Tuesday, September 2, 1924. Glazman kills himself.

Mikhail Glazman, one of Leon Trotsky’s closest advisers during the Russian Civil War, killed himself after being expelled from the Communist Party by Stalin.

Often not put in real context, something that's commonly missed about the Communists coming into power was the unending sea of blood associated with it.  The rise of the Communists was bloody, the Russian Civil War was bloody, the Communist in power, even before they fully seized power was bloody, and before that quit flowing the Reds turned on other Reds, and on members of their own party.  Included in the bloody pool was the blood of people like Glazman, who killed themselves for any number of reasons, some just to avoid being killed by others.

Last edition:

Monday, September 1, 1924. The Dawes Plan goes into effect.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Automobile racing, Dawes Plan, Russian All-Military Union

Monday, June 26, 1899. Birth of Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia.

Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia (Maria Nikolaevna Romanova) born. She was the third child of Czar Nicholas II of Russia and Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna and was murdered with the rest of her family on July 17, 1918. She was 19 years old at the time.  She was canonized as a Passion Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church as a result.

Of some interest, her parents were second cousins, and her mother, who was a Lutheran German, initially did not want to marry her father due to religious reasons. Her mother was ultimately persuaded to change her mind partially due to it being represented that she did not have to renounce Lutheranism in order to convert to Orthodoxy, although she ultimately became quite devout.

Last prior edition:

Sunday, June 25, 1899. The Great Wall of China Hoax.

Labels: 1890s, 1899, China, Denver, Myths, The Press

Wednesday, June 6, 1923. Defeat, no, explosion.

The Red Army defeated the Whites at Okhotsk in the last major battle of the Russian Civil War, although at least one more engagement would occur.  The results, at this point, were a foregone conclusion.

France and Belgium released a joint statement refusing to consider the new reparations proposal of Weimar as long as passive resistance to occupation was ongoing in the Ruhr.

The Army's TC-1 hydrogen filled dirigible was destroyed in a storm when winds blew it into a steel mooring tower.

Thursday, May 10, 1923. The bizarre actions of Maurice Conradi.

Soviet delegate to the Conference of Lausanne was shot dead by former Russian White officer and émigré Maurice Conradi in the Cecil Hotel.  Two other members of the Soviet mission were wounded when they attempted to resist.  Conradi then handed his gun to a waiter and asked him to call the police, which they did.

Conradi.

Conradi was born to Swiss parents in 1896.  They were living in St. Petersburg at the time, where they ran a candy factory.  Most of Conradi's family were killed during the Russian Revolution, with several being executed by the Bolsheviks.  During this period he married his wife,  Vladislava Lvovna Svartsevich, and he immigrated to Switzerland following the defeat of Wrangel's army.

Conradi and his confederate Arkady Polunin were tried that following November and defended themselves on moral grounds, introducing evidence of Communist horrors. The prosecution fell into this, oddly enough, and introduced evidence of the happiness of Soviet citizens, something that would have had to have involved an element of delusion.  The jury found that all the elements of murder were present, but failed to convict him 5 to 4 anyhow, leading to a rupture in diplomatic relations between Switzerland and the Soviet Union.

In 1925 the Conradi's moved to Paris. They divorced in 1929.  Conradi then joined the French Foreign Legion, returning to Switzerland and remarrying in 1942.  He died in 1947.  Polunin went to Paris as well and died under mysterious circumstances in 1933.

Of the Soviet survivors, one, was executed in Stalin's purges in 1938.  The other was killed in 1942 while serving in the Red Army.

About as much as can be said of this entire episode is that it was downright bizarre.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVI . To what extent is that new?

 A short thread just pondering some things in the news, or the zeitgeist, that are portrayed as "new".

1.  A war between Russia and Ukraine?

This is a horrible event, to be sure, but Russia's been trying to shove itself on Ukraine since 1917, or probably well before.

Russia is really like a giant bully in its neighborhood, which is why this is important.  It's not new.  Russia grabbed Ukraine back after the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and then fought its guerrillas in the early 20s. It fought guerrillas again from 1943 into the 1940s.  Ukraine wants to be an independent state. Russia doesn't like any of the neighboring countries to have that status.

2. Adult children living at home.

This is constantly portrayed as new, but it's the historical norm due to limited resources.

It really only began to change in the 1930s, at first due to economic desperation. That trend was amplified by World War Two, and the massive economic boom after the war really changed the situation.

A constructing economy has reversed it, as it has. . . 

3.  Delayed marriage

Marriage ages have traditionally been higher than they were in the1940s to 1970s time frame.  The reason is noted above.

Related Threads:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. At War With Nature and the Metaphysical

Prisoners of Myth I. The Russians in the war with Ukraine

How the Soviets,  and by extension the Russians, came to see themselves.  In reality the wool in the uniform may have come from the US, the steel nad munitions that supported his artillery did as well, when those jack boots wore out he may have worn service shoes, and he definately dug into SPAM for rations from time to time.

The danger of believing myths is that some become ahistorical.  

Not all, but some.

Which points out while studying history is so important.

Myth itself is something that's not existentially bad.  Cultures create myths for a reason, with that reason stretching back into antiquity.  The earliest human beings created myths, as their entire historical memory was oral.  Current events were reduced to stories, and the stories remembered through telling, with them evolving into myths over time.  For that reason, myths are often surprisingly accurate. There really was a Troy that the Greeks waged war upon. . . the Apaches and the Navajo had really once lived in a region where there were great white bears, you get the point.

The problem becomes that myth making can become a coping mechanism for a culture as well.  And that can become enormously dangerous to that culture in some instances.  The Germans adopting the theory that they hadn't been defeated on the battlefield in World War One, which they had been, lead them to adopt a "stabbed in the back" theory that lead directly to World War Two.  The myth of the "Lost Cause" resulted in rank and file Southerners forgetting that they'd gone to war over slavery and had been outright defeated on the battlefield with a huge percentage of Southern soldiers deserting before the war's end, resulting partially in the preservation of formal institutional racism well into the second half of the 20th Century.  The myth of the Stolen Election is corrupting American Conservatism and the Republican Party right now.

Russia, likewise, went into Ukraine believing in a set of myths, with one overarching myth, and its paying the price for it.

Modern Russia and the Myth of World War Two.

• The basic myth.

At some point during World War Two itself the Soviet Union started telling the myth that the USSR, alone in its fight against Nazi Germany, and supported only weakly by two untrustworthy and cowardly allies, the US and the UK defeated the Germans.

Not hardly.

But this myth, or versions of it, became all pervasive in the USSR and are still believed in Russia today.  Indeed, amazingly enough, versions of this myth became relatively common, in a different form, in the West.

It's simply not true.

Now eighty years after the fact, the history of the Second World War is starting to be more accurately told, stripped away of many of its myths, including this one.  Let's flatly state the truth of the matter here.

The Soviet Union, following its own self interests, was an occasional defacto Axis ally from 1939 until the spring of 1941.  In that capacity, it helped the Germans subjugate continental Western Europe, but the Germans were unable to defeat the British.  Unable to do just that, Germany turned its eye on Soviet resources, which the USSR was well aware it was going, and the two nations bargained on greater German access to them.  Stalin overplayed his hand and sought a post-war position from Germany, at the expense of the British Empire, which was too much for the German's to agree to, and the Germans, contemptuous of the Slavs in any event, were ready to break off the effort and go to war with the USSR, the heir to Imperial Russia, which the Germans had defeated in 1917.

The German invasion came in June 1941.  The Red Army made some heroic stands in the summer and fall of 1941, but by and large it was thrown back in defeat.  The real Soviet achievement in 41 was not being outright defeated, but it was thrown back again, on a massive scale, in 1942.  Only in the winter of 1942 did the Soviet fortunes turn, but it would take titanic efforts and massive loss of life in order for the Germans to be pushed back and ultimately defeated.

Added to that, much of the Red Army was simply never very good.  Materially, the Soviets were unable to supply their own army adequately, and that fell to the UK and the US in large part.  Only 55 to 60 percent of the Red Army was Russian, with the balance being made up of other ethnicities, including large numbers of Ukrainians, 7,000,000 of whom served in the Red Army. At no point whatsoever did the Soviets ever fight, moreover, alone.  There was always a "second" or even third and fourth front which was manned by other Western Allies alone.

• The actual truth

It's odd to think of the myth of the invincibility of the Red Army when it's also so commonly known that the Soviet state spent so much time destroying it after the Civil War.

Contrary to the way we came to imagine it, the USSR did not spend a lot of time trying to become a military titan before World War Two.  The Reds, not without good reason, somewhat feared what an effective standing army would mean to its political leadership.  People have often been mystified by the purges of the Red Army, but in context they made sense.  After the fighting of the civil war had ended, the only powers powerful enough to challenge the Communists core running the country were in the Red Army, or in other established Communists.  Both took a pounding during the purges.  Indeed, while it hardly justifies murder, it's far to ask if Stalin would have been able to remain in control of the country if political opponents like Trotsky had run around unaddressed, or if powerful military leaders had not been done away with.

Added to that, the Russian armies, and it's fair to use the plural, that we have as examples in the 1900 to 1941 time period were bad.  The Japanese had defeated the Imperial Russian Army in 1905, the same army in World War One did not turn in a stellar performance.  The Whites and the Reds did fight each other tooth and nail during the Civil War, but all civil wars tend to work that way.  The Soviets did well in some of the Russo Polish War but were ultimately defeated, and thereafter they lived in mortal fear of hte Poles, and the Romanians, even though logic would dictate that neither country was capable of being a serious military threat to the Soviet Union.

And, of note, it's clear that the Russians still fear the Poles today.

The USSR was fought to a standstill in the Winter War with Finland just before World War Two. And only in the final months leading up to June, 1941, did the Soviets undertake a real effort to build a capable modern army.  It had some raw elements of that, including some good armor and aircraft designs, but it also had a weakened military institution with no NCO corps and a murdered officer corps.  It realy wasn't able to fix this, and nobody would be, prior to the German invasion.

What the Soviets did have was a  massive amount of territory and a leader in singular control.  

What it also had on 1941 was a British Empire that was already fighting the Germans, with ground combat having been going on in North Africa since June 1940.  The German invasion of the USSR was the second front, or the third if the Battle of the Atlantic is considered.

The UK was already receiving substantial US material, and frankly military, support well before Barbarossa, but the British were a major military materials producer itself.  Both the US and the UK immediately started to offer the Soviets material support.  It would take months before it really began to arrive, but of note, it took months as well for the Red Army to become really effective.

During the war, that aid would become enormous.  The US supplied 400,000 vehicles to the Soviets, changing what had been a horse-drawn army into a mostly vehicle transport one.  Studebaker's 6x6 trucks were for all practical purposes a dedicated Soviet truck, not even entering the US military in substantial numbers.  14,000 aircraft were supplied to the Soviets, including some, like Studebaker trucks, that were essentially models dedicated to Soviet use.  13,000 US tanks were supplied, with additional numbers of British tanks also being supplied.

15,000,000 pairs of Army service shoes, the legendary U.S. Munson Last boot, were supplied to the Red Army. If you see a photo of a Soviet soldier wearing lace up boots, those are almost certainly US made ones.

107,000 tons of cotton went to the USSR for their use.  2,700,000 tons of petroleum products.  4,500,000 tons of food were supplied.

An entire Ford tire factor was supplied.

80% of the copper used by the USSR during the war came from the US and UK.  55% of the aluminum.  

Immediately after the war, before the myth really set in, Soviet sources outright admitted that the USSR could not have fought without lend lease supplies. As late as 1963 a Soviet marshal was known to have stated the same.

The Western Allies, of course, provided this for their own purposes.  It was not charity.  The Soviets were always reticent to some degree to really acknowledge it at that.  But its important to note that the option not to provide it existed.

That would have been risky, which is in part why the leaders of the Western Allies were so ready to engage in it.  The Soviets were a known potential enemy, but the Germans were a present actual enemy.  Prior to June 1941, the British had gone it alone, but they had been fighting a defensive war the entire time.  It was possible to imagine a Germany, particularly one that made some sort of accommodation to the Soviet Union, consolidating gains in Europe to the point where it would have been impossible for the British to ever dislodge them.  Even after December 7, 1941, that remained a possibility.  The Western Allies needed the Soviets in the fight, just as the Soviets needed the Western Allies in order to fight.  The Patrick Buchanan view that the Western Allies should have allowed the USSR and Nazi Germany to destroy each other is wrongheaded, as chances are good that the Germans would have forced the Soviets into a peace of some sort that secured southern Russian materials and left Germany in a position basically impossible to deal with.  Having said that, at the same time, it's not impossible either to imagine the Soviets getting to that point.

It was, after all, the Russians who had given up in the Russo Japanese War and who had collapsed in World War One. And the Soviets, who had been defeated by the Poles after the Great War. And the Soviets, who had accommodated in the Winter War, after invading Finland.  Throughout World War Two, Stalin worried about the Western Allies reaching a separate peace, but that may have really  revealed more about Soviet thinking than anything else.  The Western Allies had fought the Germans to the bitter end in 1914-1918, which the Russians had not.

Moreover, for all its self-congratulatory propaganda.

Additionally, or all its self-congratulatory propaganda, the Soviet casualty list does not suggest what it might.  Massive Red Army losses in World War Two were in no small part self-inflicted, reflecting a poorly formed army that was badly trained and lacking a NCO corps.  It also reflected a leadership that was completely immune to concern over human losses, truly viewing Soviet soldiers as cannon fodder.  The German view as quite similar.  The fighting on the Eastern Front was in part savage, as the two armies engaged had leadership which didn't really care about high losses as long as goals seemed obtainable.  The Western Allies did not fight this way as, being from democratic societies, they could not contemplate using their citizenry in such a callous fashion.

Additionally, and seemingly completely missed by Soviet propaganda, the Western Allies went int alone on the seas, with the Soviet Navy being largely irrelevant the entire war.  While the Soviet Union had a navy, it didn't really matter, which effectively means that in a war fought on the land, air, and sea, the Soviets only fought on two out of the three.

And, as earlier noted, the Soviets were latecomers to the war and, in fact, had been on the other side early on.  If the US and UK did not take such massive losses, it was because, as noted, that they didn't fight that way.  They were, however, fighting, and fighting in more areas than the USSR was.  They were not, of course, fighting on their own ground, however, which does make a real difference.

And it goes beyond that.

Over 7,000,000 Red Army troops were Ukrainians, as noted, with indigenous Poles, Turkic peoples, and others filling the Red Army ranks.  But around 1,000,000 Soviet citizens provided aid to the Germans during the war as well.

This is a complicated story, as that aid varied in nature substantially.  The most pronounced anti-Soviet variants of it might be found in Cossack elements that went over wholesale to the Germans and who served on the Eastern Front, the Western Front, and in the Balkans.  But they were not alone.  Other Soviet citizens willingly took up arms with the Germans and fought against the Moscow.  Others, particularly in Ukraine, fought against the Soviets and the Germans, reprising the odd role of the Ukrainian Greens of the Russian Civil War who fought against the Reds and the Whites. Large numbers of Red Army POWs joined Vlasov's White Russian Army, but probably did so out of a desire simply to survive the ordeal of being a German POW.  

Soviet civilians aided the Germans in varying ways as well.  The examples are too numerous not to take note of, with Soviet civilians providing all sorts of minor aid and comfort to the Germans in spite of the fact that the Germans were barbaric towards Soviet citizens, visiting death and rape upon them at a scale that was too large not to be regarded as institutionally sanctioned.  Indeed, early on Russians and Belorussians greeted the Germans as liberators, with their view largely changing due to German barbarism.  Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt, a traditional Ukrainian greeting.  They, too, came to change their views under German repression.

• Bringing the myth forward.

After the war, and even by its late stages, the Soviets were developing a myth that they had won World War Two basically on their own.  Their leadership knew better, which showed itself even as late as the 1980s, when the Soviets lived in real fear of a NATO attack upon the Soviet Union.  But the myth has solidified, and it's showing itself now.

The logical question would be why such a myth would have been developed and fostered.  There are, however, a series of reasons for that.

All nations have foundational myths that are central to their identify in a way.  The American one dates back essentially to the Revolution, and was redefined by the Civil War, giving the country the foundational story of rising up against tyranny, which isn't really true, to form a self-governing democratic republic with a unique mission in the world. The Australian one involves a history of mistreatment by the British culminating in the disaster of Gallipoli, which in truth the Australians were only one nation involved in a much larger Allied effort. Other examples could be given.

The Soviet Union going into World War Two already had the Russian Revolution, but the imposition of Communism on the Russian Empire had not been universally accepted by any means, and various peoples struggled against it into the 1930s.  The USSR had only been saved from defeat by the support of Western, capitalist, nations during World War Two, after it had first conspired with the fascist Nazi Germany, for its own reasons.  During the war, large percentages of its population, in spite of massive Nazi barbarism, had sided with the Germans, and resistance movements went on in the country until the late 1940s.  A myth of a Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets came to call it, served to counter all of that.

The modern Russian Army is not the Red Army.  For one thing, it lacks the huge number of Ukrainians that the Red Army had.  But the Red Army, without the West, was never all that good.  It was bad going into World War Two, and it survived World War Two thanks to the West.  After the war, it continued to rely on Western technology for a time, in the form of purchased Western material, and in the form of acquired German knowledge, but over the decades it had to go over to simply acquiring it however they could, and often they simply did not.

The current Russian Army retains all the vices of the old, plus one more.  Its equipment is antiquated and poor.  Its leadership is bad.  

And it believes that it was invincible during World War Two, forgetting that it wasn't defeated due to Western support, the very thing Ukraine is getting now.

Wednesday, October 25, 1922. Winners and Losers.

A "flying circus" was staged at Boling Field which even included a hot lunch being dropped in from the air.

The Dáil Éireann approved the Irish Free State Constitution Act of 1922.  It would become effective on December 6, 1922, when King George V proclaimed it, which created the Irish Free State as an independent and coequal member of the British Commonwealth.

On the same day, the Irish Republican Army declared the formation of a rival republican government with Eamon de Valera as "President of Ireland", a cabinet of ministers and a twelve member Council of State. By this point, however, the IRA did not holding any Irish territory of consequence.

Mussolini delivered an ultimatum to the Italian government, demanding that it surrender power to the Fascists.

Prince Andrew of Greece, a Greek army officer, was arrested on Corfu and charged with contributing the disastrous Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War.  The Prince, the father of the late Prince Consort Philip (Philippos) of the United Kingdom, would be allowed to leave the country.  Other Greek officers were executed or sentenced to long prison sentences.

The Red Army took Vladivostok.  As it did so, Imperial Russian General Mikhail Diterikhs was evacuated with such troops as could be evacuated by the Japanese.

Diterkhs was descended from German Lutherans from the Sudentenland and was a deeply religious Orthodox Christian.  He moved to China, as many Russian Whites from the far eastern part of Siberia did, where he died at age 63 in 1937.

Tuesday, August 8, 1922. An eventful Tuesday.

Here's more on the story involved in the photograph appearing above.

1922 - Into the Grand Canyon and Out Again by Airplane

Louis Armstrong made his first appearance with a major act, playing with King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band in Chicago.

In Italy, Mussolini ordered Fascist Blackshirts to demobilize after recent strife.

Mussolini with the Blackshirts in October, 1922.

Irish Republicans raided the Western Union station at Valentia Island and severed the four remaining cables that linked the US and Ireland, although how that helped their cause or was intended to escapes me.

The HMS Raleigh ran aground on the Labrador coast and was lost, but without loss of life.

The vessel was almost new at the time.

A monarchist group in Vladivostok declared Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia to be the heir to murdered Czar Nicholas.  The rebel organization that convened the process to do so was headed by Gen. Mikhail Diterikhs. The Grand Duke was already living in exile and the fortunes of the remaining Whites were desperately poor.

Shogakukan, a Japanese magazine and comic publisher that is still in business, was founded.

Monday, March 27, 1922. The Yakut Revolt.

Dorothy & Lillian Gish, D.W. Griffith, 3/27/22

 

On this day in 1922, the Yakut People's Army took Yakutsk in eastern Siberia.  They were led by White General, formerly Imperial Cornet, Mikhail Yakovlevich Korobeinkov.  His success was short-lived, and he's soon retreat to China, where he died two years later.

The Yakut Revolt was the last chapter, practically an epilogue, in the history of the Russian Civil War.  The Yakut people, a native people of Siberia, would endure years of repression at the hands of the Soviets.

Monday, February 13, 1922. The last stand of the Russian Whites, Viktorin Molchanov, Vasily Blyukher, Gloria Swanson and Harrison Ford.

The Battle of Volochayevka in the Russian far east came to an end with the withdrawal of Russian White Forces.  While it was a Red victory, the withdrawal was a White tactical success, but more or less a Pyrrhic one, save for the men that it saved from being taken by the Reds.  Following this, the Whites would come apart and remaining White forces and the Japanese occupation force in the area would be withdrawn.  It was, effectively, the last battle of the Russian Civil War.

The drama was played out in the odd context of the final days of the Whites in Russia.  In November 1921 the Whites, organized as the Far Eastern White Army, launched an offensive against the Soviet peudo state, the Far Eastern Republic. They were supported in this endeavor by the Japanese.    They had experienced initial success, but suffered setbacks in December and thereafter lost ground.  On October 25, 1922, their remnants and that of the Japanese forces were withdrawn.

The victorious Vasily Blyukher, servant of Red butchery, who would go on to be beaten to death by Red butchers.

The White commander, Viktorin Molchanov, relocated first to China, and then to the United States, dying in San Francisco at age 88 in 1975.  The Red commander, who was technically in the army of the Far Eastern Republic, Vasily Blyukher went on to become an advisor to the Chinese in from 1924 to 1927.  He was beaten to death in Stalin's purges in 1938, the same reward that a vast number of effective Red Army commanders received from their leader in the same time period.

To make this a bit odder, this region today is in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a remnant of the Soviet Union.  Created to be an "independent" region for Russia's Jewish population by the USSR, at its peak 25% of its population was Jewish.  Today, only .2% of the population is.

The movie Smilin' Through was released.  It featured Norma Talmadge and Harrison Ford in a melodrama.

No, not that Harrison Ford, this Harrison Ford:

Ford was a silent movie actor, making his last picture, and his only "talkie" in 1932.  He toured with the USO during World War Two.  He was hit as a pedestrian by a car in 1951, and would spend the rest of his life an invalid, dying in 1957 at age 73.

Sunday, January 1, 1922. Happy New Year?

Effectively the first shots of the Irish Civil War, sniping breaks out in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Belgium instituted bilingualism, making French and Flemish both official languages.

Friday, September 16, 1921. The Russian Immigrants

Refugees, no doubt, from the horrors of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

No names.  How did their story work out, and where are their descendants today?

Thursday September 15, 1921. Roman Fyodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg executed.

Baron Roman Fyodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg was executed by the Red Army on this day in 1921.

Von Ungern-Sternberg was a frightening Baltic German of noble background who entered the Imperial Russian Army prior to World War One.  Violent and erractic since his boyhood, he fought for a restoration of the Imperial crown in the Russian Civil War before crossing into Mongolia, where his forces fought for Mongolian independence.  He was captured by the Red Army after it intervened in Mongolia, and executed on this day in 1921.

The National Women's Party was meeting this day a century ago.

Thursday July 21, 1921. A big stage.

Personnel of The Tercentenary Pageant, "The Pilgrim Spirit," Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1921.

The landing of the passengers of the Mayflower was apparently celebrated with a large pageant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in July, 1921. These photographs were taken of the very large cast of that play.

Grand finale.

On the same day, David Lloyd George presented the British peace proposal to the Irish delegation.  It featured, as noted  yesterday, Dominion status for Ireland along the same lines as that had been granted to Canada and Australia, among others, with the United Kingdom retaining control of Irish foreign policy and military matters.

The Army Air Corps completed sinking the Ostfriesland.

In the Black Sea another ship went down, but due to a submarine, as the Soviet submarine Trotsky sank the Soviet ship Sawa as it attempted to make a run to defect to the Whites.  The Civil War was not yet over and sailors were changing their minds.

At some point, although I don't know when, somebody would have changed the name of the Trotsky, assuming she was still in service, as he'd fall out of favor with Stalin after Lenin's death and eventually a Soviet agent would put an ice pick into his head in Mexico.

Russell Stover and Christian Kent Nelson launched Nelson's I-Scream Bar, which later became famous as the Eskimo Pie, and which is now sold as Edy's Pie.  The chocolate covered ice cream bar was rebranded this year as Eskimo is regarded as a derogatory term.

People were experimenting with motor travel:

ALONZO’S DIARY ENTRY, 21 JULY 1921

Saturday, July 9, 1921. Revolution in Mongolia.

Mongolian communists declared themselves to be in control of Mongolia.

Revolutionaries in Mongolia, 1921.

Events in Mongolia make for a confused story, but basically Mongolia had been a Chinese province for many years, but one that had little direct interference from China. In the late Quing Dynasty period, prior to the 1911 Chinese revolution, this began to change due to Chinese fears of Russian encroachment.  This was highly unpopular in Mongolia, which was faced with an official Chinese policy of settlement and cultural replacement, and rebellion broke out. That lead to a Mongolian theocracy coming into power that negotiated a state of semi independence from China.

When the Russian Revolution and Civil War broke out, Mongolia reluctantly requested Chinese troops, who were sent, but who when asked to leave, did not.  This sparked an independence movement that sought Soviet help  In the meantime Russian White forces crossed into Mongolia.

Initially the Chinese were successful in expelling the Russian Whites, which caused the badly over stretched Soviets to forego intervening in Mongolia.  The Whites invaded a second time in February, however, and then the Soviets reversed course.

The presence of the Russian Whites combined with a local insurrection gave the Soviets the opening they needed, and the Red Army invaded Mongolia.  Seeing the inevitable the Chinese withdrew, but they did not recognize Mongolian sovereignty.   The country would remain subject to Chinese claims for many years thereafter although its association with the Soviet Union effectively made it a Soviet satellite.  The country would become fully independent, and non communist, in a third revolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The People's Republic of China recognized Mongolia as a state in 1946. The Nationalist had done so the prior year, but withdrew their recognition shortly thereafter.  Nationalist recognition was preconditioned on the Soviets withdrawing support for the Chinese Communists.  It would take until the 21st Century for the government in Taiwan to recognize Mongolia as an independent state.

Jack Johnson, former world heavyweight boxing champion, was released from prison.  He was serving time for violation of the Mann Act.  He would receive a posthumous pardon from Donald Trump.

Saturday, June 4, 1921. Aftermaths.

The Red Cross set up in earnest to provide relief to victims of the Pueblo, Colorado flood.

 

Menshevik forces, on this day in 1921, captured Omsk in far southern Siberia.  They'd already taken Vladivostok. The Japanese were aiding anti Bolsheviks by transporting additional anti Bolshevik forces to the Vladivostok region.

And the Saturday weekly periodicals hit the stands.  Rockwell illustrated two of them that week.

May 27, 1921. Horrors in Oklahoma and Futile Acts in Russia.

The body of Anna Brown, an Osage Indian woman, in Osage County, Oklahoma led to an investigation which which ultimately determined that a large number of Osage women were killed over a period of years, but the reasons and perpetrators, and even if they were related, were largely never determined, although there white men were convicted of murders.  It is thought that the killings may have been done to effectuate inheritance to non Indians, as at the time the Osage were the wealthiest people in the world due to oil production.  As a result of that suspicion, Congress ultimately passed a bill prohibiting the inheritance rights to pass to non tribal members.

Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Mensheviks seized control of Vladivostok from Bolsheviks.  

The Mensheviks were a  more numerous Socialist group than the Bolsheviks, and less radical, which doesn't mean they were not radical.  They failed in their contest with the Bolsheviks and, by this time, they'd actually been outlawed due to the Kronstadt Rebellion.

March 17, 1921. Soviet Triumphs

On this day in 1921 the Kronstadt Rebellion was crushed by the deployment of 60,000 troops of the Red Army.  Most of the 10,000 sailors and 5,000 soldiers who were part of the uprising surrendered, but some fled over the frozen Gulf of Finland towards Helsinki, where 800 went arrived.  The distance was over 150 miles.  The siege itself resulted in 11,000 casualties.

Some news outlets in the United States claimed that the sailors were fighting for the restoration of Krensky's government, but this was far off the mark. The revolutionary sailors had anarchist sympathies but more than anything else they called into question the Communists fidelity to the ideals of the revolution, something well worth questioning given their exploitation of nearly everything.

On the same day the Soviet Russian government negotiated a ceasefire with the Georgian Menshevik government, allowing the government to go into exile. 

February 28, 1921. The Kronstadt Rebellion.

Sailors had been an integral part of the Russian Revolution, and indeed they'd been an integral part of revolutions in Russia, and in Europe in general.  Revolutionary left wing sailors had revolted in Russia in 1904, 1905, 1906 and most importantly, in 1917.  Indeed, in some ways the rebellion of Russian sailors in 1917 had heralded the onset of the Russian Revolution.

All of which made the uprising that started on this day in 1921 a momentous one.  On this day, Russian sailors, taking the view that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the Russian Revolution, rose up against the Communist government on the port island of Kronstadt, just off of St. Petersburg.

Communism was proving to be a disaster.  Indeed, it was such a disaster that even though the Reds had only defeated the Whites, as we now recognize that defeat, a couple of months prior, the unworkable oppressive nature of the Communist dictatorship was already apparent.  The sailors rebellion at Kronstadt was in reaction to that.

The sailors were not "White", but rather left wing revolutionaries themselves.  They were heavily influenced by a concept of localism that some regard as anarchistic, but which might be most analogous to the views of the Greens, who sought to allow individuals the greatest possible freedom in the economy and in their personal lives.  They expressed their goals in the form of fifteen published points.

These read:

Having heard the report of the representatives of the crews dispatched by the General Meeting of the crews from the ships to Petrograd in order to learn the state of affairs in Petrograd, we decided:

1. In view of the fact that the present soviets do not represent the will of the workers and peasants, to re-elect the soviets immediately by secret voting, with free canvassing among all workers and peasants before the elections.

2. Freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties.

3. Freedom of meetings, trade unions and peasant associations.

4. To convene, not later than 1 March 1921, a non-party conference of workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd City, Kronstadt and Petrograd Province.

5. To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist Parties, and also all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who have been imprisoned in connection with working-class and peasant movements.

6. To elect a commission to review the cases of those who are imprisoned in jails and concentration camps.

7. To abolish all Political Departments, because no single party may enjoy privileges in the propagation of its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose. Instead of these Departments, locally elected cultural-educational commissions must be established and supported by the state. This is the reason for the inclusion of this document in a collection otherwise devoted entirely to official publications.

8. All ‘cordon detachments” are to be abolished immediately.

9. To equalize rations for all workers, harmful sectors being excepted.

10. To abolish all Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and also the various Communist guards at factories. If such detachments and guards are needed they may be chosen from the companies in military units and in the factories according to the judgment of the workers.

11. To grant the peasant full right to do what he sees fit with his land and also to possess cattle, which he must maintain and manage with his own strength, but without employing hired labor.

12. To ask all military units and also our comrades, the military cadets, to associate themselves with our resolutions.

13. We demand that all resolutions be widely published in the press.

14. To appoint a traveling bureau for control.

15. To permit free artisan production with individual labor.

The resolutions were adopted by the meeting unanimously, with two abstentions.

President of the Meeting, PETRICHENKO.

Secretary, PEREPELKIN.

Suffice it to say, their rebellion would not be a success.  Some have noted that it hastened the implementation of Lenin's New Economic Order, but that program itself was only intended to be temporary and indeed, given Lenin's death, it certainly proved to be.

Some regard the Kronstadt Rebellion as the final practical act of the Russian Civil War.  By this point in time the Whites had been defeated in western Russia and, to a large degree, their defeat in the East was a foregone conclusion.  The rebellion, however, represented a dangerous internal threat from the left.  Had it succeeded, which it always had very little chance of doing, it would have created a more democratic left wing Russian regime, although one that was still likely to be a radical one.

On the same day, Panamanian troops halted an advance by Costa Rica in a border war that had developed between the two nations.  U.S. troops landed in Panama City to protect U.S. interest in that nation, which obviously were centered on the Canal.

France mustered troops, including colonial troops, on the German border in anticipating of occupying the Ruhr due to the failure of Germany to provide timely reparation payments.

February 7, 1921. Refugees in Turkey, National Boy Scout Week, Army shrinks, Navy grows.

 Russian refugees on beach at Proti Island near Constantinople

It was the beginning of National Boy Scout Week.  In Sheridan Wyoming the Boy Scouts decorated the downtown windows on this Monday in honor of the week.

An issue of Boys' Life, the Scouting journal, from 1921, depicting a  Boy Scout and a Sea Scout.

Congress, earlier in 1920, had voted to reduce the size of the U.S. Army to 175,000 men.  President Wilson vetoed the measure.  Congress overrode the veto, and it became effective on this day in 1921 so the Army would accordingly shrink.

The Navy, however, gained a new ship, the USS Selfridge, a Clemson class destroyer that would serve a mere nine years.

USS Selfridge.