Pyotr Krasnov

Exile in France and Germany[edit]

On February 19, 1919, Krasnov fled to Western Europe after losing the election for the office of Don Ataman.^[17] He was succeeded by Afrikan P. Bogaewsky. Arriving first in Germany, he moved to France in 1923, where he continued his anti-Soviet activities. In France Krasnov was one of the founders of the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, an anti-communist organization with an underground network in Russia.^[18]


In exile, Krasnov wrote memoirs and several novels. His famous trilogy Ot Dvuglavogo Orla k krasnomu znameni (From Double Eagle To the Red Flag), in addition to the main plot, with its hero, General Sablin, has several sub-plots which encompass many places, events, and personages from the time of the Revolution of 1905 to the Russian Civil War.^[19] It presents a vast panorama of the Revolution and the Civil War throughout the country. Events are revealed through the fates of many characters, who, in turn, give their own interpretations of the events. Even the revolutionaries have an opportunity to express their views, although, in general, their political expositions seem to be the weakest parts of the novel. The ideology of the book is thus presented polyphonically. The author, although he tends to align himself with his conservative characters, offers no personal opinion of his own. All major themes, such as authority vs. anarchy, respect for human dignity vs. violence, creative work vs. destruction, as well as cruelty and terror, are treated in this polyphonic manner.^[20] Krasnov had begun writing From Double Eagle to the Red Flag when he was in prison in 1917, but the novel was first published in Russian in Berlin in 1921.^[19] The American historian Brent Muggenberg wrote that Krasnov had "an impressive grasp of the motivations and mentalities" on both sides in the Russian Civil War.^[19] The German historian Daniel Siemens described From Double Eagle to the Red Flag as a deeply antisemitic book that accepted The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as genuine and accused "international Jewry" of inventing Communism.^[21] Siemens noted that the German translation of Ot Dvuglavogo Orla k krasnomu znameni was the favorite book of the Nazi martyr Horst Wessel.^[21] Other books written by Krasnov included a historical novel about a group of Don Cossacks resisting the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and another historical novel about Yermak Timofeyevich, the legendary 16th century Cossack conqueror of Siberia.^[19] Krasnov's novels were translated into English, German, French, Serbian and other European languages. Despite his chequered military record, Krasnov was seen within émigré circles as a "legendary hero of the Civil War".^[22]


Another of Krasnov's novels was his 1927 work Za chertopolokhom (Behind the Thistle), a future history set in the 1990s that imagined a post-Communist Russia ruled over by a restored monarchy that had built an enormous wall around the entire empire to prevent any and all contact with the West.^[23] Through set in the future, the emperor who has chosen to isolate Russia from the West bears a strong resemblance in both appearance and personality to Ivan the Terrible.^[23] The novel begins with the Soviet Union launching an invasion of Eastern Europe sometime in the 1930s, which was to be started by an unleashing of an immense quantity of poisonous gases.^[24] However, the Soviet Air Force accidentally unleashed the deadly chemical gases on the Red Army, killing millions while setting off forest fires.^[24] The masses of corpses lead to an outbreak of plague, which rendered the borderlands of the Soviet Union uninhabitable for decades and led to a monstrous thistle standing several feet high growing up to in the borderlands.^[24] After the disaster, the rest of the world assumes that there is no life left behind the thistle.^[25]


In Krasnov's future history, in Europe, socialist parties have come to power in all of the European nations, leading to an irrevocable economic decline over the course of the 20th century.^[26] By the 1990s as a result of decades of socialism, in all the European states food is being severely rationed, technological advances have ceased, housing is in short supply and the triumph of avant-garde has led to a cultural collapse.^[26] Disenchanted with life in a declining Europe, a hardy group of the descendants of Russian emigres who have managed to keep the Russian language and culture led by a man named Korenev climb over the thistle to see what lies behind it.^[26] Korenev has a dream featuring a beautiful girl threatened by the zmei gorynych, the gigantic, monstrous three-headed dragon of Russian mythology.^[27] The girl represents Russia while the zmei gorynych represents the West whose individualistic ideology that Krasnov portrayed as antithetical to Russian values.^[27] Korenev and his companions discover that in the world "behind the thistle" that the Communist regime was overthrown decades ago and was replaced with a restored monarchy.^[26] The restored monarchy has brought a return to the dress and culture of the era before the Emperor Peter the Great with the men growing long beards and wearing modified traditional costumes while the women wear the traditional sarafans and keep their hair in long braids.^[26] The ideology of the regime is based on the Official Nationality ideology of the Emperor Nicholas I, namely the triad of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality while the only political party allowed is "The Family of Russian Brothers and Sisters in the name of God and the Tsar".^[26] Jews are allowed a place in Krasnov's utopia, but "they no longer have the power to rule over us nor can they hide under false Russian names to infiltrate the government".^[28] All of the Russian characters "behind the thistle" speak in a pseudo-folksy way meant to evoke the Russian of the 16th and 17th centuries, which is portrayed as a more "authentic" Russian than modern Russian.^[29]


In contrast to the declining economies of the socialist West, the Russia that Krasnov imagines under the restored monarchy is economically and culturally flourishing while achieving marvelous technological feats such as building a sort of flying railroad system over the entire country and constructing vast canals that turn deserts into farmland.^[26] Every home in Russia has a television, which only airs the emperor's daily speech to his subjects.^[30] Every subject has a personal library in their home consisting of traditional books such as dream-readers, patriotic poetry, folk tales and the Bible.^[31] However, the regime allows no freedom of expression and one of the returning emigres says: "Some might say that the Russian government is now totalitarian, only this is not the same sort of totalitarianism as that of the Communists and the Masons of the West. They bow down to some invisible force, whose aim is destruction, but our society is founded on the bedrock of family and at its head is the Tsar, blessed by God, a man whose thoughts are only about the prosperity of Russia".^[22] The social order is enforced by the public floggings, torture and execution of any Russians who dare to think differently and those speak out "return home with black stumps in place of their tongues".^[32] The narrator of the novel agrees that despite the use of extreme violence and cruelty by the restored Tsarist regime that the system that exists in Russia is superior to the "rotting democratic West".^[22] The narrator of Behind the Thistle praises extreme violence committed by the state as not canceling out freedom, but rather "is indeed true freedom, a freedom that democratic Europe had never known or experienced-a freedom for good deeds that goes hand in hand with oppression against evil".^[28]


Krasnov was an Eurasianist, an ideology that saw Russia as an Asian nation, having more in common with other Asian nations such as China, Mongolia, and Japan rather than with the Western nations.^[22] Some aspects of the novel such as its nostalgia for the pre-Peterine Russia have led to Krasnov being misidentified as a Slavophile, but he was opposed to the ideology of the Slavophiles, arguing that Russia had little in common with other Slavic nations such as Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.^[26] In common with other Eurasianists, Krasnov believed that Russians had a natural affinity with the peoples of Asia, and in Behind the Thistle Russia has extremely friendly relations with other Asian nations such as China, Mongolia and India (through India was part of the British empire in 1927, Krasnov assumed India would be independent by the 1990s).^[22] Krasnov favored Asian values with the focus of putting the collective ahead of the individual, and for this reason, argued that Russia was an Asian nation that should look east towards other Asian nations instead of looking west.^[22] Unlike other Eurasianists who saw the Soviet Union as a "stepping stone" towards the development of a Eurasianist Russia, Krasnov's anti-communism led to the rejection of the "stepping stone thesis".^[22] In the 1920s-1930s, Krasnov was a popular novelist with his books being translated into 20 languages.^[22] Behind the Thistle however, met with an overwhelmingly negative critical response in 1927, being panned by reviewers in the majority of Russian émigré journals who called Behind the Thistle badly written, unrealistic and preachy.^[22] Despite the negative reviews, the expression "behind the thistle" became popular with the younger Russian emigres as a way describe the Soviet Union.^[33]


During the Berne Trial of 1933-35 started when a Swiss Jewish group sued a Swiss Nazi group, Krasnov was asked by his fellow emigre Nikolai Markov to come to Berne to testify for the defendants about the alleged authenticity of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, but he declined.^[34] Markov in turn was a member of the Welt-Dienst, an international antisemitic society based in Erfurt, Germany and headed by a former German Army officer, Ulrich Fleischhauer whose efforts to promote The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in Switzerland had caused the lawsuit in Berne.^[34] In his correspondence with Markov, Krasnov affirmed his belief in the authenticity of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, but stated he was unwilling to be grilled by the lawyers for the plaintiffs.^[34]


In 1937, after several Russian White emigre leaders in Paris had been assassinated by the Soviet NKVD, Krasnov moved to Berlin where he believed he would be safer, and declared his support for the Third Reich.^[35] In another of his novels, The Lie in 1939, Krasnov wrote about one character: "Lisa was right in her severe judgment: Russia was no more. She did not have a Motherland or her own. However, when the Bremen floated noiselessly by and she saw a black swastika in a white circle on a scarlet banner, a sign of eternal motion and continuum, she was feeling a warm tide covering her heart...That’s Motherland!"^[36]