Showing posts with label Czechoslovakia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Czechoslovakia. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Thursday, March 12, 1924 Exile in Florida.

Adolfo de la Huerta went into exile to Florida, following his initial flight to Los Angeles after the collapse of his revolution in Mexico.  He's soon return to Los Angeles.

The World Court of the League of Nations issued its decision in the border dispute between Poland and Czechoslovakia within the Orava Territory. Czechoslovakia was allowed to retain Javorina and Ždiar in return for ceding Nižná Lipnica to Poland. Poland ceded territory around Sucha Góra and Glodōvka became Suchá Hora and Hladovka in what is now Slovakia.  The dispute had led to conflict in 1919.

Last prior:

Monday, March 10, 1924. Denby resigns.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Friday, January 25, 1924. The First Winter Olympics.

The 1924 Winter Olympics opened in Chamonix.  It was the first winter games.


The USSR renamed Petrograd, which had been founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and named after St. Peter, Leningrad, thereby substituting the name of a name of a lawyer turned mass murder in place of that of the Christian saint and first Pope.


While Lenin's foul body remains in a specialized mausoleum for worship by the secular, the city regained its rightful name in June 1991, when it appeared that Russia might escape the treachery of its recent past.

Mexican rebels took Morelia.

Czechoslovakia and France signed a mutual defense treaty.

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Monday, March 8, 1943. The Czechs enter the fight.

The Battle of Sokolovo began on the Eastern Front, the same being an Allied delaying action near Kharkiv.


We may say "Allied" here, as it is regarded as the first instance of a "foreign" military unit serving alongside the Red Army, with that being the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Field Battalion.  Of course, if we credit the fact that a lot of Red Army units were regional in nature, and those regions part of the Russian dominated USSR by force, it muddies the waters a bit, but perhaps not too much.

The unit's history is complicated in that the unit included Czech refugees from the Third Reich, but also Ukrainian Czechs who had been in Ukraine since the turn of the prior century. Relocating in western Ukraine, they were severely repressed by the Soviet Union.  Following World War Two, most of them relocated to Czechoslovakia under a Czech law of return.  Indeed, so many Ukrainian Czech joined the unit that they became the corps of the post-war Czech Army that existed in the newly formed Czechoslovakia.

Thursday, February 16, 2023

Tuesday, February 16, 1943. Mildred Harnack executed. Theresienstadt temporairly spared. Domenikon not spared. Norwegian paratroopers drop. Stalin asks for a "second front".

Himmler ordered a cessation of deportations of elderly Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto, resulting in a complete sessaion of deportations of all Jews from there for six months.  Oddly, the ghetto had been designated as a location where elderly Jews could live out tehir lives, albeit not comfortably, resulting in the order, but a peson has to wonder to what extent the order simply wasn't practical, given the massive strain hte war had put on the German railways system, which was being compounded by German deportations.

Italian soldiers commenced reprisal murders of Greek civilians at Domenikon which would result in 175 Greek men being killed.

Norwegian paratroopers were dropped by the British at Skrykenvann in preparation for a raid on the hydro plant at Vemork, targeted at heavy water production.

East German stamp in honor of the Harnacs.

Mildred Harnack, née Fish, a 41-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, was executed by guillotine at Germany's Plötzensee Prison on orders of Adolph Hitler.  

Harnack was an academic who married Arvid Harnack, a German academic. The couple moved to Arvid's native land, and in the 1930s the couple, if not outright Communists, were at least serious fellow travelers, something not that unusual for academics at the time.  While this was the case, they nonetheless were members of the American Church in Berlin, a Protestant church which Americans attended prior to the war.

The Harnacks were members of the Red Orchestra, which lead to her arrest and execution.  

The story of her death is largely unknown in the US and was in fact suppressed by the US government due to their Communist sympathies.   The U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) concluded her execution "justified", which legally it likely was, given that the sentence for treason was death everywhere at the time. That doesn't make her effort any less noble, of course.

Josepah Stalin, who was fighting a one front, if gigantic, war wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, reiterating the need for a "second front".  The United States was, of course already engaged in a second front in North Africa, a third front in the Pacific, and a basically a fourth front on the Atlantic, none of which involved the Soviets.

The Western Allies, throughout the war, loyally plade this sharade with Stalin, who was, of course, a former German ally, none of which is to belittle the giant Soviet war effort, but which is also not to ignore that the effort was being heavily supplied by the Western Allies.  Soviet propoganda, particularly in the USSR itslef, was so effective on thsi score, hoewver, that unfortunately modern Russians still believe it.

Former slave George Washington Buckner, and later U.S. Minister to Liberia (1913 to 1915) died in Indiana at age 87.  He was also a physician.


Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Monday, January 4, 1943. Stalin, Man of the Year.

Stalin appeared on the cover of Time Magazine as the 1942 Man of the Year.


Japanese Prime Minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, ordered Japanese forces to withdraw from Guadalcanal.

A unit of the Jewish Fighting Organization launched an unsuccessful attack aimed at the Czestochowa Ghetto.  On the following day the Nazis, as a reprisal, killed 250 children and elderly, and shipped the remaining ghetto residents to concentration camps.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was born in Rockville Centre, New York.

Friday, June 10, 2022

Wednesday June 10, 1942. The Massacre of Lidice

The Germans destroyed the Czech town of Lidice in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.  All men older than fifteen were killed immediately, numbering some 172.  Most of the children were murdered later.  

The Germans filmed the murders they committed on this day.

Ultimately, 192 men, 60 women, and 88 children would be killed by the Germans from Lidice.  The Germans forcibly aborted the babies of four pregnant women from the village.

Following the war, 153 women and 17 children returned, and the city town was rebuilt.

The entire event not only stands as a symbol of German barbarity during World War Two, but as an example of how absolutely preverse it was.

Sandra Sundon notes the "Big Inch" was approved.

Today in World War II History—June 10, 1942: “Big Inch”

It was a pipeline


More specifically, it was a pipeline that, together with the "Little Inch", took oil from Texas to the East Coast, thus allowing it to evade submarines.  Prior to the Inch pipelines, oil was transported for delivery to the East Coast by ship.

Economist John Maynard Keynes was made a peer.  I'm not a Keynes fan and think his theories have largely ended up in governments' being fiscally irresponsible.  So, just as I feel we should go back and rescind Nixon's pardon, I think we ought to de-peer Keynes.

Sunday, March 28, 2021

March 28, 1921. Empires coming and going.

Street in Seattle on March 28, 1921.

Things went from bad to worse for Charles I, the last Austro Hungarian Emperor, when newly created Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia warned Hungary that if the regained the Hungarian throne, they'd declare war on Hungary.

All of those countries, combined with Austria, had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and they feared that Charles I's restoration as King of Hungary would be followed by a claim to restore the Austro Hungarian Empire.

Winston and Clementine Churchill were the subjects of a reception at the Government House in Jerusalem.


Also present was Abdullah I and his entourage.  Abdullah's army had occupied Jordan without opposition.  He was a British client, but the situation was tense as his actions were not yet recognized as legitimate.

The U.S. launched the USS Corry, a Clemson class destroyer that would serve only nine years.  The ship had been ordered in World War One, like all of the ships then being commissioned, but finished to late to serve in the war.


The Corry was one of 60 ships decommissioned as too expensive to maintain at the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Australian Department of Civil Aviation was formed as the Civil Aviation Branch of the Australian Defense Department.

An Easter Egg roll was held on the White House grounds.  Easter was the day prior in 1921.



Saturday, March 20, 2021

March 20, 1921. The Upper Silesian Plebiscite

"Vote for Poland and you will be free", a pro Polish campaign poster.  Interestingly, while the vote would go on largely ethnic lines, this poster was in Polish and German.

A plebiscite was held in Upper Silesia to determine its national fate. The result apportioned the territory between Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia. 

This would, of course, help set the game board for World War Two, as did the Treaty of Riga from the day prior.  Germany wasn't content with the results, and in actuality Poland really wasn't either.  When Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia in the following decade, Poland took a piece, although I think of lower Silesia and other border areas, before it soon faced Germany's territorial expansion itself.  Czechoslovakia took them back in October 1939 and then the border returned to its 1920 line following World War Two.

Also following World War Two almost all of Upper Silesia was placed in Poland.  Interestingly, unlike Lower Silesia, not all of its ethnic German population was expelled as some of it was bilingual and as the Germans in Upper Silesia were Catholic, and somewhat intermixed with the Polish population, some were allowed to remain.  The region currently has a small autonomy movement.

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

July 28, 1920. Villa comes in.

On this day in 1920, President de law Huerta of Mexico and Pancho Villa met and negotiated an armistice.  Villa ended his role as a guerilla leader in exchange for a land grant of 25,000 acres in Canutillo, Mexico.  His remaining 200 troops were to go with him to his hacienda, also receiving a pension of 500,000 gold pesos upon their laying down arms. Fifty of his men were to remain in his service as bodyguards.

Villa and his acknowledged wife, Luz Corral, in 1923.  Villa's domestic situation was complicated but Corral was able to claim the position of legitimacy in regards to his female consorts.

It would be predictable that a character like Villa would not remain outside of politics indefinitely, and that would seem to have not only been correct, but to have lead to his assassination in 1923.  A person can debate whether Villas armistice on this date, or his assassination in 1923, really marked the end of the armed struggle phase of the Mexican Revolution, but the better argument would be this date.  That would, of course, regard the Cristero War that broke out in 1926 as a separate event.

It might be noted, and notable, that no newspapers appear here in our entry for this day.  That's because the news broke sufficiently late, and inaccurately, that it appeared in only one of Wyoming's newspapers. That one reported that Villa had agreed to an unconditional surrender, which he had not.

On that day, the news was focused on the fate of Poland, which was struggling within own borders against the Red Army, and on Resolute wining the America's Cup.

Resolute.

Also on this day, the Duchy of Teschen was divided between the new state of Czechoslovakia and Poland, which must have given its residents at least a little pause, given that the fate of Poland at the time did not look good.

Unknown to the world, Archibald Leach, a 16 year old actor, arrived in the United States with members of The Penders, an acting troop.  We know him as Cary Grant.

Cary Grant in 1941.

Grant had an extremely difficult early youth, which may explain his being on the road at such an early age.  His father was an alcoholic and his mother clinically insane.  His father had committed his mother to a mental hospital and told Grant that she was dead.  He would not learn that she was still alive until after his acting career had taken off.

Air Mail in the United States had two notable events, one being the end of a strike in which it was promised that pilots would no longer be required to fly in dangerous weather.  The other was the taking off of two all metal planes from New York on a transcontinental air mail flight that would take them to a landing in San Francisco on August 8.  Moving the mail by train, actually, might have been quicker in that instance.

Monday, October 29, 2018

Countdown on the Great War, October 29,1918: Austria announces it wants to quit, the birth of Yugoslavia and the mutiny in the German navy spreads.

Headlines in Cheyenne informing readers that the Austrians were seeking to quit the war.

1.  Austria seeks an armistice from the Italians, and also with the Allies in general. 

The Casper Daily Press, no doubt under pressure from its other Casper competitors, announced that it was gong to a weekly in this same issue in which it spoke of Autro Hungaria's desire to get out of the war and the continued ravages of the Spanish Flu.

2.  The Allies occupied Vittorio Veneto, Italy.

3.  The German Navy abandoned its plans for final offensive operations.  Mutinous sailors would soon return to their ships and demonstrate their loyalty, at first.  Before that, however, the mutiny spread to Wilhelmshaven.

4. The State of the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs proclaimed its independence from Austro Hungaria.  Czechoslovakia was also declared as a state on this date.

5.  The Ottomans held their positions at the Battle of Sharqat, the first time that they had done so for weeks.


Tuesday, October 16, 2018

October 16, 1968. The Black Power Salute and the Ratification of the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia.

1.  On this day in 1968, African American Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the infamous Black Power Salute in their medal ceremony. They were later stripped of their medals.

Their action at the Mexico City Olympics remain extremely controversial, making the entire "taking the knee" drama in football appear quite minor in comparison. An act in support of civil rights for black Americans, it also came at a time during which the United States was at war in Vietnam and the clenched fist was associated with the extreme left.  It also came in a location, Mexico City, which had only recently seen violence committed by the government against students.

2.  Czech Prime Minister Oldrich Cernik, against his real wishes, signed a treaty with the USSR recognizing the Soviets right of occupation of his country.

    Tuesday, August 21, 2018

    Nicolae Ceaușescu denounces the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, August 21, 2018.

    The Communist leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, delivered a speech in support of the Czech government and against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

    We remember Ceaușescu for his bloody demise in the Romanian uprising in 1989.  Ironically, if he had been able to read the tea leaves better, he might be remembered for this, his statement in favor of Romania and against the USSR, a brave thing to do under the circumstances, in 1968.

    Monday, August 20, 2018

    The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Invade Czechoslovakia. August 20, 1968.

    Czechs with their flag walking past a burning Warsaw Pact tank. 

    On this day in 1968 the Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia.

    The action commenced very late in the day, at 11:00 p.m. to be precise, and featured an armored invasion by forces from the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary.  The total combined Warsaw Pact forces totaled 500,000 troops, the same number of men that the United States committed to Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War.  It was not a small operation.


    The Czechs had not prepared for the invasion and the government quickly called on its citizenry to not resist, a call that wasn't fully headed.  In part the Czechs were of the view that resistance was futile, which explains a lack of preparation, but they had also assumed that they would not be invaded by fellow Communist countries, a naive assumption.  Having said that, Romania, Yugoslavia an Albania refused to participate.  Indeed, the invasion was denounced by Romania on the day it occurred and Albania reacted by withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact.

    Saturday, August 18, 2018

    A Storm Starts in the Prague Spring. August 18, 1968.


     WARNING! Border Zone. Enter only on authorization.

    It had been building for awhile, but on this date it became inevitable.  Leonid Brezhnev convened an meeting with his Warsaw Pack counterparts which made the invasion of Czechoslovakia inevitable.

    We haven't really dealt with the Prague Spring much here, but this was one of those events of 1968 which would explode onto the news.  The term refers to a reform movement undertaken by the sitting Czechoslovakian government to liberalize and open up the nation in spite of its Communist rule.  In some ways, the movement prefigures what would happen in the later Polish Solidarity movement and the following Czech Velvet Revolution.

    Czechoslovakia had never been an eager Communist nation and had fallen to Communism in what was effectively a slow motion coup immediately following World War Two, in 1948.  It had never been an enthusiastic Communist nation however and its indigenous Socialist party had a history of hostility towards the Soviet Union dating back to the Russian Civil War.  In 1968 it introduced a series of reforms that started opening the country up, moving it in a less authoritarian direction.  Indeed, it completely eliminated censorship of the press, a revolutionary move in any Communist country, and it had set in motion reforms designed to allow freedom of movement and refocus the economy on consumer goods.  It was fairly clearly moving in a direction that far departed from conventional Communism.

    Czech Legion soldiers, mostly Socialist, near an armored train. The Czech Legion had fiercely fought their way across Russia in a bitter campaign against the Red Army in a successful effort to return to the fighting the Germans in 1918.

    This caused the USSR grave concern.

    And not without reason.

    While little appreciated or understood in the West, Soviet Communism had never been anywhere near as stable as imagined and had struggled with forces dedicated to its elimination since day one.  In the USSR itself, armed resistance to the Communist carried on until the late 1920s, well after the Russian Civil War is generally imagined to have ceased.  During World War Two large numbers of Soviet citizens fought against the Reds and with, or allied to, the Germans for a variety of reasons.  That carried on inside the USSR in some quarters against hopeless odds into the late 1940s.

     German postage stamp commemorating the 1953 uprising against the Soviets.

    The USSR had imposed Communism on the the Eastern European countries, as is well known, following World War Two.  But that too saw resistance.  In 1953 East Germans rose up against the Soviets, the first East Block rebellion against the USSR since the end of the war and perhaps ironically one which saw the defeated Germans take on the victorious Soviets.  It was of course put down.  In 1956 the Hungarians tried the same thing in a revolution that Hungarians naively hoped would see Western intervention.  So the Czechs were not unaware of the risks.

    This was particularly so as leading into the late summer, the Soviets had sent various representatives to the Czechs to try to redirect them, without success.

    Wednesday, July 18, 2018

    Intel, the semi conductor company, was founded

    as NM Electronics by former Fairchild Semiconductor employees Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore on this day in 1968.

    The rumblings of the computer revolution were beginning to be heard.

    In Canada, the mailman wasn't being heard as the employees of Canada Post went on strike. For businesses near the US border this meant compensating by renting post office boxes in nearly by US locations.

    Alexander Dubcek went on national Czech media to inform his people that he'd continue his democratic reforms as Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia in spite of pressure form the Soviet Union to stop it.

    And Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil announced the discovery of oil in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, which the companies had made some months prior.

    It was a busy day.

    Wednesday, March 28, 2018

    Thursday, February 1, 2018

    Some major 1968 events we already missed.


     USS Pueblo.

    This blog won't become the This Day In 1968 Blog, like it threatened to become for 1915, 16, 17, and 18.

    But it is 50 years ago, and it was quite a year, as already noted.  We may, therefore, take note of some things that occurred during it.

    Here's what we already missed:

    January 4:  Mattel introduced Hot Wheels.

    I, and every boy I knew, loved those little cars.

    Shoot, I still do.

    January 5:  Alexander Dubcek chosen as the leader of the Czech Communist party, ushering in the Prague Spring.

    This seemed to usher in some hope that Communism in Eastern Europe would evolve into Democratic Socialism, something, it would would soon show, that the USSR was not prepared to accept.

    January 21.  The Battle of Khe Sanh, a diversion of for the Tet Offensive, commences.

    The battle was one of the few real sieges of the American war in Vietnam.  The Marine Corps defended the base valiantly, supplied from the air by the United States Air Force.  In April the siege ended when the U.S. Army reestablished ground connection with the base.  While an American victory of a sort, the fact that the NVA was capable of laying an American force to siege, would be a factor in the change in the public's mind on the war.   And, we started to look like the French, in a way, with there being shades of Dien Bien Phu.

    January 22:  Rowan & Martin's Laugh In debuts. 

    Funny, and irreverent, and featuring a mild form of the exist humor that characterized a lot of American humor at the time, it was hugely popular.

    January 23. The USS Pueblo taken.

    As if there wasn't enough grim news, the seizure of an American vessel, and the poor performance of the Navy's officer corps as it happened, made the Americans look anemic and caused concern that the Korean War was about to revive.

    The ship is still held by North Korea.

    January 30.  The Tet Offensive launched.

    We'd win the battle, but the public's mind was lost by the fact that the NVA and VC could launch such a major offensive after years of war.  A desperate gamble on their part, it proved to be a gamble that would pay off.

    January 31:  The US embassy in Saigon attacked by the Viet Cong.

    Part of the Tet Offensive, of course.


    All that and 1968 was just a month old.

    Monday, November 6, 2017

    October 24, 1917 (Old Style Russian Calendar). Lenin declares the Communists to be in revolt against the Russian Provisional Government

    Lenin and Trotsky sacrifice Russia to an alter of Marx while revolutionary soldiers and sailors look on in this Russian anti Bolshevik cartoon.

    And the one of the worst events in history commenced, followed by the unleashing of forces hat can only be described as evil, whose repercussions are with us today.

    First, Lenin's words, acting upon the Bolshevik Central Committee's decision the prior day that "an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe."
    I am writing these lines on the evening of the 24th.  The situation is critical in the extreme.  In fact it is now absolutely clear that to delay the uprising would be fatal.
    With all my might I urge comrades to realize that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by peoples, by the masses, by the struggle of the armed people.
    The bourgeois onslaught of the Kornilovites show that we must not wait.  We must at all costs, this very evening, this very night, arrest the government, having first disarmed the officer cadets, and so on.
    We must not wait!  We may lose everything!
    Who must take power?
    That is not important at present.  Let the Revolutionary Military Committee do it, or "some other institution" which will declare that it will relinquish power only to the true representatives of the interests of the people, the interests of the army, the interests of the peasants, the interests of the starving.
    All districts, all regiments, all forces must be mobilized at once and must immediately send their delegations to the Revolutionary Military Committee and to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks with the insistent demand that under no circumstances should power be left in the hands of Kerensky and Co.... not under any circumstances; the matter must be decided without fail this very evening, or this very night.
    History will not forgive revolutionaries for procrastinating when they could be victorious today (and they certainly will be victorious today), while they risk losing much tomorrow, in fact, the risk losing everything.
    If we seize power today, we seize it not in opposition to the Soviets but on their behalf.
    The seizure of power is the business of the uprising; its political purpose will become clear after the seizure....
    ...It would be an infinite crime on the part of the revolutionaries were they to let the chance slip, knowing that the salvation of the revolution, the offer of peace, the salvation of Petrograd, salvation from famine, the transfer of the land to the peasants depend upon them.
    The government is tottering.  It must be given the death-blow at all costs.
    The government at that point was the Russian Provisional Government, which had replaced the Imperial government and which was ruling, as a tottering democratic body, until a more perfect democratic one could be organized.  Democracy was new to Russia and the body was beset by extreme forces of all types.  Its' head, Karensky, was himself a Socialist and relatively radical and so the sometimes held concept the Communist minority (the Bolsheviks were a minority within a minority) were rebelling against the Czar or the Whites is erroneous.

     Red Guards at Vulkan factory in 1917.  Some of these men, as with many Red Guards early on, had only recently been in the Russian Imperial Army and perhaps the army of the Provisional government, which was basically disintegrating.  The Red Guards would form the first units to fight for the Communist in the Civil War, but Red reverses lead to the establishment of the Red Army in 1918 which was organized and lead by Leon Trotsky.

    The Bolshevik coup that resulted set in motion un-imagined forces of destruction and murder and, like Communist revolutions ever after, that violence would not only be visited upon their opponents but also their allies.  In spite of Lenin's words that what replaced the existing Provisional Government didn't matter, to the Bolsheviks it very much did and in the end not only would non Communist become the victims of a Red Terror, but also other radical Socialists and Leftists of all stripes.  Violence in the name of a revolutionary cause was to be unparalleled until the Communists took control in China, where Mao managed to claim the title of bloodiest modern dictator.

     Lenin and Trotsky with soldiers of the Red Army.

    In Russia, of course, the coup was far from unopposed and the country would descend into a bloody civil war which would drag on into a protracted doomed guerrilla war almost until the eve of the 1930s.  Poland, the Baltic States and Finland would leave Russia's grasp. The Ukraine attempted to but its geographic position and nature prevented that from occurring and it would be subjected to a horrific man made famine in the 1930s.  Poland would be invaded in the 1920s but threw the Soviets back, until the invasion was accomplished in league with Nazi Germany in 1939 and then completed in 1945. The Baltic States would see their independence go down due to World War Two as well although Baltic guerrillas would keep up a Quixotic effort until the late 1940s, as would some Ukrainians who attempted to use the vacuum of World War Two for the same purpose.  Only Finland would really remain free of the Communist grasp, of the former Russian Empire regions.

     Volunteer troops of one of the numerous anti Soviet Russian armies, not all of whose troops were volunteers by any means.  Poor coordination was a major factor in the defeat of the Whites who suffered greatly in that area in comparison to the Reds.  In spite of their lack of coordination, they very nearly won the Russian Civil War early on, even though they lacked any clear political goal other than defeat of the Reds.

    Communism, of course, would ultimately fall.  The East Germans would attempt it first, oddly given the German role in the absolute horror of World War Two, staging a rebellion in the form of a civil insurrection in 1953, which met with Soviet armed reaction.

    A Soviet T-34/85 tank in East Berlin, 17 June 1953. Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F005191-0040 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

    Hungary would follow in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.   But none of these efforts would prove to be successful.

    Destroyed Soviet armor in Budapest, József körút a Corvin (Kisfaludy) köznél. Harcképtelenné tett ISU-152-es szovjet rohamlövegek, a háttérben egy T-34/85 harckocs CC BY-SA 3.0.  File:József körút a Corvin (Kisfaludy) köznél. Harcképtelenné tett ISU-152-es szovjet rohamlövegek, a háttérben egy T-34-85 harckocsi. Fortepan 24854.jpg

    The first cracks in the Communist edifice occurred as early as Lenin's administration when he was forced to allow capitalism in the country on a limited basis, due to the abject failure of Communist socialism.  Stalin simply brutalized the country into economic progress, focusing on huge projects that at least were possible to organize and industrialization of what had been largely agricultural nation.  Following Stalin various Soviet leaders would attempt reforms, all of which were unknowingly and slowly headed towards liberalization.  It was Poland, however, which would set the end in motion by the legalization of Solidarity, a trade union that functioned as a political party.  Solidarity, representing Polish working men and basing its views on Catholic Social Teaching (Solidarity is a principal of Catholic Social Teaching) would force semi free elections in Poland in 1989 and the Soviets did not react.  The Czechs quickly followed with the Velvet Revolution.  The Russians themselves followed in 1991, which saw a last ditch hard core effort by the holdout Communist to once again stage a coup. That one failed.

    Today only North Korea, and perhaps Laos, are left as true Communist states. A couple of other countries claim to be, but they've evolved so far beyond it that, whatever they are, they really aren't Communist. China and Vietnam provide examples of that.  Communism, while still a darling concept of Western left wing hipsters who don't know what it every stood for, is really dead.  But the evil it unleashed in the world continues on in numerous ways, both political and social.  That destructive force will be with us for years to come.