I notice that the film omits to mention some of Kolchak's war crimes. And he had a few of them. (I'm not saying that the Bolsheviks didn't but Kolchak's own crimes are airbrushed out here)
shareFor example?
Don't Care What The Governments Say
They're All Bought And Paid For Anyway
- Sun Green
I don't think Kolchak was particularly bad by White standards. Semenov, Ungern-Sternberg and Wrangel were much worse.
"You know what else isn't cool, Bobby? Hell."
....and Wrangel were much worse.
Kolchak also became a HECK of a tabloid reporter too....
share"Remember the NKVD machine gun teams behind mowing down Krasnoy Armija soldiers who retreated in one of the opening scenes of Enemy at the Gates?"
I'm fairly sure that was a pre-Revolutionary invention. That was part of the trouble in WWI.
"There is also the Bolshevik invention called the GULag."
Actually, again, the Siberian prison camp was a tsarist invention. It's just the Communist version was nastier. Most of the early Communists, including Lenin had been stuck in these camps. I think Lenin escaped three times.
Remember Tsarist Russia was no paradise either. It has a few eerie similarities to Stalin's Russia, e.g. camps, secret police, lack of political parties etc. It was only between 1905-1917 that any semblence of Russian democracy started to emerge, and that was patchy too.
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It's not "sci-fi", it's SF!
The GULAG was tsarist carryover much improved by modern technology/efficiency. Better transportation meant more people got sent into the system. Improved food production and provisioning meant more prisoners could be held in the camps. Bigger bureaucracy meant more camps.
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Hard to tell how bad these people were today, after 80 years of brainwashing first by the winning side (USSR) and today, unfortunately, with brainwashed fathers and grandfathers (who never actually saw those atrocities) telling the same account to their children/grandchildren.
When Union won the war vs Confederacy, the winning side at least didn't try to demonize the confederates as people, even if their ideology was deeply flawed. I'm sure there were atrocities committed by both communists and Whites, but well... I wouldn't believe a thing that came from the propaganda machine that was the Soviet Union...
Of course, as a Latvian, I can at least be glad that the Reds won during that time because we at least had the independence until 1940. If the Whites had won, we'd be under Russia permanently perhaps until today. On the other hand, an old establishment Russia (with its monarchy etc.) would have been forced to change in the coming years anyway and I can only imagine how the world would have turned out if the great mistake that was USSR never existed.