While the article and scenario I linked and talk about are very specific I’d like to use this as a learning experience to be better armed when faced with something similar.
So I was scrolling through videos on tiktok responding to this “leftist” creator and one of the responses was from a reactionary guy I’m semi familiar with, familiar in the sense that I’ve seen responses to his nonsense. Anyway I went to check his account because I had never done it before and saw that he was a self identified Libertarian (bad start) and made videos on USSR history.
The latter worried me a lot and one of his most recent videos was titled “the Bolshevik revolution was evil,” and because I have no self preservation I wanted to see what his sources were. Lo and behold, he only cited this article which has some awful content. People in the comments were raving about how amazing his video was and it made me want to do a bit of a deep dive into if any of the “facts” in the article were in any way true. I just don’t know where to start.
Please mind the trigger warning at the beginning of the article as there are very graphic images and descriptions.
I’m not a historian, but from a cursory reading of this article, I think these could be some starting points. (Going to post several comments, since Lemmy isn’t letting me post my single long comment, it just keeps loading and loading and doesn’t acutally send.)
Notice how for some parts, the only sources are quotes from Bolsheviks themselves, with a lot of talk around them to provide the wrong context, like this pretty amusing one at the start (putting them all inside spoilers because I don’t like large paragraphs of reactionary drivel disrupting the flow of my comment):
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Or this one; read carefully and you will notice that nowhere does this quote support the article’s assertion in the paragraph right above it that the famine was done intentionally.
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And right after that, they quote the black book of communism. Writing its title in French. I wonder whether that’s a coincidence, or whether even they know that the black book isn’t credible and try to hide that they’re citing it. It should be well-known enough that it isn’t credible that you don’t need to do your own work investigating it and can dismiss it out of hand:
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Then there are quotes like this. You could of course try to check whether it is real and what is the context, but without looking that far, it seems like a reasonable course of action to take for a revolution desperately fighting for its survival. The article is framing this as some unique evil as if any other army wouldn’t have killed deserters.
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Once you dismiss that part, there is the other half of the article, the one that alleges a lot of atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks.
I used tineye.com to reverse image search one of the pictures from that article, the one captioned “In the foreground, the body of the telegraph operator Ponomarenko in the Cheka of Kharkiv”. Guess what I found? Look here. The pictures are at the bottom of this page, with the captions in the article being a translation of the Russian captions of the pictures in this thing. What is this thing? It seems to be a reprint/digitalization something captioned:
which translates (sorry if I got something wrong, I’m not particularly knowledgeable about military terms, but the general menaing should be there):
So literal white army propaganda. Not exactly the most credible source.
This doesn’t mean that there never were any excesses committed by the Cheka. But obviously the white army has an interest in depicting their enemy as extremely violent, excessive, and plain evil.
(part two)
Finally, the text, where they quote some actual authors. But not the page or even the book this is from, so basically impossible to verify and get some context. For the extreme claims they make, the burden of proof is on the article authors, not on us.
Anyway, let’s look at what exactly they even say:
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After reading through the loaded language, it seems that they are surprised there are a lot of prisoners in the gulag during the civil war, and that the conditions were harsh. That’s all they’re really saying. Except, I guess, for this sentence:
I vaguely remember reading that the gulags did not actually have very high death rates. I don’t remember the source, unfortunately. It seems to be a rather popular claim, so if you’re doing a debunking for yourself, you might want to try to find some reading on it.
The next two claims are ones where I’m not educated enough to know what actually happened. So, you might also want to research these two events.
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The Dimitry Pospielovsky guy they cite for the alleged brutality against the priests (paragraph below) seems rather questionable as a source.
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Here’s the Russian Wikipedia link for him (English Wikipedia doesn’t have much), the guy worked for “Free Russia” and “Radio Svoboda”. (Yes, I know Wikipedia is not a credible source, but I doubt they’d lie about the guy’s affiliations.) Literal CIA outlets. Can be dismissed out of hand.
The other guy they cite is Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. Here’s his Wikipedia. Maybe less unhinged than literal CIA, but still doesn’t exactly seem unbiased. Can’t dismiss every single thing he wrote out of hand per se, but considering the fact they don’t cite book and page so that we could look at the context and the sources, the burden of proof is still on them.
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I hope any of this is helpful to you. At least that would mean that the hours I just spent on commenting on some worthless Spanish conservative site’s drivel (notice that one paragraph where they excuse Franco in this very article) were at least somewhat worth it.
Wow thank you so much for this, I definitely wasn’t expecting something so thorough! This is incredibly helpful and I hope you’re doing alright as I know how taxing stuff like this can be.