White Army

Essentially, there, there was, there were local elections where the, it was framed as a mandate in the press for the establishment of a republic and the tossing out of, uh, the old system.

And so it just kind of happened, and, and it, and there's, there's sort of a parallel when you look at what happened in Russia, where people just lost confidence in the old system, and so, um, they waited too long before the White Army, like, asserted itself again.

The, the advances of the, of the Reds were, were massive because a lot of people kind of bought the propaganda that they were going against the failure of the old system instead of it actually having a very clear goal, right? Um, when you look at the memoirs of the people in the Republic, the people in most of the political parties, they didn't believe in a republic.

The, the conservatives certainly did not.

He went into the really deep end of reenactment.

He also started publishing articles in the historical almanac Belaya Gvardiya, White Guard, and in the small-circulation Moscow journal Voyennaya Byil, Military Past, past in the sense of, well, very archaic version of it, where he eventually took a seat on the editorial board.

He was writing for, and partly to, a readership of a few hundred people who agreed with him about the war that had ended in 1920.

The height of this point came in May 1996, when the Drozdov Association, a historical and memorial organization originally founded by white émigrés in Paris, named for a volunteer army general who died in 1919, formally enrolled the 25-year-old Girkin and gave him a rank.

The clean army had degenerated into an armed street gang flying an imperial banner.

And here, in the basement stench of besieged Sloviansk, the foundational paradox of Igor Strelkov is resolved permanently, preserved in the official administrative paperwork that survived this war.

For a quarter of a century, Igor Girkin had constructed his entire identity around a burning religious devotion to the White Guard.

He despised the Bolsheviks.

If you've never looked up Operation Trust, look that up.

While the White Army was getting slaughtered by the Jew-led Bolsheviks, there was this whole propaganda campaign to say

that the White Army was winning.

So don't worry.

That's what it is.

Essentially, there, there was, there were local elections where the, it was framed as a mandate in the press for the establishment of a republic and the tossing out of, uh, the old system.

And so it just kind of happened, and, and it, and there's, there's sort of a parallel when you look at what happened in Russia, where people just lost confidence in the old system, and so, um, uh, they waited too long before the White Army, like asserted itself again.

The, the advances of the, of the Reds were, were massive because a lot of people kind of bought the propaganda that they were going against the failure of the old system instead of it actually having a very clear goal, right? Um, when you look at the memoirs of the people in the Republic, the people in most of the political parties, they didn't believe in a republic.

The, the conservatives certainly did not.

My grandfather was a member of the minor aristocracy.

When the Bolsheviks came to power, he joined Rangel's White Army.

When the Crimea fell, he was in the rear guard.

He shot him.