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aoawarfare · 1 year ago

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Episode 25 The Russian Revolution and Central Asia

Did you ever wonder how the Russian Revolution affected Central Asia? This episode discusses how the various political factions in Central Asia-the Jadids, Alash Orda, the Ulama, and the Russian Settlers-responded to the fall of the Tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks.

When we last discussed Central Asia, they were in the midst of the 1916 Revolt, which is now seen as the harbinger of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil Wars. Today we’ll discuss how the Russian Revolution affected Central Asia.

February Revolution

1917 is an odd year for Russia, because it’s a period were militarily-things were beginning to look up, but socially and politically, things were at their lowest. Even though Russia had seen its greatest military victory in 1916 (one that cost them an estimated 3 million killed, wounded, or taken prisoner) and it was correcting its production issues, it was still facing a massive supply crisis because of an overstrained and broken transport system. This meant shortages of food, fuel, and basic household goods, rapid inflation, and corruption within the government and its military suppliers. Most fatal of all was the complete lack of trust everyone had in the Russian government. Governmental officials were either unacceptably incompetent or German spies and traitors. Even the staunchly monarchist General Aleksei Brusilov admitted that “Russia could not win the war with its present system of government.” (Figes) Everyone agreed that Russia was on the brink of a great catastrophe, but no one could have predicted it would have been at the hands of women tired of queuing for bread.

Russia had flour, despite what the rumors claimed, but the transport system had broken down, meaning the flour couldn’t get to the cities where it was desperately needed. In Petrograd, women would wait in line all night only to be told the next morning that there was no bread. On February 19th, the Petrograd authorities said that rationing would begin on March 1st, raising the specter of mass starvation.

On February 23rd, the first warm day after weeks of the coldest winter Russia had experienced for several years, women came out in mass to celebrate International Women’s Day and to protest for equal rights and bread. By mid-afternoon other workers would join them. The police tried to disperse them with Cossack support, but Cossacks were non-committal at best. Their timidity encouraged the workers to return on February 24th, this time drawing in students, bank clerks, cabbies, shopkeepers etc. and again on February 25th, when Petrograd experienced a general strike. The crowd violently clashed with the police but made appeals to the soldiers stationed in the city. There was an increasing divide within public opinion where the police were seen as the Tsar’s and would fight to the end, but the soldiers were seen as the people’s and would support them. Not all of the soldiers supported the uprising, but officials were alarmed at the growing rate of soldiers who refused to disperse the crowds.

Torn down portraits of the Tsars of Russia during the revolution

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The Russian officials decided to wait out the uprising, trusting that once flour reached the city and bread was made again, the workers would disperse. The Tsar, who was at the front and thus had no real idea of the situation on the ground because no one bothered to tell him the truth about the matter, ordered his officers to use the military to crush the uprising instead. On February 26th, the soldiers and police opened fired on the marchers. A line had been crossed, forcing soldiers to chose between protecting a regime that didn’t seem to know what it was doing or join the protesters. Slowly, regiments led by young, junior officers, turned against the regime, culminating in the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison, which took all military power away from the authorities. The soldiers infused an organized, militant strain into the uprising, turning it into a revolution. They targeted majority infrastructure, spread the mutiny to other military barracks, and turned the violence on their commanding officers, the police, and the prisons.

On February 27th, the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and others formed the Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet Worker’s Deputies, which on the 28th became the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. They would meet in Catherine Hall and drew the soldiers and protestors to them. Meanwhile the Duma, trapped inside the Tauride Palace, were forced into action after they heard of the creation of the Petrograd Soviet. They created their own governmental body: the “Temporary Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Individuals and Institutions”.

The goals of the Temporary committee were to protect as many ex-ministers as they could from the crowd and entice the soldiers back to their barracks. The soldiers, fearing they would be punished for mutinying, sided with the Soviets. Even though the Soviets had the backing of the soldiers and the crowd, they did not take power in February. Instead, they created a shared government with the Duma creating the Provisional Government, also known as the Dual Power. In the end this meant that the Soviet had the power without the responsibility and the Provisional government would have the responsibility without the power. On March 2nd, the Tsar abdicated for himself and his son. The reign of the Romanovs was over, replaced by a government put in place by an unexpected revolution that had no grand demand, only the desire for food and a competent government.

Central Asia

But what did all of this mean for Central Asia? The short answer is it’s complicated.

According to historian Marco Buttino, in Russian territories, like Central Asia, “the revolution arrived via telegraph”. With that telegraph came citizenship. See one of the many acts the Provisional Government pass was the abolition of all legal distinctions between citizens on basis of rank, religion, sex, or ethnicity, granted every citizen over the age of twenty the right to vote, and guaranteed freedom of the press. Overnight, this made the indigenous people of Central Asia citizens and dramatically changed the political dynamic between the indigenous peoples and Russian settlers, while stripping the settlers the imperial protection they used to enjoy. This isn’t to say that the Provisional Government was a great governing people who wanted equality for all. But the fall of the Tsar meant that Russia’s hold on its colonies was loosened enough for the indigenous people of Central Asia to exercise political power long denied to them.

Obviously, for the Russian Settlers this was an existential threat to their way of life and privileged positions in Central Asia. As we discussed in our episode about Russian colonialism, many of these settlers came to Central Asia looking for land and political and economic freedom they couldn’t find in Russia proper. The settlers may have been glad the Tsar was gone, may have even supported the Provisional Government principle, or may have been Bolsheviks. It didn’t matter when it came to how they felt about the indigenous peoples exercising political rights that had long been denied to them.

But what did the Revolution and citizenship mean for the indigenous peoples? This is where it gets complicated. For the purpose of this episode, we’re going to focus our discussion on the conservative ulama and merchant classes and two reformist groups: the Jadids and the Alash Orda but acknowledge that this only covers a small fraction of the many different groups and reactions to the February Revolution.

The reformists welcomed the Revolution and its promise of equality and liberty because they believed it would bring forth many needed reforms. Neither the Jadids nor the Alash Orda were anti-Islam, but they both believed that something was wrong with their current society and it needed to be fixed. The Jadids focused on spreading their message through the arts and on developing a new teaching method. One that took children out of the ulama dominated madrassas and gave them a “modern” education. The Alash Orda also believed in the new teaching method but were also more focused on land rights and expulsing settlers from former Kazakh and Kyrgyz lands.

If you want to learn more about the Jadids, you should listen to our interview with renown scholar Dr. Adeeb Khalid. You should stay tuned if you want to learn more about the Alash Orda, because we have an upcoming episode dedicated to the Kazakh intelligentsia movement.

The ulama actually welcomed the February Revolution because they believed it would allow the indigenous peoples to practice Islam without Russian interference. But they were threatened by the Jadids because they feared that the Jadids would corrupt how people practice Islam, undermine their own position of power, and change Turkestan culture for the worse. The true source of the conflict wasn’t one of secular vs Islam, but a conflict over how Islam should be practiced and what being “modern” meant.

Railway annunciation church in Tashkent 1909-1917

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Turkestan (Tashkent mostly)

The Jadids were one of the first to react to the February Revolution. In March 1917, the Jadids mobilized the urban population in Turkestan. The center of the mobilization was in Tashkent, where in the first week of March, public gatherings attracted as many as 30,000 people. During one of these meetings, the Tashkent Muslim Council (Toshkand Shuroi Islomiyasi-also known as Shuro) was created to function as the local government and party in Tashkent’s old city. The Tashkent Shuro sent representatives to other cities (who were organizing their own mass gatherings) to help local counterparts recruit new members and raise funds. The first official meeting of the Tashkent Shuro was organized by Munavvar qori Abdurashidxon and Ubaydulla Xo’jayev.

Munavvar came from a family of ulama and, like many Jadids, studied at a madrassa in Bukhara. Renown historian, Adeeb Khalid considers Munavvar to be the most important Jadid figure in Tashkent because of his organizational skills and because he was the driving force behind the formalization of the new-method schools into a network with uniform standards and curricula, providing a model for all other Jadid schools.

Ubaydulla was a lawyer by trade and had attended a Russo-native school as opposed to a madrasa. He would serve in Saratov as a translator and later as a lawyer for several years before returning to Tashkent and began involved with the Jadids. Ubaydulla’s greatest weapon as a statesman during this time period was his command of the Russian language and his familiarity with Russian ways.

The organizing efforts of the Shuro culminated in the First Congress of Muslims of Turkestan, which met in Tashkent on April 16th. This Congress attracted members from the various indigenous factions of Turkestan and was organized around a sixteen-point agenda regarding the region’s future. During the meeting, they voted for Turkestan to be territorially autonomous in a democratic federative Russian Republic. They also elected a twelve-member delegation to attend the All-Russian Muslim Congress organized by the Muslim Fraction of the State Duma that would meet in Moscow as well as established a Turkestan National Central Council. The Congress revealed many fractures amongst the Indigenous population, with the ulama and merchants seceding from the Shuro in May 1917 and creating the Society of the Ulama (Ulamo Jamiyati).

Ulama vs Jadids

Municipal elections were held in June and the Ulamo defeated the Jadids quite resoundingly. In Tashkent, the Ulamo won 62 of 112 seat, while the Shuro won only 11. The struggle between the ulama and the Jadids would grow worse as the 1917 progressed with the ulama arguing that “the affairs of religion and of this world should not be separated i.e., everything from schools to questions of land and justice should be solved according to the shariat”. (Adeeb, pg 65), which of course they were the only ones who could properly interpret.

During the Second Turkestan Muslim Congress, which met in early September, the Shuro proposed that Turkestan would have its own Duma with authority in all matters except external affairs, defense, posts and telegraphs, and judiciary, all citizens of Russia were equal, and freedoms of assembly, religion, and conversion were to be guaranteed. They agreed that Muslims were to be governed by Shariat, but they also passed a resolution that called for the establishment of a shariat administration in each oblast with administrators elected and educated in contemporary needs. Again, this wasn’t a fight to “secularized’ the region, but an argument over how to implement Islam in a “modern” world. Interestingly not all of the ulama were against this reformist approach. Those who supported the Jadids would create the Society of Jurists (Fuqaho Jamiyati) as a counter to the Ulamo.

However, already Islam was taking on an ethnic tint. While the indigenous peoples explored different forms of government and the role of Islam, they were also exploring what it meant to be “Central Asian”. For Jadids such as Abdurauf Fitrat, a giant amongst giants who we will return to many times during this season, being Central Asian meant embracing Turkism, a celebration of all things Turkic (but not Ottoman Turkic, a unique form of Central Asian Turkic centered around Turkestan and epitomized by Timur, also known as Tamerlane). The ethnicization of identity seems to have been sparked by the conflict with the ulama. As the ulama clung to Islam as a form of identity, the Jadids turned to Turkism and nationality as their identity. Of course, this left other peoples such as the Tajiks, increasingly left out in the cold.

Russian Settlers

We’ve spent a bit of time talking about the indigenous peoples of Turkestan, but what were the Russian settlers and remaining soldiers doing this entire time? They organized on their own, creating committees of public safety and Soviets. They made it clear that the indigenous peoples were not welcome, despite allowing two indigenous peoples to sit on the public safety committees. The Tashkent Soviet of Soldiers’ and Worker’s Deputies placed governor general Kuropatkin (of 1916 Revolt fame) under arrest and appointed nine members to the Turkestan Committee to govern the region. This committee consisted of five Russians and four Muslim, but none of them were from Turkestan. Initially, the settlers were much perturbed by what the indigenous people wanted or would do.

But then the Jadids and others started organizing, and the settlers grew nervous. They demanded that the old and new cities of Tashkent should have separate dumas with separate budgets. Not only did the settlers fear being politically overpowered by the indigenous citizens, they were also facing starvation. The region was already struggling foodwise because of the 1916 revolt and a brutal winter. Things only grew worse as the White Cossacks under Ataman Alexander Dutov cut the Orenburg-Tashkent railway, ending vital grain imports.

By September, the Soviets and other revolutionary organs regularly requisitioned food. Even though they claimed they were taking from the bourgeois, settlers often targeted the indigenous peoples of old Tashkent, claiming they were “hoarders”. The worst conflicts over food were seen in Semirech’e which was still recovering from the violence of 1916. By fall 1917, Turkestan was in an ethnic conflict with the settlers owning all the guns. However, the settlers were fighting with each other as much as they were fighting with the indigenous people and on October 27th, several soldiers rebelled against the Turkestan Committee and took power on November 1st.

This new Tashkent Soviet consisted of purely Russians and claimed they now ruled all of Turkestan. The Ulamo organized a congress in Tashkent in the second week of November proclaiming, that since “The Muslims of Turkestan…comprise of 98 percent of the population” it was “impermissible to advocate the assumption of power in Turkestan by a handful of immigrant soldiers, workers, and peasants who are ignorant of the way of life of the Muslims of Turkestan”. (Adeeb, pg 71). Despite this, they tried to form a coalition government with Tashkent Soviet, which the Russians rejected, claiming:

“The inclusion of Muslims in the organ of supreme regional power is unacceptable at the present time in view of both the completely indefinite attitude of the native population towards the power of the Soviets of soldier’s, workers’, and peasant’s deputies, and the fact that there are no proletarian class organizations among the native population whose representation in the organ of supreme regional power the faction would welcome.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 71

Autonomous Turkestan

The Shuro, which is the indigenous political body, responded to the settler’s actions by organizing another congress of Muslims on November 27th. This time, however, they met in Kokand, a vibrant commercial center that was safe from the Russian settlers. The conference included all major figures of indigenous politics except for the Ulamo. The Congress passed the following resolution:

“The Fourth Extraordinary All-Muslim Regional Congress, expressing the will of the peoples inhabiting Turkestan to self-determination on the principles proclaimed by the Great Russian revolution, proclaims Turkestan territorially autonomous within a Federated Democratic Russian Republic. It offers the right to establishment of the form of autonomy to the Turkestan constituent assembly, which should convene as soon as possible, and solemnly declares that the rights of national minorities inhabiting Turkestan will be protected by all means.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 71

They created an 8 men government of Autonomous Turkestan which was responsible to a fifty-four-member council. 32 of the members were elected at the conference with eighteen reserved for non-Muslim parties, and four seats were reserved for representatives of municipal dumas. Muhammedjan Tinishbayev was elected prime minister and minister of internal affairs, Mustafa Cho’qoy was named minister of external affairs, Ubaydulla Xo’jayev oversaw creating a people’s militia, and Obidjon Mahmudov became minister of food supply. The reaction to an autonomous Turkestan was euphoric. Fitrat wrote:

“Autonomous Turkestan!…I do not believe there’s a greater, more sacred, more beloved word among the true sons of the mighty Temur, the indigenous Turks of Turkestan! If there is a force that can warm the blood of the Turks of Turkestan and heighten their faith, then it’s only this word: Autonomous Turkestan.” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 75

Yet, despite this joy, the Kokand government quickly learned that it was easier to talk about governing, then actually governing a region beset by ethnic conflict and famine and they had no governmental experience, no army, and no consistent stream of income. Nor were their actions welcomed by the Tashkent Soviet, who viewed an autonomous Turkestan as an existential threat.

Bukhara Emirate

We’re going to pause there and shift our focus from the Jadids in Turkestan to the Jadids in the Bukhara Emirate, who were facing very different challenges from their Tashkent counterparts.

After the February Revolution, the Jadids secretly met at Fayzulla Xo’jayev’s house to discuss next steps. Fayzulla was born to one of the wealthiest families in Bukhara and was sent to Moscow for his education, instead of a madrasa, giving him an edge since he was comfortable with the Russian language.

The Jadids decided to send two members to Samarkand to send a telegram to the Provisional Government in Petrograd, saying:

“Great Russia, through its devoted sons, has irretrievably overthrown the old despotic regime, and founded in its place a free, democratic government. We humbly ask that the new Russian government in the near future instruct our government to change the manner of its governance to the bases of freedom and equality, so that we may [also] take pride in the fact that we are under the protection of Great Free Russia” - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 62

Knowing they could not defeat the emir alone, they also reached out to the Shuro in Samarkand and to other pan-Russian Muslim organizations.

The provisional government was receptive but torn over how to proceed. Some thought they should forcefully intervene and dictate terms to Emir Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan. Others feared that this would anger the ulama, who would incite a region wide conflict, potentially inviting intervention from Afghanistan. Instead, they decided to send A. Ia. Miller as a representative to Bukhara to pressure the emir to issue reforms himself. Together, the Emir and Miller wrote a draft of a political manifesto which the Emir proclaimed on April 7th. This new proclamation promised the end of unjust taxes, established a state exchequer and budget, created an elected council in Bukhara to oversee public health and sanitation, established Bukhara’s first printing press, and removed several conservative ulama and replaced them with reformists.

The next day, the Jadids organized a march to thank the emir while exerting the rise of reformism and were met by a counter-protest organized by the ulama. The ulama feared what these reforms would mean for the traditions they held dear as well as their own positions of power, going so far as claiming that “We do not want our Islamic lands to be liberated and we do not want indifference to the religion of the Prophet” (Adeeb). The fact that the Jadids’ thank you march included members of the city’s Shia and Jewish, confirmed the ulama’s worst fears. The march turned bloody with many Jadids being accosted. The emir knew better than to take on the conservative elements of Bukhara and used their outrage to undo all the reforms he promised (this had the added benefit of distancing himself from Russian control as well).

Emir Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan

[Image Description: A colored photo of a big man in a brilliant blue robe. The robe is decorated with white and pink flowers. He is wearing a white turban and is holding a sword. He has a thick, circular beard. He is wearing black leather books. Behind him is a tan wall and wooden doors.]

He arrested 30 Jadids, including Sadriddin Ayni, the famous Tajik poet. It is said Ayni was lashed 75 times while in prison. Many Jadids ran to Kagan, the Russian settlement outside of Bukhara. They asked the emir for amnesty for themselves and to stop persecuting their comrades. The Emir agreed to meet with them on April 14th, but the emir left halfway through the meeting, leaving the Jadids to the mercy of the angry crowd the ulama gathered outside the palace. Cossacks and Russian troops from Kagan had to intercede to rescue the Jadids. The relocated to Kagan and created their own Shuro, but knew they were powerless against the Emir without outside help. For his part, the Emir doubled down on placating the conservatives and issued a fatwa against all the Jadids, making Bukhara the center of anti-Jadid sentiment.

Alash Orda in the Steppe

We’re going to shift focus again, this time leaving the Jadids and focusing on the Alash Orda, the Kazakh modernizing movement. The Alash Orda, like the Jadids, wanted to reform their culture and society, but their main concern was the redistribution of land and establishing firm land rights for Kazakh and Kyrgyz peoples. The Alash Order were involved in many of the Muslim Congresses put together by their Tashkent counterparts, but as separate entities who were facing different dilemmas and needs.

In April 1917, they would form their own All-Kazakh Congress in Orenburg where they passed a resolution calling for the return of Steppe land to Kazakh peoples, control over local schools, and the expulsion of all new settlers in Kazakh-Kyrgyz territories. It should be noted that they were still willing to exist in a federated Russia, but they wanted to be treated as citizens with their rights respected. It wasn’t until three months later, when the idea of territorial autonomy was first discussed.

Initially, they attempted to work with the Provisional Government, but as that government lost power following the October Revolution, they, like their counterparts in Turkestan, realized their future lay beyond Russia. It is interesting to think given the fact that Kazakhs were more likely to attend Russian schools then madrassas, their constant interactions with Russian settlers as they colonized the Steppe, and the fact that that geographically they were closer to Siberia then the other peoples of Central Asia, they may have been the first indigenous group to feel the full impact of developments in Russia proper and, were in some ways, more prepared to deal with the influx of White and Red soldiers that would enter the region in 1918 and 1919. Another thing to keep in mind is that the Steppe was hit hard by the famine of 1917 and while they were forming congresses and committees, many nomads of the Steppes were still fighting the battle of 1916 with Russian settlers. We shouldn’t think that just because the Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsarist system, that the wounds of Russian colonialism and the causes and trauma of the 1916 revolt went away. The same sort of ethnic violence and food requisition we discussed early when talking about Tashkent, occurred in the Steppe as well.

On December 13th, 1917, under the leadership of Alikhan Bokeikhanov, a former scientist before turning into a statesman and Akhmet Baitursynov, a linguist who reformed the Kazakh alphabet and contributed to the development of Kazakh grammar they created the Alash Autonomy, a state that included the land that makes modern day Kazakhstan. The state was ruled by the Provisional people’s Council of Alash Orda which contained twenty-five members, ten positions reserved for non-Kazakhs. Alikhan Bokeikhanov was elected its president.

Conclusion

So, in short, 1917 was an explosive, but partially hopeful moment for Central Asia. In Turkestan, the Jadids and Alash Orda are able to create autonomous states, but the Jadids in Tashkent were threatened by the ulama and the Russian Settlers while the Alash Orda were threatened by the looming White and Red armies, massive famine, and continued combat with Russian settlers. And the Jadids in Bukhara were chased out and had a fatwa hanging over their heads. So, while the indigenous peoples were able to accomplish a stunning amount, they didn’t have the political, military, or economic power to preserve what they created.

The October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks were able to overthrow the Kerensky led Provisional Government, had little impact on Central Asia, at first. But that would not last for long, as the Red and Whites brought their war into Siberia and then the Steppes. The Alash Orda would be placed in a position of picking sides and dealing with the carnage that followed while the Jadids would have to deal first with the Russians settlers and then manage relations with the Red Army observers who made their way to Turkestan. If 1917 was a year of hope, 1918 would be a year of dashed hopes and recalibration of goals and allies.

References:

Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent 1865-1923 by Jeff Sahadeo

Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR by Adeeb Khalid

Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Coexistence by Shoshana Keller Published by University of Toronto Press, 2019

Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924 by Seymour Becker, Published by RoutledgeCurzon, 2004

The “Russian Civil Wars” 1916-1926 by Jonathan Smele, Published by Oxford University Press, 2017

A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes, Published by Penguin Books, 1996

The Other First World War by Douglas Boyd, Published by The History Press, 2014

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 by Laura Engelstein, Published by Oxford University Press, 2017

Imperial Apocalypse: the Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire by Joshua A. Sanborn, Published by Oxford University Press, 2014

#history blog #central asian history #central asia #russian revolution #russian empire #central asian civil wars #queer historian #Spotify

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thepastisalreadywritten · 1 year ago

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SAINT OF THE DAY (August 14)

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan priest, missionary and martyr, is celebrated throughout the Church today, August 14.

The saint died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during World War II.

He is remembered as a “martyr of charity” for dying in place of another prisoner who had a wife and children.

He was beatified by Pope Paul VI on 17 October 1971. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 10 October 1982.

St. Maximilian is also celebrated for his missionary work, his evangelistic use of modern means of communication, and for his lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary under her title of the Immaculate Conception.

All these aspects of St. Maximilian's life converged in his founding of the Militia Immaculata.

The worldwide organization continues St. Maximilian Kolbe's mission of bringing individuals and societies into the Catholic Church, through dedication to the Virgin Mary.

Maximilian Maria Kolbe OFM Conv. (Raymund Kolbe) was born on 8 January 1894 in Zduńska Wola, in the Kingdom of Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire.

He was the second son of weaver Julius Kolbe and midwife Maria Dąbrowska.

His father was an ethnic German, and his mother was Polish. He had four brothers.

St. Maximilian, according to several biographies, was personally called by the Virgin Mary, both to his holy life and to his eventual martyrdom.

As an impulsive and badly-behaved child, he prayed to her for guidance and later described how she miraculously appeared to him holding two crowns: one was white, representing purity, the other red, for martyrdom.

When he was asked to choose between these two destinies, the troublesome child and future saint said he wanted both.

Radically changed by the incident, he entered the minor seminary of the Conventual Franciscans in 1907 at age 13.

At age 20, he made his solemn vows as a Franciscan, earning a doctorate in philosophy the next year.

Soon after, however, he developed chronic tuberculosis, which eventually destroyed one of his lungs and weakened the other.

On 16 October 1917, in response to anti-Catholic demonstrations by Italian Freemasons, Friar Maximilian led six other Franciscans in Rome to form the association they called the Militia Immaculata.

The group's founding coincided almost exactly with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the Marian apparitions at Fatima, Portugal.

As a Franciscan priest, Fr. Maximilian returned to work in Poland during the 1920s.

There, he promoted the Catholic faith through newspapers and magazines, which eventually reached an extraordinary circulation, published from a monastery so large it was called the “City of the Immaculata.”

In 1930, he moved to Japan and had established a Japanese Catholic press by 1936, along with a similarly ambitious monastery.

That year, however, he returned to Poland for the last time.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland and Fr. Kolbe was arrested.

Briefly freed during 1940, he published one last issue of the Knight of the Immaculata before his final arrest and transportation to Auschwitz in 1941.

At the beginning of August that year, 10 prisoners were sentenced to death by starvation in punishment for another inmate's escape.

Moved by one man's lamentation for his wife and children, Fr. Kolbe volunteered to die in his place.

Survivors of the camp testified that the starving prisoners could be heard praying and singing hymns, led by the priest who had volunteered for an agonizing death.

After two weeks, on the night before the Church's feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the camp officials decided to hasten Fr. Kolbe's death, injecting him with carbolic acid.

He died on 14 August 1941. His body was cremated by the camp officials on the feast of the Assumption.

He had stated years earlier:

“I would like to be reduced to ashes for the cause of the Immaculata, and may this dust be carried over the whole world so that nothing would remain.”

St. Maximilian Kolbe is considered a patron of journalists, families, prisoners, the pro-life movement, the chemically addicted, and those with eating disorders.

#Saint of the Day #Saint Maximilian Kolbe #Militia Immaculata #Raymund Kolbe #Maximilian Maria Kolbe #World War II #Auschwitz

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maybanksslut · 4 years ago

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Dating Edmund Pevensie would include...

Key: y/h - your hobby, y/f/g - your favorite genre

Request: Congratulations on 100 followers! Could I request some headcanons of what dating Edmund Pevensi would include, please? Thanks so much!

Meeting him at a library

The two of you literally walking straight into each other, all the books falling from your arms

“Bloody hell, watch where you’re going”

You scoffing and walking away quickly, immediately disliking him and hoping you’d never see him again

“What a bloody prick...”

Forgetting about him for two months, before bumping into him again when getting coffee (tea, if you prefer)

Him sitting alone by a table and literally choking on his drink when he notices you

You acting like you didn’t notice him and getting your coffee, while secretly admiring the dark haired boy from afar

Quietly asking the waitress about him

“Him? Oh, that’s Edmund Pevensie. He’s a hot one, isn’t he?”

“He’s also a grumpy one”

Seeing him almost everyday for the next two weeks or so, but not talking to him because of his awful attitude (which for example I find very attractive)

Until one day, Edmund finally deciding to make a move and sitting down by your table

“Hey, I’m Edmu-“

“Edmund Pevensie. Yeah, I know. Would you kindly leave? I’m trying to drink my coffee”

Him being really caught off guard, not being used to people snapping at him

But not leaving, only sitting in front of you in silence

This continued for the next few days, becoming almost your routine:

You ordering coffee and choosing the table besides the windows, and him joining you four minutes later with a cappuccino of his own

You learning what coffees he drank on which days of the week, and him getting to know how many sugar cubes you liked having in your coffee

The two of you got to know each other much more than any of you had expected, by just simply drinking coffee together

You arriving a little late one day, only to find Edmund already seated at the table with his cappuccino, and much to your surprise, a skinny latte with caramel and two sugar cubes, just as you liked it

“You didn’t have to-” “But I wanted to”

The two of you starting to talk to each other, sharing interests or just discussing history which he seemed to enjoy a lot

You spending two hours everyday drinking coffee and just... talking

You finding it unusually calming to talk to Ed, loving to hear stories about his childhood or theories about aliens

Edmund enjoying to hear you rant about (y/h), becoming really addicted to hearing your voice

Becoming really good friends, reading together at the library, helping each other with homework and you learning him how to (y/h)

“No, Eds, electrons aren’t inside of the atomic nucleus, they’re in the shells around it”

“Y/n, seriously, I already told you. The Russian revolution was in 1917, not 1719”

Aventually starting to hold hands and kiss each other on the cheek

Agreeing on visiting him for the first time over a month later

Being super nervous to meet his family, especially that you weren’t even his girlfriend, at least not officially

Arriving at his house utterly stressed

“They’re gonna love you, y/n, just like I do”

You almost fainting, because he literally just told you he loved you two minutes before meeting his family

You and his siblings getting along well from the first second, and his parents absolutely adoring you

Edmund smiling at you and holding your hand under the table during dinner

Him asking you to be his girlfriend a few days later, by buying you a book + a coffee that had ‘‘Do you want to be my queen?” on it

You saying yes and the two of you kissing for the first time

Him tangling his hands in your hair, pulling you so close there was not a millimetre between your warm bodies

Your legs turning to jelly and Ed having to hold you so you wouldn’t fall

Kissing for so long that you almost ran out of breath

“I love you”

Smiling for at least an hour after the kiss

Edmund holding and kissing your hand whenever he got the chance

Having sleepovers with Susan and Lucy, and Edmund getting slightly very jealous

Susan and Lucy teasing you about your relationship

“Turtle doves!”

Lucy pretending like she’s throwing up whenever you kissed around her

Edmund loving to braid your hair, even if he wasn’t good at it

You being the only person aloud to call him “Eds”

You and Edmund reading together, sometimes y/f/g, and sometimes historical book about wars

Spending every waking moment together (except when you went to school)

Edmund loving to give you hickies to show you off

“Ed, this is so big, I’m not gonna be able to cover it up”

“Then don’t. Now everyone knows that you’re mine”

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greatwar-1914 · 4 years ago

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March 1, 1921 - Kronstadt Rebellion Begins

Pictured - Bourgeois or Bolshevik, all bosses hang!

The Russian Civil War was over. “The last of the hostile armies has been driven from our territory,” Lenin told the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party on March 8, 1921. The Reds had driven Yudenich back from the outskirts of Petrograd, expelled the Black Baron and his White army from Crimea, shot Admiral Kolchak and thrown his body under the ice floes of the Angara River. With the counterrevolutionary threat ended, the Bolsheviks marched on the breakaway states of the Russian Empire, like Poland and Georgia. Tiflis, modern-day Tbilisi, fell on February 25. Lenin claimed that the “regathering of the Russian lands” was finished. It is therefore ironic that the last and greatest threat to Bolshevik power came now, at Lenin’s apparent moment of triumph, in Petrograd rather than the provinces, and not from the political Right, but from the Left.

During the October Revolution and the civil war, the Bolsheviks had found their vanguard in the black-jacketed sailors of Kronstadt, the naval fortress on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of Petrograd, which guarded the city by sea. In Tsarist Russia, where sailors were banned from streetcars and forbidden from walking on “the sunny side of the street,” among other indignities, Kronstadt had long been a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment. The sailors had joined with striking workers in 1905, and again in 1910. In 1917 they massacred their officers and helped storm the Winter Palace, before serving as an elite unit on battlefields throughout Russia.

By 1921, however, the sailors’ revolutionary commitment had pushed them away from the Bolshevik Party. The constant withering of democracy during the war had caused party membership on Kronstadt to plummet. Meanwhile, the Russian economy had collapsed, and famine had become so widespread throughout Russia that reports of cannibalism were not uncommon. Coal shipments to Kronstadt had virtually ceased, and the sailors grew enraged as they sat in the cold and read letters from their families detailing starvation brought on by Bolshevik requisitioning.

The fury against injustice and inequality that had toppled the Tsar and Kerensky now threatened to do the same to Lenin. Across the bay in Petrograd, mill-workers went on strike, demanding that the Bolsheviks “answer before the representatives of the people for their deceit.“ The brutal handling of the strikers compelled the sailors to meet on February 28 onboard the deck of a battleship, presided over by a bright young Ukrainian sailor named Stepan Petrichenko. They formulated their own set of principles for Russia, including freedom of speech and assembly for peasants and workers, new elections, and equal rations for all. In a mass meeting on March 1 all sixteen thousand members of the garrison voted for the resolution.

It may as well have been a declaration of war. The sailors and gunners of Kronstadt had challenged the Bolshevik Party’s legitimacy, and left alone they threatened to be the spark which could turn the discontent throughout Russia into another wave of revolution. On the evening of March 1 the Bolsheviks arrested a delegation of thirty sailors sent to Petrograd, who were never seen again. The next day the Kronstadt fortress formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee with Petrichenko as its head.

By the end of the week the headlines of the Kronstadt newspaper Izvestiia trumpeted their demands throughout Russia.

ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, NOT TO POLITICAL PARTIES!

DOWN WITH THE COUNTERREVOLUTION FROM THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT!

THE POWER OF THE SOVIETS WILL LIBERATE THE TOILING PEASANTRY FROM THE COMMUNIST YOKE!

VICTORY OR DEATH!

#ww1 #ww1 history #1921 #history #world war one #first world war #great war #russian civil war #russian history #kronstadt #anarchism

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multiverseforger07 · 3 years ago

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Kraven's real name is Sergei Kravinoff (Сергей Кравинов). He is a Soviet immigrant, the son of an aristocrat who fled to the United States with his family in 1917 after the Russian nobility was decimated by the February Revolution and subsequent collapse of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II.

Kraven is a maniacal big game hunter who seeks to defeat Spider-Man to prove that he is the greatest hunter in the world.[4] Unlike other hunters, he typically disdains the use of guns or��bow and arrows, preferring to take down large dangerous animals with his bare hands. He also lives by a code of honor of sorts, choosing to hunt his game fairly.[5] He consumes a mystical serum to give himself enhanced strength and dramatically slow the aging process. Kraven was trained as a hunter largely by a mysterious man named Gregor, a mercenary who once battled Ka-Zar.[6] Kraven was, at one point, the lover of the voodoo priestess Calypso.[7]

He is contacted by his half-brother the Chameleon to defeat Spider-Man. He leads Spider-Man to Central Park with the help of the Chameleon, who disguises himself as Kraven to use himself as a decoy while the real Kraven ambushes the hero. However, despite Kraven having weakened Spider-Man with a poisonous dart, Spider-Man prevails in the end. Spider-Man proves a frustrating quarry because Kraven continually underestimates the superhero's resourcefulness.[8]

Kraven becomes a founding member of the Sinister Six when he accepts Doctor Octopus's offer to form a team to fight Spider-Man where they capture Aunt May and Betty Brant. He attacks Spider-Man in Central Park with three tigers. Spider-Man easily fights off the attackers and secures the next clue to where Aunt May and Betty Brant are being held. After Aunt May and Betty Brant are rescued, Kraven the Hunter and the rest of the Sinister Six are arrested by the police.[9]

While in the Savage Land, Kraven the Hunter found Gog in a spaceship that he stumbles upon. Realizing how useful Gog can be, Kraven the Hunter decides to use him in a plot to conquer the Savage Land. After kidnapping the visiting Gwen Stacy from a camp in the Savage Land, Kraven and Gog battle the heroes Ka-Zar and Spider-Man.[10] While Ka-Zar deals with Kraven, Spider-Man defeats Gog by luring him into a patch of quicksand, which he sinks to the bottom of.[11]

Fearful Symmetry: Kraven's Last HuntEdit

Main article: Fearful Symmetry: Kraven's Last Hunt

Determined to end his life as he becomes older, frustrated with his failing health and continuing failure to defeat Spider-Man, Kraven sets out a final hunt for Spider-Man. After capturing Spider-Man, he shoots him with a coma-inducing drug and buries him alive on his estate.[12] To complete his victory, he attempts to become Spider-Man's clear superior by impersonating him in a brutal vigilante campaign and capturing Vermin, the one foe Spider-Man had never been able to defeat on his own (Spider-Man's last battle with Vermin required Captain America's assistance).[13]

After Spider-Man emerges from his grave two weeks later, Kraven explains his actions to him and sets Vermin free, reaffirming to Kraven that his foe is an honorable man. Spider-Man goes after Vermin to prevent his killing again, giving Kraven the opportunity to leave a final confession of his crimes against Spider-Man and then commit suicide.[14] Because of his suicide, his soul is unable to find rest until Spider-Man confronts his risen corpse on Kraven's behalf.

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multiverseforger · 4 years ago

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Kraven is a maniacal big game hunter who seeks to defeat Spider-Man to prove that he is the greatest hunter in the world.[4] Unlike other hunters, he typically disdains the use of guns or bow and arrows, preferring to take down large dangerous animals with his bare hands. He also lives by a code of honor of sorts, choosing to hunt his game fairly.[5] He consumes a mystical serum to give himself enhanced strength and dramatically slow the aging process. Kraven was trained as a hunter largely by a mysterious man named Gregor, a mercenary who once battled Ka-Zar.[6] Kraven was, at one point, the lover of the voodoo priestess Calypso.[7]

Kraven is resurrected from the dead by Sasha Kravinoff and the Kravinoff family with a ritual using the blood of Spider-Man.[16] He is shown to now be explosively psychopathic and cold towards his family, beating his son Vladimir and daughter Ana and expressing little attention towards his wife. After being stabbed by his daughter Ana, Sergei recovers, stating that Sasha restored him with corrupted blood which he calls "unlife". They pull off the mask of the corpse of Spider-Man hung in their mantel and discover that Kaine is in Spider-Man's costume.[17] Spider-Man, in his black costume, confronts Kraven and the rest of the Kravinoff Family. Spider-Man is tempted to kill Kraven, but he refuses to do so when he is reminded by Julia Carpenter (who has inherited the powers of Madame Web after her death) that committing murder is not in his moral code. Following their defeat by Spider-Man, Kraven and his family escape to the Savage Land. While there, Kraven brutally kills Sasha (who complained that Kraven would have to hunt them to prove their place in the Kravinoff family) and euthanizes Vladimir. Alyosha flees in disgust of what his dad did to his stepmom and half-brother afterwards. Kraven and Ana discuss rebuilding the Kravinoff family, which leads to Ana running off to hunt Alyosha to prove herself worthy to Kraven and rebuild the Kravinoff family.[18]

It was later revealed that back in the 1950s, Kraven the Hunter was a member of Nick Fury's Avengers alongside Dominic Fortune I, Dum Dum Dugan, Namora, Silver Sable, Sabretooth, and Ulysses Bloodstone, tracking a stolen version of the Super-Soldier Serum combined with the Infinity Formula that had been stolen by a group of Nazis attempting to create their own Captain America.[19]

While he is in the Savage Land, Agent Venom lands in the area on an unrelated mission from the federal government. Mistaking him to be Spider-Man, Kraven attacks him and gains the upper hand before Venom escapes.[20]

At one point, Kraven is contacted by a doctor who once treated him when a past hunt went wrong, the doctor requesting that Kraven track down a recent patient of hers - who had been used as a test subject to duplicate another man's electrical abilities — as well as asking that he capture the Black Panther — currently acting as a 'local' vigilante to regain his sense of self after the destruction of Wakanda's vibranium - in return for her help finding a way for him to die. With the aid of Storm, T'Challa is able to stay ahead of Kraven long enough to convince him that the doctor had lied about being able to kill him, Kraven agreeing to leave T'Challa alone and take the doctor's mutated animal subjects back with him into the wild.[21]

When their identities became fractured after a temporary separation, the Hulk discovers that Bruce Banner had hired Kraven to find the lost city of the Sasquatches. Although the Hulk was uninterested with helping the Sasquatches deal with Kraven, he changes his mind and beats up Kraven.[22]

Kaine, in the alias of the Scarlet Spider, later encountered Kraven the Hunter, who was dressed as the Scarlet Spider in order to torment him.[23] With the help of Ana, Kraven kidnapped Kaine's friends in order to motivate the Scarlet Spider to fight him. In the end, Kaine delivered Kraven a fatal blow in the chest, which paralyzed his heart. But using the same attack, Kaine brought him back to life supposedly still breaking the curse. Following the fight, both Kravens disappeared.[24]

Kraven, still claiming to be cursed, next battles Squirrel Girl at Empire State University, having earned her ire by lashing out at the local squirrels, including Tippy-Toe. Kraven departs when Squirrel Girl informs him of the existence of sea monsters like Giganto and challenges him to hunt them, instead of limiting himself to going after the same prey he did prior to his resurrection.[25] He later returns to abduct Howard the Duck,[26] but gets trapped with Howard and Squirrel Girl in a manhunt as the hunted. After surviving, he vows to only "hunt the hunters".[27]

During the "Avengers: Standoff!" storyline, Kraven the Hunter was an inmate of Pleasant Hill, a gated community established by S.H.I.E.L.D. who used Kobik's abilities to turn Kraven the Hunter into a zookeeper. He rallied some of his fellow inmates to help him find Kobik and bring her to Baron Helmut Zemo.[28]

During the "Opening Salvo" part of the "Secret Empire" storyline, Kraven the Hunter is recruited by Baron Helmut Zemo to join the Army of Evil.[29] At the time when Manhattan was surrounded by a Darkforce Dome, Kraven the Hunter raided the Daily Bugle in order to find information to the identity of Spider-Man. Knowing that J. Jonah Jameson would be in danger, Phil Sheldon's daughter Jennie headed to J. Jonah Jameson's house to warn him. After Kraven the Hunter attacked J. Jonah Jameson, Jennie Sheldon fired a signal flare into the sky. This attracted the attention of Spider-Woman, who defeated Kraven the Hunter. Jennie Sheldon even took pictures of the fight.[30]

At the time when Venom encountered some Dinosaur People in the sewers, Kraven the Hunter followed Venom and killed an Ankylosaurus-type Dinosaur Person before engaging Venom in battle. He was fended off by Venom, who vowed to fight Kraven again.[31] Upon the news of Dinosaur People being found beneath the streets of New York City, Mayor Wilson Fisk and NYPD Commissioner Chris Rafferty appointed Kraven the Hunter to lead a SWAT Team into the sewers and eliminate them. When Venom deactivated each trap and confronted Kraven, Venom was caught off-guard when Kraven the Hunter revealed his secret ally Shriek, who used her attacks on Venom and then collapsed the ceiling over him. Shriek then tells Kraven the Hunter that she can have Eddie Brock's head after the mission is done.[32] As the Dinosaur People feed on the rats that enter their lair, Kraven the Hunter sneaks up on some Dinosaur People and kills them. Venom catches up to Kraven the Hunter and fights him and Shriek. With help from Tana, Venom stated that the Dinosaur People were not killing anybody and that they are only surviving underground. Kraven the Hunter and Shriek are arrested by the NYPD, as the captain stated that he never liked Kraven the Hunter anyway.[33]

Kraven the Hunter was hired by the evil organization Rampart to lure Captain America to them. After a brief struggle with Kraven the Hunter, Captain America was frozen in ice by Rampart's freeze cannon.[34]

Squirrel Girl has helped Kraven reform, teaming up with him to fight other villains, even establishing a friendship with him. She helps Kraven realize that Spider-Man is not even close to being the most dangerous prey in the Marvel Universe.[35]

In a prelude to "Hunted", Kraven the Hunter reminisces about how Sasha, Vladimir, and Alyosha were killed by him and Ana for not living up to his legacy. After cutting a deal with the High Evolutionary, Kraven the Hunter has 87 clones of him created, trained as the Sons of Kraven, and sent out to prove themselves by being hunted by each other. This motif caused Ana to leave him. The one that hunted and killed the other Sons of Kraven was labeled as the Last Son of Kraven. With help from the Taskmaster, the Black Ant, and Arcade, Kraven the Hunter starts hunting various animal-themed characters, like the Beetle, the Kangaroo, the Owl, the Puma, the Serpent Society, the Squid, and the White Rabbit. In the case of the King Cobra, the Rhino, the Scorpion, Stegron the Dinosaur Man, the Tarantula, and the Vulture, they were grouped together as the Savage Six.[36] While making the final preparations for the "Great Hunt," Kraven the Hunter recaps on his own immortality when it was revealed that the Kraven the Hunter that was stabbed by the Scarlet Spider was actually a clone. Kraven the Hunter sends the Last Son of Kraven to capture Spider-Man for the Great Hunt.[37] After a Hunter-Bot created by Arcade Industries is demonstrated on the Iguana, Kraven the Hunter and Arcade begin the Great Hunt, where Central Park is surrounded by a dome that is from the same technology as the Planetary Defense System.[38] It is revealed that the moment the individual connects to the Hunter-Bot and if it is destroyed, then the individual is killed, which is what happens when the Vulture destroys Bob's Hunter-Bot. Kraven the Hunter plans this from the beginning to punish the hunters for killing animals for sport.[39] Kraven the Hunter has Arcade tell the Vulture that there is a chance to break the force field by killing more Hunter-Bots.[40] During a fight between the Hunter-Bots and the animal-themed characters, Kraven the Hunter's secret motive is to force Spider-Man into killing him again so that he can be free from his dreadful curse. He does this by trapping Curt Connors when he tries to rescue his son, Billy. Spider-Man was forced to "kill" Curt by tearing out the implant chip that prevented Curt hurting humans as the Lizard, despite the risk that taking out the chip would kill Curt.[41] After Spider-Man found the dead bodies of the guards that were killed when the Lizard escaped, he was confronted by Kraven the Hunter. During their fight, Spider-Man figured out that Kraven the Hunter was the one who killed the guards to frame the Lizard, as the wounds are too precise for the Lizard's feral claws. In order to guilt Spider-Man into becoming a hunter, Kraven the Hunter attempts to force Spider-Man to watch the Lizard save Billy and the Black Cat from the Last Son of Kraven, but Spider-Man rejects the idea that this can only be accomplished through violence. Upon realizing that he was the beast that he was wanting to kill all along, Kraven the Hunter released all the surviving animal-themed characters and sends Spider-Man to protect Mary Jane. Kraven the Hunter then dons a copy of Spider-Man's black costume to act like him once more. When the Last Son of Kraven was conned into strangling Kraven the Hunter to death, he soon realized that he was fooled when he sees Spider-Man swinging away.[42] His funeral is later attended by the Last Son of Kraven. The Chameleon is revealed to be one of the attendees, as he is pleased that Kraven the Hunter spared him from the Great Hunt. As he walks away, the Chameleon quotes to his dead half-brother to sleep well and states "You needn't worry. The world is no longer your burden. Besides, there won't be much of it left soon...not by the time I've finished"

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radwolf76 · 4 years ago

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FLASHBack: Week 96 - The People’s Mario

On FLASHBack this week, we're going to take a cue from history, specifically Vladimir Lenin's October Revolution that began on 25 October of 1917, and marked the end of the reign of the Russian Tzars. (Yes, I know that's a Julian date and on the Gregorian Calendar it was actually 7 November, but this is a Flash Animation series, not a calendar series, and I wanted to do this post in October, so there.) However, instead of looking at historical communism, we're going to be looking at one of it's more modern incarnations, Nintendo's beloved mascot, Mario. On 15 April 2006, Newgrounds user Manuel "celarent" Alderete from Chihuahua, Mexico, posted The People's Mario, a Flash set to music from the Red Army Choir, and based off of a longstanding urban legend that the Super Mario Games were intended to be communist propaganda. Two days later it was Frontpaged and awarded Newgrounds' Daily Feature, and by the end of the week it was the Weekly Users' Choice. Filter effects have been applied to the animation to give it the flicker, grain, and vignette of old film. The Mushroom Kingdom of the first Super Mario Game is rendered as a bleak desolate brick plain. Mario, while ostensibly a plumber at this point in his franchise, wields an oversized hammer like he did when he was a carpenter facing off against Donkey Kong, although this hammer is clearly shaped like the one from the iconic ☭ Hammer and Sickle ☭ emblem from the Soviet Union flag. He is set upon by Goombas which he dispatches in the usual Mario manner, by stomping on them or kicking a Koopa shell into them, however the results are much more graphic and bloody than the 8 Bit NES game ever rendered them. The animation ends with him tearing down the Koopa banner from the flagpole and erecting a flag with a Red Star (the symbol of the Soviet military) over the castle.

Celarent was not the first to highlight similarities between Mario and communist iconography. The shock humor website murderize.com had an article detailing the major points back in 2001. A few frames of The People's Mario were used by MatPat in an early Game Theory episode on the subject (and he even title drops the Flash while showing the clip, sandwiched between the excess of meme-ery that is characteristic of MatPat's early work). Because of the humor potential of family-friendly Nintendo's beloved mascot of almost four decades possibly being secret propaganda for a hot button political topic (to US audiences at least), references and callouts to the rumor have persisted into the modern era, such as with Clickhole's review of Super Mario Odysssy. That marks the end of Marxism on FLASHBack for now. Next week, who knows? I'll determine something though. P.S. Krinkles has released a Demo for the latest iteration of his spin-off game, Madness: Project Nexus. The 2D Flash Animated character designs translate really well to the 3D engine.

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impressivepress · 5 years ago

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Bloodstained ice axe used to kill Trotsky emerges after decades in the shadows

On the evening of 20 August 1940, a man known as Frank Jacson called at a large house in the suburbs of Mexico City, and asked to see the ‘Old Man’ – as everyone called its celebrated resident, Leon Trotsky.

A few minutes later, the tip of the axe was buried more than two inches into Trotsky’s skull, becoming arguably the world’s most infamous murder weapon.

The axe was fleetingly displayed at a police press conference, but then disappeared for more than six decades.

Next year, however, the bloodstained relic will go on public display at Washington’s International Spy Museum, which will reopen in a new building to accommodate thousands of other artefacts that have emerged from the shadows.

The story of the ice axe is a convoluted one, befitting the extraordinary and macabre story of the Trotsky assassination. After the 1940 press conference, it was stored in a Mexico City evidence room for several years until it was checked out by a secret police officer, Alfredo Salas, who argued he wanted to preserve it for posterity. He passed it on his daughter, Ana Alicia, who kept it under her bed for 40 years until deciding to put it up for sale in 2005.

Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, offered to give blood for a DNA test – but only on condition that Salas donated the weapon to the museum at Trotsky’s house, preserved intact from the time of the murder. Salas rejected the deal.

“I am looking for some financial benefit,” she told the Guardian at the time. “I think something as historically important at this should be worth something, no?”

The weapon was eventually bought by a US private collector, Keith Melton, a prolific author of books on the history of espionage, and a founding board member of the International Spy Museum. For the avid collector, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida, the ice axe had become something of an obsession.

“It was a search that took me 40 years, and up lots of blind allies and lots of misinformation,” Melton said. He doggedly tracked down every rumour, including one claiming the Mexican president was using it as a paperweight, until Salas emerged.

Melton would not disclose what he paid Salas for the axe. Contacted on Wednesday, Salas denied any knowledge of the sale. Trotsky’s grandson, Volkov, said he was unconcerned about the axe’s fate.

“Frankly, we are not interested in this,” he told the Guardian. “I never did the DNA test. I was not going to accept being part of a business deal for that woman.”

“It has no significance,” Volkov said. “It could have been a knife or a pistol. It doesn’t have any significance that it was a pick. And it was clumsily done, too.

“Who knows if it is the real axe?” he added.

Melton said he had authenticated the artefact beyond doubt and by several methods. There is a paper trail confirming that it passed into Salas’ possession. It bears the stamp of the Austrian manufacturer, Werkgen Fulpmes, a detail that was not made public; it is of the same dimensions as those recorded in the police report and it still bears the rust mark left by assassin’s bloody fingerprint, identical to the one in the photograph from the 1940 press conference.

Melton also believes he has also solved one of the enduring mysteries about Trotsky’s murder. Why, if the killer had an automatic pistol and a 13in dagger, did he resort to the ice axe?

Two sons of the 1917 Russian revolution, Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, were locked in rivalry that – by the nature of the two men – could only end in death.

Stalin approved a final plan for Trotsky’s assassination in 1939. It comprised two parallel plots: the first was a frontal assault, led by David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Mexican muralist who was also an agent for Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD.

On 24 May 1940 Siqueiros and a team of hitmen, dressed as policemen and soldiers, raked Trotsky’s house with more than 200 bullets, but the intended victim and his wife Natalia survived.

It seemed to be a miraculous escape, but proved to be only a short reprieve. A back-up assassination plot was already in motion.

Two years earlier, at the congress of Trotsky’s Fourth International in Paris, a lonely young New Yorker and ardent Trotskyite, Sylvia Ageloff, was introduced to a dashing 25-year-old called Jacques Mornard, supposedly the son of a Belgian diplomat.

His real name was Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist whose mother, a loyal Stalinist, had put him up to the task of killing Trotsky.

Ageloff was persuaded to move to Mexico City to work for the Trotsky family. Mercader told her that to move with her, he would have to adopt a false identity to avoid being pursued for military service. He would go under the name of Frank Jacson (the NKVD forgers misspelled Jackson on his passport).

Ageloff accepted the explanation and the Trotsky entourage grew accustomed to see him drive her to the compound every morning.

On August 20 1940, Mercader was making his 10th visit to the house.

He told the guards he was planning to publish an article in a magazine and wanted Trotsky to look at the draft. Since the May attack, however, a new level of security had been introduced. There was a second door with a lock that was controlled from a guard tower. If Mercader was going to escape after killing Trotsky, the guards in the tower would have to let him out.

“The only chance he had was to kill him silently and then exit as a guest before they discovered the body,” Melton said.

A pistol would clearly not work in that case, and a dagger could not be guaranteed to kill Trotsky outright. By previous experience, the NKVD recommended blunt force to the back of the head to guarantee a completely silent death; to do the job Mercader stole the ice axe from his landlord’s son.

The axe is now among 5,000 artefacts that Melton is pledging to the International Spy Museum from his collection, which also includes a British one-man submarine used in second world war raids, and one of the plates used by the Nazis to forge perfect pound notes.

According to Melton, none of his treasures has quite the eerie presence of the ice axe. After letting Mercader into his study, Trotsky sat down to read his article, and the assassin attacked.

Trotsky let out a long scream and fought with his assailant until the guards arrived.

“I still remember looking through the open door and seeing my grandfather lying on the floor with his head bathed in blood and hearing him tell somebody to ‘keep the boy away, he shouldn’t see this’,” Volkov recalled on Wednesday. “I always thought that was a sign of his humanity. Even in a moment like that he was worried about me.”

Trotsky died of his wounds a little over 24 hours later in hospital. Mercader was put on trial and imprisoned for nearly 20 years.

During his time in jail, his Soviet handlers ensured he was as comfortable as possible, sending money each week and even arranging a girlfriend for him: a Mexican starlet called Roquella, who became his wife and accompanied him to Moscow after his release.

Mercader died of cancer in Cuba in 1978, with Roquella by his side. His last words are said to have been: “I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he’s waiting for me on the other side.”

by Julian Borger (Washington), and Jo Tuckman (Mexico City) · 13 Sep 2017.

#history article #leon trotsky #the guardian

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notbemoved-blog · 5 years ago

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Dorothy Day and her Hope-filled “Revolution of the Heart”

What a time we’re in! I’ve put my blog on hold while working on my next book, but feel the need to come back with a few pieces to “Keep Hope Alive” in these dark times. And just in time for a Dorothy Day revival! Dorothy Day, the enterprising journalist and social activist (and perhaps soon to be saint of the Catholic Church) is having something of a revival of her reputation. A new biography (Dorothy Day by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph) and a new documentary (“Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story” by Martin Doblmeier) have put Day back in the limelight where she belongs. She’s recently appeared in the New York Times Book Review (written by prominent religion historian Karen Armstrong, no less), for an extensive New Yorker profile, and even today in the REVIEW section of the Wall Street Journal! Day’s renaissance couldn’t come at a better time, when, thanks to the pandemic, the fragility of our safety net for the poor shows itself for what it really is: benign neglect, if not downright abuse.

I’ve been an admirer of Dorothy Day’s for decades, dating back to my time as a Catholic seminarian in Baltimore in the 1970s when we were encouraged to think a lot about the poor and about social conditions and how best to put our social consciences to work to improve things. After leaving the seminary and trying to find my way throughout the rest of the ‘70s, I enrolled in The American University’s School of Communications and set about trying to improve my skills as a writer. While pursuing a second bachelor’s degree in Communications (the first, from St. Mary’s Seminary College, was in Philosophy), I happened upon a wonderful journalist/teacher Joe Tinkelman, who taught some of my earliest writing classes and whose consistent encouragement caused me to believe I might have a career as a writer someday.

For his “American Newspapers” class, Tinkelman pushed us to write a long-form journalistic piece profiling a newspaper of our choice. My mind immediately went to The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day’s creation from the 1930s that was still going strong in the 1980s. I thought a 50-year retrospective was in order, so I set about to research this little-known gem and report back to Tinkelman and the class. The research I did (mostly at Catholic University) put me in deeper touch with Dorothy Day, her philosophy, her writing, and her work with the poor of New York City.

For the next four weeks, I’m posting a serialized version of the paper I did for Professor Tinkelman as a tribute to his inspiring teaching and to Dorothy Day herself and her incredible work. Read with caution: You may just get radicalized!

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The Catholic Worker—The Voice of American Catholic Radicalism Since the 1930’s (Part I)

By Michael J. O’Brien, 12/8/81 – American Newspapers, American University, Professor Joe Tinkelman

On a piercingly cold night in December of 1978, I stepped from the sub-compact I had so comfortably been traveling in with a former seminarian classmate of mine onto the curb of Second Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We were on our way to Maryhouse, the Catholic Worker’s House of Hospitality for homeless women, to attend one of the C.W.’s Friday night meetings. It was my first visit to the Catholic Worker Headquarters. Before I could even close the car door, a middle-aged Black man with the smell of whiskey on his breath and of urine on his clothes—the smell of the destitute in any city—asked me for some money “for a cup of coffee.” I remember looking into this man’s half-dazed eyes, seeing behind him the lights of Second Avenue—the bars and novelty shops, the cafes and movie houses that give the street a feeling of one continuous cabaret—and wondering how to tell him on this of all nights that I could not give him a penny. [Part of our seminary training was to decline to give money to alcoholics. “They’ll only use if to further their illness,” we were told.]

I was already late for the C.W. meeting, so instead of inviting him for a bite to eat at one of those cafes, I asked him to join me at Maryhouse. I knew he would at least be warm there and perhaps could even get a cup of hot coffee. He refused, and as my friend and I dashed across the street to get to the meeting, I heard him cursing us. I can’t think, now, of a more appropriate greeting for my first visit to the Catholic Worker—a group that has served the poor and the dispossessed of the Bowery for almost 50 years.

At the time, however, I was only thinking of our lateness! As we opened the doors to Maryhouse and rushed up the stairs of this seemingly ancient tenement, I was awed by the thought that Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker—“both a newspaper and a movement”—graced these steps daily. For all I knew, she was there that very night, this being her primary residence in the City. I didn’t know much about Dorothy Day then, but I knew she had chosen to live her life among the poor and to serve them as if they were Christ. That was enough to spark my interest in her and in her work.

My friend and I entered the doors of the auditorium to a standing-room only crowd. More than two hundred people were packed into this tiny hall that serves as a distribution center for the newspaper and the meeting hall for “the clarification of thought,” as Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker’s other founder, put it.

We took our places among those standing in the back and I caught a glimpse of Daniel Berrigan, the radical Jesuit pacifist, who was speaking to the throng. Berrigan was scheduled to talk that night—I guess that’s why so many people showed up—on the poetry of Thomas Merton, a well-known Catholic monk and author who died in the late 1960s. Berrigan read to us some of Merton’s poems concerning war, peace, death, and nuclear armaments. After each poem, he gave us his own interpretation of what he believed Merton was trying to convey; they had been good friends.

Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Daniel Berrigan: Three pillars of radical Catholic thought in the 1960s.

The entire evening had an aura of unreality about it for me. Here I was in Dorothy Day’s house listening to Daniel Berrigan speaking on Thomas Merton—three pillars of radical Catholic thought represented under one roof! The history of modern Catholic radicalism came alive for me that night. It is some of that history, particularly the Catholic Worker’s singular role in its development, that I will attempt to relate in the text that follows.

The Young Radical Journalist

One could say Dorothy Day was a journalist from birth. Her father was a sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph; her brothers became newspaper editors. Journalism was in her blood.

She became involved in questions of social justice at an early age. She read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Jack London’s essay on class struggle while still in high school. One of her brothers worked on a Chicago paper (where the family lived during Day’s adolescence) called The Day Book, an experiment by Scripps-Howard that reported on the ups and downs of the Labor Movement. The paper’s accounts of the the struggles of the poor and of the workers stirred Dorothy deeply. She began to feel that her life was linked to theirs, that she had received “a call, a vocation, a direction” for her life.

Dorothy Day began her career as a journalist in 1916 at the age of 18 by taking a job at a newspaper coincidentally named The New York Call—a socialist daily that was heavily involved in the labor issues of the day. Later she worked on The Masses, a monthly Communist magazine. After the periodical’s suppression by the Attorney General during the post-World War II “Red Scare”, Day worked for The Liberator, the successor to The Masses.

Her assignments took her to all kinds of strike meetings, picket lines, and peace rallies. She interviewed Leon Trotsky while he was living in New York and writing for a Russian socialist newspaper. She picketed the White House and went to jail for a month with a group of suffragists. She counted as her friends Eugene O’Neill, the great American playwright; Max Eastman, editor of The Masses; and John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a journalists’s account of the Russian Revolution. (The new movie REDS explores aspects of the lives of all three of these men.)

A 1917 photo of Dorothy Day (center, holding a copy of The New York Call) urging the U.S. NOT to enter WWI.

An Unlikely Convert

Although her early years as a journalist were spent advocating for causes and movements that were considered godless (Communism, after all, considers religion as an opiate), Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism in 1927 at the age of 30. She saw the Catholic Church as the church of the poor and of the worker, and she wanted to be one with them in every way. Also, she had given birth to a little girl through a common-law marriage, and the overwhelming love she experienced for both her lover and her daughter made her believe that there must be a God.

Day’s conversion caused her much suffering; she had to leave the man she loved because he would not condone her religious leanings. But she put principle before personal comfort, as she would so many times in the future.

After her Baptism, Day found she was no longer one with her comrades. They could not understand her religious convictions and she found it difficult as a Catholic to participate in demonstrations and meetings that were organized by Communists. She continued to report on the plight of the working man for Catholic periodicals—she even did a series of articles for the Catholic press explaining Marxist-Leninism!—but she felt far removed from her earlier radical involvement. She was at a loss as to how to reconcile her two great loves—her newfound love for God and her continued love for the working man and the poor.

An Answered Prayer

Dorothy Day often warned people to be careful how they prayed. “God takes you at your word,” she would say. It was through just such a prayer that she found a solution to her dilemma and that The Catholic Worker came to be.

In early December 1932, Day was covering a march on Washington, D.C., by the Communist-led Unemployment Councils. The march was an attempt by the Depression’s unemployed workers to bring their grievances to Congress. Day was reporting on the march for two Catholic periodicals, America and Commonweal. She became distressed by the march’s lack of Catholic leadership and felt she could no longer sit by and watch as others, especially Communists, took the lead in fighting for the working man. She had to find a way to get involved in the struggle as a Catholic.

On December 8, just after the worker’s march and, coincidentally a Catholic Holy Day, Dorothy Day went to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception—still under construction in Washington—and prayed fervently that God would show her the way out of the box she was in. Remarkably, God took her at her word. When she returned home to New York, Peter Maurin, the man who was to teach her the way out, was waiting for her in her apartment.

Peter Maurin

Maurin had been sent to Day by the editor of Commonweal because they “thought alike.” He was a French peasant and was deeply rooted in Catholic social tradition. He had studied Aquinas, Augustine, and the socialy encyclicals of the Popes, as well as the many contemporary Catholic social writers, including Hillaire Belloc, Emmanuel Mounier, and the Russian activist and social theorist Peter Kropotkin.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin sitting for a group Catholic Worker photo in the early 1940s.

Maurin had a plan for the reconstruction of the then-crumbling American society. His plan had four planks: (1) houses of hospitality for the immediate relief of those in need; (2) farming communes to relieve the wretched unemployment brought about by urban industrialization; (3) round table discussion “for the clarification of thought” on social issues; and, (4) a newspaper to get these ideas to the man and woman in the street. Maurin’s entire plan was aimed at “creating a new society within the shell of the old” where it would be “easier for men to be good.”

The Birth of a Newspaper

Dorothy Day didn’t immediately comprehend the breadth of Maurin’s thought, but she jumped at the idea of publishing her own newspaper. She found out that the Paulist Press—a Catholic publishing outlet—would print 2,500 copies of an eight-page tabloid (originally 9”X12”) for fifty-seven dollars. Day feverishly began writing articles for the fledgling paper—articles on the plight of sharecroppers, child labor, the hourly wage for factory workers, and racial injustice. These, along with Maurin’s “Easy Essays”—short, free-flowing verse for quick and easy consumption of ideas by the man in the street—made up the copy for the papers first edition.

Maurin wanted to call the paper The Catholic Radical, but because of her knowledge of Communist periodicals in the U.S., Day insisted on calling it The Catholic Worker—a direct challenge to the then-popular Communist paper The Daily Worker. “Man proposes, woman disposes,” Maurin jokingly demurred. And so, The Catholic Worker was born.

They didn’t seek permission from the Church to use the word “Catholic.” Day wondered about this, but a priest friend of hers wisely advised, “Never ask permission.”

The enduring Catholic Worker masthead

The first issue of The Catholic Worker was ready for distribution on May Day—May first, the great Communist holiday celebrating the working masses—of 1933. In a short column entitled To Our Reader, Day dedicated the paper:

For those who are sitting on park benches in the warm spring sunlight. For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain. For those who are walking the streets in the all but futile search for work. For those who think that there is no hope for the future, no recognition of their plight—this little paper is addressed. It is printed to call their attention to the fact that the Catholic Church has a social program—to let them know that there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual, but for their material welfare.

Dorothy Day was determined to make her stand along with others involved in the workers’ struggle, so in typical in-your-face radical fashion, she along with three of her Catholic supporters went to hock the paper in Union Square, where 50,000 workers had gathered for a massive show of support for Communism. They were scoffed at and they sold few papers, but Day and her friends were satisfied with their results. The paper had been launched. In addition, Day and Maurin had embarked on the great pilgrimage that would consume the rest of their lives.

(To Be Continued)

#Dorothy Day #Peter Maurin #Daniel Berrigan #Thomas Merton #Joe Tinkelman #The Catholic Worker #American University #AU Communications #St. Mary's Seminary College #smsc

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twf100 · 6 years ago

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The new years on the Western Front

German bunker at Dodengang near Diksmuide Belgium, December 2018

By January 1 1915, the hopes that the war would end quickly had dissolved into the mud of Belgium and France. The First Battle of Ypres in Belgium had ended the month before, and with it the tactics of open warfare for the next four years. Armies now faced each other for 450 miles across Western Europe, from the English Channel, across Belgium and northern France, all the way to the Swiss border. The Germans had fully moved to the defensive, reinforcing their trenches, building concrete bunkers up and down the line, and clearing positions for deadly machine gun and artillery fire. The Allies dug in as well, but had already begun making plans to attack in 1915 in the desire to evict the Germans from Belgian and French territory. The Allies built few bunkers and did not improve their trenches. Why bother, the Allied commanders thought, when they would be moving to the German positions soon enough? They would find this much easier said than done, and would experience heavy losses during the campaigns in the French Artois, at Loos and in the Champagne.

The hope for a breakout on the Eastern Front at Gallipoli, and for the USA to join the war after the sinking of the Lusitania, would both prove to be disappointing to the Allies. April of 1915 would see the first use of chlorine gas at St. Julien Belgium, with appalling results. Shockingly long casualty lists, British munition shortages, and with no end in sight, the 1915 year of the Great War came to a close.

Monument Le Mort Homme near Verdun France, December 2018

1916 would make the previous year of the war look tame in comparison. On February 21 the Germans launched Unternehmen Gericht (Operation Judgement) and attacked the French at Verdun. With a stated desire to “bleed France white”, German commander Erich von Falkenhayn looked to break both the strength of the French army and the will of the French citizenry to continue with the war. He was nearly successful. Instead, under General Philippe Petain, the French would rally to the defense of Verdun. The battle would cost Von Falkenhayn his job in addition to nearly one million German and French casualties, distributed more or less equally between the two armies. The German and French armies would each have successful offensives in the later years of the war, but the Battle of Verdun was a high water mark for both forces in terms of strength and morale.

Front Line July 1 1916, La Boisselle France, December 2018

On July 1 1916, British forces at the front along the Somme River in France, climbed over the top of their trenches and launched an attack. Wave after wave of young men walked across No-Man’s-Land into withering German artillery and machine gun fire. The bloodiest day in the history of the British Army saw nearly 20,000 soldiers killed, most within the first hour of the attack. By November Britain had suffered half a million casualties. The trauma of The Somme still resonates today throughout the United Kingdom, as well as Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand. Not to be outdone, the French would suffer 200,000 casualties. The Germans took half a millions casualties of their own at the Somme.

Canadian National Vimy Memorial, near Givenchy-en-Gohelle France, April 2018

The slaughter of 1916 would continue into 1917. This year of the war saw dramatic events such as the Russian Revolution and their near total withdrawal from the war, as well as the United States declaring war on Germany. French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre had been replaced by Robert Nivelle by the first of the year. On April 16 Nivelle launched an offensive of his own along the front in Northern France. German forces had already retreated to the fortifications of the Seigfriedstellung (Seigfried Line, or commonly known as the Hindenburg Line) and Nivelle’s offensive was a disaster. The French suffered nearly 200,000 casualties and gained practically nothing. In frustration at the meaningless loss of life, French troops began to mutiny. In May numerous French divisions flatly refused to fight. Nivelle was sacked and replaced by the hero of Verdun, Philippe Petain. “I am waiting for the tanks and the Americans” Petain stated. There would be no more pointless French attacks.

Tyne Cot British Cemetery and Memorial, near Passendale Belgium, April 2018

While Petain worked to end the mutinies, bring his soldiers back under control and rebuild French army morale, the British sought to keep the Germans distracted in Belgium. On June 7 1916 British Commander-in-Chief Douglas Haig launched the Battle of Messines. While deemed a strategic success for the British, both armies would each suffer 25,000 casualties at Messines. The next month Haig launched the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres). A heavy bombardment that turned the landscape into a muddy soup, as well as constant rain, created conditions that were truly a hell on Earth. Soldiers that fell into the mud would slowly be sucked under to drown. Any attempt to help a trapped comrade would result in additional soldiers being sucked into the mire. Despite the atrocious conditions, repeated attacks were ordered, but almost no significant ground was gained by British forces. Final casualty counts are disputed, but by November anywhere between half a million and one million soldiers were killed, wounded or missing, with the numbers again being almost equally split between the British and German armies.

1918 would see the final year of the Great War, but it would prove to be just as horrific as the previous years. With Russia out of the war, the German Empire could focus their army on the Western Front. They had no time to lose as thousands of American soldiers were pouring into France each day. On March 21 the Germans launched the Kaiserschlacht offensive and broke through Allied lines in Belgium and France. Within a week they had attacked to a depth of 40 miles and by May German forces were back on the Marne and threatening Paris just as they had done in 1914. Philippe Petain’s defensive strategy stopped the German advance in July and, having advanced past their own ability to supply their forces, the Germans had to fall back. The Kaiserschlacht was over and Germany had suffered nearly 700,000 casualties.

Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial, Romagne-Sous-Montfaucon France, December 2018

On August 8 1918 the Allies, now under the unified command of French Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch, began the Hundred Days Offensive with the Battle of Amiens in France. German General Erich Ludendorff would later refer to this day as the as the Schwarzer Tag des Deutschen Heeres (Black Day of the German Army). Morale had crumbled among German troops and they were surrendering in massive numbers. The Germans suffered 30,000 casualties on that day alone. German soldiers called reserve troops moving up for battle “strike breakers”. German commanders, trying to rally their retreating troops, were told “You’re prolonging the war!” In September German allies were dropping out of the conflict. Bulgarian, Turkish, and Austria-Hungarian armies stopped fighting. With Americans now on the battle lines, the Allies were out of their trenches and fighting the Germans in open country. Each day more German soldiers would surrender and the Allies would gain more ground. October riots within Germany convinced the high command that no more was possible. The possibility of winning the war was gone and on November 6 a delegation set out from Berlin to negotiate with Ferdinand Foch and the Allies at Compiegne France. The Armistice took effect five days later.

Foch Monument at the Glade of the Armistice, near Compiegne France, April 2018

January 1 1919 saw the first New Year’s Day on the Western Front without battle in four years. But the war was not officially over. The Paris Peace Conference opened on January 18. It was not lost on the Germans that this date was the anniversary of the establishment of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701 as well as the establishment of the German Empire in 1871. The “Big Four” major powers of France, Britain, Italy, and the United States dominated the conference and worked together to unilaterally draft the Treaty of Versailles. In addition to the loss of colonial territories, the reduction of its military force, the levy of reparations and new national borders, the treaty placed the full blame for the war on the “aggression of Germany”. While US President Woodrow Wilson and the American delegation did not believe it was fair to lay the blame for the war solely on the German Empire, they were unsuccessful in getting the language of the treaty changed. The treaty was signed by representatives of Germany, France, Britain, the United States, Italy and Japan on June 28 1919, precisely five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Great War was now officially over.

The 1918 “Alsace-Lorraine” Monument depicting a German eagle impaled by a sword, near Compiegne France, April 2018

German popular resentment of the Treaty of Versailles, the humiliation of their defeat, costly reparations, the embittered memoirs of Ludendorff and other German military commanders, along with economic depression, and political instability, are all considered to have contributed to the resulting Nazi political success that began in 1925. Some believed, like economist and British delegate to the Paris Peace Conference John Maynard Keynes, that the conditions of the treaty were far too harsh and would end up being counter-productive to peace and the word economy. French Field Marshall Foch felt the opposite. Foch believed the treaty to be far too lenient on Germany. At the signing of the treaty he declared “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”

The Second World War began on September 1 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, twenty years and 65 days after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Postscript: This is probably the last of the big text posts. From this point on I will be sharing the sites of the Western Front as they are today, 100 years after the end of the Great War. I have seen some pretty amazing things around Belgium and France and I look forward to sharing the images of these sites with you.

Additionally, if you are interested in a great book about the Paris Peace Conference I would highly recommend Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan.

January 4, 2019

#ww1 #worldwar1 #westernfront #greatwar #treatyofversailles #ludendorff #foch #Petain #DouglasHaig #Passchendaele #somme #verdun #Kaiserschlacht

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today-in-wwi · 6 years ago

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Lenin Shot Twice in Assassination Attempt

Fanny Kaplan (1890-1918).

August 30 1918, Moscow--The Socialist Revolutionaries had turned more and more to assassination (ever a favorite during the Czarist days) as a political strategy in the summer of 1918, though their most prominent targets had been Germans. Ambassador Mirbach’s assassination had led to the banning of the Left SRs, and a few weeks later they killed the head of the German occupation forces in Ukraine.

An SR member, Fanny Kaplan, confronted Lenin after he gave a speech at an arms factory in Moscow on August 30. She fired a revolver three times, hitting Lenin twice; one bullet went through his neck and punctured a lung, while the other was lodged in his shoulder. Lenin was brought back to the Kremlin and refused to leave for a hospital despite his severe injuries. He would survive, but this was not obvious for some time.

Kaplan was interrogated by the Cheka, but only gave this statement:

My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Czarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labor. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.

She was summarily executed four days later.

The assassination attempt on Lenin, together with the (successful) assassination of the head of the Petrograd Cheka a few days earlier, galvanized the Bolsheviks to take official violence against their political opponents, which had been accelerating since the revolution, to new levels. On September 2, an official state of “Red Terror” was declared. While the SRs were a target after the assassinations, the main focus was on bourgeois or Czarist political leaders, and, in what would become a staple of Soviet propaganda of the next few decades, the peasant “kulaks” who hoarded food in this time of crisis.

Today in 1917: French Refloat Captured German Submarine Today in 1916: Pro-Allied Coup in Salonika Today in 1915: French Government Proposes Landing on Asian Side of Dardanelles Today in 1914: BEF Commander Sir John French Plans To Abandon French Army, Paris

Sources include: Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War.

#wwi #ww1 #ww1 history #ww1 centenary #lenin #vladimir lenin #russian civil war #atrocities #august 1918 #assassination #bolsheviks #moscow #world war 1 #world war i #the first world war #the great war #socialism

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brookstonalmanac · 2 years ago

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Events 8.28

475 – The Roman general Orestes forces western Roman Emperor Julius Nepos to flee his capital city, Ravenna. 489 – Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, defeats Odoacer at the Battle of Isonzo, forcing his way into Italy. 632 – Fatimah, daughter of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, dies, with her cause of death being a controversial topic among the Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims. 663 – Silla–Tang armies crush the Baekje restoration attempt and force Yamato Japan to withdraw from Korea in the Battle of Baekgang. 1189 – Third Crusade: The Crusaders begin the Siege of Acre under Guy of Lusignan. 1521 – Ottoman wars in Europe: The Ottoman Turks occupy Belgrade. 1524 – The Kaqchikel Maya rebel against their former Spanish allies during the Spanish conquest of Guatemala. 1542 – Turkish–Portuguese War: Battle of Wofla: The Portuguese are scattered, their leader Christovão da Gama is captured and later executed. 1565 – Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sights land near St. Augustine, Florida and founds the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in the continental United States. 1609 – Henry Hudson discovers Delaware Bay. 1619 – Election of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor. 1640 – Second Bishop's War: King Charles I's English army loses to a Scottish Covenanter force at the Battle of Newburn. 1648 – Second English Civil War: The Siege of Colchester ends when Royalists Forces surrender to the Parliamentary Forces after eleven weeks, during the Second English Civil War. 1709 – Meidingnu Pamheiba is crowned King of Manipur. 1789 – William Herschel discovers a new moon of Saturn: Enceladus. 1810 – Napoleonic Wars: The French Navy accepts the surrender of a British Royal Navy fleet at the Battle of Grand Port. 1830 – The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's new Tom Thumb steam locomotive races a horse-drawn car, presaging steam's role in U.S. railroads. 1845 – The first issue of Scientific American magazine is published. 1849 – Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire: After a month-long siege, Venice, which had declared itself independent as the Republic of San Marco, surrenders to Austria. 1859 – The Carrington event is the strongest geomagnetic storm on record to strike the Earth. Electrical telegraph service is widely disrupted. 1861 – American Civil War: Union forces attack Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in the Battle of Hatteras Inlet Batteries which lasts for two days. 1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Second Manassas. The battle ends on August 30. 1867 – The United States takes possession of the (at this point unoccupied) Midway Atoll. 1879 – Anglo-Zulu War: Cetshwayo, last king of the Zulus, is captured by the British. 1898 – Caleb Bradham's beverage "Brad's Drink" is renamed "Pepsi-Cola". 1901 – Silliman University is founded in the Philippines. It is the first American private school in the country. 1909 – A group of mid-level Greek Army officers launches the Goudi coup, seeking wide-ranging reforms. 1913 – Queen Wilhelmina opens the Peace Palace in The Hague. 1914 – World War I: The Royal Navy defeats the German fleet in the Battle of Heligoland Bight. 1916 – World War I: Germany declares war on Romania. 1916 – World War I: Italy declares war on Germany. 1917 – Ten Suffragettes are arrested while picketing the White House. 1921 – Russian Civil War: The Red Army dissolved the Makhnovshchina, after driving the Revolutionary Insurgent Army out of Ukraine. 1924 – The Georgian opposition stages the August Uprising against the Soviet Union. 1936 – Nazi Germany begins its mass arrests of Jehovah's Witnesses, who are interned in concentration camps. 1937 – Toyota Motors becomes an independent company. 1943 – Denmark in World War II: German authorities demand that Danish authorities crack down on acts of resistance. The next day, martial law is imposed on Denmark. 1944 – World War II: Marseille and Toulon are liberated. 1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent civil rights movement. 1957 – U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond begins a filibuster to prevent the United States Senate from voting on the Civil Rights Act of 1957; he stopped speaking 24 hours and 18 minutes later, the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single Senator. 1963 – March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech. 1964 – The Philadelphia race riot begins. 1968 – Police and protesters clash during 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activity. 1988 – Ramstein air show disaster: Three aircraft of the Frecce Tricolori demonstration team collide and the wreckage falls into the crowd. Seventy-five are killed and 346 seriously injured. 1990 – Gulf War: Iraq declares Kuwait to be its newest province. 1990 – An F5 tornado strikes the Illinois cities of Plainfield and Joliet, killing 29 people. 1993 – NASA's Galileo probe performs a flyby of the asteroid 243 Ida. Astronomers later discover a moon, the first known asteroid moon, in pictures from the flyby and name it Dactyl. 1998 – Pakistan's National Assembly passes a constitutional amendment to make the "Qur'an and Sunnah" the "supreme law" but the bill is defeated in the Senate. 1998 – Second Congo War: Loyalist troops backed by Angolan and Zimbabwean forces repulse the RCD and Rwandan offensive on Kinshasa. 2003 – In "one of the most complicated and bizarre crimes in the annals of the FBI", Brian Wells dies after becoming involved in a complex plot involving a bank robbery, a scavenger hunt, and a homemade explosive device. 2016 – The first experimental mission of ISRO’s Scramjet Engine towards the realisation of an Air Breathing Propulsion System was successfully conducted from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota.

#Events

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drev-the-ambassador · 7 years ago

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It's sometime in the 1200’s. Men have come from the west, and they speak the language some - not you necessarily, but some -of the people on this small strip of sparsely populated land recognize, even if they don’t understand it. You’ve traded with the western men before, been attacked by them as well, just like a while ago, when they came. You and your people struck back, but nonetheless. Someone tells you that you must pay taxes now. You have a king now. You are handed a cross. You have a king now. A Swedish king.

It’s 1809. You are in Porvoo. The war is still ongoing, but yet, here you are, to swear an oath to your new king. No, this is no king, this man is an emperor. Alexander the First. He promises you that you can keep your religion, your old Swedish laws and your rights. The estates swear their oaths of allegiance. At the end of the ceremony, the tsar tells you that you and your people have now been heightened to a nation among nations. You are not sure what that means - there is no nation, no country, just nine provinces, the Åland islands and some land from the north, where Tornio- river marks the border between two countries - the one you belonged to yesterday and the one you’ll belong to from this day on. Next autumn, the Treaty of Fredrikshamn is signed by the representatives of both, the Kingdom of Sweden and the Russian Empire. Sweden gave up the nine läns, the islands and the strip of land from the north forever, and they would be forever a part of Russia. You wonder what you should do. Russians have given the citizens three years to decide where they wish to live; Sweden or Russia. You don’t particularly like either option, but there is no third option. There is no land between east and west.

It’s 1899. The tsar, Nicholas the Second, did not agree to meet with the men bringing him the Great Petition to end the February manifesto. The Grand Duchy of Finland does not have its own postal service anymore. The diet can no longer decide the laws; Russians decide them now. You don’t understand how the emperor could do this to his loyal citizens. They’re telling rumours that there are people in Russia who want to take the autonomy away once and for all. You hope those are only rumors.

It’s 1917. Everything is chaos.The Great War is raging. There was a second revolution in Russia; the bolsheviks have the power now. You are at a loss of what to do. The Finnish Parliament declares that it now holds the greatest legislative power in the Grand Duchy. The working class and the middle class are not getting along, haven’t been since the years of oppression. Everything is changing - you can feel it.

It’s 6th of December, 1917. The Parliament has just approved the declaration of independence made only two days earlier. Now, for the first time ever, you all have to stand on your own two feet - there is no motherland to take care of you if you mess up. You wonder if you’ll survive a decade here, in this sparsely populated land between east and west. You swear to do everything it takes.

It’s 2017. Some teenage girl is writing this pretentious text at 3:15 AM in November. In the independent Republic of Finland.

Finland’s 100 years of Independence 6.12.1917-6.12.2017

Finland is both very old and very young. The ancestors of the people living in Finland today - and of the Sami people especially - are among the first humans to have settled down in Europe, and the bedrock on which Finland rests is among the oldest in the world. However, the Finnish written language was developed only in the 1500’s by Mikael Agricola and the first books written in Finnish were published in 1870. In the 1700’s, the concept of “Finnish” being separate from “Swedish” regarding the language and some cultural aspects was born, but really being Finnish like we are Finnish today wasn’t born until the latter half of the 19th century.

Parts of the area known as Finland today were annexed by the Kingdom of Sweden at different times. Some areas of Finland were a part of Sweden for around 600 years, some less than 60. As a part of Sweden Finland wasn’t really… Finland. It consisted of the provinces, or läns, though one of them was called Varsinais-Suomi, Proper Finland, or Egentliga Finland in Swedish. Only in 1809, when Sweden lost the Finnish War to the Russian Empire and gave up its eastern areas, did Aleksanteri I, Alexander I, unify the läns under the name “Suomen suurruhtinaskunta”, “the Grand Duchy of Finland” and make the Grand Duchy an autonomous region within the empire.

As a part of Russia Finland was doing quite well, better than as a part of Sweden. It’s impossible to say if Finland would’ve been better off as a part of Sweden all along, but it can be said with certainty that as a part of Sweden Finland most likely wouldn’t have become an independent country. The Diet of Finland wasn’t called until 1863 even though Alexander promised to do so in like 1812, but Finnish people either didn’t mind or didn’t care. Finland was also one of the most peaceful parts of the Russian Empire; the Finnish people were either very loyal to the czar OR, again, they didn’t really care. Nonetheless, Finland gained its own postal service, currency and eventually the Diet was called as well. The Finnish language was to become equal to Swedish in 20 years, and the national awakening was bringing with it the Golden Age of Finnish Art.

A product of the Golden Age, Raatajat rahanalaiset (Kaski) (1893) by Eero Järnefelt, English translation being “Under the Yoke (Burning the Brushwood) ; Wage Slaves / Burn-Beating”.

In 1899, just as Finland had started to embrace its Finnishness, the Russification of Finland, known in Finland as Sortokaudet, the Years of Oppression, began with the February Manifesto by Nikolai II, Nicholas II. The postal service had been shut down earlier, but now all the power from the Finnish politicians in the Diet was given over to the Russians. The use of Finnish was no longer encouraged, now everyone was forced to learn Russian. Finnish people tried to appeal to the czar, students collecting half a million names (about ¼ of the population) into the Suuri adressi, the Great Petition, by skiing from village to village, only for the czar to decline the delegation. Finnish politicians started to be replaced by Russians. Finland was slowly losing its autonomy.

A famous painting, Hyökkäys (1899) by Edvard Isto. The name of the painting means “An attack”. It depicts the Russian double-headed eagle trying to rip the lawbook from the hands of the Finnish Maiden, the national personification of Finland. It became a symbol of the resistance towards the Russification of Finland.

In 1905 the revolution ended the Russification, and the Finnish Parliament was formed - it has barely changed since, by the way. With this reform of the Finnish political system, Finland also became the 2nd country in the world to give women the right to vote, and the first country in the world to give everyone, regardless of gender, equal political rights. The first women in the world elected as Members of Parliament were Finnish. After this brief period of time Russification was put into action again. It was only ended by the October Revolution in 1917. Which brings us to our next topic...

End of the Year 1917

In 1917 the two Russian revolutions took place, at the beginning and at the end of the year.This unrest made the working class and middle class, who were not on very good terms with each other otherwise, to agree on one thing: They wanted independence.

On November 15th the Finnish Parliament declared itself to hold the highest legislative power in Finland.

A newspaper article from Viipurin Sanomat from 10.11.1917, telling about the decision the Parliament made to transfer the power (in Finland) that earlier was held by the czar to 3 people chosen by the Parliament.

The suggestion, voting and the final result of the plenary session where the Parliament ended up deciding to ditch their previous idea of electing those 3 people and just having the legislative power to itself.

On 4th of December the government - or P.E. Svinhufvud’s Independence Senate (P.E. Svinhufvudin itsenäisyyssenaatti) - gave the Declaration of Independence.

A picture of Svinhufvud’s Senate and the original Finnish Declaration of Independence. A link to the English translation of the text.

On the 5th, the Declaration was published for all the people of Finland to see - however, the rising tensions between the working class and the middle class, as well as the famine closing in kind of distracted the people.

On December 6th the Parliament voted in favor of Independence. The votes were 100-88, those 88 being the Social Democrats who’d wanted to negotiate with the bolsheviks before independence. This day was chosen as the national day of Finland, the Finnish Independence Day. However, on 6th of December in the year 1917, the newly gained independence did not stir much positive emotions. According to the memoirs of a Finnish author, Lauri Arra, that year, “everyone waited for or sensed that some terrible disaster was going to happen”. This terrible disaster was waiting for the newly born nation in the January of 1918, only a few weeks later.

To be a real country, other countries must recognize the independence first. Right away Finland asked Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Norway and Great Britain to recognize the new country’s independence. You might have noticed that a key player in this becoming-a-country-independent-from-Russia-and-asking-others-to-recognize-our-breaking-away-from-Russia-process is missing: Russia.

No, Finland did not ask Russia to recognize our independence at first. However, all the other countries refused to recognize Finland as independent before the country Finland was trying to break free from approved of said breaking free first, and so Finland had to turn eastward with an apologetic smile and go: “...Please?” I mean, I assume that’s how it went, I dunno, I wasn’t there.

The first ones to make a move were the Social Democrats: they asked their eastern comrades to recognize Finland as a proper nation. Lenin agreed to do so if someone came and asked. On 29th of December Svinhufvud himself, with the other negotiators, traveled to St. Petersburg. The Finnish delegation was forced to wait for hours in some room outside the room where all the important stuff was happening.

Then, just before midnight, literally minutes before the year 1917 came to a close, the Finns were handed a note, a piece of paper, with which Soviet Russia recognized Finland as an independent nation.

Said piece of paper.

Recognition

Soviet Russia was the first country to recognize Finland’s independence on December 31st, 1917. The confirmation for the recognition was given on January 4th, 1918. The next countries to recognize Finland as a country were France, Sweden and Germany, on January 4th as well. Other countries followed, even though countries like USA and Great Britain recognized Finland only after WWI, to make sure Finland wouldn’t go and join the bad guy Germany, so to say. (Krhm.)

A screencap of the Wikipedia article on the Finnish Declaration of Independence because it had the handy list here. On top of these countries, Romania, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Mexico and Hungary recognized Finland in 1920. Paraguay and Luxembourg followed in 1921, Serbia in 1922, and finally Afghanistan and Albania in 1928.

Map of Finland in 1917.

Here’s the end of part 1 of the Finnish Independence post. This focused on the history, but the next part, which I will hopefully publish soon, will focus on how we celebrate our independence. I hope you enjoyed.

Hyvää itsenäisyyspäivää!

#hetaliafandomdirectory #suomi100 #finland #aph finland #finland's independence day #hetalia #hey it's sort of in time!!#i underestimated my need of sleep #so this is like 6 hours late #i apologize deeply #I hope you like it!!'#i'm pretty sure these are old enough to be in public domain #enjoy!!!!

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