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The red scribe who penned this article had no idea that the clock was ticking when it came to the USSR (it collapsed some twenty-three years later) and that the name Soviet Union would soon serve as the answer for assorted parlor games such as Trivial Pursuit. Nonetheless, the writer’s misplaced pride came bubbling forth in this column that celebrated their 50th year in existence.
Throughout much of the Twenties and Thirties the religious communities of the Western world looked at the nascent Soviet Union with some fascination: not only was it the first atheist government to be established, but it was the first government to be openly hostile to all religions alike.
An article about Chinese persecution of the Christian Church can be read here…
Click here to read about the Nazi assault on the German Protestant churches in 1935.
Indignant accusations of trickery in dealing with the grain supply, which have been launched against the Russian Soviet Government by American and European editors, who were amazed to find that Russia was exporting grain in the midst of a new famine, are not particularly noticed by the Moscow press, which however, in such journals as the Moscow ‘Isvicstia’ and the ‘Economcheskaia Gizn’ feature reports of starvation in the Volga provinces.
Although there is no mention of the Soviet famine in this 1938 interview with Leon Trotsky, it is interesting nonetheless; to read it for free, you may click here.
Nine months after the Soviet Union signed a good-will agreement respecting the autonomy and independence of its Black Sea neighbor, Vladimir Lenin’s Red Army quickly overran the borders of the Democratic Republic of Georgia on February 16, 1921; seizing the Georgian capital nine days later, Russian General Anatoli Ilyich Gekker declared the establishment of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about the Cold War may be read on this page.
Appearing in the pages of a slightly left-leaning New York paper was this obituary of Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940):
Thus, at 9:25 last night, ended the life of the man who, with Lenin, brought about the world’s most profound revolution and with his death, ended the bitterest of modern feuds – Trotsky against Stalin.
This is a carefully cataloged list of the international treaties that the Soviet Union signed and agreed to abide by during the course of their first forty years (1920 – 1960). Printed next to these agreements are listed the dates the Soviets chose to violate the treaties and the direct results that ensued.
Promises are like pie crust, made to be broken. – V.I. Lenin
Click here to read about the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.
Here is Leon Trotsky’s reminiscence of those heady days in 1917 that served as the first step in a 75 year march that went nowhere in particular and put millions of people in an early grave – this is his recollection of the fall of the Kerensky Government and the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(R.I.P.).
THE REVOLUTION was born directly from the war, and the war became the touchstone of all the revolutionary parties and energies…
The review of the first English edition of Das Kapital can be read here…
When Washington D. Vanderlip made his way to the nascent Soviet Union to secure mining rights in Siberia he wrote of his meeting with the nation’s first dictator, Vladimir Lenin, and revealed a Lenin that was seldom seen in print. He wasn’t blathering on about the proletariat or the bourgeoisie but rather musing about his pastimes and dreams for the future.
On his desk was a copy of the New York Times, well-thumbed. ‘Do you really read it?’ I asked. ‘I read the New York Times, the Chicago American and the Los Angeles Times regularly,’ he said.’Through the New York Times I keep track of the atrocities, the assassinations and the new revolutions in Russia. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where to find them.’
Here is a brief glance at various observations made by a correspondent for The London Observer who compared the two dominate tribes found in 1933 Moscow and Berlin. The journalist was far more distracted by the similarities in their street hustle and their speechifying rather than their shared visions in governance and culture – for example, both the Nazis and Soviets were attracted to restrictions involving public and private assembly, speech and gun ownership while sharing an equal enthusiasm for May Day parades and the color red. Additionally, both totalitarian governments held religion as suspect and enjoyed persecuting their respective dupes – for the Nazis that was the Jews and for the Communists it was the bourgeoisie.
Read an article explaining how the Soviets used early radio…
Victor Serge (1890 – 1947) was a devoted Bolshevik writer who was highly critical of Joseph Stalin; he spent five years in the gulag for his subversive activity and would have no doubt died there had not an international mishmash of humanitarians raised a stink about his incarceration. He was exiled from the Marxist-dream-land in 1936 – the attached column is an extract from his gulag writings concerning the cruelties of Stalin’s secret police.
Sharp encounters between Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leaders took place when Trotsky tried to take Warsaw in 1920 and the majority of the committee antagonized his policy, we learn from a letter written by a Bolshevik adherents in Russia, who is ‘presumably‘ high up in the Soviet hierarchy and a partisan of Trotsky.
An American woman recalled the difficulties she encountered while trying to set up a household in Soviet Russia.
A carefully compiled assortment of quotes that were voiced by Stalin and Hitler (or their assorted Yes-Men). These utterances were printed with Stalin’s poisonous pronouncements in red and Hitler’s sickening soliloquies in black – both shades refer to similar topics and show an identical manner of thought that is indistinguishable from the other.
Hitler used the Bolshevik lingo more often than you might have thought…
Sweet, sweet words from British socialist George Lansbury (1859 – 1940) concerning his first encounter with the Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin:
He is about 50 years old, of medium height and carries himself with a slight stoop. He has fine eyes, which look you straight in the face, sometimes with a whimsical expression, as if he were trying to discover if anything unexpressed lay behind your words. They have, too, an expression of careful kindness; and you put him down as a man who musty love children.
No liberty of the press exists in Russia and so none but a poet recognized by the Government can get his verses published… In justice to Russian letters it must be said that all talented Russian authors have abstained from writing, or at any rate, from publishing their works during the rule of the proletariat, so that only the official poets, the literati hired by the Government, have their say.
The only Soviet-approved poet they single out for derision is Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 – 1930), who is quoted liberally.
