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Notes -
The Case Of Missing Judas Statue
Wars both cultural and kinetic rage in the real world as usual, and are getting a bit boring. No surprise that the xitterspace decided it is the best time to refight long forgotten battles.
One of the greatest xitterstorms of recent days was the case of missing Judas Statue.
Judas statue? The guy from Bible? Who is building his statues? Wokeness had gone really too far!
According to Darryl Cooper, popular podcaster and xitterer, the Bolsheviks back in 1918 at direct order of Leon Trotsky himself did it.
Makes logical sense. Bolsheviks were bad. Judas was bad. Therefore, Bolsheviks would love Judas.
Some people nevertheless doubted the story. Why should dialectic materialists and scientific atheists care about Judas? This only made the pro-statue crowd double and quartuple their efforts and turned the xitter storm into wildfire of the day.
"The stories about statue come only from White Guard propaganda and began appearing about 5 years after the statue was already erected? No pictures of this statue, nothing about it in Red newspapers and official Red propaganda announcements?" Well, the evil Reds had to build the statue in complete secrecy!
So where the tale came from? It turned out that history nerds, including local history nerds from Sviyazhsk on Volga river, population 243 where the statue was supposed to stand according to the earliest reports, already resolved this mystery.
It all begins in fiery year of 1918, at the beginning of Russian Civil War. At the time, it was, for world historic event it turned out to be, rather lackluster affair - few tens of thousands of combatants on both sides struggling for power over former Russian Empire. On the Red side, the main forces were Latvians.
On the White side, it was, of all people, Czechs and Slovaks. Yes, Russian civil war was wild story, story your editor would tell you to tone down to something approaching realism.
And one of Red Latvian commanders was Janis Judins who in August 1918 fell in battle with Czechoslovaks on the outskirts of Kazan and was buried with honors in Sviyazhsk.
While Danish diplomat Henning Kehler whose book was the original source of the statue tale was at the time in the area.
"Judins" and "Judas" are not so different words, especially when you cannot speak and read Russian and (reasonably) expect the worst from the Reds.
For Henning Kehler who confused names and the names of cities, did not know the Russian language and was a man of extraordinary imagination, the surname Yudin could well have seemed consonant with the name of the apostle-traitor.
And so was the story born, spread around the world, outlived Soviet Union itself and lasted till the internet age. Lesson: when you make up tall tales, it might be the most influential and consequential thing you will ever do in your lifetime.
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.
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