Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

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Part 2 of 2

October Revolution

The October Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin and was based upon Lenin's writing on the ideas of Karl Marx, a political ideology often known as Marxism–Leninism. It marked the beginning of the spread of communism in the 20th century. It was far less sporadic than the revolution of February and came about as the result of deliberate planning and coordinated activity to that end.

Though Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Party, it has been argued that since Lenin was not present during the actual takeover of the Winter Palace, it was really Trotsky's organization and direction that led the revolution, merely spurred by the motivation Lenin instigated within his party.[30] Critics on the Right have long argued that the financial and logistical assistance of German intelligence via their key agent, Alexander Parvus was a key component as well, though historians are divided, since there is little evidence supporting that claim.

Chapter III: LENIN AND GERMAN ASSISTANCE FOR THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under varying labels that they were in a position to be able to build up their main organ Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow base of their party.

-- Von Kühlmann, minister of foreign affairs, to the kaiser, December 3, 1917

In April 1917 Lenin and a party of 32 Russian revolutionaries, mostly Bolsheviks, journeyed by train from Switzerland across Germany through Sweden to Petrograd, Russia. They were on their way to join Leon Trotsky to "complete the revolution." Their trans-Germany transit was approved, facilitated, and financed by the German General Staff. Lenin's transit to Russia was part of a plan approved by the German Supreme Command, apparently not immediately known to the kaiser, to aid in the disintegration of the Russian army and so eliminate Russia from World War I. The possibility that the Bolsheviks might be turned against Germany and Europe did not occur to the German General Staff. Major General Hoffman has written, "We neither knew nor foresaw the danger to humanity from the consequences of this journey of the Bolsheviks to Russia."1

At the highest level the German political officer who approved Lenin's journey to Russia was Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, a descendant of the Frankfurt banking family Bethmann, which achieved great prosperity in the nineteenth century. Bethmann-Hollweg was appointed chancellor in 1909 and in November 1913 became the subject of the first vote of censure ever passed by the German Reichstag on a chancellor. It was Bethmann-Hollweg who in 1914 told the world that the German guarantee to Belgium was a mere "scrap of paper." Yet on other war matters — such as the use of unrestricted submarine warfare — Bethmann-Hollweg was ambivalent; in January 1917 he told the kaiser, "I can give Your Majesty neither my assent to the unrestricted submarine warfare nor my refusal." By 1917 Bethmann-Hollweg had lost the Reichstag's support and resigned — but not before approving transit of Bolshevik revolutionaries to Russia. The transit instructions from Bethmann-Hollweg went through the state secretary Arthur Zimmermann — who was immediately under Bethmann-Hollweg and who handled day-to-day operational details with the German ministers in both Bern and Copenhagen — to the German minister to Bern in early April 1917. The kaiser himself was not aware of the revolutionary movement until after Lenin had passed into Russia.

While Lenin himself did not know the precise source of the assistance, he certainly knew that the German government was providing some funding. There were, however, intermediate links between the German foreign ministry and Lenin, as the following shows:



From Berlin Zimmermann and Bethmann-Hollweg communicated with the German minister in Copenhagen, Brockdorff-Rantzau. In turn, Brockdorff-Rantzau was in touch with Alexander Israel Helphand (more commonly known by his alias, Parvus), who was located in Copenhagen.2 Parvus was the connection to Jacob Furstenberg, a Pole descended from a wealthy family but better known by his alias, Ganetsky. And Jacob Furstenberg was the immediate link to Lenin.

Although Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg was the final authority for Lenin's transfer, and although Lenin was probably aware of the German origins of the assistance, Lenin cannot be termed a German agent. The German Foreign Ministry assessed Lenin's probable actions in Russia as being consistent with their own objectives in the dissolution of the existing power structure in Russia. Yet both parties also had hidden objectives: Germany wanted priority access to the postwar markets in Russia, and Lenin intended to establish a Marxist dictatorship.

The idea of using Russian revolutionaries in this way can be traced back to 1915. On August 14 of that year, Brockdorff-Rantzau wrote the German state undersecretary about a conversation with Helphand (Parvus), and made a strong recommendation to employ Helphand, "an extraordinarily important man whose unusual powers I feel we must employ for duration of the war .... "3 Included in the report was a warning: "It might perhaps be risky to want to use the powers ranged behind Helphand, but it would certainly be an admission of our own weakness if we were to refuse their services out of fear of not being able to direct them."4

Brockdorff-Rantzau's ideas of directing or controlling the revolutionaries parallel, as we shall see, those of the Wall Street financiers. It was J.P. Morgan and the American International Corporation that attempted to control both domestic and foreign revolutionaries in the United States for their own purposes.

A subsequent document5 outlined the terms demanded by Lenin, of which the most interesting was point number seven, which allowed "Russian troops to move into India"; this suggested that Lenin intended to continue the tsarist expansionist program. Zeman also records the role of Max Warburg in establishing a Russian publishing house and adverts to an agreement dated August 12, 1916, in which the German industrialist Stinnes agreed to contribute two million rubles for financing a publishing house in Russia.6

Consequently, on April 16, 1917, a trainload of thirty-two, including Lenin, his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, Grigori Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, and Karl Radek, left the Central Station in Bern en route to Stockholm. When the party reached the Russian frontier only Fritz Plattan and Radek were denied entrance into Russia. The remainder of the party was allowed to enter. Several months later they were followed by almost 200 Mensheviks, including Martov and Axelrod.

It is worth noting that Trotsky, at that time in New York, also had funds traceable to German sources. Further, Von Kuhlmann alludes to Lenin's inability to broaden the base of his Bolshevik party until the Germans supplied funds. Trotsky was a Menshevik who turned Bolshevik only in 1917. This suggests that German funds were perhaps related to Trotsky's change of party label.

THE SISSON DOCUMENTS

In early 1918 Edgar Sisson, the Petrograd representative of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, bought a batch of Russian documents purporting to prove that Trotsky, Lenin, and the other Bolshevik revolutionaries were not only in the pay of, but also agents of, the German government.

These documents, later dubbed the "Sisson Documents," were shipped to the United States in great haste and secrecy. In Washington, D.C. they were submitted to the National Board for Historical Service for authentication. Two prominent historians, J. Franklin Jameson and Samuel N. Harper, testified to their genuineness. These historians divided the Sisson papers into three groups. Regarding Group I, they concluded:

We have subjected them with great care to all the applicable tests to which historical students are accustomed and ... upon the basis of these investigations, we have no hesitation in declaring that we see no reason to doubt the genuineness or authenticity of these fifty-three documents.7

The historians were less confident about material in Group II. This group was not rejected as outright forgeries, but it was suggested that they were copies of original documents. Although the historians made "no confident declaration" on Group III, they were not prepared to reject the documents as outright forgeries.

The Sisson Documents were published by the Committee on Public Information, whose chairman was George Creel, a former contributor to the pro-Bolshevik Masses. The American press in general accepted the documents as authentic. The notable exception was the New York Evening Post, at that time owned by Thomas W. Lamont, a partner in the Morgan firm. When only a few installments had been published, the Post challenged the authenticity of all the documents.8

We now know that the Sisson Documents were almost all forgeries: only one or two of the minor German circulars were genuine. Even casual examination of the German letterhead suggests that the forgers were unusually careless forgers perhaps working for the gullible American market. The German text was strewn with terms verging on the ridiculous: for example, Bureau instead of the German word Büro; Central for the German Zentral; etc.

That the documents are forgeries is the conclusion of an exhaustive study by George Kennan9 and of studies made in the 1920s by the British government. Some documents were based on authentic information and, as Kennan observes, those who forged them certainly had access to some unusually good information. For example, Documents 1, 54, 61, and 67 mention that the Nya Banken in Stockholm served as the conduit for Bolshevik funds from Germany. This conduit has been confirmed in more reliable sources. Documents 54, 63, and 64 mention Furstenberg as the banker-intermediary between the Germans and the Bolshevists; Furstenberg's name appears elsewhere in authentic documents. Sisson's Document 54 mentions Olof Aschberg, and Olof Aschberg by his own statements was the "Bolshevik Banker." Aschberg in 1917 was the director of Nya Banken. Other documents in the Sisson series list names and institutions, such as the German Naptha-Industrial Bank, the Disconto Gesellschaft, and Max Warburg, the Hamburg banker, but hard supportive evidence is more elusive. In general, the Sisson Documents, while themselves outright forgeries, are nonetheless based partly on generally authentic information.

One puzzling aspect in the light of the story in this book is that the documents came to Edgar Sisson from Alexander Gumberg (alias Berg, real name Michael Gruzenberg), the Bolshevik agent in Scandinavia and later a confidential assistant to Chase National Bank and Floyd Odium of Atlas Corporation. The Bolshevists, on the other hand, stridently repudiated the Sisson material. So did John Reed, the American representative on the executive of the Third International and whose paycheck came from Metropolitan magazine, which was owned by J.P. Morgan interests.10 So did Thomas Lamont, the Morgan partner who owned the New York Evening Post. There are several possible explanations. Probably the connections between the Morgan interests in New York and such agents as John Reed and Alexander Gumberg were highly flexible. This could have been a Gumberg maneuver to discredit Sisson and Creel by planting forged documents; or perhaps Gumberg was working in his own interest.

The Sisson Documents "prove" exclusive German involvement with the Bolsheviks. They also have been used to "prove" a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theory along the lines of that of the Protocols of Zion. In 1918 the U.S. government wanted to unite American opinion behind an unpopular war with Germany, and the Sisson Documents dramatically "proved" the exclusive complicity of Germany with the Bolshevists. The documents also provided a smoke screen against public knowledge of the events to be described in this book.

-- Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, by Antony C. Sutton

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 6 January 1918. The Tauride Palace is locked and guarded by Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev and Lashevich.

On 7 November 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin led his leftist revolutionaries in a revolt against the ineffective Provisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian calendar at the time, so period references show a 25 October date). The October revolution ended the phase of the revolution instigated in February, replacing Russia's short-lived provisional parliamentary government with government by soviets, local councils elected by bodies of workers and peasants. Liberal and monarchist forces, loosely organized into the White Army, immediately went to war against the Bolsheviks' Red Army, in a series of battles that would become known as the Russian Civil War.

Soviet membership was initially freely elected, but many members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, anarchists, and other leftists created opposition to the Bolsheviks through the soviets themselves. The elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly took place in November 1917. The Bolsheviks gained 24% of the vote.[31] When it became clear that the Bolsheviks had little support outside of the industrialized areas of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, they simply barred non-Bolsheviks from membership in the soviets.[citation needed] The Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.[31] Not surprisingly, this caused mass domestic tension with many individuals who called for another series of political reform, revolting, and calling for "a third Russian revolution," a movement that received a significant amount of support. The most notable instances of this anti-Bolshevik mentality were expressed in the Tambov rebellion, 1919–1921, and the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921. These movements, which made a wide range of demands and lacked effective coordination, were eventually defeated along with the White Army during the Civil War.

Russian Civil War


American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok in armed support to the White Army

The Russian Civil War, which broke out in 1918 shortly after the October Revolution, brought death and suffering to millions of people regardless of their political orientation. The war was fought mainly between the Red Army ("Reds"), consisting of the uprising majority led by the Bolshevik minority, and the "Whites" – army officers and cossacks, the "bourgeoisie", and political groups ranging from the far Right to the Socialist Revolutionaries who opposed the drastic restructuring championed by the Bolsheviks following the collapse of the Provisional Government to the soviets (under clear Bolshevik dominance).[32][33] The Whites had backing from nations such as Great Britain, France, USA and Japan, while the Reds possessed internal support which proved to be much more effective. Though the Allied nations, using external interference, provided substantial military aid to the loosely knit anti-Bolshevik forces, they were ultimately defeated.[32]

The Bolsheviks firstly assumed power in Petrograd, expanding their rule outwards. They eventually reached the Easterly Siberian Russian coast in Vladivostok, 4 years after the war began, an occupation that is believed to have ended all significant military campaigns in the nation. Less than one year later the last area controlled by the White Army, the Ayano-Maysky District, directly to the north of the Krai containing Vladivostok, was given up when General Anatoly Pepelyayev capitulated in 1923.

Several revolts were initiated against the Bolsheviks and their army near the end of the war, notably the Kronstadt Rebellion. This was a naval mutiny engineered by Soviet Baltic sailors, former Red Army soldiers, and the people of Kronstadt. This armed uprising was fought against the antagonizing Bolshevik economic policies that farmers were subjected to, including seizures of grain crops by the Communists.[34] This all amounted to large-scale discontent. When delegates representing the Kronstadt sailors arrived at Petrograd for negotiations, they raised 15 demands primarily pertaining to the Russian right to freedom.[35] The Government firmly denounced the rebellions and labelled the requests as a reminder of the Social Revolutionaries, a political party that was popular among Soviets before Lenin, but refused to cooperate with the Bolshevik Army. The Government then responded with an armed suppression of these revolts and suffered 10 thousand casualties before entering the city of Kronstadt.[36] This ended the rebellions fairly quickly, causing many of the rebels to flee to political exile.[37]

During the Civil War, Nestor Makhno led a Ukrainian anarchist movement, the Black Army allied to the Bolsheviks thrice, one of the powers ending the alliance each time. However, a Bolshevik force under Mikhail Frunze destroyed the Makhnovist movement, when the Makhnovists refused to merge into the Red Army. In addition, the so-called "Green Army" (peasants defending their property against the opposing forces) played a secondary role in the war, mainly in the Ukraine.

Execution of the imperial family


Execution of the Romanov family, Le Petit Journal

The Bolsheviks executed the tsar and his family on 16 July 1918.[38] In early March, the Provisional Government placed Nicholas and his family under house arrest in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, 24 kilometres (15 mi) south of Petrograd. In August 1917 the Kerensky government evacuated the Romanovs to Tobolsk in the Urals, to protect them from the rising tide of revolution. After the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, the conditions of their imprisonment grew stricter and talk of putting Nicholas on trial increased. As the counter revolutionary White movement gathered force, leading to full-scale civil war by the summer, the Romanovs were moved during April and May 1918 to Yekaterinburg, a militant Bolshevik stronghold.

During the early morning of 16 July, Nicholas, Alexandra, their children, their physician, and several servants were taken into the basement and shot. According to Edvard Radzinsky and Dmitrii Volkogonov, the order came directly from Lenin and Sverdlov in Moscow. That the order came from the top has long been believed, although there is a lack of hard evidence. The execution may have been carried out on the initiative of local Bolshevik officials, or it may have been an option pre-approved in Moscow should White troops approach Yekaterinburg. Radzinsky noted that Lenin's bodyguard personally delivered the telegram ordering the execution and that he was ordered to destroy the evidence.[39][40]

The revolution and the world

Leon Trotsky said that the goal of socialism in Russia would not be realized without the success of the world revolution. Indeed, a revolutionary wave caused by the Russian Revolution lasted until 1923. Despite initial hopes for success in the German Revolution of 1918–19, in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and others like it, no other Marxist movement at the time succeeded in keeping power in its hands.

This issue is subject to conflicting views on communist history by various Marxist groups and parties. Joseph Stalin later rejected this idea, stating that socialism was possible in one country.

The confusion regarding Stalin's position on the issue stems from the fact that, after Lenin's death in 1924, he successfully used Lenin's argument – the argument that socialism's success needs the support of workers of other countries in order to happen – to defeat his competitors within the party by accusing them of betraying Lenin and, therefore, the ideals of the October Revolution.

Historiography

Few events in historical research have been as conditioned by political influences as the October Revolution. The historiography of the Revolution generally divides into three camps: the Soviet-Marxist view, the Western-Totalitarian view, and the Revisionist view.[41] Since the fall of Communism in Russia in 1991, the Western-Totalitarian view has again become dominant and the Soviet-Marxist view has practically vanished.[42]

Lenin's biographer Robert Service, says he, "laid the foundations of dictatorship and lawlessness. Lenin had consolidated the principle of state penetration of the whole society, its economy and its culture. Lenin had practised terror and advocated revolutionary amoralism."[43]

Chronology

Chronology of events leading to the revolution

Dates are correct for the Julian calendar, which was used in Russia until 1918. It was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar during the 19th century and thirteen days behind it during the 20th century.

Date(s) / Event(s)

1874–81 / Growing anti-government terrorist movement and government reaction.
1881 / Alexander II assassinated by revolutionaries; succeeded by Alexander III.
1883 / First Russian Marxist group formed.
1894 / Start of reign of Nicholas II.
1898 / First Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
1900 / Foundation of Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR).
1903 / Second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Beginning of split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
1904–5 / Russo-Japanese War; Russia loses war.
1905 / Revolution of 1905.
1905 / January Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg.
1905 / June Battleship Potemkin uprising at Odessa on the Black Sea (see movie The Battleship Potemkin).
1905 / October General strike, Saint Petersburg Soviet formed; October Manifesto: Imperial agreement on elections to the State Duma.
1906 / First State Duma. Prime Minister: Petr Stolypin. Agrarian reforms begin.
1907 / Third State Duma, until 1912.
1911 / Stolypin assassinated.
1912 / Fourth State Duma, until 1917. Bolshevik/Menshevik split final.
1914 / Germany declares war on Russia.
1914 30 July / The All Russian Zemstvo Union for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers is created with Lvov as president.
1914 August–November / Russia suffers heavy defeats and a large shortage of supplies, including food and munitions, but holds onto Austrian Galicia.
1914 3 August / Germany declares war on Russia, causing a brief sense of patriotic union amongst the Russian nation and a downturn in striking.
1914 18 August / St. Petersburg is renamed Petrograd as 'Germanic' names are changed to sound more Russian, and hence more patriotic.
1914 5 November / Bolshevik members of the Duma are arrested; they are later tried and exiled to Siberia.
1915 / Serious defeats, Nicholas II declares himself Commander in Chief.
1915 19 February / Great Britain and France promise Russia Istanbul and other Turkish lands.
1915 5 June / Strikers shot at in Kostromá; casualties.
1915 9 July / The Great Retreat begins, as Russian forces pull back out of Galicia and Russian Poland into Russia proper.
1915 9 August / The Duma's bourgeois parties form the 'Progressive bloc' to push for better government and reform; includes the Kadets, Octobrist groups and Nationalists.
1915 10 August / Strikers shot at in Ivánovo-Voznesénsk; casualties.
1915 17–19 August / Strikers in Petrograd protest at the deaths in Ivánovo-Voznesénsk.
1915 23 August / Reacting to war failures and a hostile Duma, the Tsar takes over as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, prorogues the Duma and moves to military headquarters at Mogilev. Central government begins to seize up.
1916 / Food and fuel shortages and high prices. Progressive Bloc formed.
1916 January–December / Despite successes in the Brusilov offensive, the Russian war effort is still characterised by shortages, poor command, death and desertion. Away from the front, the conflict causes starvation, inflation and a torrent of refugees. Both soldiers and civilians blame the incompetence of the Tsar and his government.
1916 6 February / Duma reconvened.
1916 29 February / After a month of strikes at the Putílov Factory, the government conscripts the workers and takes charge of production. Protest strikes follow.
1916 20 June / Duma prorogued.
1916 October / Troops from 181st Regiment help striking Russkii Renault workers fight against the Police.
1916 1 November / Miliukov gives his 'Is this stupidity or treason?' speech in reconvened Duma.
1916 29 December / Rasputin is killed by Prince Yusupov.
1916 30 December / The Tsar is warned that his army will not support him against a revolution.
1917 S/ trikes, mutinies, street demonstrations lead to the fall of autocracy.

Chronology of the 1917 revolutions

Gregorian Date / Julian Date / Event

-- / January / Strikes and unrest in Petrograd.
-- / February / February Revolution.
8 March / 23 February / International Women's Day: strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd, growing over the next few days.
11 March / 26 February / 50 demonstrators killed in Znamenskaya Square Tsar Nicholas II prorogues the State Duma and orders commander of Petrograd military district to suppress disorders with force.
12 March / 27 February / * Troops refuse to fire on demonstrators, deserters. Prisons, courts, and police bumbs attacked and looted by angry crowds. Okhrana buildings set on fire. Garrison joins revolutionaries. Petrograd Soviet formed. Formation of Provisional Committee of the Duma by liberals from Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets).
14 March / 1 March / Order No.1 of the Petrograd Soviet.
15 March / 2 March / Nicholas II abdicates. Provisional Government formed under Prime Minister Prince Lvov.
16 April / 3 April / Return of Vladimir Lenin to Russia. He publishes his April Theses.
3–4 May / 20–21 April / "April Days": mass demonstrations by workers, soldiers, and others in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow triggered by the publication of the Foreign Minister Pavel Miliukov's note to the allies, which was interpreted as affirming commitment to the war policies of the old government. First Provisional Government falls.
18 May / 5 May / First Coalition Government forms when socialists, representatives of the Soviet leadership, agree to enter the cabinet of the Provisional Government. Alexander Kerensky, the only socialist already in the government, made minister of war and navy.
16 June / 3 June / First All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies opens in Petrograd. Closed on 24 June. Elects Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK), headed by Mensheviks and SRs.
23 June / 10 June / Planned Bolshevik demonstration in Petrograd banned by the Soviet.
29 June / 16 June / Kerensky orders offensive against Austro-Hungarian forces. Initial success only.
1 July / 18 June / Official Soviet demonstration in Petrograd for unity is unexpectedly dominated by Bolshevik slogans: "Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers", "All Power to the Soviets".
15 July / 2 July / Russian offensive ends. Trotsky joins Bolsheviks.
16–17 July / 3–4 July / The "July Days"; mass armed demonstrations in Petrograd, encouraged by the Bolsheviks, demanding "All Power to the Soviets".
19 July / 6 July / German and Austro-Hungarian counter-attack. Russians retreat in panic, sacking the town of Tarnopol. Arrest of Bolshevik leaders ordered.
20 July / 7 July / Lvov resigns and asks Kerensky to become Prime Minister and form a new government. Established 25 July.
4 August / 22 July / Trotsky and Lunacharskii arrested.
8 September / 26 August / Second coalition government ends.
8–12 September / 26–30 August / "Kornilov mutiny". Begins when the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, General Lavr Kornilov, demands (or is believed by Kerensky to demand) that the government give him all civil and military authority and moves troops against Petrograd.
13 September / 31 August / Majority of deputies of the Petrograd Soviet approve a Bolshevik resolution for an all-socialist government excluding the bourgeoisie.
14 September / 1 September / Russia declared a republic.
17 September / 4 September / Trotsky and others freed.
18 September / 5 September / Bolshevik resolution on the government wins majority vote in Moscow Soviet.
2 October / 19 September / Moscow Soviet elects executive committee and new presidium, with Bolshevik majorities, and the Bolshevik Viktor Nogin as chairman.
8 October / 25 September / Third coalition government formed. Bolshevik majority in Petrograd Soviet elects Bolshevik Presidium and Trotsky as chairman.
23 October / 10 October / Bolshevik Central Committee meeting approves armed uprising.
24 October / 11 October / Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, until 13 October.
2 November / 20 October / First meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.
7 November / 25 October / October Revolution is launched as MRC directs armed workers and soldiers to capture key buildings in Petrograd. Winter Palace attacked at 9:40pm and captured at 2am. Kerensky flees Petrograd. Opening of the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
8 November / 26 October / Second Congress of Soviets: Mensheviks and right SR delegates walk out in protest against the previous day's events. Congress approves transfer of state authority into its own hands and local power into the hands of local soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies, abolishes capital punishment, issues Decree on Peace and Decree on Land, and approves the formation of an all-Bolshevik government, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), with Lenin as chairman.

Cultural portrayal

George Orwell's classic novella Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. It describes the dictator Stalin as a big Berkshire boar named, "Napoleon." Trotsky is represented by a pig called Snowball who is a brilliant talker and makes magnificent speeches. However, Napoleon overthrows Snowball as Stalin overthrew Trotsky and Napoleon takes over the farm the animals live on. Napoleon becomes a tyrant and uses force and propaganda to oppress the animals.[44]

Film

The Russian Revolution has been portrayed in or served as backdrop for many films. Among them, in order of release date:

• The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1926. Partially autobiographical novel, portraying the life of one family torn apart by uncertainty of the Civil War times. Also, Dni Turbinykh (IMDB profile), 1976 – film based on the novel.
• Konets Sankt-Peterburga AKA The End of Saint Petersburg (IMDB profile). 1927. Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin and Mikhail Doller, USSR.
• October: Ten Days That Shook the World (IMDB profile). 1927. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov. Soviet Union. Black and White. Silent.
• Arsenal (IMDB profile). 1929. Set in the Ukraine. Written and directed by Aleksandr Dovzhenko.
• Scarlet Dawn, a 1932 Pre-Code American romantic drama starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Nancy Carroll caught up in the fallout of the Russian Revolution.
• Knight Without Armour. 1937. A British historical drama starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat, with Dietrich as an imperiled aristocrat on the eve of the Russian Revolution.
• Lenin v 1918 godu AKA Lenin in 1918 (IMDB profile). 1939. Directed by Mikhail Romm, E. Aron, and I. Simkov. Historical-revolutionary film about Lenin's activities in the first years of Soviet power.
• Doctor Zhivago. 1965. A drama-romance-war film directed by David Lean, filmed in Europe with a largely European cast, loosely based on the famous novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak.
• Reds (IMDB profile). 1981. Directed by Warren Beatty, it is based on the book Ten Days that Shook the World.
• Anastasia (IMDB profile). 1997. An American animated feature, directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman.

See also

• April Crisis
• Arthur Ransome
• Jacob Schiff
• John Reed (journalist)
• White Terror (Russia)
• Iranian Revolution

Footnotes

1. Scholarly literature on peasants is now extensive. Major recent works that examine themes discussed above (and can serve as a guide to older scholarship) Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post Emancipation Period (Princeton, 1955); Frank and Steinberg, eds., Cultures in Flux(Princeton, 1994); Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge, 1994); Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics (Pittsburgh, 1998); Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley, 1999).
2. Among the many scholarly works on Russian workers, see especially Reginald Zelnik (pl), Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971); Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914(Berkeley, 1983).
3. See, especially, Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of all the Russias (London, 1993); Andrew Verner, The Crisis of the Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, 1990); Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, 1995); Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 2 (Princeton, 2000); Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, Part One.

Notes

1. Orlando Figes, A Peoples Tragedy, p370
2. Wood, 1979. p. 18
3. Perfect; Ryan; Sweeny (2016). Reinventing Russia. Collingwood: History Teachers Association of Victoria. ISBN 9781875585052.
4. Wood, 1979. p. 24
5. Wood, 1979. p. 25
6. Wood, 1979. p. 26
7. Joel Carmichael, A short history of the Russian Revolution, pp 23–24
8. Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History, page 6
9. Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1980): 76–80
10. Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I (Ithaca, 1995)
11. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 257–258.
12. Wildman: The End of the Russian Imperial Army (I), p. 85–89, 99–105, 106 (quotation).
13. "Doklad petrogradskogo okhrannogo otdeleniia osobomu otdelu departamenta politsii" ["Report of the Petrograd Okhrana to the Special Department of the Department of the Police"], October 1916, Krasnyi arkhiv 17 (1926), 4–35 (quotation 4).
14. Service, 2005. p. 32.
15. When women set Russia ablaze, Fifth International 11 July 2007.
16. Beckett, 2007. p. 523.
17. Wade, 2005. pp. 40–43.
18. Browder and Kerensky, 1961. p. 116.
19. Tames, 1972.
20. Malone, 2004. p. 91.
21. Service, 2005. p. 34.
22. N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: A Personal Record, ed. and trans. Joel Carmichael (Oxford, 1955; originally published in Russian in 1922), 101–8.
23. "Zhurnal [No. 1] Soveta Ministrov Vremennogo Pravitel'stva," 2 March 1917, GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 601, op. 1, d. 2103, l. 1
24. Smele, Jonathan (2017). The "Russian" Civil Wars, 1916-1926. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 27.
25. Lenin, Vladimir (27 September 1964) [1917]. Apresyan, Stephen, ed. One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution (in Russian). 25. Jim Riordan (4th ed.). Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 370–77.
26. Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938 (Oxford University Press: London, 1980) p. 46.
27. Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938, p. 46.
28. V. I. Lenin, "State and Revolution" contained in the Collected Works of Lenin: Volume 25 (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1974) pp. 3395–487.
29. V. I. Lenin, "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power" contained in the Collected Works of Lenin: Volume 26(Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1972) p. 21.
30. Isaac Deutscher The Prophet Armed
31. Caplan, Bryan. "Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, IV". George Mason University.
32. Riasanovsky, Nichlas V.; Steinberg, Mark D. (2005). A History of Russia (7th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195153944.
33. article "Civil War and military intervention in Russia 1918–20", Big Soviet Encyclopedia, third edition (30 volumes), 1969–78
34. "The Kronstadt Mutiny notes on Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (1996)"
35. Petrograd on the Eve of Kronstadt rising 1921 Archived 15 July 2012 at Archive.is. Flag.blackened.net (10 March 1921). Retrieved on 2013-07-26.
36. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (New York: Viking Press 1997), 767.
37. Kronstadtin kapina 1921 ja sen perilliset Suomessa (Kronstadt Rebellion 1921 and Its Descendants in Finland) by Erkki Wessmann.
38. Robert K. Massie (2012). The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. Random House. pp. 3–24.
39. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free Press, 1994).
40. Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life And Death Of Nicholas II (New York: Knopf, 1993).
41. Acton, Critical Companion, 5-7.
42. Edward Acton, ed. Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921 (Indiana University Press, 1997), pp 3-17.
43. Robert Service, "Lenin" in Edward Acton; et al. (1997). Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921. Indiana University Press. p. 159.
44. Robert W. Menchhofer (1990). Animal Farm. Lorenz Educational Press. pp. 1–8.

Further reading

• Acton, Edward, Vladimir Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg, eds. A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921 (Bloomington, 1997).
• Ascher, Abraham. The Russian Revolution: A Beginner's Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2014)
• Beckett, Ian F.W. (2007). The Great war (2 ed.). Longman. ISBN 1-4058-1252-4.
• Brenton, Tony. Was Revolution Inevitable?: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution (Oxford UP, 2017).
• Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2–3, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-81529-0(vol. 2) ISBN 0-521-81144-9 (vol. 3).
• Chamberlin, William Henry. The Russian Revolution, Volume I: 1917-1918: From the Overthrow of the Tsar to the Assumption of Power by the Bolsheviks; The Russian Revolution, Volume II: 1918-1921: From the Civil War to the Consolidation of Power (1935), famous classic
• Figes, Orlando (1996). A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924. Pimlico.
• Daly, Jonathan, and Leonid Trofimov, eds. "Russia in War and Revolution, 1914-1922: A Documentary History." (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009). ISBN 978-0-87220-987-9.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. 199 pages. Oxford University Press; (2nd ed. 2001). ISBN 0-19-280204-6.
• Lincoln, W. Bruce. Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914–1918. (New York, 1986).
• Malone, Richard (2004). Analysing the Russian Revolution. Cambridge University Press. p. 67. ISBN 0-521-54141-7.
• Marples, David R. Lenin's Revolution: Russia, 1917-1921 (Routledge, 2014).
• Mawdsley, Evan. Russian Civil War(2007). 400p.
• Piper, Jessica. Events That Changed the Course of History: The Story of the Russian Revolution 100 Years Later (Atlantic Publishing Company, 2017), popular history.
• Rappaport, Helen. Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917–A World on the Edge(Macmillan, 2017).
• Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990)
• Pipes, Richard (1997). Three "whys" of the Russian Revolution. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-679-77646-8.
• Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography (2000); one vol edition of his three volume scholarly biography
• Robert Service (2005). A history of modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01801-3.
• Service, Robert (1993). The Russian Revolution, 1900-1927. Basingstoke: MacMillan. ISBN 0333560361.
• Shukman, Harold, ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (1998) articles by over 40 specialists
• Smele, Jonathan. The 'Russian' Civil Wars, 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (Oxford UP, 2016).
• Stoff, Laurie S. They Fought for the Motherland: Russia's Women Soldiers in World War I & the Revolution (2006) 294pp
• Swain, Geoffrey. Trotsky and the Russian Revolution (Routledge, 2014)
• Tames, Richard (1972). Last of the Tsars. London: Pan Books Ltd. ISBN 978-0-330-02902-5.
• Wade, Rex A. (2005). The Russian Revolution, 1917. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-84155-9.
• Wade, R. (2000). The Russian Revolution, 1917. Cambridge: University Press.
• Walston, Oliver (2005). Russian revolution. 76: Farmers Weekly.
• White, James D. Lenin: The Practice & Theory of Revolution (2001) 262pp
• Wood, Alan (1993). The origins of the Russian Revolution, 1861-1917. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415102324.

Historiography

• Gatrell, Peter. "Tsarist Russia at War: The View from Above, 1914–February 1917" Journal of Modern History 87#4 (2015) 668-700 online
• Haynes, Mike and Wolfreys, Jim (eds). History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism. Verso Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1844671502
• Smith, S. A. "The historiography of the Russian revolution 100 years on." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16.4 (2015): 733-749.
• Smith, Steve. "Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism." Europe‐Asia Studies 46.4 (1994): 563-578.
• Wade, Rex A. "The Revolution at One Hundred: Issues and Trends in the English Language Historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917." Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography 9.1 (2016): 9-38.
• Warth, Robert D. "On the Historiography of the Russian Revolution." Slavic Review 26.2 (1967): 247-264.

Participants' accounts

• Reed, John. Ten Days that Shook the World. 1919, 1st Edition, published by BONI & Liveright, Inc. for International Publishers. Transcribed and marked by David Walters for John Reed Internet Archive. Penguin Books; 1st edition. 1 June 1980. ISBN 0-14-018293-4. Retrieved 14 May 2005.
• Serge, Victor. Year One of the Russian Revolution. L'An l de la revolution russe, 1930. Year One of the Russian Revolution, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Translation, editor's Introduction, and notes © 1972 by Peter Sedgwick. Reprinted on Victor Serge Internet Archive by permission. ISBN 0-86316-150-2. Retrieved 14 May 2005.
• Steinberg, Mark, Voices of Revolution, 1917. Yale University Press, 2001
• Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. Translated by Max Eastman, 1932. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 8083994. ISBN 0-913460-83-4. Transcribed for the World Wide Web by John Gowland (Australia), Alphanos Pangas (Greece) and David Walters (United States). Pathfinder Press edition. 1 June 1980. ISBN 0-87348-829-6. Retrieved 14 May 2005.

Primary documents

• Ascher, Abraham, ed. The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, 1976).
• Browder, Robert Paul and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents. 3 volumes (Stanford, 1961).
• Bunyan, James and H. H. Fisher, eds. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1918: Documents and Materials (Stanford, 1961; first ed. 1934).
• Daly, Jonathan, and Leonid Trofimov, eds. "Russia in War and Revolution, 1914-1922: A Documentary History." (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009). ISBN 978-0-87220-987-9.
• Miller, Martin A., ed. Russian Revolution: The Essential Readings (2001) 304pp
• Steinberg, Mark D. Voices of Revolution, 1917. In the series "Annals of Communism," Yale University Press, 2001. 404pp On-line publication of these texts in the Russian original: Golosa revoliutsii, 1917 g. (Yale University Press, 2002)
• Zeman, Z. A. B. ed. Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915-1918: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry (1958) in Questia

External links

• Read, Christopher: Revolutions (Russian Empire) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Brudek, Paweł: Revolutions (East Central Europe) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Sumpf, Alexandre: Russian Civil War , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Mawdsley, Evan: International Responses to the Russian Civil War (Russian Empire) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Melancon, Michael S.: Social Conflict and Control, Protest and Repression (Russian Empire) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Sanborn, Joshua A.: Russian Empire , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Gaida, Fedor Aleksandrovich: Governments, Parliaments and Parties (Russian Empire) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Albert, Gleb: Labour Movements, Trade Unions and Strikes (Russian Empire) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Gatrell, Peter: Organization of War Economies (Russian Empire) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Marks, Steven G.: War Finance (Russian Empire) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Orlando Figes's free educational website on the Russian Revolution and Soviet history, May 2014
• Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.
• Soviet history archive at http://www.marxists.org
• Précis of Russian Revolution A summary of the key events and factors of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
• Kevin Murphy's Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize lecture Can we Write the History of the Russian Revolution, which examines historical accounts of 1917 in the light of newly accessible archive material.
• Thanks to Trotsky, the 'insurrection' was bloodless
• Violence and Revolution in 1917. Mike Haynes for Jacobin. 17 July 2017.

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Bloody Sunday (1905)
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Bloody Sunday/Red Sunday
Part of the 1905 Russian Revolution


Crowd of petitioners, led by Father Gapon, near Narva Gate, St. Petersburg
Date 22 January [O.S. 9 January] 1905
Location St. Petersburg, Russian Empire
Goals To deliver a petition to Tsar Nicholas II, calling for reforms such as: limitations on state officials' power; improvements to working conditions and hours; and the introduction of a national parliament
Methods Demonstration march
Resulted in Dispersal of the workers' procession; beginning of the 1905 Russian Revolution
Parties to the civil conflict
Assembly of Russian Factory Workers of St. Petersburg
Imperial Guard, cossacks, line infantry.
Lead figures
Father Georgy Gapon
Number
3,000 to 50,000 demonstrators
10,000+ soldiers
Casualties and arrests
Deaths 143–234
Injuries 439–800
Arrested 6831

Bloody Sunday or Red Sunday[1] (Russian: Крова́вое воскресе́нье, tr. Krovávoye voskresén'e, IPA: [krɐˈvavəɪ vəskrʲɪˈsʲenʲjɪ]) is the name given to the events of Sunday, 22 January [O.S. 9 January] 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, when unarmed demonstrators led by Father Georgy Gapon were fired upon by soldiers of the Imperial Guard as they marched towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

Bloody Sunday caused grave consequences for the Tsarist autocracy governing Imperial Russia: the events in St. Petersburg provoked public outrage and a series of massive strikes that spread quickly to the industrial centres of the Russian Empire. The massacre on Bloody Sunday is considered to be the start of the active phase of the Revolution of 1905. In addition to beginning the 1905 Revolution, historians such as Lionel Kochan in his book Russia in Revolution 1890–1918 view the events of Bloody Sunday to be one of the key events which led to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Background

After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 by Tsar Alexander II of Russia, there emerged a new peasant working class in Russia’s industrializing cities. Prior to emancipation no working class could be established because serfs working in the cities to supplement their incomes retained their ties to the land and their masters. Although the working conditions in the cities were horrific, they were only employed for short periods of time and returned to their village when their work was complete or it was time to resume agricultural work.[2]

The emancipation of the serfs resulted in the establishment of a permanent working class in urban areas, which created a strain on traditional Russian society. Peasants “were confronted by unfamiliar social relationships, a frustrating regime of factory discipline, and the distressing conditions of urban life.”[3] This new group of peasant workers made up the majority of workers in urban areas. Generally unskilled, these peasants received low wages, were employed in unsafe working environments, and worked up to fifteen hours a day. Although some workers still had a paternalistic relationship with their employer, factory employers were more present and active than the noble landowners that previously had ownership of the serfs. Under serfdom, peasants had little, if any, contact with their landowner. In the new urban setting, however, factory employers often used their absolute authority in abusive and arbitrary manners. Their abuse of power, made evident by the long working hours, low wages, and lack of safety precautions, led to strikes in Russia.]

Early strikes

“The Russian term for strike, stachka, was derived from an old colloquial term, stakat’sia- to conspire for a criminal act.”[4] As such, Russian laws viewed strikes as criminal acts of conspiracy and potential catalysts for rebellion. The governmental response to strikes, however, supported the efforts of the workers and promoted strikes as an effective tool that could be used by the workers to help improve their working conditions. Tsarist authorities usually intervened with harsh punishment, especially for the leaders and spokesmen of the strike, but often the complaints of the strikers were reviewed and seen as justified and the employers were required to correct the abuses about which the strikers protested.

These corrections did not address a grossly unbalanced system that clearly favored the employers. This caused the continuation of strikes and the first major industrial strike in Russia, which occurred in the year 1870 in St. Petersburg.[5] This new phenomenon was a catalyst to many more strikes in Russia, which increased until they reached a peak between 1884 and 1885 when 4,000 workers went on strike at Morozov's cotton mill.[6] This large strike prompted officials to consider regulations that would restrain the abuses of employers and ensure safety in the work place. A new law was passed in 1886 that required employers to specify working conditions in their factories in writing. This included the treatment of the workers, the workers' hours, and the safety precautions that were taken by the employer. This new law also created factory inspectors who were charged with preserving industrial peace. Despite these changes, strike activity again reached high proportions during the 1890s, resulting in the restriction of the workday to eleven and a half hours in 1897.[7]

Father Gapon


Father Georgy Gapon, a Russian Orthodox priest, led the workers' procession to present a petition to the Tsar on January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1905, known as Bloody Sunday

A leading role in these events was played by a priest Father Georgy Gapon.[8] Fr. Gapon was a charismatic speaker and effective organiser, who took an interest in the working and lower classes of the Russian cities.

The "Assembly of the Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg", otherwise known as “the Assembly”, had been headed by Fr. Gapon since 1903.[9] The Assembly was patronized by the Department of the Police and the St. Petersburg Okhrana (secret police); during 1904 the membership of the association had grown rapidly, although more radical groups saw it as being a "police union" – under government influence.[10] The Assembly's objectives were to defend workers' rights and to elevate their moral and religious status. In the words of Fr. Gapon, this organization served as:

…a noble endeavor, under the guidance of truly Russian educated laymen and clergy, to foster among the workers a sober, Christian view of life and to instill the principle of mutual aid, thereby helping to improve the lives and working conditions of laborers without violent disruption of law and order in their relations with employers and the government.

— G.A. Gapon, quoted in Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 89

The Assembly served as a type of union for the workers of St. Petersburg. Depicted as strictly conservative in its support of the autocracy, the Assembly was a means of preventing revolutionary influences and appeasing the workers by striving for better conditions, hours, and pay. The Assembly would act as one of the catalysts for what would later be known as Bloody Sunday.

Prelude

Putilov incident

In December 1904, four workers at the Putilov Ironworks in St Petersburg were fired because of their membership of the Assembly, although the plant manager asserted that they were fired for unrelated reasons. Virtually the entire workforce of the Putilov Ironworks went on strike when the plant manager refused to accede to their requests that the workers be rehired.[11] Sympathy strikes in other parts of the city raised the number of strikers up to 150,000 workers in 382 factories.[12] By 21 January [O.S. 8 January] 1905, the city had no electricity and no newspapers whatsoever and all public areas were declared closed.

Petition and preparation for the March

The decision to prepare and present a petition was made in the course of discussions during the evening of 19 January [O.S. 6 January] 1905, at the headquarters of Father Gapon's movement—the "Gapon Hall" on the Shlisselburg Trakt in Saint Petersburg. The petition,[13] as drafted in respectful terms by Gapon himself, made clear the problems and opinions of the workers and called for improved working conditions, fairer wages, and a reduction in the working day to eight hours. Other demands included an end to the Russo-Japanese War and the introduction of universal suffrage. The idea of a petition resonated with the traditionally minded working masses. In the 15th to the early 18th centuries individual or collective petitions were an established means of bringing grievances to the attention of the Tsar's administration. They could be submitted to the Petitions Prikaz (office) in Moscow, or directly to the Tsar or his courtiers when the tsar was making an appearance outside the palace.

The march on the Winter Palace was not a revolutionary or rebellious act. Political groups, such as the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the Social Revolutionaries disapproved of the procession due to its lack of political demands.[14] Fr. Gapon even encouraged his followers to tear up leaflets that supported revolutionary aims.[15] The majority of Russian workers retained their traditional conservative values of Orthodoxy, faith in the autocracy, and indifference to political life.[16] The workers of St. Petersburg wished to receive fair treatment and better working conditions; they decided, therefore, to petition the tsar in hopes he would act on it. In their eyes, the tsar was their representative who would help them if he was made aware of their situation. God appointed the tsar, therefore the tsar had an obligation to protect the people and do what was best for them. Their petition was written in subservient terms, and ended with a reminder to the tsar of his obligation to the people of Russia and their resolve to do what it took to ensure their pleas were met.[17] It concluded: "And if Thou dost not so order and dost not respond to our pleas we will die here in this square before Thy palace". Gapon, who had an ambiguous relationship with the Tsarist authorities, sent a copy of the petition to the Minister of the Interior together with a notification of his intention to lead a procession of members of his workers' movement to the Winter Palace on the following Sunday.[18]

Troops had been deployed around the Winter Palace and at other key points. Despite the urging of various members of the imperial family to stay in St. Petersburg, the Tsar left on Saturday 21 January [O.S. 8 January] 1905 for Tsarskoye Selo. A cabinet meeting, held without any particular sense of urgency that same evening, concluded that the police would publicize his absence and that the workers would accordingly probably abandon their plans for a march.[19]

Events of Sunday 22 January

Beginning of march


Still from the Soviet movie Devyatoe Yanvarya ("9th of January") (1925) showing a line of armed soldiers facing demonstrators at the approaches to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg

In the pre-dawn winter darkness of the morning of Sunday, 22 January [O.S. 9 January] 1905, striking workers and their families began to gather at six points in the industrial outskirts of St Petersburg. Holding religious icons and singing hymns and patriotic songs (particularly "God Save the Tsar!"), a crowd of "more than 3,000"[20] proceeded without police interference towards the Winter Palace, the Tsar's official residence. The crowd, whose mood was quiet, did not know that the Tsar was not in residence. Insofar as there was firm planning, the intention was for the various columns of marchers to converge in front of the palace at about 2pm. Estimates of the total numbers involved range wildly from police figures of 3,000 to organizers' claims of 50,000. Initially it was intended that women, children and elderly workers should lead, to emphasize the united nature of the demonstration. Vera Karelina, who was one of Gapon's inner circle, had encouraged women to take part and she expected that there would be casualties. On reflection, younger men moved to the front to make up the leading ranks.[21]

Government measures


Soviet painting of the Bloody Sunday massacre in St Petersburg

A report had been made to the Tsar at Tsarskoe Selo on Saturday night on the measures being taken to contain the marchers. Substantial military forces were deployed in and around the environs of the Winter Palace. These comprised units of the Imperial Guard, who provided the permanent garrison of Saint Peterburg and cossacks, plus infantry regiments brought in by rail in the early morning of 9 January from Revel and Pskov. The troops, who now numbered about 10,000, had been ordered to halt the columns of marchers before they reached the palace square but the reaction of government forces was inconsistent and confused. Individual policemen saluted the religious banners and portraits of the Tsar carried by the crowd or joined the procession. Army officers variously told the marchers that they could proceed in smaller groups, called on them to disperse or ordered their troops to fire into the marchers without warning. When the crowds continued to press forward, cossacks and regular cavalry made charges using their sabers or trampling the people.[22]

Shootings

The first instance of shooting occurred between 10 and 11am. There was no single encounter directly before the Winter Palace, as often portrayed, but rather a series of separate collisions at the bridges or other entry points to the central city. The column led by Gapon was fired upon near the Narva Gate. Around forty people were killed or wounded there, although Gapon himself was not injured.[23]

As late as 2pm large family groups were promenading on the Nevsky Prospekt as was customary on Sunday afternoons, mostly unaware of the extent of the violence elsewhere in the city. Amongst them were parties of workers still making their way to the Winter Palace as originally intended by Gapon. A detachment of the Preobrazhensky Guards previously stationed in the Palace Square where about 2,300 soldiers were being held in reserve, now made its way onto the Nevsky and formed two ranks opposite the Alexander Gardens. Following a single shouted warning a bugle sounded and four volleys were fired into the panicked crowd, many of whom had not been participants in the organized marches.[24]

Casualties


Bloody Sunday (Angelo Agostini, O Malho, 1905).

The total number killed in the day's clashes is uncertain but the Tsar's officials recorded 96 dead and 333 injured; anti-government sources claimed more than 4,000 dead; moderate estimates still average around 1,000 killed or wounded, both from shots and trampled during the panic.[24] Another source noted that the official estimate was 132 people killed.[25] Leon Trotsky did not put forward a precise figure, but claimed that hundreds were killed, and that many casualties were secretly buried by the authorities. [26]

Nicholas II described the day as "painful and sad".[27] As reports spread across the city, disorder and looting broke out. Gapon's Assembly was closed down that day, and Gapon quickly left Russia.

Reactions

Although the Tsar was not at the Winter Palace and did not give the order for the troops to fire, he was widely blamed for the inefficiency and callousness with which the crisis had been handled. While it was unrealistic for the marchers to expect Nicholas to ride out into the Palace Square to meet them, his absence from the city, against at least some advice, reflects a lack of imagination and perception that he was to show on other occasions. The killing of people, many of whom had seen the Tsar as their "Little Father", resulted in a surge of bitterness towards Nicholas and his autocratic rule. A widely quoted reaction was "we no longer have a Tsar".

This event was seen by the British ambassador as inflaming revolutionary activities in Russia and contributing to the Revolution of 1905. Media commentary in Britain and the United States was overwhelmingly negative towards the actions of an already unpopular regime. The writer Leo Tolstoy was emotionally impacted by the event,[28] reflecting the revulsion of liberal and intellectual opinion within Russia itself.

Consequences

The immediate consequence of Bloody Sunday was a strike movement that spread throughout the country. Strikes began to erupt outside of St. Petersburg in places such as Moscow, Riga, Warsaw, Vilna, Kovno, Tiflis, Baku, Batum, and the Baltic region. In all, about 414,000 people participated in the work stoppage during January 1905.[29] Tsar Nicholas II attempted to appease the people with a Duma; however, the autocracy eventually resorted to brute force near the end of 1905 in order to curtail the burgeoning strike movement that continued to spread. It is estimated that between October 1905 and April 1906, 15,000 peasants and workers were hanged or shot, 20,000 injured, and 45,000 sent into exile.[30]

Perhaps the most significant effect of Bloody Sunday was the drastic change in attitude of the Russian peasants and workers. Previously the tsar had been seen as the champion of the people: in dire situations, the masses would appeal to the tsar, traditionally through a petition, and the tsar would respond to his people promising to set things right. The lower classes placed their faith in the tsar. Any problems that the lower classes faced were associated with the boyars of Russia; however, after Bloody Sunday the tsar was no longer distinguished from the bureaucrats and was held personally responsible for the tragedy that occurred.[31] The social contract between the tsar and the people was broken, which delegitimized the position of the tsar and his divine right to rule. Although Bloody Sunday was not initiated as a revolutionary or rebellious movement, the repercussions of the government’s reaction laid the foundations for revolution by bringing into question autocracy and the legitimacy of the tsar.

In popular culture

Dmitri Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, subtitled The Year 1905, is a programmatic work centered on Bloody Sunday. The second movement, entitled "The Ninth of January", is a forceful depiction of the massacre.[32] The sixth of Shostakovich's Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets is also called "The Ninth of January".[32] Shostakovich's father and uncle were both present at the march that day, a year before the composer's birth.[33] Maxim Gorky's novel The Life of a Useless Man (1908) portrays the effects of Bloody Sunday on the Russian working class and operations of the spies employed by the Tsar.

References

1. A History of Modern Europe 1789–1968 by Herbert L. Peacock m.a.
2. Walter Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 4.
3. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 3.
4. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 20.
5. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 21.
6. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 22.
7. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 25.
8. Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 22.
9. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 23.
10. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1981). Black Night White Snow. Da Capo Press. pp. 104–105. ISBN 0-306-80154-X.
11. Sidney Harcave, First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964), 68-71.
12. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1981). Black Night White Snow. Da Capo Press. p. 117. ISBN 0-306-80154-X.
13. Petition Prepared for Presentation to Nicholas II, Documents in Russian History.
14. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905 25.
15. Harcave, First Blood, 73.
16. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 15.
17. Phillip Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 140.
18. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1981). Black Night White Snow. Da Capo Press. pp. 119–120. ISBN 0-306-80154-X.
19. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1981). Black Night White Snow. Da Capo Press. p. 110. ISBN 0-306-80154-X.
20. Gapon, Address to the Tsar, February 1905, in Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, Vol. 1
21. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1981). Black Night White Snow. Da Capo Press. p. 121. ISBN 0-306-80154-X.
22. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1981). Black Night White Snow. Da Capo Press. pp. 122–123. ISBN 0-306-80154-X.
23. Ascher, Abraham. The Revolution of 1905. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1988. p. 91. Print
24. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1981). Black Night White Snow. Da Capo Press. p. 125. ISBN 0-306-80154-X.
25. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 4th edition, Oxford University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-19-503361-2
26. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsk ... htmTrotsky, Leon 1905 Chapter 6, Ninth January
27. Kurth, Peter. Tsar: the Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra. Boston: Back Bay, 1998. p. 81
28. Rolland, Romain (1911). Life of Tolstoy. London: T. Fisher Unwin. p. 212.
29. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 28.
30. Blom, The Vertigo Years, 148.
31. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday, 274.
32. Laurel E. Fay, Symphony No. 11 in G minor, "The Year 1905," Op. 103 (1957), American Symphony OrchestraProgram Notes
33. Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 Archived December 7, 2013, at the Wayback Machine., Classics Online

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Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov was probably poisoned, German medics say
by Atika Shubert, Stephanie Halasz and Judith Vonberg
CNN
Updated 2107 GMT (0507 HKT) September 18, 2018

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Berlin (CNN)

German doctors say there is a "high plausibility" that a member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot, who was taken ill in Russia last week, was poisoned.

plau·si·bil·i·ty: the quality of seeming reasonable or probable.
"he offers no support for the plausibility of his theory"

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Dr. Kai-Uwe Eckardt of the Berlin Charite Hospital said that an external substance appears to have affected Pyotr Verzilov's nervous system.

Doctors have been unable to determine the nature of the substance or the source, he said, adding that while the activist remains in intensive care, his life is no longer in danger.

"The information we currently have... shows a high plausibility that poisoning has taken place here," Eckardt said. "To turn it around, so far we have no indication that there might be another explanation for his state."

The announcement adds weight to claims made by other Pussy Riot members on Thursday that Verzilov was poisoned in Russia. The Russian punk band -- known for obscuring their identities with colorful balaclava-style masks -- is an outspoken critic of the Putin government.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Pussy Riot founding member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said that Verzilov was probably the victim of an "assassination attempt," alleging that multiple law enforcement agencies in Russia have been "trying to find a way to get to Pyotr."

"Nobody who has taken part in political activity in Russia can really be safe," she said.

When contacted by CNN last week, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had no comment on Verzilov's illness.


Verzilov is removed from the field after protesting at the 2018 World Cup Finals in Moscow.

Doctors confident of 'complete cure'

Speaking to CNN Tuesday, Verzilov's girlfriend and fellow Pussy Riot activist Veronika Nikulshina said he fell ill last Tuesday. Verzilov first lost some sight and became unable to walk straight, Nikulshina said, adding that his condition worsened as the hours passed.

Following treatment in Moscow, Verzilov flew into Berlin on Saturday, according to Germany's Cinema for Peace Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian group that has previously advocated for Pussy Riot and which organized the flight.

He was admitted to the Charite Hospital with symptoms of intoxication and in a state of confusion, the hospital said in a statement Tuesday.

The hospital's Chief Executive Office, Dr. Karl Max Einhäupl, said in the statement that Verzilov's condition had since improved significantly and that doctors are "confident that a complete cure will come."

He added that doctors in Moscow had provided good initial treatment and had cooperated well with the hospital in Berlin.

Doctors believe that Verzilov was poisoned almost a week ago. They are working with toxicologists in an effort to identify the substance used, the statement said.

Verzilov is a joint Russia-Canada citizen, and on Thursday Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the situation was of concern, "particularly given actions of recent months by the Russians in the UK."

Trudeau appeared to be referring to the alleged Russian poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the southern English city of Salisbury in March. CNN asked the Russian foreign ministry for comment on Trudeau's comments but has yet to receive a reply.

It was later determined that they had been poisoned with a powerful nerve agent called Novichok, which British investigators tied to the Russian government. Russia has denied the claims.

NGO: 'Poisoning was revenge for World Cup protest'

Verzilov was one of four protesters dressed as police officers who rushed the field during the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow in July.

In a statement, Pussy Riot claimed responsibility for the demonstration and called for political prisoners to be freed, for the arrests of opposition protesters to cease, and for the jailing of citizens over their social media activity to end.

"The attack (last week) is regarded as revenge for appearing in the World Cup final to support human rights in Russia," said the Cinema for Peace Foundation in a statement Sunday.

re·gard (rĭ-gärd′) v. re·gard·ed, re·gard·ing, re·gards 1. To think of or consider in a particular way: I regard him as a fool.

Verzilov's then-wife Nadezhda Tolokonnikova appears at a court hearing in 2012.

Nearly six years ago, three of Pussy Riot's members -- Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich -- were charged with hooliganism and sentenced to two years in prison for performing an anti-Putin protest song called "Punk Prayer" at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow.

One of them, Samutsevich, had her sentence suspended on appeal, but the others served their sentences until being released in December 2013.

They have continued to be critical of Putin and his government in subsequent years. On their release, they founded an independent media outlet that advocates for political prisoners, including through "immersive" theater projects.

Atika Shubert reported from Berlin and Judith Vonberg wrote in London.

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Jaka Bizilj
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/19/18

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Jaka Bizilj (born December 8, 1971 in Ljubljana) grew up in Slovenia, Libya, Tanzania, Malaysia and Germany. During his school and studies in politics, literature and film at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, he devoted himself to journalism. Jaka Bizilj posted articles and reports for print, radio and television, for example for ZDF, Bild and Der Spiegel. Since 1995 he has been working as promoter and producer. With his Berlin-based production company Star Entertainment Jaka Bizilj is the founder and since 2002 the largest financial sponsor of the global Cinema for Peace initiative, which has been reaching billions of people via media coverage and could collect more than 10 million USD for charity, confirmed by external audit. Since its inception in 2008 Jaka Bizilj also volunteers as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cinema for Peace Foundation.

Promoter and Producer

Jaka Bizilj is as writer, promoter and producer. He began organizing concerts in 1995 with artists such as Andrea Bocelli, Bryan Adams, Montserrat Caballe, Liza Minnelli and toured with artists such as José Carreras. Since the end of the 1990s, Jaka Bizilj has been working internationally as a producer and was the largest presenter of open-air opera in Europe for many years. Jaka Bizilj annually staged up to 700 concerts and live productions. Among his productions are "Magic of the Dance", Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Evita", Elton John’s musical Aida and the Broadway musical Jekyll & Hyde. Moreover he has launched a number of festivals. In 2002 he founded the Cinema for Peace initiative and in 2008 the Cinema for Peace Foundation with the goal of creating awareness of the social relevance of films and the influence of movies on the perception and resolution of global social, political and humanitarian challenges of our time. Jaka Bizilj is also involved in the production of films, including the Richard Curtis remake “Suddenly Gina (de)” and the documentary “Letter to Anna” about Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. He was also involved in the realization of the documentary "This Prison Where I Live" about the detained Myanmar comedian "Zarganar" and the recent film productions "After the Silence" and "Song of Names" with Dustin Hoffman and Anthony Hopkins.

Goodwill efforts

Jaka Bizilj is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and collaborates with and supports, among others, UNICEF, Unifem, Amnesty International, ONE, amfAR, Richard Gere's work for Tibet and the International Campaign for Tibet, which was initiated through a meeting with the Dalai Lama in 2004. After visiting Nelson Mandela in November 2006, he began working with the "Schools for Africa"- program, a joint initiative of UNICEF and the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Since 2002, Jaka Bizilj has raised a notarized amount of more than three million Euros for a variety of charitable causes. He has co-chaired various charitable events alongside Federal Ministers, head of states and legendary artists such as Elizabeth Taylor.

Following the tragedy of 9/11 Jaka Bizilj launched the Cinema for Peace initiative with an annual gala as a platform for communicating humanitarian, political and social issues through the medium of film. The Cinema for Peace Gala has grown to the attention of well over a billion media hits each year, possibly making it one of the most relevant film events in the world. Bob Geldof described the awards gala as "the Oscars with brains". George Clooney said to have found inspiration for his Oscar-nominated film "Good Night and Good Luck" in the Cinema for Peace initiative.

Previous hosts, chairs and speakers at the Cinema for Peace galas include Leonardo DiCaprio, President Mikhail Gorbachev, Richard Gere, Buzz Aldrin, Sean Penn, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Antonio Banderas, Sharon Stone, Catherine Deneuve, Forest Whitaker, Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman. In 2007 Cinema for Peace launched together with Amnesty International the “International Human Rights Film Award” and together with the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the “Cinema for Peace Award for Justice” in 2009. President Mikhail Gorbachev presented the first “International Green Film Award” on the occasion of Cinema for Peace 2009 to Leonardo DiCaprio.

Jaka Bizilj distributed the Bosnian Oscar-winning war-satire "No Man's Land" by Danis Tanovic. Ahead of the G8 Summit in Germany he produced at the initiative of Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis a remake of the Golden Globe-winning film "The Girl in the Café" with Iris Berben, Julia Jentsch, Jan Josef Liefers and Catherine Deneuve in 2007. He also initiated Bob Geldof to become the editor of Europe's biggest-selling newspaper BILD for a day in order to publish an issue solely dedicated to Africa, with guest contributions by personalities such as the Pope, Bill Gates and Bono.

Together with the Trust Fund for Victims at the International Criminal Court he organized with the Cinema for Peace Foundation - "The Special Evening on Justice" on the eve the International Criminal Court Review Conference of the Rome Statute in Kampala, Uganda. The Cinema for Peace Foundation presented on this occasion the first "Justitia Award" to honor the United Nations and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for establishing and supporting the International Criminal Court. The award was presented to Ban Ki-moon by the Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador Bianca Jagger, founder and chairperson of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation. Ban Ki-moon said that it is a great honour to accept the first "Justitia Award" and he thanked the CFPF for recognizing the UN's persistent efforts to establish justice in the world.[1]

On the occasion of the 12 IAAF World Championships in Athletics in Berlin 2009 he launched together with Gerhard Janetzky the initiative "Sports for Peace". This was preceded in 2008 by a unilateral appeal in the International Herald Tribune on the occasion of the Olympic Games, signed by more than 100 world champions, Olympic champions and world record holders in order to remind China to live up to the Olympic ideals and universal human rights. The first “Sports for Peace” Awards were presented at the “Sports for Peace” inauguration 2009 to IOC Vice President Sergey Bubka, Laureus ambassador Dr. Edwin Moses and those players of the Iranian national football team, who wore green wristbands during their match against South Korea, thus expressing their solidarity with the freedom and democracy movement in Iran. They all identified themselves with the “Sports for Peace” goal: to create awareness for the peace-building ideals of sport and the need for the implementation of a global communications platform designed to also support various sports oriented aid projects.

On June 8, 2010, Jaka Bizilj hosted the "Sports for Peace" gala on the occasion of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa - the world's biggest single sporting event and first ever FIFA World Cup to take place in Africa - bringing together the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, South African President Jacob Zuma, Madama Graça Machel, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, 1Goal Ambassadors and many other dignitaries from across the globe in order to address this serious issue - the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG): "achieve universal primary education by 2015".[2]

In 2011 he organized for the first time a Cinema for Peace Dinner in Cannes [3] and accompanied the visit of the 14th Dalai Lama to Wiesbaden with a film program and a charity dinner to support the culture of Tibet.[4] Furthermore, he assisted on 24 and 25 August in The Hague a symposium on the issue of child soldiers which was held at the International Criminal Court in The Hague on the occasion of the closing statements of the case against Thomas Lubanga by arranging for film screenings and a charity dinner. Together with former child soldiers, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie and the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy all parties involved signed a petition urging all UN member states to condemn the use of child soldiers, to fight the use of sexual violence in war and to make efforts to prevent that schools and hospitals become targets of armed attacks. On 23 September 2011 Jaka Bizilj produced the presentation of the first universal human rights logo on the occasion of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Bizilj also produced the Los Angeles premiere of Cinema for Peace in January 2012 by staging “Help Haiti Home” benefiting Sean Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization.;[5][6] Cinema for Peace Los Angeles raised 5 million USD for Haiti with the help of Julia Roberts, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hillary Clinton amongst others. The Cinema for Peace-Gala in Berlin 2012 saw Angelina Jolie receiving the “Honorary Award for Opposing War and Genocide” for her directorial debut “In the Land of Blood and Honey”.[7] In this context Bizilj arranged for a press workshop with Angelina Jolie and Luis Moreno-Ocampo, initiating a global campaign against sexual violence in war and post-conflict zones.http://newssun.suntimes.com/photos/gall ... y=10619908 In June 2012 Jaka Bizilj welcomed 100 personalities from the world of arts, film and society on the occasion of Art Basel and “Art & Cinema for Peace” in honour of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. This occasion included the premiere of the documentary film “Ai Weiwei – Never Sorry” by Alison Klayman. Two time Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon concluded the evening with a video statement expressing the worldwide support for Ai Weiwei.[8] At the Cinema for Peace Gala for Humanity in Los Angeles, produced by Jaka Bizilj in January 2013, Ben Affleck received the Cinema for Peace Humanitarian Award for his work with the Eastern Congo Initiative.[9] At the Cinema for Peace Award Gala in Berlin in February 2013 Charlize Theron and her Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project was awarded the Cinema for Peace Honorary Award for the exemplary dedication to prevent South African Youth from HIV and Aids.[10] On 12 July 2013 actress Nicole Kidman and UN Women Action Head Lakshmi Puri were honored by Jaka Bizilj at a 'Cinema for Peace' Honorary Dinner for their furthering of women's rights.[11] In 2014, Jaka Bizilj as the Founder of Cinema for Peace invited Pussy Riot to the Olympic Games in Sochi [12] and introduced them to Hollywood [13] and to Washington [14] in order to promote global Human rights responsibility and advocate a global Sanktion List for Human rights offenders.

Productions

Entertainment / Shows

• since 1996 - The Black Gospel Singers
• since 1997 - Nabucco, Aida
• since 1998 - Carmen
• since 1999 - Magic of the Dance
• since 2000 - Romanza with Helen Schneider, Königstein Castle Festival, Nahe-Festival (until 2005)
• since 2001 - Stardance, Dancing Queen/Abbafever
• since 2002 - Evita
• since 2003 - The Vienna Johann Strauss Waltz Gala, Festival under the Stars (Herrenchiemsee Castle)
• since 2004 - The Magic Flute, Jedermann
• since 2005 - Last Night of Spectacular Classic, Arena di Bavaria, Wörthersee Festival
• 2006 - The World Football Concerts at the FIFA World Cup, Jesus Christ Superstar, Galanacht des Musicals, Mozart Gala
• 2007 - The Lord of the Rings in concert, Queen - a ballet homage by Ben van Cauwenberg
• 2008 - Aida, the musical by Elton John and Tim Rice
• 2009 - Jekyll & Hyde
• 2011 - Phantom of the Opera Birthday Gala at the O2 World in Berlin, The Fantastic Shadows
• 2012 - The Fantastic Shadows

Advocacy Events

• since 2002 - annual Cinema for Peace Gala in Berlin
• 2005 - Long Walk to Justice / Live 8 Germany
• 2008 - Sports for Peace Campaign at the Summer Olympics in Beijing
• 2009 - Cinema for Peace Dinner Honoring Mikhail Gorbachev on the occasion of the 20 anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
• 2010 - A Special Evening on Justice at the Review Conference of the Rome Statute in Kampala, Uganda
• 2010 – Sports for Peace Gala Event South Africa
• 2010 - Art & Cinema for Peace Dinner at the 41 Art Basel
• 2010 - Special Youth Day Screening of "Themba - A Boy Called Hope" at Cape Town, presented by Desmond Tutu, starting the anti-AIDS-film-campaign
• 2010 - An Evening for Africa in New York with Bob Geldof and Sharon Stone
• 2010 - Green Evening in Berlin with Sebastian Copeland and Orlando Bloom
• 2011 – Cinema for Peace Honorary Dinner Cannes with Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Jane Fonda
• 2011 – Cinema for Peace Dinner and film symposium honoring Hans-Dietrich Genscher in Ljubljana
• 2011 – Cinema for Peace Welcome Dinner in St.Tropez
• 2011 – Cinema for Peace Dinner for Tibet, screenings, symposium and speeches on the occasion of the visit of His Holyness the 14 Dalai Lama to Wiesbaden
• 2011 - Cinema for Peace Evening on the Issue of Child Soldiers and petition in The Hague at the International Criminal Court
• 2011 – Cinema for Peace Dinner in New York celebrating the presentation of the first universal human rights logo
• 2011 - Justice Gala in New York staged together with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court[15]
• 2012 - Cinema for Peace Los Angeles – Help Haiti Home
• 2012 – Art & Cinema for Peace Art Basel in support of Ai Weiwei
• 2012 – In the Name of Justice - Farewell Event for Luis Moreno-Ocampo at the International Criminal Court
• 2012 – “Sports for Peace” London honoring Muhammad Ali and celebrating his core values on the occasion of the Olympic Games
• 2012 – Cinema for Peace Dinner New York – Artists help Development and Climate Protection, honoring Sting and Trudie Styler
• 2013 – Cinema for Peace Gala for Humanity, Los Angeles
• 2013 - Cinema for Peace Dinner Honoring UN Women, Berlin

Film Productions

• Not the same procedure as every year - Dinner for All with Bob Geldof and Katja Riemann (2007)
• Suddenly Gina (de) with Iris Berben, Julia Jentsch, Jan Josef Liefers and Catherine Deneuve (2007)
• I don't feel like dancing short film (2008)
• Eric Bergkraut's documentary Letter to Anna about the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (2008) [16]
• This Prison Where I Live, co-production for Rex Bloomstein’s documentary about the Burmese comedian “Zarganar”(2010)
• Steuer gegen Armut - Eine gute Idee, producer of the German spot of the Robin-Hood-Tax-Campaign, following an idea of Richard Curtis (2010)
• After the Silence, co-production for Marcus Vetter's documentary (2011)
• The Song of Names, co-production for Vadim Perelman's feature film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Dustin Hoffman (2012)

Awards

• Václav Havel, the former Czech president, in 2008 committed the audience award for "Letter to Anna" at the One World International Human Rights Film Festival. The Prague festival uses international documentary films to highlight opportunities for individuals to champion human rights.
• "I don't feel like dancing" received the award "Best Short Fiction Film" by the "GoEast Festival" in April 2008

External links

• http://www.cinemaforpeace.com
• http://www.cinemaforpeace-foundation.com
• http://www.star-entertainment.org
• http://www.sportsforpeace.de
• https://thewallmuseum.com/

References

1. Remarks by UN SG Ben Ki-moon upon accepting the first "Justitia Award" on behalf of the United Nations [1]
2. Announcement of "Sports for Peace" Johannesburg
3. http://www.morgenpost.de/printarchiv/le ... annes.html
4. http://www.wiesbadenaktuell.de/nachrich ... ichte.html
5. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424 ... 1510356718
6. http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2 ... /?ref=bono
7. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... rtner.html
8. http://www.moviesthatmatter.nl/english_ ... n/news/327
9. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01 ... 62814.html
10. http://lematin.de/politik/635-cinema-fo ... 013-berlin
11. http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/ ... in-berlin/
12. http://world.time.com/2014/02/20/pussy- ... -beatdown/
13. http://www.laweekly.com/publicspectacle ... -hollywood
14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/w ... video.html
15. http://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/8EC ... 9Dec11.pdf
16. Letter to Anna: The Story of Journalist Politkovskaya's Death

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Pussy Riot Theatre
by Kulturfabrik
Accessed: 9/28/18

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“ We have a voice. We have a choice. We want to inspire people. Community is stronger than any government. To overcome nationalism, sexism, racism, fear and indifference, we should riot together! You have a voice. I'll show you !” –Maria Alyokhina (Pussy Riot)

In December 2016, Maria Alyokhina and music producer Alexander Cheparukhin started a new project – Pussy Riot Theatre with Riot Days - a play based on Alyokhina's book Riot Days (published in UK in Summer 2017). There are 4 people on stage: 2 women and 2 men. Maria Alyokhina herself, Kyril Masheka - her main stage partner plus Nastya and Max of the music duo AWOTT (Asian Women On The Telephone). The project is produced by Alexander Cheparukhin and directed by Yury Muravitsky - one of the leading Russian theatre directors.

Pussy Riot is a Russian protest art collective founded in 2011 and based in Moscow. The group staged unauthorized provocative guerrilla punk rock performances in unusual public places, which were made into music videos and posted on the Internet. The collective's lyrical themes included feminism, LGBT rights, and opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom the group considered to be a dictator. They gained global notoriety when five members of the group staged a performance inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012. On March, 2012, three of the group members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were arrested and charged with hooliganism and sentenced to two years of imprisonment. The trial and sentence attracted considerable attention and criticism, particularly in the West. Human-Rights groups, including Amnesty International, which designated the women as prisoners of conscience, adopted the case. Having served 21 months, the girls were released on December 23, 2013.

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Nikolai Bukharin
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/28/18

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"Bukharin" redirects here. For the Russian anarchist, see Mikhail Bakunin. For the Jewish ethnic group, see Bukharan Jews.

This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Ivanovich and the family name is Bukharin.
Nikolai Bukharin


Никола́й Буха́рин
Full member of the 13th, 14th, 15th Politburo
In office
2 June 1924 – 17 November 1929
Candidate member of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th Politburo
In office
8 March 1919 – 2 June 1924
Personal details
Born Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin
9 October 1888
Moscow, Russian Empire
Died 15 March 1938 (aged 49)
Communarka shooting ground, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Cause of death Execution
Nationality Russian
Political party Bolshevik, Communist Party
Spouse(s) Anna Larina
Children Svetlana, Yuri Larin
Parents Ivan Gavrilovich and Liubov Ivanovna Bukharin
Alma mater Imperial Moscow University (1911)
Known for Editor of Pravda, Izvestia, author of The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period, Imperialism and World Economy, co-author of The ABC of Communism, principal framer of the Soviet Constitution of 1936

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin[a] (9 October [O.S. 27 September] 1888 – 15 March 1938) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and prolific author on revolutionary theory.

As a young man, he spent six years in exile, working closely with fellow exiles Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. After the revolution of February 1917, he returned to Moscow, where his Bolshevik credentials earned him a high rank in the party, and after the October Revolution, he became editor of the party newspaper Pravda.

Within the Bolshevik Party, Bukharin was initially a Left Communist, but his gradual move from the left to the right from 1921, as a strong supporter and defender of the New Economic Policy (NEP), eventually saw him lead the Right Opposition. By late 1924, this had positioned Bukharin favourably as Joseph Stalin's chief ally, with Bukharin soon elaborating Stalin's new theory and policy of Socialism in One Country. Together, Bukharin and Stalin ousted Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev from the party at the XVth Communist Party Congress in December 1927. From 1926 to 1929, Bukharin enjoyed great power as General Secretary of Comintern's executive committee. However, Stalin’s decision to proceed with collectivisation drove the two men apart, and Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in 1929.

After the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 ended, the Soviet government under Lenin introduced a semi-capitalist economic policy to stabilize Russia’s floundering economy. This reform, the New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced a new social policy of moderation and discipline, especially regarding Soviet youth. Lenin himself stressed the importance of political education of young Soviet citizens in building a new society.

The first Komsomol Congress met in 1918 under the patronage of the Bolshevik Party, despite the two organizations' not entirely coincident membership or beliefs. Party intervention in 1922-1923 proved marginally successful in recruiting members by presenting the ideal Komsomolets (Komsomol youth) as a foil to the "bourgeois NEPman".[3] By the time of the second Congress, a year later, however, the Bolsheviks had, in effect, acquired control of the organization, and it was soon formally established as the youth division of the Communist party. However, the party was not very successful overall in recruiting Russian youth during the NEP period (1921-1928).

This came about because of conflict and disillusionment among Soviet youth who romanticised the spontaneity and destruction characteristic of War Communism (1918-1921) and the Civil War period.[4] They saw it as their duty, and the duty of the Communist Party itself, to eliminate all elements of Western culture from society. However, the NEP had the opposite effect: after it started, many aspects of Western social behavior began to reemerge.[5] The contrast between the "Good Communist" extolled by the Party and the capitalism fostered by NEP confused many young people.[6] They rebelled against the Party's ideals in two opposite ways: radicals gave up everything that had any Western or capitalist connotations, while the majority of Russian youths felt drawn to the Western-style popular culture of entertainment and fashion. As a result, there was a major slump in interest and membership in the Party-oriented Komsomol.

In March 1926, Komsomol membership reached a NEP-period peak of 1,750,000 members: only 6 percent of the eligible youth population.[7] Only when Stalin came to power and abandoned the NEP in the first Five Year Plan (1928–1933) did membership increase drastically.[8]

-- Komsomol, by Wikipedia

When the Great Purge began in 1936, Stalin looked for any pretext to liquidate his former allies and rivals for power, and some of Bukharin's letters, conversations and tapped phone calls indicated disloyalty. Arrested in February 1937, he was charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state and executed in March 1938, after a show trial that alienated many Western communist sympathisers.

Before 1917

Nikolai Bukharin was born on September 27 (October 9, new style), 1888, in Moscow.[1] He was the second son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich Bukharin and Liubov Ivanovna Bukharina.[1] His childhood is vividly recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began.


Ivan Bukharin, father of Nikolai

Bukharin's political life began at the age of sixteen with his lifelong friend Ilya Ehrenburg when he participated in student activities at Moscow University related to the Russian Revolution of 1905. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik faction. With Grigori Sokolnikov, he convened the 1907 national youth conference in Moscow, which was later considered the founding of Komsomol. By age twenty, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party. The committee was heavily infiltrated by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. As one of its leaders, Bukharin quickly became a person of interest to them. During this time, he became closely associated with Valerian Obolensky and Vladimir Smirnov, and also met his future first wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, his cousin and the sister of Nikolai Lukin, who was also a member of the party. They married soon after their exile, in 1911.

In 1911, after a brief imprisonment, Bukharin was exiled to Onega in Arkhangelsk, but soon escaped to Hanover, where he stayed for a year before visiting Kraków in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin for the first time. During the exile, he continued his education and wrote several books that established him as a major Bolshevik theorist in his 20s. His work, Imperialism and World Economy influenced Lenin, who freely borrowed from it[2] in his larger and better known work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Nevertheless, he and Lenin often had hot disputes on theoretical issues and Bukharin's closeness with the European Left and his anti-statist tendencies. Bukharin developed an interest in the works of Austrian Marxists and non-Marxist economic theorists, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, who deviated from Leninist positions. Also, while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin write an article, Marxism and the National Question, at Lenin's request.

In October 1916, while based in New York City, he edited the newspaper Novy Mir (New World) with Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai.When Trotsky arrived in New York in January 1917, Bukharin was the first to greet him (as Trotsky's wife recalled, "with a bear hug and immediately began to tell them about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once" dragging the tired Trotskys across town "to admire his great discovery").[3]

In 1916, the year preceding the Russian Revolution, internationalist Leon Trotsky was expelled from France, officially because of his participation in the Zimmerwald conference but also no doubt because of inflammatory articles written for Nashe Slovo, a Russian-language newspaper printed in Paris. In September 1916 Trotsky was politely escorted across the Spanish border by French police. A few days later Madrid police arrested the internationalist and lodged him in a "first-class cell" at a charge of one-and-one-half pesetas per day. Subsequently Trotsky was taken to Cadiz, then to Barcelona finally to be placed on board the Spanish Transatlantic Company steamer Monserrat. Trotsky and family crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed in New York on January 13, 1917.

Other Trotskyites also made their way westward across the Atlantic. Indeed, one Trotskyite group acquired sufficient immediate influence in Mexico to write the Constitution of Querétaro for the revolutionary 1917 Carranza government, giving Mexico the dubious distinction of being the first government in the world to adopt a Soviet-type constitution.

How did Trotsky, who knew only German and Russian, survive in capitalist America? According to his autobiography, My Life, "My only profession in New York was that of a revolutionary socialist." In other words, Trotsky wrote occasional articles for Novy Mir, the New York Russian socialist journal. Yet we know that the Trotsky family apartment in New York had a refrigerator and a telephone, and, according to Trotsky, that the family occasionally traveled in a chauffeured limousine. This mode of living puzzled the two young Trotsky boys. When they went into a tearoom, the boys would anxiously demand of their mother, "Why doesn't the chauffeur come in?"1 The stylish living standard is also at odds with Trotsky's reported income. The only funds that Trotsky admits receiving in 1916 and 1917 are $310, and, said Trotsky, "I distributed the $310 among five emigrants who were returning to Russia." Yet Trotsky had paid for a first-class cell in Spain, the Trotsky family had traveled across Europe to the United States, they had acquired an excellent apartment in New York — paying rent three months in advance — and they had use of a chauffeured limousine. All this on the earnings of an impoverished revolutionary for a few articles for the low-circulation Russian-language newspaper Nashe Slovo in Paris and Novy Mir in New York!

Joseph Nedava estimates Trotsky's 1917 income at $12.00 per week, "supplemented by some lecture fees."2 Trotsky was in New York in 1917 for three months, from January to March, so that makes $144.00 in income from Novy Mir and, say, another $100.00 in lecture fees, for a total of $244.00. Of this $244.00 Trotsky was able to give away $310.00 to his friends, pay for the New York apartment, provide for his family — and find the $10,000 that was taken from him in April 1917 by Canadian authorities in Halifax. Trotsky claims that those who said he had other sources of income are "slanderers" spreading "stupid calumnies" and "lies," but unless Trotsky was playing the horses at the Jamaica racetrack, it can't be done. Obviously Trotsky had an unreported source of income.

What was that source? In The Road to Safety, author Arthur Willert says Trotsky earned a living by working as an electrician for Fox Film Studios. Other writers have cited other occupations, but there is no evidence that Trotsky occupied himself for remuneration otherwise than by writing and speaking.

Most investigation has centered on the verifiable fact that when Trotsky left New York in 1917 for Petrograd, to organize the Bolshevik phase of the revolution, he left with $10,000. In 1919 the U.S. Senate Overman Committee investigated Bolshevik propaganda and German money in the United States and incidentally touched on the source of Trotsky's $10,000. Examination of Colonel Hurban, Washington attaché to the Czech legation, by the Overman Committee yielded the following:

-- Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, by Antony C. Sutton

1917 to 1923

At the news of the Russian Revolution of February 1917, exiled revolutionaries from around the world began to flock back to the homeland. Trotsky left New York on March 27, 1917, sailing for St. Petersburg.[4] Bukharin left New York in early April and returned to Russia by way of Japan (there he was temporarily detained by local police), arriving in Moscow in early May 1917.[3] Politically, the Bolsheviks in Moscow remained a definite minority to the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. However, as soldiers and workers began to be attracted to the Lenin's promise to bring peace by withdrawing from the war, membership in the Bolshevik faction began to skyrocket—from 24,000 members in February 1917 to 200,000 members in October 1917.[5] Upon his return to Moscow, Bukharin resumed his seat on the Moscow City Committee and also became a member of the Moscow Regional Bureau of the Party.[6]


Delegates of the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern in 1920

To complicate matters further, the Bolsheviks themselves were divided into a right wing and a left wing. The right wing of the Bolsheviks, including Aleksei Rykov and Viktor Nogin, controlled the Moscow Committee, while the younger left-wing Bolsheviks, including Vladimir Smirnov, Valerian Osinsky, Georgii Lomov, Nikolay Yakovlev, Ivan Kizelshtein and Ivan Stukov, were members of the Moscow Regional Bureau.[7] On October 10, 1917, Bukharin, along with two other Moscow Bolsheviks: Andrei Bubnov and Grigori Sokolnikov were elected to the Central Committee.[8] This strong representation on the Central Committee was a direct recognition of the fact that the Moscow Bureau had grown in importance. Whereas the Bolsheviks had previously been a minority in Moscow behind the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, by September 1917 the Bolsheviks were in the majority in Moscow. Furthermore, the Moscow Regional Bureau was formally responsible for the party organizations in each of the thirteen (13) central provinces around Moscow—which accounted for 37% of the whole population of Russia and 20% of the Bolshevik membership.[7]


Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Budyonny, Mikhail Frunze and Nikolai Bukharin in Novomoskovsk 1921 with the 1st Cavalry Army (Konarmia).

While no one dominated revolutionary politics in Moscow during the October Revolution, as Trotsky did in St. Petersburg, Bukharin certainly was the most prominent leader in Moscow.[9] During the October Revolution, Bukharin drafted, introduced, and defended the revolutionary decrees of the Moscow Soviet. Bukharin then represented the Moscow Soviet in their report to the revolutionary government in Petrograd.[10] Following the October Revolution, Bukharin became the editor of the party's newspaper, Pravda.[11]

Bukharin believed passionately in the promise of world revolution. In the Russian turmoil near the end of World War I, when a negotiated peace with the Central Powers was looming, he demanded a continuance of the war, fully expecting to incite all the foreign proletarian classes to arms.[12] Even as he was uncompromising toward Russia's battlefield enemies, he also rejected any fraternization with the capitalist Allied powers: he reportedly wept when he learned of official negotiations for assistance.[12] Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Left Communists in bitter opposition to Lenin's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.[13] In this wartime power struggle, he was urged by some of his more fiery allies to have Lenin arrested. He rejected this idea immediately, but the issue would later become the basis of Stalinist charges against him, culminating in the show trial of 1938.


Nikolay Bukharin with “Communist Bible” (ABC of Communism). 1923

After the ratification of the treaty, Bukharin resumed his responsibilities within the party. In March 1919, he became a member of the Comintern's executive committee and a candidate member of the Politburo. During the Civil War period, he published several theoretical economic works, including the popular primer The ABC of Communism (with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, 1919), and the more academic Economics of the Transitional Period (1920) and Historical Materialism (1921).

By 1921, he changed his position and accepted Lenin's emphasis on the survival and strengthening of the Soviet state as the bastion of the future world revolution. He became the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy (NEP), to which he was to tie his political fortunes. Considered by the Left Communists as a retreat from socialist policies, the NEP reintroduced money, allowed private ownership and capitalistic practices in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry while the state retained control of heavy industry. While some have criticized Bukharin for this apparent U-turn, his change of emphasis can be partially explained by the necessity for peace and stability following seven years of war in Russia, and the failure of communist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, which ended the prospect of worldwide revolution.

Power struggle

After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo.[14] In the subsequent power struggle among Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Stalin, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as centrist of the Party and supported the NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks (wealthier peasants), and agitation for world revolution. It was Bukharin who formulated the thesis of "Socialism in One Country" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism (in Marxist theory, the transitional stage from capitalism to communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that revolution need no longer be encouraged in the capitalist countries since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism.

Trotsky, the prime force behind the Left Opposition, was defeated by a triumvirate formed by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, with the support of Bukharin. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, Stalin openly attacked Kamenev and Zinoviev, revealing that they had asked for his aid in expelling Trotsky from the Party. By 1926, the Stalin-Bukharin alliance ousted Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Party leadership, and Bukharin enjoyed the highest degree of power during the 1926–1928 period.[15] He emerged as the leader of the Party's right wing, which included two other Politburo members Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and Mikhail Tomsky, head of trade unions, and he became General Secretary of the Comintern's executive committee in 1926.[16] However, prompted by a grain shortage in 1928, Stalin reversed himself and proposed a program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization because he believed that the NEP was not working fast enough. Stalin felt that in the new situation the policies of his former foes -- Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev — were the right ones.[17]


Nikolai Bukharin on the Congress of educators, USSR 1925

Bukharin was worried by the prospect of Stalin's plan, which he feared would lead to “military-feudal exploitation” of the peasantry. Bukharin did want the Soviet Union to achieve industrialization but he preferred the more moderate approach of offering the peasants the opportunity to become prosperous, which would lead to greater grain production for sale abroad. Bukharin pressed his views throughout 1928 in meetings of the Politburo and at the Party Congress, insisting that enforced grain requisition would be counterproductive, as War Communism had been a decade earlier.[18]

Fall from power

Bukharin's support of continuation of the NEP was not popular with higher Party cadres, and his slogan to peasants, "Enrich yourselves!" and proposal to achieve socialism "at snail's pace" left him vulnerable to attacks first by Zinoviev and later by Stalin. Stalin attacked Bukharin's views, portraying them as capitalist deviation and declaring that the revolution would be at risk without a strong policy that encouraged rapid industrialization.

Having helped Stalin achieve unchecked power against the Left Opposition, Bukharin found himself easily outmaneuvered by Stalin. Yet Bukharin played to Stalin's strength by maintaining the appearance of unity within the Party leadership. Meanwhile, Stalin used his control of the Party machine to replace Bukharin's supporters in the Rightist power base in Moscow, trade unions, and the Comintern.


Nikolai Bukharin on the meeting of the workers and peasants news reporters in Moscow, June 1926

Bukharin attempted to gain support from earlier foes including Kamenev and Zinoviev who had fallen from power and held mid-level positions within the Communist party. The details of his meeting with Kamenev, to whom he confided that Stalin was "Genghis Khan" and changed policies to get rid of rivals, were leaked by the Trotskyist press and subjected him to accusations of factionalism. Eventually, Bukharin lost his position in the Comintern and the editorship of Pravda in April 1929 and he was expelled from the Politburo on 17 November of that year.[19]

Bukharin was forced to renounce his views under pressure. He wrote letters to Stalin pleading for forgiveness and rehabilitation, but through wiretaps of Bukharin's private conversations with Stalin's enemies, Stalin knew Bukharin's repentance was insincere.[20]

International supporters of Bukharin, Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party USA among them, were also expelled from the Comintern. They formed an international alliance to promote their views, calling it the International Communist Opposition, though it became better known as the Right Opposition, after a term used by the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the Soviet Union to refer to Bukharin and his supporters there.

Friendship with Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak

In the brief period of thaw in 1934–1936, Bukharin was politically rehabilitated and was made editor of Izvestia in 1934. There, he consistently highlighted the dangers of fascist regimes in Europe and the need for "proletarian humanism". One of his first decisions as editor was to invite Boris Pasternak to contribute to the newspaper and sit in on editorial meetings. Pasternak described Bukharin as "a wonderful, historically extraordinary man, but fate has not been kind to him."[21] They first met during the lying-in-state of the Soviet police chief, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky in May 1934, when Pasternak was seeking help for his fellow poet, Osip Mandelstam, who had been arrested -- though at that time neither Pasternak nor Bukharin knew why.


Old Bolsheviks: Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda and Projector. Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, the First People's Commissar (Minister) for Finance. Lev Karakhan, Deputy People's Commissar (Deputy Minister) for Foreign Affairs, the first Soviet Ambassador to China. 1928

Bukharin had acted as Mandelstam's political protector since 1922. According to Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda, "M. owed him all the pleasant things in his life. His 1928 volume of poetry would never have come out without the active intervention of Bukharin. The journey to Armenia, our apartment and ration cards, contracts for future volumes -- all this was arranged by Bukharin."[22] Bukharin wrote to Stalin, pleading clemency for Mandelstam, and appealed personally to the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. It was Yagoda who told him about Mandelstam's Stalin Epigram, after which he refused to have any further contact with Nadezhda Mandelstam, who had lied to him by denying that her husband had written "anything rash"[23] - but continued to befriend Pasternak.

Soon after Mandelstam's arrest, Bukharin was delegated to prepare the official report on poetry for the First Soviet Writers' Congress, in August 1934. He could not any longer risk mentioning Mandelstam in his speech to the congress, but did devote a large section of his to Pasternak, whom he described as "remote from current affairs...a singer of the old intelligensia...delicate and subtle...a wounded and easily vulnerable soul. He is the embodiment of chaste but self-absorbed laboratory craftsmanship..."[24] His speech was greeted with wild applause, though it greatly offended some of the listeners, such as the communist poet Semyon Kirsanov, who complained: "according to Bukharin, all the poets who have used their verses to participate in political life are out of date, but the others are not out of date, the so-called pure (and not so pure) lyric poets."[25]

When Bukharin was arrested two years later, Boris Pasternak displayed extraordinary courage by having a letter delivered to Bukharin's wife saying that he was convinced of his innocence.[26]

Great purge

Stalin's collectivization policy proved to be as disastrous as Bukharin predicted, but Stalin had by then achieved unchallenged authority in the party leadership. However, there were signs that moderates among Stalin's supporters sought to end official terror and bring a general change in policy, now that mass collectivization was largely completed and the worst was over. Although Bukharin had not challenged Stalin since 1929, his former supporters, including Martemyan Ryutin, drafted and clandestinely circulated an anti-Stalin platform, which called Stalin the "evil genius of the Russian Revolution".

However, Sergey Kirov, First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee was assassinated in Leningrad in December 1934, and his death was used by Stalin as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people were to perish as Stalin eliminated all past and potential opposition to his authority.[27] Some historians now believe that Kirov's assassination in 1934 was arranged by Stalin himself or at least that there is sufficient evidence to plausibly posit such a conclusion.[28] After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged an ever-growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder and other acts of treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.[29]

Tightening noose


Nikolai Bukharin London 1931

In February 1936, shortly before the purge started in earnest, Bukharin was sent to Paris by Stalin to negotiate the purchase of the Marx and Engels archives, held by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) before its dissolution by Hitler. He was joined by his young wife Anna Larina, which therefore opened the possibility of exile, but he decided against it, saying that he could not live outside the Soviet Union.

Bukharin, who had been forced to follow the Party line since 1929, confided to his old friends and former opponents his real view of Stalin and his policy. His conversations with Boris Nicolaevsky, a Menshevik leader who held the manuscripts on behalf of the SPD, formed the basis of "Letter of an Old Bolshevik", which was very influential in contemporary understanding of the period (especially the Ryutin Affair and the Kirov murder) although there are doubts about its authenticity.

According to Nicolaevsky, Bukharin spoke of "the mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, with women and children" under forced collectivization and liquidation of kulaks as a class that dehumanized the Party members with "the profound psychological change in those communists who took part in the campaign. Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme virtue. ... They are no longer human beings. They have truly become the cogs in a terrible machine."[30]

Yet to another Menshevik leader, Fyodor Dan, he confided that Stalin became "the man to whom the Party granted its confidence" and "is a sort of a symbol of the Party" even though he "is not a man, but a devil."[31] In Dan's account, Bukharin's acceptance of the Soviet Union's new direction was thus a result of his utter commitment to Party solidarity.

To André Malraux, he also confided, "Now he is going to kill me". To his boyhood friend, Ilya Ehrenburg, he expressed the suspicion that the whole trip was a trap set up by Stalin. Indeed, his contacts with Mensheviks during this trip were to feature prominently in his trial.

Trial

Following the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other leftist Old Bolsheviks in 1936, Bukharin and Rykov were arrested on 27 February 1937 following a plenum of the Central Committee and were charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state.


Anna Larina (Bukharina), the second wife of Nikolai Bukharin 1936.

Bukharin was tried in the Trial of the Twenty One on 2–13 March 1938 during the Great Purge, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, and 16 other defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites". In a trial meant to be the culmination of previous show trials, it was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the Soviet Union and hand out her territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain.

Even more than earlier Moscow show trials, Bukharin's trial horrified many previously sympathetic observers as they watched allegations become more absurd than ever and the purge expand to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into passionate anti-Communists eventually.[32]

While Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured and his letters from prison do not give the suggestion that he was tortured, it is also known that his interrogators were instructed with the order: "beating permitted". Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down.[33] But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.[34][35]

Bukharin's confession and his motivation became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to the "sum total of crimes," he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in the written confession and refuse to go any further.

There are several interpretations of Bukharin's motivations (beside being coerced) in the trial. Koestler and others viewed it as a true believer's last service to the Party (while preserving the little amount of personal honor left) whereas Bukharin biographer Stephen Cohen and Robert Tucker saw traces of Aesopian language, with which Bukharin sought to turn the table into an anti-trial of Stalinism (while keeping his part of the bargain to save his family). While his letters to Stalin – he wrote 34 very emotional and desperate letters tearfully protesting his innocence and professing his loyalty – suggest a complete capitulation and acceptance of his role in the trial, it contrasts with his actual conduct in the trial. Bukharin himself speaks of his "peculiar duality of mind" in his last plea, which led to "semi-paralysis of the will" and Hegelian "unhappy consciousness", which likely stemmed not only from his knowledge of the ruinous reality of Stalinism (although he could not of course say so in the trial) but also of the impending threat of fascism.[36]

The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for the "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. After disproving several charges against him (one observer noted that he "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case"[37]) and saying that "the confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was solely based on confessions, he finished his last plea with the words:

"the monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all."[38]

Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party and French author and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland. 1935

The state prosecutor Vyshinsky characterized Bukharin as an "accursed crossbreed of fox and pig" who supposedly committed a "whole nightmare of vile crimes".

While in prison, he wrote at least four book-length manuscripts including a lyrical autobiographical novel, How It All Began, philosophical treatise Philosophical Arabesques, a collection of poems, and Socialism and Its Culture -– all of which were found in Stalin's archive and published in the 1990s.

Execution

Among other intercessors, the French author and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland wrote to Stalin seeking clemency, arguing that "an intellect like that of Bukharin is a treasure for his country." He compared Bukharin's situation to that of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier who was guillotined during the French Revolution: "We in France, the most ardent revolutionaries... still profoundly grieve and regret what we did. ... I beg you to show clemency."[39] He had earlier written to Stalin in 1937, "For the sake of Gorky I am asking you for mercy, even if he may be guilty of something," to which Stalin noted: "We must not respond." Bukharin was shot on 15 March 1938, but the announcement of his death was overshadowed by the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.[40]

According to Zhores and Roy Medvedev in The Unknown Stalin (2006), Bukharin's last message to Stalin stated "Koba, why do you need me to die?", which was written in a note to Stalin just before his execution. "Koba" was Stalin's nom de guerre, and Bukharin's use of it was a sign of how close the two had once been. The note was allegedly found still in Stalin's desk after his death in 1953.[41] This anecdote has been disputed due to inconsistencies in its reporting from various sources, however, particularly by professor Grover Furr.[42]

Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband officially rehabilitated by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.[43]

Political stature and achievements

Bukharin was immensely popular within the party throughout the twenties and thirties, even after his fall from power. In his testament, Lenin portrayed him as the Golden Boy of the party,[44] writing:

Speaking of the young C.C. members, I wish to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures (among the youngest ones), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of the dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it) ... Both of these remarks, of course, are made only for the present, on the assumption that both these outstanding and devoted Party workers fail to find an occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness.

Bukharin delivers the welcome speech on the meeting of Young Communist International. 1925

Bukharin made several notable contributions to Marxist–Leninist thought, most notably The Economics of the Transition Period (1920) and his prison writings, Philosophical Arabesques,[45] (which clearly reveal Bukharin had corrected the 'one-sidedness' of his thought), as well as being a founding member of the Soviet Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a keen botanist. His primary contributions to economics were his critique of marginal utility theory, his analysis of imperialism, and his writings on the transition to communism in the Soviet Union.[46]

His ideas, especially in economics and the question of market-socialism, later became highly influential in Chinese market-socialism and Deng Xiaoping's reforms.

British author Martin Amis argues that Bukharin was perhaps the only major Bolshevik to acknowledge "moral hesitation" by questioning, even in passing, the violence and sweeping reforms of the early Soviet Union. Amis writes that Bukharin said "during the Civil War he had seen 'things that I would not want even my enemies to see'."[47]

Works

Books and articles

• 1915: Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State
• 1917: Imperialism and World Economy
• 1917: The Russian Revolution and Its Significance
• 1918: Anarchy and Scientific Communism
• 1918: Programme of the World Revolution
• 1919: Church and School in the Soviet Republic
• 1919: The Red Army and the Counter Revolution
• 1919: Soviets or Parliament
• 1920: The ABC of Communism with Evgenii Preobrazhensky
• 1920: On Parliamentarism
• 1920: The Secret of the League (part I)
• 1920: The Secret of the League (part II)
• 1920: The Organisation of the Army and the Structure of Society
• 1920: Common Work for the Common Pot
• 1921: The Era of Great Works
• 1921: The New Economic Policy Of Soviet Russia
• 1921: Historical Materialism—a system of Sociology
• 1922: Economic Organization in Soviet Russia
• 1923: A Great Marxian Party
• 1923: The Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party
• 1924: Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital
• 1924: The Theory of Permanent Revolution
• 1926: Building Up Socialism
• 1926: The Tasks of the Russian Communist Party
• 1927: Economic Theory of the Leisure Class
• 1927: The World Revolution and the U.S.S.R.
• 1928: New Forms of the World Crisis
• 1929: Notes of an Economist
• 1930: Finance Capital in Papal Robes. A Challenge!
• 1931: Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism
• 1933: Marx's Teaching and its Historical Importance
• 1934: Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.
• 1937-38: How It All Began, a largely autobiographical novel, written in prison and first published in English in 1998.[48]

Cartoons

Nikolai Bukharin was a cartoonist who left many cartoons of contemporary Soviet politicians. The renowned artist Konstantin Yuononce told him: "Forget about politics. There is no future in politics for you. Painting is your real calling."[49] His cartoons are sometimes used to illustrate biographies of Soviet officials. Russian historian Yury Zhukov stated that Nikolai Bukarin's portraits of Joseph Stalinwere the only ones drawn from the original, not from a photograph.[50]

See also

• Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• Historical materialism
• Marxian economics

Notes

1. Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Буха́рин

References

1. Cohen 1980, p. 6.
2. Lenin wrote a preface to the book of Bukharin Imperialism and the World Economy (Lenin Collected Works, Moscow, Volume 22, pages 103–107).
3. Cohen 1980, p. 44.
4. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921(Vintage Books: New York, 1965) p. 246.
5. Cohen 1980, p. 46.
6. Cohen 1980, p. 49.
7. Cohen 1980, p. 50.
8. Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union(Vintage Books: New York, 1971) pp. 175 and 647.
9. Cohen 1980, p. 51.
10. Cohen 1980, p. 53.
11. Cohen 1980, pp. 43–44.
12. Ulam, Adam Bruno (1998). The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 410–412. ISBN 0-674-07830-6. Retrieved 2011-01-26.
13. Rabinowitch, Alexander (2007). The Bolsheviks in power: the first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 167, 174-175, 194 and passim. ISBN 978-0-253-34943-9. At the crucial meeting of the CEC convened at 3:00 AM, on 24 February 1918, few hours before the Gernan ultimatum was due to expire, Bukharin had the courage to break ranks and voted against accepting the treaty, while many other Left Communists either observed party discipline (V. Volodarsky and Stanislav Kosior, for instance) or were simply "no shows" (Dzerzhinsky, Kollontai, Uritsky, etc.) (p. 178).
14. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (1980)
15. RUSSIA: Humble Pie, TIME Magazine, October 25, 1926
16. Cohen 1980, p. 216.
17. Coehn, 1980
18. Paul R. Gregory, Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (2010) ch 3-6
19. Paul R. Gregory, Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (2010) ch 17
20. Robert Service. Stalin: A Biography (2005) p 260.
21. McSmith, Andy (2015). Fear and the Muse Kept Watc, the Russian Masters - from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein - Under Stalin. New York: New Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-1-59558-056-6.
22. Mandelstam, Nadezhda (1971). Hope Against Hope, a Memoir, (translated by Max Hayward). London: Collins & Harvill. p. 113.
23. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. p. 22.
24. Gorky, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, Maxim,; et al. (1977). Soviet Writers' Congress 1934, the Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism. London: Lawrence & Wishart. p. 233.
25. Medvedev, Roy (1980). Nikolai Bukharin, The Last Years. New York: W W Norton. pp. 85–86. ISBN 0-393-01357-X.
26. Medvedev, Roy. Nikolai Bukharin. p. 138.
27. Nikolaevsky, Boris, The Kirov Assassination, The New Leader, 23 August 1941
28. Conquest, Robert. Stalin and the Kirov Murder. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 122–138, ISBN 0-19-505579-9.
29. A. Yakovlev, "O dekabr'skoi tragedii 1934", Pravda, 28 January 1991, p. 3, cited in J. Arch Getty, "The Politics of Repression Revisited", in ed., J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, New York, 1993, p. 46.
30. Nicolaevsky, Boris. Power and the Soviet Elite, New York, 1965, pp. 18–19.
31. Radzinsky, Edward (1997). Stalin. New York: Random House. p. 358. ISBN 0-385-47954-9. Retrieved 2011-01-28.
32. Bertram David Wolfe, "Breaking with communism", p. 10; Arthur Koestler, Darkness of Noon, p. 258.
33. Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991, Pelican Books, 2014, p. 273
34. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 364–65.
35. Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion(1999) p 31.
36. Stephen J. Lee, Stalin and the Soviet Union (2005) p. 33
37. Report by Viscount Chilston (British ambassador) to Viscount Halifax, No.141, Moscow, 21 March 1938.
38. Robert Tucker, "Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Block of Rights and Trotskyites", pp. 667–68.
39. Radzinsky, p. 384.
40. РЕПРЕССИИ ЧЛЕНОВ АКАДЕМИИ НАУК
41. Zhores A. Medvedev & Roy A. Medvedev, translated by Ellen Dahrendorf, The Unknown Stalin, I.B. Tauris, 2006, ISBN 1-85043-980-X, 9781850439806, chapter 14, p. 296.
42. Furr, Grover (2007). "Furr, Bobrov. Bukharin's 'Last Plea': Yet Another Anti-Stalin Falsification". msuweb.montclair.edu. Archived from the original on December 11, 2016. Retrieved December 11, 2016.
43. Alessandra Stanley (February 26, 1996). "Anna Larina, 82, the Widow Of Bukharin, Dies in Moscow". New York Times. Retrieved May 6, 2017.
44. Westley, Christopher (2011-03-30) A Bolshevik Love Story, Mises Institute.
45. Monthly Review Press, 2005, ISBN 978-1-58367-102-3,
46. Philip Arestis A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, p. 88.
47. Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million(Hyperion, 2001), p 115
48. Nikolai Bukharin, How It All Began. Translated by George Shriver, Columbia University Press
49. Russkiy Mir, “Love for a woman determines a lot in life” – Interview with Yuri Larin, 7 August 2008
50. KP.RU // «Не надо вешать всех собак на Сталина» at http://www.kp.ru (Komsomolskaya Pravda)

Bibliography

• Coates, Ken (2010). Who Was This Bukharin?. Nottingham: Spokesman. ISBN 978-0-85124-781-6.
• Cohen, Stephen F. (1980). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502697-7.
• Gregory, Paul R. (2010). Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN 978-0-8179-1034-1.
• Kotkin, Stephen (2014). Stalin: Volume 1: The Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928.
• Service, Robert (2004). Stalin: A Biography. ISBN 0-330-41913-7.
• Imperial Moscow University: 1755-1917: encyclopedic dictionary. Moscow: Russian political encyclopedia (ROSSPEN). A. Andreev, D. Tsygankov. 2010. pp. 108–109. ISBN 978-5-8243-1429-8.

External links

• Nikolai Bukharin archive at marxists.org
• Bukharin's death-cell letter to Stalin
• How it all began, Bukharin's last letter to his wife
• A site dedicated to Bukharin
• A Bolshevik Love Story, Mises Institute
• February–March Plenum discussions transcript (in Russian) on which Bukharin was finally defeated, humiliated and expelled from Party
• Some of Bukharin's famous cartoons
• Newspaper clippings about Nikolai Bukharin in the 20th Century Press Archives of the German National Library of Economics(ZBW)

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Gabriele D'Annunzio
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General
Gabriele D'Annunzio
OMS CMG MVM
Prince of Montenevoso
Duke of Gallese
Gabriele D'Anunnzio.png
Duce of the Carnaro
In office
12 September 1919 – 30 December 1920
Preceded by Office created
Succeeded by Office abolished
(Riccardo Zanella as President of the Free State of Fiume)
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office
5 April 1897 – 17 May 1900
Constituency Florence
Personal details
Born 12 March 1863
Pescara, Kingdom of Italy
Died 1 March 1938 (aged 74)
Gardone Riviera, Kingdom of Italy
Resting place Vittoriale degli italiani, Gardone Riviera, Lake Garda
Nationality Italian
Political party Historical Right
(1897–1898)
Historical Far-Left[1]
(1898–1900)
Italian Nationalist Association
(1910–1923)
Spouse(s) Maria Hardouin (m. 1883)
Domestic partner Eleonora Duse (1898–1901)
Children
Mario (1884–1964)Gabriellino D'Annunzio (1886–1945)Ugo Veniero (1887–1945)Renata Anguissola (1893-1976)Gabriele Cruyllas (1897-1978)
Parents Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta and Luisa de Benedictis
Profession Writer, journalist, poet, soldier
Military service
Nickname(s) "Il Vate" ("The Poet"); "Il Profeta" ("The Prophet")
Service/branch Royal Italian Army
Royal Air Force
Years of service active: 1915–18
Rank General (honorary)
Lieutenant colonel
Major
Lieutenant colonel
Unit 3rd Army
Arditi
Battles/wars
World War IImpresa di FiumeTenth Battle of the IsonzoFlight over Vienna
Writing career
Period 20th century
Genre Poetry, novel
Subject Individualism, existentialism
Literary movement Decadentism
Notable works
Il PiacereIl trionfo della morteLa Gioconda
Years active 1879–1938
Signature

General Gabriele D'Annunzio, Prince of Montenevoso, Duke of Gallese OMS CMG MVM (Italian pronunciation: [ɡabriˈɛːle danˈnuntsjo]; 12 March 1863 – 1 March 1938), sometimes spelled d'Annunzio,[2] was an Italian writer, poet, Master Mason, journalist, playwright and soldier during World War I. He occupied a prominent place in Italian literature from 1889 to 1910 and later political life from 1914 to 1924. He was often referred to under the epithets Il Vate ("the Poet")[3] or Il Profeta ("the Prophet").

D'Annunzio was associated with the Decadent movement in his literary works, which interplayed closely with French Symbolism and British Aestheticism. Such works represented a turn against the naturalism of the preceding romantics and was both sensuous and mystical. He came under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche which would find outlets in his literary and later political contributions. His affairs with several women, including Eleonora Duse and Luisa Casati, received public attention.

During the First World War, perception of D'Annunzio in Italy transformed from literary figure into a national war hero.[4] He was associated with the elite Arditi storm troops of the Italian Army and took part in actions such as the Flight over Vienna. As part of an Italian nationalist reaction against the Paris Peace Conference, he set up the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro in Fiume with himself as Duce. The constitution made "music" the fundamental principle of the state and was corporatist in nature.[5] Some of the ideas and aesthetics influenced Italian fascism and the style of Benito Mussolini and, thereby, Adolf Hitler.

Early life


Birthplace of Gabriele D'Annunzio Museum in Pescara

D'Annunzio was born in the township of Pescara, in the province of Abruzzo, the son of a wealthy landowner and mayor of the town Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta d'Annunzio (1831–1893) and his wife Luisa de Benedictis (1839-1917). His father had originally been born plain Rapagnetta (the name of his single mother), but at the age of 13 had been adopted by a childless rich uncle Antonio d'Annunzio.[6][7] Legend has it that he was initially baptized Gaetano and given the name of Gabriele later in childhood, because of his angelic looks,[8] a story that has largely been disproven.[9]

His precocious talent was recognised early in life, and he was sent to school at the Liceo Cicognini in Prato, Tuscany.

He published his first poetry while still at school at the age of sixteen — a small volume of verses called Primo Vere (1879). Influenced by Giosuè Carducci's Odi barbare, he posed side by side some almost brutal imitations of Lorenzo Stecchetti, the fashionable poet of Postuma, with translations from the Latin. His verse was distinguished by such agile grace that Giuseppe Chiarini on reading them brought the unknown youth before the public in an enthusiastic article.

In 1881 D'Annunzio entered the University of Rome La Sapienza, where he became a member of various literary groups, including Cronaca Bizantina, and wrote articles and criticism for local newspapers. In those university years he started to promote Italian irredentism.

Literary work


D'Annunzio in 1889

He published Canto novo (1882), Terra vergine (1882), L'intermezzo di rime (1883), Il libro delle vergini (1884) and the greater part of the short stories that were afterwards collected under the general title of San Pantaleone (1886). Canto novo contains poems full of pulsating youth and the promise of power, some descriptive of the sea and some of the Abruzzese landscape, commented on and completed in prose by Terra vergine, the latter a collection of short stories dealing in radiant language with the peasant life of the author's native province. Intermezzo di rime is the beginning of D'Annunzio's second and characteristic manner. His conception of style was new, and he chose to express all the most subtle vibrations of voluptuous life. Both style and contents began to startle his critics; some who had greeted him as an enfant prodige rejected him as a perverter of public morals, whilst others hailed him as one bringing a breath of fresh air and an impulse of new vitality into the somewhat prim, lifeless work hitherto produced.[10]

Meanwhile, the review of Angelo Sommaruga perished in the midst of scandal, and his group of young authors found itself dispersed. Some entered the teaching career and were lost to literature, others threw themselves into journalism.[10]

Gabriele D'Annunzio took this latter course, and joined the staff of the Tribuna, under the pseudonym of "Duca Minimo". Here he wrote Il libro d'Isotta (1886), a love poem, in which for the first time he drew inspiration adapted to modern sentiments and passions from the rich colours of the Renaissance.[10]

Il libro d'Isotta is interesting also, because in it one can find most of the germs of his future work, just as in Intermezzo melico and in certain ballads and sonnets one can find descriptions and emotions which later went to form the aesthetic contents of Il piacere, Il trionfo della morte and Elegie romane (1892).[10]

D'Annunzio's first novel Il piacere (1889, translated into English as The Child of Pleasure) was followed in 1891 by Giovanni Episcopo, and in 1892 by L'innocente (The Intruder). These three novels made a profound impression. L'innocente, admirably translated into French by Georges Herelle, brought its author the notice and applause of foreign critics. His next work, Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death) (1894), was followed soon by Le vergini delle rocce (1896) and Il fuoco (1900); the latter is in its descriptions of Venice perhaps the most ardent glorification of a city existing in any language.[10]

D'Annunzio's poetic work of this period, in most respects his finest, is represented by Il Poema Paradisiaco (1893), the Odi navali (1893), a superb attempt at civic poetry, and Laudi (1900).[10]

A later phase of D'Annunzio's work is his dramatic production, represented by Il sogno di un mattino di primavera (1897), a lyrical fantasia in one act; his Città Morta (1898), written for Sarah Bernhardt. In 1898 he wrote his Sogno di un pomeriggio d'autunno and La Gioconda; in the succeeding year La gloria, an attempt at contemporary political tragedy which met with no success, probably because of the audacity of the personal and political allusions in some of its scenes; and then Francesca da Rimini (1901), a perfect reconstruction of medieval atmosphere and emotion, magnificent in style, and declared by an authoritative Italian critic – Edoardo Boutet – to be the first real, if imperfect, tragedy ever given to the Italian theatre.[10]

In 1883, D'Annunzio married Maria Hardouin di Gallese, and had three sons, Mario (1884-1964), Gabriele Maria "Gabriellino" (1886-1945) and Ugo Veniero (1887-1945), but the marriage ended in 1891. In 1894, he began a love affair with the actress Eleonora Duse which became a cause célèbre. He provided leading roles for her in his plays of the time such as La città morta (The Dead City) (1898) and Francesca da Rimini (1901), but the tempestuous relationship finally ended in 1910. After meeting the Marchesa Luisa Casati in 1903, he began a lifelong turbulent on again off again affair with Luisa, that lasted until a few years before his death.

In 1897, D'Annunzio was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for a three-year term, where he sat as an independent. By 1910, his daredevil lifestyle had forced him into debt, and he fled to France to escape his creditors. There he collaborated with composer Claude Debussy on a musical play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (The Martyrdom of St Sebastian), 1911, written for Ida Rubinstein. The Vatican reacted by placing all of his works in the Index of Forbidden Books. The work was not successful as a play, but it has been recorded in adapted versions several times, notably by Pierre Monteux (in French), Leonard Bernstein (sung in French, acted in English), and Michael Tilson Thomas (in French). In 1912 and 1913, D'Annunzio worked with opera composer Pietro Mascagni on his opera Parisina, staying sometimes in a house rented by the composer in Bellevue, near Paris.

Initiation to the Freemasonry

In 1901, D'Annunzio and his closely friend Ettore Ferrari, the [[Great Master] of the Grand Orient of Italy, inaugurated the Università Popolare of Milan, located in via Ugo Foscolo (33 degree Scottish Rite Mason). In that occasion, D'Annunzio took the inaugural speech, and in the following years was associated professor and lecturer at the same university[11].

D'Annunzio was 33 degree Scottish Rite Mason of the Great Lodge of Italy, which in 1908 had separated from the GOI[12], and some years later was introduced to the Martinism[13].

Among the volunteers of Fiume, there were many Freeamsons and occultists like Alceste De Ambris[14], Sante Ceccherini[15], Marco Egidio Allegri. The flag of the Regence of Carnaro would have contained gnostic and masonic symbols, like the Ouroboros and the seven stars of the Ursa Major[16], [17][18].

Flight over Vienna


Italian translation of the propaganda leaflet which D'Annunzio threw from his airplane during his flight above Vienna.

After the start of World War I, D'Annunzio returned to Italy and made public speeches in favor of Italy's entry on the side of the Triple Entente. Since taking a flight with Wilbur Wright in 1908, D'Annunzio had been interested in aviation. With the war beginning he volunteered and achieved further celebrity as a fighter pilot, losing the sight of an eye in a flying accident.


Gabriele D'Annunzio (left) with a fellow officer

In February 1918, he took part in a daring, if militarily irrelevant, raid on the harbour of Bakar (known in Italy as La beffa di Buccari, lit. the Bakar Mockery), helping to raise the spirits of the Italian public, still battered by the Caporetto disaster. On 9 August 1918, as commander of the 87th fighter squadron "La Serenissima", he organized one of the great feats of the war, leading nine planes in a 700-mile round trip to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna. This is called in Italian "il Volo su Vienna", "the Flight over Vienna".[19]

Fiume



1921 Postcard from Fiume and postage stamp with D'Annunzio's portrait. (The motto Hic Manebimus Optime is Latin for: "Here we'll stay wonderfully.")

The war strengthened his ultra-nationalist and irredentist views, and he campaigned widely for Italy to assume a role alongside her wartime allies as a first-rate European power. Angered by the proposed handing over of the city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) whose population, outside the suburbs, was mostly Italian, at the Paris Peace Conference, on 12 September 1919, he led the seizure by 2,000 Italian nationalist irregulars of the city, forcing the withdrawal of the inter-Allied (American, British and French) occupying forces.[20] The plotters sought to have Italy annex Fiume, but were denied. Instead, Italy initiated a blockade of Fiume while demanding that the plotters surrender.


Fiume residents cheering D'Annunzio and his raiders, September 1919

D'Annunzio then declared Fiume an independent state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro; the Charter of Carnaro foreshadowed much of the later Italian Fascist system, with himself as "Duce" (leader). Some elements of the Royal Italian Navy, such as the destroyer Espero joined up with D'Annunzio's local forces.[21] He attempted to organize an alternative to the League of Nations for (selected) oppressed nations of the world (such as the Irish, whom D'Annunzio attempted to arm in 1920),[22] and sought to make alliances with various separatist groups throughout the Balkans (especially groups of Italians, though also some Slavic and Albanian[23] groups), although without much success. D'Annunzio ignored the Treaty of Rapallo and declared war on Italy itself, only finally surrendering the city in December 1920 after a bombardment by the Italian navy.


Gabriele D'Annunzio (in the middle with the stick) with some legionaries (components of the Arditi's department of the Italian Royal Army) in Fiume in 1919. To the right of D'Annunzio, facing him, Lt. Arturo Avolio (commander of the Ardit's department of Bologna Brigade).

Later life


Villa of Vittoriale degli italiani

After the Fiume episode, D'Annunzio retired to his home on Lake Garda and spent his latter years writing and campaigning. Although D'Annunzio had a strong influence on the ideology of Benito Mussolini, he never became directly involved in fascist government politics in Italy. In 1922, shortly before the march on Rome, he was pushed out of a window by an unknown assailant, or perhaps simply slipped and fell out himself while intoxicated. He survived but was badly injured, and only recovered after Mussolini had been appointed Prime Minister.

In 1924 he was ennobled by King Victor Emmanuel III and given the hereditary title of Principe di Montenevoso. In 1937 he was made president of the Royal Academy of Italy. D'Annunzio died in 1938 of a stroke, at his home in Gardone Riviera. He was given a state funeral by Mussolini and was interred in a magnificent tomb constructed of white marble at Il Vittoriale degli Italiani.

His son Gabriellino D'Annunzio became a film director. His 1921 film The Ship was based on a novel by his father. In 1924, he co-directed the historical epic Quo Vadis, an expensive failure, before retiring from filmmaking.

Politics


Picture of d'Annunzio

D'Annunzio is often seen as a precursor of the ideals and techniques of Italian fascism. His political ideals emerged in Fiume when he coauthored a constitution with syndicalist Alceste de Ambris, the Charter of Carnaro. De Ambris provided the legal and political framework, to which D'Annunzio added his skills as a poet. De Ambris was the leader of a group of Italian seamen who had mutinied and then given their vessel to the service of D'Annunzio. The constitution established a corporatist state, with nine corporations to represent the different sectors of the economy (workers, employers, professionals), and a tenth (D'Annunzio's invention) to represent the "superior" human beings (heroes, poets, prophets, supermen). The Carta also declared that music was the fundamental principle of the state.

It was rather the culture of dictatorship that Benito Mussolini imitated and learned from D'Annunzio. D'Annunzio has been described as the John the Baptist of Italian Fascism,[24] as virtually the entire ritual of Fascism was invented by D'Annunzio during his occupation of Fiume and his leadership of the Italian Regency of Carnaro.[25] These included the balcony address, the Roman salute, the cries of "Eia, eia, eia! Alala!" taken from the Achilles' cry in the Iliad, the dramatic and rhetorical dialogue with the crowd, and the use of religious symbols in new secular settings.[24] It also included his method of government in Fiume: the economics of the corporate state; stage tricks; large emotive nationalistic public rituals; and blackshirted followers, the Arditi, with their disciplined, bestial responses and strongarm repression of dissent.[26] He was even said to have originated the practice of forcibly dosing opponents with large amounts of castor oil, a very effective laxative, to humiliate, disable or kill them, a practice which became a common tool of Mussolini's blackshirts.[27][28][29]

D'Annunzio advocated an expansionist Italian foreign policy and applauded the invasion of Ethiopia.



First and last sheet of D'Annunzio's letter to Mussolini, 15 February 1920

Rivalry with Mussolini

As John Whittam notes in his essay "Mussolini and The Cult of the Leader":[30]

This famous poet, novelist and war hero was a self-proclaimed Superman. He was the outstanding interventionist in May 1915 and his dramatic exploits during the war won him national and international acclaim. In September 1919 he gathered together his 'legions' and captured the disputed seaport of Fiume. He held it for over a year and it was he who popularised the black shirts, the balcony speeches, the promulgation of ambitious charters and the entire choreography of street parades and ceremonies. He even planned a march on Rome. One historian had rightly described him as the 'First Duce' and Mussolini must have heaved a sigh of relief when he was driven from Fiume in December 1920 and his followers were dispersed. But he remained a threat to Mussolini and in 1921 Fascists like Balbo seriously considered turning to him for leadership.

In contrast Mussolini vacillated from left to right at this time. Although Mussolini's fascism was heavily influenced by the Carta del Carnaro, the constitution for Fiume written by Alceste De Ambris and D'Annunzio, neither wanted to play an active part in the new movement, both refusing when asked by Fascist supporters to run in the elections of 15 May 1921. Before the March on Rome, De Ambris even went so far as to depict the Fascist movement as: "a filthy pawn in Mister Giolitti's game of chess, and made out of the least dignified section of the bourgeoisie"

D'Annunzio was seriously injured when he fell out of a window on 13 August 1922; subsequently the planned "meeting for national pacification" with Francesco Saverio Nitti and Mussolini was cancelled. The incident was never explained and is considered by some historians an attempt to murder him, motivated by his popularity. Despite D'Annunzio's retreat from active public life after this event, the Duce still found it necessary to regularly dole out funds to D'Annunzio as a bribe for not re-entering the political arena. When asked about this by a close friend, Mussolini purportedly stated: "When you have a rotten tooth you have two possibilities open to you: either you pull the tooth or you fill it with gold. With D'Annunzio I have chosen for the latter treatment."[31]

Nonetheless, D'Annunzio kept attempting to intervene in politics almost until his death in 1938. He wrote to Mussolini in 1933 to try to convince him not to take part in the Axis pact with Hitler. In 1934, he tried to disrupt the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini after their meeting, even writing a satirical pamphlet about Hitler. Again, in September 1937, D'Annunzio met with the Duce at the Verona train station to convince him to leave the Axis alliance. Mussolini in 1944 admitted to have made a mistake not following his advice.[citation needed]

Literature


Gabriele D'Annunzio reading (photo by Mario Nunes Vais)

At the height of his success, D'Annunzio was celebrated for the originality, power and decadence of his writing. Although his work had immense impact across Europe, and influenced generations of Italian writers, his fin de siècle works are now little known, and his literary reputation has always been clouded by his fascist associations. Indeed, even before his fascist period, he had his strong detractors. A New York Times review in 1898 of his novel The Intruder referred to him as "evil", "entirely selfish and corrupt".[32] Three weeks into its December 1901 run at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome, his tragedy Francesca da Rimini was banned by the censor on grounds of morality.[33]

A prolific writer, his novels in Italian include Il piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889), Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894), and Le vergini delle rocce (The Virgins of the Rocks, 1896). He wrote the screenplay to the feature film Cabiria (1914) based on episodes from the Second Punic War. D'Annunzio's literary creations were strongly influenced by the French Symbolist school, and contain episodes of striking violence and depictions of abnormal mental states interspersed with gorgeously imagined scenes. One of D'Annunzio's most significant novels, scandalous in its day, is Il fuoco (The Flame of Life) of 1900, in which he portrays himself as the Nietzschean Superman Stelio Effrena, in a fictionalized account of his love affair with Eleonora Duse. His short stories showed the influence of Guy de Maupassant. He was also associated with the bizarre Italian noblewoman Luisa Casati, an influence on his novels and one of his mistresses.

The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica wrote of him:

The work of d' Annunzio, although by many of the younger generation injudiciously and extravagantly admired, is almost the most important literary work given to Italy since the days when the great classics welded her varying dialects into a fixed language. The psychological inspiration of his novels has come to him from many sources—French, Russian, Scandinavian, German—and in much of his earlier work there is little fundamental originality.

His creative power is intense and searching, but narrow and personal; his heroes and heroines are little more than one same type monotonously facing a different problem at a different phase of life. But the faultlessness of his style and the wealth of his language have been approached by none of his contemporaries, whom his genius has somewhat paralysed. In his later work [meaning as of 1911], when he begins drawing his inspiration from the traditions of bygone Italy in her glorious centuries, a current of real life seems to run through the veins of his personages. And the lasting merit of D'Annunzio, his real value to the literature of his country, consists precisely in that he opened up the closed mine of its former life as a source of inspiration for the present and of hope for the future, and created a language, neither pompous nor vulgar, drawn from every source and district suited to the requirements of modern thought, yet absolutely classical, borrowed from none, and, independently of the thought it may be used to express, a thing of intrinsic beauty. As his sight became clearer and his purpose strengthened, as exaggerations, affectations, and moods dropped away from his conceptions, his work became more and more typical Latin work, upheld by the ideal of an Italian Renaissance.

In Italy some of his poetic works remain popular, most notably his poem "La pioggia nel pineto" (The Rain in the Pinewood), which exemplifies his linguistic virtuosity as well as the sensuousness of his poetry.

Museums

D'Annunzio's life and work are commemorated in a museum, Il Vittoriale degli Italiani. He planned and developed it himself, adjacent to his villa at Gardone Riviera on the southwest bank of Lake Garda, between 1923 and his death. Now a national monument, it is a complex of military museum, library, literary and historical archive, theatre, war memorial and mausoleum. The museum preserves his torpedo boat MAS 96 and the SVA-5 aircraft he flew over Vienna.

His birthplace is also open to the public as a museum, Birthplace of Gabriele D'Annunzio Museum in Pescara.

Works


Poster by Adolfo De Karolis for Alberto Franchetti's opera La figlia di Iorio (1906)


Pro-Italy messages that D'Annunzio threw from his airplane during his 1915 flight above Trieste

Novels

• Il Piacere (The Child of Pleasure[3], 1889)
• Giovanni Episcopo (1891)
• L'innocente (The Intruder (UK) or The Victim (US)) (1892)
• Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894)
• Le vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks, 1895)
• Il fuoco (The Flame of Life: A Novel, 1900)
• Forse che sì forse che no (1910)

Tragedies

• La città morta (The Dead City: a Tragedy, 1899)
• La Gioconda (Gioconda, 1899)
• Francesca da Rimini (1902) [4]
• L'Etiopia in fiamme (1904)
• La figlia di Jorio (1904)
• La fiaccola sotto il moggio (1905)
• La nave (1908).
• Fedra (1909)

Short story collections

• La Riscossa (1918), Bestetti e Tumminelli Edizioni d'Arte, First Edition[34]
• Terra vergine (1882)
• Le novelle della Pescara (1884–1886)

Poetry collections

• Primo vere (1879)
• Canto novo (1882)
• Poema paradisiaco (1893)
• The five books of Laudi del cielo, del mare, della terra e degli eroi (1903–1912)
• Maia (Canto Amebeo della Guerra)
• Elettra
• Alcyone
• Merope
• Asterope (La Canzone del Quarnaro)
• Ode alla nazione serba (1914)

Autobiographical works

• La Leda senza cigno
• Notturno
• Le faville del maglio
• Le cento e cento e cento e cento pagine del Libro Segreto di Gabriele D'Annunzio tentato di morire o Libro Segreto (as Angelo Cocles)
His epistolary work, Solus ad solam, was published posthumously.

Movies of Gabriele d'Annunzio

• Cabiria, directed by Giovanni Pastrone (1914) – screenplay
• D'Annunzio, directed by Sergio Nasca (1985) – about the romantic relationships in the life of the poet

Legacy

• D'Annunzio University in Chieti and Pescara is named after him.
• The Brescia Airport is named after him.
• In his honour, the Chilean poetess Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature, took the first name of her pseudonym, Gabriela Mistral.
• Ernesto Giménez Caballero was given the nickname the "Spanish D'Annunzio".[35]
• The play Tamara is based on his meeting with the painter Tamara de Lempicka.
• Luchino Visconti's last film, The Innocent, is based on d'Annunzio's novel

See also

• Maurice Barrès, a friend and literary-political kindred spirit of D'Annunzio
• Tom Antongini, D'Annunzio's private secretary for more than thirty years
• The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, a modern reappraisal of his life and work.

Notes

1. Francesco De Filippo (12 December 2014). "Gabriele D'Annunzio fu anche socialista". ANSA.
2. As he used to sign himself (Guglielmo Gatti, Vita di Gabriele d'Annunzio, Firenze, 1956, pp. 1–2).
3. The Italian vate directly stems from Latin vates. Its meaning is a poet with special emphasis on prophetic, inspiring or even divining qualities.
4. D'Annunzio and "Carnaro" irredentism
5. Parlato, Giuseppe (2000). La sinistra fascista (in Italian). Bologna: Il Mulino. p. 88.
6. Joseph Guerin Fucilla, Joseph Médard Carrière D'Annunzio abroad: a bibliographical essay Volume 2, page 29 1935 "(Translation of the birth certificate of d'Annunzio's father, Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta, of the legal act recognizing the latter's adoption by his uncle Antonio d'Annunzio, and the birth certificate of Gabriele d'Annunzio)."
7. André Geiger Gabriele d'Annunzio, 1918, page 142: "Après la légitimation, et conformément à la loi, il perdit ce nom de Rapagnetta pour prendre le seul nom du père qui l'avait légitimé. Il est probable que le Camillo Rapagnetta, qui figure dans- l'acte de naissance du poète, était un parent, ..."
8. Adrian Room, Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins (2010), p. 132
9. For the urban legend: Cfr. A. Rapagnetta, La vera origine familiare e il vero cognome del poeta abruzzese Gabriele D'Annunzio, Carabba, Lanciano, 1938; online sources on the real birthname of "Gabriele D'Annunzio": [1] and [2]
10. Chisholm 1911.
11. "Our History - Gabriele D'Annunzio". unipmi.org (in Italian). Università Popolare di Milano. Archived from the original on Jan 31, 2011. Retrieved Sep 21, 2018.
12. Fulvio Conti (2003). Storia della massoneria italiana. Dal Risorgimento al fascism. Bologna: Il Mulino. ISBN 978-88-15-11019-0.
13. M. Introvigne. "Gli ordini martinisti e l'ermetismo kremmerziano" (in Italian). Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni. Archived from the original on Dec 17, 2015. Retrieved Sep 20,2018.
14. "Alceste De Ambris. L'utopia concreta di un rivoluzionario sindacalista". archiviostorico.info (in Italian). Archived from the original on Feb 21, 2014.
15. Esoterismo e Fascismo (in Italian). Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee. 2006. p. 44. ISBN 978-88-272-1831-0. Unknown parameter |authir1= ignored (help)
16. De Turris 2006, p. 44.
17. S. Calasso (2011). Speciale movimenti moderni - La Reggenza del Carnaro (pdf) (in Italian). pp. 1–13. ISSN 2279-6924. Archived (PDF) from the original on Feb 10, 2002. Retrieved Sep 20, 2018. Unknown parameter |review= ignored (help) and Ermini, Armando (2011). Speciale movimenti moderni - Bilancio (pdf) (in Italian). pp. 13–16. ISSN 2279-6924. Archived (PDF) from the original on Feb 10, 2012. Retrieved Sep 20, 2018. Unknown parameter |review= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |Issue= ignored (|issue= suggested) (help) .
18. P. Colono. "A special flag". superEva (in Italian). Archivedfrom the original on Aug 4, 2002. Retrieved Sep 20, 2018.
19. Chisholm 1922.
20. H.R. Kedward, Fascism in Western Europe 1900–45, p 40 New York University Press New York, 1971
21. "D'ANNUNZIO PAYS DESERTING SAILORS; Hands Out 10,000 Francs to Crew of Destroyer—Its Officer Bound to Gun.WRANGEL TROOPS NEAR BYMany in Rome Look Hopefully to Giolitti to Find a Way Outof Flume Crisis". The New York Times. 11 December 1920. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
22. Mark Phelan, 'Prophet of the Oppressed Nations: Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Irish Republic, 1919–1921, History Irelandvol. 21, no, 5(Sept/Oct 2013, pp. 44–50.
23. Ekrem Vlora (1973). Lebenserinnerungen: 1912 bis 1925[Memoirs: 1912–1925] (in German). Walter de Gruyter. p. 154. ISBN 9783486475715.
24. Ledeen, Michael Arthur (2001). "Preface". D'Annunzio: the First Duce (2, illustrated ed.). Transaction Publishers. ISBN 9780765807427.
25. Paxton, Robert O. (2005). "Taking Root". The Anatomy of Fascism. Vintage Series (reprint ed.). Random House, Inc. pp. 59–60. ISBN 9781400040940.
26. The United States and Italy, H. Stuart Hughes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1953, pp. 76 and 81–82.
27. Cecil Adams, Did Mussolini use castor oil as an instrument of torture?, The Straight Dope, 22 April 1994. Accessed 6 November 2006.
28. Richard Doody, "Stati Libero di Fiume – Free State of Fiume". Archived from the original on 8 March 2009. Retrieved 24 August 2002., The World at War.
29. Cali Ruchala, ""Superman, Supermidget": the Life of Gabriele D'Annunzio, Chapter Seven: The Opera". Archived from the original on 10 February 2005. Retrieved 6 November 2006., Degenerate magazine, Diacritica (2002).
30. Mussolini and the Cult of the Leader, John Whittam, New Perspective, vol 3, no 3, March 1998 pp. 12–16
31. The Vittoriale degli Italiani, Fred Licht, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec. 1982), pp. 318–324
32. "D'Annunzio.; Books That Prove Him to Be Entirely Selfish and Corrupt", New York Times, 5 March 1898. p. RBA145.
33. "D'Annunzio's Tragedy Prohibited by Censor.; Further Performances of Francesca da Rimini at Rome Forbidden on Moral Grounds", New York Times, 31 December 1901. p. 5.
34. First edition of warlike prayers held on the Italian front from November 1917 to May 1918, in 16 °, pp. 171 broch. orig. xilografata, frontispiece and trim always engraved on wood by Sartorio
35. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914–1945, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 258

References

• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. p. 22.
Attribution
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Annunzio, Gabriele D'". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1922). "D'Annunzio, Gabriele". Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). London & New York.

Further reading

• Gabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (2013, ISBN 0307263932)
• Gabriele D'Annunzio: Defiant Archangel by J.R. Woodhouse (2001, ISBN 0-19-818763-7)
• D'Annunzio: The First Duce by Michael A. Ledeen (ISBN 0-7658-0742-4)
• D'Annunzio: The Poet as Superman by Anthony Rhodes (ISBN 0-8392-1022-1)
• Gabriele D'Annunzio: The Dark Flame by Paolo Valesio (trans. by Marilyn Migiel, ISBN 0-300-04871-8)
• D'Annunzio and the Great War by Alfredo Bonadeo (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8386-3587-3)
• Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 edited by Philip Rees (1991, ISBN 0-13-089301-3)
• The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism 1919–1945 by Alastair Hamilton (London, 1971, ISBN 0-218-51426-3)
• D'Annunzio by Tom Antongini (William Heinemann, 1938) - the author was his private secretary
• David Gilmour, "He Dared the Undarable" The New York Review of Books 6 March 2014, pp. 21–22.
• Matteo Veronesi, Il critico come artista dall'estetismo agli ermetici. D'Annunzio, Croce, Serra, Luzi e altri, Bologna, Azeta Fastpress, 2006, ISBN 88-89982-05-5
• Nicoletta Pireddu, Antropologi alla corte della bellezza. Decadenza ed economia simbolica nell'Europa fin de siècle, Verona, Fiorini, 2002, ISBN 88-87082-16-2
• Nicoletta Pireddu, "Gabriele D'Annunzio: the art of squandering and the economy of sacrifice,” in _The Question of the Gift. Essays Across Disciplines_, ed. by Mark Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): 172–190.
• Nicoletta Pireddu, “’Il divino pregio del dono’: Andrea Sperelli’s economy of pleasures,” _Annali d’italianistica_, 15, 1997: 175–201.
• Rudolph Altrocchi (1922). Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet of Beauty and Decadence. Chicago Literary Club.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gabriele d'Annunzio.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Gabriele d'Annunzio

• Full texts of Gabriele D'Annunzio's works and chronology
• Works by Gabriele D'Annunzio at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Gabriele D'Annunzio at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Gabriele D'Annunzio at Internet Archive
• Works by Gabriele D'Annunzio at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Gabriele D'Annunzio – gabrieledannunzio.it
• http://www.gabrieledannunzio.net
• Gabriele D'annunzio
• Casa D'Annunzio
• D'Annunzio's museum "Il Vittoriale"
• IL VITTORIALE "La Cittadella del d'Annunzio"
• Per non dormire Eleganze notturne al Vittoriale
• Eleganze notturne al Vittoriale
• Decennale di Fiume
• Stamp Fiume
• Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien "Epistolario D'Annunzio Debussy"
• Free scores by Gabriele D'Annunzio at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Newspaper clippings about Gabriele D'Annunzio in the 20th Century Press Archives of the German National Library of Economics (ZBW)

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Ilya Ehrenburg
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/29/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Ilya Ehrenburg in the 1960s


Ilya Ehrenburg in 1943

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Russian: Илья́ Григо́рьевич Эренбу́рг, pronounced [ɪˈlʲja ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲjɪvɪtɕ ɪrʲɪnˈburk] (About this sound listen); 27 January [O.S. 15 January] 1891 – 31 August 1967) was a Jewish Soviet writer, Bolshevik revolutionary, journalist and historian.

Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars (First World War, Spanish Civil War and the Second World War). His articles on the Second World War have provoked intense controversies in West Germany, especially during the sixties.

The novel The Thaw gave its name to an entire era of Soviet politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Joseph Stalin. Ehrenburg's travel writing also had great resonance, as did to an arguably greater extent his memoir People, Years, Life, which may be his best known and most discussed work. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, has special historical significance; detailing the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry by the Nazis, it is the first documentary work on the Holocaust. In addition, Ehrenburg wrote a succession of works of poetry.

Life and work


Ehrenburg, early 20th century

Ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, Russian Empire to a Lithuanian Jewish family; his father was an engineer. Ehrenburg's family was not religiously affiliated; he came into contact with the religious practices of Judaism only through his maternal grandfather. Ehrenburg never joined any religious denomination. He learned no Yiddish, although he edited the Black Book, which was written in Yiddish. He considered himself Russian and, later, a Soviet citizen, but left all his papers to Israel's Yad Vashem. He took strong public positions against antisemitism. He wrote in Russian even during his many years abroad.

When Ehrenburg was four years old, the family moved to Moscow, where his father had been hired as director of a brewery. At school, he met Nikolai Bukharin, who was two grades above him; the two remained friends until Bukharin's death in 1938 during the Great Purge.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1905, both Ehrenburg and Bukharin got involved in illegal activities of the Bolshevik organisation. In 1908, when Ehrenburg was seventeen years old, the tsarist secret police (Okhrana) arrested him for five months. He was beaten up and lost some teeth. Finally he was allowed to go abroad and chose Paris for his exile.

In Paris, he started to work in the Bolshevik organisation, meeting Vladimir Lenin and other prominent exiles. But soon he left these circles and the Communist Party. Ehrenburg became attached to the bohemian life in the Paris quarter of Montparnasse. He began to write poems, regularly visited the cafés of Montparnasse and got acquainted with a lot of artists, especially Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Jules Pascin, and Amedeo Modigliani. Foreign writers whose works Ehrenburg translated included those of Francis Jammes.

During World War I, Ehrenburg became a war correspondent for a St. Petersburg newspaper. He wrote a series of articles about the mechanized war that later on were also published as a book (The Face of War). His poetry now also concentrated on subjects of war and destruction, as in On the Eve, his third lyrical book. Nikolai Gumilev, a famous symbolistic poet, wrote favourably about Ehrenburg's progress in poetry.


Ehrenburg with Ernest Hemingway and Gustav Regler during the Spanish Civil War, c. 1937

In 1917, after the revolution, Ehrenburg returned to Russia. At that time he tended to oppose the Bolshevik policy, being shocked by the constant atmosphere of violence. He wrote a poem called "Prayer for Russia" which compared the Storming of the Winter Palace to rape. In 1920 Ehrenburg went to Kiev where he experienced four different regimes in the course of one year: the Germans, the Cossacks, the Bolsheviks, and the White Army. After antisemitic pogroms, he fled to Koktebel on the Crimea peninsula where his old friend from Paris days, Maximilian Voloshin, had a house. Finally, Ehrenburg returned to Moscow, where he soon was arrested by the Cheka but freed after a short time.

He became a Soviet cultural activist and journalist who spent much time abroad as a writer. He wrote modernistic picaresque novels and short stories popular in the 1920s, often set in Western Europe (The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922), Thirteen Pipes[1]). Ehrenburg continued to write philosophical poetry, using more freed rhythms than in the 1910s.

As a friend of many of the European Left, Ehrenburg was frequently allowed by Stalin to visit Europe and to campaign for peace and socialism. In 1936–39, he was a war journalist in the Spanish civil war, but also got involved directly in the military activities of the Republican camp.

World War II


Ilya Ehrenburg with Red Army soldiers in 1942

Ehrenburg was active in war journalism throughout World War II. As a consequence, he is one of many Soviet writers, along with Konstantin Simonov and Aleksey Surkov, who have been accused by many of "[lending] their literary talents to the hate campaign" against Germans during World War II.[2] His article "Kill" published in 1942 — when German troops were deeply within Soviet territory — became a widely publicized example of this campaign, along with the poem "Kill him!" by Simonov.[3][4] In "Kill", Ehrenburg wrote: "We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed." After criticism by Georgy Aleksandrov in Pravda in April 1945,[5] Ehrenburg responded that he never meant wiping out the German people, but only German aggressors who came to our soil with weapons, because "we are not Nazis" who fight with civilians.[6] He wrote already in May 1942 : "The German soldier with weapon in hand is not a man for us, but a fascist. We hate him [...] When the German soldier gives up his weapon and surrenders, we will not touch him with a finger – he will live."[7] Ehrenburg fell into disgrace at that time and it is estimated that Aleksandrov's article was a signal of change in Stalin's policy towards Germany.[8][9]

Ehrenburg was a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

In 1942 Ehrenburg was a companion to Leland Stowe, an American journalist who traveled to Soviet front lines. In his book They Shall Not Sleep published in the United States in 1944 Stowe describes his interaction with Ehrenburg.

Postwar writings


Ehrenburg awarding the Stalin Peace Prize to Soong Ching-ling and Guo Moruo, April 1951

In 1954, Ehrenburg published a novel titled The Thaw that tested the limits of censorship in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. It portrayed a corrupted and despotic factory boss, a "little Stalin", and told the story of his wife, who increasingly feels estranged from him, and the views he represents. In the novel, the spring thaw comes to represent a period of change in the characters' emotional journeys, and when the wife eventually leaves her husband, this coincides with the melting of the snow. Thus, the novel can be seen as a representation of the thaw, and the increased freedom of the writer after the 'frozen' political period under Stalin. In August 1954, Konstantin Simonov attacked The Thaw in articles published in Literaturnaya gazeta, arguing that such writings are too dark and do not serve the Soviet state.[10] The novel gave its name to the Khrushchev Thaw. Just prior to publishing the book, however, Ehrenburg received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952.[clarification needed]

Ehrenburg is particularly well known for his memoirs (People, Years, Life in Russian, published with the title Memoirs: 1921-1941 in English), which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers. In this book, Ehrenburg was the first legal Soviet author to mention positively a lot of names banned under Stalin, including the one of Marina Tsvetaeva. At the same time he disapproved of the Russian and Soviet intellectuals who had explicitly rejected Communism or defected to the West. He also criticized writers like Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, for not having been able to understand the course of history.

Ehrenburg's memoirs were criticized by the more conservative faction among the Soviet writers, concentrated around the journal Oktyabr. For example, as the memoirs were published, Vsevolod Kochetov reflected on certain writers who are "burrowing in the rubbish heaps of their crackpot memories."[11]

For the contemporary reader though, the work appears to have a distinctly Marxist-Leninist ideological flavor characteristic to a Soviet-era official writer.

He was also active in publishing the works by Osip Mandelstam when the latter had been posthumously rehabilitated but still largely unacceptable for censorship. Ehrenburg was also active as a poet till his last days, depicting the events of World War II in Europe, the Holocaust and the destinies of Russian intellectuals.

Death


Ilya Ehrenburg's grave with a wire reproduction of his portrait by Picasso

Ehrenburg died in 1967 of prostate and bladder cancer, and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where his gravestone is adorned with a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend Pablo Picasso.

English translations

• The Fall of Paris, Knopf, NY, 1943. [novel]
• The Tempering of Russia, Knopf, NY, 1944.
• European Crossroad: A Soviet Journalist In the Balkans, Knopf, NY, 1947.
• The Storm, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1948.
• The Ninth Wave, Lawrence And Wishart, London, 1955.
• The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, Polyglot Library, 1960.
• A Change of Season, (includes The Thaw and its sequel The Spring), Knopf, NY, 1962.
• Chekhov, Stendhal and Other Essays, Knopf, NY, 1963.
• Memoirs: 1921–1941, World Pub. Co., Cleveland, 1963.[12]
• Life of the Automobile, URIZEN BOOKS Joachim Neugroeschel translator 1976.
• The Second Day, Raduga Publishers, Moscow, 1984.
• The Fall of Paris, Simon Publications, 2002.
• My Paris, Editions 7, Paris, 2005

References

1. Liukkonen, Petri. "Ilya Ehrenburg". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 27 February 2015.
2. Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 0805074619, page 414.
3. (Text is found in Ilya Ehrenburg's book Vojna (The war) (Moscow, 1942–43)
4. Original text in Russian. Militera.lib.ru. Retrieved on 24 June 2015.
5. Товарищ Эренбург упрощает. vivovoco.rsl.ru
6. ПИСЬМО И.Г. ЭРЕНБУРГА И.В. СТАЛИНУ. vivovoco.rsl.ru
7. "On Hatred", May 1942
8. Joshua Rubenstein: Tangled Loyalties. The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. 1st Paperback Ed., University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa (Alabama/USA) 1999 (= Judaic Studies Series), ISBN 0-8173-0963-2
9. Carola Tischler: Die Vereinfachungen des Genossen Ehrenburg. Eine Endkriegs- und eine Nachkriegskontroverse. In: Elke Scherstjanoi (Hrsg.): Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland. Briefe von der Front (1945) und historische Analysen. Texte und Materialien zur Zeitgeschichte, Bd. 14. K.G. Saur, München 2004, S. 326–339, ISBN 3-598-11656-X, p. 336-
10. Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 0805074619, pages 590–591.
11. Stacy, Robert H. (1974). Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History. Syracuse University Press. p. 222. ISBN 9780815601081.
12. Muchnic, Helen (11 March 1965). "Ilya Ehrenburg's Story". New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 11 October 2014.

External links

• Works by or about Ilya Ehrenburg at Internet Archive
• Works by Ilya Ehrenburg at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Poems by Ilya Erenburg (English Translations)
• A poem in verse translation by A. Givental and E. Wilson-Egolf
• The Black Book at jewishgen.org
• Tangled Loyalties, the 'definitive' Ehrenburg biography by Joshua Rubenstein at the book's home on the web
• Long biography, includes quote above
• Article in The Columbia Encyclopedia
• Brief page on The Thaw
• Marevna, "Homage to Friends from Montparnasse" (1962) Top left to right: Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, his wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski [1] [2]. Bottom left to right: Marevna, hers and Diego Rivera's daughter Marika, (Amedeo Modigliani), Moise Kisling.
• Olga Carlisle (Summer–Fall 1961). Ilya Ehrenburg, The Art of Fiction No. 26. The Paris Review.
• Excerpts from "The Storm" in English. From SovLit.net
• Tribute to Ehrenburg by Aleksandr Tvardovsky in English. From SovLit.net

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Grigori Sokolnikov
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/29/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Yakovlevich and the family name is Sokolnikov.


Grigori Sokolnikov
Григорий Сокольников
Sokolnikov grygory.JPG
Grigori Sokolnikov (1888-1939)
People's Commissar for Finance of the USSR
In office
6 July 1923 – 16 January 1926
Premier Vladimir Lenin (until 1924)
Alexei Rykov
Preceded by None—post created
Succeeded by Nikolai Bryukhanov
People's Commissar for Finance of the RSFSR
In office
22 November 1922 – 6 July 1923
Premier Vladimir Lenin
Preceded by Nikolay Krestinsky
Succeeded by Myron K. Vladimirov
Full member of the 6th, 7th Bureau
In office
11 March – 25 March 1919
In office
10 October 1917 – 29 July 1918
Candidate member of the 13th Politburo
In office
2 June 1924 – 1 January 1926
Personal details
Born Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant
15 August 1888
Romny, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire
Died 21 May 1939 (aged 50)
Verkhneuralsk, Tyumen Oblast, Soviet Union
Political party All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks)
Alma mater Saint Petersburg State University

Grigori Yakovlevich Sokolnikov[a] (born Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant; 1888–1939) was a Russian old Bolshevik revolutionary, economist, and Soviet politician.

[b]Biography

Grigori Sokolnikov was born Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant to a railway doctor in Romny on 15 August 1888. Sokolnikov was Jewish.[1] He moved to Moscow as a teenager and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1905. He served time in prison and studied economics whilst at the Sorbonne.

He returned to Russia in April 1917 along with Vladimir Lenin in the 'sealed train', and on arriving in Russia became part of the editorial board of the Bolsheviks' central party organ.[2]


Grigori Sokolnikov, People's Commissar for Finance of the USSR, marked (1) negotiates in Berlin Sep 1923

Grigori Sokolnikov was a member of the first Politburo, with seven members: Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov.[3] After the October Revolution, he held various government positions. He was a member of the Joffe led delegation for peace negotiations with Germany. While Joffe accompanied the signatory team in protest as a consultant, he replaced Leon Trotsky as chairman and signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918 on behalf of the Bolshevik government of Russia. Later, alongside Rosalia Zemlyachka, he became commissar of the Eighth army, using this position to order mass shootings during the Russian Civil War.[4] He was appointed People's Commissar of Finance following the introduction of the New Economic Policy and became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Communist Party in May 1924. According to Boris Bajanov, as minister of finance Sokolnikov proved himself to be a capable administrator, accomplishing every task he was asked to do, such as creating the first stable Soviet currency. Bajanov also notes that despite Sokolnikov's past in the Red Army, he was not ruthless in his personality. Privately, Sokolnikov lost faith in the Soviet Union under Stalin and later described the Soviet economy as "state capitalist".[5] He was removed from his position in the Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) and demoted from the Politburo after calling for Joseph Stalin's removal as General Secretary of the Communist Party at the Fourteenth Congress of the Bolsheviks in December 1925. Sokolnikov was appointed instead as vice-chairman of Gosplan, the new economic planning agency (an appointment that carried cruel irony since Sokolnikov himself was a bitter opponent of heavy-handed centralized planning) and later as head of an oil company. He was the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1932.

During the Great Purge, Sokolnikov was arrested in 1937 and tried at the Trial of the Seventeen. He was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. Reportedly, he was assassinated in a prison by other convicts on 21 May 1939. A post-Stalin official investigation during the Khrushchev Thaw revealed that the murder was organized by the NKVD official K.P. Nikolaevich (ru) being ordered by Lavrenty Beria and Josef Stalin personally.[6]. In 1988, during perestroika, he was rehabilitated along with many other victims of the Great Purge.

Notes

1. Russian: Григорий Яковлевич Сокольников
2. Russian: Гирш Я́нкелевич Бриллиа́нт

References

1. http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/bio_s/sokolnikov_g.php
2. Trotsky, L. 'A New Moscow Amalgam' in "Writings of Leon Trotsky (1936-37)", pg.120, Pathfinder, New York
3. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin. A New Biography, translated and edited by Harold Shukman (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 185.
4. Boris Bajanov, Bajanov révèle Staline, Gallimard, 1979
5. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archi ... /12/18.htm
6. "ИЗ СПРАВКИ ПРЕДСЕДАТЕЛЯ КГБ ПРИ СМ СССР И.А. СЕРОВА В ЦК КПСС ПО ДЕЛУ «АНТИСОВЕТСКОГО ТРОЦКИСТСКОГО ЦЕНТРА» ОБ ОБСТОЯТЕЛЬСТВАХ УБИЙСТВА Г.Я. СОКОЛЬНИКОВА И К.Б. РАДЕКА".
• Soviet Policy in Public Finance, 1917–1928, by Gregory Y. Sokolnikov & Associates; translated by Elena Varneck, edited by Lincoln Hutchinson & Carl C. Plehn. Stanford University Press. 1931.

External links

• Grigory Sokolnikov Archive, part of Marxists Internet Archive.
• Grigorii Yakovlevich Sokolnikov and the development of the Soviet state, 1921–1929

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Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War: August 1914-September 1918
by Arlen J. Hansen
© 1996 The Estate of Arlen J. Hansen

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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Chapter One: The Three Beginnings; The Harjes Formation

In March of 1910, a group of Americans living in Paris opened a small, semiphilanthropic hospital just off the Boulevard Victor Hugo in the suburb of Neuilly. When the war broke out in August of 1914, the American Hospital became a natural focal point for the concerned American colony. They donated money, equipment, and automobiles, and even offered their personal services, to help the war effort. Learning that the American Hospital intended to treat wounded soldiers by setting up tents in the hospital's gardens if necessary, French officials were directed by a Dr. Fevier, surgeon general of the French Army, to offer the Americans the unfinished Lycee Pasteur to use as its "ambulance," or military hospital. (Ambulance can be a misleading term. The Americans, like the English, use the word to denote a motorized vehicle designed to carry patients to hospitals. For the French, ambulance designates a military hospital. In this text, ambulance in lowercase refers to vehicles, and Military Hospital replaces Ambulance, though I am aware there are those who prefer American Ambulance of Paris to American Military Hospital because the latter suggests that the American military was involved, and this was most emphatically not the case.) The Lycee Pasteur, which had been requisitioned by the French government, was an elaborate arrangement of red-brick school buildings just beyond the Maillot gate in Neuilly, six blocks from the American Hospital.(1) After the war, the Lycee Pasteur reclaimed its buildings on the Boulevard d'Inkerman, and the Americans were reimbursed for some of their construction expenses. The ante-bellum American Hospital, which got a new building in 1926, still carries on its work today at its old location, just off the Boulevard Victor Hugo.

The French offer of Lycee Pasteur carried with it two conditions. First, the American Hospital Board had to agree to underwrite the completion of the buildings and grounds, at a cost of $400,000. Second, the Board had only twenty-four hours to accept. Neither of these stipulations daunted the Hospital Board's two principal powers: former Ambassador Robert Bacon, its president, and Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, the second wife of William K. Vanderbilt. Once introduced, the deal was done.(2) On August 14, 1914, the day after accepting the offer, Bacon appointed a Board of Governors for the American Ambulance of Paris. The roster of the Ambulance Board alone is sufficient to demonstrate that this board had the wherewithal, clout, and connections to get things done: Mrs. Henry P. Davison (her husband later directed the American Red Cross), Mrs., E. H. Harriman, Mrs. Myron T. Herrick (wife of the popular ambassador to France), Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Airs. Montgomery Sears, Mrs. Bayard Van Rensselaer, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, among other names of equal luster.(3)

To help recruit the medical staff and oversee the completion of the lycee buildings (which needed mostly interior work: lighting, heating, and cabinetry), the Ambulance Board named an administrative Ambulance Committee.(4) Working together, these two groups soon had the American Military Hospital up and running--in the nick of time. According to a report later filed with the American Hospital Board, the first four wounded soldiers were received on September 6. As the French and British continued to drive the Germans back from the Marne in mid-September, the number of blesses rose steadily. Ninety-one were admitted to the Military Hospital on the 15th of September; 146 on the 16th; 209 the following day; and during the second half of September and the first half of October, the average number of patients per day reached 238.(5)

Yet all this medical service would not have been helpful without a means of getting the blesses to the hospital. Mrs. Vanderbilt and Harold White, manager of the Ford Motor Company's French assembly plant, had already addressed the matter of transporting the wounded.(6) With financial assistance from Mrs. Vanderbilt, White donated ten Ford chassis, which were outfitted as ambulances by a local carriage builder. A crude plank floor was extended from the gas tank out over the rear axle, an overarching canopy of canvas covered the rear compartment, and a single board was strapped across the top of the gas tank for the driver to sit on. That was all--no side doors, no roof over the cab, no windshield.

The first drivers signed on in no less improvised a manner. J. Paulding Brown, whose pleasure tour of Europe had been interrupted by the outbreak of the war, showed up at the Military Hospital one day in early September of 1914, and "15 minutes later was an ambulance driver.(7) Brown's first of a series of interesting trips into the environs of Paris" was made on September 7, and thereafter 'for several weeks we were busy along the Marne gathering in wounded and bringing them back to Paris."(8)

Once the Germans had been pushed above the Aisne in late September, the French holding stations were necessarily beyond the reach of the Military Hospital's Fords, and the usefulness of the ambulances temporarily waned. Sanitary trains now constituted the principal means of transporting the wounded from the front to La Chapelle, the renovated rail station at the northernmost edge of Paris. This former railway depot had been transformed into an official receiving station to which all Paris-bound hospital trains brought their wounded. Once a warehouse-like barn with a huge unloading platform, this cold and stark station was made over into a warm, pleasant, and efficient distribution center. On the platform facing the railroad tracks were four newly constructed barracks, each painted a different color. The wounded were taken from the railroad cars directly into one of these structures, where nurses gave them hot soup and bread, and dressed them in fresh bandages if necessary. Using cards coded according to the color of the barracks, clerks wrote down the names of the wounded, four per card, grouped according to type of injury. Then the cards were distributed to the drivers, whose ambulances were lined up in stalls. After selecting his or her stretcher-bearers from a common pool, the driver sent them to the barracks corresponding to the card's color, where they picked up the four blesses named on the card. Once the blesses were loaded into the ambulance, the driver took off for the appropriate hospital--say, the American Military Hospital if four blesses required facial surgery--or to the Val du Grace for special types of amputation. The only hitch was that no station, not even the wondrously efficient La Chapelle, could keep pace with the daily slaughter and the resultant backlog of trains. One night, Harold Howland noted, "There were two trains standing alongside the La Chapelle station and one inside, and eight more waiting in the yards outside the city to come in."(9)

The most expedient means of distributing blesses from La Chapelle to the numerous hospitals was by automobile, but ambulance work was regarded by many as incidental, not integral, to a hospital's true and proper functions. In that trips into the field were no longer practical and, for Americans, were actually prohibited by military policy, the Ambulance Committee of the American Military Hospital hesitated before deciding officially to add a transportation department to its operations.(10) Some on the Committee felt that whatever ambulance service the American Military Hospital required could be handled by other motor corps operating in the city, including units from Spain, Canada (whose drivers were all women), and Scandinavia. In addition, they knew that eventually an ambulance service would probably be co-opted by the military, which would, understandably, take over the control and deployment of the vehicles. The Hospital seemed to have little to gain by setting up its own ambulance service. Most of the medical administrators felt that a hospital's job was to treat the wounded, not to fetch them.

Other factors worked against the inclusion of a transportation department in the American Military Hospital's operations. Given the magnitude of the Hospital's undertaking and its policy of treating the most challenging cases, particularly men in need of facial reconstruction,(11) an ambulance service would be a drain on the Hospital's finances and personnel. The American Military Hospital had become a highly respected and successful institution by concentrating its efforts on the medical aspects of its service. By the end of 1915, it had an impressive number of beds in operation -- 575, with another 50 ready for emergencies.(12) Although the hospital staff was serving largely without pay, the Board spared no expense on medical technology, which gave rise to the criticism that the Hospital was extravagant.(13) Still, despite the Hospital's emphasis on treatment rather than transportation, its ambulances had already proved their worth at the holding stations in Meaux, Lizy-sur-Ourcq, and Coulommiers during the Battle of the Marne. The cars were also of considerable use in distributing the wounded who continued to arrive at La Chapelle. So, by late February of 1915, the Military Hospital Board finally consented to form a Transportation Committee, which would oversee the formation and operation of an ambulance service. Not surprisingly, transportation matters were relegated to the bottom of the Hospital's budgetary and organizational priorities. New ambulances were occasionally purchased with money raised in the United States by William R. Hereford, a New York banker who was the chief fund-raiser for the entire American Hospital organization. Some contributors specified that their donations go toward buying ambulances, giving Hereford no choice but to spend the money on cars. Nevertheless, by December of 1916, when the hospital was spending over $1,000 per day to handle nearly 1,600 wounded, the number of ambulances working directly out of the Neuilly hospital had increased from the original ten to just thirty-five.(14)

The American Military Hospital was not unique in its attitude toward ambulance units. Until the early spring of 1915, few hospitals recognized the importance of independent ambulance services, particularly when it came to trench warfare. When armies marched, the armies' mobile hospitals could follow the troops and pick up the wounded at assembly points. In this war, however, not only was the French Army stationary, but its medical facilities were often based in converted civilian hospitals and other civic buildings, which were invariably a moderate distance from the front, far enough to be out of artillery range. The wounded had to be hauled back to these urban hospitals, but neither trains nor horse-drawn wagons provided an entirely satisfactory means of transporting them. The blasted, seasonally boggy terrain over which the blesses had to be carried would not sustain railroad beds, and the wagons moved so slowly that the wounded were exposed far too long to enemy fire. Cars, in short, were the answer. However, as was the case with the American Military Hospital in Paris, most civilian hospital boards and their administrative surgeons were not accustomed to supporting or managing an extensive ambulance service.

A typical case was Mrs. C. Mitchell Depew, who converted half of her Chateau d'Annel at Longueil, some nine miles north of Compiegne, into a splendid forty-bed hospital. The American Mrs. Depew was a long-time resident in France and a close friend of General Joffre, who helped her obtain the necessary medical licenses. Mrs. Depew and her staff opened the hospital on August 27, but when German troops poured across the region three days later, everyone, including members of her own family, had to leave. Returning a month later, they reopened their hospital and, according to Dr. Harvey Cushing, who visited the Chateau d'Annel the following March, "have been continuously busy [ever since]." Cushing, a Harvard surgeon who was inspecting various regional clinics on behalf of the American Hospital Board, counted "seven nurses for the 40 patients [and] an ambulance corps of four Ford cars."(15)

But Dr. Cushing was wrong in one matter. Mrs. Depew's hospital may have been in full operation when he visited it in March of 1915, but between the preceding September and the end of January it had been virtually without patients. Earlier, in November of 1914, two French generals (Berthier and Dziewonski) directed the medecin en chef at Montdidier to deliver his overflow of wounded to her hospital. However, because the Montdidier doctor had no ambulances to spare and because Mrs. Depew had not obtained the requisite laisses-passers (permits) or sufficient gasoline to run her own ambulance service, Mrs. Depew's hospital was without the means of bringing in any patients, Montdidier's overflow included.(16) Not until the end of January, by which time Mrs. Depew had obtained three ambulances, the appropriate passes, and a ration of gasoline, did the Longueil hospital have a legitimate ambulance service. Accordingly, when Cushing arrived in March, the hospital had ambulances (Cushing counted an additional one, making four in all) and a full component of forty ....

Largely owing to the French ban on foreign nationals in the field, the American volunteer ambulance services were slow to be accepted by French officials, but once the usefulness of the American cars and drivers was recognized, the demand grew instantly.The experience of Edward Dale Toland captures the pace and nature of the change in attitude toward American ambulance drivers. Toland, a 28-year-old Philadelphia gentleman, boarded the S.S. Laconia out of New York in late August of 1914, intending "simply to see the excitement and the French people in wartime."(17) Having spent the previous six years in the engineering and banking businesses, the Princeton alum (1908) was intrigued by 'the prospect of an indeterminate holiday." Instead, the unassuming and modest Toland got caught up in the rush of events and before he knew it was helping to form the very first American volunteer ambulance unit.

Having been in Paris the previous year, Toland was stunned by what he saw upon arrival on September 14. The entire length of Avenue de I'Opera revealed "not a soul on the sidewalks," and that evening the usually hectic Place de la Concorde was "as dark and still as a country churchyard, " Toland wrote in his diary.(18) In early September, United Press reporter William Shepherd had stood on Avenue de l'Opera and looked in its shops and down its side streets. "No human being is in sight," Shepherd observed in Confessions of a War Correspondent. "The prairies of Texas were never more silent." In contrast, Will Irwin's first chapter in The Latin at War depicts Paris as unfazed during this period, with its populace as contented and outgoing as ever. Irwin admitted that his sample was skewed, however: Naturally, I know the American colony in Paris better than the French . . . , [and] they are for the most part wealthy or well-to-do, and before the war they were an idle set.' The city was still reeling from the terrors of the first weeks of the war. During August, three million German troops had raced across the western front, carried by 550 trains a day rolling through Belgium, to bear down upon the French capital. The German advance was finally halted and turned back a few miles outside Paris in early September, just before Toland's arrival. By late September, the German western flank had been driven north of the Aisne, where both sides eventually dug in. Nevertheless, many Parisians remained convinced that the German threat was not over, and that made them wary and sometimes capable of ugly conduct that winter.

Toland spent his first day at the Cooper-Hewitt Hospital, a small operation near the Bois de Boulogne. Although splendidly equipped, the fifty-bed Cooper-Hewitt was completely empty -- not a single patient, despite the savage fighting that had taken place recently along the Marne, literally within earshot of Paris. "The French officials in Paris do not seem to want wounded men brought in here," Toland was told by a Mrs. F, who managed the hospital (Toland does not give her full name). Throughout the city, she said, "There are some six hundred beds now prepared with first-class equipment and staff all ready and waiting for them." The officials, she figured, "are afraid the possibility of a siege is not over, or else they are afraid that the moral effect on the French public will be bad."(19)

Mrs. F told Toland that the only way to get patients into these small private hospitals was to ignore the officials and operate one's own ambulance service, as she had done for her other hospital, the converted Majestic Hotel. The night before Toland's arrival, Mrs. F and her aides had driven a huge omnibus out to the army's holding station at Montereau, some sixty miles outside Paris, and brought back twelve blesses, who had been virtually abandoned there. What she had seen at the Montereau station was almost more than she could bear: hundreds of wounded men piled on filthy straw, all wounds septic "beyond description," no bandages or gauze or anesthetics, no surgeons, and maybe one nurse for every fifty men. Sadly, her "horrible old rattle-trap of an omnibus"(20) had room for only a small fraction of the men requiring emergency attention. Mrs. F's passionate account of this experience so impressed Toland that the former banker instantly blurted out an offer to help the Majestic's operations in any way he could. So much for the indeterminate holiday he had envisioned.

One day, while working at the Majestic as a volunteer orderly, Toland heard that a trainload of British wounded, slowly making its way to the coast, would stop briefly at Villeneuve St. Georges, six miles outside Paris, the following morning. "The thing that is most needed," he wrote in his diary that night, echoing Mrs. F's sentiments, is to get the men off the field and to a place where they can have some sort of attention."(21) Despite the proscription against civilian travel beyond the gates of Paris, Toland, along with one of the Majestic's surgeons and a French nurse, decided to intercept the train when it stopped at Villeneuve St. Georges and bring the most seriously wounded back for immediate care.

Thanks to the nurse's personal charm and her quick tongue, the group got past the various sentries and reached the Villeneuve St. Georges station well ahead of the British hospital train. However, no amount of time could have prepared them for the train's gruesome cargo. Some twenty small boxcars were crammed with maimed and bleeding men lying on wisps of straw loosely scattered over the floor boards. Far too many needed immediate attention for the Majestic's omnibus-ambulance to carry, so the irrepressible nurse went to work again, this time on the Villeneuve St. Georges station master, and enchanted him completely. He found them an empty railroad car with enough space for twenty-two couches, and ordered it attached to a train about to depart for Paris. Despite the impeding efforts of the civilian and military authorities, Toland and the others were able to bring dozens of severely wounded men to the Majestic that night.

There are several explanations for the abundance of horrific scenes of brutalized men at the holding stations. The new warfare technology accounted for a large percentage of the numerous conspicuous casualties. Fragmentation shells such as the so-called Daisy Cutter exploded on impact and were designed to maim and cripple rather than kill outright. Thus, in this war, siege artillery became antipersonnel weaponry. Shrapnel produced three times as many casualties as bullets. The newly designed pineapple ridges on hand grenades maximized the number of jagged bits of hot metal that burst randomly about, maximizing the ability of grenades to rip up human flesh. The machine gun, especially the Germans' Maxim, gave the solitary soldier a disproportionately large capacity for carnage with a single sweep of his gun.(22) Perhaps nothing was more efficient as a disabling weapon than gas: at first the suffocants, greenish-yellow chlorine and colorless phosgene; later, mustard gas, which produced progressive conjunctivitis or painfully crippling blisters.(23) Men died slowly from all of this new weaponry -- or, perhaps worse, didn't die at all, surviving with permanent disability or mutilation, a living reminder of the Great War's horrors.

-- The Horror of It: Camera Records of War's Gruesome Glories, by Frederick A. Barber

There were nontechnological reasons as well for the boxcars overflowing with wounded, and the huge numbers of mutiles de guerre. During the first months of the war, the French military authorities tended to accept a notion attributed to Lieutenant Colonel Louzeau de Grandmaison, chief of training on the General Staff: ardor wins wars. Never mind weapon power or troop numbers, this view argued, an army that displays an unconquerable spirit will be victorious and, thus, French military strategy called for I'attaque a outrance, all-out attack.(24) As one historian put it: "The 1913 [French] manuals contained no prescription for retreat."(25) consequently, the number of casualties rose as French ardor rose, and the ardor soared the closer the Germans got to Paris.

Ironically, advances in treatment and medical knowledge may also have contributed to the suffering during the First World War. In 1901, the Austrian-born pathologist Karl Landsteiner, working in the United States, discovered the secret of blood types (A, O, B, AB), which made transfusions more practical. Many wounded who would previously have been regarded as untreatable were now being shipped back to urban hospitals for transfusions in the hope that their limbs, or lives, could be saved. Moreover, the recently developed practice of debridement, which prevented gangrene by immediately removing damaged tissue from wounds, kept still others alive long enough to endure the boxcar rides. In earlier wars, many of the raving, suffering men that Toland and Mrs. F encountered would have been silently abandoned or buried at the battlefront, out of public view.

To get these wounded men to urban hospitals, some type of transportation service was necessary, but ambulances were difficult to come by, at least for Mrs. F. It was a simple matter of greed, she concluded. "There are a good many motors which could be put at the disposal of hospitals," she stated bitterly, "but it is quite hard to get hold of them. " People who owned motorcars, she said, were acting in the "most cowardly and selfish way.' Although Mrs. F had extracted promises from several owners, she invariably discovered, when she went to pick up the cars, that neither the machines nor their owners were in town. The cars had been taken to the country and safely ensconced, presumably, on the grounds of family estates.(26)

Toland was shocked by the hypocrisy of car owners who reneged on their promises, but he was even more disturbed by the behavior of some hotel owners. Certain hotels made an ostentatious show of having been converted into hospitals, although these same hotel-cum-hospitals showed little real concern about actually treating patients. For instance, the glamorous Ritz Hotel generously reserved sixty-four beds for hospital use. It purchased some state-of-the-art medical equipment and hired two dozen nurses. Yet, the Ritz's management accepted no patients, protesting that it could not admit any blesses without authority from the officials of the Bureau de Sante (Department of Health). Literally speaking, that was true. However, Toland countered, "we told them they would never get any patients if they waited for authority from [the Health Department]."(27)

The advantages of such tactics were immediately apparent, assuming the hotel's management did not foolishly set aside so many beds that it undercut business. The idea was to hire a few nurses (but no expensive surgeons), giving the operation a veneer of sincerity, and perhaps even to invest in some medical equipment. It was imperative to announce the conversion by flying Red Cross flags conspicuously. A hotel could continue its normal routine without actually bothering about hospital work -- until, of course, the licenses were issued by the bureaucracy. There was little need to worry -- the labyrinthine Parisian bureaucracy worked it a snail's pace in the best of times. The point of such deviousness was to make sure German artillery spotters or troops, in the event that Paris was taken, might believe the hotel was a hospital. Best of all, the hotel's management did not have to put up with any bleeding blesses or imperious surgeons making things unpleasant for the hotel's clientele.

Toland sensed a change in the Majestic's attitude right after the Germans had settled in along the Aisne and the threat of a further assault on Paris had virtually disappeared. "Our relations with the management of this hotel," Toland said, "are decidedly unpleasant." The cause was obvious: "I am quite sure that the only reason the hotel was given as a hospital was as a sort of insurance proposition." In other words, Toland writes, "Now that there is no chance of the Germans getting in here [Paris], I think they [the Majestic's management] would jolly well like to kick us all out."(28)

When the French and German armies took up defensive positions during the relatively peaceful winter of 1914-1915, the small private hospitals in Paris became undersubscribed, if not superfluous. Civilian-managed mobile field hospitals were rumored to be in the offing. These field hospitals, it was held, would include both medical and automobile units, and would be set up just behind the trenches, within driving distance of the army's holding stations. Having heard about these field units, Toland noted that "It has been my wish to do this sort of work, and I feel I could be of far more use out there than in a [Paris] hospital."(29) He arranged a meeting with Robert Bacon, the President of the American Hospital Board, to talk it over. A man of considerable influence, Bacon had been President Theodore Roosevelt's third (1909) Secretary of State and President Taft's Ambassador to France. Toland's session with Bacon on September 25 turned out to be most frustrating. "There isn't any chance of getting to the front," Bacon had explained to him. "The English and French armies won't have any outsiders messing about their work."(30) Bacon was alluding to the French policy banning all nonmilitary personnel, including those from neutral or nonaligned countries, from traveling into battle zones.(31)

On October 1, Bacon introduced Toland to Dr. Edmund Gros, one of the chief medical officers at the American Military Hospital in Neuilly, who proposed that Toland come to work for them. As President of the American Hospital Board, Bacon added that the American Military Hospital "would offer me [Toland] more opportunities than the "Majestic Hotel Hospital." The hospital in Neuilly was a much larger operation, Bacon pointed out, with a capacity of six hundred patients. Moreover, it was about to establish a small ambulance unit for transporting blesses to and from the hospital. Driving an ambulance for the Military Hospital, Toland felt, was "more like the work I have been wishing to do."(32)

Bacon mentioned a second, even more appealing, possibility to Toland. H. Herman Harjes, the 39-year-old Senior Partner of the Morgan-Harjes Bank in Paris, was planning to organize a mobile field unit under the sponsorship of the French military hospital, the Val de Grace. Harjes, Bacon said, intended his field service to work in cooperation with both French medical and military officials (thus avoiding the ban against allowing neutrals in a war zone) in the Compiegne-montdidier sector, where the battle lines had not yet completely stabilized. If Toland so wished, Bacon would try to get him into Harjes' unit. "It is exactly what I want," Toland wrote in his diary that evening.(33)

The next morning (October 2, 1914), Mrs. Herman Hades, an active member of the Ambulance Board, as well as the prime force behind her husband's field service, made Toland an offer: Would he be willing to go to the front with the Morgan-Harjes Ambulance Mobile de Premiers Secours to set up a field hospital, complete with its own ambulances? Toland replied without hesitation that he would, and so for the next week he helped set up the Morgan-Harjes field hospital and ambulance service.

At 6:00 A.M. on Saturday, October 9, two chauffeur-driven Packards left Paris in search of a location for Harjes' field hospital. They wanted to choose a spot as close to the front as possible, enabling them to have prompt access to the wounded.(34) In this initial scouting party were Mr. and Mrs. Harjes, their chief surgeon (an American), a head nurse, a French corporal ("who is to represent the army and keep military records, etc."), and Edward Toland. Other personnel and equipment were soon added to this nucleus, including two operating surgeons, a few paramedics, and at least three more Packards.(35) Four Ford ambulances, donated by J. P. Morgan, were said to be on the way from New York.

In the village of Ricquebourg, halfway between Compiegne and Montdidier, the scouting party found a beautiful and spacious chateau, which seemed suitable, though it needed some repair and modernization (for example, running water) before it could function as a hospital. The chateau was also within three hundred yards of a French battery that invited the attention of enemy fire. Nevertheless, the Harjes group was assured, should the German infantry break through, that they would have plenty of time to evacuate. The group settled in and work began the next day.(36) For the first time, an American volunteer unit was setting up a hospital and ambulance service in the field, relatively close to the battle lines.

Two of Toland's favorite surgeons from the Majestic Hotel Hospital, Drs. Joll and DeQuelen, came out on October 11 to help the Harjes crew get started. Their operational model, naturally, was the Majestic, where the ambulance service (that is, the omnibus that Toland and Mrs. F occasionally drove) was secondary to the medical service. Drivers were members of the general hospital staff rather than an independent ambulance corps. Accordingly, when Clarence Mitchell joined the Harjes unit, he and the others who drove its ambulances regarded themselves as employees of a hospital, and therefore undertook whatever hospital chores needed to be done. "I have been working in the wards a good deal," Mitchell wrote his parents in December of 1914, "and this morning I put in chopping Wood."(37) Ambulance driving was simply one of the tasks he was assigned as an employee of the field hospital.

Given the extensive renovation required, and the proximity of the French battery, the setup at the Ricquebourg chateau didn't work out, so on October 26 the Harjes unit relocated to Compiegne. Less than a week later, Harjes drove out from Paris with instructions for his group to move again, this time to a chateau outside Montdidier belonging to French Minister of Finance Monsieur Klotz. Significantly, the instructions to move had originated at the 4th Corps of the French Second Army, which was expecting a large battle and a concomitant number of wounded.(38) In other words, the Harjes group was complying with, or at least responding to, a French Army request.

The following day, November 2, the medecin en chef of the Montdidier district and the chief surgeon of the largest hospital at Montdidier arrived, apparently uninvited and unannounced, to inspect Harjes' medical facilities. After giving their approval, the officials, suggested that some of the Montdidier patients might be transferred to Harjes' hospital. On the morning the transfer was to begin, a fierce battle broke out near the small town of Roye, and all available vehicles were pressed into emergency duty. By order of the Montdidier medecin en chef, every ambulance, including the five Harjes Packards, was sent to one of the rear-line holding stations in the region around Roye. Each of the Packards, which were big cars -- the one Toland was driving was a six-cylinder Packard 30 -- had room for six stretchers, and ended up transporting 250 couches (stretcher cases; those blesses or wounded men, able to sit up were called assis), most of whom were taken to Montdidier hospitals. Rolling all day and through most of the night, the Harjes ambulances played a far more prominent role than had the hospital to which they were assigned. Indeed, it was the biggest day the Harjes Ambulance Mobile de Premiers Secours had had so far.(39)

A few days later, French officials ordered the Harjes Packards back into the field, again without consulting the Harjes hospital. About three in the afternoon," Toland wrote in his diary, "the Medecin Chef sent for all of our cars again. . . . I was detailed to car No. 9. When we got to the [holding] station they had fifty men to take to Breteuil, twenty-two kilometers west of US."(40) French military and medical officials had found Harjes' ambulances efficient and convenient -- an eminently valuable autonomous service on which they could call regardless of the hospital to which it was formally attached. Gradually, Harjes' ambulance corps began to split off from the hospital unit and function independently. The Morgan-Harjes operation was evolving into two discrete groups: the medical staff, whose job it was to maintain a functional hospital, and the ambulance drivers, whose services were increasingly being called upon by second-line French officials.

As the separation between the medical and ambulance personnel formalized, the differences between the type of volunteer each attracted became more distinct. Signing up for hospital duty was quite unlike offering to drive an ambulance. Hospitals were hectic and crowded, yet guided by strict rules, and staffed with other overworked angels of mercy; ambulance driving was usually carried out alone. In an ambulance, you were alone, heading blindly down a bomb-cratered, unmarked dirt road to god-knows-where in a rattletrap of a car. Each job appealed to individuals with fundamentally different motives, attitudes toward the war, skills, expectations, and degrees of recklessness. The two sorts of work reinforced personality traits. If the volunteer ambulance driver and the volunteer hospital worker weren't that different when they arrived, the demands and pressures of their disparate jobs soon made them so.

The Morgan-Harjes unit was growing increasingly interested in and attractive to men who were more familiar with automobiles than with hospital work. When Clarence Mitchell decided to sail for France after the war broke out, he thought the type of assistance he could offer would be medical, not mechanical. He hadn't calculated exactly what he would do when he got to Paris, but he figured he would probably help out at the American Military Hospital in Neuilly. Upon his arrival in Paris on October 17, Mitchell presented a letter of introduction to an official at the Morgan-Harjes Bank. The official, who knew relatively little about the Neuilly hospital, said that Harjes had a unit "just behind the firing line and needs another man who understands automobiles, and I [Mitchell] can probably have the job."(41)

Two weeks later, after hurriedly practicing his driving and passing the requisite test, Mitchell was assigned to the Harjes unit. Despite anxious projections by the 4th Corps of the French Second Army (which had instructed Harjes to move his unit to Monsieur Klotz's chateau outside Montdidier), the sector was still rather quiet when Mitchell arrived, so he spent his first days making trips to and from the local train station. The action picked up "Mitchell called it a "rush" on November 5, and the drivers of the Harjes Packards, including Mitchell and Toland, were instr-ucted to proceed beyond the train station and pick up wounded men from the Warsy and Dancourt assembly points a few miles behind the trenches. Mitchell soon felt as if the Harjes ambulances had become part of the French Army. "This job beats working in the American [Military] Hospital four ways at once," he wrote his parents on November 11, 1914. "The field work is exciting and very good exercise. . . ."(42) Mitchell and the other Harjes drivers were now largely spared the drudgery of hospital duty and made available for emergency calls from French officials. Although not yet allowed to travel to the postes de secours at the very front, neither were Harjes' drivers confined to doing tiresome jitney work, shuttling back and forth between city hospitals and train stations.

In the winter of 1914-1915, the demand for ambulance drivers and their cars spread throughout France, even in Paris, where only a few months earlier the American Ambulance Board had displayed only a minimal commitment to its transportation service. The attitude of the Board had changed. "I had a note from the American [Military] Hospital, " Mitchell observed in December, "offering me a driving job, and one from F[rancis] C[olby] asking me to join his ambulance corps."(43) By February of 1915, the British Army started allowing British Red Cross groups, such as the Friends' Ambulance unit, to work the British Expeditionary Force's advanced dressing stations, a change in policy that incurred Mitchell's envy and admiration. "The English Red Cross men are nervy beyond belief," he wrote, "and the casualties among them are very high, even among the ambulance drivers who run up in daylight to the second line of trenches."(44)

The conversion of local hospitals and civic institutions near the battle zones into military hospitals was virtually completed by the early spring of 1915. Anyone setting up a hospital or clinic finally realized that they needed their own ambulance corps to bring into them. Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, who completely refurbished a sixteenth-century seminary in the small village of Juilly (population 400) into a second American Military Hospital provides an example. Hospital B, as Mrs. Whitney's clinic was called, opened February 1, 1915, but it had no operational ambulance service.(45) Consequently, when Mitchell visited Hospital B a week later, he found "electric lights, steam heat, scientific sewerage, bath tubs, [and] two hundred and fifty beds -- but no patients."(46) This problem was rectified when Mrs. Whitney and the American Hospital Board in Paris arranged for a corps of ambulances to serve her hospital.

Given the disproportionate abundance of medical facilities in the Montdidier sector, as compared with the paucity of ambulance service, Harjes dropped the hospital branch from his operations in mid-February. "Our hospital is closed," Mitchell wrote on February 19, 1915, "but our ambulance service is to be kept going."(47) Indeed, Harjes' unit now included volunteers whose full-time job it was to drive its ambulance fleet, which consisted of two six-cylinder Packards, a 35-horsepower Renault, and, when operational, three wornout 1907 Panhards (as well as a 1907 Renault light truck).(48) Although later augmented by other vehicles and some new drivers, this group was all that remained of the original Morgan-Harjes Ambulance Mobile de Premiers Secours that Harjes and his wife had organized in late September of 1914. With the medical component dropped, the operation became strictly an ambulance service, known officially as the Harjes Formation.

From February to June, the Harjes Formation was attached to a regional evacuation hospital and assigned vital, if routine, duty. The hours between 8:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. were divided into three shifts, during which at least one ambulance was on duty. The Formation's on-duty drivers transported blesses who came in on the regularly scheduled sanitary trains, helped distribute the sick and wounded brought in from the front by French Army convoys, and delivered urgent cases that arrived randomly and unannounced from the front throughout the day. The off-duty Harjes ambulances were kept on alert. It was strictly jitney work.

Like the Harjes Formation, the ambulance corps headed by Richard Norton and A. Piatt Andrew were also attached to rear-line bases during late 1914 and early 1915. In these first months, Norton's unit was attached to the British Red Cross headquarters in Boulogne, and Andrew initially was overseeing the cars and drivers dispatched by the American Military Hospital in Neuilly. Both units were deployed in regions controlled by the British Expeditionary Force, north of the Harjes Formation, and they were all also pretty much limited to jitney duty, although their collective hearts ached for work more demanding and consequential.

The tedium of the American volunteers' life ended in the summer of 1915. The Harjes, Norton, and Andrew volunteer units grew dramatically, and their services became essential to the French Army. As their respective affiliations with regional base hospitals were dropped, the American units all became first-line ambulance services attached to specific divisions of the French Armies. Soon, Americans seemed to be everywhere up and down the French front, as Andrew observed. "In 1915," he said, "the little American ambulances could be seen scurrying over the flat plains of Flanders, on the wooded hills of northern Lorraine, and in the mountains and valleys of reconquered Alsace."(49)

Steerforth