Russia’s Dark Night Of Horror And Insanity
Almost two years into the Russia-Ukraine War, the outlook is grimmer than ever. Hundreds of thousands have died, millions have fled their homes, the much-hyped counteroffensive has failed, and the likelihood of a Ukrainian victory is negligible. Time and money is running out, yet the Biden Administration has reportedly blocked all attempts to broker a peace deal, and last week warned that the United States risks getting pulled into direct conflict with Russia, with “consequences [that] reverberate around the world.”
Evidently, the ultimate goal is a post-Putin future in which Ukraine is liberated, Russia is dismantled, its power vertical knocked flat, and her dream of resurrecting the old Russian Empire and “pulling Europe back into the past” dashed for good.
It’s worth pointing out what happened the first time foreign meddlers successfully conspired to bring down the Russian empire. Indeed, the world is still reeling from the impact of the color revolution to start them all: the infamous Bolshevik coup orchestrated during the fall/winter of 1917.
The perpetrators were Imperial Germany in fellowship with a group of internationalists, professional revolutionaries, and vengeful exiles. The motive, for Germany, was the conclusion of a separate peace treaty with a neutered Russia, the deployment of all its divisions to the Western Front, and the delivery of a massive blow to the Allies after Russia had meekly bowed out of the conflict. For the Bolshevik middlemen, the objective was a sadistic combination of vengeance against the Tsarist autocracy, the dismemberment of Russia into smaller territories, and the spurring of a worldwide socialist revolution.
The crime was the unleashing of revolutionary forces in Russia, the subjugation of the Russian people, and the burying – literally - of the Imperial family. The weapon was Lenin, “the most grisly of all weapons”, per Churchill, a “plague bacillus” transported from Switzerland through Germany into Russia to infect a disillusioned, war-weary, and overwhelmingly uneducated and illiterate population.The victims were the Russian people, the Romanov dynasty, and Christian civilization.
Alexander Kerensky, the one-time head of the Provisional Government set up following the abdication of the Tsar, lamented that the West incorrectly “explained away Russia’s unprecedented catastrophe as a “local development.” He attested to a “master plan” devised and implemented by a German-Bolshevik coalition.
Revolutionierungspolitik was essential to Germany’s strategy from the outbreak of World War I. General Erich Ludendorff later described revolution as the “eternal chimera” he often dreamed of that would alleviate the burdens of war. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik blueprint for world revolution was being plotted, first at party congresses in London by future leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution. These same individuals were soon scheming in the mountain resorts of Zimmerwald and Kienthal in Switzerland, with socialists, internationalists, and logicians from all over Europe and among the multitudinous emigrant population, many of whom had fled or been deported after the failed 1905 Russian revolution.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia during WWI, David Rowland Francis observed in 1917 that the Bolshevik leaders were predominantly non-ethnic Russians and returned exiles who “care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists … trying to start a worldwide revolution.”
There was never any affection for Russia. This motherland, whom the Tsar wept over as he consented to abdicate the throne, was for the Bolsheviks merely a base for a future proletarian revolution in the West. As Lenin put it, “To hell with [Russia] … All this is only the road to a world revolution.”
Lenin believed that the overthrow of the great monarchies of Europe - German, Austrian and Russian - would accelerate world revolution. But since Germany alone could defeat Russia, revolutionaries needed to partner with the former to destroy the latter. “Their ends were diametrically opposed and certainly irreconcilable,” Kerensky explained, “But their means were identical - the destruction of Russia’s fighting spirit.”
One tactic was the driving of separatist movements among non-Russian peoples, notably in Ukraine. The goal was to create a chain of “buffer states”, as Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg explained, and “thrust[sic] Russia back to the east, as far as possible.” Hence the League for the Liberation of the Ukraine was created in Lemberg, Austria in August 1914, ostensibly by Ukrainian exiles but really as a propaganda tool funded by the German Reich.
Another strategy was the instigation of industrial strikes and labor unrest throughout the Russian empire, a plan outlined in detail for the German Government by Alexander Helphand aka Parvus, a Belorussian-Jewish Marxist-millionaire-merchant and close associate of Trotsky during the 1905 Revolution. Helphand’s large-scale black-marketeering and war-profiteering activities and network of dissident groups, into which Germany funneled tens of millions of gold marks (German Foreign Ministry archives reveal at least 7 million paid to Helphand in 1915 alone) culminated - serendipitously perhaps - in the February 1917 Revolution, which saw the toppling of the mighty Romanov dynasty in three days.
Germany also helped steer Russian public opinion against the lawful sovereign by propagating what can best be described as the Germany Collusion Hoax, a faux-scandal more damning to the monarchy than Raspustinism or any war-time calamity. Germany leveraged assets like Robert Grimm, leader of the Swiss Socialist Democratic Party and founder of the Zimmerwald movement, and Karl Radek, a fellow Zimmerwald devotee and Austrian-Hungarian subject, to spread the falsehood that the Tsar and his government, influenced by his German-blooded wife, Alexandra, were secretly preparing to betray the Russian people and the Allies, and negotiate a separate peace with Germany.
Sensational accusations of treachery and treason were launched in the Russian State Duma in the fall of 1916 by parliamentarian Pavel Milyukov, who had picked up the gossip while in Switzerland that summer. Yet judicial inquiries conducted after the abdication found the imperial couple entirely innocent and identified no trace of a pro-German, defeatist movement among the Tsarist bureaucracy.
Instead, it was Grimm who, after the February Revolution, was sprung in St. Petersburg, inciting separate peace negotiations between Germany and Russia in collaboration with the disgraced Swiss Foreign Minister Arthur Hoffman. And it was Radek who, after the Bolshevik coup, relocated to St. Petersburg, became Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and took part in the treasonable winter of 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations, which robbed the Russian Empire of her western provinces, including Ukraine. As the Tsar bitterly said when he learned of this disgraceful betrayal of Russia and her allies: “And those who dared accuse Her Majesty of treason have turned out to be the real traitors.”
Germans and Bolsheviks wantonly distributed separate peace propaganda in the trenches and at the rear, leading to large-scale desertion, fraternization, subordination, and mutiny. At home, a socialist-minded Provisional Government, pinioned by the influential and increasingly Bolshevik-infiltrated Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, issued orders which eroded military authority and tradition, utterly demoralized the Army, and pitted soldiers against their commanding officers with murderous hatred.
But the pièce de résistance was the April 1917 dispatching of Lenin and his gang of revolutionaries to Russia, with logistical help provided by the German government and contacts like Grimm and Radek, and financial backing from Helphand’s associates, via the infamous sealed train. Whereas the Tsar never would have allowed these rabble rousers back in, the newly installed Provisional Government made unconditional amnesty its first order of business. Russia would have likely been spared the Bolshevik coup and the humiliation at Brest-Litovsk had - in Churchill’s words - “unnatural spirits” like Lenin and Trotsky not been set loose in St. Petersburg. Ambassador Francis argued in his memoirs that had Kerensky executed these two for treason after the first Bolshevik uprising in July 1917 when he had the chance, “Russia probably would … have been spared the reign of terror, and the loss from famine and murder of millions of her sons and daughters.”
Instead, with Lenin pulling the strings in the Soviet, the shadowy vampire authority that had breathed down the Government’s neck and slowly sucked the life out of the country, was officially Bolshevized, the Provisional Government ousted, and the long-awaited Constituent Assembly violently disbanded in mid January 1918, never to meet again. Within twelve months of the collapse of the monarchy, the military victory of which Russia had been so confident at the beginning of 1917, was spat on. Russia was severed from her allies, delivered to her enemies, and plunged into civil war.
Little wonder German foreign minister, Richard von Kühlmann, boasted to Kaiser Wilhelm in late 1917 of Germany’s “subversive activity” and “steady flow of funds” to the Bolsheviks, and her success in weakening Russia as a partner in the Entente.
However, Germany’s wager that she could outlast her Bolshevik associates once their usefulness had expired was ultimately lost. Germany wound up defeated on the battlefield, plagued by socialist insurgencies, and infected with the same Bolshevik virus she’d injected into her Slavic cousin’s veins. Ambassador Francis quotes the stunning post-war mea culpa of General Maximilien Hoffman, Chief of the General Staff of the German Army on the Eastern Front and one of the chief delegates during the peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks: “On my word of honor as a German general, in spite of the valuable service Trotsky and Lenin rendered, we neither knew nor foresaw the danger to humanity from the consequences of this journey of Bolsheviks to Russia.”
The cost to civilization is incalculable. Bolshevism, although enjoying only limited support in Russia, was forced on the country through party room tactics and sheer brute force, and its poison was exported throughout the world. 13 million souls perished during the Russian civil war which lasted until 1923, and a further 3 to 5 million people were killed off a decade later in the Bolshevik-orchestrated famine in Ukraine. The Tsar, whose abdication precipitated the decades of chaos, coercion and cruelty, was murdered with his beloved wife and five children in July 1918 in Ekaterinburg. The once richest empire in the world, had been debased, looted, and torn asunder with implacable vengeance, giving way to “a state without a nation,” as Churchill described it, “an army without a country, and a religion without God.”
A century on, the German-Bolshevik obsession with the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and the exploitation of Ukraine as a front-line proxy, continues to haunt the European continent and is dragging the world into the abyss. The issue the Russia hawks fail to address is not about Ukraine’s sovereignty or Putin’s authoritarianism. They must explain why the European Union and NATO’s relentless eastward expansion - which George Kennan presciently cautioned against as far back as 1948 - warrants the millions of tax dollars already spent, and the countless lives that will inevitably be sacrificed if the US and its European allies embark on Lenin’s style of blow-up-the-world-to-save-the-world suicide mission.
Contrary to the cheery assurances, foreign orchestrated regime change in Russia has manifestly not historically led to greater liberalization, but rather, as the WWI Russian General Anton Denikin lamented, to the crushing of a nation and a “dark night of horror and insanity”. This is the nightmare we can all expect if the West’s policy toward Russia continues to be maniacally driven by ancient regional rivalries, ethnic grievances, and internationalist agenda.
Carina Benton is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Federalist, The American Spectator, The Western Journal and other publications. She is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States.
