Today in Labor History March 1, 1921: Anarchist and leftwing communist soldiers and sailors rose up against the Russian Bolsheviks in the Kronstadt uprising. The rebellion, which lasted until March 16, was the last major revolt against the Bolsheviks. It began when they sent delegates to Petrograd in solidarity with strikes going on in that city, and demanded the restoration of civil rights for workers, economic and political freedom for workers and peasants, including free speech, and that soviet councils include anarchists and left socialists. The Bolshevik forces, directed by Trotsky, killed over 1,000 Kronstadt rebels in battle, and executed another 2,100 in the aftermath. As many as 1,400 government troops died in their attempt to quash the rebellion.
Today in Labor History February 24, 1917: The Petrograd bread riot that started yesterday (March 8 on Western calendars) turned into a revolution. Soldiers refused to fire on demonstrators and turned on their officers. Then they stormed the arsenal and liberated 20,000 automatic pistols, torched the police stations and emptied the prisons.
Today in Labor History February 23, 1944: The Soviet Union began the forced deportation of Chechen and Ingush people from the North Caucasus to Central Asia. The Soviets forcibly deported millions of ethnic minorities from the 1930s-1950s. At least 25% of the Chechen and Ingush deportees died at the hands of soldiers or from cold and hunger.
"In memory of #Navalny, #EU must give money to #Ukraine and defeat #Russia"
Absolutely.
Throughout history, west has been particularly good supporting #Nazis against #USSR.
Why not do the same thing again?
Is there any merit to framing conflicts of the recent past in ideological terms?
For example, the events leading up to WWII could be described as #fascism vs #communism, until you learn about the economic and military pacts Bolsheviks made with Hitler and Mussolini.
Sure, Brownshirts were fighting communists on the streets of Berlin, but once each side captured their own state, differences were set aside for the greater project of making their respective nations stronger.
Similarly, the Cold War was supposedly about capitalism vs communism, until you learn about China embracing Kissinger and the Sino-Soviet split.
It feels like nationalism is the singular dominant ideology of the XX and XXI century and all other ideologies are incidental and need to align themselves with the ultimate goal of "how to make our country strong".
#Russia Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a comment condemning 1945 Allies bombing of Dresden^1 in Nazi #Germany and calling it “barbarian”. What Russia forgot to mention that the bombing was performed on request from #USSR marshal Ivan Konev 🤷
Today in Labor History February 11, 1953: Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower denied all appeals for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The government executed them at Sing Sing in 1953. They had been convicted of espionage for the USSR. Their sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol (adopted by Abel Merepol, composer of the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,”), maintained their parents’ innocence. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, decoded Soviet cables showed that their father had collaborated. They continued to fight for the mother’s pardon, but Obama refused to grant it.
The political distance that the world has traveled over the last 40 years cannot appear much larger than in the Baltic states. In 1984, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had spent decades locked inside the Soviet Union, but today they exist independently as capitalist democracies–and, as members of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, economic partners and military allies of the United States.
In fewer words, just about everything that the old men leading the USSR wanted to suppress has happened in these three countries. Knowing this has made walking around here this week a little more enjoyable, as it did in visits to Tallinn in 2021 and Riga in 2022.
Friday morning, I took in an additional reminder of why 2024 is not like 1984: a visit to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. The name refers to invasions by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but this exhibit space in a 19th-century government office building–which until 2018 went as the Museum of Genocide Victims despite devoting little of its space to the Holocaust–mainly serves as an indictment of Stalin and his successors.
Room and after room recounts how the Communist regime rounded up Lithuanians for alleged crimes against the state and the party and exiled them to prisons and camps as far away as Siberia. Some of the most affecting exhibits showcase what these internal exiles did to retain a tiny bit of their former lives, such as assembling rosaries from bits of stale bread and sending letters back home that first received strikes through sentences from a censor’s pen and then had to be mailed without envelopes.
The museum also notes the partisan warfare Lithuanians staged in forests for years after World War II, a doomed effort that the country later pointed to as proof that it had never consented to its incorporation into the USSR as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.
A sequence of exhibits upstairs details how Soviet repression grew more organized and bureaucratic under Khrushchev and Brezhnev–one room holds a set of shelves of KGB rubber stamps, while another features cheery cards, posters and booklets celebrating the KGB’s 50th birthday.
They also unpack how advances in technology allowed increasingly intrusive monitoring of Soviet subjects, which reminded me of the exhibits at the Stasi Museum in Berlin, and of foreign visitors, which made me wonder what records linger of me from my 1989 post-high-shool trip to the Soviet Union.
The lowest levels of the museum reveal the grimmest evidence: rows of prison cells (one made over into a documentation of the local chapter of the Holocaust that saw Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators murder proportionally more Jews than anywhere else in Europe), some set up for solitary confinement and various forms of torture, as well as a chilling basement room in which Soviet functionaries shot prisoners.
I exited feeling a profound gratitude at living in a democracy with guarantees of human rights in its constitution. And at the fact that generations have grown up only reading past-tense accounts of the Soviet Union.
This victory over what President Reagan called an “Evil Empire” remains incomplete. The other countries that escaped Moscow’s rule are far less free–especially Belarus, barely 20 miles to the east. And under Putin’s dictatorship, Russia itself now seems to aspire to be an evil empire modernized with crony capitalism and, as highlighted by all the Ukrainian flags flying in Vilnius, the pointless sacrifice of tens of thousands of its own men in the invasion of Ukraine.
But when so much of the news today can inspire doomism, it is worth taking a minute to reflect that the awful Soviet regime that once seemed an immovable object is gone, swept into the dustbin of history.
(Disclosure: All three trips to the Baltics involved travel comped by hosts, in 2021 as part of a press trip, in 2022 because I spoke at the TechChill conference in Riga and in 2024 because my visit involved both my speaking at the Fintech Day conference and arranged visits to a variety of local startups.)
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman (December 3, 1889 – January 13, 1939), an American political activist and functionary for the Communist International (Comintern). Time Magazine once called him “the reddest of the blacks.” As a young man, he lived in the Yucatan, during the Mexican Revolution, which radicalized him and introduced him to anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing. After this, he moved back to the U.S. and became a leading activist and speaker during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote two works of fiction during this period. In 1918, he met anarchist cartoonist Robert Minor, who inspired him to visit the Soviet Union. Soon after, they both joined the Communist Labor Party of America. In 1927, he moved to Moscow, where he worked as a teacher at an English-language school. However, in 1937, he was caught up in The Great Purge, and was sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian prison camp because of his Trotskyist affiliations. There, he died of malnutrition in 1939.
Today in Labor History February 3, 1961: The U.S. Air Forces began Operation Looking Glass, code name for its airborne nuclear weapons command and control center. Ever since, there has been a "Doomsday Plane" always in the air, able to take direct control of U.S. nuclear bombers and missiles if the land-based strategic command (USSTRATCOM Global Operations Center (GOC) is incapacitated. Perhaps it will come in handy, should its current game of chicken between the US/NATO and Russia go sideways.
Today in Labor History February 2, 1942: The Osvald Group took the first anti-Nazi action in Norway, to protest the inauguration of Vidkun Quisling, by bombing the Oslo East Station. Over 200 members of the Osvald Group committed at least 110 acts of sabotage against the Nazis and Quisling’s collaborationist government during World War II. The Osvald Group was aligned with, and support by, the Soviet Union. The Nazis occupied Norway starting on April 9, 1940. The Osvald Group continued its sabotage until 1944, when the USSR officially disbanded the organization.
Looking at how #Russia statements or denials are being repeated by world media with literally zero scrutiny you can now watch live a case study that explains how ongoing #Holocaust was largely ignored in the West for the first few years of the WW2.
As a reminder, Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp[^1] was opened by Nazi #Germany in occupied #Poland already in May 1940, half year after their joint invasion with #USSR. Polish underground Home Army started gathering intelligence from the very beginning and in 1940 it published its first report on “The Jewish situation”, documenting ghettos, arrests, executions etc. But the full-scale horror unrolled only with Endlosung (Final Solution to the Jewish Question)[^2] in 1941, when Nazis started to bring millions of Jews from all Europe for extermination.
All that industrial scale genocide was scrupulously documented by the Home Army and ultimately published in the form of an official report of Polish government on exile under the title “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland”, usually referred to as Karski’s Reports.^3
What happened in response to the report was… nothing. Respected mainstream media covered the reports as a “minor story”, watered down by categorical denials from German officials, whom, of course, the journalists felt obliged to ask. Some Western experts dismissed the reports based on “they couldn’t possibly”, “it wouldn’t make economic sense” and other such “common sense” denial.
We had all the same spectrum as today - outright denialists, pragmatists, realists, cherry-pickers, nitpickers and, most notably, the “journalists just doing their job” who copied German denials verbatim and presented them on par with numerous witness reports.
Because, you know, it’s how balanced journalism works… Of course, after the war ended and the camps were liberated, all reports came out to be not only true but the tip of an iceberg. But it was all these years between 1941 and 1945 when Germans methodically slaughtered civilians in the camps, while their diplomats smiled and demonstrated entirely fake evidence, exactly in the same way Russia posted a dozen of contradictory versions of #MH17 and is now showing a “film proving Ukrainian PoWs were loaded into Il-76”.
And world’ most respected media are happily repeating it, commenting on it, balancing “who said what”, just like they did 80 years ago 🤷
🇷🇺 Putin is going on a property hunt, ordering officials to find Russian assets that once belonged to its former empire or were owned by the Soviet Union.
Today in Labor History January 16, 1969: Jan Palach committed suicide by self-immolation in Prague, Czechoslovakia to protest the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring. Prior to his political suicide, he sent a letter to several public figures demanding an end to censorship and an end to the Soviet propaganda paper, as well as a call for a General Strike to meet these demands. His funeral turned into a major protest against the occupation. Several others also committed self-immolation in the coming months.
https://www.europesays.com/1003920/ On this day in 1992 the European Community, along with its members, recognised the Republic of Slovenia as a sovereign and an independent state. #slovenia
It's been 30 years since the demise of dictator #Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), commonly referred to as SFR #Yugoslavia.
31 years since the end of the #ColdWar, the #WarsawPact, and the #USSR.
By invading #Ukraine since 2014, #Putler wants to turn back time and even twist history
"On 13 January 1953, the #USSR-based newspapers Pravda and Izvestiya reported that #Soviet Union Premier Joseph #Stalin had arrested nine #doctors, six of whom were #Jewish, for conspiring to assassinate the country’s political leadership. The “killer doctors,” as they were referred to, were accused of being members of the U.S. and British intelligence services and of serving the interests of international #Jewry."
Edit: This does definitely not apply to any victims of dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. It is merely a (not complex enough) expression of my discomfort with people who moan all the time about the society they live in, without acknowledging their own part.
Today in Labor History January 5, 1968: Reformist Alexander Dubček came to power in Czechoslovakia, marking the beginning of the "Prague Spring." During the Prague Spring, Dubček loosened restrictions on the media, speech and travel. He also created a dual federation within the country made up of the Czech Socialist Republic and Slovak Socialist Republic. However, this was insufficient to mollify activists, who became increasingly defiant of the government. They began to occupy workplaces and formed mutual aid networks. When the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded the country with tanks and 650,000 soldiers, activists fought them with rocks, Molotov cocktails and homemade weapons. The Soviet military predicted they would subdue the country in four days, but the resistance held out for eight months. When they finally quashed the uprising, the Soviets continued to control Czechoslovakia until 1989, when the Velvet Revolution finally ended the Communist regime.
I've loved The New Cambridge Modern History ever since I first found it - all two or three feet of it - at the library when I was a kid.
It ends at 1945.
I'm looking for a similar book or series to the Modern History which takes up the torch and carries it through the mid- and late-20th century. At least to the end of the Cold War, but which doesn't focus on it solely.
Today in Labor History December 28, 1943: Soviet authorities began Operation Ulussy, the deportation of the Kalmyk nation to Siberia and Central Asia. They forcibly relocated over 93,000 people of Kalmyk nationality in cattle wagons on December 28–31 to forced labor camps. The government accused them all of collaborating with the Nazis based on the roughly 5,000 Kalmyks who fought in the Nazi-affiliated Kalmykian Cavalry Corps. However, over 23,000 Kalmyks served in the Red Army and fought against Axis forces at the same time. The deportation resulted in more than 16,000 deaths. Overall, the Soviet government deported millions of ethnic minorities from the 1930s-‘50s, and hundreds of thousands died in the process. In 1956, Khrushchev rehabilitated The Kalmyks. In 1989 the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared all of Stalin's deportations "illegal and criminal."
Today in Labor History December 27, 1918: The Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU) seized 7 airplanes, establishing an Insurgent Air Fleet. The RIAU was an anarchist peasant army led by Nestor Makhno. During the Ukrainian War of Independence, they created a stateless libertarian communist society known as the Free Territory, or Makhnovia. It lasted from 1918 to 1921, when it was ultimately crushed by the Bolsheviks.
"Imperialism only counts if it's Western, otherwise it's just sparkling liberation"
'Weddings', by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Those weddings in wartime! The deceiving comfort!...