On the 16th of June 1963, a Vostok 8K72K rocket is launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh SSR. Its payload is a Vostok 3KA orbital module, the same type which had carried Yuri Gagarin into space 2 years earlier.
Inside the cramped and almost unbearably hot capsule, Vostok had a crew of just one cosmonaut. There was no backup, unreliable radios, and only rudimentary computer navigation. The sole cosmonaut was expected to manually manage every aspect of the mission, even parachuting back to earth after re-entry.
The cosmonaut was well trained for this. The rigorous screening process had winnowed thousands of applicants down to 400. The training further reduced that number to 58, then 23. Eventually, only three remained. The one chosen for this mission came from a humble background, a factory worker and amateur skydiver from Yaroslavl and the child of a tractor driver and a textile worker with no military experience.
Her name is Valentina Tereshkova. She is 26 years old and the first woman in space, 20 years before Sally Ride. She completed a three-day mission, parachuted to earth, and was greeted with parades in her honor then awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s highest honor. Her accomplishments will be forever engraved in the annals of history.
In 2017, a young girl in a filthy fur coat lies next to a pile of construction debris in the streets of Kiev. A park stood here once, in happier times. Now all that remains is rubble and sadness. This is where she lives, sometimes taking shelter in the sewers or metro stations when it’s particularly cold.
She is one of 800,000 homeless Ukrainian children in a nation of 40 million, forced to suffer because the machinations of Capitalism have deemed their lives to be superfluous. The entire United States homeless population, at the height of the nation’s greatest housing crisis in the postwar era, is under 600,000.
She is clutching the stray dog she keeps as a pet as she drifts in and out of consciousness. Tonight, she huffed glue for the first time to dull the physical and emotional pain from a savage beating at the hands of her pimp. The pimp was angry that the girl had become pregnant and would soon be rendered unable to sell her body, and what remains of her innocence, cheating the pimp of his tribute.
Her name is Natasha, and she is 16 years old. She will never be allowed to explore the stars. There will be no parades in her honor and no medals on her chest. History will forget that she ever existed. Her future was stolen from her a decade before her birth by bankers in Washington and gangsters in Kiev.

Natasha enjoys the freedom brought to her by the west
This should not be possible if we believe the omnipresent propaganda from our government and its thralls in the press. We are told Valentina lived in a repressive dictatorship that stifled human potential and ambition, while Natasha lived her entire life in a country that was “liberated” 25 years prior by the magnanimous west. As usual, this propaganda about “freedom” poorly conceals the savage truth.
The New Soviet Woman
“Petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades [the woman], chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery."- V.I. Lenin
Had Natasha been born on June 16th, 1963, she would have been born truly free. In the Soviet Union, women were not the slaves of pimps. They were not forced to sell themselves out of desperation nor beaten and forced to freeze and starve in the streets. They did not huff glue to dull the pain of being alive. In the Soviet Union, women held up half the sky.
From the very beginning of the Union, the CPSU viewed the liberation and advancement of women as vitally important. The 1918 family code guaranteed the rights of women to no cause divorce, maternal leave, and equal wages, entitlements, and protections in the workplace. In 1920, the USSR legalized abortion, and in 1922 it was the first nation to recognize and criminalize marital rape.
The cause was important enough that a women’s committee called the Zhentodel was formed inside the Central Committee of the CPSU, the party’s highest decision-making apparatus. The committees proliferated down to the local level where they were known as Zhensovety, and by the time of Gorbachev, 2.3 million Soviet women took part. The Zhentodel advocated for all women, regardless of their background, each of the USSR’s 100 ethnic groups had its own councils to focus on their specific needs. Women did not just petition the party, the women of the Zhentodel took an active role in the fight for liberation.

Chuvash Zhentodel, 1925
The situation facing these women was often dire. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this was in Central Asia, where the region’s fundamentalist strain of Islam kept women in complete isolation. In many wealthy families, women were kept in separate rooms and not allowed to leave the home, with all their needs attended to by legions of servants. Poor women were forced into head-to-toe veils known as paranja, and any who refused were beaten or executed. Beyond veils and isolation, women’s literacy rates were in the single digits, and practices such as bride kidnapping, child marriage, widow inheritance, honor killings, and female genital mutilation were common.
On International Women’s Day, March 8th of 1927, the Zhenotdel began an organized campaign known as the Hujum (Arabic for “attack” or “storming”) against these practices. Cadres of Soviet women were trained and dispatched to the region. They set up maternity hospitals, informed local women of their rights, and most importantly, educated them. This was done in concert with a public campaign against the veil as a symbol of oppression. Within 3 months, around 100,000 women removed and publicly burned their veils in protest.
This campaign was not an easy one. Around 2500 feminists were murdered in Uzbekistan alone. Many were killed in public, beaten and stabbed in the same squares where they had removed their veils for the first time. Ainabyubyu Jalganbayeva, a Kyrgyz activist, teacher, and member of the local Soviet government was ambushed and murdered with a dagger in broad daylight for the crime of teaching women how to read. Nurkhon Yuldashkhojayeva and Tursunoy Saidazimova, two of the most remarkable Uzbek singers of their era, were both murdered for performing without a veil at CPSU events.
Despite this campaign of terror and violence, the Zhentodel and its successors persisted. They continued fighting, in one form or another, for 15 years before the Hujum finally ended due to the Second World War. It did not end in vain. The hard work and sacrifice of thousands of Soviet women brought the flame of liberation to those who had been held in darkness for centuries. By 1950, the literacy rate of Uzbek women was 75%. Life expectancy skyrocketed, and infant mortality plummeted. Statues to the martyrs who died for this cause stood all over central Asia until the fall of the USSR.
Soviet women were among the world’s most highly educated and encouraged to enter medicine, academics, and STEM fields. By 1967, Soviet women comprised 41% of the nation’s engineers and 75% of its doctors. They made vast contributions to fields as diverse as medicine, mathematics, computer science, nuclear physics, and much more. Even today, so many women remain in STEM fields in the former Warsaw Pact that the Economist views it as a problem.

“Madam Penicillin” Zinaida Yermolyeva
As was the case with all Soviet citizens, women had access to the nation’s wide array of free art programs. Soviet women once again excelled, creating some of the nation’s most iconic works of art. Countless sculptors, painters, poets, actresses, musicians, dancers, singers, and more were given the nation’s highest awards in honor of their work and Soviet women were instrumental in the creation of new artistic movements, such as Constructivism, Suprematism, and Futurism. Far from the repressive and drab lives of drudgery we are told were part and parcel of the Soviet system, Soviet women flourished in the new artistic scenes ushered in and nurtured by the revolution.
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“Portrait of Different Years” by Mariam Aslamazyan
When Nazi barbarians came to enslave and murder the Soviet people, Soviet women refused to bend the knee. Nearly half a million women risked their lives in the struggle against fascism, and once again Soviet women covered themselves with glory. Over 200,000 were decorated for valor, 89 of those were awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest possible honor for a Red Army soldier. Women fought as snipers, tankers, pilots, machine gunners, and even partisans.
Heroes like partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya paid the ultimate price in the battle against Nazism. Zoya was only 18 years old when she was captured, tortured, and murdered by the Nazis while on a combat mission near Moscow. Even after days of torture, she never betrayed her comrades. Her last words were “Farewell, comrades! Fight, do not be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!” She died to ensure that not even Adolf Hitler could put Soviet women back in chains.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Hero of the Soviet Union
With Marxism and Soviet power behind them, Soviet women were able to break through the bounds of the sky itself and take their place among the stars. Sadly, it would not last. While Hitler failed, Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton succeeded in tearing down the sky.
Genocide by any other name
“Why are you worried about these people? Well, thirty million will die out. They didn't fit into the market. Don't think about it - new ones will grow”- Anatoly Chubais
The liberatory power of Marxism posed an existential threat to the forces of international capital who depend on slavery and exploitation to sustain themselves. Therefore, the USSR was never allowed to peacefully develop, instead forced to exist under the constant threat of annihilation, even facing a western led invasion in 1918.
Hitler was only one of many Capitalists who attempted to destroy the USSR, and after the war, the remains of the Third Reich were all but openly rolled into the new US-led NATO security apparatus which waged a covert war against the USSR. This external pressure combined with betrayal from within eventually led to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and unleashed a catastrophe upon the Soviet people that would have made Hermann Göring proud.
In 1990, when the USSR was one year away from collapse after a decade of economic sabotage, the nation’s Human Development Index was ranked 25th in the world at .920.
In 2019, the most recent year the data was published, Russia ranked 52nd. Kazakhstan was 51st. Ukraine plummeted to 74th, below Sri Lanka, Mexico, and Albania. Uzbekistan, where so many Soviet women fought and died to win their freedom, was 106th. Even the Baltics have yet to fully recover. Estonia is ranked 29th, Lithuania is 34th, and Latvia is 37th.
None of the Union Republics have a HDI of over .900 today. Even at its worst, the Soviet Union provided a better quality of life than any of its successor states.
This was not an accident, but rather the result of an intentional policy. The wealth and security of the Soviet people did not vanish into thin air, they were stolen by western bankers and their collaborators in the former Warsaw Pact.
Much like in the 1940s, when the grandfathers of these bandits looted the Soviet Union for the first time, this campaign of systematic pillaging was lethal. Peer-reviewed documents list the excess deaths from 1991 to 2001 at a minimum of five million in Russia alone. When the Union Republics are added to the butcher’s bill, the death toll easily exceeds that of the Holocaust.
Had this happened anywhere else or had it been perpetrated by anyone else; it would have been called what it was. Genocide.
Even beyond the death toll, the magnitude of this crime is staggering. In 1992, the inflation rate was 2520%. The next year, Boris Yeltsin’s criminal regime confiscated the savings of the Soviet people, sending their money to banks in Europe and America to pay off debt. This, of course, only affected the Soviet people lucky enough to have any savings left. Many were not so fortunate.
In the name of “modernizing the social safety net”, the new regime simply quit paying pensions, child benefits, and unemployment. By 1997, unpaid pensions amounted to 17 trillion rubles, child benefits 10 trillion, and unemployment 2 trillion. This is around 500 billion USD, stolen from the Soviet people and sent to the west. When protests forced the resumption of payments in 1998, inflation rendered the meager payments essentially worthless. Pensions were only 44% of a subsistence income, and child benefits only 8%, utterly devastating mothers and leading many women to either forgo having children or put their children up for adoption.
This meant that many elderly people died of exposure, starvation, and deprivation. Many of those who remained were reduced to begging or selling their few possessions on the streets. It created a crisis of child homelessness which has still not been resolved, with millions of children leaving school and falling into crime and drug abuse to survive. The effects of this genocide on Soviet mothers and children were so severe it created a demographic crisis that continues to this day.
Adding to their misery, the purchasing power of the Soviet people declined by 98%, a fact rendered almost meaningless by severe, widespread shortages of basic goods caused by the destruction of Soviet industry for the benefit of the US and Europe. Factories sent their machinery west then closed by the thousand, taking jobs with them, and many of those who kept their jobs were paid sporadically, if at all.
By the end of 1995, wages in the former USSR had fallen to 34% of their 1991 levels. This was compounded by widespread wage theft. By the end of 1997, the amount of wages stolen from Russian workers sat at a minimum of 20 trillion rubles and many workers went months, even years without payment. This led to widespread strikes, occupations, and sabotage, culminating in the 1998 “railway war” in which workers occupied and shut down railway networks throughout Russia.
One Vorkuta miner described their situation:
"There is no money for basic necessities. <...> We have to ask for money from retired parents, whom we must help ourselves. And their pension is known what. Shamefully. < ... > My son once said to me: What, Dad, are we going to die? <...> In one family, a schoolboy son hanged himself and left a note: "I'm tired of listening to you and your mother quarrel over money…“ In another family, the father himself couldn't stand it — he tied explosives around himself. Three of us have committed suicide. We are slaves, cattle. The slave is fed by the master. You can't live like this anymore! "
The workers were successful in the short term, forcing the Yeltsin regime to transfer money from the budget to cover their back pay. In the long term, however, it was a disaster. The payment of workers represented a violation of loan terms imposed on Russia by the World Bank, leading to the withdrawal of vital loans and the forced privatization of most of Russia’s mines and railways. James Cook, an American banker and major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton described this crisis as “the best thing that ever happened to us.”
All of this was carried out with the assistance and advice of both international finance capital and the United States Government, in particular the pedophile-in-chief Bill Clinton, who viewed Yeltsin as a close friend and indispensable partner. Bill went to bat for Yeltsin numerous times and even implemented a full court press to rig the 1996 Russian election in Yeltsin’s favor, ensuring 4 more years of suffering for the Russian people and 4 more years of profit for his fundraisers.
The ravenous sexual predator in the White House was not content to simply rape the Soviet economy. He also raped its girls with the help of his best friend, Jeffery Epstein.
From Vostok to the Lolita Express
“I will send you to Paris. You’ll live there, you’ll chat a little, we’ll get you cleaned up. We’ll make you a portfolio, I’ll show your pictures to a rich man. And if he likes you, he’ll give me the money to introduce you. You’re going to play around with him a bit, and importantly, listen to Uncle Peter [Listerman’s nickname for himself], you are not to let him have you immediately. Because if you decide to give it to him, then he has to pay more. And then, if he likes you and he decides to keep you with him, he has to pay even more. Moreover, Uncle Peter will teach you how to live.”.”- Peter Listermann, international sex trafficker
The genocide of the 1990s hit Soviet women especially hard. They were not simply impoverished, fired, turned out of their homes, forced to starve and freeze, denied basic medical care, and stripped of their dignity. Starting in the 1990s, millions of Soviet women have been enslaved by gangsters both foreign and domestic. Taken off the streets either through deception or violence, they are trafficked to foreign countries and raped by the very same people who richly profited from their misery.
Interpol and the OSCE estimate that 4-7 million people from the former Warsaw Pact are trafficked each year, and the majority of those are women and children.
In this regard, Yeltsin and Clinton managed to once again outdo Hitler. The Nazi Ostarbiter program managed to enslave about 8 million for forced labor in the Reich, but what took Hitler 4 years, the American model manages in 2. Perhaps it is a testament to the ruthless efficency of American capitalism that our bandits do twice the work in half the time.
So many women are trafficked and enslaved that it has become almost cliché. In Turkey and Israel, these women are called “Natashas.” Much like Natasha in Kiev they suffer in the streets, often addicted to drugs and unable to contact their families and homes. Their real names are no longer important to their new exploiters. However, it could be much worse.
Peter Listermann refers to them as “chickens” or “tyolki,” which means heifers or virgin cattle.
Listermann is one of the many gangsters responsible for the enslavement and exploitation of an entire generation of women. Listermann is a Ukrainian-born, Odessa-based gangster and sex offender who refers to himself as a “matchmaker” instead of a pimp. He scouts underage women at fashion shows and movie premiers, at first promising them modeling work before shipping them off to the highest bidder.
Far from a shadowy figure, Listermann is quite open and proud of what he does. He has done numerous interviews, maintained an active social media presence, and appears openly at entertainment and fashion events in Odessa. The predator even has his own website, which has yet to be taken down.
In fact, nothing of any real consequence has happened to Listermann at all. He is now reportedly banned from several fashion shows, but he remains both a free man and a very wealthy one.

Listermann, right
It could be that Listermann remains untouchable because his clients include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on both sides of the old Iron Curtain. Among them are countless oligarchs and fellow gangsters, along with Bruce Willis, Robert DeNiro, an unnamed British noble, and the infamous international sex trafficker, Jefferey Epstein. At one point, Listermann claims to have procured half of Epstein’s victims. While some of this is probably an exaggeration, it can be proven that Listermann represented several of Epstein’s known victims.
With Epstein comes his best friend, Bill Clinton. The former president and current pedophile’s name appears in Epstein’s black book and the guest book of Epstein’s Zorro ranch, he has also been photographed both on the infamous “Lolita Express” and with Epstein’s victims. He was even invited to dinner dates with new victims to give his friend more credibility.
The connection between the two is so deep that Epstein’s madam and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was invited to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding months after being served an indictment for sex trafficking at a Clinton Foundation event. Before the wedding, Chelsea spent a week-long vacation on Ghislaine’s yacht.

Clinton walking his daughter down the aisle as Maxwell looks on
Clinton did not just steal the future from these girls, he did not just make them poor, throw them out of their homes, enslave them and force them to freeze and starve in the streets for the benefit of his friends and donors. Chances are, he also raped them on his friend’s airplane.
Of course, Peter Listermann is only one of many. This type of predator is still common all throughout the Eastern Bloc. Most of them are smart enough to avoid notice, or at least canny enough to try, but nonetheless hundreds of thousands of Russians are trafficked each year. The ties between the fashion industry, sex trafficking, and pedophilia are well established. By and large, these victims will suffer in anonymity, without the benefit of a political scandal to make the world pay attention.
Not long ago, the women of Eastern Europe were free to live their lives to their full potential. They broke boundaries in science, started new trends in art, and even explored the stars as cosmonauts. In the so-called repressive dictatorship of the USSR, women held up half the sky. Now, their daughters and granddaughters travel the sky in the Lolita Express.
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