History as Propaganda

Three articles not one

My three "special articles" for coffee buyers on Putin were originally one.

I began with Putin's accomplishments.

But to deal properly with his accomplishments I had to look at what he inherited when he took over from Yeltsin at the beginning of this century and the situation then— the context in which these achievements must be understood.

This required me to look at not only the situation at that time in Russia (1999) but at the whole story of the collapse of the Soviet state, which in turn required me to look at the history of the USSR and what it had become after Lenin under the stewardship of Stalin, and ,then after his death, subsequent leaders.

When a leader wants to create a new future for his country, he must look first at the past, at what has shaped his nation and public attitudes and values—the foundation. His success will be partly dependent on whether or not his is an accurate understanding.

But how do you know the past?

The problem is information – or rather separating information from misinformation, if not malinformation—not to mention filling in the blanks when there is not information.

Fortunately, Putin has the gifts to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I deal with his gifts in the final third article, which look at his personality, his upbringing, influences,education and environment.

The War on Russia —1918 to 2025

The Past?

One must keep in mind that the USSR came into being under attack from 1918 ~1920 by the US, the UK, Canada, Japan and most of Europe, not to mention the newly minted Ukrainian Republic with its center in Galicia!

The "Reds" won. The "Whites" lost.

But the “allies” then could no more accept defeat than they can accept it today.

This war was a war of aggression with European states hoping for territorial aggrandizement through the mechanism of a counterrevolution.

As such the threat did not end with the defeat of the Allied armies.

Lenin, the architect of the socialist revolution had envisaged a rather democratic bottom up socialist system, in which the working class determined policy at all levels. But Lenin suffered severe strokes in 1922, which led to a power struggle, with Stalin winning and Trotsky eventually going into exile.

Stalin enforced collectivization in all areas.

Russia had always suffered periodic severe famines which were exacerbated by feudalistic landholding systems, which exploited the peasantry. An untold number of people died at such times.

So the new leadership sought a solution in collectivizing agriculture, to the detriment of the kulaks, farm owners and renters a level above the peasantry, seeing these remnants of feudalism with some justification as exploiters. .

The kulaks of course resisted, which created a new set of problems.

With the great famine of 1930-1933, there was widespread disruption made worse by resistance to Stalin’s agricultural reforms and also by industrial collectivization, which diverted resources.

Lenin’s idealistic notion of “bottom-up” control by those who actually worked—a dictatorship by the many, who knew what actually needed to be done was replaced by central planning carried out by elites, a dictatorship of a few, ideologs and intellectuals, who only thought they knew!

Those who disagreed were either executed or went to the Gulags. Archival records show that over 680,000 people died in the “Terror” — including members of the NKVD who Stalin felt had overstepped the bounds!

Of course, the rationale behind collectivization of agriculture and industry and crushing dissent was that much of the world was still hostile to the USSR and this pre-WWII “cold” war could become hot anytime. Pretty much all nations opt for extreme measures domestically under external threat. We can see that in the US today!

Say way you like, Vladimir Putin has not forgotten. [with a massive memorial to victims of Stalin’s era. .

The Soviet Union made great strides under this quasi-war society which allowed it to survive Hitler in 1941 – but at great cost.

From the Western point of view, the USSR had been the enemy until it became Hitler’s enemy, in which case the enemy of my enemy, became our friend.

That lasted until 1945. When Hitler was gone. Stalin and the USSR were Evil agian.

And then the Cold war of the post 1922 period revived.

This is one interpretation of Soviet/ Russian history – but there are many others.

LLMs and the Russian Federation

Using DeepSeek, I saw there was not consensus on anything about the USSR or Russia after 1918. DS always default to consensus views available to its database, which if you dig is mostly based on Western academia, thinktanks, and the like.

So, for example, while there is no real, convincing evidence that the Holodomor “genocide” was anything than one of Russia’s periodic catastrophic famines, DS presents it as likely – according to the consensus view, while admitting the possibility that the Soviets maybe did not plan it – just made it worse by collectivization.

Likewise, DS accepts the assertions of Robert Conquest, a British academic known for his CIA and UK Foreign Office ties.

Conquest noted that Stalin’s documented executions during the “Soviet Terror” were about 700,000 ( actually 681,692, including NKVD perpetrators ) but claimed up to 20 million deaths counting the gulags, and a few other things.

Conquest also disagreed with Khrushchev’s assertion that Stalin had betrayed Lenin’s ideals. Communism is Evil, you understand - just Evil.

It was a black and white picture.

The CIA disagreed.

Releases of previously classified CIA documents present another story.

Michael Parenti’s conclusions?

In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976.

At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.

Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies….

[T]he great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records.

Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as 'the largest system of death camps in modern history'.

Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military.

The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population. (

Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.

Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes ('counterrevolutionary offenses') numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year.

The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.

Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, whereas according to declassified Soviet archives, 2,369,220 up until 1954.

When compared to the population of the USSR at the time, as well as the statistics of a country like the United States, the Gulag percent population in the USSR throughout its history was lower than that of the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, based on Sousa's (1998)research, there was a larger percentage of prisoners (relative to the whole population) in the US, than there ever was in the USSR:

In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice….

The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.

What does all this mean?

So far no one has been able to disprove Parenti.

It means controversy. There is no consensus.

However, it IS clear is that Western historiography lacks credibility in the case of Russia, the USSR — among others.

The fact that DS is not able to recognize this lack of credibility calling it “controversy” or “lack of consensus” is an issue.

It means that DS defaults to consensus status quo views. As Bob has shown, however, you can force it to think critically —it just takes time —just as my attempts to correct flawed assessments of Vladimir Putin is taking.

In the meantime, do not believe what your teachers taught you in school.

Chappy knows!

As Chappy likes to say (from his hammock….

Please support the Chappy& Ichi Fund. The Way of the Cat. You can buy coffees here!