Friday, July 17, 1942. End of the Archangle Route, Soviet female snipers, Combat at El Alamein, Case Blue resupplied from the air.

Churchill informed Stalin that in light of the PQ 17 disaster, convoys to Archangel would be suspended. Stalin already believed that the British were exaggerating about their losses.

It's worth noting, in my view, that Stalin's grasp, in my view, of the difficulties faced by the Western Allies tended to be clouded.  The Soviet Union was no more of a naval power than Imperial Russia had been, indeed considerably less so, and Stalin's ability to grasp the problems faced by the United States Navy and Royal Navy was not necessarily great.

Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Roza Shanina appeared on the cover of Life Magazine.

Pavlichenko.

Pavlichenko, as her last name would indicate, was Ukrainian.  She was sent on a tour of the United States and Canada in 1942, where she was very blunt in her comments and found the questions asked of her by the press to sometimes be stupid.  Her husband died during the war, and she suffered from his loss and PTSD until her early death at age 58 in 1974.

Shanina

Shanina was a Russian from northwestern Russia.  Unlike Pavlichenko, she was highly photogenic and there are a great number of photos of her as a result, in which she is usally broadly smiling.

A bright, highly intelligent woman, she was killed in action in January 1945.

Shanina's death notice to her mother.

Australian and British forces at El Alamein attempted to take Miteirya Ridge, succeeded at first against Italian troops, but were later pushed back by combined German and Italian forces.

The Luftwaffe airlifts 200 tons of fuel to advancing German forces in Russia.  Hitler moved his headquarters to Werewolf, where he plans to personally oversee Case Blue.

Thursday, June 8, 1922. The Show Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries

In part of what would end up being a decades long process, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began to the massacre of its fellow travelers. The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries began.

Scene from the trial.

The Socialist Revolutionaries were a left wing Russian Party that were pro-democracy and had participated in Kerensky's government.  Indeed, the Socialist Revolutionaries out polled the Bolsheviks in the 1917 election for a Constituent Assembly, and only the Bolshevik's illegal seizure of power precluded a democratic body from forming.  By 1922, they had been crushed, but Lenin's government opted for a show trial anyhow, resulting in death sentences for the party figures who were tried.

It turned into a pr disaster, with the victims of the show trial becoming a cause célèbre among non Communist radicals.  Marxist, but anti Bolshevik, Karl Kausky said about the event:

The Bolsheviki were first to use violence against other socialists. They dissolved the Constituent Assembly not by way of resistance against any violence on the part of the Socialists-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki, but because of their realization of their own inability to obtain the support of a majority of the peasants and workers by means of free propaganda. This was the fundamental cause of the Bolshevist coup d'etat against the representatives of the revolutionary workers and peasants. Hence, the abolition of all rights of all other socialists who refused to submit to the crack of the Bolshevist whip. Hence, the establishment of a political regime which leaves but one form of open political action for the opposition — civil war.... The real crime of which the Socialists-Revolutionists are guilty before the Bolsheviki at the present moment is not in the preparation of terroristic acts and armed uprisings, but in that...[they] are acquiring in ever increasing measure the confidence of the toiling masses of Russia. This bids fair to bring about the complete isolation of the Bolsheviki in a short time.

The results of the trial were that Central Committee of the SRP were found guilty, of course, and sentenced to death.  The Communists position was still sufficiently tenuous that disquiet over the results meant the sentences were commuted. All twelve were later murdered during Stalin's purges, of course.

While this trial was a well known event, and while mass killings were already a feature of Soviet rule, Stalin's later purges overshadowed these to such a degree that they're often treated as something uniquely Stalinesque.  In truth, the Communist Party everywhere featured the murder of its rivals as a norm, once in power, and murdering those who were closest to it in views, but not wholly their views, was not unusual at all.  In some ways, therefore, Stalin's murder of party members was a mere continuation to what had become the blood soaked norm already, different only in degree and that it was typically based on nothing at all.

Monday, May 8, 1922. The Spread of Soviet Terroristic Justice.

Monument to the victims of the Soviet confiscation in Shuya on Wikipedia. By Сергей Дорогань - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62975457

In the Russian city of Shuya, eight Russian Orthodox priests, two laymen, and one woman were sentenced to death for resisting the state confiscation of church property.

The episode was part of the cynical 1922 Soviet campaign to confiscate the wealth of the Russian Orthodox Church on the pretext of famine relief, a famine that Soviet policies and ineptitude had itself brought about.  No amount of stored church wealth was going to address what the Soviets had brought about and the effort has been argued simply as an excuse to attempt to break the back of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Lenin demanded the death penalty and Trotsky, who of course would ultimately lose his life as well at the hands of Soviet policy, concurred, but Politburo member Lev Kamenev intervened, saving the lives of the laypersons and three of the priests.  While Lenin was the dictator of the Soviet Union at the time, Soviet power was not yet as fully concentrated as it would become under Stalin, such that Kamenev could intervene.

Lenin was days away from a stroke at the time, and Kamenev would rise to be the acting head of the Soviet Union as a result in 1923 and 1924.  In that role, he sided with Stalin against Trotsky.  In 1936, he was a victim of one of Stalin's purges.

Sunday, December 21, 1941. The Long Short Days.

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.  It'd be another long day for the United States and the British Commonwealth, however.

The Japanese landed troops at Lingayen Gulf and Lamon Bay in the Philippines.

Wake Island was heavily bombed.

The Kingdom of Thailand entered into a formal alliance with the Empire of Japan.

Off of Portugal the Battle of Convey HG-76 raged as German U-boats and Allied ships sought to amke progress and destroy each other.  Meanwhile, a British Swordfish torpedo bomber sank the German U-451 off of Morocco, from which only one crew member survived.

The Red Army and the German Army begin a week of close quarter fighting in Kaluga.

German and Romanian units commenced murdering Jews in the Bogdanovka concentration camp.  In two weeks they would kill 30,000 individuals.

Winston Churchill sent birthday wishes, late, to Stalin, whose actual birthday was December 18. The note states:

I send you sincere good wishes for your birthday and hope that future anniversaries will enable you to bring to Russia victory, peace and safety after so much storm.

As noted in Today In Wyoming's History: December 21:

1941  $5,077 collected in Sheridan Wyoming war relief drive. Attribution.  Wyoming State Historical Society.

The Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants in the NFL Championship.

Peetie Wheatstraw, whose real name was William Bunch, died when a car he was a passenger in was hit by a train. At the height of his popularity, the bluesman was 39 years old.

The Man Born To Be King, a BBC dramatization of the life of Jesus, premiered on the British Broadcasting Corporation Home Service.

The Home Service started airing in 1922, and was later replaced as Radio 4.