Volcanal was Bovtschever. The finance division of Bella Moistroy was headed by L. Berenzen.

His deputies were A. Dorfman, the already mentioned Injir, Levetsky, Kagnar, Engert. And how many of the other humbler posts remain unmentioned? Is it really reasonable to suppose that Jews were digging soil with shovels and racing their hand barrows and dying under these barrows from exhaustion and emaciation? Well, view it as you wish. AP Scripnikova and D.P. Wittkovsky, who were there, told me the Jews were overrepresented among idiots during construction of Bellamor Canal, and they did not roll barrows and did not die under them. Yeah, these are well-known facts in Russia and Belarus, even in Poland, but not in the West. of course they didn't.

And that just adds one other layer of proof that Jewish cohesiveness is what the Soviet Union base itself on. In bad economic times, the Soviet system became more dependent on production from various, there were so many camps all over the place, all over the country.

Each had its own function. Some of them, you know, purely white-collar labor. and they became both in and of themselves and as a network a massive bureaucracy and a massive part of the economy. They couldn't get rid of them if they wanted to, and they certainly didn't want to. But, you know, Jews will probably kill themselves before they actually dig a hole, you know, up in the far north in the frozen soil. But they didn't have to do that because it's true.

Well, there were plenty of Jews that were punished for various things. They were not treated the same way as Russians were. And one of the main reasons is that Russians refused to organize on ethnic terms. They'd rather they ended up killing each other. They ended up fighting one another rather than seeking common ground so they could fight back. And the Jews were rewarded for this. That's why I keep saying this is this network, including it even outside of the Soviet Union,

that created this privileged, almost a utopia, for Jewish power. And this is actively covered up in both popular history and academic history today. And you could find highly placed Jewish commanders not only at Belbalt-Lag. Construction of the Kotlas Vorkuta Railroad was headed by Moros, his son married Svetlana Stalina. The special officer in charge of Gulag in the Far East was Grotch.

These are only a few of the names, which resurfaced accidentally. If a former inmate Thomas Govillo, an American National, didn't write to me, I wouldn't be aware about the head of the Chai Yorinsk Mining Administration on Colt Colima between 1943 to 1944 at the depths of the patriotic war. Half Colonel Arm was a tall black-haired Jew with a terrible reputation. His orderly man was selling ethanol to everybody, 50 grams for 50 rubles. Arm had his own personal tutor of English, a young American arrested in Corellia. His wife was paid a salary for an accountant's position, but she didn't work.

Her job was actually performed by an inmate in the office. A common practice revealing how families of gulag commanders used to have additional incomes. Yeah, and this also implies that they were skimming from what these gulags were producing in the first place, that they had no right to. This is just another layer. Remember, when Jolzhenitin wrote the gulag archipelago, he wasn't just talking about his own personal experience. He spent quite a bit of time researching the nature of these camps and what they did and how they were organized, how they were connected. and their connections with the rest of the Soviet Empire. And at the same time, you still had thousands of American intellectuals saying that this was,

this was the wave of the future. And these people deserve to be there. And how many times have I said that the Jews in the Soviet, in Russia, acted like a mafia group. Here you have classic mafia device of a, of a no work job, classic, you know, in New Jersey, New York. But they were just given a salary just for existing. But that's because they were able to plug into the Jewish network.

And that was, that's with the Soviet Union, to a great extent, especially in these areas, the punitive organs, gulogs, prisons, Jewish cohesiveness was the main actor and the main, main functionary. Or take another case. During the age of Glasnos, one Soviet newspaper published a story about the dreadful Gulag administration, the built a tunnel between Sakhalin and the mainland. It was called the trust of Arias. Who was that comrade Arias? I have no idea. But how many perished in his minds and in the unfinished tunnel? Sure, I knew a number of Jews. They were my friends who carried all the hardships of common labor. In archipelago, I described a young man, Boris Gameroff, who quickly found his death in the camp, while his friend, the writer Ingle,

was made an accountant from the very first day in the camp, although his knowledge of arithmetic was very poor. I knew Valadia Gershuni, an irreconcilable and incorruptible man. I knew Joe Jog Masamed, who did common labor in the hard labor camp at Eccabassus on principle, though he was called upon to join the idiots. Besides, I would like to list here a teacher, Tatyana Musivna Falki, who spent 10 years dredging, she said, like a beast of burden. And I also would like to name here a geneticist Vladimir Ephraimson, who spent 13 of his 36 months of imprisonment, one out of his two terms, doing common labor. He also did it on principle, though he also had better options. Relying on parcels from home, one cannot blame him for that. He

picked the handbarrow precisely because there were many Jews from Moscow in that Jejagan camp, and they were used to settling well, while Ephroimson wanted to dispel any grudge toward Jews, which was naturally emerging among inmates. And what did his brigade think about his behavior? Quote, he has a black sheep among Jews with a real Jew roll of barrow, end quote. He was similarly ridiculed by Jewish idiots who felt annoyed that he quote, flaunted himself, end quote, to reproach them. In the same vein, another Jew, Jakov, Davidovich Gordensky, who also beavered in the common category, was judged by other Jews, by others. Is he really a Jew? Yeah, so anyone who did, any Jew who did

manual labor, and remember, that's only from what they're saying. Something tells me if they're exaggerating. Whatever their motive might even if they were doing it, and how often they were doing it, whatever it was, you know, and they were even offered because they were Jewish. They didn't have to do it. But it seems to hear that he's implying that it was to remove the idea that Jews essentially were this aristocracy in the Soviet Union. So they send a couple of Jews off to, you know, cut a few trees or whatever, you know, send them into the minds, which is the worst kind of death, I can imagine. And remember, so many of these projects failed miserably,

especially in the 60s, 60s and 70. They spent a fortune on these huge things, often done with slave labor or gulag labor, with people who weren't qualified to run these things. There's been several articles, even in the popular press, of these huge behemoth projects that are still sitting there in Russia today. you know, surrounded by forests, you know, no one goes there.

So many of these projects did not work. But I will, I'll say, express caution when they say that, yes, I worked in common labor. I'm not going to believe them off the bat. But if they did, they may have done it on occasion to be able to say, see, Jews are doing this too. plus the fact you only had you know you had a relatively few

number of Jewish prisoners in the Gulag anyway they did do things that pissed people off and ended up there I think few died there unlike the unlike the Gentiles

so you know theft usually was a big one probably the only thing that would really send a Jew to the to the to the Gulag but the

but for someone to say because someone is hold a pick and gets a picture taken like he's actually doing the work that oh he can't really be a Jew you wouldn't even have to do that and the common labor

as we know was was deadly because the sheer amount of effort that you had to do especially in the northern camps but elsewhere too in the swampy can anywhere else you weren't getting you were getting terrible food you know soup of some kind with some crap in it and even the

strongest ended up dying yeah jews were not in this category whatsoever but he seems to suggest that that the few that were doing i'm sure very publicly in drawing attention to themselves some of the manual labor were doing it just so russians could say oh well i guess it's a jews too you know but i don't want i'll give the impression that you know there were a all these Jews in the camps, there were a tiny, tiny minority. They did do things wrong. They did piss people off. They weren't there for all that long. And they functioned. And I'll give you other era in Russian history as a as a mafia group. They took care of each other, even to the point of having no work jobs and no show jobs. It's, you know, every chapter, it just continues

to solidify that idea. It is so symbolic. Both Ephraimson and Grozensky did those things right, did those right and best things, which could be only motivated by the noblest of Jewish appeals to honestly share the common lot, and they were not understood by either side. They are always difficult and derided, the paths of austerity and dedication, the only ones that can save humanity. I try not to look,

I try not to overlook such examples because all my hopes depend on them. Let's add here a valiant Gersh Keller, one of the leaders of the Gengkir uprising in 1954. He was 30 years old when he was executed. I also read about Yitzhak Ghanov,

commander of an artillery squadron during the Soviet German war. In 1948, he was sentenced to 25, years for Zionism. During seven years of imprisonment, he wrote 480 pieces of poetry in Hebrew, which he memorized without writing them down. I looked up the footnote here. Yeah. It's from the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia second edition. Oh, right. It doesn't surprise me. It would have to be some publication like that. Hebrew was sort of semi-illegal, I find that very hard to believe. And sentenced to 25 years for Zionism in

1948, that's an absolute lie because the Soviets were extremely pro-Israel in 1948. So there's, yeah, so I don't, this paragraph, I reject out of hand for that reason. During his third trial, July 10, 1978, after already serving two terms, Alexander Ginsburg, was asked a question, What is your nationality? And replied, inmate. That was a worthy and serious response, and it angered the tribunal, but he deserved it for his work for the Russian Public Relief Fund, which provided existence to families of political prisoners of all nationalities and by his manly vocation. that is what we are a genuine breed of prisoners regardless of nationality

and probably in 1978 you were at a period of time you can get away with something like that although the number of Jews in the USSR was shrinking fast so many were immigrated either to the U.S. or Western Europe U.S. or especially Israel but that this whole thing sounds like and I'm sure you had you had maybe they did do good things like this. You know, I have no reason to doubt it. But claiming to be an inmate when you're asked about your nationality, suggesting, by the way, that Jew is a nationality as far as the Soviets were concerned, I think that was a big show. You know, there's one thing that the Soviet Union was known for were these kind of show trials, although we don't mean it

in the exact same way here. You know, there's... There's a lot of these, this group of paragraphs here, I question a lot of it because, you know, Solzhenitin is, he can only go by what he's told. You know, he's seen some of it, but most of it comes from his own research, but he's talking to these people personally. And of course, they're going to make themselves seem, look like the victims. That's what they do, especially, you know, after World War II. And remember, any Soviet POW was, had to be cleansed somehow. That's the only reason Solzhenits was ever sent to the camps in the first place. Even for a very short time, Jews, of course, were almost exempted from this, but that was sufficient. The fact that you were in a German POW camp was enough to say that we can't trust you anymore.

You may be a propagandist. this is pure projection on on their part but um but but he can only go by what he's being told i think we should stop right there um he's going he's switching tone here to get personal to tell his other to sell his personal story i noticed that and uh yeah it's reading the gulagal Copacelago, of course, takes a very long time. It's a very complicated book, but there's some parts where you just can't put it down. And a lot of this stuff is in that book in a much expanded fashion. It's not just his personal experience.

That's a part of it. But no, this is a far broader critique of the Soviet Union. And yet the Jews are a part of this. and it started to dawn on them in the in the 70s and 80s that way this this guy's an enemy you know when he was in the U.S you know he had to move all the time he had to move he couldn't stay in one parish for long because there was a lot of people that were after him that weren't just KGB KGB would have killed them in the USSR now I think it was I think it was

ADL and JDO and everyone else who And he wasn't even going around saying that he was a Jewish society. But he just listed the names and showed the pictures. And that was sufficient to make him an absolute enemy. And you do have admirers in the mainstream. You do. Not necessarily even conservative ones. But they try to paper over these.

you know it's the phenomenon of how the regime deals with a great writer who's also like say an orthodox nationalist or or someone like Johann Herder or George William Frederick Hegel you can't ignore him he's there too major to be ignored so you rewrite them in your head you stress certain things I have a paper I'm working on now on Hegel I've always been a Hegelian of how liberals try to deal with him he was anything but a liberal he was he was a nationalist with a strong socialist element

I based so much my own political theory in a secular way on him who's a royalist too they need to paper that over and in their interpretations I'm going through these interpretations he didn't say it He doesn't say it that way.

They're claiming he's talking about the individual. He didn't have an individual in his theory. He's talking about it in a state system. They're doing everything in their power, and they do that for a Gogol. They do it for Sultan. Just stressing certain things over others to make him appear more liberal than he really was.

There's a book out called Three Russian Liberals. and I can't remember I read it a long time ago and the three people in it were the opposite of liberal they just were opponents of the Petrine monarchy but that was enough

to get them called liberals in the mainstream press that's all you had to be and that's what the regime tends to do with they do it with Gogol all the time they don't necessarily just condemn him he was a great writer

they can't just condemn him I mean there's mainstream books all over the place, but they can't dwell very much on the fact that he was a Russian Orthodox nationalist and medievalist from Ukraine. So they have to reinterpret things and reinterpret things and reinterpret things. And that becomes the typical vocabulary in academia. And I wrote my book, I mean, it was pretty sloppy. I need to, it was a long time ago. The Orthodox idea in Russian literature, I got to redo it to express this idea. that they treat these men as completely secular, even though they weren't.

So with great writers that they can't ignore, they simply have to reinterpret them and manipulate what they say and essentially project their own liberalism onto them. And it makes them sound ridiculous in many places. If you don't know any better, you think that's what it is. Hegel, because he's so difficult to read, Johnson's Law is very much a powerful thing. and Hegel is extremely important. He is certainly a social nationalist. I've always said so.

Many of the Russian conservative said so too. Russian royalists said so. Ivan Ealing being the main one. But Shultzhenit was the same way. You did have plenty of people who just condemned him outright. But most of the time, they went and just reinterpreted him. They would stress certain things over others. to make him seem more liberal than he really was.

And so, or, you know, because ignoring him, that's simply impossible. And that's what they do with anybody like that, Russian or otherwise. And they did it in the Soviet Union. They do it in the West. And that's what's considered, you know, knowledge in literature or history. Well, Dr. Johnson, we'll come back in a couple days for episode 100. What do you think of that? I don't know.

it's it's uh it's extraordinary um the the listeners have to know though there's going to be another book we're not done just with this we're to continue this because i don't know how to live my life without this now i hear you i hear you know this is an ingrained part of my existence i encourage everyone to go over to the show notes and to go to the descriptions of the videos and um donate to dr johnson's work also to buy his new book. That's another way that you can support him. Please do that. I think Dr. Johnson's work here is invaluable and this kind of thing is legacy building stuff. So yeah, please. Please help him out. Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's talk to you in a couple days.

Bye-bye. We're going to be able to be.