Tag Archives: Anton Denikin

The “First Red Scare”: America and Communism in 1919

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 August 2023

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Russian Terrorist-Revolutionaries: Ideology and Worldview

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 13 May 2023

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Could Britain Have Saved the Tsar?

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 November 2022

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The Bolshevik Assassination Campaign Against the Russian Royal Family

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 January 2022

The Russian Imperial Family: Olga, Maria, Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, Anastasia, Tsesarevich Alexei, and Tatiana. Taken in Crimea, 1913.

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Russian Influence on the Nazis

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 December 2021

Michael Kellogg’s 2005 book, The Russian Roots of Nazism, argues that Russian “White émigrés” exerted financial, political-military, and ideological influences that “contributed extensively to the making of German National Socialism”. As such, argues Kellogg, Nazism “did not develop merely as a peculiarly German phenomenon”, but within an “international radical right milieu”. The book is interesting but deeply flawed, overstating its case by failing to set the facts it gathers in a proper context and for similar reasons misunderstanding where some of the Russian elements under discussion fit within the politics of the revolutionary upheaval after 1917, both within the borders of Russia and in exile in Europe. Continue reading

Unravelling the “Kornilov Affair”: The Last Stop Before the Bolshevik Takeover of Russia

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 December 2021

General Lavr Kornilov, 27 August 1917

The final key event on the road to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in November 1917 was the “Kornilov Affair” that took place about two months earlier. Alexander Kerensky had become Prime Minister of the Provisional Government in July 1917 and around the same time General Lavr Kornilov had become Commander-in-Chief. A lot of accounts portray the “Kornilov Affair” as a “reactionary” coup attempt by Kornilov against Kerensky. The reality is very nearly the exact opposite. As historian Robert Pipes summarises: “All the available evidence, rather, points to a ‘Kerensky plot’ engineered to discredit the general as the ringleader of an imaginary but widely anticipated counterrevolution, the suppression of which would elevate the Prime Minister to a position of unrivaled popularity and power, enabling him to meet the growing threat from the Bolsheviks.”[1] Continue reading