Book review: The White Pill

The improbable rise - and fortunate fall - of the Soviet Union

Michael Malice’s The White Pill gives us a backstage pass to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the moral degradation we discover in that far-flung realm is far from uplifting. Hell, at one point the Soviets began prosecuting children as adults just so they could ship teenagers off to the Siberian prison camps. A communist paradise indeed.

From Lenin’s revolution in 1917 to the demolition of the Berlin wall in 1989, The White Pill is the story of what happens when an idealistic young government makes promises it can’t deliver on.

As one prominent Tcheka operative advised, “Don’t seek for incriminating evidence as to whether the prisoners took part, by deed or word, in a rebellion against the Soviet government. You have to ask him what class he belongs to, what is his origin, his education and profession. It is those questions that should decide the fate of the defendant—and therein lies the meaning of the red terror.”

Stage 1 - The Promise

To err is human, to really screw up you need a government.

In 1917 Vladimir Lenin was exiled in Switzerland where he might have remained indefinitely had it not been for the Germans. General Ludendorff, Kaiser Wilhelm’s top military official, cooked up a plan to send the provocative Lenin back to Russia. Ludendorff hoped that Lenin would cause enough internal chaos that Russia would be forced to withdraw from the war, leaving Germany to relocate all her soldiers to the western front.

The crafty Ludendorff accordingly sought “to improve peace possibilities through the internal weakening of Russia,” one of Germany’s foes at the time. This was an opportunity for Communist agitator Vladimir Lenin, who was widely regarded as a lunatic.

Only rarely has the action of a single German been more impactful. By the law of accessory to a murder, it could be argued that by schlepping Lenin back to Russia Ludendorff indirectly enabled one of the worst human rights atrocities in history. Well done lad.

Once home, Lenin began agitating for the Marxist revolution and he quickly gained support. According to Marxist dictates; poverty, privation and perpetual pecuniary were caused by the wealthy exploiting the working class. It followed that with Lenin operating the government according to Marxist principles, conditions for poor Russians would be greatly improved. How would the new government actually work in practice? Here’s the model I use to understand the Marxist’s claim.

A Russian manufacturer (I.e. a bourgeois money grubbing capitalist) sells a widget for ₽100.

• ₽20 pays for labor

• ₽20 pays for the raw materials

• ₽20 pays for the factory’s upkeep

• ₽10 pays for various other incidentals like packing & shipping

• ₽10 pays for the taxes

₽20 remain after all accounts are settled. This money, otherwise known as profit, goes to the factory owner. This despite the owner doing “nothing,” according to the Marxists. Since the factory owner’s only contribution is exploitation, it’s fine for the government to murder him and his wife then ships his kids off to Siberia to freeze to death. In fact this benefits society! With the owner gone the workers can split the “extra” ₽20 among themselves and loh; a working class family can finally afford that Xbox they’ve had their eyes on.

This interpretation of the production process has, quandaries… The Marxist worldview fails to account for the characteristics that define many successful factory managers. Discipline, experience, business connections, sales skills, organization skills, insight into human psychology, technical expertise, and so forth. Dismissing these abilities as unnecessary is the strategic roadmap for Disney and the plot for Atlas Shrugged, neither of which have promising story arcs.

At any rate, I guess Lenin forgot to read my Substack because he thought Marxism would definitely probably work wonders in Russia. And if it didn’t work, well, one can always turn to violence…

Stage 2 - The clampdown

Revolutions occur in stages. The people who are most desirable in one stage may be completely unwelcome at another. For example, when a radical movement is getting started chaos is a prerequisite. Zealots, Molotov cocktail distribution specialists, blue-haired cringe-goblins: this class of fanatical people does to the social structure what Jesse Pinkman did to that guy in his bathtub… Turns it into goop! If society is a tall building, first you must deconstruct the structure to its base elements before you can rebuild it in a different shape.

If the revolution is successful, as Lenin’s was, the useful idiots must either reform themselves as cogs in the burgeoning bureaucratic state, or fall out of favor. Once the revolution has installed a new government the leaders do not want any more societal disruptions. The post-revolutionary government prefers a docile, subordinate populace that doesn’t make too many demands.

When former supporters of the revolution do make demands their protests may be squashed quite ruthlessly. This is what happened to a contingent of sailors who had zealously supported the Marxists in 1917. After several years of growing discontent with the Marxist’s broken promises, the sailors began to agitate for better food and working conditions. Nothing more than that which had been promised to them in the revolution.

In March of 1921 they rebelled against Lenin’s forces, protesting in the streets and insisting upon their rights under socialism. The insurrectionists issued a fifteen-point manifesto, asking what had been promised for years by the ideology of socialism.

In return for their insubordination, Lenin ordered a heavy artillery regiment to fire on the sailors. Thousands were killed over the course of several weeks. Here is a firsthand account of how the Russian people reacted to the famous heroes of the revolution being slaughtered by their own government.

“Days of anguish and cannonading,” Berkman continued. “My heart is numb with despair; something has died within me. The people on the streets look bowed with grief, bewildered. No one trusts himself to speak. The thunder of heavy guns rends the air.”

The story continues…

With the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion, the Bolshevik victory was now complete and total. “The time has come,” Lenin decreed, “to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it; we have had enough opposition.” A mere nine days after Kronstadt fell, Lenin publicly declared war on those former allies who had been useful in putting over Bolshevism to the Russian people.

The put down of this “rebellion” is the moment when many Russians began to understand the character of their new leaders. It was increasingly obvious that the Marxist government either couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver on any of its campaign promises, and the people were too scared to revolt lest the artillery be trained on them as well.

As Lenin’s power increased, many former supporters of the revolution were eventually jailed or executed.

After the defeat of the Socialist rising in Vienna in 1934, several hundred members of the Socialist defense organization Schutzbound took refuge in Russia. They were welcomed as heroes, and marched past in a body in the Red Square to applause and congratulations. By mid-1937, they had been arrested and sent to camps “almost without exception.”

The tendency of a post-revolutionary government to betray its champions is a point I’ve highlighted before in relation to our current societal upheavals.

Stage 3 - Living under tyranny

The problem with communism is that eventually you run out of possible scapegoats for failure—at which point acknowledging or even noticing that something was wrong itself becomes a form of treason.

The power an administration needs to keep the populace in submission is inversely correlated with the economic prosperity being delivered by said government. If the regime is making everyone rich, few will advocate for its overthrow.

The Marxists, unfortunately, were not making everyone rich. As anti-prosperity spread through the land, ever greater shows of force were necessary to keep the people in check. These power displays by the Marxists manifested in several ways.

There was soft tyranny…

The search for truth, the urge to understand the meaning of life, is wholly alien to the younger generation which has passed through the school of the Communist Youth Organization. For them, all problems have been solved; there is a standard answer to every question. The language of these intellectually impoverished young people is larded with ready-made phrases. They quote Stalin instead of thinking for themselves; they derive their opinion from Pravda editorials. They are arrogant and complacent, and everything that pertains to them is the greatest thing there is: their country, their power, their leader. Theirs is also the greatest misery and oppression, but they are unaware of this, for they have never known anything but Soviet life.

Horrifying tyranny…

Trigger alert! I’m no snowflake and you probably aren’t either, but this is seriously brutal stuff. Skip this paragraph if torture makes you squeamish.

“The NKVD [secret police] investigators tortured prisoners for many hours at a stretch, and repeatedly,” recounted Medvedev. “Brutal interrogators disfigured prisoners. They not only beat them and kept them from sleep, food, and water; they gouged out eyes and perforated eardrums, pulled out fingernails and toenails, broke arms and legs, burned their victims with redhot irons, and mutilated sex organs.” Others were beaten until their eyes popped out of their heads, a level of violence so inhuman as to seem like something out of a cartoon.

And mental tyranny…

In the post-Stalin era, many dissidents in the Soviet Union and allied countries were sentenced to mental institutions for spurious reasons. You’d have to be insane to oppose the truth of communism, after all.

We’re all aware of the Holocaust, but less well-known were Lenin and then Stalin’s despotic purges in Eastern Europe. Estimates vary, since the executioners hardly kept detailed records, but historians believe that the Marxists managed to indirectly (via starvation and exhaustion) or directly (via execution) murder more people than the Nazis. The evidence of communism’s failure is so astonishingly clear that it’s baffling to me that anyone is still advocating for its revival, even in the diluted form popular with today’s “enlightened” elites.

Stage 4 - The aftermath

While we view the Soviet Union as a historical occurrence, the reverberations of communist rule are still present throughout the former USSR. For example, an extensive internal spy network was one of the Soviet’s preferred methods of control. Millions of people reported on their neighbors, coworkers, friends and even spouses. The spy network was so prolific that it was impossible to trust anyone you met, and even your closest relations had to be kept at arm’s length.

It thus became common for villagers to spy and inform on one another. Turning in a neighbor for having a sack of grain might be the easiest and safest way to procure food for one’s family.

On account of the decades of spying, an atmosphere of distrust persists in Eastern Europe to this day. For example, when I was living in a small town on the outskirts of Kiev I was fascinated by the apparently endless fence bordering the road. Each section of fence was unique, according to the homeowner’s preference, but one section invariably connected to another to form an uninterrupted barrier thousands of feet long.

I walked down streets for minutes at a time without glimpsing a single front yard. In America our fences are (generally) decorative, but in Eastern Europe they serve the explicit purpose of turning away prying eyes.

By not teaching people about Lenin, Stalin and the USSR, we’re creating conditions under which Americans may not understand how destructive the Marxists really were. This I think is a shame. While I am not of the belief that America will ever approach a Marxist level of tyranny, any step in this direction is still a battle lost.

Conclusions

In the final tally I’m giving The White Pill a 4 out of 5. My primary grievance was an extended section about anarchists. The exposition didn’t add to the motif, in my opinion, as I’m unsure what relevance anarchists have in our modern age. Apart from that thought the story progressed nicely, and Michael obviously did a great deal of research for this book.

This has not been the most uplifting of articles, so let us round out this review with a bit of humor. Even in the worst of times the Soviet citizens could always appreciate a joke, for no regime has yet been invented that can mangle the human spirit entirely.

One day Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin was in Moscow making a speech about how much the country had improved. He got particularly excited discussing the new twenty-story skyscrapers on Karl Marx Street in Kharkov.

A worker in the audience quietly stood up to protest. “Comrade Kalinin, I live in Kharkov. Almost every day I take a long walk on Karl Marx Street. I haven’t seen any skyscrapers.”

“That’s the trouble with you!” Barked Kalinin. “You waste your time promenading, instead of reading the newspapers and learning what is going on in the country!”