As you read this book review/article just realize that what you are viewing solves several major issues in the JFK conundrum:
1) It definitively identifies the author/publisher, and therefor the originator, of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a White Russian Emigre.
2) It definitively identifies the most likely persons named Baron Wrangel whose son Baron Charles Wrangel was on Dick Russell's watch list since he asked me to be on the lookout for him. This was because Richard Case Nagell identified both a person named Wrangel and a person named James Wheeler-Hill, (who attended Bund rallies with Vonsiatsky in Nordland, NJ, by the way, in the late 1930's as I later discovered) as major players in the JFK hit. And I do trust both Nagell and Russell as being without agendas.
3) It discusses even more about both Dietrick Eckart or Eckhart and Alfred Rosenberg who were frequent correspondents, close fiends and constant associates of Anastase Andreivitch Vonsiatsky. Eckhart is known as the grandfather and the architect of the Nazi philosophy and a very strong Hitler supporter as was Vonsiatsky of course.
Providence College has 2 invaluable and possibly priceless documents written by Dietrick Eckhart about Nazi youth camps and other topics which they have yet to digitize and make available to serious scholars for unknown reasons. They were pulled out of Vonsiatsky's storage area by the person who bought the second Ream estate from the Reams. The first one burned to the ground and was much more ornate. Comparable to the Newport mansions, I was told in fact right here in River City.
4) Is confirms the pivotal roles of not only White Emigres in general but Anastase Vonsiatsky in particular in the rise to power of Hitler and the interactions between U.S. based financiers, bankers, wall streeters and Eugenicists in not only supporting Hitler but in using him to advance their agendas of master racism and Eugenical approaches to the elimination of whomever they considered "undesirable" or "useless eaters" which would include the Jews, the negroes, the mentally retarded, the epileptics, the criminals, the insane, the Communists and the liberals and socialists.
Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making Of National Socialism, 1917-1945. 327 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0521845122. $80.00; eBook $64.00.
Michael Kellogg's book examines the contribution of Russian emigres to the formation of Nazi ideology as well as the cooperation of far-right Russian emigres in Germany with the Nazis. The author pays special attention to the Russian-German society Aufbau (Reconstruction), with which Adolf Hitler collaborated between 1920 and 1923. Chapter 4 is dedicated to Aufbau (10935), but other parts of the book also touch on the subject. Among the leading figures of Aufbau were the Baltic German emigres Max Scheubner-Richter, Arno Schickedanz, Alfred Rosenberg, and Otto von Kursell; the Russian emigres General Vladimir Viktorovich Biskupskii, Fedor Viktorovich Vinberg, Petr Nikolaevich Shabel'skii-Bork, and Sergei Vladimirovich Taboritskii; and the "Ukrainian Cossack" Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa.
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The distinct contribution of Russian emigres to the formation of the Nazi ideology has been noted before by investigators. Usually mentioned have been German familiarity with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conception of Bolshevism as the brainchild of Jewry (7-9). (1) Unlike his predecessors, Kellogg goes much further, writing of the "Russian roots of Nazism" and stressing that early National Socialism was based on a synthesis of German and Russian right-radical tendencies and ideologies. Kellogg draws a parallel between the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who argued that Germans should resist Jewish materialism, and the predictions of the Russian mystical writer Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii and the philosopher Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev, who foresaw a battle between Russia and world Jewry, with Russia embodying Christ and Jewry the Antichrist (11-12). Based on new archival materials and periodicals from 1919-23 that are now bibliographic rarities, Kellogg's book is the most detailed investigation of the phenomenon of cooperation between German and Russian rightists during the troubled period following the Great War.
In Kellogg's estimation it was precisely the influence of Aufbau that to a considerable degree defined the antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler, which in turn led to the risky invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and facilitated the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Even the fateful decision to direct a significant portion of German forces for the occupation of Ukraine instead of concentrating on the advance on Moscow in the summer and fall of 1941 was, in the author's opinion, a reflection of the influence of the ideas of Aufbau (16-17, 261-62).
Kellogg came to these conclusions based on his study of materials at the Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections in Moscow (Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumental'nykh kollektsii [TsKhIDK], now part of the Russian State Military Archive), for many years closed to researchers. Kellogg investigated materials of the Secret Intelligence Office of the Weimar Republic, the Gestapo, and French and Polish intelligence (10-11). Several personal collections were deposited in the former TsKhIDK, among them the diary of Walter Nikolai, chief of German intelligence during World War I, who worked thereafter with Aufbau and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP); and the fond of the well-known volkish publicist Ludwig Mueller von Hausen. It was precisely to the latter that Shabel'skii-Bork gave a copy of the Protocols with his own commentaries, introducing the text into German antisemitic discourse (11). Kellogg also employed materials of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (the former Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] Central Committee), and several German archives.
Rosenberg's views, as Kellogg puts it, formed under the simultaneous influence of Germanic mythology (the works of Schopenhauer and Chamberlain, whom he read enthusiastically in his youth) and of Russian literature, in particular Dostoevskii. Here he has in mind, of course, the latter's antisemitic "publicistic" works. "Later on," the author concludes, "Rosenberg helped in the formation of national-socialist ideology by synthesizing Germanic volkish ideas and White emigre views" (42). Vinberg and Shabel'skii-Bork "transferred" Black Hundred ideology to early National Socialism, primarily in the form of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (46). Kellogg maintains that the Black Hundreds in Russia achieved greater success in popularizing antisemitic ideology than contemporary volkish organizations in Germany (46). He seemingly perceives no difference between the views of the Black Hundreds and the ideology of the Whites, noting that the ideology White emigres brought with them to the West, especially as embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, played a decisive role specifically in German developments. The author suggests that cooperation between the Germans and the Whites in Ukraine in 1918 served as a precedent for the international cooperation of rightists after the defeat of Germany in World War I, something especially clearly observed in the Baltic in 1919. The cooperation of National Socialists with the Whites followed a tradition established in Ukraine in 1918 (47). The second chapter of the monograph is dedicated to the cooperation of the German military and German officials with the Whites in Ukraine. The author emphasizes especially the "White General" Vladimir Biskupskii, who later played such a prominent role in Aufbau, actively worked with the Nazis, and even claimed later in 1939 that the Union of the Russian People was the first fascist/national-socialist organization (55).
Kellogg underlines the role of the "White emigres" Scheubner-Richter, Vinberg, and Rosenberg and of Dietrich Eckart, the volkish ideologue closely involved with them, in the elaboration of Nazi ideology and especially its absorption of anti-Bolshevism and antisemitism, in particular the theory of a world-Jewish conspiracy (chapters 8, 217-44, esp. 243). To stress the influence of these four "writers of the apocalypse" on Hitler, Kellogg does not refrain from the questionable proposition that Hitler was not an antisemite and considered himself a socialist even during much of 1919--this about a person who already in 1917 spoke of Jewish murderers of the nation, 15,000-20,000 of whom it would be necessary to gas !2 In time the 15,000 became 6 million, and the mustard gas employed on the fronts of World War I was exchanged for the Zyklon-B used in the gas chambers of the death camps.
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Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg facilitated the synthesis of German volkish theories of spiritual and race superiority with the apocalyptic conceptions of the Whites about an international Jewry striving for world rule. Thus Eckart and Rosenberg especially influenced Hitler, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had a profound influence on them. Under their influence, Hitler's antisemitism significantly intensified from November 1919 to the summer of 1920 (73).
It would be possible to expand on Kellogg's interpretation, but likely enough any specialist familiar with the history of the Russian Civil War has already noticed some questionable points, above all the question of the Whites and their ideology. Not one of the above-mentioned "White emigres" who influenced to some degree the formation of the Nazi ideology ever took part in the White movement. (3) This applies unconditionally to all the Baltic Germans--Rosenberg (whom Kellogg explicitly identifies as a White emigre), Arno Shickedanz, Otto von Kursell, and especially Max Scheubner-Richter, who emigrated to Germany before World War I. This applies just as much to Biskupskii, Shabel'skii-Bork, Taboritskii, Pavel Rafailovich Bermondt-Avalov, and especially Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa. Service in the armed forces of the puppet Ukrainian government under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskii, which rested on German bayonets, is no evidence of adherence to the White movement. Quite the opposite, it fundamentally contradicted the doctrine of the White movement: the restoration of a Russia One-and-Undivided.
For the record, Biskupskii headed the puppet "West-Russian" government in Berlin between July and September 1919. Bermondt-Avalov commanded the Western Volunteer Army formed in 1919 in Germany from Russian POWs and German volunteers, who constituted the great majority of the army staff (40,000 of 52,000) (95). He maintained a German orientation and during the planning of military operations cooperated with German General Rudiger von der Goltz. He refused to unite with the Northwestern Army of one of the leaders of the White movement, General Nikolai Nikolaevich Iudenich. As Kellogg himself correctly writes, "the German generals believed that Bermondt-Avalov's forces would counterbalance the army of General Nikolai Iudenich in Estonia, which they regarded as fully under the control of the British" (92). On 9 September 1919, the day of the opening of the offensive against Petrograd, Bermondt-Avalov undertook an attack on the White forces in Latvia; he was pronounced a traitor by Iudenich. In October 1919, Bermondt-Avalov, together with German forces, occupied Riga, where an attempt to form a pro-German government was undertaken. Having been defeated by White forces in Latvia and Estonia supported by the Anglo-French fleet, Bermondt-Avalov retreated to German territory, where his forces were disarmed. Both Biskupskii and Bermondt-Avalov were unconditionally condemned by the leaders of the White movement.
The reader should recall that the White Movement emerged with the aim of restoring the Eastern Front in order to fulfill Russia's commitment to its allies to continue the war with Germany. The Whites saw the Bolsheviks as German agents and opposition to them as part of the struggle with their "masters," the Germans. With no less fervor, the Whites fought every sort of separatism. Ukrainian separatists, whether advocates of the creation of an independent Ukraine under the aegis of Germany or some other power, occupied nearly as high a place on the Whites' list of enemies as the Bolsheviks.
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How little the author understands the essence of the White movement appears, for example, in this statement: "Hitler continued to use White emigres, especially Ukrainian nationalists, to destabilize Soviet rule after the failure of the Hitler/Ludendorf Putsch" (245, italics added). This is the precise analogue of Soviet propaganda, according to which the White movement incorporated all opponents of Soviet power to be forced abroad, including Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, nationalists of every stripe, Trotskyites, and so on. It deserves repeating that the Ukrainian nationalists were enemies of the Whites no less than were the Bolsheviks.
Among the Bolsheviks' opponents were advocates of German orientation. In part these were Germanophiles with prerevolutionary credentials, in part pragmatists who believed that the war was being decided in favor of Germany and that it was necessary to come to terms with the victors. Thus the leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov, attempted to establish contact with the German ambassador in Kiev, which resulted in his loss of leadership over the party. His colleagues did not forgive his "betrayal." Cooperation (or attempts at cooperation) with the Germans were condemned without trial by the Whites and their supporters.
In this way, the implications of the book's subtitle-that White emigres helped form national-socialist ideology--might be simply crossed out as having nothing to do with historical reality. This is the most serious mistake the author makes in those parts of the work that treat the realities of Russian history and culture, but it is not the only one. For example, without any basis whatsoever he describes the philosemitic philosophy of Vladimir Solov'ev as antisemitic.
Despite all of what I would call the eccentricities in Kellogg's book and despite certain factual errors, the author succeeds in showing many important sides of the relationship between Russian Germanophiles or right-wing radicals (I would use one of these expressions instead of the historically misleading "White emigres") and German extreme rightists during the first five postwar years. (The title of the book gives the years 1917 to 1945, but most attention is devoted to the 1919-23 period.) From my point of view, the Baltic Germans who played such an important role in the foundation of National Socialism represented an exceptional circumstance, and one should not view their activity in the framework of the relationship between Russian emigres and the Nazis. They were educated in German culture, their mother tongue was German, and they considered Germany and not Russia to be their homeland. Their role in the establishment of National Socialism is well known. Hitler later joked that the Volkischer Beobachter of the late 1910s and early 1920s could be given the subtitle "Baltic Publications." (4)
Russian Germanophilia is an extremely interesting phenomenon. One French general, in despair, called Biskupskii "more German than the Germans themselves" (94). In the 1930s, a number of Russian emigres in Germany served the Nazis not out of opportunism but from ideological commitment. Between 1919 and 1923, it was a matter of a union between losers in World War I. The extreme right segment of the Russian emigration counted on a union with its German counterparts in the struggle against Bolshevism; the Nazis considered an alliance with the Russian radical Right useful in the campaign to undo the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. Both sides were dissatisfied with the results of the war. The basis for this union, in my opinion, was not only illiberalism and antisemitism but also their common weakness: the Russian rightists could not independently take on the Bolsheviks, just as the Germans could not handle their own Left--not to mention the victorious powers. As Kellogg's book shows, Hungarian nationalists were also ready to unite with this emerging "right international."
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These obvious mutual interests made the Russian emigres ready to participate-and they did participate-in the German rightists' attempts to seize power, whether in the putsch of Wolfgang Kapp (Berlin, March 1920) or the Nazi Beer-Hall Putsch in Munich (November 1923). German rightists saw the Russian rightists as allies. It is indicative that Scheubner Richter (and I repeat, to call him a White emigre is nonsense) took part in the congress of Russian extreme rightists in May 1921 in Bad Reicheshalle (Bavaria), making his speech in both German and Russian, greeting the gathering on behalf of German right-nationalist monarchist circles, and expressing hopes for joint reconstruction work and the reconstruction of a great and powerful Russia (146-47). It is hard to imagine similar words from the lips of Nazi ideologues ten years later!
In October 1921, Scheubner-Richter traveled to Budapest, where he conducted talks with Minister-President Gyula Gombos and General von Lampe in hopes of obtaining support for the creation of an independent Ukraine (151-52). Of course, he could not receive support from von Lampe and from the leaders of the Russian army in general, the remnants of which were located at that time in Bulgaria and Serbia. They were pro-French and oriented toward Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and not Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, the pretender to the imperial throne supported by some of the right-wing Russian emigres. Kirill Vladimirovich and his wife Victoria of Saxony-Coburg were living part of the time in a hotel in Munich, and part of the time on her estate in Coburg. Kirill Vladimirovich supported the National Socialists. Biskupskii transferred sizable sums of money from Kirill and Victoria to Hitler in 1922 (157-58).
The hatred of German (and some Russian) rightists for France was so strong that when rumors circulated of an impending invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1923 by Poland and Romania with French backing, with Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to head the new Russian power, the rightists were prepared to fight on the side of the Red Army against the aggressors rather than support the campaign against the Bolsheviks (161-63). It should be noted that, as in many other cases, these were nothing more than rumors.
In sum, the common enemies of Aufbau (including to a significant degree Russian emigres and Baltic Germans) and the German volkish movement were the Entente, the Weimar Republic, the Soviet Republic, and, of course, "International Jewry"
According to Kellogg, at least up until the November putsch of 1923, Hitler had not yet worked out the concept of conquering "living space" (Lebensraum) in the East. He counted on a union between a Nazi Germany and national-socialist governments in the East--in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics. This was exactly the plan of Aufbau (167, 180). Only after the failure of the November putsch did Hitler openly speak of "living space" in the East (185). It is not necessary to explain that Aufbau's plan was the nightmare of the White movement: the breakup of Russia and the hegemony of Germany.
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Among the most interesting, if not sensational, discoveries discussed in Kellogg's book concerns the trip of a German (or rather Bavarian) delegation headed by Scheubner-Richter to Crimea while it was under Wrangel in 1920, with the aim of concluding an agreement on a common fight against the Bolsheviks. On the road, the delegation of German rightists carried on talks in Budapest with the Hungarian dictator Admiral Miklos Horthy. The commander of the Hungarian army told Scheubner-Richter that he was ready to provide the soldiers for a common German-White struggle to destroy the arrangements established by the Treaty of Versailles. In these talks, General Rudiger von der Goltz, the former commander of joint German-Russian anti-Bolshevik formations in the Baltic, now living in Hungary under an assumed name, took part.
In Crimea, Scheubner-Richter was able to convince himself to his great satisfaction of the extreme unpopularity of the Entente and France, especially in the army and among the population. He carried on extremely success ful talks with Wrangel on collaboration. As a result, a number of German technical specialists and merchants traveled to Crimea, and in the ranks of Wrangel's army a significant number of Russian and German officers arrived from Bavaria with the support of Scheubner-Richter's associates. However, Scheubner-Richter and his Bavarian sponsors were bothered by the considerable number of members of the Kadet Party, known for their pro-French orientation, in Wrangel's government. To reassure his critics in right-wing Bavarian financial circles, Wrangel accepted into his service several extreme rightists, including the Ukrainian Cossack Ivan Rodionov, well known for his publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1918 in the official newspaper of the Don Host under Ataman General Petr Krasnov (118-21).
All these facts might lead to a serious reconsideration of our notions of the Russian Civil War--if they corresponded to historical reality. First, there were hardly any members of the Kadet Party in Wrangel's government, in contrast to the government (Special Conference) of General Anton Denikin. The presence of rightists in Wrangel's circle, among them former senior officials of the tsarist regime, on the contrary, elicited cautious attitudes on the part of the Kadets, accusations of monarchism and reaction, and so on. Second, Wrangel's politics was diametrically opposed to that which Kellogg ascribes to him: the general cut short antisemitic propaganda; fired the director of the Press Department, the extreme right-winger Georgii Vladimirovich Nemirovich-Danchenko; and named the comparatively liberal Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadskii to the posts The Ukrainian (in actual fact Don) Cossack Ivan Rodionov occupied no significant posts; and of course, one can least of all imagine Wrangel's "cadre policy" working on behalf of any potential Bavarian sponsors.
But most important, Kellogg's discoveries fundamentally contradict everything we know about Wrangel's politics, as they do common sense. Only France could offer real help to Wrangel, as the only great power de facto recognizing his government and prepared (if not selflessly), unlike Great Britain and the United States, to give practical support. The Bavarian rightists, even if they strongly desired to do so, were hardly physically capable of aiding Wrangel. One need only recall with what difficulty the delegation of Scheubner-Richter made its way to Crimea. The presence of German officers in Wrangel's army seems just as improbable. Wrangel would have had to be insane to trade a real union with France for assistance from some Bavarian rightists, whom France, of course, could have easily cut off.
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So where did Kellogg gather his information? Primarily from the reports of various French and German intelligence agencies. In this regard it would not be out of place to discuss the reliability of the sources on which Kellogg builds his case. The information of secret services is far from always reliable. Not uncommonly, the "sources" relay rumors and suppositions, construct logical deductions on the basis of unreliable references, exaggerate, or are themselves influenced by various phobias. Archival documents, even previously secret documents, are valuable in the context of other sources and have to be linked to historical reality. In a word, they require source-critical analysis. One cannot take documents at face value, and this applies even more to specific documents such as intelligence or police reports. Unfortunately, Kellogg does not indicate the type of document he is using beyond reference to the archive and fond (collection), seemingly not concerning himself with their reliability. Thus, informing us about the number of German officers in Wrangel's army at the end of July sent by the collaborators of Scheubner-Richter from Bavaria, Kellogg cites a report of the Eastern Border Police (Landesgrenzpolizei Ost, or National Border Police East) from 1 August 1920 (121 n. 60). Naturally, the question arises: where did the German border police obtain its information while located a thousand kilometers from Crimea? How could the officers from Bavaria have already been in Wrangel's army at the end of June if Scheubner-Richter's delegation arrived at Wrangel's headquarters in Sevastopol in the second half of July 1920--and that, incidentally, after a journey that included stops in Vienna and Budapest but had begun in the middle of June (118)?
Kellogg compiled a significant part of his information on the journey of the Scheubner-Richter delegation from materials of French intelligence, the Second Section. For France a possible union of Russia and Germany was a nightmare, hence such intent attention to contacts (real or imagined) between Russian and German leaders, the significance of which was often exaggerated. On the other side, the nightmare of White diplomats (for example) was the possible enslavement of Russia by Germany with the help of the Bolsheviks. As late as the end of 1920, several White diplomats were convinced that Germans were fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks. Even such a sober-minded person as the Russian ambassador in Paris, Vasilii Alekseevich Maklakov, included among the factors permitting the Red victory over Wrangel the "unbelievably talented command of the Bolsheviks by German officers and generals.... Their names are well known," writes the Russian diplomat with conviction. (6) In this case, one can only speculate about whose name misled Maklakov: perhaps he took Vasilii Konstantinovich Bliukher for a German general, while the divisional commander was in fact a Russian peasant's son (during the Napoleonic Wars one of his ancestors was decorated with the name in honor of the German commander who was a hero at Waterloo).
The fragment of Kellogg's book we have just considered suggests more general thoughts on the analysis of historical sources, on source criticism. Unfortunately, uncritical use of information offered in sources-be they archival or published-frequently leads researchers to false conclusions and to the construction of conceptions that crumble on serious examination of their source foundations. I am not suggesting that all police or intelligence organizations are unreliable. But their documents demand careful checking, something the author of the monograph under review does not always do. This is not even to mention such inherently subjective sources such as memoirs.
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A poor mastery of the historian's craft, which requires source-critical analysis, frequently misleads authors who have spent a large amount of time in the archives. As a striking example, I would like to cite the book of Anna Geifman on terrorism in Russia. Geifman, basing herself on documents of the Russian secret police, writes that these deserve trust, despite "a certain tendentiousness." As a result, uncritically following police sources, she in effect looks at events from the window of the Police Department and cites, for example, without any critical distance, a report on the recruitment of terrorists in a synagogue or about participants in Jewish self-defense groups shooting at passers-by. (7)
Michael Kellogg's book is, unfortunately, not free of various factual errors. For example, Kellogg writes about "large-scale" antisemitic pogroms that broke out in 1871 and about the expulsions of many Jews by the Russian government in 1881. Only one pogrom, however, broke out in 1871--in Odessa, and it did not have a significant impact on Russian Jewry. Numerous pogroms did in fact occur in 1881, which sparked mass Jewish emigration. But the government, despite what the author writes, did not expel Jews from the country. There are a considerable number of small mistakes and obvious misunderstandings. Thus Aleksei von Lampe was not a former tsarist general (124, 151); Wrangel promoted him to major-general only in 1923, in emigration. Von Lampe could not have been a representative of the Russian General Military Union (Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz, or ROVS) in 1921, since ROVS was founded in 1924 (151). Hitler reflects on the Soviet Union in 1920, though the USSR was founded in 1922 (124).
The problem of antisemitism in the ideology and "practice" of the White movement deserves special attention. Here I speak of the actual White movement, and not about the group of Russian emigres to whom Michael Kellogg mistakenly ascribes its ideology. Not having the space to explore this issue in detail within the present review, I simply note that "officially" antisemitism was not part of the ideological arsenal of the White movement, and that its leaders published more than a few orders condemning the pogroms in which forces under their command "distinguished themselves." Nonetheless, de facto antisemitism became a trump card for the anti-Bolshevik propaganda of the Whites-the "soul of the Volunteer Army," as one of its apologists put it. (9) Later, in emigration, many participants in the White movement praised fascism; during World War II many cooperated with the Nazis, even forming with the permission and support of the German occupational powers the Russian Corps in Yugoslavia, which fought against the Yugoslav partisans. Between 1919 and 1923, however, it was quite different people, for the most part, who collaborated with the Nazis, people who had never taken part in the White movement.
The romance of the Nazis and the Russian emigres ended in part as a result of the death of Scheubner-Richter, who had served as the link between them, and in part because the Russian colony in Bavaria (and in Germany as a whole) dwindled significantly. After the German currency grew stronger, life there became more expensive, and in the mid-1920s many Russian emigres moved to France.
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Michael Kellogg's work--despite its obvious confusion about the White movement and the author's not always clear understanding of its history and nature, not to mention various tendencies in the Russian emigration--does substantially widen our knowledge of the early stage in the formation of Nazi ideology and of the mutual influences between Russian and German rightwing radicals. Kellogg demonstrates that refugees from the former Russian empire--of Russian and of German ethnicity--had greater influence on the formation of national-socialist ideology than has previously been understood in the literature. Even so, the author is inclined to exaggerate the extent of this influence. The most important part of the book, in my opinion, is its demonstration of interchanges among right-wing nationalists of various countries who lost in World War I. These nationalists attempted to destroy democratic institutions in their own countries and to enact a revanche in the lands of the victorious powers. The analysis of the formation of national-socialist ideology is equally fruitful. The stakes are high in considering this topic, for the attempt to bring Nazi mythology to life led to the demise of tens of millions of people.
Translated by Michael Gelb
(1) Henri Rollin, L'Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de la propaganda allemande d'apres des documents inedits (Paris: Gallimard, 1939); Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1965); Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981); Johannes Baur, Die russische Kolonie in Munchen 1900-1945: Deutschrussische Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000). The author of what is probably the most popular biography of Hitler, Joachim Fest, writes of the significant influence of "several" Baltic Germans in the early period of the NSDAP: loakhim [Joachim] K. Fest, Gitler: Biografiia (Perm': Kul'turnyi tsentr "Aleteia," 1993), 1: 226 (orig. pub. in 1973 as Hitler: Eine Biographie).
(2) Fest, Gitler, 128.
(3) The book mentions a number of Russian emigres who did in fact take part in the White movement: for example, General Konstantin Sakharov and the writer Georgii Vladimirovich Nemirovich-Danchenko. They played no role whatsoever in the formation of Nazi ideology, however, and Michael Kellogg devotes no significant attention to their activities.
(4) Fest, Gitler, 226.
(5) On this, see O. V. Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 266-68-reviewed in Kritika 7, 3 (2006): 667-74.
(6) V. A. Maklakov to B. A. Bakhmetev [Boris Bakhmetieff], 7 December 1920, in "Sovershenno lichno i doveritel 'no!" B. A. Bakhmetev-V A. Maklakov: Perepiska 1919-1951, 3 vols., ed. O. V. Budnitskii (Moscow: ROSSSPEN, and Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001-2), 1: 297.
(7) See my review of Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill! Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), in Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 5 (1995): 186-87.
(8) John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21-24, 39-190.
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(9) See Peter Kenez, "Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War," in Pogroms, 293-313; and Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei, 158-367.
Institute of History
Russian Academy of Sciences
Ul. Dmitriia Ul'ianova, 19
Moscow 117036
Russian Federation
obud@mail.ru
COPYRIGHT 2007 Slavica Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
Oleg Budnitskii "Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945". Kritika. FindArticles.com. 17 Dec, 2009.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_69...n28430616/
COPYRIGHT 2007 Slavica Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
