Tag Archives: history

The Hungarian “Revolt” of 1956 – a detailed historical look at the events

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Declassified documents on the assassination of President Kennedy show, in particular, that the uprising in Hungary in 1956 was supervised and sponsored by the CIA.

The recent declassification of the JFK files had a welcome side-effect – it showed that a lot of what the Soviet Union was saying regarding the Western meddling was not some “conspiracy theory”, but solid conspiracy facts. One such fact, is the Western meddling the in bloody 1956 colour revolution attempt in Hungary. The other fact is that the “revolt” was in fact a fascist revanchist attempt. We shall see how the pardon and release by Hrushyov in 1955 of hundreds of Hungarian nazi-criminals convicted of war crimes and atrocities committed during the Great patriotic War proved crucial to the organisation and conduct of the fascist counter-revolution attempt in Hungary in October 1956.

In this article we present five materials, both from the English-language publications, and translated from Russian. Pay attention to their publication dates.

We shall start with 3 shorter publications, then moving to a longer illustrated article, which takes a broader historical perspective into account. Finally, there is a long article which references several contemporary Soviet notes and evaluations of the months and days before the attempted coup.

Read also the article “Hungary: bloody autumn 56” at TopWar!

Burn after reading: Operation Focus and the fictional Nemzeti Ellenzéki Mozgalom in the lead-up to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising

This article is only available as an abstract. It was published on December 8, 2022 as part of the book “Cold War History”.

ABSTRACT

From 1954 to 1956, the Free Europe Press, sister organisation to Radio Free Europe, engaged in a covert propaganda campaign known as Operation Focus. Writing under the alias of the fictional Hungarian partisan group Nemzeti Ellenzéki Mozgalom, the campaign encouraged widespread passive resistance against the communist regime through a coordinated print and radio campaign facilitated via specially-designed weather balloons and RFE broadcasts, respectively. Under pressure from the Hungarian and US governments, the campaign came to end just days before the outbreak of the 1956 Hungarian Rising.

MI6 trained rebels to fight Soviets in Hungarian revolt

– This article was published by “Independent” on October 22, 1996

Some of the rebels who took on the Soviet Union in the Hungarian uprising, 40 years ago this week, were trained by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – popularly known as MI6 – according to the author of a new book on the history of the organisation.

Last night, the Foreign Office said it would not comment on “operational intelligence matters”. However, Michael Smith, the author of New Cloak, Old Dagger, to be published by Gollancz on 7 November, said: “The officers I spoke to said there was an intention to cause an uprising in Hungary.” But he added: “There is no evidence that this was specifically sparked by MI6 because there was another series of events”.

An estimated 15,000 mainly young, working-class Hungarians took up arms in the 1956 uprising, defying the might of the Soviet military for almost two weeks. An estimated 3,000-4,000 Hungarians died in the revolt, which represented the most serious challenge to Soviet rule in Eastern Europe since it was imposed following the Second World War.

In 1955 the reformist Hungarian prime minister, Imre Nagy, was forced to resign, and in 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin and his legacy. The clamour for reform began to grow. The revolt broke out on 23 October after more than 100,000 students took to the streets to call for free elections, the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the reinstatement of Mr Nagy. Small bands of fighters established pockets of resistance and demobilised scores of Soviet tanks.

Some of the weapons used were American, and others almost certainly British. Mr Smith says MI6 and the CIA had buried arms caches in the woods around Prague and Budapest for use by “stay-behind” parties or fifth columnists in case of war.

The mid-1950s were regarded by the British and the United States as the last chance to challenge Soviet dominion over eastern Europe. The Eisenhower administration had been elected on a platform of “liberating” the Soviet satellite states, but in the 10 years since the Allied victory in Europe, the Soviet Union had strengthened its hold over the central and eastern part of the continent.

The name of Mr Smith’s main contact – a military officer working for MI6 – has been withheld under a D-notice. However, he recalled “picking up agents on the Hungarian border” to take them across in to the British-occupied zone of Austria in 1954. “We were taking them up into the mountains and giving them a sort of … crash course. I would be told to pick somebody up from a street corner at a certain time of night in the pouring rain. Graz was our staging point. Then, after we’d trained them – explosives, weapons training – I used to take them back … We were training the agents for the uprising.”

In return, the British received information. Paul Gorka was one of a group of students recruited in the early 1950s to gather intelligence on Soviet activity in Hungary. “In due course we received coded messages from Vienna asking us for information about Russian troop movements … We replied with information written in invisible ink in innocuous letters to special addresses.”

Unfortunately the Budapest students met in a coffee bar to discuss their activities and were swiftly rounded up. Mr Gorka was interrogated for several weeks, strung up from a beam and immersed in icy water. Under torture, he confessed, and was sent to prison for 15 years.

Laszlo Regeczy-Nagy, the President of the Committee for Historical Justice, representing the interests of the veterans, said: “There were thousands of Hungarians living in Austria at the time and some were undoubtedly organised and trained by the British.” He believes that foreign intervention played a modest role, and “the vast majority of those taking part [in the revolt] were locally trained and led”. He added: “Even without training, they pretty quickly learned how to fire machine guns and hurl Molotov cocktails.”

The Liquidation or The Bloody Autumn of 1956

– Historian Nikolai Starikov published this blog post on April 29, 2017:

In my new book “War. With someone else’s hands,” I analyse in detail the causes, course and essence of the so-called “uprising” in Hungary in 1956. In fact, it was a rebellion heavily based on purely “colour technologies”. The United States and Great Britain stood behind it. What for and why did our “partners” need the Budapest uprising can be found in my book, which will appear in early June 2017.

This article was published a year and a half ago in one of the mass media of Kazakhstan. We are interested in it as a living historical document, as an eyewitness account. One that is telling the truth.

And the truth looks as follows:
1. There was a fascist uprising in Hungary in 1956. On the streets of Budapest and other cities, Hungarian fascists killed Hungarian communists.
2. The technology of organising an insurrection is tricky and simple at the same time: it is a cross between the Maidan in Kiev and Gorbachev. That is, “colour” technologies multiplied by the betrayal of the Hungarian elite led by Imre Nagy.
3. The USSR did absolutely the right thing by suppressing this rebellion. The Hungarian Communists did this alongside our soldiers.
4. The fault of the USSR leadership lies in that, by his actions at the beginning of “de-Stalinization”, Hrushyov created a pretext and a backdrop for rebellion and an attempt to split the Soviet bloc. There are only a few months between the Twentieth Congress and the uprising in Hungary…
5. During the rebellion, the “rebels” committed heinous crimes: murders, burning people alive, torture, robberies, rapes.
6. The West was not going to support the rebels at all, it needed the shooting in Budapest for completely different purposes. (the details are in my new book “War. By someone else’s hands”)
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The not so peaceful “Peaceful Germans”

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Exactly 80 years ago, the Soviet satirical magazine “Krokodil” had a special drawing by I.Semyonov in issue №9 from March 24, 1945.

On one page we observe “Peaceful Germans”: a doctor, a typist, two clerks getting their money… and a text at the bottom:

“We forcefully recommend to look at them against the light.”

🤔 What can that be?

On the reverse side of the page we are met with several mirror-image amendments!

The video simulates how that caricature would look once you shone the torchlight of truth at the deceptive images! Watch it in full screen.


Backup at Rumble.

The peaceful doctor is not so peaceful any more, the peaceful typist turns into a radio operator with a “code book”, the peaceful clerks are now seen getting money “for sabotage” and “for murder”!

‼️ There is a bit of context one has to keep in mind, when looking at the caricature. In the final months of the war, culminating in May 1945. the West started to present Germans as poor victims of the big bad Russian bear, with Goebbelsian propaganda myth about the misconduct of the Soviet troop, finding fertile ground in the Anglo-sphere. This caricature, as well as a number of others that we will present in time, aim to highlight this, puzzling to the USSR, change in attitude.

Here is a combined image, showing both the components and the combined result.

The materials are from our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”, where the individual images can be downloaded in the comments section.

“Political Chernobyl has blown up.” How Burbulis justified the collapse of the USSR

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Despite the majority of the Soviet citizens speaking out in favour of the preservation of the Soviet Union, their will was completely disregarded. In this article, which was published by “Argumenty i Fakty” on June 20,2022, Gennady Burbulis is giving his justification for the process. We shall make a note of when he is referencing a Western-sponsored myth about the USSR as part of his justification. Make sure you have read first the article The referendum on the independence of Ukraine on December 1, 1991: how Kravchuk deceived Sevastopol and Crimea, which uncovers the motivations for Kravchuk’s actions, which may seem as coming out of the blue in Burbulis’ story.

“Political Chernobyl has blown up.” How Burbulis justified the collapse of the USSR
– by Vitaly Tseplyaev

President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin and Secretary of State under the President of the Russian Federation Gennady Burbulis

Gennady Burbulis, one of the closest associates of the first President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, died on June 19 (2022) at the age of 77. In December 1991, he held the position of Secretary of State of Russia, which was specially created for him, and played a crucial role in signing the Belovezha Agreements, which ended the existence of the Soviet Union. In a recent interview with AiF, Burbulis explained why he considered the collapse of the USSR to be an “optimistic tragedy” and did not regret what he had done.

— In December 1991, the Soviet Union practically did not exist. Moreover, a new Union Treaty had been prepared, and its signing was scheduled for December 9th. We chose this date specifically in order to wait for the results of the presidential elections in Kazakhstan and the referendum in Ukraine, which took place on December 1.

On Gorbachev’s initiative, on September 5, Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed to the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR to dissolve itself and create transitional governing bodies of the Union. And such a decision was made. There was no mention of the USSR in the text of the Treaty on the creation of the Union of Sovereign States (note the “Union” in the formula here! See: On March 17th 1991, the referendum on the preservation of the USSR was held) as a confederate democratic voluntary association, which was finally agreed upon in Novo-Ogaryovo on November 28-29.

Even before August, Gorbachev defended the erroneous formula of the 9+1 treaty, where 9 are republics and 1 is the Kremlin, the Union center. But by December, everything had changed. By that time, not a single organ of the union government was functioning normally. The country was on the verge of the most dangerous anarchy, and Gorbachev himself knew this best of all. Therefore, our decision (to sign an agreement on the establishment of the CIS in Belovezhskaya Pushcha on December 8. — Ed.) was vital and necessary. We had no choice.

“We spent the whole day trying to convince Kravchuk”

Vitaly Tseplyaev, aif.ru: — Why didn’t you wait for December 9th? Did you want to disrupt the signing of a new union treaty?

Gennady Burbulis: — Leonid Kravchuk said from the very first minute of our meeting in Belovezhskaya Pushcha that the mandate of the Ukrainian people, which he received in the elections and in the referendum, forbids him to discuss any options for a new Union Treaty: Ukraine declared itself a sovereign independent state. Such a categorical position came as a surprise to us. For a whole day we tried to convince Kravchuk that the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus cannot just leave for nowhere. It was unthinkable at the time. And after difficult conversations, reflections, and the realisation that a unique empire filled with nuclear weapons was disintegrating, in my opinion, it was Kravchuk who proposed this compromise form: the Commonwealth of Independent States. Here one can glean more than just a good analogy with the British Commonwealth.
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World War Zero, or the so-called “Crimean” War. A documentary.

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There was a question from one of the subscribers at a friendly channel if there exist an honest English-language documentary about the Crimean war.

As a matter of fact, there is one 4-part Russian documentary with English subtitles, from Star Media, called “World War Zero”

All 4 episodes can be accessed though this YouTube playlist. Make sure to turn on subtitles and select your language.

Here are the introductory lines of the first film:

The Battle of Sinop, 1853
These four hours of the battled passed quickly, like one minute.
The tension reached its utmost point, when the enemy broke down and opened fire.
In the blink of an eye the sky, the water, and the land were became red as flame and blood. That was a magnificent victory of the imperial fleet.
The entire world witnessed again the decisiveness and courage of the Russian warriors. It seemed that the Black Sea would be safe forever.
It only remained to wait till the sea becomes calm, the smoke from the fires disperses, and it would be safe again to approach the home coast, the bay of Sevastopol.
Only one person, the winner, a famous admiral, Nakhimov, standing on the deck of Empress Maria, understood: this was only the beginning of a terrible and merciless world war.
This war is most often called the Crimean War.
But the Crimean battles, including the famous defence of Sevastopol, are only a part of a greater war.
The warfare embraced vast territories, from the Baltic Sea and Arctic to the Caucasus and the Pacific Ocean.
The war was waged on the lands that were remote from each other, its players were pursuing global goals.
With every new step the ideological struggle was growing more intense.
These factors are signs of a world war.
That was namely the reason why the Crimean War of the mid-19th century was called the Zero World War.
It became a kind of a rehearsal for the upcoming First and Second world wars.

While we are on the subject, we have earlier written a short overview article on the topic: The “Crimean” War misnomer – A bigger picture

Oscar-winning film lies about the Red Army. A re-blog of MFA statement

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The re-writing of history is happening in two planes – the erasure of the actual history through the destruction of the monuments, and the implanting of a “new” narrative in the minds of the people. We told about the destruction of the monuments through a video clip from the film “Warsaw ’21” in the article “Warsaw ‘21” – a political thriller with a fragment on the essence of the Polish destruction of the Soviet memorials, while the alteration of the history with the “new narrative” is happening though the films, like the one criticised below.

For an additional story about the liberation of Poland, and how that event gets malformed in the minds of the Poles, see our 2015 article The Sorrow of a Warsaw Woman. Why Poland is not happy to be liberated from fascism?

Soviet and Polish soldiers plant the victory banner. Warsaw, January 1945. The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

Oscar-winning film lies about the Red Army

Nikolai LAKHONIN, Chief Counselor, Foreign Ministry Information and Press Department
March 17, 2025

The annual Oscars Academy Award ceremony attracts attention of the whole world. Recently, another such show took place. We would like to talk not about the American film Anora (rated R) with Russian actors (we congratulate them on their great success), but about the drama A Real Pain (rated R) directed by Jesse Eisenberg.

It is also an American film, made by Americans primarily for Americans and about Americans. This is important. The picture is about historical memory in the perception of American descendants who survived the Holocaust. The genre is a road film: the main characters travel to memorial sites, get acquainted with monuments in the Polish capital and go to the Majdanek concentration camp museum. The picture has already been seen by millions, and after it received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, even more people will see it. The screenwriters of such films lay down powerful narratives. And since they contain a distorted view of the most important events related to our country, we cannot remain silent.

The myth of the Red Army

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The referendum on the independence of Ukraine on December 1, 1991: how Kravchuk deceived Sevastopol and Crimea

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This in-depth research and chronology article by Lyubov Ulyanova was published in the Sevastopol publication “ForPost” on November 30, 2022.

Without understanding the events and manipulations happening in the Ukrainian SSR in 1991, it is impossible to understand the mechanics behind the collapse of the USSR.

On March 17, 1991 the majority of the Soviet citizens voted for the preservation of the Union. But this vote was disregarded. Moreover, Ukraine held a referendum on independence, first denouncing the Union treaty of 1922, while Crimea was falsely assured that Ukrainian SSR has no intention of leaving the Union. This largely made the referendum on the secession of Crimea from Ukraine inevitable at some point in time, and that finally happened on March 16, 2014, after USA, dissatisfied with their already significant control of Ukraine, decided to push the country even further away from Russia though a Nazi-powered coup d’etat.

The article, while being long, is very much worth every minute that you will spend reading it, as it clears up many questions. One can summarise the key takeaways:

  • The “granite” colour revolution of October 1990, when protesters were taken with busses from Western Ukraine to Kiev.
  • Ukraine denounced the 1922 treaty, which means that Ukraine reverts to it’s pre-USSR state of not existing at all.
  • Ukraine expected to keep the borders as they were within the Union (i.e., following the 1922 Treaty and its amendments)
  • Ukraine used the “right to self-determination” to hold a referendum on independence
  • Ukraine denied Crime to have the UN-enshrined right to self-determination to hold its own referendum on independence
  • Ukraine promised that it will not leave the Union
  • Ukraine left the Union
  • Ukraine regarded USSR as “former”, non-existent
  • Ukraine deferred Crimea to the head of the USSR (Gorbachev) to repeal the 1954 decree of transfer of Crimea, thus recognising USSR as existing.
  • The process was closely guided from Canada and the USA
  • Crimea could appeal to the leadership of the USSR to repeal the 1954 decree, with a logical legal implication that as Russia is the legal heir of the USSR, Russia can repeal that decree on behalf of the USSR.

Watch also the following video, where Kravchuk speaks about the break-up of the USSR:

The referendum on the independence of Ukraine on December 1, 1991: how Kravchuk deceived Sevastopol and Crimea

Ukraine ratified a completely different text of the Belovezha Agreements compared to Russia and Belarus, and this calls into question the legal force of the Agreement as a whole.

Kravchuk distracted and deceived Sevastopol and Crimea in 1991.
The caption reads: “One must decide today that what can be decided today”. Date: 26.10.1991

Lapshin M.I. (Stupinsky territorial electoral district, Moscow region)… I have a question about the denunciation of the 1922 Union Treaty… Just look at the map of the USSR in 1922, and we will see that the states that have denounced the treaty today were located within completely different borders. Does the denunciation mean a return to the old days, when Russia was without the Far Eastern Republic, Kazahstan and Central Asia were part of the RSFSR, the border of Belarus was just west of the Minsk region, and Ukraine, to put it mildly, could show for itself quite different territory from what it currently has (most likely, it was, first of all, a hint at Crimea and Sevastopol – author note). Are we not creating the basis for huge territorial claims against each other by denouncing the Union Treaty?”

USSR 1922

This question, asked on December 12, 1991 by one of the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR during the discussion in the Russian Supreme Council of the Agreement on the creation of the CIS, a few days after the “Belovezha”, was basically ignored by other participants in that discussion.

However, today, more than 30 years later, it cannot be said that this question was completely meaningless.
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On March 17th 1991, the referendum on the preservation of the USSR was held

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On March 17th 1991, the referendum on the preservation of the USSR was held. we are commemorating the event with a series of posts at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”, as well as publications here and at our Odysee and Rumble channels.

The question at the referendum was formulated as follows:

“Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of people of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?”

113.5 million people voted in favour of preserving the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that is, almost 78% of those who voted.

In accordance with Art. 29 of the USSR Law “On National Voting” of December 27th 1990 No. 1869-I, a decision made through a referendum of the USSR is final and can be cancelled or changed only through a new expression of the will of the peoples of the USSR.

“The fate of the peoples of the country is inseparable; only through joint efforts can they successfully resolve issues of economic, social and cultural development”, stated the official commentary of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

On November 6th 1991, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party throughout Soviet Russia.

On December 8th, the will of citizens to live in a single multinational state was cynically and brazenly trampled on, when in Belovezhskaya Pushcha Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich, without any legal authority to do so, with the criminal inaction of Gorbachev, secretly signed an agreement from the people that “The USSR as a subject of international law and as a geopolitical reality ceases to exist”.

On December 25th Yeltsin officially dissolved the Soviet Union. Next day, USSR to longer existed.

Word to the Rector — on the disappearance of the CIS documents


Backup at Rumble.

Russia is the legal successor of the USSR on the territory of all the Union republics.
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A posthumous sentence. How the French legalised Petlyura’s murder

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The extrajudicial execution of the Ukrainian Nazi Demyan Ganul yesterday bears a certain resemblance to the extrajudicial execution of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist and mass-murderer, Simon Petlyura, 99 years ago. Demyan Ganul was, among other, one of the people behind the Odessa massacre of May 2, 2014, for which a few days ago, the European Court of Human Rights has found Ukraine to be responsible.

Read on and compare. The article is from “Argumenty i Fakty”, published on October 26, 2014.

A posthumous sentence. How the French legalised Petliura’s murder

A bust of Simon Petlyura in Rovno, Ukraine.

Three shots fired at a Paris shop window

On May 25, 1926, a stranger approached a man who was looking at a street window at the corner of Paris Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue Racine. After asking the man a question in Ukrainian and receiving an answer that satisfied him, the stranger took out a revolver and shot the man three times.

The shooter did not try to escape, but remained at the scene until the police arrived. After handing over the weapon to the police, he stated that he had shot a murderer.

The victim of the attack was taken to a nearby hospital on Jacob Street, where the man died fifteen minutes later.

The killer’s name was Samuel Yakovlevich Schwarzburd. His victim was Simon Petlyura, the former head of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, one of the most well-known figures of the time of the Civil War.

Both the killer and his victim were, as they say, “products of the era”.
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Macron’s belligerent talk, Russian MFA’s sharp reply, and the lesson of the “civil” war from 1918

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Macron recently decided to play the role of one of the riders of Apocalypse and delivered a very belligerent speech, which drew a shap response from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which we reblog in full below.

But first, to the events of 1918, when another, similar crusade against Russia was started by the West. The same fratricidal “civil war” as we see now in Ukraine, where Russians are killing Russians.

The material is from our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

On March 6, 1918, an English landing force landed in the port of Murmansk from the cruiser “Glory”. The open military intervention by the Entente of Russia began.

On March 14, the British cruiser “Cochrane” arrived in Murmansk with a new detachment of interventionists.

March 18 – French cruiser “Admiral Ob”.

The Americans joined later: on May 27, the American cruiser “Olympia” entered the Murmansk port, from which a detachment of American infantry soon disembarked.

The topic of foreign intervention against Soviet Russia in 1918-21 has been completely cast out of sight, completely “blurred”, and sometimes even disputed. There is practically no mention of it in the modern media.

This intentionally or unintentionally creates the myth of the Civil War as a war exclusively between “Whites” and “Reds.” Which is obviously a manipulation.

So, shall we remember who supported the “Whites” against the “Reds” with their manpower and equipment?

1. 🇬🇧 England. 28,000 soldiers – Arkhangelsk (1918), Murmansk (1918), the Baltic (1918), Revel (1919), Narva (1919), the Black Sea (1920), Sevastopol (1920), the Caspian Sea (1920), Transcaucasia (1918), Vladivostok (1918).
2. 🇺🇸 USA. 15,000 soldiers. – Arkhangelsk (1918), Murmansk (1918), Trans-Siberian Railway
3. 🇫🇷 France – Arkhangelsk (1918), Murmansk (1918), Odessa (1918), Kherson (1918), Sevastopol (1918), Siberia.
4. 🇦🇺 Australia – 4,000 soldiers. Arkhangelsk (1918), Murmansk (1918).
5. 🇨🇦 Canada – Arkhangelsk (1918). Murmansk (1918).
6. 🇮🇹 Italy – Murmansk, Far East.
7. 🇬🇷 Greece – 2,000 soldiers. Odessa, the Black Sea.
8. 🇷🇴 Romania – Bessarabia.
9. 🇵🇱 Poland – The North of Russia, the South, Siberia.
10. 🇯🇵 Japan. 28,000 soldiers – Far East (Vladivostok, Sakhalin)
11. 🇨🇳 China – Arkhangelsk (1918), Murmansk (1918).
12. 🇷🇸 Serbia – “Serbian Battalion”. The North of Russia.
13. 🇫🇮 Finland – Karelia. The Karelian and Murmansk legions, created by the 🇬🇧 British.
14. 🇩🇪 Germany. Ukraine, the Baltic States, part of European Russia
15. 🇦🇹🇭🇺 Austria-Hungary. (Germany’s ally)
16. 🇹🇷 Turkey (the Ottoman Empire). Transcaucasia.

🇨🇿 We can also recall the Czechoslovak Corps, which became the trigger of the Civil War.

In total, more than 20 countries took up arms directly or indirectly against the young Soviet Republic. Do not forget that the “Whites” were also fully funded by the Entente.

It was no accident that Stalin was saying, “The so-called Civil War”.

⚡️⚡️⚡️

👉 Read also Occupation of Russia by the USA in 1918-1920. The “international intervention” during the post-revolutionary unrest.

What do English, French, coming with war against us, want?

— A “Civil war” flyer by the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, 1918.

THEY SEIZED the road to Murmansk, the entire coast of the White Sea, Onega Lake, Arkhangelsk.
THERE WERE TRAITORS who helped them.
The peaceful population was shelled with GUNS from the cruisers — for what, what have we done to them?
ASK THE WORKERS OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE: WORKERS-BROTHERS, WHAT DO YOU WANT?
They will say WE WANT PEACE, WE hate WAR, but we still don’t have the strength to overthrow those who send us to the slaughter!
And what do you want, king, president, lords and dukes, merchants, bankers, landowners of America, England, France, Japan?
— Ha ha ha! What do we want? WE WANT TO DEVOUR YOU, we want to take over your forests in the north, as well as harbours, your roads.
WE WANT flax and hemp, forest and bread, everything your country is rich in, copper and iron, lead, silver, platinum, gold — WE WANT to capture IT ALL.
WHAT DO WE WANT? — these gentlemen will say, we want to capture both the North, the Volga, the Urals, and Caucases. We need your oil sources, your mines, your fishing grounds, we’ll take everything!
WHAT DO WE WANT? — they will say WE WANT TO PUT ON YOUR NECK THE TSAR, because in our country, King George is a relative of Romanov, because our bourgeoisie is relatives of yours, and our landlords are relatives of yours.
You have overthrown the NOBILITY, and WE WILL AGAIN PUT THEM ON YOUR NECK.
You overthrew the landowner, and we’ll put him on your neck again.
Do you want to live a free independent life? And we’re thrusting you back into slavery.
— That’s what these people want.
— CHASE THEM AWAY!

Foreign Ministry Statement regarding French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech

In the run-up to the EU summit dedicated to Ukraine crisis and confrontation with Russia, and clearly trying to set the tone for the upcoming gathering, French President Macron made an extremely aggressive anti-Russia speech calling our country, as he did on multiple previous occasions, a “threat to France and Europe.” Without providing any evidence, as he usually does, he accused our country of all the deadly sins from cyber attacks and interference in elections to our alleged plans to attack other countries in Europe.

We have heard him come up with similar fabrications and provocative claims before as well. Perhaps, this was the first time he laid them out in such an intense and irreconcilable manner which made them sound like a catechism for the Russophobic action programme.

Notably, the French leader has repeatedly made public his plans to call President Putin on the telephone to discuss ways to achieve peaceful settlement in Ukraine and to ensure security in Europe. The Russian side has always been open to discuss these matters. However, Macron, this time again, confined himself to clamorous public rhetoric.

The French President is trying hard to convince the French citizens of an “existential threat” coming from Russia. In fact, Russia has never threatened France, but, instead, helped it defend its independence and sovereignty in two world wars. However, Macron’s statements, in fact, pose a threat to Russia.
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The history of repressions devoid of emotion. Viktor Zemskov’s arguments and facts

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We present translations of two article in the newspaper “Argumenty i Fakty”:

– “The history of repressions devoid of emotion. Viktor Zemskov’s arguments and facts” from July 25, 2015, dispelling one of the myths surrounding Stalin – that of “tens of millions of repressed”, replacing it instead with impartial historical research.

– This is followed by a translation of an earlier article from 1989, “‘The Gulag Archipelago’: through the eyes of a writer and a statistician”, where Zemskov counters the misinformation in Solzhenicin’s work.

Read also: Myths about Stalin. Where do legs grow from? Reblog of a detailed research article!

Victor Nikolaevich Zemskov

The man who believed the facts

The official website of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that on July 21, 2015, Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Scientific Secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia, died suddenly at the age of 70.

“Viktor Nikolaevich’s whole life was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years,” the report says. — Viktor Nikolaevich became especially famous for his archival research. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the discoverer of archival funds on the history of political repression in the USSR that had previously been closed to scientists.

Viktor Zemskov’s name won’t say much to a wide audience. His books were not published in millions of copies, they were not decorated with catchy titles. He preferred painstaking work with historical documents, rather than a pursuit of high-profile sensations.

In 1989, at the peak of “perestroika”, Zemskov joined the commission for determining population losses at the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Yuri Polyakov. The Commission gained access to the statistical reports of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB, stored in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution.

These previously classified documents contained all the factual information about the real history of political repression during the Soviet period.

As already mentioned, Viktor Zemskov did not chase after sensations, but the research materials he published overturned ideas about the scale of political repression in the USSR.

The secret that has become disclosed

The historian, who had never hidden his negative attitude towards the Stalinist repressions, came to the conclusion that the data on tens and hundreds of millions of repressed people, which appeared in foreign studies and in media materials from the time of “perestroika”, do not reflect the reality.

Having thoroughly studied all the materials, Zemskov established that in the period from 1921 to 1953 in the USSR, 4,060,306 people were convicted of “counterrevolutionary and other particularly dangerous state crimes”, of which 799,455 people were sentenced to capital punishment.

Zemskov also refuted the popular statement about “a country where every second person went through prison camps”. According to the results of the study, it was found that the maximum total number of prisoners in camps in the entire Soviet history was recorded as of January 1, 1950 — 2,760,095 people, while the average number of prisoners ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 million people. At the same time, we are talking about both political prisoners and those convicted of criminal offences.

For comparison, the number of prisoners in the United States reached 2.2 million in 2013.
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Snipers on Maidan – New testimonies from Ukraine

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From the Telegram channel of Eva Karene Bartlett, Reality Theories

This is additional proof to the material provided Snipers on Maidan – A German newsreel from 2014, which we translated last year.


Backup at Rumble.


Backup at Rumble.

Bombshell: Maidan activist stated that he saw sniper in pendulum floor window of Hotel Ukraina shooting numerous Maidan activists. It matches open window in video in which protesters wondered that snipers from hotel were shooting Maidan activists. A Svoboda leader lived in this room during massacre, according to Prosecutor General Office investigation. He said that he was in this hotel room at that time & was filming massacre from it. Wikipedia editor was killed at that time & place when he & other Maidan activists were looking at Hotel Ukraina. Verdict confirmed my studies findings that he was killed from Maidan-controlled area and not by police.

But Prosecutor General Office investigation & USAID funded Ukrainian media denied that there were any snipers in this hotel, even when this Maidan activist testified what he saw and BBC & ICTV filmed snipers there. Verdict stated that the Maidan sniper shot at BBC journalists from neighboring room of Hotel Ukraina which was “activist controlled.”

Prosecutor General Investigation revelated another far-right Svoboda leader leaved in neighboring hotel room that was filmed by BBC and ITCV. The same Maidan activist also posted on X that he also saw gunshots from another Hotel Ukraina room & identified this room on 13th floor.

This activist also noted that brother of killed Maidan activist considered that he was shot dead from the upper floors of the hotel based on his steep wound direction on his left side and his position in the video with Hotel Ukraina on his left. But investigation attributed the killing of his brother to the commander of the special Berkut company based on the falsified forensic examination of the bullet because Berkut police was on the ground on his right during his killing.

This is all consistent with findings of my academic studies of the Maidan massacre in Ukraine. But official government investigation, media with some exceptions, Wikipedia & various self-proclaimed experts continue to deny that there were snipers in Maidan-controlled Hotel Ukraina.”
– Source

CIA Against Detente

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The article appears in the “Historian” magazine, written by Alexander Kolpakidi. We added an illustration to better drive home the point about MSM collusion.

US President Dwight Eisenhower was quite far-sighted, but America in his time was not yet mature enough to understand the changed balance of power in the world.

The first timid steps of this president towards “détente” were resolutely opposed by the majority of the American elite, and the CIA twice became an insurmountable obstacle to the president’s path, thwarting his plans.
The first time this happened was due to the myth that America was lagging behind in the number of bombers.

It all started when the experts from the Rand Corporation began to study the vulnerability of the bases of the Strategic Aviation Command. Although the United States had superiority over the USSR in both nuclear weapons and bombers at that time, experts painted a terrifying picture of how a Soviet strike would destroy American strategic aviation on the ground and the United States would remain helpless before the “terrible Russians.”

The CIA was tasked with assessing the power of the Soviet air force. This task was performed in an absolutely amazing way. Intelligence agents had to… estimate the total production area of the aviation plant in Fili and, based on this estimate, calculate the production rate of strategic bombers. American military factories must be somewhat different from ours in terms of the rational use of the land allocated to them. Based on the CIA agents walking around the factory fence, which, in addition to the workshops, enclosed squares, garbage dumps and wastelands, it was concluded that the production of Soviet bombers was growing fantastically.

These “scientifically” based calculations were supported by even more “scientific” observations. On July 3, 1955, the Day of the Air Force, during the aviation parade in Moscow, the American intelligence officers diligently counted the bombers which took part in the celebration. The numbers turned out to be fantastic. The only thing the Americans didn’t realise was that they kept counting the same planes circling in the area of the air parade. This consideration was too primitive for the intelligence aces.

Based on these calculations and observations, the CIA estimated that the USSR would deploy 500 such aircraft by 1960. The terrible data got into the press, and the hysteria that broke out about the “bomber gap” significantly limited Eisenhower’s freedom of manoeuvrer for a while.

– The article continues after the illustration…

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The “Soviet threat” (which nowadays morphed into the “Russian threat”) remained with the USA, constantly whipped into the frenzy among the general public by the “free press”.

Andrey Krylov drew this caricature for the Soviet satirical magazine “Krokodil”, published in issue №2 in 1983.

— Remind our readers that the USSR has a superiority in armaments.
— But we do not have facts, sir…
— On the other hand, we have freedom of press.

♦️♦️♦️
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Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at a UNSC Briefing on Ukraine, 17.02.2025 – Repost

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This is probably the strongest condemnation of the “civilised West” to date. Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at a UNSC Briefing on Ukraine is available in English at the site of the “Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the UN”. Video in Russian is available at their Telegram channel.

Before reading on, do watch the following three short videos:


Backup at Rumble.


Backup at Rumble.


Backup at Rumble.

Main statement:

Mr. President,

We thank Roger Waters for his statement with an analysis of the history of the Ukrainian crisis and assessments of the significance of the Minsk agreements with regard to the relevant diplomatic efforts.

Today marks ten years since the adoption of UNSC resolution 2202, which endorsed the “Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements”. Having thus expressed its support for the solutions that had been found in Minsk a few days prior, the Council took the implementation of these agreements under its supervision. We all hoped then that a long-term and lasting peace would finally come, but all hopes of ours were fated to fail. Moreover, today the very word-combination “Minsk agreements” has become something of a diplomatic euphemism replacing the words “failure” or “lie”. We believe that our Security Council has every reason to analyze why this happened and why peace in the east of Ukraine never came after that.

First of all, let me briefly recall that the 13 points of the Package of Measures unambiguously defined the sequence of concrete steps to normalize the situation in Ukraine and bring Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (LNR and DNR) back to Ukraine’s fold. The last of these steps was to restore Kiev’s control over the State border in the east of the country. For this to happen, the Ukrainian leadership needed to undertake a number of measures geared towards granting the LNR and the DNR broader autonomy and protecting the identity of the Russian-speaking population.
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Enemies of World Peace

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From our post at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden” Telegram channel

The fragment of the literary work that you are about to read is best illustrated by this caricature, drawn by the art collective “Kukryniksy”, which appeared in issue №01 of the Soviet satirical magazine “Krokodil” in 1952.

It came out under the title “From the series «Enemies of Peace»” or “From the series «Enemies of the World»” — both meanings are possible in Russian, and are, in fact, intended by the authors.

On the wall, we see the portraits of the old Krupp, Morgan, Rockefeller and Ford, who financed and profiteered from World War II.

Below are “The Masters, sitting from left to right: Krupp, Rotschild, Lady Astor, Dupont, Rockefeller, Mellon, Ford, Harriman”, their grubby hands raking in the blood money of the past and future war profits.

Back in 1952 it was still remembered who financed the Third Reich, even though these perpetrators did not appear before the Nuremberg Trial. And only now, in the recent years, is it being talked and written of again, as in Dmitry Medvedev’s article “How the Anglo-Saxons Promoted Fascism in the 20th Century and Revived It in the 21st”.

🔥🔥🔥

📖 A reflection from the book by Eduardo Galeano “Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone”:

“Love Me Do”

Adolf Hitler’s friends have lousy memories, but the Nazi enterprise would not have been possible without their help.

Like his colleagues Mussolini and Franco, Hitler got approval early on from the Catholic Church.

Hugo Boss dressed his troops.

Bertelsmann published the training manuals for his officers.

His airplanes flew thanks to fuel from Standard Oil, and his soldiers traveled in Ford trucks and jeeps.

The maker of those vehicles and author of The International Jew, Henry Ford, was his muse. Hitler thanked him with a medal.

He also decorated the president of IBM, the company that made it possible to track and identify Jews.

The Rockefeller Foundation financed Nazi medicine’s racial and racist research.

Joe Kennedy, father of the president, was the U.S. ambassador in London, but might as well have been the German one. And Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents, was an associate of Fritz Thyssen, who used his fortune to further Hitler’s cause.

Deutsche Bank financed the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

IG Farben, the giant chemical conglomerate, which later on changed its name to Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst, used concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs and workers. These slave laborers made everything, even the gas that killed them.

The prisoners also worked for other companies, like Krupp, Thyssen, Siemens, VARTA, Bosch, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and BMW, which provided an economic foundation for the Nazi madness.

Swiss banks made a killing buying the gold jewelry and teeth of Hitler’s victims. The gold crossed the border with astonishing ease, while the gates remained hermetically sealed to flesh and blood trying to escape.

Coca-Cola came up with Fanta for the German market smack in the middle of the war. During that period, Unilever, Westinghouse, and General Electric also boosted their investments and profits in the country. When the war ended, ITT received a multimillion-dollar settlement for damages to its factories in Germany caused by Allied bombing.

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👉 Kudos to our subscriber Andrea for the lead to the book via Oleg Yasinsky‘s Russian translation.

The pre-War sabotage of the Soviet peace efforts by Britain and France, seen through the memoirs of Georgy Zhukov and the modern British press

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In a comment to a recent post, our reader JMF made us aware of an article by the British newspaper “The Telegraph”, under the title of “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'”. We shell re-blog that article in full at the end of this publication, but first….

Reading the very first paragraphs caused raised eyebrows with The Shieldmaiden, who has studied the memoirs of Marshal Georgy Zhukov in great detail.

Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.

Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler’s pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany’s other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.

Secret?!!

It often happens, by the way, that most important documents are ignored by our historical researchers. Sometimes the thoughts and judgements on prewar years obtained from indirect sources and through supplementary research sound as a revelation, while the same thoughts and even facts are contained in books easily available in libraries.

Historians and writers of memoirs are fond of asking: “What would have happened if…?” Indeed, if the governments of Britain and France had agreed to join hands with the Soviet Union against the aggressor in 1939, as we suggested, the destiny of Europe would have been different.

— Georgy Zhukov, 1962

In his memoirs published in 1962, Zhukov talks about those negotiations and the British/French unwillingness to commit. This is not at all surprising – as we wrote earlier, at approximately that time Britain and France were themselves preparing to pounce on the USSR: England and France were preparing an attack on the USSR in the summer of 1940: Operation Pike.

We are going to reproduce the relevant passages from Zhukov’s memoirs, using the English translation of his “Recollections and Reflection”, volume 1, found at WebArchive. Volume 2 is also available there.

But first, there is another paragraph in “The Telegraph” that raised our hackles.

But the British and French side – briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals – did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

Notorious treaty?!!

Shouldn’t the British press rather call the Munich conspiracy of 1938 for “notorious”. While the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was the last such treaty to be concluded. From our Telegram post “All European countries signed pacts with Hitler!”

  • Declaration on the Non-Use of Force between Germany and Poland, signed in 1934;
  • The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, which gave Hitler the opportunity to have a navy, which was prohibited as a result of the First World War;
  • The Anglo-German Declaration of Chamberlain and Hitler, signed on September 30, 1938;
  • The Franco-German Declaration of December 6, 1938, signed in Paris by the French and German Foreign Ministers Bonn and Ribbentrop;
  • The Treaty between the Republic of Lithuania and the German Reich of March 22, 1939, signed in Berlin, which dealt with the reunification of the Klaipeda Region with the German Reich;
  • The Non-Aggression Pact between the German Reich and Latvia of June 7, 1939;
  • These are only a part of the treaties concluded in pre-war Europe with Nazi Germany.

We also wrote in the post “Failed Union Against Fascism”

In 1934, the USSR invited European countries to jointly resist fascist aggression.
Their refusal made a new world war inevitable.

Doctor of Historical Sciences Mikhail Meltyukhov reflected on this in an interview with the magazine “Historian”:

The main reason for the failure of the “collective security” policy is that Great Britain and France were more inclined to agree with Germany and Italy rather than with the Soviet Union.

Thus, during contacts with the German leadership on November 19, 1937, the Lord Chairman of the Royal Privy Council of Great Britain Edward Halifax, and a little later, on December 2, the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden notified Berlin that London was not against the revision of borders in Eastern Europe, but considered an indispensable condition is the prevention of war.

France supported this position during the Anglo-French negotiations, which took place in the British capital on November 28–30, 1937.

The parties agreed on further non-interference in international disputes [read: no support for the anti-fascist struggle against Franco in Spain] and clashes in Eastern Europe.

And now, to memoirs by Marshal of the Soviet Union, Georgy Zhukov, first published in 1962, English translation from 1985.

From chapter 8, “In Command of Kiev Special Military District”, pages 211 – 216 of volume 1

In reporting to the Party’s 18th Congress about the work of the Central Committee, J. V. Stalin commented on the threat of the new imperialist war. He said that our country, which constantly followed a policy of peace, was doing its utmost to enhance the fighting capacity of the Red Army and Navy. That was really so.

It often happens, by the way, that most important documents are ignored by our historical researchers. Sometimes the thoughts and judgements on prewar years obtained from indirect sources and through supplementary research sound as a revelation, while the same thoughts and even facts are contained in books easily available in libraries.
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