Excerpts from “The Russians are Coming, Again”

Excerpts from The Russians are Coming, Again: The first Cold war as Tragedy, The Second as Farce by Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano From Chapter 2 “The Time You sent You Sent troops to Quell the Revolution”: The True Origins of the Cold War

On Kolchak deputy [One of the “White” (Counter-Revolutionary ) generals backed by America and Britain]  Cossack Ataman  Gregori Semonoff [close to Major David Barrows of American Intelligence and future president of UC Berkley]

A decorated Veteran of the Tsarist and Kerensky armies nicknamed “The Destroyer”  Semenoff allegedly set up “Killing Stations” boasting that he could not sleep at night if he did not kill someone that day. In Trans Baikal , According to General Graves [Head of the American force] his men shot the men, women and children of an entire village as if he was hunting rabbits. According to American intelligence Semonoff was responsible for 30,000 executions in one year, which earned him promotion by Kolchak to the rank of Major General.

Another Kolchak deputy, Ataman Ivan Kalmykoff roamed the Amur territory, robbing, burning raping, and executing hundreds of Russian peasants without trial, including two red cross representatives and sixteen Austrian musicians who allegedly housed. bolshevik one night. Lt Col. Robert Eichelberger said Kalmykoff’s actions would be considered shameful in the Middle Ages” Graves referred to Kalmykoff as a “Notorious Murderer” and the worst scoundrel he had ever seen...

Congressional Hearings ignored the White Terror which General Graves predicted “would be remembered and recounted to the Russian People for [the next] 50 years” Instead as historian Frederick Schuman summarized they depicted “Soviet Russia as a kind of Bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of an organization of homicidal maniacs [the Bolsheviks] whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and carry the nation back to barbarism” Drawing from these hearings the press became filled with screaming headlines, claiming the Bolsheviks had even nationalized women. Graves however wrote in his memoirs “that he was well on the side of safety” in saying that “the anti-Bolsheviks killed 100 people in Eastern Siberia to every one killed by the Bolsheviks”

   He [Graves] became disheartened at how America’s allies applied the word Bolshevik “To most of the Russian People” including peasants opposed to the Kolchak coup who were “Kicked beaten  and murdered in cold blood by the thousands”...Turning against the war, Graves was hounded by the Bureau of Investigation as a security risk when he came back...

On American and British troops during the Invasion of Russia

Referring to them as “John Bolo” or “Bolos” a euphemism for wild men, American and British troops pioneered the use of nerve gas designed to incapacitate and demoralize the Red Army, and according to Albertson “fixed all the devil traps we could think of for them when we evacuated villages” He noted that we “shot more then thirty prisoners in our determination to punish these murderers. and when we caught the Commisioner of Borok we left his body in the street stripped  with sixteen bayonet wounds.”

[After discussing the burning of a Russian village where the women wept as the Americans celebrated] Such dehumanization in war and desire for revenge would go on to spawn the “Atrocity producing environment” that characterized the War in Vietnam and other Cold War conflicts. Moore, Mead, and Jahns’s history spotlights the “enormous” and “terrific” Red Army losses under bursts of “murderous” shelling and “dreadful trench mortars” that could shower the enemy at eight hundred yards with a “new kind of hell.” The British contingent had many First World War vets who had been gassed or wounded and were prone to “homicidal excesses” as were the Japanese. A Canadian platoon from rural Saskatchewan included “Unpremeditated murderers who had learned well the nice lessons of war and looked upon killing as the climax of a day’s adventure.” They committed gratuitous acts with the Americans such as closing a school for the storage of Whiskey, and threw peasants out of their homes looted personal property, stole rubles from the dead Bolsheviks, and ransacked churches.

   British General Edmund Ironside said he was “overpowered by the smell” upon visiting the archangel prison; suspected Bolsheviks were crowded into dank cella sometimes sixty to a room with the windows sealed and baths closed. Ralph Albertson concluded that the

   Spoiliation of scores of Russian Villages and Thousands of little farms and the disorganization of the life and industry of a great section of the country with the attendant wanderings and sufferings of thousands of peasant folk who had lost everything but life, was but the natural and necessary result of an especially weak and unsuccessful military operation such as this one was. [Imperialist logic]

In Southern Soviet Russia, the british deployed tanks and bombed enemy transport vehicles, bridges, towns, and villages. For the first time they deployed gas bombs that caused respiratory illnesses (One victim had his eyes and mouth turn yellow and then died) The British were supporting viciously anti-Semitic White Russian General Anton Denikin...

   Historian John T. Smith reports on the bombing of Grozny on February 5, 1919 with incendiaries that ignited a large fire. He Later discusses the RAF’s bombing of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) on the Volga, which had been defended by a Soviet Committee led by the Future dictator Joseph Stalin and Marshal Zhukov, deputy supreme commander during the Second World War. Allegedly a British DH9 dropped a huge missile on a building where eighty soviet commissars were meeting, all of whom were killed. Such incidents would remain seared in the minds of Soviet Leaders, shaping a deep distrust for the West as the Cold war developed...

It is Ironic that we in the United States have always been lead to fear a Russian invasion when Americans were in fact the original invaders. In may 1972 on a visit to the Soviet Union promoting detente President Richard Nixon boasted to his hosts bout never having fought one another in a war, a line repeated by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union address. A New York Times poll the next year found that only 14 percent of Americans said they were aware that in 1918 the United States had landed troops in northern and eastern Soviet Russia, a percentage probably even lower today.

    James Loewen in “Lies My Teacher told me: Everything Your American History Textbook got Wrong found that none of the twelve high school history textbooks he surveyed mentioned the “Midnight War”