September 28, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Scale of the Russian Civil War (1917-22)
With the onslaught of the troika of the
World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War all coming in
series and overlapping each other the cruelty, suffering and misery could not
be greater than this for any nation.
The Russian Civil War was fought between
Vladimir Lenin’s Communist Bolsheviks backed up the Red Army against the
loosely allied forces called the White Army that stood for economic capitalism,
monarchy and alternative form of socialism.
The scale of this civil war raises the
hairs on the nape of my neck when I read about it; it included European part of
Russia, Central Asia, Mongolia, South Russia, Caucasus, Eastern Russia,
Siberia, Far East of Russia, Baltics including Lithuania, Latvia and Northern
Russia that includes Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.
From the scale of it one would not be wrong
to call it a mini World War.
The loss of human lives also justifies in
calling it so; the death toll ranges from 7,000,000 to 12,000,000 most of them
being civilians.
Many of them took place in the straight
forward mass killings and summary executions that now goes in the name of Red
Terror and decossackization which was the systemic policy of “elimination,
extermination, deportation of a whole territory” targeting the Cossacks of the
Russian Empire localized around the region of the Don and Kuban.
I am not sure why there was such a hatred
against the Cossacks but my guess is they being of Turkish origins may have been
considered as ethnically different and thus “foreigners”.
Besides the direct killings and genocide
perpetrated during the civil war, death due to starvation accompanying droughts
and famine death came in yet another form.
Epidemic!
Soviet Russia being unique, it was neither
plague nor flu that was the killer but typhus fever that is caused by the
bacteria Rickettsia prowazekii and spread by body lice.
The Typhus took more than 3,000,000 Soviet lives
alone in 1920!
Like Cossacks millions of Jews were also
racially targeted and pogroms against them in Southern Russia and Ukraine
reached epic proportions.
By 1922 it is estimated that there were 7
million children in the streets of Russia presumably orphans.
The Russian Civil War can easily be said to
be one of the greatest and most under spoken national catastrophe that Europe has
yet seen.
This is the bitter truth behind romantic ideological
revolutions that is often cherished by many dreamers of utopian society that
will never exist.
It is the bitter realization that any sane
man will come to acknowledge that the greatest lie that any state sells to its
citizens is some variation of the first sentence of the second paragraph of the
American Declaration of Independence dated July 4, 1776 that was first used by
Thomas Jefferson but later stylized into its current form by Benjamin Franklin.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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