Recently, Netflix produced a series entitled, The Last Czars. As the title suggests, the series chronicles the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty and the end of autocratic monarchy in Russia. The show elicits an almost visceral response in its portrayal of the Romanovs, who are typically demonized by the usual suspects. In many aspects, the decline of Tsarism parallels the decline of the Old South and the fall of the Confederacy.
Tsarist Russia and the Confederacy both represented the last vestige of big ‘T’ Traditionalism, in a modern world that had gone drunk off the Enlightenment dogma. Both Russian and Southern society were hierarchical. The aristocracy of the South was the planter class, who made up the bulk of the South’s economic movers. And, Russia was still deeply feudal. Both societies were intrinsically agrarian. Russians employed serfs and the South utilized African slaves. Both recognized that men were not created equal and the duty of the aristocracy was to guide and care for those below them. Anglicanism was the predominant faith of the Southern aristocracy; and at the time, like Orthodoxy in its conservatism, embraced hierarchy and traditional liturgy.
In the East, there had been no Reformation of the Orthodox Church and no subsequent Enlightenment. Accordingly, those Western ideals of the Enlightenment, coupled with the Industrial Revolution, had dire consequences for Russia. As Russia industrialized, it embraced those Marxist ideas (via her decline in the Great War and revolutionary forces) promoting the rise of the proletariat above the aristocracy. In the same vein, the South had been the victim of foreign industrialists looking to exploit and supplant its agrarian way of life. Both Dixie and Tsarist Russia had been victims of materialism and imperialism (with Russia, a global communist empire) over traditionalism.
To put the downfall of the Confederacy and Tsarist Russia in perspective, Karl Marx wrote Abraham Lincoln to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election and resistance to the “Slave Power.” These same materialistic, pseudo-Marxist notions that killed the ideals of the Old South did so in a very direct way by overturning the monarchy in Russia and killing the Romanovs. The materialistic Northern industrialists pushed into the South to expand their markets and manufacturing base. The War of Northern Aggression was as Marx outlined, the victory of the materialistic bourgeoise class over the aristocracy. The Bolshevik Revolution was the victory of the materialistic proletariat over the bourgeoise and aristocratic castes. Both wars were the product of alien influence on the homeland and had devastating consequences afterward.
The Russian Church commissioned Tsar Nicholas II as a saint along with his family. The last royal family is recognized as Passion Bearers for the pious manner in which they lived their lives and faced death in a Christ-like fashion. The Southern and Russian aristocracy were “modern” (in the 19th and early 20th century sense) nobility, and made up the plantation class and officers corps respectively. Our current state of late stage capitalism has removed any sort of Christian morality from the economy, along with the culture. Legalized usury, porn peddling and money movers have created an upper-class that is devoid of any sort of piety or nobility. Our rich are scrupulous, greedy and perverted by the means that arrived at their wealth in the first place. We long for the nobility in novels like War and Peace and Gone with the Wind.
The fall of Russia is a tale that Southerners can identify with. We also saw our traditional institutions destroyed in many ways. We saw our agrarian way of life and connection with blood, soil and our ancestors supplanted with factories, commerce and the rise of the “New South.” Our best efforts as nationalists or identarians have been reactionary and within the modernist, post-war framework. As Southerners, we should embrace our religious, ethnic and agrarian identity and begin the same traditionalist renaissance already underway in Russia, one that is rapidly rejecting modernist, cosmopolitan and enlightenment dogma.
-By Dixie Anon
Editor’s Note: this post was not hacked by the Russians.
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
I know many Southern Nationalist groups are trying to make this comparison with Russian civilization because of sympathy with Putin’s nationalist regime, but it’s largely inaccurate. The South has more in common with Ukraine (and yes Ukraine is a nation with it’s own ancient national identity, I know Ukrainians IRL and gone to their churches, good people). Ukraine like Confederate South is largely agrarian, pro-Catholic (confederates like Jeff Davis were suspected crypto-Caths), but also has a neocon/oligarchy problem. I can see a comparison of Appalachia and Virginia with Russia but not the Jewish neoliberal mass plantations of the Deep South. My nation (Vinland/ the Rust Belt) is more like Russia. We are a worker centric people with small but infertile/cold land. More like the honest vodka drinking Russian worker than the farming faith centered Ukrainian.
Hahahaha…The Yusupovs, Sheremetevs, Vrontsovs, Trubetskoyss, Tolstoys and Golitsyns would spin in their graves, over this comparison.