Tag: ussr

The Crony Capitalists Who Financed The Bolshevik Revolution

The United States is not a free-market or true “capitalist” society but rather a crony capitalist/welfare-state society. That is, many big businesses don’t compete to please the consumer but instead for coercive government privilege.

It is well documented that monopoly can’t exist in a free-market society; the forces of competition will always introduce new competitors to any particular field, especially when there is large amounts of money to be acquired. However, some astute businessmen notice that they can strangle their competition in the womb through government. They lobby for legislation that creates artificial barriers to entry, insane regulations for how productive processes must be run, subsidies, special taxes, or other inventive hurdles. It is far easier to “go political” and join the government in its parasitic extraction of wealth from the economy. A monopolist’s dream is to have a government grant it an exclusive monopoly over an industry.

There are many examples of crony capitalism in action. However, one historical example proves particularly interesting, for it shines a light on just how far monopolists are willing to go to acquire such government privilege. The event in question is the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Much evidence points to the fact that big business firms in the US—centered around the J. D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan conglomerates—helped bankroll the Bolsheviks using their massive funds and influence. While the jury is out whether the Bolsheviks would have succeeded in their takeover of Russia and the subsequent creation of the Soviet Union without this assistance, these big business firms absolutely played a part.

Why would these “capitalist” business firms help fund the Marxist Bolshevik revolutionaries? Were they secretly wooed by the false promises of communism? Most likely, no; some firms that aided the Bolsheviks also aided their enemies, presumably so they could have influence within whichever party was victorious. As monopoly capitalists, they realized that an inefficient economy run by totalitarian socialist central planning provided the perfect captive market for them, assuming they are on good terms with the socialist power-brokers. In this situation, the monopolists can easily achieve “protection” from the totalitarian government and take advantage of the consumers who are forced to buy from them because there is no alternative. This arrangement is especially advantageous when the captive market in question is as large as Russia. Therefore, the alliance between these two groups of seemingly enemies is actually not hard to imagine.

This situation is in the same line as the creation of the Federal Reserve System. As Murray Rothbard details in his history of the Federal Reserve, these same monopolist interests—centered largely around the Morgans and Rockefellers—pushed through the parasitic Federal Reserve System. This gave them a banking monopoly at home in the US similar, in principle, to the monopoly they worked to obtain in Russia. It is worth noting that monopoly “capitalists” are the enemies of laissez-faire capitalists who follow the tradition of Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, etc. The monopolists may run businesses, but they still owe their wealth to government power, not pleasing the consumer.

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Leftwing Candidate for French Presidency Is Grandson of an Infamous Soviet Spy

Glucksmann hopes to be the Left’s candidate against favorite Le Pen.

The board is set, the pieces are moving: as we approach next year’s consequential French Presidential elections, a variety of candidates are making their play.

The election has a clear favorite: right-wing Marine Le Pen, from the RN party.

Ever since Jordan Bardella led the RN to a major victory in the June 2024 European elections, the RN ceased being just a competitive power alternative and became the clear leaders of the pack.

That’s over two years of undisputed leadership in the polls that has the left-wing parties and Macronist centrists scrambling to launch a variety of candidates, trying to capture the imagination of the French public.

And there are some ‘beauties’ in this group.

The odious MSM has gone overboard trying to paint right-wingers in France (and Europe) as ‘Putin’s puppets’ – but when facts are revealed, we rapidly find out who is who.

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Lenin’s New Economic Policy: When the Soviets Admitted Socialism Doesn’t Work

A century ago, the Mother Ship of Socialism—the Soviet Union—was teetering on the precipice. The Poles had just vanquished the hopes of dictator Vladimir Lenin to sweep across Europe. Under the bludgeon of Marxist central planning, the economy had collapsed to a fraction of its pre-war dimensions. The country was seething in discontent. Insurrection seemed imminent. Indeed, the month of March 1921 had begun with hungry Soviet soldiers and sailors mounting the Kronstadt Rebellion against the Bolshevik regime.

What was Lenin’s remedy for his unfolding socialist catastrophe? It wasn’t more socialism, at least for the moment. That would be like chasing a glass of tainted water with a gallon of Clorox. Desperate to reverse the consequences of socialism, Lenin turned to their only known antidote—capitalism.

Sunday marked the 100th anniversary of the start of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). In a stunning about-face on March 21, 1921, the NEP began undoing the previous four years. Expropriation of businesses and the nationalization of industries stopped. Lenin proclaimed a partial restoration of, in his own words, “a free market and capitalism.” Even state-owned firms would seek to operate on a “profit” basis. Individuals could own small enterprises again. Market prices would be permitted in place of state directives.

A little bit of freedom goes a long way. In this instance, it turned the economy around and saved the infant Bolshevik tyranny. But it did not last long. Three years later, Lenin would be dead. Before the end of the decade, Stalin obliterated the NEP with a massive collectivist campaign to re-socialize the economy. Of the NEP, former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1989 book, The Grand Failure, “For many Russians, even more than sixty years later, these were the best years of the era ushered in by the revolution of 1917.”

On that March day in 1921, the very day winter bowed to spring, the socialists in Moscow effectively admitted they had to stop stealing. There just was not much left to steal. In a 1990 article, economist Peter Boettke cited a litany of mea culpas from leading Soviet intellectuals, including a most revealing tribute to free market economist Ludwig von Mises from socialist architect Nikolai Bukharin. He grudgingly admitted that Mises’s devastating critique of socialism made him “one of the most learned critics.”

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The Bizarre Soviet Experiments That Attempted To Understand Psychic Powers

Could someone stop a heart with their mind? Could objects move through the use of mental imagery? Could someone communicate from the shore with a submarine through their thoughts? These were the premises of several strange experiments performed under direction of the Soviet Union. Citizens believed to possess unique parapsychological abilities were tested and studied by renowned scientists in an effort to illuminate the supposed physics that were thought to underlie supernatural abilities. Whether “bioplasma” or “psi particles,” brilliant minds were determined to reveal the science behind the paranormal.

The Cold War was a time rife with competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The nations battled for control of territories left vulnerable in the aftermath of World War II and fought to claim ideological supremacy. Fear and paranoia were stoked in the American public by the declaration of an arms race, although it was later revealed that the Soviet Union did not have access to such destructive weapons as the U.S. had claimed.

Both governments also competed in the realm of scientific advancement, most famously characterized by the Space Race, in which the U.S. managed to land people on the moon. In a time of such fierce competition, it was all hands on deck, including some scientists with rather peculiar beliefs. The U.S. received intelligence that the Soviet Union was attempting to capture the paranormal using the tenets of the scientific method, gaining an upper hand through telekinesis, telepathy, and clairvoyance.

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How MI6 backed ‘right-wing religious fanatics’ in Afghanistan

In 1980, journalist John Fullerton sat down for lunch in London with members of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6. The spooks asked the restless reporter to name five cities where he would like to work. He scrawled the answers unhesitatingly on a paper napkin.

“The top one was Peshawar in Pakistan,” he told Declassified, explaining his desire to move near the turbulent Afghan border. “The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan but I couldn’t find ways to be a freelancer out there. There were no journalists covering it. Everyone had left Kabul. So I wanted to cover the war and that’s how SIS employed me.”

He had been on good terms with SIS for many years already, after a chance encounter with Nicholas Elliott, one of the agency’s high fliers. Elliott, who famously confronted the KGB double agent Kim Philby, had just retired as an SIS director when he spotted an article by Fullerton exposing a power struggle between the police and military in apartheid South Africa.

Fullerton grew up in Cape Town, rising to night news editor on the Cape Times before migrating back to the UK, the country of his birth. After checking he was not a mole for the apartheid regime’s Bureau of State Security, British intelligence eventually took him on as a “contract labourer”, a cheaper option than a permanent SIS officer position.

“They employed quite a lot of these contract labourers, many from military backgrounds,” Fullerton commented. “SIS had gone through a period of retrenchment in the 1970s and early 80s and it had shrunk. From having three fully staffed stations in Latin America it went to having none.”

This all changed under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who received informal advice on espionage from Elliott. “She took a great interest in foreign affairs and intelligence and she tried to beef it all up,” Fullerton remarked, adding that her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington was eager to get “scenes of Afghans fighting communists onto television screens.”

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UFO intel documents stolen out of Russia reveal decade-long probes into alien encounters, abductions

Landmark UFO documents smuggled out of Russia 30 years ago — and just publicly revealed — show the Soviets investigated thousands of reports of extraterrestrial craft and encounters with aliens.

Legendary reporter George Knapp, 73, quietly released on Jan. 16 documents he smuggled out of Russia in 1993 under the nose of the KGB after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

The translated documents reveal the shocking extent to which the USSR and the post-Soviet Russian Federation probed the persistent phenomenon — despite the communist government officially deeming UFOs a concoction of war-mongering “American imperialists” in 1953.

The USSR commissioned several studies of UFOs beginning with the “Network-AN” program in 1979, continuing with “Galaxy-MD” from 1981-1985, “Pluton 7” in 1989 and 1990, and the continuing “Thread 3” program.

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Official CIA documents reported that a UFO turned a Soviet infantry unit to stone

UFO hype reached a fever pitch in 2025, as President Donald Trump’s order to declassify and release military and intelligence documents related to UFOs began to flood the internet. One document in particular received some extraordinary attention, relaying the story of a Soviet Red Army infantry unit that was attacked not only by a UFO, but by its alien crew.

A story reprinted in the Ukrainian newspaper Ternopil Vechirny (meaning “Ternopil Evening”) alleged that the American intelligence community received a 250-page file from the KGB’s archive after the fall of the Soviet Union. That file was said to contain documentary evidence (including photos) of an attack on a Soviet infantry unit in Siberia.

The KGB documents supposedly report that the unit was conducting a regular training exercise, when a “quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer appeared above” them. For reasons that no one really knows, one of the soldiers suddenly fired a surface-to-air missile at the craft. The UFO crash landed “not far away” and “five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes” emerged from the downed vessel.

The file says that two surviving Red Army soldiers reported that the aliens “merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape.” The shape began to buzz and hiss, then turned a brilliant white, growing bigger and bigger before it exploded in a bright white light. Instantly, 23 soldiers had been turned into “stone poles.” The two soldiers had been standing behind trees, which they believed helped them survive.

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CIA tried to recruit Winston Churchill – Telegraph

The CIA tried to recruit British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill to spread propaganda broadcasts on the agency-backed Radio Liberty in the 1950s, in an effort to undermine the Soviet Union, The Telegraph has reported.

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA-funded radio station targeted the Soviet Union with propaganda broadcasts, while its sister organization, Radio Free Europe, focused on Moscow’s allies. Both were covertly controlled and funded by the US intelligence agency until 1972 and merged into RFE/RL four years later.

In 1958, Radio Liberty’s controllers suggested riding the wave of “revisionism” gripping the Soviet Union at the time, and taking advantage of emerging ideological divisions within Marxism-Leninism to undermine the government, The Telegraph wrote on Saturday, citing declassified CIA documents.

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Declassified: MI6 Support For Nazi ‘Forest Brothers’

September 22nd marked “Resistance Fighting Day”. It was on this date in 1944 anti-Communist guerrilla forces in Estonia declared war on the Soviet Union’s ‘occupation’ of their state. Parallel paramilitary factions rapidly formed in neighbouring Latvia and Lithuania. For over a decade, these violent factions – popularly known as the Forest Brothers – waged a brutal, ill-fated insurgency against Soviet authorities. They remain venerated in the region and beyond today as courageous freedom fighters, immortalised by commemorative monuments, street names and statues throughout the Baltic states.

In reality, the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Forest Brothers were Holocaust perpetrators and Nazi collaborators. In many cases, militants joined the movement due to fear of prosecution and punishment for their activities during World War II. While waging their anti-Soviet crusade, the Brothers also murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including many children. However, critical scrutiny of the Forest Brothers’ genocidal legacy is criminalised throughout the Baltics. Academics, journalists and lawyers have been jailed for exposing the truth.

The same legislation moreover prohibits any public discussion of how the Jewish populations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were slaughtered in their virtual totality, largely before the Wehrmacht arrived in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa. Western powers are aggressively complicit in this historical coverup. In July 2017, NATO produced a slick propaganda film heroising the Forest Brothers. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits routinely whitewash Baltic Nazi collaboration, on the risible basis local populations simply sought to resist Communist rule.

There is another core component of the Forest Brothers’ history their advocates at home and abroad are keen to conceal. Namely, the Baltic Nazi guerrilla war was covertly supported financially, materially and practically by MI6. Britain’s foreign spying agency assisted their attempted insurrection by supplying explosives and weapons, infiltrating and exfiltrating agents, and sponsoring assassinations and sabotage attacks. Yet, MI6 records documenting this dark alliance are unforthcoming. Evidence of London’s cloak-and-dagger assistance to the Forest Brothers is provided largely by declassified CIA files.

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Putin compares ideology of modern West to USSR

Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn a parallel between the Soviet Union and the present-day US and EU, accusing them of imposing their own political systems on other countries.

Speaking at a plenary session of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, the president suggested that political systems which force their own values on others don’t last.

“The Soviet Union once erred by imposing its system. Then, the United States has taken up that baton. The EU has also distinguished itself,” Putin said.

“A nation that respects its own tradition, as a rule, does not encroach on the traditions of others,” the Russian president concluded.

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