America’s neo-Nazis don’t look to Germany for inspiration. They look to Russia.
This might not be so surprising to those who study history closely. Germany’s original Nazis looked to Russia too, with disastrous consequences for the world:
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou1398772391
Since the collapse of the socialist state and the opening of the Soviet archives, the historical community has only begun to understand the full extent of crimes committed at the hands of the Cheka, and its successors, the OGPU, NKVD, and KGB. Yet, after tracing this repression to its origins, historical evidence indicates that Imperial Russia first cultivated this culture of secret policing and introduced many of the policing techniques the Bolsheviks later implement and further perfected. By the turn of the 20th century, the Okhrana – the Tsarist secret police – developed into a highly effective political police force which was, by and large, quite successful in penetrating underground revolutionary organizations, including Lenin’s Bolshevik party. The imperial political police cultivated a new tradecraft that influenced the later Soviet apparatuses in cryptanalysis, signals intelligence, external surveillance, and agent provocateurs.
…In the 1950s, the CIA correctly identified the importance of the Okhrana; the Agency’s deep interest in the Okhrana files opened at the Hoover Institution demonstrated that the Tsarist secret police held vital information on the tradecraft of the later Soviet apparatuses. Indeed, the Okhrana files did reveal important information on the Soviet methodology for gathering intelligence through external surveillance. According to Aleksei Myagkov, a KGB agent who defected in the 1970s, “it was not only the Cheka that made use of their [the Okhrana’s] methods; they also persist to this day, and are being extensively used by the KGB,” and that KGB recruits “were all astonished at the similarities between the Tsarist system and the KGB’s in the way of working with agents.
…The brutal police repression seen during the Bolshevik’s first few years surpassed the most violent days of Russian autocracy. The state justified every action the Cheka took as necessity to protect the revolution. For the Bolsheviks, the end justified the means – but the means used were barbaric. Lenin did not see the implementation of terror in terms of morality; in a speech given in February 1920, he stated bluntly, “for us this question is one of expediency.”
http://bookfi.net/dl/548070/5d8658
The Russian Roots of Nazism
…In the aftermathof the Russian Revolution of October 1917, anti-Bolshevik exiles from the former Russian Empire, known as “White émigrés,” contributed extensively to the making of German National Socialism. This book examines the formative political, financial, military, and ideological influences that White émigrés exerted on Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist movement.This study of White émigré contributions to Hitlerism demonstrates that National Socialism did not develop merely as a peculiarly German phenomenon. National Socialism arose in the early post-World War I period (1918–1923) from an international radical right milieu in which embittered völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans collaborated with vengeful White émigrés in an anti-Entente (Britain and France), anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic struggle.
From 1920 to 1923, Hitler allied himself with a conspiratorial völkisch German/White émigré association headquartered in Munich, Aufbau: Wirtschafts-politische Vereinigung für den Osten (Reconstruction: Economic-Political Organization for the East), hereafter Aufbau. This secretive union sought to combat international Jewry and to overthrow both the German Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union in league with National Socialists. Aufbau contributed considerable sums of money to Hitler’s National Socialist movement. Moreover, early National Socialist ideology combined völkisch notions of Germanic racial and spiritual superiority with the apocalyptic White émigré Aufbau conspiracy theory in which Jews, who operated as a seamless web of conniving finance capitalists and murderous Bolsheviks, threatened to conquer the world and then to send it to perdition. Aufbau left a powerful anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic legacy to National Socialism after 1923 as well.
…The significance of substantial White émigré influences on Hitler’s Weltanschauung has become more apparent since Brigitte Hamann convincingly argued in her 1996 work, Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Hitler’s Vienna: Apprentice Years of a Dictator), that Hitler was not yet anti-Semitic during his “hunger years” in Vienna from 1908 to 1913. He even defended the Jews in intense political arguments with those who denounced them. Hamann’s book refutes the earlier historical consensus which had contended that Hitler developed an acutely anti-Semitic world-view during his time in Vienna.
Further indications of the relatively late development of Hitler’s far right political ideas exist. Hitler’s correspondence and private writings from World War I (1914–1918) lack anti-Semitic passages. Hitler’s comrades during World War I did not detect anti-Semitic views among his beliefs. Moreover, according to Aide-de-Camp Hans Mend, Hitler’s immediate commanding officer on the Western Front in World War I, Hitler occasionally praised Jews, and he exhibited socialist leanings. He often held “rabble-rousing speeches” in which he called himself a representative of the “class-conscious proletariat.” Hitler only began to crystallize his virulent anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Weltanschauung in Munich in late 1919 in the context of intercultural collaboration between alienated völkisch Germans and radical White émigrés.
https://books.google.com/books?id=X2eTBtFWQdUC&pg=PA30
The Russian emigration was a seedbed of conspiracies and clandestine figures, a vast shadowland of grand ambitions and shabby realities. All this was so because of past-war unsettlement, because of the circumstances of the exile and an unrelenting commitment to counterrevolution, and because in a world awash with opportunities from gunrunning to selling information to tracking down spies, ex-czarist officers on-the-make were available and where most often the people to turn to. Their political adventurism fit into the wider pattern of intrusiveness by which the great events of the period pressed in on people and became in inescapable presence or fact of their lives. For White Russians who emerged out of war and revolution this intrusiveness was simply a norm; but it showed up as well in the way their politics were absorbed into the politics of others–Soviet politics, German politics, Spanish politics, Japanese politics–that is, into the greater power struggles of their day. Likewise White Russians revealed the flux of the period in their desire to reverse historical change but also in the range of possibilities open to individuals within their milieu. Before the war the riddle was, who worked for the Okhrana and who did not. A similar question was compounded by combinations that took one to Sofia, Burgos, Tokyo, and Berlin.
http://bookfi.net/dl/548070/5d8658
In April 1920, Kommissarov began working for the intelligence agency that his old protector in the Tsarist Secret Police, General Kurlov, had recently established in Berlin to provide anti-Bolshevik information to White émigrés in Germany. Despite the mistrust that he had engendered among rightist circles in the past, Kommissarov used his considerable intellectual gifts and social adroitness to find his way quickly into high society wherever he went. He began circulating in right-wing monarchical circles in Munich. He worked especially diligently to gain General Ludendorff’s favor. At the same time, however, he initiated contact with Bolshevik representatives in Germany and provided them with information on anti-Soviet activities in Germany.
…Kommissarov, a prominent member of the Saint Petersburg Okhrana, provided the Union with additional support. …After the outbreak of socialist revolution in the Russian Empire in 1905, he established a clandestine printing press in the basement of Okhrana headquarters. He used this press to print anti-Semitic leaflets calling for pogroms. He lost his position because of his unauthorized dissemination of pogrom literature, but his writings galvanized Black Hundred violence against Jews and socialist revolutionaries.
…These fearsome groups gave their name to the Russian far right from 1905 to 1917. Black Hundreds carried out anti-revolutionary pogroms in October 1905 in which they killed a total of 1,622 people, 711 of whom were Jews. The pogroms of October 1905 proved the worst manifestation of Black Hundred violence. Despite the Union’s use of illegal Black Hundred squads to terrorize and assassinate Jewish and socialist opponents, Imperial authorities supported the Union. Piotr Rachkovskii, the head of the Okhrana (Tsarist Secret Police) abroad, supported the Union’s activities. He even acted as Union leader Dubrovin’s advisor. Representatives of the Union received even greater official recognition when they met with Tsar Nikolai Romanov II in December 1905. The Tsar assured them: “I am counting on you.”
…Kommissarov proved a most colorful adventurer who underwent many permutations in his career of intrigue and deceit. He ultimately helped to establish Aufbau, the Munich-based völkisch German/White émigré organization that greatly influenced the National Socialist movement, in 1920 as a double agent before he openly joined the Soviet cause.
…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufbau_Vereinigung
The Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.
According to Michael Kellogg, the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing NSDAP with, for example, funds from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind. Recent research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under the new influences.
…After the death of Scheubner-Richter in the putsch, Aufbau rapidly declined, and notions of Lebensraum and Slavic inferiority, naturally unpopular with the Russians, gained a stronger hold on the Nazi movement.
The long-term influence of Aufbau has been traced in the implementation of the final solution and in Hitler’s disastrous decision to divert troops away from Moscow towards the Ukraine in 1941.
Prominent members of Aufbau included:
- Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)
- Alfred Rosenberg (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)…
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007058
Nazi party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg introduced Hitler to the Protocols during the early 1920s, as Hitler was developing his worldview. Hitler referred to the Protocols in some of his early political speeches, and, throughout his career, he exploited the myth that “Jewish-Bolshevists” were conspiring to control the world.
Pyotr Rachkovsky … probably the ablest head of the Okhrana’s Foreign Bureau. Rachkovsky was a pioneer. He refined the art of what we today call active measures or perceptions management techniques.
…According to one authority, Rachkovsky was a “born intriguer” who “delighted” in forging documents. He allegedly was among those responsible for the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, perhaps the most infamous political forgery of the 20th century. Rachkovsky’s tactic of exploiting anti-Semitism for political purposes was used repeatedly during the Soviet era–for example, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in the 1980s.
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007058
…During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion played an important part in the Nazis’ propaganda arsenal. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1939. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, some schools used the Protocols to indoctrinate students.
http://bookfi.net/dl/548070/5d8658
…Rosenberg held high posts in the Third Reich, such as leader of the National Socialist Foreign Policy Office along with his colleague Schickedanz and State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Hitler and Rosenberg worked to detach the Ukraine from the Soviet Union in collaboration with Poltavets-Ostranitsa. During World War II, Hitler’s desire to gain the Ukraine for Germany in the tradition of Aufbau led him to divert strong formations of the German Army southwards away from Moscow in 1941, thereby granting the Red Army a valuable respite.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/21/magazine/hitler-s-russian-blunder.html
HITLER’S RUSSIAN BLUNDER
…At that date, Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Northern Army Group, supplemented by 12 Finnish divisions, had encircled Leningrad. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Central Army Group had smashed across the wheatfields of central Russia. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Southern Army Group had encircled half a million Russians in the Konotop-Kremenchug-Kiev triangle and killed, wounded or captured them all.
Then, this early in the campaign, Hitler made a major mistake. The Fuhrer’s strategy prevailed over the more orthodox approach of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief, who held that Marshal Simeon Timoshenko’s battered army group covering Moscow must be defeated and the city - the political, military and communications center of the Soviet state - taken.
Hitler, now convinced that he was a military genius, thought otherwise. He wanted to win more territory: the Donets Basin and its industrial resources in the southern Ukraine; the Crimea and the oil of the Caucasus; Leningrad, renamed for the founder of the Communist state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge
Richard Sorge (October 4, 1895 – November 7, 1944) was a Soviet military intelligence officer, active before and during World War II, working as an undercover German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.
…Sorge supplied Soviet intelligence with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact and the German-Japanese Pact. In 1941, through his Embassy contacts, he learned of Operation Barbarossa, the imminent Axis invasion of the USSR, and even the approximate date. Moscow received the report, but ultimately Joseph Stalin and other top leaders ignored Sorge’s warnings, as well as those of other sources.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/21/magazine/hitler-s-russian-blunder.html
…To this day, no one knows why Stalin ignored the warnings. Those Soviet historians who address this delicate subject suggest that he was playing for time in which to build up Russia’s armed forces. A similar explanation has been offered for the British and French willingness to appease Hitler at Munich.
If the Russian explanation is true, then Stalin and his Government accomplished very little in the time bought by appeasement. The weapons and equipment of the Russian army, air force and navy were lamentable when the war began and continued to be so for another two years.
To the blindly suspicious, yet paradoxically credulous dictator in the Kremlin, the most surprising result of the invasion probably was the offer of political and material support first from Britain and then from the United States. Churchill, as usual, gives the best explanation.
‘‘I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler,’’ he told an aide. ‘‘If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.’’
…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufbau_Vereinigung
…
- Fyodor Vinberg (Russian officer)
- Piotr Shabelsky-Bork (Russian officer)
- General Vasili Biskupsky (Russian officer)
- Erich Ludendorff…
http://today-in-wwi.tumblr.com/post/158837112438/ludendorff-agrees-to-send-lenin-to-russia
Today in World War I
Ludendorff Agrees to Send Lenin to Russia
https://books.google.com/books?id=9WnWxkT4TuIC&pg=PT123
As we have seen, Lenin wanted the defeat of Russia and a civil war. It was a position the German High Command found deeply sympathetic, for their own ‘defeatists’ were hardly to be heard. As First Quartermaster General Erich von Ludendorff, the ‘military brain of the German nation’, was to write of this episode: ‘In helping Lenin to travel to Russia, our government accepted a special responsibility. The enterprise was justified from a military point of view. We had to bring Russia down.’ The Bolshevik revolution, when it came, would offer Germany an unique opportunity to win the war. Ludendorf would declare frankly that the Soviet government ‘exists thanks to us.’
“us”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Malinovsky
Roman Vatslavovich Malinovsky was a prominent Russian Bolshevik politician before the revolution, while at the same time working as the best paid agent for the Okhrana.
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSmalinovsky.htm
Bukharin wrote to Lenin claiming that when he was hiding in Moscow he was arrested by the police just after a meeting with Malinovsky. He was convinced that Malinovsky was a spy. Lenin wrote back that if Bukharin joined in the campaign of slander against Malinovsky he would brand him publicly as a traitor. Understandably, Bukharin dropped the matter. Nadezhda Krupskaya later explained: “Vladimir Ilyich thought it utterly impossible for Malinovsky to have been an agent provocateur. These rumors came from Menshevik circles… The commission investigated all the rumors but could not obtain any definite proof of the charge.” Instead of carrying out an investigation into Malinovsky, Lenin made him his deputy inside Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Zhitomirsky
Jacob (Yakov) Zhitomirsky was a prominent Bolshevik best known for being a secret agent of the Okhrana.
https://books.google.com/books?id=6ZNuZ6fq1WoC&pg=PA536
In 1911, Zhitomirsky finally fell under suspicion, but it was not his chief who suspected him. Lenin received a warning from Vladimir Burtsev. Now warnings from Burtsev were no small matter, for he was a self-constituted, one-man, counter-espionage agency. As some collect coins or stamps or feminine conquests, he collected spies. He it was who had shortly before exposed the incomparable Azev, director of the Fighting Section of the Social Revolutionary Party. Yet so sure was Lenin of his most trusted agent that he ignored the warning.
A revolutionary bloodhound by vocation, Burtsev, once he had scented a spy, was not to be put off the trail. By 1913 he had gathered so much evidence that he sent Lenin an ultimatum. He would create a public scandal if trust were not withdrawn from this man. “If my charges are false, let him haul me before a revolutionary tribunal. There he will prove his innocence or I my charges.”
Alarmed at last, Lenin sent another “man of confidence” to take up the Zhitomirsky matter with Burtsev, and, at the same time, to discuss the whole problem of combatting the spies with which the Bolshevik movement was now obviously infested. The man whom Lenin sent was Roman Malinovsky!
Malinovsky questioned Burtsev with strained interest. Who in the police or government was giving him his secret tips? what reasons had he for suspecting Dr. Zhitomisky? how could the Bolsheviks judge the reliability of such grave charges unless they were given the sources? what other Bolsheviks did he suspect?
https://books.google.com/books?id=N9mbl_xbWpkC&pg=PT259
The Okhrana saw Lenin as a brilliant potential executor of the task demanded by the Emperor: the disintegration of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The enhancement of Lenin’s career was the Okhrana’s confidential priority.
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Today’s new world order has its roots in the events of 1917
Lenin founded the first secret police of modern times, the Cheka (later OGPU, NKVD, KGB and FSB)
…The real lesson of 1917, expressed by Lenin, is the alchemy of power practiced by Putin and Trump: “Kto kovo?” — who controls whom?”
…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana
Formed to combat political terrorism and left-wing revolutionary activity, the Okhrana operated offices throughout the Russian Empire and satellite agencies in a number of foreign nations. It was concerned primarily with monitoring the activities of Russian revolutionaries abroad, including Paris, where Pyotr Rachkovsky was based (1884–1902).
The task was performed by multiple methods, including covert operations, undercover agents, and “perlustration”—reading of private correspondence. Even the Foreign Agency served this purpose. The Okhrana was notorious for its agents provocateurs, including Dr. Jacob Zhitomirsky (a leading Bolshevik and close associate of Vladimir Lenin), Yevno Azef, Roman Malinovsky and Dmitry Bogrov.
…The Okhrana used many seemingly unorthodox methods in the pursuit of its mission to defend the monarchy; indeed, some of the Okhrana’s activities even contributed to the wave of domestic unrest and revolutionary terror that they were intended to quell. Perhaps most paradoxical of all was the Okhrana’s collaboration with revolutionary organizations.
…For over twenty years, the Okhrana had focused on interfering with the activities of relatively small, and distinct, revolutionary groups. The Revolution of 1905, characterized by seemingly spontaneous marches and strikes, exposed the Okhrana’s inefficacy at controlling mass popular movements. Not only did the Okhrana lack the capacity to prevent the mass movements of 1905, or even to contain them once they began, the Okhrana’s misguided attempts may even have worsened the unrest. D. F. Trepov, the Assistant Minister of the Interior in charge of police affairs, and P. I. Rachkovsky, now in charge of all domestic political police operations, attempted to mount an aggressive offensive against those they believed to be responsible for the unrest, namely zemstvo employees, in May 1905, but backed down three months later. In October of that year, Trepov again attempted a violent repression of the revolution only to call off the effort for lack of manpower. Since these attempts at repression never reached fruition, they only served to aggravate the already enraged Russian populace and to deepen their distrust of the Imperial government. Trepov’s replacement by P.N. Durnovo in late-October ushered in a period of even more vicious repression of the Revolution.
…Just as the Okhrana had once sponsored trade unions to divert activist energy from political causes, so too did the secret police attempt to promote the Bolshevik party, as the Bolsheviks seemed a relatively harmless alternative to more violent revolutionary groups. Indeed, to the Okhrana, Lenin seemed to actively hinder the revolutionary movement by denouncing other revolutionary groups and refusing to cooperate with them. To aid the Bolsheviks at the expense of other revolutionaries, the Okhrana helped Roman Malinovsky, a police spy who had managed to rise within the group and gain Lenin’s trust, in his bid to become a Bolshevik delegate to the Duma. To this end, the Okhrana sequestered Malinovsky’s criminal record and arrested others candidates for the seat. Malinovsky won the seat and led the Bolshevik delegation in the Fourth Duma until 1914, but even with the information Malinovsky and other informants provided to the Okhrana, the police were unprepared for the rise of Bolshevism in 1917. Although the secret police had agents within the Bolshevik organization, other factors contributed to the Okhrana’s inefficacy at averting the events of 1917. Among these factors was the Deputy Minister of the Interior, General V. F. Dzhunkovsky’s ban on police spies within the military, a practice he found dishonorable and damaging to morale. While, initially, the beginning of World War I moved the Okhrana’s attentions from countering revolutionaries to countering German espionage, the focus quickly shifted back as it was revealed that the Germans were heavily funding Russian revolutionary groups in order to destabilize the nation. Despite the renewed attention, the February Revolution took the secret police, and the nation, by surprise. Indeed, the Okhrana’s persistent focus on revolutionary groups may have resulted in the secret police not fully appreciating the deep-seated popular unrest brewing in Russia.
The Okhrana was identified by the revolutionaries as one of the main symbols of Tsarist repression, and its headquarters were sacked and burned on 27 February 1917. The newly formed Provisional Government then disbanded the whole organization and released most of the political prisoners who had been held by the Tsarist regime. Revelations of the Okhrana’s earlier abuses heightened public hostility towards the secret police after the February Revolution and made it very dangerous to be a political policeman. That fact, along with the St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) Soviet’s insistence on the dissolution of the regular Tsarist police force, as well as the political police, meant that the Okhrana quickly and quietly disappeared.
…
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/21/magazine/hitler-s-russian-blunder.html
…The invasion of the Soviet Union, 40 years ago tomorrow, was one of the turning points of World War II. The hitherto invincible German Wehrmacht, after a series of stunning victories, was bled into impotence by the long, agonizing Russian national effort. Four years later, as the Russian armies rolled westward, the Soviet Union emerged as the most powerful state on the Eurasian land mass and the long duel with the United States began.
https://www.voanews.com/a/russian-veterans-recall-horros-of-ww-ii-eastern-front/2761094.html
Russian Veterans Recall Horrors of WWII Eastern Front
Russia staged a huge military parade in Moscow Saturday to mark the 70th anniversary of victory in the World War II over Nazi Germany. VOA spoke to veterans of the conflict about their memories of the fighting, and their thoughts on current tensions between Russia and the West.
The scale of sacrifice still has the power to shock: An estimated 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died in World War II, the highest toll of any nation.
At his home near Moscow, war veteran Aleksandr Podobed proudly displays his medals as he prepares to attend the Victory Day events.
As a 12-year-old, he served as a spotter for partisan forces in occupied Belarus. Podobed recalled one occasion when he managed to distract a group of Nazi soldiers, who were about to stop a cart that was being used to smuggle supplies.
“I ran down the slope towars the soldiers,” he said. “They noticed me and shouted, ‘Halt! Halt!’ I kept running. They started to fire at me. I thought that they’d kill me. After I heard the cart pass safely, I fell down. The Germans dragged me and kicked my face with their boots. I was all beaten up.”
…“At the time we firmly believed that Germans would kill us in any case,” he said. “And this very fact drove us to fight until the end — and we did, each one of us in his own way. We were doing what we were supposed to do.”
…Victory Day should also be an occasion for reflection about the suffering that followed 1945 in the Soviet Union, historian Andrei Zubov said.
He said the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime did not fall then, but became stronger. “And that is another reason why this was a victory ‘with tears in our eyes’ — not only because of huge losses, but also because the victory had not brought about the end of the totalitarian Stalinist regime,” he said.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15884254
…Lev Mishchenko was 9 months old when the Bolshevik Revolution took place. His engineer father evacuated his family from Moscow to what he believed would be relative safety in Siberia.
But during the bitter civil war that engulfed the country soon after, Bolshevik revolutionaries shot Mishchenko’s parents. Four-year-old Mishchenko attended both their funerals.
He was raised by his grandmother and grew up to become a physicist. He graduated from Moscow State University the day before the Soviet Union entered World War II.
…Millions of Soviets taken prisoner by the Germans died in captivity. Of those who survived to return, more than a million are estimated to have been sent straight to the gulag on suspicion of spying.
…Among them was Mishchenko, who was put on trial a second time after an alibi led to his initial acquittal. At one point, Mishchenko was loaded into the back of a truck with other prisoners, who he believed were to be driven away to be shot.
Instead, Mishchenko spent the next nine years in Siberian gulags. His wife, whom he’d met before the war, made arduous trips from Moscow to visit him.
“Stalin was a maniac,” he says. “People say he led us to victory against the Germans. In fact, he drove the Soviet Union into the ground. The war was won only because of the heroism of those who fought in it.”
…Recounting his experiences, Mishchenko breaks down only when describing some of the people he met as a prisoner.
He says tiny acts of kindness took tremendous bravery: a sandwich secretly given to him by a German secretary; a sympathetic guard who snuck him out of his camp barracks to talk to others.
“Such gestures of humanity,” Mishchenko says, “they were the true acts of heroism.”
Today, Mishchenko says Russians’ growing nostalgia for the Soviet era is a dangerous result of past Communist Party propaganda.
“Tens of millions of lives were destroyed under the Soviet Union,” Mishchenko says. “I saw how people lived. Children were starving, and their parents still had to give milk and eggs to the state.”