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Notes -
It’s curious if not comical that a Russian village that probably has no more than 200 inhabitants today and is located on a secluded island has an extensive Wikipedia page in Russian that also includes a section on the statue myth. On a different note, Cooper and his readers might find it interesting that Thomas More, the Italian Dominican friar, theologian and utopian theorist Tommaso Campanella, and English Protestant reformer and activist Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the so-called Diggers, among others, were indeed commemorated by the Bolsheviks on a repurposed Czarist obelisk near the Moscow Kremlin officially dedicated to ‘outstanding thinkers and personalities of the struggle for the liberation of workers’. I guess that is some potential fodder for anti-Protestant memes or something.
Regarding the Russian Civil War I would mention that the largest foreigner contingent (so to speak) on the side of the Reds consisted not of Latvians but of Hungarians. Of the about 400 thousand POWs of Hungarian origin that were still alive in Russian captivity at the time when the Czar was toppled, about 100 thousand joined the Red Army and the Cheka and basically none joined the opposing side. Mundane motivations were obviously in effect as well but were in this case rather different. The Latvian volunteers (correctly) assumed that the Whites opposed Latvian independence but the Reds were in favor of it (at least that was the situation then and in the foreseeable future). The Hungarians were mostly seeking a practical way to get home (in a Western direction) as soon as possible.
Commemorating the Diggers (a radical group who appeared in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War and were violently suppressed by Cromwell) as proto-communists is straightforwardly correct.
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