ALEXANDRA PREITSCHOPF
A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume V, Number 01 (2022): 10-27

War, Hate, and Aggressivity

A WAR AGAINST BOLSHEVISM, FOR THE LOVE OF THE
HOMELAND? THE NOVEL ENDLESS HATE (1934/1938) BY PJOTRKRASNOV AS AN ANTI-COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA TOOL IN THE
INTERWAR PERIOD
Alexandra Preitschopf

Abstract
The paper explores the novel Endless Hate by the Russian émigré writer Pjotr
Krasnov in the context of anti-communism in interwar Europe. The Russian versionof the book was published in Paris in 1934, the German edition in 1938. This isrelated to the fact that Krasnov – as an exposed Nazi sympathizer – went toGermany in 1937, after several years of exile in France. Previously, he had fought
as a Cossack general against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. His deep
hatred against the Soviet Union is also evident in his novel that describes thechanges before and after the October Revolution of 1917, glorifying “good old
Russia” and depicting an extremely dark picture of everyday life undercommunism. The book is only one among many anti-communist writings by Russian
emigrants in Europe – despite their influence on the general discourse on the Soviet
Union, their discursive impact has not yet been extensively researched. Using theexample of Krasnov’s novel as a historical source for opinion forming in theinterwar period, my aim is thus to show how émigré literature could serve as apolitical propaganda tool and a call to war against Bolshevism.
Keywords: anti-communism, Soviet Union, White émigrés, literature, propaganda,
National Socialism, Second World War

Introduction
A bunch of hungry, miserable, half-barefoot people hurriedly strove along the snowy, slippery, badsidewalks (…). The long hours of Soviet service and the even longer “queuing,” sometimes startingat night, to get a piece of stinking, dried fish or a herring, the eternal fear of doing something wrong
and then being “lishenets,” which means being exposed to starvation, all this wore people down.

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period
Everyone hid in the corners of their cold, overcrowded apartments. No one dared to speak a loudword.1This gloomy insight into St. Petersburg/Leningrad in the early 1920s is taken from the novel
Endless Hate by the Russian émigré writer Pyotr Krasnov. It was first published in 1934 under
the Russian title Nenavist (“Hate”) in Paris and awarded two years later with a literary prize by
the Vatican, the German edition Der endlose Haß appeared in Berlin in 1938. In over 600 pages,
Krasnov describes the changes before and after the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. As
the quote indicates, he depicts an extremely dark picture of the Soviet Union – misery, hunger,
fear, and oppression dominate people’s everyday lives. This is hardly surprising, consideringthat Krasnov was a prominent emigrant who dedicated his life to the fight against Bolshevism.
Initially, he fought as a Cossack leader in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites
against the Red Army. After his emigration in 1919, he began to stir up sentiment against
communism and the Soviet Union in Western Europe through his publications, allied with the
French extreme right and later with the National socialists. 2
As an emigrant, he was far from being an individual case. As a result of the October
Revolution and its subsequent excesses of violence, economic grievances and famines, morethan 1.5 million people emigrated to Europe, above all to cities such as Berlin, Munich, Paris,
Prague, Belgrade, Sofia and others.3 Their social composition was very diverse, ranging fromthe monarchist far right and aristocrats to bourgeois liberals, Mensheviks, Socialist
Revolutionaries, social democrats, Trotskyists, dissident communists etc. Consequently, someof them – especially military members, journalists, writers and former politicians – became
important anti-communist voices in Europe. 4
Since anti-communism in general was a central political driving force of the interwar
period, be it on the part of the far right, the conservative or social democratic side, Krasnov’s
and other émigrés’ writings easily found a wide and diverse audience. Nevertheless, theircontribution to the intellectual mindset of the time and their discursive impact have not yet been
extensively researched.5 Using the example of Krasnov’s Endless Hate as a historical source

1

Pjotr N. Krasnow, Der endlose Haß (Berlin: Vier Falken Verlag, 1938), p. 372. All quotes from the novel aretaken from the German edition from 1938 and have been translated into English by the author.
2
For more details and references, see the further explanations in this article.
3
Pavel Polian & Myriam Ahmad-Schleicher, “Neue Heimat: Die vier Wellen der russischen Emigration im 20.
Jahrhundert,” Osteuropa, Vol. 53, No. 11 (November 2003), p. 1678; Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin & Giles
Scott-Smith (Eds.), Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. Agents, Activities, and Networks(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 3.
4This concerns for instance (and among many others) the Baltic Germans Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter andAlfred Rosenberg, and the Russian monarchists Vasilij Biskupskij and Fjodor Vinberg on the side of the early
National Socialists, Ivan Ilyin, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Alja Rachmanova as Nazi
sympathizers as well, Alexander Denikin and Georges Lodygensky as White monarchists, Pavel Milyukov andVladimir Burtsev as more liberal voices, Boris Savinkov, Sergei Melgunov, Alexander Kerenski, Boris MirkinGetzevich and Oreste Rosenfeld on the socialist or social democratic side, Boris Souvarine and Victor Serge as
former communists and fervent anti-Stalinists.
5
See also Nicolas Lebourg, “White Émigrés and International Anti-Communism in France (1918–1939),” IERES
Occasional Papers, Vol. 9 (December 2020), p. 5.

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

for mind making,6 my aim is thus to show how émigré literature could serve as a propaganda
tool to influence and mobilize people and was (mis)used to mentally prepare a new war, a“crusade against Bolshevism:” What role does emotionalization and the concepts of love andhate play in this context? Thus, how does Krasnov’s novel generate hate against the Soviets
and appeal to patriotic love for his homeland? Moreover, how does the author deter his nonRussian readers in particular from Bolshevism and implicitly warn them against a similarsystem in their own country? And why and how were Krasnov’s narratives also connectable toNazi propaganda?
After a few general remarks on anti-communism in the interwar period, I will focus on
Krasnov’s biography and his novel and situate it in its socio-political context. In this way, mypaper is intended to shed new light on this hitherto neglected source and contribute via its
analysis to the research on anti-communist (war) propaganda by the Russian émigrécommunity.
Anti-communism in Interwar Europe
In early 1933, the Vatican, under Pope Pius XI, initiated an international novel contest for antiBolshevik literature. In order to remain in the background, the contest was officially announced
by the Catholic Académie d’éducation et d’entraide sociales in Paris. Nonetheless, Pius XI
supervised the entire process – the call for entries, the selection of jury members, and theawarded novels. Besides the strictly catholic character of the competition, the institutions andindividuals involved had also close ties to the extreme right: The Académie d’éducation etd’entreaide sociales was affiliated with the nationalist, right-wing Action française7; the twomain persons responsible for the contest, the historian of religion Georges Goyau, who had
arranged the contact with the Vatican, as well as the president of the jury, Henry Bordeaux,There are a large number of publications, especially in cultural and literary studies, on the Russian emigration perse, as well as a number of individual biographies of prominent representatives of this emigration. (For a general
overview see for example (selective choice): Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian
Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Karl Schlögel (Ed.), Der große
Exodus. Die russische Emigration und ihre Zentren 1917–1941, (München: C. H. Beck, 1994); John Glad, Russia
Abroad. Writers, History, Politics (Washington: Birchbark Press, 1999); Simon Karlinsky, Freedom from Violenceand Lies: Essays on Russian Poetry and Music (Brookline: Academic Studies Press, 2013); Greta N. Slobin,
Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora (1919–1939) (Brookline: Academic Studies Press,2013).) Comprehensive studies on the contribution of Russian emigrants to anti-communism in the interwar
period, especially in a transnational perspective, are, however, rather limited to the political connections of someWhite emigrants to fascism and National Socialism, especially to the early National Socialists in Munich until
1923. (Concerning the latter see for instance Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés andthe Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and for a first
overview “Antirevolutionäre Emigranten aus Russland im München der 1920er Jahre,” Osmikon. Das
Forschungsportal zu Ost-, Ostmittel-, und Südosteuropa, accessed October 26, 2022,(https://www.osmikon.de/themendossiers/muenchen-und-die-russische-revolution/weisse-emigranten-inmuenchen). Contrary to this research tendency, research on anti-communism among social-democratic or former
communist Russian émigrés is still largely lacking.
6
To the author’s knowledge, the novel has not yet been analyzed in detail in this context.
7
Franz Stadler, “Die unterschlagenen Geheimnisse der Milchfrau in Ottakring,” Zwischenwelt. Zeitschrift für
Kultur des Exils und Widerstands, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2018), pp. 8-9.

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

openly sympathized with fascism. 8 In this sense, it is not surprising that the third prize wasawarded (in 1936) to Pyotr Krasnov for Nenavist. The first prize as well went to a far-rightWhite émigré, the Austrian-based bestseller author Alya Rachmanova for her novel Die Fabrik
des neuen Menschen (“The Factory of the New Man”), published in Salzburg in 1935. 9
The result does not only indicate the significance of Krasnov and Russian émigré writers
in general, but the contest is an ideal example of the complex, transnational interconnections ofanti-communism in interwar Europe. It demonstrates the manifold lines of connection between
politics, propaganda, and the literary establishment, and highlights some of its key players:
religious institutions, the Catholic Church and the Vatican in particular, conservative forces,
the far right and fascists, and Russian emigrants as representatives of the “old,” prerevolutionary Russia.
At this point, it has to be noted that anti-communism is a phenomenon with a multitudeof manifestations with highly diverse, often contradictory and sometimes even diametrically
opposed political identities and motivations.10 With regard to the interwar period, the spectrum
ranges from anarchism, the socialist left and social democracy, bourgeois circles and Christian
movements, to the far right, authoritarian and fascist political systems, although the crossings
were sometimes fluid. 11 In addition, important aspects of anti-communism are its adaptability,
flexibility, and diverse “applicability.” Jean-François Fayet, for example, speaks of a“chameleon tactic” of anti-communism in order to strengthen the respective existing order andtraditional elites:
The strength of anti-communism lay in its ability to penetrate existing structures and to blend inwith local culture, and it is this that explains the diversity of the phenomenon. Unlike fascism, it was
not meant in any way to compete with the established parties. On the contrary, it wished to endorse
the existing order and relied on the traditional elites that it conceived of as the ‘legitimate
authorities’. Consequently, the modus operandi of its principal stakeholders was that of seeking to
influence existing structures rather than creating specifically anti-communist institutions.12

Despite their diversity, the various manifestations of anti-communism are connected by
the underlying expression of fear. First and foremost, this implies the often-invoked fear of
Giuliana Chamedes, “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-communism in the
1930s,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2016), pp. 272-273.
9
The second prize was awarded to the Austrian aristocrat Erik Maria Kuehnelt-Leddihn for Jesuiten, Spießer und
Bolschewiken (“Jesuits, Bourgeois and Bolsheviks”) (Stéphanie Roulin, “Le concours international de romans
antibolcheviques, ou comment faire de la ‘bonne littérature’ médiocre (1933–1936),” in Claude Hauser, Thomas
Loué, Jean-Yves Mollier, and François Vallotton (Eds.), La diplomatie par le livre. Réseaux et circulationinternationale de l’imprimé de 1880 à nos jours (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011) , p. 6.) For Rachmanova, see
further Alexandra Preitschopf, “‘Gegenwind’? Antikommunistische Reaktionen nach der Oktoberrevolution
anhand des Beispiels der österreichisch-russischen Schriftstellerin Alja Rachmanowa,” Acta Philologica, Vol. 58(2022), pp. 119–130.
10
Johannes Großmann, “Die ‘Grundtorheit unserer Epoche’? Neue Forschungen und Zugänge zur Geschichte desAntikommunismus,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, Vol. 56 (2016), p. 552.
11
Ibid.; Jean-François Fayet, “Reflections on Writing the History of Anti-Communism,” Twentieth Century
Communism. A Journal of International History, Vol. 6 (2014), p. 12.
12Ibid., p. 14.
8

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

revolution, the threat to (bourgeois and entrepreneurial) property and class privileges, tobourgeois culture and individual freedom, the threat to social and political order. 13 Especiallythe bourgeois right and religious communities considered that the fundamental values ofwestern civilization, such as the family, religion and homeland, were thus endangered.14 This
was all the more relevant for the period after the October Revolution, which turned a previously
rather diffuse social threat into a real, concrete danger and also made the idea of an approachingcommunist “world revolution” more plausible. 15 The evocation of such (imagined and existing)dangers, in turn, served in particular to strengthen social cohesion, to unite societies or certain
population groups against a common enemy. Therefore, anti-communism, as a kind of“integration ideology,” was particularly virulent during periods of social disruption in which(new) cohesion was to be created. 16
Even if, during the interwar period, anti-communism was sometimes expressed in termsof the defense of democratic values and institutions (especially on the part of social democracy),
the threat of a communist dictatorship was often employed to legitimize other, non- or anticommunist dictatorships, some of which were among the most brutal of the century. 17 Thisapplies, for example, to the regimes of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, for Franco’s Spain andSalazar’s Portugal, Miklós Horthy’s Hungary, Józef Piłsudski’s Poland or to the Austrian
fascist “Ständestaat,” where anti-communism was instrumentalized to stabilize the system andlegitimize political violence and persecution of (alleged) communists. 18 In this context,
Andreas Wirsching also speaks of a “functional anti-communism:” A real – or supposedly
impending – communist revolution offered right-wing, authoritarian movements an ideal
opportunity to present themselves as the defensive movement against the communist-Bolshevik(or even social-democratic) “red danger” and to undermine democratic structures. 19
The complete diabolization of the enemy is another characteristic of anti-communismof authoritarian/fascist type. As Fayet puts it, its ideology was “fueled by a multitude offantasies, fears and anxieties,” often combined with racist stereotypes such as the image of thebloodthirsty “Asian barbarian” from the far Russian east and of the “Jewish conspirator” orAnselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Der Antikommunismus in seiner Epoche,” in Norbert Frei & Dominik Rigoll(Eds.), Der Antikommunismus in seiner Epoche: Weltanschauung und Politik in Deutschland, Europa und den
USA (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), p. 13.
14
Jean-François Fayet, “Reflections,” p. 13.
15
Robert Gerwarth, “Die Geburt des Antibolschewismus,” in Norbert Frei & Dominik Rigoll (eds.), Der
Antikommunismus in seiner Epoche: Weltanschauung und Politik in Deutschland, Europa und den USA(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), p. 51.
16
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Der Antikommunismus,” p. 14.
17
Jean-François Fayet, “Reflections,” p. 11; Dieter Pohl, “Antikommunismus als Ressource von Diktaturen undautoritären Systemen bis 1945,” in Lucile Dreidemy, Richard Hufschmied, Agnes Meisinger, Berthold Molden,
Eugen Pfister, Katharina Prager, Elisabeth Röhrlich, Florian Wenninger and Maria Wirth (Eds.), Bananen, Cola,
Zeitgeschichte. Oliver Rathkolb und das lange 20. Jahrhundert (Wien: Böhlau, 2015), p. 476.
18
Johannes Großmann, “Die ‘Grundtorheit’,” p. 565.
19
Andreas Wirsching, “Antikommunismus als Querschnittsphänomen politischer Kultur, 1917–1945,” in Stefan
Creuzberger & Dierk Hoffmann (Eds.), ‘Geistige Gefahr’ und ‘Immunisierung der Gesellschaft’.
Antikommunismus und politische Kultur in der frühen Bundesrepublik (München: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014),
p. 20.
13

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period“Bolshevik Jew” as mastermind behind communism and the October Revolution 20: There wasa longstanding affinity between antisemitism and anti-Marxism, traceable from as early as the
mid-nineteenth century, until it led to the National Socialist call for a “crusade against JudeoBolshevism” in Soviet Russia. 21 In this context, it is important to stress that in the 1930s andearly 1940s the combination of anti-Bolshevism and antisemitism was a central link not only
within the National Socialist leadership but also in large parts of German society. Stalin’s
system was seen as an ideological mortal enemy and an eminent cultural threat; at the sametime, it was imagined that the moment had come for a direct confrontation with “World Jewry”
which was held responsible for the Russian Revolution.22
These and other conditions led to a cruel, deeply racially motivated war of
extermination, against the Jewish population and against Soviet Russia as a whole. A total ofaround 27 million Soviet citizens (soldiers and civilians) fell victim to acts of war, captivity,
forced labor, massacres, mass shootings, starvation policies and deportations to extermination
camps between June 1941 and May 1945, 23 among them around three million Jewish victimsof the Holocaust.24 The starvation plans in particular, clearly show that the National Socialists
intended much more than the murder of Soviet Jews: Already in the months before the attackon the Soviet Union, different starvation scenarios were discussed in the German Ministry of
Nutrition and among the Wehrmacht leadership, which made the genocidal dimensions of theirwar strategy apparent. A figure of 30 million people starving to death was calculated, the Soviet
population was expected to decline to the level of 1913.25
Interestingly, this racist, genocidal anti-Russian component of anti-communism did notprevent some Russian emigrants from allying with the National Socialists. Likewise, Krasnov
completely omits from all his works the Nazis’ own racial anti-Slavic hate.
The Novel Endless Hate
Some Words on Pjotr Krasnov (1869-1947)
Before becoming an important writer and political actor within the Russian emigration abroad,Pjotr Krasnov – as a general and commander of Cossack military forces – was among the firstJean-François Fayet, “Reflections,” p. 9; see further Ulrich Herbeck, Das Feindbild vom ‘jüdischen
Bolschewiken’. Zur Geschichte des russischen Antisemitismus vor und während der Russischen Revolution(Berlin: Metropol, 2009); Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, “Jüdischer Bolschewismus.” Mythos und Realität(Graz: Ares Verlag, 2010); Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
21
Jean-François Fayet, “Reflections,” p. 11.
22
Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Verbrechen 1939-1945. Innenansichten des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 2022), p. 139.
23
Christian Hartmann, Unternehmen Barbarossa. Der deutsche Krieg im Osten 1941–1945 (München: C. H.
Beck, 2011), pp. 115-116; see further Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Verbrechen, pp. 139-172.
24
Ilja Altman, Opfer des Hasses. Der Holocaust in der UdSSR 1941–1945. Mit einem Vorwort von Hans-Heinrich
Nolte (Zurich: Muster-Schmidt, 2008), p. 47.
25
Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Verbrechen, p. 140.
20

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

to take military action against the Bolsheviks in the Don region in October 1917.26 He cancelled
the Bolshevik decrees and declared the territory an independent state and himself its leader. At
the same time, the way he proceeded with Cossacks who were fighting on the side of the Red
Army during the Civil War or supported the Bolshevik regime was utterly cruel: between
25,000 and 40,000 were executed and another 30,000 exiled. 27 In the beginning, Krasnov had
Germany’s support through weapon supplies, but his self-declared “tsardom” broke up when
the Germans retreated from the Don region and he was forced to flee to Berlin in early 1919. 28
He shared this fate with many other anti-Bolshevik Cossacks: as the Red Army gained theinitiative in the Civil War during late 1919 and early 1920, Cossack soldiers (often together
with their families) withdrew with the White troops; as many as 80,000–100,000 of themeventually joined the defeated Whites in exile. 29
In Germany, Krasnov shifted his anti-Bolshevik struggle to the intellectual sphere andpublished his first historic novels. 30 His writings quickly became popular in the émigré Russiancommunity where he was still regarded by many, especially by the émigré Cossacks, as alegendary anti-Bolshevik hero. His success was, however, not limited to these reactionary
Russian circles. His novels found a wide European audience and were translated into more thantwenty languages, among them German, French, English or Serbian. 31 Hostile to democracy,
Krasnov romanticizes in his books the patriarchal life in pre-revolutionary Russia under the
Tsar and especially glorifies the Cossacks 32 – he sees old Russia as standing for “true values,”
morality and decency, whereas the Bolshevist regime as symbolizing absolute evil, decay anddepravity. This is hardly surprising, considering that Krasnov defined himself as “a puremonarchist, a restorationist, and an extreme reactionary” and that, in general, White émigrés
often held onto the Russia they had known from before they left the country. 33 This becomes
clear already in Krasnov’s first work, written between 1918 and 1921: From Double Eagle to
Red Flag was published in Berlin in 1921, the French and English versions appeared in 1926. 34

Marina Aptekman, “Forward to the Past or Two Radical Views on the Russian Nationalist Future: Pyotr
Krasnov’s Behind the Thistle and Vladimir Sorokin's Day of An Oprichink,” The Slavic and East European
Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2009), p. 243.
27
Georgy Manaev, “Between a rock and a hard place: The Cossacks’ century of struggle,” Russia Beyond, lastmodified March 29, 2014,
https://www.rbth.com/arts/2014/03/29/between_a_rock_and_a_hard_place_the_cossacks_century_of_struggle_3
5465.html.
28
Marina Aptekman, “Forward to the Past,” p. 243.
29
German Olegovitch Matsievsky, “Political Life of the Cossacks in Emigration: Tendencies andFeatures,” Modern Studies of Social Problems, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2013), p. 3.
30
Marina Aptekman, “Forward to the Past,” p. 243.
31
Ibid., p. 246; John Glad, Russia Abroad, p. 254; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York:
Vintage Books, 1993), p. 39.
32
Stéphanie Roulin, “Le concours international,” p. 6.
33
John Glad, Russia Abroad, p. 254.
34
“De l’aigle impérial au drapeau rouge,” Librairie Gallimard Paris, last modified October 5, 2017,https://www.librairie-gallimard.com/livre/9782940523580-de-l-aigle-imperial-au-drapeau-rouge-piotr-krasnov/.
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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

As with his later writings, the novel is also deeply anti-Semitic, advocating theconspiracy theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism.”35 Here, it is important to stress that – even if there
were some Jews in the Bolshevik leadership of the young Soviet State – they were far frombeing the majority.36 Moreover, a number of Jews made up an important part of the opposite,anti-Bolshevik camp and thus also found themselves exiled. 37 Nevertheless, the idea of a
Jewish-Communist conspiracy remained very persistent. In Germany for instance, it wasparticularly widespread among the Early National Socialist in Munich, also due to their close
contacts with Russian White emigrants.38
Interestingly, Krasnov himself lived in Munich from 1920 to 192339 and moved then to
Paris where he expanded his anti-Soviet activities: He became one of the founders of theBratsvo russkoi pravdy, the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, a militant anti-communist
organization with an underground network 40 that carried out several terrorist attacks in Soviet
Russia. Besides Paris, the BRT had bases in Germany, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia as well as
outside of Europe in the United States and Manchuria. It advocated for a “unified anti-Soviet
front on a ‘global scale’ with the aim of establishing a ‘liberation movement’ of peoples who
had come under communist rule.”41 As the French historian Nicolas Lebourg has shown, themembers of the French base, led by Krasnov, were also linked to the Russian Sportsmens’
Union, an organization that carried out paramilitary preparations under the guise of sports
activities and was openly pro-Nazi.42
In general, Krasnov himself never made a secret of his sympathies for National
Socialism; since Hitler’s seizure of power, he completely supported the regime and hoped fora liberation of his homeland from Bolshevism through a new war. In 1937 he left Paris, becauseof concerns for his personal safety, apparently due to the activities of the Soviet Secret Police
in France. From 1937 until the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Krasnov lived
again in Berlin where he continued his writing and his involvement with the émigrécommunity.43
He eventually allied himself, at the age of 78, with the German Army. This can also be
explained by the fact that Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German and prominent Nazi ideologue in
35

Daniel Siemens, The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel (London: Bloomsbury,2013), pp. 43-44.
36
At the level of political commissars, for example, about 10-20% were of Jewish origin. (Dieter Pohl,
Nationalsozialistische Verbrechen, p. 142.)37
An estimated 20 percent of immigrants from Russia in Germany were Jews, and among the stateless the figurerose to nearly 40 percent. (John Glad, Russia Abroad, p. 140.)
38
See in detail for instance Ulrich Herbeck, Das Feindbild, p. 16; Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism.
Therefore, it is also hardly surprising that, as the German historian Daniel Siemens points out, the German version
of From Double Eagle was the favorite book of the young Nazi Sturmführer Horst Wessel. (Siemens 2013, pp.
43-44.)
39
Samuel Newland, The Cossacks in the German Army 1941-1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1991), p. 95.
40
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, p. 39.
41
Nicolas Lebourg, “White Émigrés and International Anti-Communism in France (1918–1939),” p. 12.
42
Ibid., p. 12.
43
Samuel Newland, The Cossacks in the German Army 1941-1945, p. 95; Brent Mueggenberg, The Cossack
Struggle Against Communism, 1917-1945 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2019), p. 248.

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

charge of the occupied eastern territories, was particularly keen on supporting the antiBolshevik Cossacks in their efforts to create their own state, independent from Russia. In
October 1941, he persuaded Hitler to sign a decree creating special military units manned by
Cossack prisoners of war and led by former Russian officers. Krasnov eventually was put incharge of all anti-Soviet Cossack units. 44 In a public address beforehand, he set out his
conviction and determination, charged, once more, with crude antisemitism: “Tell all the
Cossacks that this is no war against Russia, but rather against Communists, Jews and theirhenchmen who sell Russian blood. May God help the German sword and Hitler! Let themaccomplish their endeavor (…).”45
His ideological conviction that the National Socialists – being anti-Semites and antiBolsheviks like him – would finally liberate his country and enable the creation of a separate
Cossack state probably also explains why he was not troubled by their own deep anti-Slavic
racism. This blindness ultimately also sealed his fate: Despite Rosenberg’s support, Krasnov’s
work for the Wehrmacht was rather limited to tasks like writing letters and propaganda pleas –this was not only due to his advanced age, but also due to a general mistrust on the part of the
Nazis. Finally, the German leadership did not want to enlist in their armed forces large numbersof Russians who sought to create a new Russia or a new state and utilized émigré assistanceonly very selectively. 46 As pointed above, their true intention from the very beginning was towage a genocidal war of extermination against the Soviet Union and its population. By the endof the war, Krasnov himself was captured by the British Army in Austria and was forcibly
repatriated to the Soviet Union. In January 1947, he was accused of treason, sentenced to deathby hanging by order of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.47
Although almost forgotten in Europe, Krasnov’s works are nowadays republished in
Russia and gain new popularity. Since the early 1990s, there have been several attempts torehabilitate and commemorate the Cossack general, despite his collaboration with National
Socialism.48 This is not surprising, taking into consideration that finally, his fervent patriotism,his glorification of “old Russia” and “Russian values,” his references to the Orthodox religion,and even his anti-Semitic conspiracy ideas fit perfectly in Putin’s Russia. 49

44

John Glad, Russia Abroad, p. 315.
Artem Kirpichenok, “Krasnov, the Cossacks’ chief. Who is behind the rehabilitation of the former Nazi
collaborator?,” Remembrance, Research and Justice: Heritage of WWII in the 21st Century, last modified May
22, 2020, https://eng.remembrance.ru/2020/05/22/krasnov-the-cossacks-chief-who-is-behind-the-rehabilitationof-the-former-nazi-collaborator/#easy-footnote-bottom-4-274.
46
Samuel Newland, The Cossacks in the German Army 1941-1945, p. 96.
47
Marina Aptekman, “Forward to the Past,” p. 243, and Samuel Newland, The Cossacks in the German Army
1941-1945, p. 96.
48
Artem Kirpichenok, “Krasnov, the Cossacks’ chief.”
49
This applies even more to the pro-fascist White émigré author Ivan Ilyin on whom Putin, among others, bases
his ideology. (See for instance for a first overview Norbert Matern, “Putins Selbstverständnis basiert auf Iwan
Iljins Staatideologie”, Die Tagespost, last modified March 25, 2022, https://www.die-tagespost.de/kultur/iwaniljin-stichwortgeber-des-boesen-art-226652.)
45

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

A Novel of Hate and Love?
Krasnov’s political ideas and his hope for liberation from Bolshevism with the help of Hitler
and other fascists are also very clear in his novel Nenavist.50 The title refers on the one hand to
the “endless hate” of the Bolsheviks towards everything and everyone that does not correspondto their worldview. According to Krasnov, with the establishment of communist power “love,
humanity, respect for personality, everything was inexorably swept away, and in their place
was sown in the hearts of the people blind hatred, irreconcilable malice, diabolical indifference
to the suffering of others, and scornful disdain for all opponents.” 51 On the other hand,
Krasnov’s title also means the anti-Bolsheviks’ hate towards the communist rulers to be
exterminated in a future war. Love as the counter-concept of hate plays a role insofar as
Krasnov’s anti-communist protagonists are characterized by an unshakable, patriotic love for
their homeland, the “real” Russia, with its traditions, Christian religion, and the Tsar as ruler –a selfless love for which they are also ready to die.
The Disaster Announces
To consolidate this contrast between good and evil from the beginning, the novel opens in prerevolutionary Russia, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. Krasnov introduces
his readers to the wealthy, bourgeois Shiltsov family living in St. Petersburg. Although theylead a happy, peaceful and carefree life – especially the two schoolgirls Genia and her cousin
Shura, as well as Genia’s little brother Gurochka – Volodya, Genia’s older brother and the“black sheep” of the family, already signals an approaching catastrophe. In the summer, hevisits his uncle, Tichon Ivanovich Vechotkin, a Cossack, officer in the Tsarist Army andlandowner, in the Don region. The latter is very irritated by Volodya’s questions on his property
and by his belief that all the fields, meadows, fruit trees and the farm should not belong to his
uncle but should instead become collective property. At this point, it should be already clear
for the contemporary reader that Volodya was a (still hidden) communist. Tichon Ivanovich
has no sympathy for his nephew’s ideas; he understands the danger that lies in them, and isspontaneously seized with a deep dislike when he sees Volodya, still asleep in his bed, the nextmorning: “I took one look at him and thought, here he lies now, this slimy worm who knows
nothing, can do nothing, and such a one will come one day and rob and smash everything...
Then a fiery hate stirred in my heart...”52
The aversion to Volodya’s views is also shared by Shura who tells her cousin Genia that
Volodya took her with him to a secret communist party meeting in St. Petersburg. She remains
unimpressed by the event, but describes the circumstances full of disgust:50

Even though the German edition of the novel from 1938 fit in perfectly with Nazi propaganda, its publication
was temporarily suspended from 1939. This was because after the German-Soviet non-aggression pact between
Hitler and Stalin in August 1939, it was generally decreed that “for the time being no literature on Russia” shouldbe published, neither positive nor negative. Subsequently, with the German war of aggression against the Soviet
Union starting in June 1941, anti-Soviet propaganda flourished again (Stadler, “Die unterschlagenen
Geheimnisse,” p. 9).
51
Pjotr N. Krasnow, Der endlose Haß, p. 337.
52
Ibid., p. 55.

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period
The intelligentsia (...), the students (...) were dressed in a decidedly dissolute manner. The womenin unwashed blouses, with short-cropped, disheveled hair, with burning eyes, exalted. In front of me
sat a couple (...): He – student, in a red shirt, (...) thick, sweaty, with a Jewish face, she also a Jew,
puffy. Everything about her hung shapelessly, the blouse was sweaty under the arms andunwashed.53

In addition to the obvious antisemitism – Krasnov hardly misses an opportunity in his
novel to emphasize the Jewishness of many of “his” communists – another characteristic
becomes clear here: often in anti-Bolshevik writings, communists are described as especiallydirty, unwashed and without hygiene (contrary to the pure, clean old Russia). 54 This repulsive
image becomes all the more effective when it is combined, as it is here, with the old anti-Semitic
stereotype of the “dirty Jew.”
However, Krasnov does not only diabolize the Bolsheviks or describe them from theexternal perspective of their enemies. In general, the manipulative power in his novel also liesin the many direct speeches and expressed thoughts of his protagonists, with whom the reader
can thus identify more easily. This is sometimes extended to the communist characters when
Krasnov suggests looking into their minds as well. Obviously, he wants to show that someamong them have doubts themselves, that they may have had the right motives, but realizedthat they were wrong about the communist idea. The first example in the novel is Dalekich, aparty member from the beginning on who still believes in God and finally decides to work as a
spy for the tsarist secret police, providing them with information about communist party
activities. Exactly at Christmas he is kidnapped by other party members, among them Volodya,
and internally tried. Dalekich explains to his “judges,” and subsequently to Krasnov’s readers,that he chose communism in the hope of love but encountered only hate and therefore turned
away and began to fight the movement:
I joined the party because I believed it gave us all equality, it gave us all love. I believed that theGospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and socialism – were one and the same. I joined the party because
I was told that it was fighting for the poor people, to free them and create a better life for them. (...)
I realized long ago that socialism is not love and not forgiveness, that it does not bring equality
between rich and poor, not freedom, but that it is the most blatant hatred, against everything that ishigher, malice itself and the desire to destroy everything that is higher and better. 55

Consequently, he is “sentenced to death” by the other party members, tied up anddrowned in an ice hole in the Neva River to make his body disappear immediately. While theother three comrades involved in the brutal murder decide to go to the brothel afterwards –besides the cruel act itself, yet another sign of their immorality – Volodya refuses the offer,goes home where his family is about to celebrate Christmas and tries to distract himself fromhis bad conscience by reading Marx’s Capital.
At this point, the communists have not yet taken power in Russia, but Volodya becomes
more and more radicalized and leaves his family for his career in the party. Meanwhile, his
53

Ibid., pp. 72-73.
Alexandra Preitschopf, “Gegenwind,” pp. 123-124.
55
Pjotr N. Krasnow, Der endlose Haß, p. 129.
54

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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

sister Genia falls in love with the Cossack lieutenant Gennady Gurdin. Summer moves into thecountry, everything seems harmonious and peaceful, until the outbreak of the First World War
in July 1914. Gennady has to go to war, but he and Genia promise to wait for each other until
he returns. The more the war and the political radicalization within Russia progress, the greater
the worries about the political future become in the Shiltsov family. Once again, the antiSemitic character of the novel becomes clear in this context in statements such as the following:“It will probably come to the point that an all-Russian pogrom will be organized, not one against
the Jews, but one that will plunder the whole of Russia with Jewish hands.” 56 The bitter irony
here lies in the perpetrator-victim reversal that is typical of anti-Semitic argumentation: Not
only did Jews repeatedly fall victim to cruel pogroms in tsarist Russia, especially after 1881,
but also later – during the Civil War – they were a particularly vulnerable population group that
suffered especially from White and sometimes also Red Terror. 57 Between 50,000 and 150,000
Jews were murdered between 1917 and 1920 alone. 58 It should be noted at this point that
Krasnov himself and anti-Bolshevik Cossack troops in general were particularly known for
their profound antisemitism and repeatedly carried out brutal pogroms against the local Jewish
population in their territories.59
Under the New Regime
However, in Krasnov’s novel, the members of the aristocracy, clergy, and bourgeoisie are theonly true victims of the historical circumstances and are seen at the same time martyr-likeheroes. Consequently, in the Shiltsov family as well, the October Revolution leads to radical
changes. Matvei Trofimovich, the head of the family, immediately loses his job as amathematics teacher in high school, because he is not regarded as convenient for the new
regime anymore. Little Gurochka has grown up and became an officer – since he does not wantto fight for the Red Army, he looks for a possibility to get to the south of the country to join the
Whites instead. Shura works as a nurse in the hospital while her cousin Genia joins the Soviet
authority Glav-Bum (Central Paper Administration) to financially support the family. In St.
Petersburg, now Leningrad, they all live in great poverty; nevertheless, they do not lose their
humanity and Christian solidarity – as many people are wanted by the communist secret police
Cheka to be arrested, desperate fugitives ring their doorbell almost every evening. Be it astranger or former student, “they let him in, gave him something to eat (…), shared the last of
the bread with him, (…) and put him to sleep on the sofa.” 60 Throughout the whole novel,
especially Genia and Shura, remain – as unmarried virgins and good Christian women – apersonification of purity, innocence, morality, and decency, respectively of “old Russia” itself.
Others hate them for the simple fact that “for all their poverty and misery, they were always
56

Ibid., p. 288.
See for instance Frank Golczewski, “Pogrome in der Ukraine,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Band 4.
Ereignisse, Dekrete, Kontroversen, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Berlin: De Gruyter 2011), pp. 303–308; Anke Hilbrenner,“Pogrome im Russischen Reich (1903-1906),” in ibid., pp. 298-299.
58
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution. 1891-1924 (London: Penguin Books, 2017),
pp. 676-769.
59
Ulrich Herbeck, Das Feindbild, pp. 292-293; see further Mueggenberg, The Cossack Struggle, pp. 127-128.
60
Pjotr N. Krasnow, Der endlose Haß, p. 352.
57

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ALEXANDRA PREITSCHOPF
A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Periodclean and neatly dressed, that they looked fresh and good, that their voices sounded kind andmusical (…), but above all, for not forgetting God, going to church, and singing in the church
choir.”61
Finally, they even haunt the memories of Volodya who has in the meantime risen to
become a senior communist commissar named Granitov. During a meeting with Lenin himself,
he thinks back to moments spent with his sister and cousin at the home of his grandfather, an
Orthodox priest, where they sang religious songs together:
Volodya felt even now something of the feeling of a very special, unearthly emotion, the feeling of
an inexplicable purity, goodness and love that had completely taken hold of him at that time. (...)
He remembered how little Genia had sighed deeply and whispered: ‘How beautiful!... How glorious
it all is. As if the Mother of God, the cherubim and seraphim were with us!... 62

The same uncle, Otets Pjotr, later comes back to Leningrad and holds a mass, together
with a sermon following the liturgy, even though this is forbidden (a sermon would have to beapproved by the Soviet authorities beforehand). The moment constitutes a climax in the novel
and at the same time an irreconcilable reckoning with the grievances of the Soviet regime:
Where are children still raised to respect their parents? Where is the family where parents andchildren live in peace and love? Besprisornyje [homeless children] corrupted from the bottom uproam the streets like half-starved wolves, (...) Russian children! Mountains of corpses of starvedorphans lie in cellars waiting for a Christian burial!...
(...) But if it was not the power of God, of the Lord, that established this government of ours, then it
can only have been the diabolical power of the Antichrist that brought us these commissars andcommunists! (...) The Lord has taught us: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but the air of our whole vast empire
is polluted with the corpse stench of millions of innocent slain... ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’and here marriages are contracted for days and hours and the unhappy women are pushed into thestreet and treated worse than slaves (...).63

At this point it should be borne in mind that Krasnov does address real problems ofeveryday Soviet life, especially of the first years after the Revolution. Marriage laws were
supposed to give women more freedom, but in the beginning, they simplified divorces so muchthat – as a consequence – many women were abandoned by their husbands and left alone with
their children.64 In addition, there were numerous orphans – their parents had died as a result
61

Ibid., p. 447.
Ibid., pp. 344-345.
63
Ibid., pp. 412-413.
64
In Lenin’s theory, the bourgeois family was regarded as an “institute for the subjugation of women.” With theintroduction of “de facto marriage,” the divorce procedure was simplified and women’s right to an abortion was
also legalized for the first time worldwide in order to combat illegal abortions that endangered women’s healthand lives (Sanita Osipova, “Sowjetisches Ehe- und Familienrecht von den Ersten Dekreten 1917 bis zum letzten
Gesetzbuch 1968: vom Standpunkt der Lettischen Sozialistischen Sowjetrepublik,” Právněhistorické Studie, Vol.
49, No. 1 (2019), p. 125). However, this liberal phase of Soviet marriage and family law ended as early as 1926
under Stalin and was changed entirely by the 1936 Constitution (ibid., p. 128). Homeless children, socially andeconomically unprotected women, and the decline in the birth rate were reasons that increasingly led to the search
62

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ALEXANDRA PREITSCHOPF
A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Periodof the Civil War, of famine and disease, or had been arrested as (alleged) political opponents,
especially when they belonged to the bourgeoisie or the clergy. Since there were far too few
places in orphanages, many of them roamed homeless and lived in extreme poverty. 65
Moreover, countless people (at least between 50,000 and 250,000 until the year 1922) fell
victim to the Red Terror by the Cheka and its successor GPU, were arbitrarily arrested, cruelly
tortured and executed.66 Krasnov, however, uses these sad circumstances not only to deter hisreaders as much as possible from the communist system per se. Through the words of the priest,
he also exposes the Bolsheviks (as often in religiously based anti-communist discourses of thetime) as inhuman devils, as personified satanic evil par excellence. By this logic, according toKrasnov, only strong faith in God and the struggle against those in power can lead to an“exorcism” of Russia to bring back the “old order,” love and peace.
In this “terrible kingdom of Satan” that “was set up in Holy Russia,” 67 however,opinions like those of Otets Pyotr are not tolerated. After his sermon, he is beaten to death by
Chekists in front of the church while about 800 people stand around, watching the scene anddoing nothing; his dead body is taken away by the Cheka afterwards. The daughter of Otets
Pyotr, Olga Petrovna (the mother of Volodya and Genia) asks, however, for the body to bury
her father and is sent, after a long interrogation, to the Cheka’s mortuary. Here, the reader sees
once again the whole diabolical cruelty of the Bolshevik system, which has, according toKrasnov, no respect for life and not even for death: Olga learns that it was already ordered tohand over the body to Chinese butchers, “to prevent martyr relics,” they chopped it up andbrought it to the zoological garden to feed the predators.68
Warnings and Appeals
The whole Shiltsov family, except Volodya who broke off all contact, remains extremely
distressed by the incident. All they have left is their hope of liberation – Genia never received
any more news from her fiancé Gennady, but she thinks that he is in France: “And he is waiting
for them there in Europe to finally understand who the Bolsheviks are and what a horrible goal
they have. He is waiting for the crusade against the Communists to be finally declared, as Hitler

for new solutions starting in 1929. Divorcing and re-marrying several times was more and more considered
unethical and inappropriate to Soviet morality (ibid., p. 129).
65
See for instance Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 780-781.
66
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011), p. 838; Norman Lowe, Mastering
Twentieth Century Russian History (London: Red Globe Press, 2002), p. 151; Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev,
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 156-160; “Vor 100 Jahren:
Beschluss des Roten Terrors,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, last modified September 4, 2018,https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/275169/vor-100-jahren-beschluss-des-roten-terrors/.
As contemporary sources of Russian emigrants see for example: Paul Miliukow, Rußlands Zusammenbruch.
Erster Band (Berlin: Obelisk-Verlag, 1925); Paul Miliukow, Rußlands Zusammenbruch. Zweiter Band (Berlin:
Obelisk-Verlag,1926); Serguei Melgunov, La Terreur Rouge en Russie (1918-1924) (Paris: Payot,1927); Iwan
Iljin, Welt vor dem Abgrund. Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur im kommunistischen Staate. Nach authentischen
Quellen (Berlin: Eckart-Verlag,1931).
67
Pjotr N. Krasnow, Der endlose Haß, p. 426.
68
Ibid., p. 424.

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Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

declared it in Germany... And he will invade Russia with these armies.” 69 This not only
illustrates Krasnov’s political stance and the hope he places in National Socialism but is also a
powerful appeal to his readers – inside and outside the émigré community – to support the antiBolshevik struggle, by generating sympathy for the family and identification with theirsuffering, especially of the innocent, faithful Genia.
As mentioned above, however, Krasnov’s strategy is not only to generate pity; he alsosuggests that communists themselves actually realize how wrong they have been with what
they do and believe. Towards the end of the novel, he cleverly combines these fictional“insights” with a warning to his readers about the world communist revolution. When Volodya
meets his party comrade Malinin who fears that communism could spill over into Western
Europe, the latter urges him to overthrow the system from within:(…) the basic tendency of the war that we are planning against the ring of bourgeois states
surrounding us, is the endeavor to transform the war of the Soviet Union into a tremendous civil warof the world proletariat against the bourgeoisie of the whole world. This is the war plan which I
myself have worked out. (...) First suppress Christianity and destroy culture, in whatever form it
may appear, and instead bring to fruition the communist movement deep in the rear of the enemy
seeds. Earlier I had the impression that these plans were simply utopian, and I did not take them
seriously. Now, however, I see that people in Western Europe are responding to our plans, that theywant to open the gates to us voluntarily and believe our fantastic lies... Then all at once the horror
became clear to me, I saw the danger and decided to take up the fight against it. 70

Unsurprisingly, Malinin is subsequently shot. He shares this fate with Matvei Shiltsov
who is executed after telling a group of foreign tourists in the Hermitage Museum that the whole
Soviet Union was “one enormous swindle, the greatest swindle that ever existed on God’s
earth.”71 His wife Olga dies of grief, exhaustion, and hunger shortly after her husband.
Hunger is also a central issue at the end of the novel – we are now in the early 1930s –when Genia decides to go to her aunt in the Don region where she is confronted with enormous
misery. Due to a massive famine, people slaughter and eat not only dogs and cats, butsometimes even humans. This is less a particularly gruesome fiction by Krasnov, but is based,again, on the tragic historical reality: indeed, dramatic famines, including cases ofcannibalism, 72 occurred repeatedly in the Soviet Union. Particularly in 1932/33, supply
shortages occurred throughout the country, but in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, in the Don and theVolga region, and in the North Caucasus the situation was extremely critical as a result ofcollectivization, and starvation resulted in a total of five to seven million deaths. 73

69

Ibid., p. 458.
Ibid., pp. 519-520.
71
Ibid., p. 474.
72
See for instance Steven Bela Várdy & Agnes Huszar Várdy, “Cannibalism in Stalin’s Russia und Mao’s China,”
East European Quarterly, Vol. XLI, No. 2 (June 2007), pp. 226-233.
73
See for instance Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday, 2017), pp.
186-221; Robert Kindler, Stalins Nomaden: Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition,2014), pp. 239-262; Viktor Kondrashin, Golod 1932-1933 godov: Tragedija rossijskoj derevni (Moscow:
Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 2008).
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A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

Although Genia is jaded after more than 15 years of living in deepest poverty andoppression, she cannot cope with the discovery that she makes in the Cossack village,
meanwhile transformed into a kolkhoz called “Karl Marx.” There, she finds the remains of aslaughtered woman, the communist village chief, whose flesh was processed into sausage:
Genia could not get rid of the horrific scene. It was a horror without equal. It was an agonizing statesuch as she had never experienced in her entire life, a state of fear, disgust and deepest pity at how
people had fallen so low. (…) She had seen a lot in the last twenty years of her life: murders,shootings, hunger... But this most horrible thing she could not bear.74

She leaves the village and wanders desperately through the lonely steppe, keeping,
however, one last hope in her heart – after the reader has made the shocking discovery together
with Genia, Krasnov repeats his appeal to support the people of the Soviet Union by all means:
Like many others in the Soviet Union, she believed that abroad there would be a fierce agitation
against the Bolsheviks, and that the moment would not be far away when the Entente, the Germans,
the Japanese, at whatever cost, would eliminate the horrors of communist rule, which made amockery of all common sense and destroyed millions of flourishing human lives year after year, sothat hunger and cannibalism, class struggle and hatred would finally be eradicated from this world. 75

Since Genia thinks Gennady lives in Paris (her family received foreign food parcels
several times, the sender was a mysterious Mademoiselle Solange unknown to them), she
finally decides to leave the country and look for him in France. She makes it to the RussianPolish border where she finds the gravesite of a Cossack Regiment, dating from World War I –among others, also a certain Sotnik Gennady Gurdin is buried there, killed on September 12,
1914. Genia loses all strength, she sinks down and dies, “her body lay peacefully beside thecrucifix, beside the grave of the one to whom she had promised loyalty to the death.” 76
The novel moves on to another cross in France, in the Auvergne region, on a mountain
top – the reader meets again Gurochka who drives to the crucifix with a young lady and learns
that the parcels were sent by him. He lives in Paris where he has worked for ten years as achauffeur and is (presumably) engaged to Mademoiselle Solange, the lady accompanying him.
In the pathetic style typical of Krasnov, Gurochka complains to her: “The sinister European lie
wants you to believe that the Soviet Union is a happy country, where workers and peasants livein happiness, peace and wealth, and that only we, the emigrants slander and malign the
Bolsheviks...”77 She, however, tries to reassure him, points at the cross and says: “There it is,
our faithful France... (…) The Christian France of loyalty, of the fulfillment of duty, of thewarm love for the homeland and God... This France will always understand you and suffer withyou... And the day will also come when this France will come to your aid and not to theBolsheviks.”78
74

Pjotr N. Krasnow, Der endlose Haß, pp. 597-598.
Ibid., p. 604.
76
Ibid., p. 613.
77
Ibid., p. 620.
78
Ibid., p. 621.
75

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Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

Krasnov alludes here, at the exuberantly kitschy end of his novel, to French foreign
policy, criticizing especially the pro-Soviet attitude of many French left-wing intellectuals.
Whereas, in the first years after the October Revolution, France still provided support to theanti-Bolshevik Whites, by supplying them with military equipment and participating in the
Allied intervention in the Civil War, it officially recognized the Soviet Union in 1924.
Moreover, in the early 1930s, when Krasnov wrote his novel, the two states continued toapproach each other: in 1932, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, urged
Stalin to attempt a rapprochement with France and the United Kingdom, to contain the advancesof Nazism. Finally, in 1935, the Soviet Union and France signed a Mutual Assistance Treaty. 79
The France-based White Russians on the contrary, turned more and more to the political
opposition for support and made connections with several factions of the French extreme right,
as for instance with Action Française. 80 In this sense, in Krasnov’s novel, Gurochka andMademoiselle Solange perfectly symbolize this alliance between pro-fascist Russian émigrés
and the catholic far-right who saw in communism their common enemy.
Conclusion
Compared with other contemporary writings by White émigrés or anti-communist authors, it isstriking that Endless Hate is not particularly innovative or exceptional. On the contrary,Krasnov re-creates an already widespread, almost stereotypical image of the life in Soviet
Russia. He makes use of the anti-communist discourse of the interwar period and builds his
own deterrent vision of the “Soviet nightmare” on it. The description of the fate of the Shiltsov
family, their integrity and faith in God, their suffering and almost martyr-like deaths can beconsidered as ideal-typical stereotypes of “good Russians” as well: despite their tremendous
misery, they do not get involved with the new regime but carry on the former tsardom in theirhearts. They face the “endless,” all-destroying, diabolic hate emanating from the Bolsheviks
with dignity and preserve their love for their homeland. In this sense, Genia’s love for the
Cossack Gennady, to whom she remains faithful till the end, is highly symbolic of this patriotic
love for a world that no longer exists.
Undoubtedly, the grievances and inhumane policy that Krasnov depicts – extreme
poverty, hunger and famines, including cases of cannibalism, omnipresent fear, arbitraryarrests, oppression, executions and murders, etc. – are based on tragic facts of the Soviet reality.
However, the author deliberately conveys the impression that before the October Revolution,
Russia was a kind of paradise, a realm of love and peace – problems such as massive poverty
and social inequality, oppression, illiteracy and underdevelopment, as well as imperialism andwarmongering during the tsarist regime are not mentioned at all. Similarly (and unsurprisingly),
for Krasnov not a single positive achievement or improvement of the Soviet system exists. On
the contrary, as we can often observe in the anti-communist discourses of the time, theBolsheviks are accused of having turned paradisiacal Russia into a reign of Satan, into hell on
earth. In this context, anti-Semitism has an important complementary key role – ultimately thisalmost biblical evil is not due to former Christians (on the contrary, they can come to their
79
80

Nicolas Lebourg, “White Émigrés and International Anti-Communism in France (1918–1939),” p. 6.
Ibid., p. 6.

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ALEXANDRA PREITSCHOPF
A War Against Bolshevism, for the Love of the Homeland? The Novel Endless Hate (1934/1938) by Pjotr
Krasnov as an Anti-communist Propaganda Tool in the Interwar Period

senses again and turn against communism like Dalekich or Malinin) but due to “the Jews.”
According to Krasnov, only faith in and love for God and the homeland, as well as willingness
to go to war against the devil, “Judeo-Bolshevism,” can save the country and its people.
These images and accusations reinforce the dangerous effect of Krasnov’s novel. For,in the end, his deterrent descriptions are not limited to generating disgust with the Bolshevik
regime and pity for its victims. By identifying with the protagonists, the aim is rather to provoke
hate in the readers themselves, to mobilize them through literature. It is therefore hardly
surprising that Krasnov’s novel is also an open declaration of support for Adolf Hitler: although,in the interwar period, the fear and fomenting of hate against the Soviet Union expressed itself
in many ways, emanating from various political sides, it was – as explained above – particularly
essential for the radical right, fascism and National Socialism.
While the original Russian version of 1934 was primarily aimed at the White Russianémigré community in France and contains an appeal to ally with their French (Catholic and farright) counterparts, the German translation of 1938 is addressed directly to the German reading
public. As one propaganda tool among many, it functioned as mental preparation for the“crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism” in the Soviet Union. At the same time, the novel’s
religious component and the steadfast Christian faith of its protagonists also made it amenable
to the Vatican’s anti-communist discourse (as the results of the above mentioned anti-Bolshevik
literary competition show) and to a German-speaking Catholic (or generally Christian)readership.
To come back to the concept of the “chameleon tactic” of anti-communism (Fayet),Krasnov’s novel illustrates how anti-communist resentment could permeate various discourses
and be tailor-made for different groups within a society. Endless Hate, along with all its antiBolshevik, anti-Semitic, and emotionalizing pathos, suited the National Socialist politics,
although at no time did the latter pursue the same goal as Krasnov. Consequently, it can beassumed that National Socialist propagandists recognized potential in the novel’s deterrent
effect, even if – unlike Krasnov – it was not their intention to generate a pity for the sufferingof the Russian people among the German readers. On the contrary, and to the great error of theauthor, the Nazis were not concerned with liberating Russia, but with waging a war of
extermination against the country and its population. The question whether Krasnov himself
realized his misjudgment during or after his service for the German army, must remain open.
Krasnov’s own fate, however, bears no relation to the enormous suffering of the Soviet
population in the face of countless Nazi war crimes. The unimaginable cruelties inflicted on theSoviet people show most clearly the danger of propagated hate – be it hate against communists,
against Jews, Slavs, or whomever. This is all the more the case when hate is veiled by supposed
love for one’s own homeland and declared to be a patriotic duty of war.

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