Easter Sunday, April 20, 1919

April 20, was Easter Sunday in 1919, in both the East and the West.

Things weren't going well that Easter Sunday in much of Christendom, including in the domain of the largest Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox.  On this day in 1919, the Red Army's First Army surrendered to the Ukrainian Blacks, a quixotic anarchist army, in the Ukraine. The blacks were an army that was fighting for a stateless state. . . which sounds like it'd be just about as successful as it turned out to be, but they were having some military success at the time.

Ukrainian black cavalry.  They did have commanders, and the like, which makes their being anarchist problematic right from the start.

In the same war, but in Moldova, the French army blew up a Bridge in order to keep advancing Reds from taking the town of Bender.

On the same day, Hungarian Communist Bela Kun asked for volunteers for the Hungarian Red Army, proclaiming the Hungarian Communist revolution in danger.  It indeed was in danger as its support was limited.

Kun, as we earlier noted, would end up in Russia after the failure of the Hungarian Communist revolution and end up as a figure in the Russian Civil War in the Crimea, where he played a part in ordering the execution of civilians, the Communist being fond of executing the people in the name of the people's state.  Large number of people would die in this instance.  Following that, the Soviets sent him to Germany where he backed a Communist revolution in 1922 which was a failure, and in turn Lenin blamed himself for sending Kun to Germany in the first instance.  Returned to the Soviet Union in 1928 he spent the next decade in internal Communist infighting, sometimes denouncing fellow Hungarians, until his opposition to the Popular Front concept lead to his arrest and execution.

Bela Kun as a prisoner in 1937, before he shared the fate he'd approved of for others.

In Germany, things remained in a state of turmoil, although newsreel footage shows that a lot of people actually turned out in Berlin this day to generally enjoy Easter.

On the same day, the newspaper The Sun ran scenes of the German government's response to the thread of further Communist uprisings in Berlin.

Crowds gathered as the zoo in Washington D. C. for an Easter Egg roll.

Things were much more normal that Easter in the United States.

And in far off Alaska St. George's Episcopal Church was dedicated near Valdez.

In Wyoming, the "ain't no Sunday's west of Omaha" type of logic was apparently at work:

1919  A pipeline was completed between Lost Soldier and the site of the former Ft. Fred Steele. Ft. Fred Steele was a railhead on the Union Pacific Railroad at this time. Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.