Kevin Strom on Russia & Ukraine

^[1]4,311 words

Translations: Polish ^[2], Russian ^[3]

Kevin Strom is one of White Nationalism’s best writers. I seldom disagree with his work, and even when I do, I find it highly valuable as a clear synthesis and statement of beliefs I oppose. A case in point is his August 16, 2014 American Dissident Voices podcast “Jewish Aggression,” Part 2 ^[4], on the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Strom seeks to reduce the Ukraine crisis to a conflict between international Jewry and a Jew-wise Russia. To argue this thesis, Strom dismisses other actors and motives on the Ukrainian side and offers a false picture of the relationship between Russia and Jewry.

Strom begins, “In order to weaken Russia, and eventually install a pro-Jewish government there, the Jewish/US axis has engineered a coup d’etat in Ukraine.” This is wrong on three counts:

1. The United States and Jewry did not “engineer” the Maidan protests that led to the fall of Viktor Yanukovych’s government. The initial small protests on the Maidan against Yanukovych’s policies attracted little attention. But when they were brutally dispersed by police, Ukrainians of all political convictions, from far Left to far Right, gathered to protest police brutality and generalized corruption, and the protests grew into a revolution. The Maidan protests were not initially or primarily pro-EU or anti-Russian. They were against Yanukovych’s corruption and lawlessness and for honest government.
2. Once the Maidan protests were underway, the US government and other Jewish-dominated organizations tried to shape the outcome. But it is simply untrue to say that they “engineered” them.
3. Beyond that, it is false to claim that Yanukovych was ousted by a coup d’etat.  In truth, as the death tolls mounted, he lost his nerve and fled the capital. Describing Yankovych’s fall as a “coup” and the interim government that followed him as a “junta” is just lying Russian propaganda that should not be used by discerning individuals.

Strom continues:

Russians have historically been among the most Jew-aware people on Earth. A century ago the Imperial Russian government set many restrictions on Jewish activity there to prevent the exploitation of its citizens.  When that government was overthrown and Russia was converted into the Soviet Union by the Jewish-dominated Bolsheviks in 1917, a period of overt Jewish rule took place in which millions of the best men and women in Russia were killed, imprisoned, and had their property stolen. Under Communism, “anti-Semitism” was a capital offense.

When a non-Jew, Stalin, evidently an even more vicious player of power politics than his Jewish “comrades,” took control, he distrusted the tribally-focused Jews and proceeded to systematically reduce their power, killing quite a few of them in the process. When faced with the German invasion in 1942, and realizing that more than a few Russians and Ukrainians (Ukraine was then a part of the Soviet Union) were welcoming the Germans as liberators, Stalin ditched much of the Communist party line and embraced Russian nationalism. As a result the post-war Soviet Union became less and less Jewish-controlled and more and more under the control of Russian nationalists. Despite still paying lip service to Marxism, by the 1960s Russian leaders were openly opposed to Zionism, and Jews, no longer favored, were queuing up by the thousands to leave the country. . . .

This is a very misleading picture which conceals the fact that Jews have always been a privileged people in Russia. They were privileged under the Tsars. They were privileged under Stalin and the post-Stalin Soviet regime. And they are privileged under Putin. One has to treat Jewish claims of Russian anti-Semitism very skeptically, since Jews are hardly scrupulous in throwing that epithet around.

According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together — ably and extensively reviewed by F. Roger Devlin here ^[5] and here ^[6]— there were practically no Jews in Russia until the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, which brought Russia vast territories overlapping today’s Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. The partitions took place during the reign of Catherine the Great, who set the foundations of subsequent imperial Jewish policies.

From the start, Jews were free subjects of an empire in which most whites were serfs. (Serfdom was only abolished in 1861.) In 1785, Jewish communities were granted self-government. In 1786, public offices were opened to Jews.

In 1790, merchants in Moscow petitioned the Empress for relief from Jewish competition, which was granted in Russia proper, laying the foundations of the Pale of Settlement, which encompassed the former Polish-Lithuanian territories, plus “New Russia,” i.e., Ukrainian territories conquered by Catherine the Great from the Turks.

Although Russians were protected from Jewish competition by the Pale, the relationship was reciprocal: Jews within the Pale were protected from Russian economic competition. In short, the Pale of Settlement was a vast area given to Jews for unlimited and ruthless economic exploitation of whites, leading to massive poverty and misery.

If Jews were a privileged people in Imperial Russia, whence the perennial kvetching about Russian anti-Semitism? Simple: Jews did not think they were privileged enough. They wanted to exploit the whole of the Russian Empire, which they duly seized during the Bolshevik revolution.

Given the overwhelmingly Jewish nature of Bolshevism, when Stalin purged the party, he of necessity purged many Jews who opposed him. After the foundation of Israel, Stalin purged Jews for Zionist tendencies. But Jews who did not oppose Stalin were not purged and indeed enjoyed positions of power and trust throughout his regime.

For example, the Ukrainian-born Jew Lazar Kaganovich, one of history’s great butchers, was the architect of the Ukrainian famine and the Gulag. He enjoyed Stalin’s confidence to the very end. He may have had a hand in Stalin’s death. It is even claimed that Stalin married a shadowy Kaganovich sister named Rosa. After Stalin’s death, Kaganovich remained on the Politburo until 1957, when he tried to engineer a party coup against Khrushchev. In 1961, he entered an evidently comfortable and secure retirement and died at the age of 97, just after the fall of Communism.

If Jews were a privileged people under Stalin, what is the basis of claims of Stalinist anti-Semitism? Again, Jews simply felt that they were not privileged enough. Also, Jews propagate the idea of Soviet anti-Semitism to obfuscate the overwhelming Jewish culpability in the crimes of communism. Finally, Stalin may not have hated Jews as such, but many Jews hated Stalin, and that is sufficient ground to be called an anti-Semite

After Stalin, Jews remained a privileged people as well. After all, what other group could emigrate en masse from Russia?

Under Putin today, Jews remain a privileged group. Yes, when Putin came to power, he redistributed some of the ill-gotten wealth of largely Jewish oligarchs, and some of the oligarchs have predictably squealed about anti-Semitism. But Putin’s policies were certainly not anti-Semitic per se, as a new crop of Jewish oligarchs has emerged ^[7] under Putin’s tenure.

Even Strom admits that “Putin speaks highly of Jews and disparagingly of anti-Semitism, though he keeps some pet Jews (with no trace of real power) in his circles [Who are these Jews, and how does Strom know they have no real power? Does one appease people who have no “real power”?], and though he has outlawed ‘extremism’ as a versatile way of cementing his rule . . .” But Strom has convinced himself that Putin doesn’t really mean it. Because Putin acted against some Jews, Strom is convinced that he really opposes all Jews as Jews.

Strom claims that the aim of the “Jewish/US axis” is “to weaken Russia, and eventually install a pro-Jewish government there” and “the Jewish power structure is most anxious that Russia be surrounded, its government overthrown, and a new ‘democracy’ installed there.” But this does not hold water, since there is already a pro-Jewish government in Moscow. As far as Russian Jews are concerned, Putin is quite pro-Jewish. There are Jews on the American side, Jews on the Russian side, and Jews on the Ukrainian side of this conflict. No matter what the outcome, Jews are positioned to benefit. This is one meaning of Jewish hegemony. But it also means that the events in Ukraine cannot be reduced to a simple “Jews versus Russia” opposition.

Strom has also convinced himself that Putin’s foreign policy is based not on calculations of Russia’s national interests, but on a desire to combat international Jewry:

. . . in the last few years, every time the US/Israeli warmongers were attempting to start another war in the Middle East — first in Iran and then in Syria — Vladimir Putin checkmated them. For these things, the Jews cannot forgive him. They are very worried about a resurgent, nuclear-armed, and Jew-aware Russia — and any alliances she may build in an increasingly Jew-aware world.

Putin’s policies certainly irritate the Israelis. They irritate American neoconservatives. And they irritate the broader American Jewish community, which harbors extremely irrational anti-Russian hatreds going back to the 19th century. But Putin’s policies are not directed at Jews as such. Instead, Putin regards the United States as his primary adversary, Israel as a US client, and international Jewry as a divided community whose favors he ardently seeks to woo.

Strom has even convinced himself that Putin might not really mean it when he says he is fighting against “fascism” in Ukraine, or that by being a good nationalist, he is effectively a fascist, even if he denies it:

Vladimir Putin, whatever he may believe personally, is forced by political necessity to praise the “heroic Soviet soldiers” who “saved the Motherland from Hitler.” Russia has quite as many “my country is always right” patriots as does America, where the fighters in the “good war” (which wasn’t good at all) must be praised in Politically Correct terms by all politicians or those politicians will face political suicide. Putin therefore presents himself as (and may even believe himself to be) an “anti-Fascist” even while he pursues essentially nationalist policies, simply because those are the policies that are objectively good for Russia, even going so far as to decry the low White birthrate and implement laws designed to increase it.

Putin has adopted a range of sensible policies, but the fact that he is committed to maintaining Russia as a multiracial, multicultural empire means that all these sound policies actually work against the racial interests of Russian whites, who suffer from catastrophically low fertility and are being outbred by Muslims from the Caucasus and Orientals in the East. (Incentives to raise birthrates will not help if they are applied equally to more fertile non-Russians as well.)

Putin’s form of conservative, race-blind, Jew-friendly civic nationalism is actually the worst case scenario for whites, since it places an essentially anti-white system on firmer political and economic foundations, which will allow its anti-white, ethnocidal trends to proceed more efficiently until Russia’s white population is biologically beyond recall. But Putin doesn’t think this way, because he is not a “fascist,” i.e., a racial nationalist — not even an “implicit” one.

Thus when Putin claims that he is battling against fascism and anti-Semitism in Ukraine, he really means it. And, as a “fascist” and anti-Semite, Strom needs to take him at his word. Vladimir Putin is not our “secret friend.”

What does Strom have to say about the real “fascists” and anti-Semites in the Ukraine crisis, namely the political party Svoboda (Freedom) and its radical break-away group Right Sector?

Since late last year, the Jewish power structure, through its puppet, the United States, was trying to overthrow the legitimate elected government of Ukraine [This reads like Russian boilerplate. Since when does the National Alliance recognize elections as legitimating anything?], which had taken a position of moderate and positive engagement with Russia [a rather delicate description of Yanukovych selling his country’s alignment to the highest bidder]. Hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars were expended to recruit a group of supposedly “right wing fascist” mercenaries [Is Strom asserting that the US created and/or pays and/or controls Right Sector? What is the proof?], who were carefully watched at all times by Jewish and US intelligence operatives [Sounds like a likely deduction being passed off as fact], since they were not entirely trusted. These groups were politically and philosophically descended from the Ukrainians who joined the German forces in World War 2 to liberate their country from Communism. [And should thus have Strom’s default sympathy.] The understanding of the members of these groups ranged from full awareness that the Jews were responsible for the historical starvation and enslavement of Ukrainians — to jingoistic petty nationalists who blamed everything on “Russians.” Frustrated by political impotence [Svoboda has actual elected officials] and long-fooled by American anti-Communist rhetoric [or perhaps merely alarmed by Russia’s paeans to the glories of Stalininsm], they were ripe for exploitation. These mercenaries were provided with weapons and other military hardware. They provided much of the “muscle” for the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych last February.

. . .

The naive nationalists in Ukraine were fooled. They were tricked into fighting the wrong enemy. They were fooled by promises of support from their real enemy — the regime in Washington. They were fooled because they were petty nationalists, not racial-nationalists. I pray that some of them are racial-nationalists now. They were fooled — not unlike the way their grandfathers were fooled into thinking that the Russian foot soldiers who enforced the Jews’ orders to starve Ukraine were the real enemy. They didn’t see the big picture.

Strom wishes to argue that Jews, not Russians, are responsible for all the evils of Communism, thus Ukrainians who dislike and distrust Russians are being “petty” and deluded.

1. This is contradicted by Strom’s own claim that during World War II “Stalin ditched much of the Communist party line and embraced Russian nationalism” in order to beat the Axis and regain control over Ukraine. If there really was a point that the USSR ceased being a recognizably Jewish regime and became a Russian nationalist regime instead, then why is it not reasonable for Ukrainians to resent specifically Russian domination?
2. Moreover, Russian domination over Ukraine goes back to the 18th century, and Ukrainians remember that it was the Russians who created the Pale of Settlement, confirming and expanding Jewish exploitation in Ukrainian lands.
3. Finally, Ukrainians have every reason to dislike and distrust Russians for their actions today. It is Russians who seized control of Crimea (a real coup), sending in Russian troops operating as partisans (without uniforms), and legitimating it with a farcical referendum which only offered two choices — Crimean independence or being absorbed by Russia — and then probably rigging the whole thing, just to be sure. It is Russians who have incited unrest in Eastern Ukraine, providing troops and weapons to separatists (and lying about it all the while), leading to the needless deaths of thousands.

As for Svoboda and Right Sector, they are not perfect, but in terms of their ideological roots, principles, and goals, they are Jew-wise racial nationalists. Yet Strom is willing to make excuses for what he assures us are Putin’s merely strategic nods to Jewish power and Russian petty nationalism, but he is unwilling to accord Svoboda and Right Sector similar courtesies.

It means nothing to Strom that Putin puts a beanie on and prayerfully presses his hand to the Wailing Wall like every other white leader. “We can trust Vlad,” Strom whispers assuringly, “because he’s just lying to the Jews and the Russians.” But if the leader of Svoboda — an actual member of the interim government — meets with John McCain, or if the leader of Right Sector engages in some wink-wink, nudge-nudge to calm the local Jews, Strom intuits treason in their hearts.

Why the double standard? Why the indulgence for Putin and jaundice toward Ukrainian White Nationalists?

Even as Russia claims to be fighting against anti-Semitism in Ukraine, pro-Russian propagandists seem anxious to sway foreign anti-Semites to their side by making a great deal of the Jews involved in the Ukrainian interim government, the subsequently elected government, and the outside parties that have tried to shape the Ukrainian Revolution.

For instance, Volodymyr Groysman is a deputy prime minister, and Ihor Kolomoisky is governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Both of them are Jews. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of casual dishonesty among anti-Semites, which leads to many false accusations. For instance, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, President Petro Poroshenko, and Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko have all been called Jews, but no firm evidence has been offered for these claims. (If Klitschko is a Jew, it is rather odd he named one of his sons after Max Schmeling.) American Jewish neocon Victoria Nuland — whom anti-Semites tiresomely refer to by her family’s original German name Nudelman, as if it were somehow more “Jewish” than Nuland — was on the scene and certainly up to no good during the Maidan protests.

But what does this all mean? The Maidan Revolution was made by a wide coalition of groups, including Ukrainian White Nationalists, and the subsequent governments have reflected the different strands of this coalition. Yet pro-Russian/anti-Ukraine propaganda treats the involvement of Jews as revealing the essence of the Ukrainian regime. They refer to the government as “Jewish,” tout court, and shamelessly slander Ukrainian White Nationalists as Jewish puppets, stooges, and collaborators.

But the involvement of Jews in the Putin regime is treated as accidental and negligible. Strom assures us that they are mere “pets” with “no trace of real power.” It is hard to judge such claims, of course, because Strom does not name names. Using English, French, and German sources, it is actually quite difficult to discover the ethnicity of many of Putin’s ministers, which itself is suspicious. But two are explicitly identified as Jews even by Wikipedia: Igor Levitin (Transportation Minister, 2004–2012) and Mikhail Fradkov (Director of Foreign Intelligence from 2007 on). Director of Foreign Intelligence is certainly not a position with “no trace of real power.” You can be assured if Ukraine had a Jewish Director of Foreign Intelligence or Transportation Minister, we would never hear the end of it.

Again, why the double standard? If there are Jews on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, why does the presence of Jews in the Ukrainian government prove that is is “Jewish” while the presence of Jews in the Russian government apparently means nothing at all (lest it undermine the false narrative that Russia is “Jew-wise” and working to counter international Jewry)?

The fact-fudging rush to brand the Ukrainian government “Jewish” aims to obscure the true nature of the Ukrainian situation, namely, that Ukraine has a parliamentary system with a number of different parties, in which common aims and enemies can lead to unlikely coalitions. Most importantly, it seeks to obscure the fact that the Ukrainian Revolution is by no means over. The situation in Ukraine is fluid and developing. It is too soon to say that Ukraine will be sucked into NATO and the EU, that it will lose its independence to the West, that it will be flooded with non-white immigrants and asylum seekers, etc. Certainly not if Ukrainian nationalists have anything to say about it.

Unfortunately, ongoing Russian intervention has pushed Ukraine closer to the West, caused the various parties to set aside their differences to pose a united front, and disproportionately absorbed the energies of the nationalists. But when the insurgency in the East is over, then the nationalist struggle for an independent Ukrainian third way will resume. In the meantime, it is simply intellectually dishonest to pretend that one already knows the outcome.

But let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that in the end, the nationalists will lose and Ukraine will become absorbed by the West. Is it really the position of Strom and other Russia apologists that Svoboda and Right Sector should have never even tried? The Putin apologists claim that it is futile for Ukraine to ever seek national self-determination, that Ukraine is doomed either to be a Russian satellite or an American one. My question is: Do they think that nationalism is futile in all cases? Is it futile in France? Is it futile in Germany? In Denmark? In Sweden? Do they think that it is futile for Americans to try to build an alternative to the Democrat vs. Republican hegemony?

What kind of White Nationalists believe that White Nationalism is futile everywhere it is tried? Such people obviously are in no position to lead, so they should step down. Or, since they presumably believe that Russian nationalism, at least, is not futile, perhaps they should simply become full-time apologists for Russia. Unfortunately, some websites are already drifting in that direction.

Or do these White Nationalists believe that our cause is futile only in Ukraine? If so, why? The answer is obvious: because they are engaged in special-pleading for Russia. (Presumably they would say the same thing about Belarus, too, should that nation grow restive in Moscow’s shadow.)

So both options really reduce to the same shameful toadying for Russian petty imperialism under the delusional conviction that it is really a battle for all whites against America and international Jewry.

This delusion is the “big picture” that Strom thinks the Ukrainian nationalists have missed and that the whole world should see:

The big picture of Jewish power ranged against the freedom and self-determination of all peoples — and against the very survival of our race itself. That’s the reality of what’s happening in Ukraine — that’s the reality of what’s happening all around the world today, from Cleveland to Gaza to Stockholm to Vladivostok: the Jewish war against our freedom, against our future, and against our very existence. And showing our people that reality is our highest duty.

I agree fully with Strom’s general point that Jewish power is arrayed against the freedom and self-determination of all peoples, and this is the chief impediment to white survival. But that is not the battle in Ukraine today. Russia is not fighting against international Jewry. Putin is engaged in petty imperialist aggression against a former vassal state that wishes to assert its legitimate rights to freedom and self-determination.

Being an independent nation means being able to make decisions your neighbors dislike. Respecting the independence of other nations is easy when they only make decisions that please you. The hard part is accepting decisions that displease you. And Russia consistently fails this test with the former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact nations. Even though around a quarter century has passed since communism in Europe began its implosion, the Russians have not mentally adjusted to the fact that they cannot boss their neighbors around.

Even more alarmingly, the Russians continue to identify themselves with the Soviet Union—even the regime of Stalin, one of the evilest men in human history—and this identification has been growing stronger, not weaker, with time. For instance, Russia angrily protests—and local Russians have actually rioted ^[10]—whenever its former imperial subjects move, destroy, or deface Soviet-era monuments to the Red Army that brought slavery, torture, deportations, and death to their countrymen—or when they try to honor their countrymen who joined the Axis crusade against communism. Thus it is somewhat beside the point to blame Jews for the crimes of communism when today’s Russians are happy to claim them. In truth, all the efforts of George Soros and the US government pale by comparison to Russia’s ongoing NATO recruitment drive.

Thus I completely sympathize with the desire of Russia’s neighbors to enter NATO. They would be fools not to. Every nation must worry about securing its basic sovereignty before it can turn its attention to remoter dangers and larger civilizational issues, and Russia’s former dominions are right to see her as the primary threat.

If Russia did not want NATO extended to her borders, she should have been a better neighbor. But it is never too late to start.

Moreover, NATO expansion is not a threat to Russia’s sovereignty and legitimate interests. It is arrant nonsense for Strom to claim — and here he is just following standard Russian propaganda — that the purpose of the “coup” in Ukraine is “to encircle and conquer Russia.” Russia has the second largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, which is enough to deter any conquest. The claim that Russia is in danger of conquest is no more credible than the Jewish claim that “another holocaust” is around the corner if Jews do not get their way – as if Israel’s mountain of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons were not a sufficient deterrent either.

It would be wonderful if a powerful nation like Russia really were fighting international Jewry and its minions in the name of the self-determination of all peoples. But that is not the case. Strom’s account of the Ukraine-Russia crisis is a tissue of delusions and distortions. But I do not wish to pick on Kevin Strom, who is merely expressing views that are widely held in the White Nationalist community due to intense Russian propaganda efforts. (We should be flattered, I guess, that they think us worthy of deceiving.) I have chosen to respond to Strom in particular simply because of the virtues of his argument: as always, he states his views clearly and compellingly. But in this case, he fails to convince.

Further Reading on Counter-Currents

My Writings:

Greg Johnson, “The Ukraine Crisis ^[11]” (Translations: Czech ^[12], Spanish ^[13])

Greg Johnson, “The Ukraine Crisis: Taking Our Own Side ^[14]”

Greg Johnson, “What We Don’t Know About Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 . . . ^[15]” (Czech translation here ^[16])

Other Authors:

Kerry Bolton, “Geopolitics and Oligarchy in the Ukraine Crisis ^[17]” (Czech translation here ^[18])

Émile Durand, “White Nationalist Delusions about Russia ^[19]” (German translation here ^[20])

Émile Durand, “The Crimea Annexation: Putin Profits from Stalin’s Crimes ^[21]”

Émile Durand, “Look to Ukraine ^[22]”

Émile Durand, “On Russia, Ukraine, and Honor ^[23]”

Guillaume Faye, “Ukraine: Understanding the Russian Position ^[24]”

Guillaume Faye, “On the Russian Annexation of Crimea ^[25]” (Czech translation here ^[26])

Fria Tider, “Swede Patrols Ukraine’s Streets with Right-Wing Militia ^[27]”

Andrew Hamilton, “Russia, Ukraine, and White Nationalism ^[28]”

Collin Liddell, “Vladimir Putin and the Sane Man Theory ^[29]” (Czech translation here ^[30])

Collin Liddell, “False Flags and Dull Facts ^[31]”

Leo Yankevich, “A Hundred Since the First ^[32]”