Friday, June 15, 1923. The American Relief Administration stops aid to the USSR.

The American Relief Administration stopped aid to the USSR after finding that the country was exporting grain in spite of internal famine.

Lou Gehrig played his first major league baseball game, being a defensive substitute in the ninth inning.

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.

Friday, September 2, 1921. Famine

Houston Texas, September 2, 1921.

On this day in 1921 food aid from Western countries arrived in Riga, Latvia for transport to the Soviet Union as famine relief.  The US was the largest contributor.

The famine was human induced, caused by the incompetence and stupidity of the communist economic system in multiple ways.

On the same day, Federal troops arrived in West Virginia, but President Harding declared they would not be used to impose martial law as long as civil law continued to function.  The threat, of course, was the private warfare between union coal miners and non-union/company forces.

Japanese dignitaries were photographed in Washington, D.C.

 

Baron Kyuro Shideharu

Belle Case LaFollette, wife of Sen. Robert LaFollette, was photographed walking their dog.

Monday, July 18, 1921. Start of the workweek.

Pearl Kane, a newspaper "girl" for the Washington Times, on July 18, 1921.

On this first day of the workweek, for most people, and more typically the first day of the workweek then, as opposed to now, the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis was administered for the first time in Paris, France.

Getting tuberculosis is bad.

Getting COVID 19 is bad too.  If you haven't been vaccinated, get vaccinated.

Babe Ruth hit the longest home run in the history of major league baseball, 560 feet, which knocked the ball out of Tiger Stadium.

General Pershing inspected the troops at Camp Humphries, Virginia.

Camp Humphries was also spelled "Humphreys" and is now part of Ft. Belvoir.

It was a very active training range at this time, hosting not only units of the U.S. Army, but also ROTC.

Meanwhile, the United States Army Air Corps spent the day bombing the former German cruiser the SMS Frankfurt off of Virginia's coast.

Well, not the day.  It sank within twenty-six minutes of being hit.

This was all part of Billy Mitchell's effort to prove that aircraft could sink ships, any ship, and that effectively they were now the premier service in the defense of the coast. . . it not more than that.  The Navy didn't particularly like it, and it'd later end up providing part of the background to Mitchell's eventual court marshal.

Maxim Gorky, the still respected Soviet writer who was an occasional tool of the Stalin's wrote a letter on behalf of famine victims in the Soviet Union.

The famine was certainly real, brought on by the forced collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union.