Tag: history

How the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Became a Country

The former Soviet administrative unit that emerged as independent Ukraine in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union was bounded by the exact borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). That is, it comprised a wholly unnatural polity whose borders and population had been assembled by successive Soviet leaders for the administrative convenience of their brutal communist dictatorship.

Once the external scaffolding of this Moscow disappeared, that construct quickly polarized along regional and linguistic lines. The red-and-blue electoral map below supplies the generic illustration: Western and central oblasts (blue) delivered overwhelming majorities to candidates oriented toward Ukrainian language and Western institutions, while eastern and southern oblasts (red) – from Kharkiv through the Donbas and along the Black Sea rim including Crimea – delivered equally lopsided majorities to candidates favoring closer Russian ties and greater status for the Russian language.

Accordingly, national results stayed reasonably close; regional electoral results did not. The pattern amounted to a standing de facto referendum for partition.

The blue territories of Galicia and Volhynia had spent centuries inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austrian Empire, developing under Greek-Catholic and later Polish institutions. The populations there had little affinity for both communism and Russian culture.

The red territories, by contrast, had been shaped by the Czarist Empire: Novorossiya, the Donbas, Kharkiv, and Crimea were settled or industrialized under Russian rule, with heavily Russian-speaking urban populations economically integrated with Russian economic markets and religiously tutored by the Russian Orthodox church.

Both zones carried scars from the depredations of the Second World War: The criss-cr0ssing of the lands first by the German occupation, then by Red Army reconquest. Those nightmarish experiences reinforced the older divergence.

In the first presidential election in December 1991 a recycled communist apparatchik, Leonid Kravchuk, won nationally with 61.6% of the vote on a national independence platform. Regional variation already existed – Kravchuk was stronger in the center and west, more pro-Russian candidates relatively stronger in the industrial east and Crimea.

But the simultaneous independence referendum that year and the popular relief from the oppression of Moscow rule masked the depth of the underlying split in the polity. So Kravchuk’s pro-independence moderation of 1991 did not last.

By the 2004 presidential election the cleavage had hardened. In the final December 2004 rerun, Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, received 15.1 million votes (52.0%) while the pro-Russian, Viktor Yanukovych, received 12.8 million votes (44.0 percent). The national margin was modest. But inside the regions, the vote gaps were huge.

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Soviet Dictators Used War and Famine To Create Ukraine

The Russian Empire entered the First World War in 1914 as one of Europe’s great powers, yet four years of catastrophic military defeats, economic dislocation, and social upheaval destroyed the foundations of the Romanov autocracy. By early 1917 the army was demoralized, the cities were hungry, and the authority of Nicholas II had evaporated.

In February 1917 strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd escalated into open mutiny. The Tsar abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. A Provisional Government, composed of liberal and moderate socialist politicians and eventually led by Alexander Kerensky, attempted to steer Russia toward a constitutional order while simultaneously continuing the war against the Central Powers.

The government introduced civil liberties and promised land reform and elections to a Constituent Assembly, but it refused to withdraw from the conflict or to sanction the spontaneous seizure of noble estates by the peasantry. Parallel to the Provisional Government stood the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, creating the unstable system of “dual power.” Kerensky’s attempts to rally the army for a summer offensive in 1917 failed, and by autumn the Provisional Government commanded little loyalty outside a narrowing circle of officers and urban liberals.

On the night of 25–26 October 1917 the Bolshevik Party, directed by Vladimir Lenin and executed through Leon Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee, carried out an armed coup in Petrograd. Red Guards and sympathetic garrison units seized bridges, railway stations, and the telephone exchange; the Winter Palace, where the remaining ministers had taken refuge, was stormed with relatively little bloodshed.

The Provisional Kerensky Government was there upon arrested and the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified the transfer of power. Lenin’s new Council of People’s Commissars immediately issued decrees calling for an end to the war and for the distribution of land to the peasants. In March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany formally removed Russia from the World War, ceding vast territories to Germany and its allies.

The October coup did not bring peace. Instead it ignited a brutal civil war that lasted until 1921. The Bolshevik “Reds” confronted a heterogeneous array of “White” forces – former Tsarist generals such as Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel, together with liberal and socialist opponents of the incipient Bolshevik dictatorship.

National movements, peasant insurgencies, and foreign intervention by British, French, American, Japanese, and other contingents further fragmented the struggle. Fighting raged across European Russia, Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus.

The Reds ultimately triumphed because they controlled the industrial core and the railway network, maintained stricter internal discipline through the Cheka (secret police), and offered the peasantry at least the promise of land. By contrast, the Whites remained divided, often restored landlord claims, and failed to articulate a compelling political program. By the end of 1920 the principal White armies had been defeated – even as sporadic resistance continued into 1921 but no longer threatened Bolshevik power.

In the Ukrainian lands the imperial collapse opened a brief window for independence. After the February Revolution, Ukrainian activists in Kiev organized the Central Rada, which progressively asserted autonomy and, in January 1918, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The republic adopted national symbols, issued currency, and sought international recognition.

The latter was short-lived, however, because German and Austrian troops now occupied much of Ukraine under the terms of Brest-Litovsk. Accordingly, they installed the conservative Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in place of the socialist-leaning Rada. After the Central Powers’ defeat in November 1918, the Directory under Symon Petliura restored a republican regime and attempted to defend Ukrainian independence against both Bolshevik and White Russian forces.

None of these successive Ukrainian governments possessed the military or administrative capacity to hold the territory. By 1920–1921 the Red Army had overrun the greater part of the Ukrainian provinces east of the emerging Polish frontier. The Ukrainian People’s Republic survived thereafter only as a rump émigré government based in Warsaw, Paris and scattered elsewhere in Europe.

Moreover, at the Paris Peace Conference the Allied powers revived an independent Polish state. The Treaty of Versailles and subsequent arrangements awarded Poland eastern Galicia, including the city of Lviv and the surrounding districts that had belonged to the Austrian Empire. These western Ukrainian territories therefore remained outside Soviet control and inside the Polish Republic until 1939.

In a similar manner,Crimea, historically administered as part of the Taurida Governorate, stayed within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and was not transferred to Ukrainian jurisdiction until 1954.

Lenin’s incorporation of the remaining Ukrainian lands into a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was an act of administrative state-building based and geographic contiguity. It was focused on control of factories, railroads, coal mines and other resources – not the vindication of an underlying national sovereignty.

Once the Civil War was won, the Bolshevik leadership had confronted the practical problem of governing an immense, ethnically diverse territory. So rather than reconstitute a unitary Russian state, they created a federal structure of nominally sovereign Soviet republics.

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How Ukraine Was Pieced Together

As we indicated in Part 1, even by the end of the 18th century, the nation of “Ukraine” was nowhere to be seen on the maps of the era. And shortly thereafter the greatest map-making assemblage of nations that the world had ever seen only confirmed its non-existence within the maws of an expanding Russian Empire.

We are referring to the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, which was the diplomatic mechanism by which the victors over Napoleon – Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain – reordered the political geography of Europe. Their purpose was to restore monarchical legitimacy after a quarter-century of revolution and war, to prevent the re-emergence of French hegemony, and to compensate themselves for the costs of the struggle.

Under the guiding influence of Austria’s Prince Metternich, Russia’s Tsar Alexander I, Britain’s Viscount Castlereagh, and Prussia’s Prince Hardenberg, the powers rejected both the popular sovereignty associated with the French Revolution and also any simple reversion to the pre-revolution map of 1789.

Instead they fashioned a conservative settlement grounded in dynastic right, a workable balance among the great powers, and mutual territorial swaps and boundary adjustments. These rearrangements extended across the continent and into the adjacent Eurasian borderlands.

Thus, France was confined to its frontiers of 1792 and surrounded by reinforced buffer states. The German lands were consolidated into a confederation dominated by Austria, while Italy was left divided among restored or compensated rulers. In northern Europe, territorial exchanges strengthened Sweden and created a united Kingdom of the Netherlands.

But it was the settlement in the east that is material to what was the still missing map of Ukraine at the end of the Congress. In fact, its handiwork went in the opposite direction by confirming and enlarging the late 18th century gains and colonization projects of the Russian Empire.

Alexander I of Russia received most of the former Duchy of Warsaw, reconstituted as the Kingdom of Poland under the Russian crown, and obtained formal recognition of the extensive territories Russia had already acquired through the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and through earlier wars. Those acquisitions encompassed the greater part of the territories that constitute modern Ukraine: the Right Bank and the Left Bank of the Dnieper River, as well as the region then known as Novorossiya, and the Crimean Peninsula.

At that point in time, Galicia, including the city of Lviv, remained under Habsburg rule, a secondary consequence of the partitions that the Vienna powers left undisturbed. Prussia obtained more limited Polish districts to the west.

In none of these allocations did an independent Ukrainian state appear. The peacemakers regarded the region as imperial territory to be distributed among the victorious monarchies, not as the patrimony of a distinct nation entitled to sovereignty. British and Prussian acquiescence in Russia’s share formed part of the larger bargain that contained France and preserved the conservative equilibrium; neither power had an interest in promoting a Ukrainian polity that would have unsettled the eastern settlement they had helped to construct.

The Concert of Europe that issued from Vienna therefore placed the Czarist empire’s control over the Ukrainian lands under the collective sanction of the anti-Napoleonic coalition. Territories that had been absorbed through Russian conquest, partition, and colonization in the preceding century were now underwritten by the authority of the principal European powers.

For the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, therefore, the territories of today’s Ukraine continued to be governed as provinces of the Russian and Austrian empires. Their inhabitants remained subjects of those states rather than citizens of a Ukraine that the statesmen of 1814 had not had reason to reject because as of yet it had not even been envisioned.

Needless to say, the 1814 map below speaks for itself. The current line of contact in the Ukraine War, which is just east of the Dnieper River has seen the slaughter of upwards of 400,000 soldiers on both sides of the trenches. Yet when the modern map of Europe was fixed at the Congress of Vienna their forebears had all been subjects of the same Russian Empire; most were adherents of the Russian Orthodox confession; and the mother tongue of many was Russian, as well.

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Halloween ‘Corpses’ Hanging Outside PA Home Spark Outrage as NAACP Demands Removal Over ‘Painful Historical Significance’ — Homeowner Refuses to Back Down

A Bucks County, Pennsylvania, homeowner is refusing to remove his Halloween decorations after the local NAACP and some residents claimed the display of hanging “bodies” resembles lynching victims and carries “painful historical significance” for Black Americans.

Homeowner Mike Wade told reporters he bought the kit and never intended to offend anyone. “My house is scary. My house is always scary. It’s always set up scary. Same thing. Dead bodies laying around, skeletons. It’s Halloween,” he said.

Some neighbors agreed it was simply seasonal spookiness, while others, including resident Roshea Newkirk, questioned, “I’m just looking at it and I’m just thinking to him, like, ‘do you not see what’s wrong with this?’”

The controversy reached a Bristol Borough Council meeting, where resident Karla Scott called the scene “very inappropriate.”

Council President Ralph DiGuiseppe confirmed that a borough inspector contacted the homeowner shortly after the display went up. Officials asked him to take it down, but he declined.

The homeowner told FOX 29 the display was simply for Halloween and there was “no other agenda.”

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America’s Sordid History of Filming Executions as Entertainment

Earlier this month, Acting Secretary of the Army Adam R. Telle signed an order scheduling the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Two days later, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth made a startling announcement. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told the conservative Real America’s Voice News network, as the interviewer raised his eyebrows. The Department of War’s official “Rapid Response” Twitter account promptly promoted the clip.

Hegseth’s plan apparently won’t come to fruition. Amid outcry about the barbarity and optics of streaming the planned execution by firing squad — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood — President Donald Trump on Thursday called off the broadcast. “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump posted on his social media website.

Some news outlets, such as The New York Times, framed the planned killing as an aberration, claiming that “such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.” This narrative, however, overlooks a forgotten American cultural history in which filmed executions turned government killings into spectacle.

The practice of filming executions in America is effectively as old as cinema itself.

In 1897, a few years after the first motion pictures began to be exhibited in the United States, a Missouri farmhand named William Carr was convicted of murdering his daughter and sentenced to death by hanging. Filmmaker Frederick Guth, of the American Phonographic Company, who had previously recorded an interview with Carr in prison, opted to film the execution as well — marking a grim milestone as history’s first filmed execution. The resulting motion picture, “The Hanging of William Carr” (1897), was first exhibited in Kansas City and St. Louis, then screened around the country.

The following year saw the nationwide premiere of “An Execution by Hanging,” otherwise known as “Execution of Negro at County Jail, Jacksonville, Fla” (1898). It showed the hanging of Edward Heinson, who was convicted and sentenced to death for criminal assault of a 14-year-old white girl. Illustrating racist views that have long shaped the American criminal legal system and the death penalty, the catalog of the film’s production company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, teased the film as depicting “a very ghastly, but very interesting subject.”

As these early films were distributed across the nation, they were met with interest and outcry. The journal Phonoscope at the time described the filming of Carr’s execution as “revolting,” while the Cleveland Leader cautioned that the film may have “brutalizing effects” on viewers. Some newspapers even claimed that during the hanging of Carr, Guth had hired people to storm the gallows to create added pandemonium.

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Israeli False Flags From Irgun to Flydubai

By now, you’ve likely seen the “terror at 30,000 feet” that just played out in the skies over Tel Aviv last week. And you’ve probably marveled at how the narrative of that fateful Flydubai flight—a narrative dutifully parroted by the eager propagandists of the establishment media—disintegrated in the exact same way that Boeing’s airframe miraculously didn’t disintegrate.

As unsurprising as this latest manipulated news story may be to us veteran conspiracy researchers, however, there are millions around the world who, shocked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are only now beginning to look into the false flag trickery and the bloody deceptions upon which the modern state of Israel has been built.

So, for the benefit of such newly awakened students of suppressed history, today let’s examine some of the foundational false flag terror events of Israeli history.

On July 22, 1946, terrorists associated with the Irgun—a Zionist paramilitary organization operating in Mandatory Palestine and led by Menachem Begin—bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Their targeting of the hotel was a response to Operation Agatha, a security operation conducted by British troops days earlier that had resulted in the arrest of 2,700 Zionist operatives.

Operation Agatha included the seizure of documentary evidence that the Jewish Agency for Palestine—a branch of the World Zionist Organization—had approved sabotage operations as part of their insurgency against the British Mandatory government. Knowing that the King David Hotel housed the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Palestine and Transjordan, the Irgun terror squad presumed that this was where the Brits were storing these incriminating documents.

An article from History Today recounts the set-up for the attack.

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North Dakota: Seven Coffins Holding Human Remains Found Near Governor’s Residence

Archeologists have located seven coffins containing human remains near the governor’s residence in Bismarck, North Dakota, a site where community members laid their loved ones to rest in the 1800s.

Crews found the coffins and a wooden box after Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Facilities Management Director Brandon Solberg said they investigated over 80 spots before concluding their fieldwork in early September, KFYR reported Monday.

OMB told People that preliminary analysis of the remains inside the coffins showed they were those of two women, two men, two teenage boys, and a toddler.

Per the KFYR article, “The discovery dates back to May 19, when contractors doing excavation on the southwest corner of the property near 4th Street and Boulevard Avenue first uncovered remains, coffin hardware, and fragments. That paused construction and led to a radar scan by the State Historical Society, followed by a dig that started Sept. 1.”

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The 200-Year History of Vaccine Disasters That The Government Censors

The first federal vaccine push in the U.S. was the Act to Encourage Vaccination of 1813 – signed by President James Madison, which required free distribution of smallpox vaccine – according to historical accounts. The measure followed lobbying by James Smith, a physician known as the “Jenner of America,” who was appointed federal vaccine agent under the law.

Congress repealed the act in 1822 after safety failures and complaints of profiteering and corruption, the same accounts state. The repeal marked the first federal retreat from vaccine regulation in the nation’s history. The episode set a template that historians and critics say has repeated for more than two centuries: government promotion of vaccination, followed by documented safety failures and followed by public backlash.

Early Setbacks: Tarboro Tragedy and Civil War Vaccination Problems

The 1822 repeal followed what is known as the Tarboro Tragedy, in which Smith sent live smallpox virus instead of cowpox vaccine to North Carolina, causing about 60 infections and 10 deaths, according to the historical account. The incident is cited as an early example of distribution failures under a federal vaccine program.

Historian Terry Reimer wrote that “unfavorable results from vaccination, or spurious vaccinations, were all too common” during the Civil War, according to Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey A. Tucker. Reimer stated that syphilitic scabs and contaminated material spread disease, and that the Confederate Medical Department tried to limit soldier-to-soldier vaccination.

These 19th-century episodes illustrate a recurring theme that later critics of vaccine policy would cite. Safety problems were often documented only after widespread use, and official responses frequently came after public harm had occurred.

Biologics Control Act of 1902: Industry Initiative, Coleman Article Says

The Biologics Control Act of 1902, a foundational federal law governing vaccine and antitoxin production, was an initiative of the large biologics manufacturers, according to Terry S. Coleman’s 2016 article in the Food and Drug Law Journal titled “Early Developments in the Regulation of Biologics.” Coleman wrote that “the 1902 Act was an initiative of the large biologics manufacturers, and it was enacted with the secret cooperation of Public Health Service.”

According to the historical account, Parke-Davis pushed for strict standards and wrote to the Public Health Service, “As you are perhaps aware, the regulations cannot be too stringent for us.” The correspondence is cited as evidence that industry players sought regulation to stabilize markets and disadvantage smaller competitors.

Separately, investigative reporting published by The BMJ has found that regulatory agencies in six countries, including the United States, have seen large proportions of their budgets funded by the industry they are sworn to regulate, raising questions about independence. Maryanne Demasi, the investigative journalist behind the report, documented significant conflicts of interest between drugmakers and the agencies, according to the reporting [1][2][3].

Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the 1986 Liability Shield

In 1905, the Supreme Court decided Jacobson v. Massachusetts, upholding forced vaccination on public health grounds over freedom of conscience, according to the historical account. The ruling remains a foundational precedent for state vaccine mandates.

Eighty-one years later, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 granted liability protection to makers of childhood schedule vaccines and moved injury claims out of civil courts into a specialized federal compensation program, according to the account. The law has been criticized by vaccine-injured families, who describe the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program as “a fortress of opacity and resistance – a system that prioritizes protecting the pharmaceutical industry” over claimants [4].

According to Tucker, the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act enabled the National Institutes of Health to share patents with pharmaceutical companies, a policy shift with reported market value approaching $1 billion to $2 billion. The combination of liability protection, patent sharing and mandatory childhood schedules created what critics describe as a durable framework of industry-favorable regulation.

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REALLY? MSNOW Guest Suggests the Second Amendment Was About ‘Slave Patrols’

Left wing author Malcolm Gladwell recently appeared on MSNOW’s ‘Morning Joe’ and suggested that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees American citizens the right to bear arms, was really written about slave patrols.

He spends much of the segment complaining about the Supreme Court, which he says has been ‘a significant impediment’ in the left’s pursuit of gun control.

The most amazing thing is that what he is saying here is treated as completely normal by the hosts, who do not interrupt or correct him in any way.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

MIKE BARNICLE, MS NOW CONTRIBUTOR: What do you say about a culture, American culture, that when a disease is identified and it’s threatening and it’s killing people, you can talk about from the inception of polio vaccines through AIDS, we — we react, we find — we find a cure almost immediately. People feel relieved. Guns have been killing Americans on the streets for decades — decades. And there’s nothing we can do.

GLADWELL: Yeah. I mean, here I have two chapters in the book on the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has been a significant impediment here. They have — the last two major gun rulings — in the Bruen case and the Heller case — are abominations. And I had — I actually have fun with them because in both of those cases, the court plays historian and plays linguist, because in the Heller case, of course, Scalia famously.

And the — and the fellow justices try to make sense of the grammatical convolution that is the Second Amendment, which, if you read, makes — no one would ever write that sentence today. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s commas everywhere. There’s this weird initial what’s called an initial being clause. Does it modify the main clause? And all of these linguists lined up and told the court, “Okay, here’s how people in the 18th century used an initial being clause — here’s how James Madison used that clause. Here’s what James Madison meant.” What he meant was, we’re talking about militias here, and by militias he meant slave patrols, right? And the court had no interest.

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Napoleon’s secret code deciphered after 217 years using AI to read emperor’s mysterious letter

After more than 200 years, a coded letter written by the wee warlord Napoleon Bonaparte has been deciphered.

Napoleon’s stepson, Eugene, the Viceroy of Italy, sent the original letter to French general Auguste de Marmont in March of 1809 amid France’s ongoing conflict with Austria.

At the time, Marmont, a close companion of the emperor, was positioned with his troops in Dalmatia, on the far side of the Adriatic, where he was totally isolated from other French forces and their allies.

While the opening line of Napoleon’ correspondence is in his native French, the next 24 are an incomprehensible mix of symbols, letters, and numbers.

Experts believe the OG correspondence would have come with a deciphering key, but that key has been lost to the mists of time, until now.

Carter Church, an engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, has cracked the centuries-old code with the aid of AI. 

‘I used GPT–6 Astra to break an unsolved cipher to one of Napoleon’s generals that had gone unread for 217 years. What makes this impressive isn’t actually the codebreaking, but that Astra completed the entire multi-modal workflow in six hours from a single image and goal,’ he explained on X. 

The first line reads: ‘Vous avez dû recevoir, Monsieur le Général Marmont, mes lettres des 8, 14 et 20 courant,’ which translates to: ‘You must have received, General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th, and 20th of this month.’

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