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“I feel only sympathy for the Russians. No people have suffered as much death.”
That was the response of a colleague of mine, Jan, a Polish professor and adviser to the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. I had hosted Jan as a guest lecturer in one of my courses at Grove City College. He spoke about the Polish people’s suffering under the jackboot of Soviet communism. The ongoing assault upon his people by the beast to the east had gone on for a long time, well before the post-WWII Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. In fact, Stalin’s USSR in August 1939 had struck a deal with Hitler that saw both the Soviets and Nazis invading the country in September 1939. And two decades before that, Lenin and his goons had invaded Poland in 1920, stopped by the Polish military in an extraordinary effort known as the Miracle on the Vistula.
So, I asked Jan: “Do you hate the Russians because of all this?” His response: “Oh, no. No, no, no. I feel only sympathy for the Russians. No people have suffered as much death.”
Jan is right. The Russians lost more men in combat than any nation in World War I, and though they had allied with the winning side, the Bolsheviks pulled them out in 1917, meaning they tasted no fruits of victory. Instead, they got a Russian civil war from 1918–21 that, according to historian W. Bruce Lincoln, left over seven million Russian men, women, and children dead.
The Russian people’s reward for that period of suffering? Seventy years of Bolshevism, which meant death, death, and more death. The Red Terror of Lenin, the Great Purge of Stalin, and more. The internal purges were interrupted only, and horrifically, by World War II, when the Russians/Soviets once again lost more men than any other country in the conflict — by far. Historians are still trying to figure out how many Russians/Soviets were killed in World War II, but the figure is likely 20–30 million. It might be as high as 40 times the combined wartime deaths of the United States and the United Kingdom.
And how many people perished under Marxism–Leninism in the USSR? Again, no one knows for sure. The Harvard University Press book The Black Book of Communism says only 20 million. Other authorities go higher. Alexander Yakovlev, in his 2002 Yale University Press work, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, claims that Joseph Stalin alone “annihilated 60 to 70 million people.”
And none of these figures include the ghastly number of abortions in the country. Lenin and his minions immediately legalized abortion as soon as they seized control of the Kremlin. By the 1970s, according to official Soviet Health Ministry statistics, the USSR was averaging an unbelievable 7–8 million abortions per year. History has never seen anything like it. Do the math: That’s potentially close to 80-100 million abortions in one decade.
Death, death, death.
I mention this now — and I’ve written about it before — because of two new sets of figures regarding Russia’s perpetual culture of death.
First, there are the staggering losses by Russia in Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine — devastating losses that I’ve repeatedly warned would happen, given that Russia always gets its collective butt kicked on the battlefield. Some current estimates are that Putin’s Russia may have experienced 250,000 casualties in Ukraine. That is devastating. For a sense of comparison, America lost about 50,000 men in Vietnam over a decade-plus of combat. The Russians have lost multiple times that number in a year in Ukraine.
For the American Putinists who oddly want to defend the Kremlin madman, blame his invasion on Russia not being let into NATO, or bizarrely buy his disinformation campaign about sparing Ukraine from a process of “Nazification” under Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, those fatalities should be quite a wake-up call. The man they’re excusing has mercilessly fed hundreds of thousands of Russian boys into a meat grinder, in a war those boys don’t want.
Well, now there are new reports on Russian death (click here and here, among others). They focus on something we Russia-watchers have known about for some time, namely its population implosion. Russian sources are estimating that the country will need 1.1 million immigrants a year for the next 80 years simply to maintain its current population level, which is unlikely to happen, given that few foreigners are dashing to Moscow nowadays to take up residence in Putin-land, including the American Putinists prattling on about their courageous leader in the Kremlin.
This demographic crisis is no surprise. I could share with you figures from the World Health Organization and other organizations and media sources circa 2000 that forecasted a Russian demographic implosion from about 140 or 150 million people in the year 2000 to under 110 million by 2050. The reasons for that anticipated decrease were many, from a society of men drinking themselves to death to a vast demographic plague of abortion-induced infertility among Russian women butchered by repeated abortions.
The birth dearth is one of the reasons why Vladimir Putin in the year 2000 put the first major restrictions on abortion in the country in nearly 50 years, and why he also restricted foreign adoptions of Russian children. He wants to keep kids in the country. He’s facing a population crash, which does not help his ambitions to expand the borders of his glorious Mother Russia.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has worsened his nation’s long demographic winter. Not only have over 250,000 healthy young Russian men died, been wounded, or gone missing in sacrifice to Putin’s bloodlust for Ukraine, but many more are bolting from the country to avoid his forced conscription. Apparently, unlike Putin’s defenders in America, these young Russians see no good reason for invading their democratic neighbor. They’re getting out of Dodge.
Tragically, the Russian people remain mired in a perpetual culture of death. Mad Dog Putin is merely making things worse. Few people have suffered so much.
The only way Communists can stay in power is to kill-off its opponents. But those advocating for Communism ignore the facts of the mass murders insisting they would never do such a terrible thing. History shows this to be a blatant lie that those who are ignorant to the facts of history fall for every time
Putin isn’t a communist, he’s a totalitarian tribalist, the Russians are his tribe. Communism, intellectually speaking, is discredited and dead. I might even add that fascism, intellectually speaking, is discredited and dead.
But altruism, collectivism, and totalitarianism live on with the fig leaf of altruist, socialist, or fascist slogans added on to give the brutality a veneer of justification. What do I mean by an altruist slogan? Altruism is the moral code that claims that sacrifice is the individual’s highest and most noble virtue and duty.
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole… that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual…” – Adolf Hitler
”250,000 healthy young Russian men died,”
There is something not genuine about this statement. Cant quite put my finger on it.
For every Russian killed there are about eight Ukranians killed. Russia has suffered about 20,000 KIA while Ukraine has suffered about 180,000 KIA. That’s a fair analysis from Russian, Ukranian, NATO and independent sources. Not the naked propaganda numbers Mr. Kengor is repeating here. This war is a far greater disaster for the Ukrainians who were and are being viciously used by power mad psychopaths in the U.S. and NATO to start and perpetuate a war with Russia. It’s a disaster for Ukraine, Russia, Europe and the whole world. A disaster for all except the military industrial complex, Blackrock, politicians and a few others who grow ever richer off people’s suffering. Veiled propaganda pieces like this one only perpetuate the suffering.
Not 250k killed.
250k casualties. That is the number of all the dead, the missing and the injured.
The author of this article is a liar.. i stopped reading when he claimed Putin was doing this bc Russia was not allowed into Nato
Paul Kengor, you are a lying $&)@
Fascist lapdog and Putin’s bootlicker
October 2019 Zelinskij and Putin signed an agreement on the Donbass, taking into consideration the historical and demographich issues there. This was initiated by Zelenskij as a response to his election promises about permanently ending the war in Eastern Ukraine. Militant Ukrainian veterans and militia created large violent demonstrations in Ukraine, and after talks with Andriy Billetsky of Azov Batallion fame the agreement was abandoned – like the four before it. This leads to the question: Who rules in Ukraine? It is not Zelinskij. The bloodthirsty Russia has offered peace many times i 2023, every single time Ukraine or USA has rejected. And what is USA doing in Central Europe, as usual aging a war on foreign soil? Haven’t you got enough problems at home?
Putin the thug does. The day eill come when his rotting corpse will hang from a lamppost in Maiden square
WW3 Already came and went. It was called “The Cold War”.
There will be no World War, Vladimir Putin and Xi are in no shape to fight a World War.
What is happening in the world is the final decay of the socialist/communist corpse. It had to be so.
About Biden, I do not support him, neither do I like him, but I agree with him in aiding Ukraine and destroying, once and for all, the Russian menace that has spread death and destruction throughout the world in the past 100 years.
Good luck with that.
Well said Too bad most posters here are fascists
“ blame his invasion on Russia not being let into NATO”
Literally no one says this. Op isn’t merely wrong, he is flat out lying and he goddamn knows it.
This article is disgusting and should be removed immediately.
This article is sheer nonsense.
The Ukrainians are the ones being fed to the meat grinder. All of those young men who will never come home. All of the children who will never see their fathers again. Because of … Globalists.
Most of the fighting to date has been done by Wagner, not the main Russian army. So, this 250K Russian killed is obvious Globalist propaganda and intellectually insulting.
The reality is this : We (the US) took a big gamble, hoping to topple Russia on our way to China. We have failed. Not only the kinetic war, but also the economic one, which is far more important.
The rest of the world is watching the US losing badly in Ukraine and watching our sanctions back-fire. They are cautiously optimistic that the era of Pax Americana is coming to an end. And, they are helping that process by dumping the dollar.
As the dollar declines to be a reserve and trade currency, our nation will suffer. Arguments over the debt ceiling will be meaningless if nobody wants to buy our debt! The “privilège exorbitant” that we have enjoyed since WWII is coming to a close.
The Globalists in this administration have royally messed up. They put all their money on one horse (toppling Russia) and lost. All the MSM news is about the kinetic war in Ukraine. The REAL war news is at the economic and strategic level – a global realignment against the West (specifically WEF aligned nations) and its petrodollar. And, we’re losing.
The Ukies are voluntarily defending their country against Mongol barbarians
I’m just about ready to unfollow FPM for allowing the propagandist, Paul Kengor, to post this steaming pile of horse manure!
One less fascist. Sounds bgood. Bye
That’s plausable.
I am surprised that a scholar of Paul Kengor’s stature would write an article that seems to be so light on facts and heavy on propaganda.
I guess he has made the move from scholar to ”expert”
Like the covid ”experts”.
They are all for sale.
Fascist lies on behalf of a ruzzian thug
Dore and Carlson are wannabe fascists who deserve a one way ticket to ruzzia
The Wagner group fascists have been decimated
Considering the population crisis that Kengor rightfully identifies this war is so futile. No matter who “wins” there will be no victor. All their young men have been driven to early graves. Females are sterile from botched abortions; the population is imploding. I suspect the same is true for the Ukrainians. There’s no new generation replacing the old—or not nearly at the necessary rate. And instead of addressing this existential situation, they’re sending all their young instead to die horrid deaths and perpetuate the ancient hatreds. US was supposed to be the “adult in the room;” instead it took a side. It sabotaged all efforts at diplomacy. This can never be fixed now—only a miracle will fix it.