Westbrook Pegler
Columbus Ledger/January 4, 1956
The National Broadcasting Company recently produced a good historical television fill-in on the Russian revolutions of March and November, 1917, and the continuation of the communist imperial war for world conquest down to the present. Of course no single TV production, probably no effort in any medium, can tell the whole story with all its conflicting phases. Yet NBC has made a good start and, more important than the actual scenes revived for us in this show, has done something to remind the American people that we never have known much about this terrible subject and have forgotten much that we did know.
So all of us who respect truth and try to keep history reasonably honest should offer thanks and congratulations on a daring venture.
The subject is dangerous and attacks upon it call for daring because many people would like to suppress the facts of their own complicity. There were many naive Americans who in 1917 thoughtlessly rejoiced at the news of the overthrow of the Russian imperial house. The czars had a bad reputation among us, probably worse than they deserved, because they were constantly hammered by propaganda here and had no machine of their own to create a counter-force. However we have always been sanctimonious about the brutality of Czars and dictators in other countries and our loud loathing of the Czar was an expression of a native instinct. At the time of the Kerensky revolution in March few Americans had the sense to realize that this probably meant the elimination of the great Russian armies and the release of many German divisions to attack us in the west. That did happen after some futile efforts by Kerensky and the general.
Kerensky was a weak fellow. He has been living in New York for many years now, shunned by the few remaining traditional imperial Russians and the Communists as well. A man who was secretary to a member of his ephemeral cabinet came along in recent years to a position of influence over Marshall Field in his lurid exploits in tabloid political journalism. This man is Gregory Zilbourg a doctor specializing in psychiatry.
Although most of us were pleased to hear the startling news of the First Revolution simply because we had no sense of the obvious immediate consequences, others did know what it meant in the long run and rejoiced nevertheless. It almost meant victory for the Germans, Austrians and Turks, and that probably would have been a comparative blessing to Western civilization because communism and the degradation of the human being which it caused would have been frustrated. The monarchs would have kept their thrones and even Russia would have retained her royal system. The Bolsheviks who rose to power in the November Revolution never have been headed and the empire of the Czars was small and benevolent by comparison.
Although the Russian people were hungry and despondent, they did not make the revolutions which have been attributed to some spontaneous stirring of a mighty resentment and longing within them. They are now depicted as strange, sentimental oafs with an inexpressible devotion to their homeland called Mother Russia. But in those days that affection, which probably is not wholly imaginary, was directed at the Czar and his family. The Oriental hordes included in the population of the empire were not regarded as Russians either in the empire or elsewhere. The real Russians are a particular breed and in those revolutions they were the catspaws of manipulators within and outside their homeland. At one stage they almost overthrew Lenin and Trotsky.
The Germans were excellent conspirators as we learned by some of their activities among us, and they played a great part in the March Revolution because the advantage to them was plain to the simplest German soldier.
My own curiosity has sent me to great libraries where I find much information which flashed by the vision of my generation and was quickly forgotten. Our people were more angry over prohibition in its early experimental days than we were over fateful developments in Russia Germany and the Balkans which in recent years have imposed military conscription on us as a permanent phase of our economy, citizenship and state.
Unquestionably we and the British let Leon Trotsky, then known as Bronstein, walk out of New York and into Petrograd and if there was a secret deal in Washington and London to this effect, as it would seem there must have been, it has never been revealed. So not all the story of this continuing disaster can be depicted in riots and Cossack charges on Russian civilians. Much of it was told in day-by-day news items in old government prints and private files and much of it has never been told and never will be.
The Archive 