Hi everybody,
I am about a week away from finishing the eighth script of a new history series I am writing for Daily Wire. The three series I had previously done for them — Apollo 11: What We Saw, The Cold War: What We Saw and America’s Forgotten Heroes — contained four, thirteen and seven episodes, respectively. I had not the faintest idea when I took this latest series that the amount of research, note taking, organization and writing required for these eight new episodes would be at least — at least! — five times the total for the previous 24 episodes combined.
Late last week, I discovered a document that I have been looking for for the past four months. It was a first-hand account of Lenin’s Red Terror, written by one S.P. Melgunov, at the end of the murder spree in 1924. I finally found it buried in the US Archives ofter some four months of searching. Over the last 72 hours I have managed to read all 96,992 words, pull 16,000 or so, and then finally edit that down to 4,220 words for inclusion in Episode 6 of the new series. Episode 6 is called The Red Terror.
Because of this (and also due to the demands of the research and writing for the past five months) I was not able to edit or post our regular content despite my strong desire to do so. I was simply too exhausted at the end of the night at the studio, which has been around 2-3am for the past several weeks. I will get on those now and should be caught up by Wednesday.
I would to apologize for the delay, and thank you, as always, for your continued patience. For those who have seen the previous historical series, I can say with confidence that this is the most powerful by far; more importantly, this one needs to be seen because modern left-wing Americans have to understand just what Lenin and his Communists were and what they did to their own people.
I’ll conclude here with a few snippets of the work I have been doing for the past four days. Here are four first-person examples of what happened during Lenin’s Red Terror, as related by that unsung Russian hero, S.P. Melgunov, as the Communists turned their secret police, the Cheka, out to murder and terrorize their own people:
As soon as the snow melts, the friends and families of the dead sneak to the creek, single and in groups, looking over their shoulders in fear. At first the visitors were being arrested, but there were so many of them, and they kept coming despite the arrests. The flood waters exposed the victims of communist persecution by washing away dirt. How many? Unlikely one could tell. Even the Cheka itself does not know. Approximately 1500 have been executed with and without documentation in 1918 and 1919. The most recent corpses – executed late last autumn – have not yet decomposed. Wearing nothing but underwear, with the hands tied behind their backs, sometimes in sacks or completely naked… It is frightening to look at the bottom of the scary creek! But the visitors look, peering into it to find any marks that would allow them to identify the body of a relative… …And with every day that creek becomes scarier and scarier for the Saratov residents. It consumes more and more victims. The steep slope slides after every execution, burying the dead; the creek widens. But every Spring flood water unearths the latest execution victims…
There is a revered icon of The Virgin Mary in the village of Vyshinskaya. The Spanish flu epidemic was ravaging the residents. They organized a prayer and procession of the Cross, for which local Cheka arrested both priests and the icon… The peasants learned of desecration of the icon by Cheka and went like a wall to rescue the God’s Mother. These were women, elderly and children. The Cheka fired on them with machine guns. The machine gun is downing the ranks, but they are coming, without seeing anything, over the corpses, over the wounded, crawling ahead, mothers holding the babies, with everyone screaming: “Mother, the savior, save and pardon us, we all are going to die for you..!
In Alekseyevskaya village of Voronezh region, a victim is exposed to a heated bath, than sent out into the cold; (Russian winters routinely hit 60 degrees below zero), The naked victims have been drenched with cold water in the winter cold, turning them into ice statues..Freezing into an ice statue was widely practiced in Orel region during the food confiscations.
Here is a striking description of political exile by G. M. Yudovich, transferred from Moscow to Ustsysolsk of North-Dvinsk region in the fall of 1921: “The day brought new horror: food. We were fed with half-rotten fish only. There were no grains – the jailers stole it. Kitchenwares are never washed. Everything is cooked in the dirty pots. The pots, used to cook disgusting broth, are teeming with incredible number of worms… There are 9 bunk beds made of boards. No mattresses, pillows, nothing. The women in tattered clothes, some almost naked, half-dead, are laying on the beds and floor… The floor is concrete and never cleaned…Underwear is worn unwashed and unchanged for up to two months. I cannot recall another night, so horrible as one spent in Vyatka prison. Billions of insects. The inmates are throwing themselves around, moaning, begging for water… We were given “soup” at 8 PM. I never saw anything like that before: it was cooked from the dirty horse heads; the pieces of horse hides, hair, some slime, bugs are floating in dark stinky liquid… People eat that horrible broth eagerly, take turns at swallowing, fighting for potato peel… A few minutes later many of them vomit. So ends a day and comes another nightmarish night.
This testimony, which has been effectively lost to history, will finally see the light of day thanks to your patience, support and understanding, and I wanted to personally thank you for all three. I hope and expect all eight episodes to be completed one week from now, at which point I can return to Firewalls and a new content series I have been forced to delay while I try to dig these stories out of the Russian permafrost.
Bill