<>1921:German sociologist Max Weber’s "life work", Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [Economy and Society], published posthumously. Contained influential treatment of "class and status" [CCS:409-23 | CCS,1:701-15]. A great European, whose career got under way in 1904:1905, had his most influential work published only after his death

<>1921fe21:Persian coup d'état, carried out by a small force of 1200 troops under the command of Reza Khan returned power to a ministerial government within the Majlis [the Persian parliament]. Reza Khan appointed a civilian journalist to the position of Prime Minister and himself to Minister of War
*--An official Iranian historical website [W] described the situation this way = After centuries of misrule and the ravages of the war waged by foreign belligerents on its soil from 1914 to 1919, Iran in 1921 was prostrate, ruined, and on the verge of disintegration. The last of the shahs of the Qajar dynasty, Ahmad Shah, was young and incompetent, and the Cabinet [Persian government formed within the Majlis] was weak and corrupt. Patriotic and nationalist elements had long been outraged at the domination of Iran by imperialist foreign powers, especially Great Britain and Russia, both of which had strong commercial and strategic interest in the country

<>1921fe22:Soviet Central State Economic Planning Commission [GosPlan] created

<>1921fe27:Georgia [Gruziia] Soviet regime established

<>1921mr01:mr08; Kronstadt (fortress island protecting Peterograd) the scene of a significant rebellion against Communist rule, though in favor of Soviet rule. Resolutions [BNE:239-41 | Chamberlin,2:495-7 | SGv:147-8 | DPH:435-6 | Voline:passim | PWT2:298-300]

<>1921mr08:mr16; Communist Party Congress #10 [McC2:207-14]
*--Resolution on Unity [Chamberlin,2:497-9 | SGv:149 | DPH:436-7]

<>1921mr16:English-Russian commerce [Senn,2:]

<>1921mr18:Poland gained recognition of independence by Treaty of Riga, which favored Poland (1/3 of the population in the new Poland were non-Poles, mainly East-Slavic peoples of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine)

<>1921mr23:1927de; Soviet Republic [soon the USSR] declared New Economic Policy [NEP] which lasted seven years
*--Comparison of the 1921 Soviet economy with the last pre-WW1 year of the Imperial economy (1913) [McC2:257]
*--The so-called "War communism" of Revolutionary Civil War period relaxed. Radical Communist restructuring of the Soviet economic system was postponed (some thought forever)
*--The agricultural economy, including the growing number of "Russian farmers", and the small-scale commercial economy were allowed to operate without direct state control
*--Decree on tax in kind, etc [Chamberlin,2:499-503 | SGv:323-4 | DPH:437-8]
*--The state did retain control over the "commanding heights" of the economy = banking, currency, foreign trade, heavy industrial productivity, means of communication and transportation, national labor organizations, etc
*--Industrial wage-labor disturbances in this year cautioned against letting workers go free in their unions [Page]
*1921mr27:Lenin outlined the threats to the revolution [BNE:241-]
*1921ap05:Soviet commercial and trade concessions to Germany and Italy [McC2:241]
*1921ap07:Russian-German negotiations [McC2:195-6]
*1921my30:Army called in to perform significant economic tasks [McC2:238-9]
*1921jy08:Nikolai Bukharin, "The New Economic Policy of Soviet Russia"
*--USA journalist William Henry Chamberlin witnessed and described NEP [P20:115]
*--USA labor activist and pacifist Anna Louise Strong traveled from Seattle to Russia, working for the American Friends Service Committee relief mission, and wrote descriptions of famine and socialist construction during NEP, The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia's New Life, August, 1921, to December, 1923 (1924), with an introduction by Leon Trotsky. Website excerpts. NB! her chapter on the Russian oil enterprise and its place in the larger story of the Russian Revolution [TXT]. [Connect with the petroleum LOOP] She also wrote accounts of famine relief in the Volga basin [W]
*--This marked the beginning of a period that Moshe Lewin has titled Lenin's Last Struggle (1968), three years from NEP to 1924ja21:Lenin's death. These first three years of NEP provided a chance for the Revolution to take a different path than that forced by circumstances of WW1 and Civil War. A central vexing problem was how to balance Party power with wage-labor authority, or at least "in-put". However, Lenin's last struggle was not successful, or perhaps not full-hearted. These years were merely a prelude to the rise of Stalinism
\\
Rimlinger:252-69 [TXT]

<>1921my30:je01; USA Oklahoma | Tulsa race riot, arguably the worst in US history [W]

<>1921je:jy; Mikhail Gerzhenzon & Viacheslav Ivanov, Correspondence from Two Corners [Raeff3:373f]

<>1921jy:Soviet Republic hosted Third World Congress of the Communist International [RFP2,2:158-61]

<>1921fa:1922wi; Soviet Republic suffered famine
*1921oc:Volga region famine described by Philip Gibbs [Eye:493-5]

<>1921no05:Mongolia and the Soviet Republic signed treaty after Mongolia broke away from China

<>1921de06:Ireland and Great Britain signed Treaty of Irish independence
*1922:1923; Ireland soon locked in a bloody civil war. One of the two big Irish political parties, Fianna Fail, was founded by Eamon de Valera, the man who led the opposition to the 1921 treaty that forged the new southern Irish state. Valera felt that the pact tied Ireland too closely to Britain. He would not accept the oath of allegiance to the English King which the treaty required. He and his associates also resented the division of Northern Ireland from the Irish Free State and the continuation of English rule there
*--The other big Irish party, Fine Gael, was later created by those who accepted the treaty. By 1923, they had crushed de Valera's rebels. In the decades to come, these two political parties kept the hostilities alive that had fueled the murderous civil war. Then there arose another major party, Labour, which grew from a faction in the rebel ranks that hoped the rising against imperial dominion of the English would spark a Marxist revolution of workers against all bourgeois exploiters
*1960s:1997; IRA conducted a war of terrorism against English power
*1997:The IRA declared a cease-fire
*2005:The IRA disarmed, making it possible again to celebrate the Easter Uprising, banned in Ireland since 1966

<>1921de19:de22; USSR Communist Party conference11 officially named the new revolutionary nation the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (USSR), which was to survive seventy years, almost to the day, until 1991de31

<>1922:England | C. E. Montague, Disenchantment [BNE:211-5]

<>1922:Irish author James Joyce published Ulysses in book form [TXT], a great 20th-century fine arts landmark. Joyce was "Irish" by birth and steeped in a half-millennium of Irish history, but he was pan-European by avocation. Like so many leading figures of 20th-century high art, he lived the life of the émigré
*--In this same year, USA-born émigré in England T.S. Eliot published his challenging and characteristic poem "The Waste Land" [TXT]. Eliot had warned that “poetry, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult”
*--Readers on their own have difficulty with Joyce and much else in 20th-century high culture. They have often had to seek guidance -- “mediation” -- from cultural/literary commentators. The European “audience” has always had Joyce’s challenging literary art “mediated”.  An English critic wrote [2005ap29:TLS:3] =

Disorientated by the radical novelty of Ulysses, many early readers relied instead on the critical compass of insiders like Larbaud, whose influential 1922 essay in La Nouvelle Revue Française had been informed by access to Joyce’s private schemata of the novel’s structure. This experience of heavily mediated reading remains just as true today. Joyce asks that we be well versed in Catholic rite, fluent in Latin and with few snatches of Greek, on intimate terms with Homer, naturally, but no less with Dante, Shakespeare, St Augustine, Aristotle, Aquinas, music hall, opera, the Celtic twilight, and the demography, topography and historiography of turn-of-the-century Dublin -- the whole kit and boodle in a word. Because our cultural competence is not up to the task now, if ever it were, we fall back on a wealth of reference materials.... Where earlier reviewers complained of the book’s unreadability, today’s critics regard this resistance to reading as a legitimate means of keeping the work ‘open’

*--Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo, eds., The Reception of James Joyce in Europe | noUO
\\
*--[W]

<>1922ja26:China and USSR issued Joint statement of Sun Yat-sen and A. A. Joffe [RFP2,1:177-8] Official USSR Communist Party position was to support nationalist "liberal" Kuomintang party in China
*1922fe06:USA Washington, DC | Belgium, Great Britain, China, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, USA signed Nine-Power Treaty on China  | RWP1,3:222-4]
*--Sun's decade of greatest political influence on events was nearing its end, but his legacy lived on in his party, the Kuomintang, which played a central role in Chinese  politics throughout the 20th century

<>1922ja31:German financier Walther Rathenau became German Foreign Minister

<>1922mr:ap; USSR Communist Party congress #11. Joseph Stalin became First Secretary [F/] of Central Committee [F/] of Communist Party of the USSR. Fundamental institutions of one-party rule now firmly in place: Politbiuro [F/] and Secretariat (led by First Secretary or sometimes General Secretary or "Gensek") the central ruling group within the highest larger "representative" body, the Central Committee. GPU [F/] [State Political Control—the centralized state secret police] replaced Cheka [F/]
*--Tomskii speech criticized wage-labor strikes [SGv:409f]
*1922:Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and Publication (Glavlit) created. It functioned into the final years of the USSR as the main institution administering Soviet censorship of the print media [PS&C:132-5]
*1922:USSR revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky published Dictatorship vs. Democracy [CCS:945-67 | CCS,2:557-79]
*1922:OGPU (Ob"edinnenoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie; Unified State Political Control—i.e., state police) established
*1926:Law on OGPU prohibited changes in OGPU personnel above rank of ordinary agent, except from Moscow; i.e., limited provincial control & strengthened Moscow control. Police everywhere instituted as arm of central state, another institutional foundation for Stalinism

<>1922mr01:Sweden signed commercial treaty with USSR

<>1922ap:USSR diplomat Georgii Chicherin expressed views on Reconstruction [Senn,2:]

<>1922ap16:German-Soviet Rapallo Treaty resumed normal diplomatic and commercial relations and recognized USSR as "great power" [DPH:461-2 | Senn,2:]. Thus the two "renegade states" of Europe, Germany in defeat and Russia in revolution, gave one another support while other European governments continued to insist on German payment of indemnities to the victorious Allies and Soviet payment of tsarist debts (mainly connected with WW1) to Allied treasuries and bankers

<>1922my:Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Tikhon arrested

<>1922my24:Italy signed commercial treaty with USSR
*--Commercial relations in the first year or so of NEP [LOOP]

<>1922my25:Vladimir Lenin 1st stroke

<>1922je24:German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau murdered by right-wing nationalists

<>1922au04;au07; Communist Part Congress #12 [McC2:214-17]

<>1922se19:Germany, Kiel | USA author Ernest Hemingway described scene of economic collapse [Eye:497-501]
*--In a matter of a few months, the Deutschmark had fallen from 162 to the USA dollar to 7000 DM/dollar. Within a year, it fell to 4.2 trillion DM to the dollar! [I.e., it evaporated]
*1923:Konrad Heiden, The Ruinous Inflation [P20:153]

<>1922oc:Vladivostok,Siberia | Japan withdrew its forces from the vital Russian port after almost 4 years of occupation, since the early days of the Revolutionary Civil War

<>1922oc30:1943jy26; Italian Fascist Party came to power and remained for 21 years after Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) led march of para-military supporters on Rome [DPH:387-8] The Fascists were a political party in mold of the Nazis. They could claim to be the original European fascist-style party
*--On the very eve of this success, Mussolini delivered a speech in Naples in which he said, "We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, which we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest" [BMC1:649-50]
*--"Life under Fascism" [W]
*--Photo exhibits = [pix] [pix]
*1932:ex.USSR leader Leon Trotsky explained, from his Communist point of view, how Fascism succeeded in Italy, with reference also to the looming possibility of Nazi victory in Germany [TXT]

<>1922oc30:USSR | NEP era labor law [SGv:413-24]

<>1922no:USSR hosted Fourth World Congress of the Comintern [RFP2,2:161-5] Marxist ideology was being tailored to meet needs of a world wider than northwest Europe =
*1923:Pod znamenam Marksizma#1:177-8 | Petr Stuchka on the inconsistencies in the Marxist theory of Basis [Unterbau] and Superstructure [Überbau] [Jaworskyj:99] Compare with post-Stalinist essay over thirty years later on the same topic

<>1922no01:Turkey | Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Pasha or Kemal Atatürk) led modernizing revolution to power at the head of a rebel army. Declared the Ottoman Empire dead, pulled down the old state, moved government headquarters (capital) to Ankara, and declared a Turkish Republic

<>1922no16:Italian Chamber of Deputies heard Fascist Party leader Mussolini's speech [DPH:388-9]

<>1922no18:USSR | Bukharin issued policy statement on the right of "red intervention", a foreign policy justification for pre-emptive strikes against bourgeois power anywhere in the interests of the liberation of the world proletariat

<>1922de13:de30; USSR formally declared. First Transcaucasian Congress of Soviets (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidzhan) brought the formal proposal to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaidzhan, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia [RSFSR]). 1924ja13:Approved

<>1922de23:1923ja04; Vladimir Lenin's "Testament" [TXT] dictated over two week period [SGv:155-9]. A critique of Joseph Stalin and others, but essentially a belated call for radical democratization of Party and state

<>1923:Austrian-born Hebrew scholar and moral philosopher Martin Buber published I and Thou in which he described a highly personal relationship between the individual and God, a relationship which provided the ideal model for all human relationships, subjective dialogue rather than interaction between objectivities. In 1929 he published an essay "Zwiesprache" [dialogue] which concentrated on this idea [CCS,1:337-61]

<>1923:NYC etc | Sergei Esenin, "An Iron Mirgorod" [Hasty:144-58]

<>1923:Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) published El tema de nuestro tiempo [1931:translated as The Modern Theme] in which he argued that "the modern theme is to subject reason to living, to localize it within the biological field, to subordinate it to the spontaneous". He celebrated razon vital [living reason; rationality for life] [CCS,2:709-729]

<>1923:USSR and Finland sought advisory opinion in international law from the League of Nations Permanent Court of International Justice [ID] regarding jurisdiction in eastern Karelia [RWP1,2]

<>1923ja:German industrial center in the Ruhr area was occupied by French and Belgian troops to ensure that Germany make reparation payments. German officials adopted passive resistance to occupying forces [DPH:412-13]
*--Versailles settlement crumbled yet further

<>1923mr04:Lenin published his last substantial piece, "Better Fewer, But Better" [TXT] [Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle:156-74]
*--A comparison of this work with Lenin's famous What's to be Done? twenty years earlier helps measure the evolution of his political thought
*1923:1925; Documents of Soviet History, v3 [DSH,3]

<>1923my12:Italian periodical Il Mundo employed the political term “totalitarian” to describe a kind of political order. Fascist Party leader Mussolini coined and used, with approval, the political term totalitario

<>1923jy24:Turkey | Convention Relating to the Regime of the Straits [TXT#1 and TXT#2]
*--Revolutionary Turkey was the only defeated power in WW1 to force revision of the peace terms imposed by victorious allies at the Paris Peace Conference [ID] (e.g., Versailles). In this year, Mustafa Kemal [pix] created the "Republican People's Party" and began to fashion a modernizing, secular, one-party state, taking inspiration from the Soviet Revolution. Kemal's political party was in the Leninist tradition

<>1923se:German officials called off passive resistance to Allied occupation of Ruhr district
*--Within the next year the "Dawes Plan" put reparation payments back on track, still without any time limit. Heavy payments from Germany continued for six more years, until the Dawes Plan was replaced by a less harsh "Young Plan" in 1929 [DPH:413-118]

<>1923de06:USA President Coolidge on "interrupted" USA foreign policy and on the special problem of Russia and earlier famine relief, with Soviet responses [RFP2,2:37-9]

<>1924:China | Kuomintang declaration [SPE2:875-9] China

<>1924:USA culture critic Gilbert Seldes published The Seven Lively Arts, a pioneer study of popular commercial arts [pop-arts] or commercial culture in the new electronic media. Seldes expressed an open willingness to find all that was best in the new commercial media [bibliography]
*--Gilbert Seldes' brother George Seldes [ID] was also an influential pundit

<>1924:German novelist Thomas Mann published his third great novel, Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] which portrayed the details in the life of a young middle-class man visiting a TB sanatorium as WW1 loomed. Somehow, though not originally sick, the young man stayed in the mountain-top sanatorium. There he cast his many petty and creature-comfort-oriented personal agonies and ecstasies across the ruined but somehow still beautiful European bourgeois cultural landscape

<>1924:Russian political émigré, ex-terrorist and anti-Bol'shevik insurgent Boris Savinkov slipped over the border into the USSR but was soon arrested
*--Savinkov was forced to flee the USSR six years earlier. He wrote fascinating Memoirs of a Terrorist
*--Now he fell into the hands of Soviet authorities, was put on trial, and imprisoned. He committed suicide the following year, ending a fabulous two-decade political career

<>1924ja13:USSR Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets approved first USSR Constitution, based on deliberations that got under way in 1922de. This first constitution took the form of a Declaration and a "Treaty", the first Union Treaty, among the unifying republics [SGv:51-62]
*--Passport regulations in the early Soviet period [PS&C:161-3]
*1923 essay by Soviet Marxist ideologist I. Podvolotskii argued that civil rights were a bourgeois deception [Jaworskyj:114-17]
*1924 essays by N. V. Krylenko on the Marxist concept of Law and State and on the conflict between socialist theory and Soviet reality [ibid:142-9, 162-78] Compare with a theoretical discussion ten years later
*1926 essay by I. Naumov on "legal nihilism" [ibid:247-51]

<>1924ja21:Vladimir Il'ich Lenin died, ending a remarkable revolutionary career that spanned 28 years

<>1924ap:Moscow | Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) laid his ideological claim to Communist Party leadership with a series of lectures, later gathered and augmented in a booklet Foundations of Leninism [CWC:233-51 | BPE:560-72 | MDF:122-3]
*--With this work Stalin first suggested the idea of "socialism in one country". [On dialectical and historical materialism, see BMC1:626-34 & BMC4:731-8]
*--Stalin and Trotsky were locked in an ideological struggle with immense implications for the Marxist legitimacy of the Soviet Union. Stalin staked all on the concept of "socialism in one country" and Trotsky on his own concept of "permanent revolution" [TXT]
*--In Stalin's surprising ideological foray we see an early appearance of the concept "Leninism", but some would argue that as Stalin laid claim to be the only faithful adherent to "Leninism" he was in fact creating the central creed of a new "ism", Stalinism

<>1924my31:China & USSR Agreement on General Principles [RFP2,1:179-83]

<>1924oc02:Geneva Protocol set procedures and obligations in connection with the League of Nations effort to settle international disputes without war [DPH:462-5] The protocols failed due to English refusal to ratify them

<>1924de:USSR hosted Fifth World Congress of the Communist International [RFP2,2:165-9]

<>1925:1926; NYC, Chicago, etc.| Vladimir Maiakovskii, "My Discovery of America" [Hasty:159-220]

<>1925:Germany | Austrian-born political conspirator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) described his main political ideas with bold clarity, Mein Kampf [My struggle TXT] [CWC:191-218 | BMC4:748-9] This text became the main ideological foundation of the Nazi movement
*1926:German intellectual Friedrich Jünger presented anti-democratic argument based on his sense of a "new nationalism" [P20:154 | PWT2:328-31]

<>1925:Italy, Perugia | Fascist Party activist Alfredo Rocco delivered authoritative speech in which he defined "The Political Doctrine of Fascism" [CCS:1015-36 | CCS,2:648-69 | BMC1:640-6 | BMC4:738-44]

<>1925:USSR scholar and Marxist ideologist D. Riazanov published article [TXT] on Engels' Peasant War in Germany

<>1925:Spanish writer and thinker Miguel de Unamuno published The Agony of Christianity [CCS,2:858-72] Born in Basque country, Unamuno grew up mindful of cultural distinctions. He resisted simple-minded generalizations like "Europe" and "The West". His thought was full of lively paradox, and he placed highest value on immediate experience. He and Ortega y Gasset contributed a distinct, innovative yet traditional flavor to 20th century thought, a "Spanish" flavor, if you find such generalizations to your taste

<>1925ja:USSR Communist Part dismissed War Commissar Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's aggressive promotion of the idea of "permanent revolution" brought him under attack from moderates, led by Nikolai Bukharin [RRC1,3:534-41]
*--Having sided with Stalin against Trotsky, now Bukharin would come under attack from Stalin

<>1925ap:USSR Communist Party congress12; Joseph Stalin formally announced his concept of "socialism in one country". Conventional Marxist ideologists, including Bukharin, presumed, as Lenin had for so long, that no true socialist revolution was possible in an economy ("mode of production") as undeveloped as Russia's. Stalin insisted that the USSR did not need a liberal or "bourgeois" revolution in order to move ahead toward the construction of a socialist and then communist future. [This idea explained].
*--Stalinism now had a powerful slogan

<>1925oc16:Locarno Treaties negotiated by France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and England in an effort normalize relations in the post-WW1 era. For the first time in this era, Germany met as a sovereign equal in open diplomatic parley with the other European states, and the intention was to mop up some part of the mess created by the Versailles Treaty. The central issue was regularization of Germany's borders to east and west. Locarno marked the high point of European inter-state goodwill between WW1 and WW2 [DPH:465-8] Several treaties were signed in these sessions =
*--Germany agreed with France to recognize borders set in the Versailles Treaty, in exchange for German entry into the League of Nations
*--Germany and eastern European states failed to achieve as much, but they agreed at least to diplomacy and arbitration
*--England refused to sign on with France to those provisions that guaranteed east European borders. England was concerned only with the German threat in the westward direction. This was the major flaw of Locarno diplomacy. Thus, France signed independent mutual defense pacts with Poland and Czechoslovakia against Germany, not at all in the spirit of Locarno or the League of Nations

<>1925oc:Persian Majlis (parliament) declared the rule of the Qajar dynasty to be terminated and deposed Ahmad Shah while he was absent in Europe. War Minister Reza Khan advised the creation of an Iranian Republic, but conservative Shie religious leaders blocked that. [Here Persia parted ways with a similar movement in Turkey (LOOP)]
*--The Majlis found a solution to the impasse when it elected Reza Khan to the position of shah and granted him the title Reza Shah Pahlavi, thus marking the beginning of 1925:1979; Pahlavi Dynasty (54 years)
*1925:1941; Persian/Iranian Reza Shah Pahlavi ruled for 16 years and dedicated his energies to the termination of decades-old chaos in his land and the introduction of radical reform. His first priority was to strengthen the authority of the central government by creating a disciplined standing army under the Majlis and restraining the autonomy of tribal chiefs (local "warlords") which under the Bakhtiari had caused so much trouble. Iran's first industrialization program got under way, with dramatic development of modernized infrastructure = roads, bridges, railways, schools and hospitals. The Iranian state took control of the country's finances and communications, which up to then had been virtually in foreign hands. Many factories were built and managed as state enterprises. Reza Shah earlier failed to guide Iran on the path toward a republican form of government, but he was able now to democratize the country and emancipate it, at least temporarily, from foreign interference
*1927:1938; The Trans-Iranian Railway was completed with a growing number of branch lines to principal cities
*1928: One-sided agreements and treaties with foreign powers were terminated, abolishing all special privileges in Iran
*1935:Women were emancipated and required to discard their veils
*1934:The first Iranian university opened and became the crown-jewel of a growing national system of schools. Schools were opened to women, and job opportunities brought women into the work force
*1935: All foreign governments were requested to observe the new name of Persia = Iran

<>1925de24:Italian parliament neutralized by laws that allowed Mussolini to rule as a Fascist dictator [DPH:389-90]

<>1925de25:Moscow premier of two movies: ROBIN HOOD, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, directed by Sergei Eisenstein
\\
*--Richard Schickel, "Cinema Paradiso", 99su:WQu 23,3:56-70, a brief history of movies ("film") as a world cultural phenomenon, lamenting decline in recent years. Moscow premier is the central symbolic moment in his tale of movies and the pop-arts

<>1926:Austrian Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi argued against nationalist and racist doctrines and in support of what he called Pan-Europe [P20:196]

<>1926:English economist John Maynard Keynes published Laissez-Faire and Communism [CCS:754-74] and "The End of Laissez-Faire" [TXT with an antagonistic editorial warning] [Excerpts = BPE:663-8]. In this epoch of serious market-economic collapse and widely expressed hysteria about the apparently thriving revolutionary Soviet economy, with its claim on social justice as well as prosperity, Keynes also wrote "A Short View of Russia"
*--English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) published an influential book on Science and the Modern World [BMC1:606-9 | BMC4:699-701]

<>1926:German political activist Robert Michels explained European class consciousness [CCS,1:739-65]
*--German teacher and free-lance writer Oswald Spengler completed his gloomy Decline of the West [BPE:637-62 | BMC1:683-6 | BMC4:777-80 | CCS,2:485-507 | CCS,1:134-43]. The book wasn't published until after the war. What it lacked in seriousness of content, it made up in popularity. Spengler set the tone for following generations of pop-art pundits. He caught the mood of the time and helped popularize the concept of "The West"

<>1926:Scottish-born USA political philosopher Robert M. MacIver sought to redefine relationship of individual to society and state, to defend liberal and democratic governments from the onslaught of European statist doctrines, in his book The Modern State [CCS,1:631-50]

<>1926ja31:Italian Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini strengthened by law on power of the executive branch to make decrees having the force of legislation or laws [DPH:390]

<>1926ap03:Italian Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini strengthened by law forcing state control over compulsory collective labor relations. Labor unions brought into "Corporative State" and a form of fascist welfare statism put in place [DPH:390-1]

<>1926my03:my12; British General Strike spread for nine days throughout major industrial centers of England, Wales and Northern Ireland
*--The general collapse of European capitalism intensified the economic struggle between wage-laborers and their bosses, and English domestic policy displayed an unexpected similarity to emerging harsh continental policies. See the following two news stories that did not break until more than 80 years after the events =
\\
*2009no16:CSM| Kathy Marks, "Australia's Rudd apologizes to forced child migrants"| [The apology was for] a postwar plan to empty British orphanages and repopulate [Australia] with "good white stock". The children, who were shipped out [...,] believed their parents were dead. In reality, [one child, a so-called "orphan of Empire", learned years later that his] unmarried mother had been forced to give him up as a baby. That was the case with many of the "orphans", others had been placed in care by impoverished families. Some migrants learned that their parents had tried to seek them, without success – either because their names were changed when they arrived in Australia, or because parents were told by British authorities that their children were dead or had been adopted by wealthy families. Parliamentary inquiries in Britain and Australia in the past decade [1999-2009] concluded that physical and sexual abuse were "widespread and systematic" in the institutions, particularly those run by Catholic orders such as the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy. [...] The children were cheap to house, and a ready source of labor. And, importantly for Australia, they were white; this was an era when Australia feared being overwhelmed by "Asian hordes" from neighboring countries. The institutions, though, were not properly inspected, and staff were mostly untrained and poorly supervised. The official inquiries heard that funds provided by the government for the children's upkeep were sometimes used to feed staff well, while the children were given scraps
*2009no16:guardian.co.uk| More than 150,000 British children, most of them from deprived backgrounds [impoverished wage labor], were sent to Commonwealth countries with the promise of a better life – but the reality was often very different, with many facing abuse and a regime of unpaid labor. Government records show that at least 150,000 children aged between three and 14 were sent to Commonwealth countries, mainly Australia and Canada, in a program that began in the 1920s and did not end until 1967. [...] Parents were told the children had gone to a better life, but many of them ended up in institutions or were sent to work unpaid on farms, with many facing abuse
*--These stories suggest that the long history of removal, transport and concentration stretched further into the 20th c. than we might conventionally expect
*--Anne Perkins, A Very British Strike... [noUO], offers an establishmentarian interpretation of the labor strikes in these years, with more attention to “Communist influence” on the union movement than to domestic economic and political actualities in the everyday life of wage-laborers

<>1926jy:USA Colonel Raymond Robins decried lack of normal USA-USSR relations [RFP2,2:42-8]

<>1926oc:USSR | Leon Trotsky & other "Joint Opposition" leaders, Leo Kamenev & Grigorii Zinoviev, dismissed from Politbiuro [F/]. [Excerpt from Trotsky's "defense" [TXT]]
*1926:1928; Documents of Soviet History, v4 [DSH,4]

<>1927:1928; French writer André Gide wrote Voyage au Congo and Le retour du Tchad, powerful but straightforward descriptive condemnations of imperialism based on eye-witness experiences in the Congo [CCC2,2:853f CCC3,2:1161-9]

<>1927:1937; Europe-wide era of economic, social and political crisis
*--Dramatic Soviet modernization seemed to rival capitalism. Apparent Soviet success, combined with collapse of the world’s market economies in the Great Depression might be compared with a crudely reversed set of events at the end of the 20th century = apparent US success, combined with "the collapse of Communism". And an even more crude parallel might be seen in the resurgence of Russia and the economic crisis in the "capitalist world" beginning in 2008
*--After WW1 and particularly in the late 1920s, market economies were in shambles. As one result, European welfare programs expanded. Welfare programs were designed to address the needs of labor. One natural motive was to reduce the chance that labor might turn to progressive and socialist movements, or fall under the influence of Soviet Communism. At the same time, Welfare might limit the influence of crisis-driven, far-right fascist-style political movements. Post-WW1 European states were caught not only between a rock (Soviet Communism) and a hard place (radical rightist movements), but had to try to navigate around a perilous "soft place" right in the center of their paths, namely, the revival of 19th-century social democracy. Labor unions were weakened, but still capable of significant self-organization and exertion of economic pressure on "the bosses"
*--Economic collapse in a global GREAT DEPRESSION impacted USA like a meteor, having already for ten years wobbled the orbits of European and world capitalist markets [EG]. USA isolation was not a successful quarantine against world problems. USA isolation exacerbated world problems and intensified the shock when these problems finally caught up to USA
*--Economic and social collapse inspired and served to justify "right-wing" reactionary and well as "left-wing" revolutionary statism =
*--RISE OF FASCIST ITALY and NAZI GERMANY
*--USSR TURNED TO STALINISM, a trend that had been growing in Russia over the previous ten years
*--By the late 1920s, many European nations (e.g,, Austria, Spain) imitated Italy & Germany, rather than the USSR
*--In the broadest sense 20th-century statist radicalism, "right and left" [ID], may be said to have grown from the following trends =

*--World War One opened a new era of "far-right" and "far-left" statist radicalism. Perhaps the France of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) [ID] was the earliest European harbinger, but now statist radicalism waxed with intensity through World War Two, and it continued to flicker to life again and again, even into the 21st century [EG]

<>1927:French philosopher Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals [BMC4:761-3]

<>1927:German philosopher and educator Martin Heidegger (Marburg University, then Berlin) published Sein und Zeit [translated in 1949 as "Existence and Being"] Heidegger may be thought of as the creator of non-Christian or "esthetic" existentialism
*--Sartre was his student
\\
*--[W] [W]

<>1927:USSR feminist writer and public figure Aleksandra Kollontai’s novel Red Love, which was taken to advocate "free love" relationships between men and women, once translated into English, caused stir but inspired more radical participants in the women's movement
*--Kollontai had been the first woman ever appointed ambassador when she took up her post at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden

<>1927:USSR Foreign Affairs Commissar (de facto) Maksim Litvinov proposed "the complete abolition of all land, naval and air forces" to members of the League of Nations. The proposal was couched in terms that could not please League members = "armed force is a weapon in the hands of great powers for the oppression of peoples in small and colonial countries" [ORW:196-7]
*--Intuitively grasping the close similarity of "external war" (war between nation states) and "internal war" (revolution within the nation state) [ID], League members saw no sense in a disarmament that left the world-revolutionary Comintern, under Soviet leadership, still active in its support of anti-imperialist armed insurrection and thriving, to all appearances, in its exaggerated ambition to overthrow the very members of the League of Nations themselves
*--Litvinov did not give up
*--Even active members of the Comintern were beginning to stir under increasing Soviet control of the nominally "international" organization. See Helmut Gruber, ed., Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern: International Communism in the Era of Stalin's Ascendancy

<>1927mr:China, Hunan Province | Communist activist of peasant origins, Mao Tse-Tung [Zedong], published report on rural conditions, "Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan" [CCS:1120-52] The Comintern now thought it could count on serious participation of Chinese revolutionary forces
*--GO my30

<>1927ap21:Italian "Corporate statism" consolidated itself by gaining dominion over the wage-labor movement with its "Charter of Labor" [DPH:393-6]
*1927my:Italian leader Mussolini addressed his puppet parliament and attacked political opposition as “silly and superficial in a totalitarian regime” [Nicholas Farrel, Mussolini: A New Life:161 | Also see 2005mr25:TLS:17]

<>1927my30:Comintern Executive Committee resolution on China [Gruber,2:490-500 | BNE:299-303]
*1927jy25:Japanese Premier Tanaka memo to Emperor on railroads and "Our New Continent" (China) [RWP1,2:113-24 | RFP2,1:191-3]
*1927au01:Stalin on China [RFP2,1:184-90]

<>1927oc:USSR "Joint Opposition", including Trotsky, expelled from Communist Party & banished

<>1927oc15:oc20; Turkey | Mustafa Kemal delivered 6-day speech [SPE2:855-6]

<>1927de02:de19; USSR Communist Party Congress #15. End of NEP. Stalin proposed new industrialization program which became the foundation of the industrial Five-year plans for rapid economic modernization [DPH:439-]
*--Collectivization of agriculture was also proposed
*--The Stalinist "cadre" political party sought managerial control over all aspects of national life [SWL:103-34]
*--USSR under Stalin was on its way toward becoming a model "total state" or "totalitarian state" [ID]
*--Around the globe, debate sharpened on the comparative virtues (and relationships) of Stalinist style command economies and capitalist economies. The debate intensified as global market economies wobbled on the brink of collapse
*--Even some US entrepreneurs who had the strongest negative views on Stalinist economics were quick to invest and do business in and with the USSR. For example, Henry Ford was a famous anti-Communists at home, but his company built vehicles in the USSR. Other USA businessmen became deeply involved in the Soviet economy, for example, Armand Hammer. His (auto)biography (co-written by Neil Lyndon) concentrates on his Russian/American background and experience = Hammer (1987)
*--Global growth of a managerial culture in association with large trans-national corporations influenced Stalinist managerial policies (see Merkle and Granick below). What began as management of workplace efficiency [ID] was becoming a widely employed technique of industrial institutional administration and national governance
*--Five-year plans and Collectivization were the two core ingredients of Stalinism. These two were quickly augmented by intellectual and cultural control, and purges (terror as state policy)
\\
*--Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule focuses on captured archives relating to one western region
*--Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (1980) Ch.1, Origins:7-36; and "The Taylor System in Soviet Socialism":103-135 [TXT]; on Stalinist industrialization and collectivization of agriculture [TXT]; on Henry Ford's Soviet plant [TXT]
*--David Granick, Red Executive:1-33, 266-81. Chapter titled "Managerial Class":307-16 [TXT]
*--Cyril Black, "Russian and Soviet Entrepreneurship in a Comparative Context", intro to Entrepreneurship:3-10
*--J. C. Thompson & Richard F. Vidmer, Administrative Science & Politics in the USSR and the United States: Soviet Responses to American Management Techniques, 1917-Present (1983) Chs. 1-4 (ca. 69 pp) into the Stalin period
*--Barry M. Richman, Soviet Management: With Significant American Comparisons (1965)
*--Milton Friedman with the assistance of Rose D. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
*--Saul G. Bron, Soviet economic development and American business; results of the first year under the five-year plan and further perspectives (New York, 1930) [ORBIS, OSU]
*--Joseph Finder, Red Carpet: The Connection between the Kremlin and America's Most Powerful Businessmen--Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Cyrus Eaton, David Rockefeller, Donald Kendall (1983) [ORBIS OSU]
*--Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974)
*--Edward Jay Epstein, Dossier : the secret history of Armand Hammer (1996)
*--GO 1928my28 for more Russia/USA macro-economic comparisons, concentrating on agriculture

<>1927de27:Joseph Stalin condemned Trotskyist Opposition [SGv:160-2]

<>1928:Peruvian Marxist and member of the Comintern José Carlos Mariátegui (1895-1930) published Seven Essays Interpreting the Peruvian Reality. The second essay was "The Land Problem" [CCS,2:730-52]

<>1928ap14:USA Secretary of State Kellogg stated impossibility of USA-USSR relations so long as Comintern existed [RFP2,2:39-41]

<>1928my28:USSR | Stalin on Collectivization of agriculture [ID] [SGv:325-30]
*--Over the next five months, the Central Committee debated about increasingly prosperous peasant farmers, the so-called kulaki [kulaks, "tight fists", usurers; in this case, by extension, rich farmers, peasants who had thrived in the countryside since the Stolypin land laws [ID] and NEP [ID]] [Tucker,Stalin in Power:84-5]
*--Collectivization was a component of a broad Stalinist program for economic modernization and for realizing "socialism in one country". The main outline of what might be called "Stalinism" was becoming clear
*--Two movies illustrate some similarities and differences in the revolutionary Soviet and depression-era US views on the "land" and the "salt of the earth"—the agriculturists who work the land, those who produce the food =
*--USSR film—1929: "The General line", directed by Sergei Eisenstein
*--USA film—1936: "The Plow that broke the Plains", written and directed by Pare Lorentz
*--USA Library of Congress website on "Dust Bowl" culture
*1936:USA | Dorothea Lange's depression-era photo "Migrant Mother"
*--Everywhere in the 1930s, farmers had a hard time
\\
*--Rimlinger:269-80
*--N. C. Field's comparison of the agricultural land base of the USSR and North America" [TXT]
*--Jon Lauck, American agriculture and the problem of monopoly: the political economy of grain belt farming, 1953-1980 (2000) helps put Soviet collective farming into context with a later trend in the USA toward corporate farming. This study puts a question mark around several of the titles that follow below, those mid-century efforts of USA specialists who placed much emphasis on the contrast of individual, free-market farming in the USA with Soviet statist agriculture =
*--George Grantham, et al., eds., Agrarian Organization..., v1:1-24 (gnr intro) v2:USA & Russia
*--Agriculture in the United States and the Soviet Union (Several US gov. publications)
*--Lazar Volin, Agricultural Picture in U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. (1963)
*--E. G. Richards, ed., Forestry and the Forest Industries: Past and Future; Major Developments in the Forest and Forest Industry Sector Since 1947 in Europe, the USSR, and North America (1987)
*--USA Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in a Time of Change (1979), see especially Douglas B. Diamond and W. Lee Davis, "Comparative Growth in Output and Productivity in U.S. and U.S.S.R. Agriculture"; and Imogene Edwards, Margaret Hughes, and James Noren, "U.S. and U.S.S.R.: Comparisons of GNP":369-401
*--Agrarnaia evoliutsiia Rossii i SShA v XIX-nachale XX veka : materialy sovetsko-amerikanskikh simpoziumov [Agrarian evolution in Russia and the United States in the XIX--early XX century] (1991). Table of contents also in English
*--GO 1964:USA for more Russia/USA macro-economic comparison

<>1928jy:USSR | Conclusion of Shakhty [Mines, Miners] Trial, early Stalinist purge trial

<>1928jy:USSR | Sixth World Congress of the Communist International [RFP2,2:192-8]. USSR asserted its dominion over the members of supposedly international Comintern [ORW:199-200]
*1928:1929; US Communist Party, for example, was a product of earlier home-grown radical traditions [EG]. It now fell under the dominance of the Comintern. By this time, Jay Lovestone was the leading figure in CLP, but he became entangled in Stalin’s struggle against Nikolai Bukharin. Oddly, the US movement vibrated in response to Soviet Communist Party internal struggles rather than in response to political and economic conditions in the USA. Comintern leadership and policy were at a crossroads. Bukharin was forced out, but Lovestone would not denounce him. Under Lovestone’s leadership US Communist Party dissenters tried to resist Stalinist manipulation of the Comintern
*1928de:1929sp; Bertram Wolfe traveled to Moscow in an effort to restore harmony, but he found the Soviet Party set on taking over the USA Party by undermining its elected leadership
*1929my06:my14; Moscow | Stalin delivered three speeches on the US situation in which he conceded that US capitalism showed certain specific features, but that it was quite wrong to presume that these warranted different Marxist analysis or Party program in USA. CPA leaders “exaggerate the significance of the specific features of American capitalism and thereby overlook the basic features of world capitalism as a whole”. In other words, CPA should not seek to form policy based on US specifics but rather on global universals, as defined at global headquarters = the Comintern
*--Perhaps Stalin’s most salient point was this = CPA had no one to back them up, CPA by now had no “constituency”, no authentic comradely association with US workers. Constituent relationships with the working people were not characteristic of the parties close to the center of the Comintern. CPA was asked to bear in mind that it had only one important “comrade”, and that was Stalin. He was not to be defied
*--After Stalin’s my14 speech, many of the CPA leaders capitulated. However, when Stalin left the meeting at which he defeated the US leadership, he stopped to extend a hand of greeting to Edward Welsh, a black delegate in the US group. Welsh turned from Stalin to the defeated Lovestone next to him and asked, “What the hell does this guy want?” Welsh did not shake Stalin’s hand
*1929je:Lovestone was expelled from the Comintern, and so was Wolfe when he refused to support the Comintern decision against Lovestone. The USA Party, earlier in a majority behind the dissenter Lovestone, now went along with the decision handed down from Moscow, and this on the eve of the US stock-market collapse
\\
*-- Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (1960)
*--The Soviet World of American Communism

<>1928au27:Kellogg-Briand Pact | Germany, USA, France, England, Italy, Japan, plus Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland solemnly declared "that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another" [DPH:468-9]
*1922fe06:1936de31; Fourteen years of negotiations between USA, France, England, Italy and Japan, in an effort to limit naval armament, lay behind the landmark Kellogg-Briand Pact [RWP1,3:230-7] USA isolationism began to crumble, but was it too little, too late?
*--The Pact affirmed good sentiments, and was eventually signed by 65 nation-states. But the Pact provided for no enforcement mechanisms and thus reflected a general structural fault in the design of the League of Nations

<>1928se:Scotland | Achnacarry Agreement created global petroleum cartels
*--International Petroleum Cartel (WDC:Gvt. Printing Office,1952)

<>1928oc:1932de; USSR First Five-year Plan lasted four years and became the industrial cornerstone of Stalinism
\\
*--Paul R. Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives

<>1928de09:Italian Fascist state strengthened by its absorption of the Grand Council of Fascism (something like the fascist party executive). The corporate state was absorbing the Fascist Party [DPH:396-7]
*1928, Mussolini published his autobiography. The English translation sported a forward by Richard Washburn Child, who had witnessed the rise of Italian corporate statism as Ambassador to Italy from USA. Child was an early supporter of Theodore Roosevelt and his "Bull Moose" party of US progressives. Now Child scoffed at the "so-called liberals" who criticized Fascism. Child extolled the mystic power of the Italian leader and compared his personal magnetism to that of Teddy Roosevelt. "Admire him or not, approve his philosophies or not, concede the permanence of his success or not, consider him superman or not, as you may, he has put to a working test, on great and growing numbers of mankind, programs, unknown before, in applied spirituality, in applied plans, in applied leadership, in applied doctrines, in the applied principle that contents are more important than labels on bottles. He has not only been able to secure and hold an almost universal following; he has built a new state upon a new concept of a state. He has not only been able to change the lives of human beings but he has changed their minds, their hearts, their spirits." [xi]
\\
*--Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Professor of Economics at Loyola University and Senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, explored the broader 20th-century implications of "corporatism" in his article "Economic Fascism"

<>1929:English novelist Virginia Woolf published personal declaration of independence, requiring only, as her title put it, A Room of One's Own [TXT] [CWC:386-98]. Yes, a room of one's own, but also, as her text added, a steady income of 500 British Pounds a year. A feminist manifesto by a representative of the English social, economic and cultural elite, one of the great novelists of the 20th century, was also a plea for economic independence. Economic pressures caused by the commercialization of the fine arts and the rise of pop-arts was felt in Woolf's circles. Her manifesto had long-term influence, and not only on women's movements

<>1929:German writer Erich Maria Remarque published powerful novel about WW1, All Quiet on the Western Front
*--German sociologist (Hungarian-born) Karl Mannheim published pioneer work in the "sociology of knowledge", Ideology and Utopia [CCS:329-56]

<>1929:Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses [TXT] [TXT] [Excerpts = (W) | (W) | CCS:485-506 | CCS,2:508-29 | BMC4:659-61] Critical of mass culture [of which pop-arts were but a superficial expression] and suspicious of undisciplined democracy, he was nonetheless a liberal who fought against old regime Spain and helped establish a brief republican epoch before defeat in the Spanish Civil War brought militarist, right-wing movement of Franco to power
\\
*--[W]
*--A praiseful contemporary "right-wing" critique of Ortega's central ideas (with long quotes) [W]

<>1929fe09:USSR | Joseph Stalin on Nikolai Bukharin and the Right Deviation [SGv:163-6]
*1929:1931; Documents of Soviet History, v5 [DSH,5]

<>1929fe11:Italian Fascist state signed concordat with Pope [DPH:398-9]

<>1929ap08:USSR | Status of Religious Groups Defined [SGv:63-70]
*--Changes over the following half century documented = [PS&C:298-304]

<>1929oc29:USA | New York Times reported "Stock Prices Slump", marking the beginning of the US phase of the temporary global collapse of the capitalist economy. "The Great Depression" was already a decade old in central Europe and only now swept over USA isolationism
*--Andrew Mellon served as Secretary of the Treasury (1921-1932) during administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. He was described by his son Paul as “a thin-voiced, thin-bodied, shy and uncommunicative man” driven by a narrow acquisitive ethic and esthetic. He seemed a man of much wealth and very little personality. However, he established a fabulous personal art collection and used it to found the great National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC
*--Mellon averred that the only role of government in a free economy was to cut taxes and balance its budget. Nonetheless, Mellon continued from his high position of national governmental responsibility and trust to tend daily to the business of his own remarkably successful “laissez-faire” enterprises. He claimed to have withdrawn from his own companies “as if I had died”, but that was a lie. He had no sense of contradiction or conflict of interests. As the depression set in, he claimed that people needed simply to work harder and “lead a more moral life”. His financial elitist and anti-wage-labor views, and his harsh, impractical ideas about the national economic crisis were so offensive that President Hoover found it necessary to reassign Mellon as ambassador to England
*--The most famous pop-art song about the depression, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" [TXT#1 and #2], was written in 1931 by two Russian Jewish émigrés in America, Yip Harburg (lyrics) and J. Gorney (music) and based on a Russian folk tune
\\
*--Rimlinger:193-200 [TXT]

<>1929no:USSR | Nikolai Bukharin dismissed from Politbiuro. The so-called "right opposition" was defeated, and Stalin's path to unchecked power was nearly clear of obstacles

<>1929de21:USSR | Fiftieth birthday of Joseph Stalin

<>1929de27:USSR Collectivization of agriculture intensified as Stalin delivered speech which called for "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class" and "the eradication of the distinction between city and countryside" [SGv:330-1 | DPH:440-1 | PWT2:306-7]
*--The next few months witnessed forced collectivization of about half the USSR rural population, a bitter struggle, eventually with tragic result that millions died in the Soviet countryside, particularly in Ukraine
*1929:1932; Letters and other testimony from rural laboring folks [SWL:28-77]
*--Party activist and later dissenter Lev Kopelev recalled long after the events his own participation in the Terror in the Countryside [P20:121 | PWT2:307-10]
*--Miron Dolot much later recalled his experience of the Famine in the Ukraine [P20:124]
*--From the time of Collectivization, Soviet Union expanded programs of removal and concentration of designated individuals and groups, lodging them in an expanded system of Government Administered Camps [GULag], another essential institutional foundation of Stalinism
*--Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the GUlag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror

<>1930:Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud published Civilization and its Discontents  (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) [Summarized TXT w/quotes | Excerpts = CCS:623-40 | CCS,1:365-82 | PWT2:242-7 (includes other excerpts) | BMC1:617-20]
*--Freud was then at the height of his career, but he had been moving in recent years beyond the "science" of psychoanalysis into huge issues of cultural analysis and criticism =
*1927:The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion), a serious critique of religion as an illusion [BMC4:661-3]
*1939:Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion)

<>1930:German journalist and Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg wrote the influential Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts [The Myth of the Twentieth Century] [BMC1:651-3 | BMC4:749-51]

<>1930ja05:USSR | Collectivization of agriculture accelerated [SGv:331-2]

<>1930mr:Stalin signaled crisis in the implementation of Collectivization with his deceptively titled speech "Dizzy with Success" [SGv:332-3]

<>1930mr:USSR Menshevik Party trial signaled intensification of political terror as a facet of Stalinism

<>1930mr20:Italian labor law, reforming the National Council of Corporations, further strengthened Fascist statism [DPH:399-401]

<>1930mr28:German Socialist Party [SPD] addressed an Executive Appeal to the German working people. The SPD was a central component of the several coalition governments that tried to rule under the Weimar Constitution. In this appeal it defended its social welfare program against the attacks of a strong right-wing party, Deutsche Volkspartei [German People's Party] [DPH:418-19]
*--More social-democratic and right-wing parties (e.g., Nazis)

<>1930my21:India | Followers of Gandhi marched on salt deposits at Dharsana to protest English arrest of their leader, as described by Webb Miller [Eye:501-4]
*1931no30:Gandhi [pix] addressed Second Plenary Meeting of the Second Session of the Round Table Conference. He spoke boldly for the whole of India and insisted upon complete freedom and independence from England. He saw India guided by the political party, the Indian National Congress (founded in the 1880s) [BNE:303-6] Gandhi visited the English Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street [pix]
*1933:1972; Afghanistan ruled for nearly 40 years by its own "king" Mohammad Zahir Shah. Pressed between colonial India and Iran (and eventually Pakistan), and at the strategic southern limit of Russian imperial expansion, Afghanistan was an artificial border drawn by great-power rivalry, and within it lived Uzbek, Pashtun (Pakistany) and Iranian (Persian) peoples. Yet Afghanistan found its way in relative independence through the next four decades
*1946:Kabul University founded
*1964:"liberal" constitution limited monarchical power
*--The 40 years of the Shah was a time of moderate self-administered "modernization" without thorough uprooting of traditional ways. Afghanistan might have become a model of independent, non-European modernization if the great powers had not once again found reason to focus their rivalries on it

<>1930se:USA ex-Socialist John Spargo argued for recognition of USSR [RFP2,2:49-58]

<>1930oc09:1940je26; USSR | Stalinist decade of labor laws (prior to WW2) [SGv:425-32]
*1932au10:Nizhnii Novgorod penal labor colony [GULag] described in official report [SWL:88-93 | see also other documents and narrative discussion:94-102] [W] [W]
*--Women's memoirs of the GULag, edited by Simeon Vilensky, Till My Tale is Told
*1930oc25:oc26; Georgian Society of Marxist Theorists of State met, followed soon by =
*1931ja07:ja14; Moscow meeting of the First All-Union Congress of Marxist Legal Theorists [Jaworskyj:281-90]

<>1930oc18:German Social-Democratic [SD] deputies in the Reichstag declared their unwillingness to cooperate with either the National Socialists [Nazis] or Communists [supporters of the Soviet programs designed within the Comintern]. Surrounded on the right and on the left, German SDs predicted victory for the Nazis, but insisted that Social Democracy and free trade unions were a bastion against Fascism in Germany. "The whole working class must support the parliamentary struggle of the Social-Democratic deputies...with all its power" [DPH:419-20]

<>1930no:USSR "Industrial Party" trial under way

<>1931:Austrian (born in Czech region) mathematician Kurt Gődel (sometimes "Goedel" and incorrectly as "Godel") (1906-1978) published his Incompleteness Theorems in Uber formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme
*--The Goedel Society website explains that Goedel "proved fundamental results about axiomatic systems showing in any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms of the system. In particular the consistency of the axioms cannot be proved. This ended a hundred years of attempts to establish axioms to put the whole of mathematics on an axiomatic basis".
\\
*--[W]
*--Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1981)

<>1931:German author of world fame, Thomas Mann, tried to put rise of Nazism in broadest cultural and historical framework in a article titled "An Appeal to Reason" in which he reflected that Europe was in "a crisis which heralded the end of the bourgeois epoch that came in with the French revolution and the notions appertaining to it. A new mental attitude was proclaimed for all mankind, an attitude that has nothing to do with bourgeois principles such as freedom, justice, culture, optimism, faith in progress. As art, it gave vent to expressionistic soul-shrieks; as philosophy it repudiated ... reason, and the ... ideological conceptions of bygone decades; it expressed itself as an irrationalistic throwback, placing the conception life at the center of thought, and raised on its standard the powers of the unconscious, the dynamic, the darkly creative, which alone were life-giving." [P20:169 | PWT2:351-2]
*--Late this same year in Germany, Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party and remained a member into the year 1938. Later he explained the circumstances that attracted him to the Communist Party [PWT2:352-4]

<>1931:Berlin, Rome and Moscow were the only places where the 100th anniversary of Hegel's death was celebrated. Hegel might not have approved of  Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin, but they all had reasons to approve of him. How are philosophy and totalitarianism linked in this episode?
*--In this same year, as the Nazi movement grew in strength, Free Corps spokesman Ernst von Salomon described the brutalization of post-war life [P20:86 | PWT2:286-7]

<>1931:USSR | Stalin delivered speech (1931fe05:Pravda) in which he said, "One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans [ID]. She was beaten by the Turkish beys [ID]. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords [ID]. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry [ID]. She was beaten by the French [ID] and British capitalists [ID]. She was beaten by the Japanese barons [ID]. All beat her--for backwardness, for military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for her industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished.... In the past we [Soviet working peoples] had no fatherland and could have none. Now, however, that we have overthrown capitalism and the workers wield power in our country, we have a fatherland and shall defend its independence. Do you want our Socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want that, then you must abolish its backwardness and develop a really Bolshevik pace in the establishment of its Socialist economy.... We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we accomplish this or we will be crushed." [The hyperlinks are to plausible historical events behind  Stalinist fear of defeat at the hands of foreign armies. Commentators have taken note of the fact that ten years after this speech, USSR was invaded by Hitler Germany] [BNE:248-55]

<>1931my31:Pope Pius XI issued Quadragesimo Anno [TXT], referring to the 40th anniversary of Rerum Novarum and bringing the message into line with the authoritarian and anti-secular temper of the depression era [BPE:669-99]
*1937mr14:Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge [TXT], criticized Nazi anticlericalism and paganism, then =
*1937mr19:Restated anti-communism, Divini Redemptoris [TXT] [BPE:585-604]

<>1931se18:Manchuria invaded by Japan
*--By 1932ja:Japan declared puppet Manchukuo state there
*1932se:League of Nations Commission head, English Lord Lytton, delegated to study situation [BNE:268-70]
*1933fe24:League tried to intervene, but failed [DPH:469-72]
*--Japan  withdrew from the League of Nations and waged war against China for 14 years, until 1945

<>1932:1933; Ukraine experienced collectivization of agriculture and famine, statistically the most murderous dimension of Stalinism  [93je18:MNe#25:15]
*1932:1934; Documents of Soviet History, v6 [DSH,6]
*--Stalin's personal life took a tragic turn

<>1932:English writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) published Brave New World, a nightmare vision of a totally managed -- a "scientifically" managed -- culture, government, and society. This famous anti-utopian novel was provoked less by this or that monstrous ideology of the inter-war years than by a much more ubiquitous industrial modernization and the erosion of old-fashioned European values. Huxley felt that advanced technologies and pop-art culture were displacing traditional European humanist civilization. He felt a vast cultural disenchantment with 20th-century mass society, in certain ways like that perceived by Weber [ID] and, to some degree, Zamiatin [ID] and Ortega y Gassett [ID]

<>1932:German/Swiss novelist Herman Hesse published Morgenland Fahrt [Journey to the east] and concentrated on completing Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi], not published until 1943. Both works reflected a desperate search for cultural identity in a dispirited or disenchanted era
*--German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) won Nobel Prize, largely for his role over the previous five years in the elaboration of the Principle of Indeterminacy or Uncertainty in the new quantum physics
*1931:English scientific theorist Herbert Dingle endeavored to explain the wider meaning of relativity and quantum theory in the new physics [CCC2,2:1042-60] In the same year his fellow countryman John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) lamented that "the attempt to place biology on a physico-chemical basis has been far from encouraging" [BMC1:596-8]
*1955:Heisenberg himself endeavored to compare medieval and modern ideas of nature, and to explain quantum physics, in his Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik [translated as "The Physicist's Conception of Nature"] [BMC4:704-8]
*--Heisenberg's versatility is suggested in this original German-language "Diskussionen über die Sprache" [TXT].
\\
*--[W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4] [W#5]

<>1932:Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, "The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism" [TXT]
[Excerpts = BNE:261-4 | CWC:219-33 | CCC2,2:1147-60 | BMC1:646-9 | BMC4:744-7]
*--More Fascism

<>1932:Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget published The Moral Judgment of the Child [CCS,1:455-79] in which he continued to expand psychology beyond its main fixation on sexuality and the study of psychic pathology. He sought to illuminate how in general the human brain works, especially how adult consciousness grows from earliest childhood

<>1932:USA Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued in his Moral Man and Immoral Society for democracy using the concept of "original sin" to justify checks and balances and the concept of choice to justify hope for human progress [CCS:552-70 | CCS,2:839-57]
*--Niebuhr began his ministerial career in Detroit where he sided regularly with autoworker unions in their conflicts with management. Eventually a famous "liberal" in public life, Niebuhr was equally famous as a conservative theologian who adhered to the "Pauline Doctrine" and insisted on the inherent sinfulness of humanity. He rejected the popular "social gospel" found in suburban churches of his day, with its casual, maybe even smug, neglect of "original sin". His strong support of institutional restraint ("checks and balances") in political life and justice in social and economic life, thus to minimize the constant threat posed by humanity's wayward ways, harmonized his secular liberalism with his Christian conservatism. His writings influenced many "New Deal" liberals [EG]. In this ideologically intense epoch, Niebuhr also encouraged the more practical-minded, less righteous and "ideological" theorists of international relations [EG]
*1933:English historian Christopher Dawson published Enquiries into Religion and Culture, in which he described the failure of secularization [P20:211]

<>1932:USA social/economic theorists close to FDR’s New Deal administration, Adolf Berle, Jr. (1895-1971), and Gardiner Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property [CCS:729-53 | CCS,2:222-46] This "became the most acclaimed book of the depression decade, if not of the first half of the twentieth century". It was "a manifesto for augmenting a system of private planning with a system of public planning". These were the central ideas: The corporation "transferred control over property from the owner (the stockholder) to management". Berle saw in this the danger of near constant violation of the very foundation of laissez faire market economics, fiduciary trust [those who accept responsibility for the management of resources belonging to others cannot work to make this benefit themselves]. This subtle point became a matter of great public interest when Berle showed what a huge part of USA national wealth was concentrated in a few managers' hands (e.g., Andrew Mellon) [Jordan Schwarz, Liberal, p. viii]
*--The famous liberal "public intellectual" Walter Lippmann explained why a free but democratic USA had to guarantee minimal prosperity under 20th-century conditions of hyper-industrial productivity [Rimlinger provides 2 paragraphs of TXT]
*--Popular self-organization and self-help groups, emphasized one hundred years earlier in Tocqueville's famous study of USA [ID], now were much weaker, though they still played a role, for example in the Townsend Movement [Rimlinger provides 5 paragraphs of TXT]
*--In this way, the New Deal may be thought of as a renewal of the "Progressive Era" under conditions of economic collapse and under the shadow of the managerial revolution in corporate administration
*--The historical irony here may be that "The West" experienced a crisis-ridden 1930s in which an intense assault on the nearly two-century tradition of market economics came from two very different directions =
(1) large business enterprises themselves and
(2) totalitarian statism
*--Some opponents of the US "New Deal", accused it of siding with the first, and some of siding with the second [EG]. Berle and other "New Dealers" sought to tip-toe between these two threats and to bring the USA out of economic collapse
*--Berle kept a meticulous record of his active life, which included serving as "Russian expert" with President Wilson's delegation to the Versailles conferences, published as Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971 (1973)

<>1932ja:Soviet journal Kul'tura i byt [Culture and Everyday life] became the organ of "Obshchestvo bor'by s alkogolizmom" [Society for the struggle with alcoholism] and absorbed the journal Kul'turnaia revoliutsiia [Cultural Revolution]
*--Lenin’s and Stalin’s styles of struggle for revolutionary culture were illustrated in this transition from Lenin's call for more culture & retreat from revolutionary extremes of War Communism, from that to Stalin’s struggle against alcoholism; from Beethoven for the proletariat to no booze -- from literary dreams to Socialist Realism

<>1932fe:League of Nations Disarmament Conference convened. Representatives of USA and USSR participated. The goal was to define means to limit and control expenditures by nation-states for military weaponry and to reduce numbers in uniform. France rejected the draft treaty that came out of these meetings. Germany suggested that all nation-states should reduce their military to the levels imposed on Germany at Versailles, a powerful idea but one accompanied by an unsettling threat = Accept this German plan or Germany would rearm
*1933mr:As the German Nazi Party ascended to power (via elections), the Disarmament Conference adjourned. Disarmament was perhaps the most significant initiative of the League of Nations, and it clearly was in jeopardy from the very beginning

<>1932mr:Leon Trotsky journal Bulletin of the Opposition (Bolshevik Leninists) contained powerful letter

<>1932jy30:German physicist Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in which he explored the question of why humans go to war
*1932se:Freud replied [the two letters in RWP1,2:21-35 and RWP2:19-32]
*--Freud had already over the previous third of a century made his great contributions to psychoanalytic theory
*--Freud was soon forced to flee from the spread of Nazism in Austria. He emigrated to England, where he died in 1939
*--His intellectual influence was great from 1900 up to a point of rather precipitous decline at the end of the 20th century when his psychological views came under wide and severe criticism

<>1932au21:USSR | Riutin's "Appeal" [Tucker,Stalin in Power:211-12]

<>1932oc27:London | Hunger marchers converged on House of Commons, as described by Wal Hannington [Eye:504-5]
*--In this same year, German writer Heinrich Hauser described his experience among Germany's unemployed [P20:160 | PWT2:336-9]
*1930:Austrian social scientist reported on impact of depression on everyday life in the small industrial town Marienthal [CWC:446-63]
*--English governmental figure and academic economist, active in the design of modern welfare policies in the first half of the 20th century, William Henry Beveridge, assessed the economic collapse in the Great Depression [CCC2,2:1129-43]
*1942de06:Ten years later, during WW2, Beveridge put up a strong defense of social insurance [CWC:503-15]

<>1932no09:Joseph Stalin's wife Nadia killed herself

<>1932de27:USSR | Internal Passport Re-established [SGv:74-7 | PS&C:164-6]

<>1933:1937; USSR Second Five-year Plan lasted four years


1932 New Years postcard created by N. I. Dormidontov
depicting "Moscow-Narva House of Culture" in Leningrad
[SOURCE]

<>1933:USSR Foreign Commissar Maksim Litvinov proposed definition of "aggression" to League of Nations. League members were but little interested in the Soviet proposal, even though it might be said to have defined international revolutionary activities as aggression, as well as the traditional military actions of "states" = Litvinov's proposal stipulated that aggression cannot be justified by "the alleged absence of certain attributes of state organization" in the country attacked, or by "the establishment or maintenance in any state of any political, economic or social order". Clearly Litvinov aimed to restrict threats to the USSR and not to restrict actions of the Comintern [ORW:198-9]
*--Nonetheless, these formulas carried the seeds of the notion of "peaceful co-existence" and might have restrained both the new nation-state militarism of the time, as well as the actions of the Comintern. The world, however, was spiraling in directions not likely to be altered by this or any other "definition of aggression"

<>1933ja:1941; USA President Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR] & "New Deal" in eight pre-WW2 years introduced a dramatic series of emergency measures to combat the devastating consequences of the Great Depression and, then in a steadier sequence of legislative acts, to restore and rebalance the US market economy
*--English economist John Maynard Keynes was the most influential spokesperson for New Deal style Anglo-American  social democracy
*--In the first two years of FDR's administration, this and other powerful measures were taken =
*1933mr09:Emergency Banking Act
*1933mr12:Agricultural Adjustment Act (1936:US Supreme Court declared AAA unconstitutional)
*1933mr31:Civilian Conservation Corps Reforestation Relief Act established work camps for 250,000 young men who were compensated with room and board plus $30/mo salary. The CCC was much expanded with time
*1933my12:Federal Emergency Relief Administration [FERA] created with wide discretionary authority and headed up by FDR's most trusted administrative lieutenant, Harry Hopkins. A $500 million budget was devoted to state-administered rations of food and other commodities for those in desperate need. It's programs reached all the way to Alaska Territory
*1933my18:Tennessee Valley Authority Act [TVA] (which, like the next three on this list, issued from Congress rather than from the White House)
*1933my27:Federal Securities Act
*1933je06:National Employment Service Act, designed to facilitate bringing those who needed labor together with those who needed to work
*1933je12:Home Owners Refinancing Act allocated $2.2 billion to refinance about one million mortgages on private homes
*1933je16:Glass-Steagall Act which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC]. Bank failures were drastically curtailed
*1933je16:National Industrial Recovery Act, the act of broadest significance, creating the "National Recovery Administration" [NRA]. (1935:US Supreme Court declared NRA unconstitutional)
*1933je16:Emergency Railroad Transportation Act which sought to ramp up railroad regulation, building on the original and continuing close ties between government and enterprise in this branch of the industrial economy
*1935:Social Security Act [ID] [TXT]
*1935:1939; Works Progress Administration, later called Work Projects Administration. Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA lasted de jure until 1943, but anti-New Deal Congressional opposition (fearing the spread of "socialism") reduced its operations to nearly nothing in 1939. Before its abolition, WPA expended $11 billion to employ 8,500,000 otherwise unemployed in useful public projects. All across the land, WPA constructing 116,000 buildings, 78,000 bridges, 651,000 miles of hard-surface road, and 800 modernized airports. WPA also administered a Federal Art Project (creating 10,000 works of art, most notably decorative murals in public buildings), Federal Writers' Project (which produced a remarkable series of guidebooks, state by state), and a Federal Theatre Project (sponsoring an estimated 4,000 performances a month during the depression years) [Knight Library Holdings]
*1935:"Wagner Act" & National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] built on the principle that membership or non-membership in a labor union cannot be a condition of employment. This principle was first articulated in the act creating the NRA. Labor unions, which had been considered something close to illegal political conspiracy in the USA since the great Homestead Strike [ID], were now recognized.
*--USA was the last of the "Western" nations to adopt modern welfare legislation. It lagged behind Russia, imperial and Soviet. English and USA tardiness in part influenced by "Social Darwinism" [ID], in part by an obdurate US reluctance to vouchsafe a place for wage-labor interests and organizations in the emerging modern industrialized political economy. GO 1947:USA Taft-Hartley
*1935my27:USA Supreme Court, however, declared the New Deal "National Industrial Recovery Act" (a key element of the NRA plan) unconstitutional. Still, the New Deal moved ahead in its struggle against economic collapse
*--FDR redefined US liberalism, adding a large dose of what in Europe might be called social democracy. However, some called it by other names which variously implied managerial bureaucratic statism ("planned economy"; in this case the planning was by a nationally elected government rather than self-administered corporate boards or industrial CEOs) [Howard Zinn, ed., New Deal Thought]
*--Ex-Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon remained until his death in 1937 a bitter critic of FDR’s “socialistic” New Deal. The Roosevelt Administration began to pull the US capitalist economy out of the swamp into which it had driven itself in the years of Mellon’s service as Secretary of the Treasury. Many whose chestnuts were thus pulled from the fire nurtured until their deaths an angry and thankless hatred for the progressivism of the New Deal. Those who thought this way felt it was sufficient condemnation of the "New Deal" to equate it with the European (could we say "Western") social-democratic tradition
*--Building on an inherited family fortune, Mellon individually achieved a vigorous and astonishing half-century-plus business and public service career
\\
*--Rimlinger on Roosevelt's background [TXT]; on the depression era  [TXT]
*--LBH,3:380-7

<>1933ja11:USSR Machine Tractor Stations nationalized and centrally administered large farm implements. Agriculture mechanized or industrialized as agricultural collectivization advanced [SGv:334-6]

<>1933fe22:Germany, Berlin | D. Sefton Delmer described Hitler's reaction to the burning of the Reichstag [Eye:507-9]. From the beginning, the Nazis counted on its being the work of communists. Thus they sought to exploit public concern over a terrorist act in order to rouse the electorate to vote for their right-wing party. It appears now to have been a Nazi setup, and it worked

<>1933fe28:Nazis persuaded ineffective President Hindenburg to issue an ordinance "for the protection of the people and state", on the basis of which Hitler was able to attack all political opposition to his party in upcoming elections [DPH:420-1]

<>1933mr05:1945ap30; Adolf Hitler elected head of German State, the beginning of 12-year-long "Thousand Year Reich" (the "Third Reich") in Nazi Germany
*--Ended with Hitler’s suicide and, two days later, the surrender of Berlin to the Soviet Red Army and the end of WW2 in Europe
*--But over the next dozen years, Hitler reshaped European history

<>1933mr07:Austrian Premier Engelbert Dollfuss (Christian Socialist Party) suspended parliamentary government, ousting Social Democrats. He sought support from Fascist Italy, but he nonetheless tried to keep native-born Austrian Nazi Party activists at arms length. Dollfuss assumed dictatorial power

<>1933mr24:German "Weimar Constitution" suspended in emergency "enabling law" which gave Hitler unchecked authority "to relieve the distress of the people and the Reich". Only the SDs voted against this measure. Liberalism appeared politically inert. Other laws followed in quick succession over the next few months in which Hitler carried out his "revolution after power", establishing a dictatorship for himself and his Nazi Party [DPH:421-4]

<>1933ap:USSR Metro-Vickers Trial

<>1933ap16:USSR | Sholokhov letter to Joseph Stalin re. excesses of Collectivization [Tucker, Stalin in Power:194]
*--Stalinist policy in this epoch has reminded some commentators of English policy in the early industrial era. Stalin's "primitive accumulation of capital" meant heartless squeezing of the domestic population of the northern Eurasian continent, all in a very brief historical period, about one decade. It meant a hurried transfer of the economic resources of Russian and all other people under direct Soviet rule, and especially traditional rural populations. These resources were gathered into the hands of Party bureaucratic and managerial elites for purposes of investment in Soviet industrial development, and the comfort of the gathering elite. English "primitive accumulation" was much slower and came from two sources. First, common agricultural lands under traditional village authority were "inclosed" (or "enclosed") [ID] by landowning elites. This meant the expropriation and concentration of economic resources into the hands of a privileged aristocracy and crown administration for their own comfort and expanded opportunities through investment in the dynamic new global market economy. Thus the second source of English "primitive accumulation of capital" = exploitation of overseas imperial domains [EG]
*--Collectivization disrupted and transformed forever the Russian rural landscape. The destruction of traditional village ways and the introduction of modern, urban, mechanized means of production has been variously painful everywhere it has happened, whether managed by entrepreneurial aristocrats, Commissars or corporate executives. In contrast to other moments in the history of the European "agricultural revolution" in preparation for industrialization, Soviet Collectivization was an intense and purposeful telescoping of the misery and dislocation into a brief historical moment --  mostly in the first five years of agricultural collectivization between 1927 and 1933 [ID] -- in which levels of suffering and loss were staggering, even when judged by the standards of the statist-managerial 20th century, in fact, they were nearly unprecedented in the history of domestic governmental policy

<>1933ap26:English ambassador to Germany Horace Rumbold sent to London a clear description of what Hitler and his Nazi Party meant for the wider world [BNE:270-3]. Political life darkened in central and eastern Europe

<>1933ap28:USSR Central Committee directive re. Communist Party purge [Tucker, Stalin in Power:221-2 | SGv:167-70]
*--A political culture of denunciation crept into the everyday life of the Soviet citizen [SWL:154-7; 207-81]
*--Over next five years, Stalinist purges also eradicated leading Bolsheviks and other Communist Party members [ORW:208-10]

<>1933my10:German university students burned books which the Nazis identified as objectionable. In Berlin, the local Associated Press bureau chief Louis P. Lochner observed and reported on book burning [P20:177]

<>1933je:USA consul general at Berlin George S. Messersmith reported, "The Nazis were after...unlimited territorial expansion" [P20:218]

<>1933se01:Germany | Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, became an annual event of high theatre
*--Leni Riefenstahl Produktion, Triumph of the Will [80 min. videorecording] Direction and artistic organization, Leni Riefenstahl ; camera director, Sepp Allgeier ; musical composition, Robert Windt. Original German language version with English subtitles Videocassette release of the 1934 motion picture Winner of Germany's National Film Prize ; awarded first place at The Paris International Exhibition. Parental discretion advised. A film commissioned by Adolph Hitler as the official record of the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1934. Produced as an important piece of political propaganda to introduce the new German leaders to the nation and to impress foreign audiences
*1937:German supporter of Hitler who later broke with him, Kurt G.W. Ludecke, described The Demagogic Orator [P20:168]
*--USA medical doctor Alice Hamilton visited Germany and reported what she saw with precision and vitality = "To understand Hitler's enormous success with the young we must understand what life has meant to the post-war generation in Germany, not only the children of the poor but of the middle class as well. They were children during the years of the war when the food blockade kept them half starved, when fathers were away at the front and mothers distracted with the effort to keep their families fed. They came to manhood in a country which seemed to have no use for them" [P20:172 | PWT2:342-4]
*--GO oc14

<>1933se02:Winnipeg Free Press. An article by Frank H. Williams on conditions in western Canada during the Depression = "How families in stricken prairie areas have managed to live during these trying times. Those too proud to accept relief have exhibited considerable ingenuity in devising ways and means of augmenting the family income. For one thing the old spinning wheel has come back into use again. In a small Manitoba town a blacksmith took advantage of this sudden demand for spinning wheels to revamp his shop into a spinning wheel factory and business boomed so quickly he had to take on additional help. In the Edenwold district, east of Regina, one family with butter and eggs to sell debated whether it was worth while to spend the money for gasoline to take their produce to Regina. They solved the problem by filling the old Model T Ford with cut firewood and the sale value of the wood paid the expenses of the trip. Another farmer near Rouleau, Sask., despaired of selling his hogs in the ordinary way for the price was at rock bottom. He conceived the idea of manufacturing the entire hog into sausage and the word spread that his sausage was good, so he was forced to go out and buy the hogs of his neighbors. The spinning industry was revived because the price of wool was so low as to make it unprofitable to sell. The government instructors quickly adapted their training to the changed conditions and showed the farm women how to make blankets out of the raw wool. Unable to buy new cars and by the same token unable to buy gasoline for the old car, or even to buy a buggy, the farmers have taken the engines out of their old Model T Fords, hitched a tongue and whiffle-trees to the front axle and called it a "Bennett" buggy. Others have put a seat on the front wheels of a Model T and have christened this an "Anderson" cart. Probably Premiers Bennett and Anderson will not feel flattered at the use of their names in this connection, but it is a reflection of the spirit of the times.... One item of expense the farmer has eliminated is that of flour. With thousands of bushels in his granaries that the market price doomed to remain there, the farmer took five or ten bushels to the small grist mill for his own flour. If he had no money to pay for the milling he left the bran and shorts with the miller in payment. The average farm family has limited its purchases to sugar and tea, for which no substitutes can be found on the land. A few dozen eggs or a few pounds of butter can take care of these requirements. Some enterprising businessmen, such as local theatre and skating rink managers offered to take wheat and barley as payment for admission prices. They tell the story of a Manitoba farmer who met two acquaintances outside a beer parlor. "Lets go in for a beer," he suggested. The three quaffed their bottles of beer and when the host arose to go he turned to the hotel-keeper. "I'll bring you ten bushels of barley to pay for that." he said. Until organized relief measures came to the aid of the farmer the fuel problem was his greatest worry. You can drive a day at a time in some parts of Saskatchewan and never see a tree or a bush. Those farmers burned coal in the good days, but in their necessity they had no money with which to buy coal. So they burned barley. But they have caught a vision of better times, with the upward trend of the wheat market. Those courageous enough to hold their crop over from last year have sold it this summer, mostly in small lots, for a carload shipment would excite comment and perhaps invoke a seizure order from the bank, the implement agent or the mortgage company. So they have sold a lot of their grain a hundred bushels at a time and they are paying their small debts, preferably their store bills. They feel the banks, the implement companies and the mortgage companies can wait a bit longer for their money.... There will be money to spend in western Canada this year if the market price of grain keeps up. The farmer is starved for everything that contributes to the comfort and well-being of his family and as soon as he gets some surplus cash he will turn it loose into the avenues of trade" ....   [SOURCE]

<>1933oc14:Germany, under Nazi rule, withdrew from League of Nations and from its Disarmament Conference [DPH:472-3]
*--The Disarmament Conference was just then reconvening. Perhaps we should say "just then coming too" after being knocked out in its first phase

<>1933no:USA-USSR diplomatic relations restored based on USA formal recognition of USSR that summer [related documents—RFP2,2:59-67]
*--Fifteen years of non-recognition and, in general, USA isolationism in relationship to European problems were now coming to a close. A perception spread that the world was dividing along lines perceived as "progressive" on one side and "fascistic" on the other. Reluctantly FDR's administration saw itself forced to position itself in this starkly bifurcating world.  By now, however, the devastated US economy placed severe limits on just how effective US involvement could be

<>1933de:Japanese-Russian international relations described by USA Ambassador William Bullitt [Senn,2:]

<>1934:English philosophical historian Arnold Toynbee helped make sense out of confusing times for countless readers when he first published A Study of History [BMC1:688-94 | BMC4:782-8]
*--Toynbee, in a time of decline, helped popularize the notion of "The West" as an ascendant civilization [i.e., northwestern Europe and its North American off-shoot]. The concept had emerged over the previous half-century. The notion came to full blossom in the half century of Cold War at the end of the 20th century

<>1934:French artist André Breton, What is Surrealism? [CWC:368-86]
*--Breton rejected Tristan Tzara's "Dada" movement, with its influential two-decade-long emphasis on the unconscious, chaotic and irrational elements of creativity in the fine arts

<>1934:1937; German classicist Werner Jaeger, Paideia: die Formung des griechischen Menschen (3 volumes, Berlin and Leipzig:1934-1937; English translation)

<>1934:German physicist and Nobel Laureate Johannes Stark urged scientists to embrace Nazi racist doctrine and pitted "Jewish Science" versus "German Science" [P20:175]

<>1934:German-born (USA émigré) theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, "What is the Theory of Relativity?" [BPE:723-6]

<>1934:Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-) wrote "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" [BMC4:718-22 (includes excerpt from later work)]
*--Selections from Jung's works [TXT#1] [TXT#2]
*1908:Jung met Freud [ID] and was thrown into the psychological movement of the early 20th century. He soon found his own voice and broke with Freud. For one thing, he did not accept the nearly exclusively sexual inclination of Freudian analysis. He was more mystical, religious and anthropological in his psychology. He sought to understand what he called "the collective unconscious", a cluster of archetypical emotions, images and inclinations that helped identify the individual within the larger collective of general human consciousness and subconscious
\\
*--[W] [W]

<>1934:USA public intellectual Lewis Mumford published Technics and Civilization [CCS,2:18-39]

<>1934:1935; USA athlete, scholar, actor, singer, and increasingly an activist on behalf of blacks and other oppressed minorities, Paul Robeson, accepted an invitation from Sergei Eisenstein to visit the USSR. This was the beginning of a complex and troubled epoch of activism in Robeson's life [W]

<>1934wi:French political crisis threatened possibility of right-wing takeover [DPH:328-36]

<>1934ja:Stalin speech on relations of USSR with Capitalist States represented a reasonably unambiguous statement of Stalinist foreign policy in the aftermath of Nazi victory in Germany [RFP2,1:118-28 | ORW:205-7]

<>1934fe04:USA New Deal agency, FERA [ID], received report on the feasibility of establishing an agricultural colony in the Alaska Matanuska Valley. FDR ordered an end to the spontaneous settlement that had been filling Alaska habitable places since the days of Russian dominion. The Valley experienced 110 frost-free days. Sunshine was ample, 24 hours worth on June 21. Three years earlier, USA Department of Agriculture, working closely with the Alaska Railroad, supported experimental stations in Fairbanks and the Matanuska Valley. But by 1934, only about 100 families could be found scattered in the Valley. FDR now authorized Harry Hopkins to create a New Deal colony, the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corporation, and to fund it out of the Federal Treasury until it got on its own feet. FERA seized all previously abandoned claims to Matanuska land and began to design and build a colonial settlement and to recruit settlers from depression-hit Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan
*1935my22:Seward-Palmer train delivered the second group of immigrants. Now each of the 200 resettled families, by lot, was assigned a 40-acre plot
*1935je06:Anchorage Daily Times editorialized, "It would be little less than a Siberian exile to send decent Americans to Alaska"
*1935oc:Twenty-six families had given up and had the way paid back home to "the lower 48" (Alaskans often say "outside"). But 140 homes had been built, and 40 more were under construction. US government paid $7-8,000 for each house and laid a mortgage on the householders. A Community Center, warehouse, dormitory, and power plant were completed. A Community Council was organized among the immigrants, made up of 18 members (1 man and 1 woman from each of the 9 camps)
*1936fa:Twenty-room school under construction
*1937fe:A year and a half into its existence and 130 babies had been born to the colony. The Matanuska Valley Farmers Cooperative was up and running, modeled on WPA [ID] designs
*1938se03:FERA administration ended, and the Matanuska Valley Civic Association assumed the responsibilities of the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corporation
*1940jy09:Anchorage Daily News reported that the government had invested $4,169,370 in the Valley project. As WW2 loomed, Federal military projects (e.g., construction of Fort Richardson, then later the construction of the Alaska Highway) further infused public tax dollars into the Valley. By the end of WW2, US governmental expenditures in the Valley approached $6 million
\\
*--Orlando W. Miller, The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony
*--T. C. Feldman, The Federal Colonization Project in the Matanuska Valley (U of Washington MA thesis) ORBIS
*--Clarence C. Hulley, Alaska...

<>1934fe05:Italian Fascist state complete with Law on Corporations [DPH:401-2]

<>1934fe10:USSR | Rules of the Communist Party [DPH:441-5]

<>1934ap:Austrian strong-man Dollfuss, after crushing a Social Democratic uprising against his dictatorship, declared his government an authoritarian or "corporate state" with a constitution drafted by Austrian Nazis
*--Julius Deutsch, Commander of the Schutzbund, a private Social Democratic army defeated by Dollfuss, gave an eyewitness account of the brief Vienna-based civil war, Destruction of Austrian Socialism [P20:185]

<>1934ap:USA commercial attaché in Berlin, Douglas Miller, reported to consul general Messersmith that "The Nazis were determined to secure more power and more territory in Europe" [P20:219]

<>1934my13:USSR | Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam arrested, as described by his wife Nedezhda Mandelshtam [Eye:510-11]

<>1934je08:USSR Decree emphasized dangers of treason [ORW:207-8]

<>1934je30:Germany experienced "the Night of the Long Knives" in which Nazis began to "purge" SA [Sturm Abteilung, storm troopers, a paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party]. Hitler ordered the murder of hundreds of leaders whose radical ambitions threatened Hitler's leadership but also challenged the regular German army
*1934jy03:Nazi authorities passed Law Concerning Measures for the Defense of the State which served post facto to legitimize the "Long Knives" murders and to propel SS leaders to top positions of power and influence. Heinrich Himmler commanded the SS [Schützstaffel, defense echelon]. He and his elite military/police units thrived as repression became the heart of the Nazi regime. That was unclear only to those who thought violence directed against leftists and Jews was justifiable
\\
*--Pierre Ayçoberry, The Social History of the Third Reich, 1933-1945 explores the roots of  Nazi success as it molded social acceptance of its repressive policies. Neither professional, intellectual, nor moral conscience prevented individuals and groups from compliance with Nazi policy. German civil society was like a "kicked-in anthill"

<>1934jy10:USSR upgraded its NKVD [Narodnaia kommissariat vnutrennikh del; Interior Commissariat, with heavy "police" overtones] [SGv:254-5] Compare with earlier Cheka & OGPU, and with later MVD. These institutional arrangements were essential features of Stalinism
*--Soviet theorists worked on new interpretations of the Marxist concept of the "withering away" of the state and law [Jaworskyj:303-14] Compare with treatment of this topic a quarter-century later

<>1934jy25:Austrian dictator Dollfuss assassinated by local Nazis as they tried unsuccessfully to seize power
*--Finally Hitler Germany moved in to complete what the local Nazis could not finish on their own

<>1934se18:USSR became a member of the League of Nations after 30 member-states offered invitation to join, plus membership on the Permanent Council

<>1934au:USSR Union of Soviet Writers held Congress #1. "Socialist Realism" became state doctrine and an essential ingredient of Stalinism
*--Party intrusion into cultural life increased in the two years prior to this official act [SWL:77-89]
*--Party apparatchik Andrei Zhdanov on literature & the arts [RRC1,3:693-5]
*--Party intrusion into cultural life extended the managerial authority of Party "cadres" [SWL:134-53]
*--Years later, Russian poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko described Literature as Propaganda [P20:129]
*--In the year that the Soviet state moved to terminate the great "Silver Age" of Russian culture, Andrei Belyi died, but not before he issued his belated and fruitless defense of "symbolism", Masterstvo Gogolia [Gogol's workshop]. Belyi was one of the last great representatives of the Silver Age. His career spanned three decades
*--At this fateful juncture in the history of Russian (Soviet) culture, it could be said that Russia was more at one with general European popular arts that it was ever again to be until the late 20th century. Popular musicians like Aleksandr Varlamov, Yakov Skomorovskii, Aleksandr Tsfasman, Nikolai Minkh, and, especially, Leonid Utesov excelled in the new and exciting world of jazz. In 1934, Utesov wrote, starred and more or less produced and directed the film Veselye rebiata [Jolly Fellows], a fascinating and lighthearted musical comedy, maybe one of the last pre-Code (i.e., pre-Socialist Realism) works of pop-art
*1934jy01:USA saw imposition of the "Hays Code" [ID] to regulate making, distribution and showing of moving pictures. As in USSR, so also in USA, certain cultural elites took steps to protect the public from the evil that might arise from spontaneous pop-arts. The USSR went further, roping in all forms of artistic creativity, high and low, and pushing hard, not simply to prevent creation and distribution of certain sorts of art, but to promote and assure creation and distribution of approved sorts of art. But what are the similarities and differences in these two coincidental nation-wide efforts at censorship?
*--Marc Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems 1917-1977 (1977):177, had this to say about comparative esthetics, USA/Russia, in the era of pop-arts and "socialist realism" = "The mechanics of making a best-seller in Russia are much the same as in capitalist countries, the difference being that social content and an affirmation of incorruptible conviction, rather than an adventurous or salacious story, form the basis of mass appeal. In the U.S. (and in the West, in general) large sections of the public seek in books primarily entertainment, or escape, but the Russians have been so conditioned by tradition and by the Revolution as to expect in their reading an echo of their own thoughts and an answer to their perplexities and anxieties ­ or at least an indication of what is good or evil. New audiences in the Soviet Union, less sophisticated than those of the pre-revolutionary epoch, yet much more numerous, demand moral and social inspiration from works of fiction ­ hence the fact, that while second- or third-rate Western literature offers simple trash, poor Soviet literature produces tendentious and didactic trash."
*--Problem of "social responsibility of art" not just a problem of "art for art's sake" vs. propaganda. English poet (and later USA émigré, then, after 1946, citizen) W.H. Auden spoke of "parable-art" and opposed it to both "escape-art" and propaganda. See his 1940 poem "Voltaire at Ferney" [CWC:464-5] with the words, "Yes, the fight / Against the false and the unfair / Was always worth it."
\\
*--Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934

<>1934de01:Decree on the assassination of Sergei Kirov [SGv:251-3] Central Executive Committee issued order to track down terrorists [DPH:445]

<>1935:Russian Christian philosopher in exile from the USSR, Nikolai Berdiaev, described how Christian civilization was being destroyed by Nazism, Communism and other forms of "collective demoniac possession". Only Christian piety (active struggle for human dignity and social justice) could save Europe and all mankind, Modern Ideologies at Variance with Christianity [P20:209]
*--Berdiaev, "Socialism as Religion" [RRS:105-34]

<>1935:Turkey | Kemal Atatürk's Republican People's Party program [SPE2:861-2]
*--By this time Turkey had adopted features of the Stalinist five-year plans, emphasizing state controlled and planned heavy industrial development, and leaning heavily on an antiquated agricultural economy. Hostile to the USSR in foreign affairs, Kemal's Turkey nonetheless imitated the Soviet domestic economy
*--Turkey survived into the middle of the 20th century as an independent state as a result of the efforts of Kemal and the "young Turks" who got under way in the years before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire [ID]

<>1935:USA journalist Eugene Lyons tried to explain the Soviet Union in Moscow Carrousel
\\
*--Whitman Bassow, Moscow Correspondents: Reporting on Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost

<>1935:1936; Soviet writers Ilia Ilf and Evgenyi Petrov, famous for their biting satirical prose works, traveled across USA and wrote an account, Little Golden America (also a later 1974 translation). They were especially struck by the mistreatment of blacks. They saw this as a cultural tragedy, as well as a human-rights scandal. If the USA did not have its blacks, it would be a very dull place, they said
*--In these years "jazz" was sweeping the global cultural horizon. Maxim Gorky was appalled by what he took to be the savage degeneracy of jazz [as quoted in S. Frederick Starr, Hot and Cool:91]
\\
*--Maxim Matusevich, "An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans and the Soviet Everyday" [TXT]

<>1935fe17:USSR Seventh Congress of Soviets passed law about the kolkhoz [kollektivnoe khoziaistvo; collective farm] which joined Collectivization with Stalinist five-year plans for industrialization and promoted "the liquidation of the distinction between town and countryside" [SGv:337f] The small family farm did not seem to have much of a future in the industrializing 20th century
*--Discontent with collective farms [kolkhozy] was rampant [SWL:282-355] Chaos at kolkhoz market described [SWL:254-5]
*--Congress heard speech by A.O. Avdienko which extolled The Cult of Stalin [P20:128] Since Stalin's 50th birthday a few years earlier signs of the so-called "Cult of Personality" appeared with greater frequency. A better translation of kul’t lichnosti might be "Cult of the Individual". This "cult" substituted the single individual for the group, i.e., for the Party. Stalin increasingly put himself above the Party, and he put his Party above all else, creating "Stalinism" or Soviet-style "totalitarianism"
*--In this year the 1935 General plan for the reconstruction of Moscow overshadowed all the far-reaching architectural projections of the first "five year plans" [pix]. The plan envisaged the city as a unified system of highways, squares and embankments with unique buildings, embodying the ideas and achievements of socialism. The plan paid little attention to preservation of historical heritage. Architects of diverse orientations and schools of thought were invited to submit projects toward the realization of this grand design. Particularly noteworthy were the projects for a Palace of Soviets (1931-1933) [W] [W] and for the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (1934) [W] [W] [W]. Neither of these structures was built, but the heroic Stalinist architectural projects had a noticeable influence on the development of Moscow. [W--Follow the right arrow for more examples]

<>1935mr16:Germany denounced military clauses of the Versailles Treaty and announced its plans to rearm [DPH:473-6] Europeans tried to coordinate their relationship to the newly rearming Nazi Germany [DPH:476-9] But the faulty Versailles settlement continued to crumble

<>1935my25:Stalin disbanded the Society of Old Bolsheviks [Obshchestvo starykh bol'shevikov] & its printing/publishing establishment

<>1935au:Soviet "Stakhanovite" program introduced for industrial wage-labor, encouraging and rewarding a select few examples of Herculean accomplishment on the worksite during the implementation of the five-year plans
*--USA welder John Scott left Depression-era  joblessness in USA and sought his fortune in the construction and operation of the massive Magnitogorsk steel mills in the Five-Year-Plan-era in the USSR. He described his experience in a remarkable, detailed personal account, Behind the Urals : an American worker in Russia's city of steel. Of especial interest is his introduction and the history of Magnitogorsk he gathered between shifts
\\
*--Merkle interprets the Stakhanovite program [TXT]

<>1935au:Moscow | Seventh World Congress of the Communist International [RFP2,2:198-205]
*--Comintern strained relations with USA to the extreme [RFP2,2:67-72]

<>1935se13:German Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg | Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels delivered speech in which he endeavored to distinguish National Socialist (Nazi) rule in Germany from Communist rule in the USSR [TXT]
*--That summer and fall, a series of Nazi laws on racial purity were put in force [DPH:424-6]
*--German textbook by Jakob Graf explained Heredity and Racial Biology for Students [P20:177]
*1933ap01:1938au05:Berlin. German medical doctor Hertha Nathorff (Albert Einstein’s niece) kept a diary record of Jewish persecution, A German Jewish Doctor's Diary [P20:179]
*--Marta Appel described her similar experiences in Dortmund, Memoirs of a German Jewish Woman [P20:181]

<>1936:1937; French coalition of socialist, communist and other left political parties joined in a movement called "The Popular Front". Their combined efforts for a moment rescued France from political and economic crisis. Socialist Léon Blum became Prime Minister and openly imitated USA President Roosevelt's New Deal policies [ID], especially concessions to the needs of wage-labor [CWC:271-2 | DPH:336-8]
*--Despite brief and partial successes, European social-democracy in the inter-war period failed to recover its pre-WW1 vigor
*--Then WW2 picked up where WW1 left off and scrambled European life beyond recognition. After France was swiftly defeated in the opening days of WW2, socialist Prime Minister Blum was arrested and sent to a Nazi concentration camp. "Leftist" and "rightist" attacks on liberalism and socialism intensified
*--Blum was not finished yet. He survived the concentration camp, even smuggled a manuscript defense of democracy out of prison [BPE:605-16]. After the war, in 1946, he was briefly elected Premier. With that, Blum's 30-year career in French socialist politics was at its end.

<>1936:USA socialist leader Norman Thomas published After the New Deal, What? in which he urged the nation to a fuller realization of workers' democracy [Excerpts RWP1,1:86-93]

<>1936:Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published his gloomy vision of the future with a warning that European civilization was at a breaking point: The Shadow of Tomorrow [CCS,2:463-484]

<>1936:French political philosopher Elie Halévy (1870-1937) put a fierce polemical edge to his liberal social and economic views in The era of tyrannies: Essays on socialism and war (1965:English translation). He was increasingly convinced that all state involvement in economic life (from communism to fascism) equaled socialism, and socialism was the source of militaristic tyranny everywhere in Europe, beginning with the earliest comprehensive theorist, Saint-Simon [ID]. He dubbed Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) "Saint-Simon on horseback" [ID]. But Halévy also perceived that the essential Saint-Simonian "managerial" quality of this "era of tyrannies" was expressed in politics and business

<>1936:English economic theorist John Maynard Keynes addressed problems of collapsed market economies in The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money [TXT]
*--The brief opening chapter summarized his argument [bold face and hypertext hop supplied by SAC editor] =

I HAVE called this book the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, placing the emphasis on the prefix general. The object of such a title is to contrast the character of my arguments and conclusions with those of the classical theory of the subject, upon which I was brought up and which dominates the economic thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of this [post-WW1] generation, as it has for a hundred years past. I shall argue that the postulates of the classical theory [ID] are applicable to a special case only and not to the general case, the situation which it assumes being a limiting point of the possible positions of equilibrium. Moreover, the characteristics of the special case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of the economic society [in] which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of [our contemporary] experience.
*--The 24th and final chapter summarized the broader implications of his general theory [TXT]

<>1936:German "Frankfurt School" member Walter Benjamin published "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" [CWC:413-33], an effort to subject industrial age pop-arts to serious theoretical analysis

<>1936:Paris | Russian émigré philosopher Leon Shestov (pseudonym of Lev Isaakovich Shvartsman, 1866-1938) contributed to the growth of "existentialist" philosophy, particularly Christian existentialism, with his Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle [Edie,3:227f]

<>1936mr07:German Nazi troops occupied left and right banks of Rhine River, demilitarized by the Versailles settlement, now all but nullified by Nazi action
*--French reaction [BNE:273-5]
*--Hitler continued into WW2 to justify Nazi aggression as proper or natural response to the Versailles settlement imposed on Germany 17 years earlier

<>1936ap:Ethiopia [Abyssinia] defeated by Italian Fascist army after a half-year struggle. Events described by White Russian adviser to Ethiopian troops, Konovalov, and USA journalist with Mussolini's forces, Herbert Matthews [Eye:513-17]
*1935oc02:Rome | In the previous fall, Benito Mussolini addressed crowd about Italian invasion of Ethiopia [P20:221]
*--Founded 17 years earlier, the Italian Fascist movement was solidly in power and ready for any challenge, having now "erased" the humiliation of earlier defeat at the hands of Ethiopia
*1936je30:Geneva. League of Nations heard Haile Selassie report on the destruction of his Ethiopia at Fascist Italy’s hands [P20:223]
*--European reactions to Italian invasion of Ethiopia were centered in League of Nations economic sanctions feebly imposed on Italy [DPH:479-85]
*--Europe was showing itself unwilling or unable to keep the peace, and then came the Spanish Civil War

1938ja02:Rome. L'Aquilone
Weekly propaganda magazine for young people,
intended to spark their interest in flying and to call attention to the prowess of Italian pilots
[SOURCE]

<>1936au:1938se; Spanish Civil War; Franco and Falange (fascist militarists) defeated legitimate Republican government. World-wide "progressive" forces (including USSR and "Lincoln Brigade" of volunteers from USA) opposed General Franco [DPH:488-98]
*--Facist Italy and Nazi Germany supported General Franco (US and other European governments stood aside from the conflict, in many cases hindering citizens who sought to support the Spanish Republic)
*1937jy06:USA Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteer in Spain, Canute Frankson, write Letter from an African-American Volunteer [P20:191]
*--Bitter song of protest against USA persecution of Americans who sought at this time to fight against Fascism, "A Hero of the Wrong War" [TXT]
*--Civil War described by eyewitnesses, including English pundit George Orwell (pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950), one of the volunteers who sought to oppose fascism [Eye:518-23, 25-6]
*--English Labour Party activist Fred Thomas described his motives for going to fight against Franco in Spain, To Tilt at Windmills [P20:189]
*--English Communist (later a notable apostate from the Communist Party) Arthur Koestler was imprisoned in Spain and released just before he was scheduled to be executed. He described his experience [P20:193]
*--At the opening of the school year at Salamanca University in October, 1936, Rector Miguel de Unamuno was affronted by a falangist military leader's attack on Basque identity accompanied by the shouted fascist slogan "Viva la Muerte!" [Long live death]. In his speech, Unamuno said about his university, "This is the temple of the intellect. And I am its high priest. It is you who profane its sacred precincts. You will win, because you have more than enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right in the struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain. I have done." Unamuno was put under house arrest and soon died there, an early figure in the history of 20th century dissent [Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War:353-5]

<>1936au:1938mr; Purge trials snared first central leaders of 1917 Revolution and terminated their political careers, beginning w/Grigorii Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev. Stalin was eradicating old Bolsheviks
*--As Stalin's power became more secure, the vozhd  [leader, boss] became more harsh
*--Stalinism appears less a way to achieve or protect power than a way to exercise power

<>1936se25:USSR | Stalin and Zhdanov sent telegram to Politbiuro on NKVD [DPH:204-05]

<>1936no25:Berlin | Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact [RFP2,3:3-4 | DPH:487-8]
*--The complete "Axis" alliance followed within the next four years

<>1936de:USSR Third Constitution (Stalin Constitution) [RRC1,3:600-14 | CCC2,2:1194-1203 | DPH:446-9]
*--The adoption of the constitution provoked wide discussion in the USSR [SWL:158-206]
*1936no25:Stalin reported on the constitution, distinguishing it from "bourgeois" constitutions, delivered to the Special All-Union Congress of Soviets (Eighth) [CCC2,2:1204-16]
*--Anna Louise Strong wrote a description and defense of the "Stalin Constitution", The New Soviet Constitution: A Study in Socialist Democracy (1937)

<>1937:England, Oxford | World Ecumenical Conference passed resolutions on market economies that built significantly on earlier church pronouncements on economic questions (1908:USA Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and its 1932 depression-era update) [CCC2,2:996-1011]
*--Orwell described English poverty with moving, sober, descriptive honesty in The Road to Wigan Pier [BPE:700-17]
*1938:English commission, Pilgrim Trust, reported on the human impact of the Great Depression, Men Without Work [P20:158]
*--As WW2 loomed on the horizon, vigorous state measures were being taken throughout Europe and North America to recover from the great post-WW1 collapse of the market economies
*1937:English author Rebecca West [ID] wrote a remarkable travelogue of her visit to the Balkan Peninsula, mindful in every line of the fact that fascism in these days threatened the very roots of the civilization she loved and identified with, mindful also of the rich history of "the Byzantine commonwealth" [ID] as it intersected with current events = Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941:published)

<>1937:German theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) delivered a lecture in which he endeavored to explain the relationship between religion and the natural sciences [BMC1:604-6]
*1941:Another lecture, on the meaning and limits of contemporary exact sciences [BMC1:598-603 | BMC4:694-9]

<>1937:Italian Communist writer Ignazio Silone resisted Fascism but more generally became a dissenter from all ideologies. His novels, for example, Bread and Wine, gave expression to a personal disillusionment but also to a new affirmation of socialist idealism and Christian ethics

<>1937:Russian émigré religious philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, published Origin of Russia Communism [cf. KMM:251-7]

<>1937ja23:Stalinist purge trials of Radek, Piatakov, etc [RRC1,3:664-73 | Tucker,Stalin in Power:394f!]

<>1937ap:League of Nations Disarmament Conference suspended its inconclusive 5-year-long operations as Japan stepped up its military aggression in China
*--After 18 years of existence, the League of Nations was an obvious failure, though it was not itself formally dismantled until the end of WW2 and the creation of the second great effort at trans-nation-state governance, the United Nations Organization [UNO LOOP]

<>1937my:je; Stalinist purge trial of Marshal Tukhachevskii & other Red Army officers

<>1937jy15:Moscow-Volga Canal opened

<>1938:1941; USSR Five-year Plan3
*--The third five-year plan built on a cruel decade of forced "modernization"

<>1938:Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: Proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultur (1949:English translation, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture) [CCS,1:83-110]

<>1938ja19:Stalinist purge trials officially said to be over [SGv:171-5]. But they were not

<>1938ap30:Spanish Republican Government, about to be defeated by Franco's fascist armies in their civil war, issued war aims and guiding "liberal" principles, including guarantee of property but "within limits prescribed by the higher interest of the nation"; agrarian reform in which "the peasant will own the land he tills"; protection of wage-labor rights through "up-to-date social legislation"; welfare measures, etc. [DPH:491-2]

<>1938mr:Stalinist purge trials ended on dramatic note with Nikolai Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinskii, Rakovskii, Yagoda (head of NKVD), etc. [Senn,2:]
*--Excerpt from Bukharin's last plea at his purge trial [TXT] with a retrospective quote from Trotsky on the theme of opposition within the Communist Party [TXT]
*--Bukharin had been the "darling of the Party" for 17 years, since the era of NEP, but his execution brought an end to the fond revolutionary hopes that had attached to him. Bukharin and others were "rehabilitated" in 1988
*--General Procurer and chief prosecutor of Stalinist law, Andrei Vyshinskii (1883-1954), offered his concept of a "new" approach to socialist law [Jaworskyj:324-29]
*--On a broader scale, G. Gak offered his thoughts on the Marxist-Leninist theory of truth [ibid:333-41], then =
*1949:Mikhail Arzhanov (Communist Party member since 1924, Academy of Sciences since 1939) outlined the Stalinist interpretation of Communism, the state and law [ibid:380-7]
*--As the USSR approached a very different epoch, WW2, the most intense 10-year period of "Stalinism" as a domestic historical experience came to a close, though Joseph Stalin lived on fifteen more years, and the Stalinist legacy lived on for years to come

<>1938mr13:Austria seized by Nazi Germany and declared a part of the Reich, an act of "incorporation" or Anschluss [DPH:498-500]
*--Austrian author Stefan Zweig expressed his disgust at general European trends that contributed to the Anschluss , The World of Yesterday [P20:225]
*--Austria had been slanting toward corporate statism over the previous five years

<>1938se:Munich Accord [TXT], signed by England (Neville Chamberlain), France (Édouard Daladier), Italy (Benito Mussolini) and Germany (Adolf Hitler) seemed to ratify Nazi aggression against Austria back in March [ID], and removed obstacles to German invasion of Czechoslovakia [DPH:500-1]
*--Neville Chamberlain offered a defense of his actions [P20:228; PWT2:355-7]
*1938oc05:English statesman Winston Churchill addressed House of Commons to attack Munich Accord, "A Disaster of the First Magnitude" [P20:229 | PWT2:357-61 (with other eloquent early war-time utterances)]
*--The Munich Accord was a pivotal event. "Western" diplomacy turned Wehrmacht attention eastward briefly. Then Soviet diplomacy turned it back toward the west. The pitiful consequences for Austria and Czechoslovakia led directly to the tragic events we call WW2

<>1939:English political figure, famous for his no-nonsense acknowledgment of the role of pure power in politics and for his sympathetic interest in Russian/Soviet studies, Edward H. Carr analyzed the European crisis since WW1 in The Twenty Years' Crisis [RWP1,2:96-102]

<>1939:German legal scholar Ernst Huber defined the Nazi state in legal/political terms in Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches [Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich] in which he argued that "the authority of the Führer is...all-inclusive and unlimited" [P20:171]
*--Beginning 20 years earlier as a small party, the Nazis now ruled a powerful central European state

<>1939:German ex-communist Franz Borkenau argued in World Communism that the Comintern ought to be considered no more than an instrument of Soviet foreign policy [RFP2,2:206-20]

<>1939:Irish author James Joyce published Finnegans Wake., an extreme moment in the evolution of literary fine arts. Try part one.

<>1939:USA philosopher and educator John Dewey published a defense of liberal democracy against the rising tide of managerial statism in the world = Freedom and Culture [CCS,1:866-80]

<>1939ja20:USSR | Stalin telegram to Party Secretaries and the NKVD about use of "physical pressure" [i.e., torture] against those under interrogation

<>1939mr10:Stalin sized up recent events (especially exclusion of the USSR and reliance on exclusively "Western" diplomacy at Munich). Stalin hinted at impending change in Soviet policy toward Hitler Germany [BNE:275-8 | RFP2,3:5-15]

<>1939au14:Moscow | USSR Marshal Voroshilov received little assurance of mutual defensive support from a joint meeting with the military missions of England and France [BNE:278-9]

<>1939au22:Adolf Hitler delivered speech to his leading generals, "Poland Will Be Depopulated and Settled with Germans" [P20:232]. These were war aims consistent with modern total war. The battlefield included both the war front and the home front

<>1939au23:WORLD WAR TWO (first phase): Hitler Germany vs. western Europe. German-USSR, Hitler-Stalin Pact (or Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty) [RFP2,3:16-18 | RFP3:390-2 | ORW:211-12 | Senn,2 | HLW:387-8]
*--England reaffirmed its intention to protect Poland from invasion [DPH:502-4]
*1939au24:Moscow. Joseph Stalin-Ribbentrop conversation [HLW:388-91]
*1939au31:Molotov explained Hitler-Stalin Pact [RFP2,3:18-27 | RFP3:392-401]
*--Stalin feared "The West" was trying to turn Hitler against the USSR, and he sought to prevent that. Stalin succeeded in the short run and failed in the long

<>1939se01:1945my08; Europe | Actual hostilities marked formal opening of WW2 after German invasion of Poland [DPH:504-07]. WW2 lasted five and a half years (about 2090 days in all)
*--German Wehrmacht ["defense force"] introduced world to Blitzkrieg [lightning war]. WW2 opened with swift Nazi victories. Then, according to 1939au23:Pact, USSR moved troops into eastern Poland, Estonia, and Latvia. Lithuania at first fought in alliance with Soviet troops in Poland, but soon suffered the fate of the other Baltic states
*1939se01:England, London children evacuated to countryside, as described by Hilde Marchant [Eye:526-7]. Everyone knew that the big capital cities, the home of military and industrial administrations, would become battlefields
*--WW2: first phase lasted only just over one year and resulted in the near total defeat of western European enemies. Only Great Britain stood, protected by the English Channel and by a feisty air force but still vulnerable and much weakened. The first phase was short, but filled with lessons about the nature of the total-war battlefield [LOOP on "battlefield" for some defining moments in the military action of WW2]
*--HyperWar: A Hypertext History of the Second World War
*1960:Soviet version of war’s outbreak [ORW:212-19]
*--WW2: second phase
\\
*--Mary Ann Robinson, The Home Front and War in the Twentieth Century
*--Graham Lyons, ed., Russian Version of the Second World War
*--Arthur Marwick, ed., Total War and Social Change
*-----------------------, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, ch1:1-23 ch7:213-25

<>1939se19:Poland, Gdansk [Danzig is the German name of this Polish Baltic port city]. Adolf Hitler speech [KRW:827-8]

<>1939no:1940mr; Finland-USSR "Winter war" flared as a result of Finland’s resolute refusal to accept Soviet troops (contrast with Estonia, Latvia, & Lithuania); the war a miserable stalemate

<>1940:1950; USA | George Seldes [ID] [ID] in his dissenting journal In Fact launched crusade against propaganda in the press
*--George Seldes' brother was the media critic Gilbert Seldes [ID]

<>1940sp:Katyn, Kalinin, Starobelsk | People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs [NKVD] shot 1000s of Polish officers in what has been called a "prophylactic genocide" of future Polish leaders [Tumarkin, Living:176f]

<>1940my07:1945jy27; English Prime Minister Winston Churchill formed new war-time government
*1945jy27:He and his Conservative Party were soundly defeated at the polls five years later, only weeks after the end of WW2. England accepted Conservative Party leadership during the war, but in peacetime trusted the reigns of government in the hands of liberal and left political parties

<>1940my10:Hitler Germany launched its attack to the west, against The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and France. The first three small nations were defeated within 4-5 days
*--The Dutch city Rotterdam was seriously damaged by aerial bombing, the first such attack on a major city in what would soon become one of the distinctive features of the expanded European battlefield
*--English, French and other forces arrayed against Hitler Germany were surrounded near the Belgium port city Dunkirk and were not finally defeated until June. All the while a massive air campaign was launched against military and civilian targets on the English island

<>1940my10:je22; France invaded by Hitler Germany and defeated in 42 days. Southern France (Vichy France) fell under the rule of a French Nazi puppet regime. Some French leaders escaped to France where they planned bitter revenge, and some French citizens went into the underground to continue the struggle as guerilla warriors or insurgents, but for four years, until the Normandy invasion, the great bulk of the French nation settled into a state of inactive occupation or semi-alliance with Germany
*1940my15:France, Maginot Line | German Panzer [panther] tank commander Erwin Rommel described Blitzkrieg success [Eye:528-9]
*--Panzer Commander General Heinz Guderian explained later that "French Leadership...Could Not Grasp the Significance of the Tank in Mobile Warfare" [P20:234] But Hungarian journalist and volunteer in France, Hans Habe, blamed "France's Internal Weaknesses" [P20:237]
*--Modern total war would not be decided by static fortress defenses on pre-defined battlefields

<>1940my13:je18; English Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered several inspiring speeches over the first month of the "Battle of Britain", "Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat" [P20:239]
*--For Volk, Führer, and Fatherland. (Excerpts from Nazi propaganda tracts and personal letters) [P20:241]

<>1940my26:je04; France | Dunkirk beaches the scene of near disastrous Allied escape from the European continent to England, as described by eyewitness John Charles Austin [Eye:529-33]. Fishermen from English coastal villages plucked the poorly led British army home as this battlefield failed to become the utter disaster it was about to become, only because of civilian effort. Three-hundred and thirty thousand retreating British and French troops were rescued. One-hundred thousand were captured. Casualties were high
\\
*--Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality (1993) "stands just about every preconceived notion concerning Britain's role in World War II on its head" (William L. O'Neill): Britain's "finest Hour" looks more like a muddle of ineptitude and propaganda. Britain was broke and utterly dependent on USA aid. It suppressed knowledge of the fiasco that led to Dunkirk. It tried secretly to sue for peace.

<>1940je:Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, & Lithuania. These became Soviet republics after the end of WW2 and emerged again as independent states fifty years later as the USSR collapsed

<>1940je14:Moscow | German Ambassador to USSR communicated back to Berlin about Soviet efforts to quell rumors of war with Germany [RFP2,3:36-8]

<>1940jy02:Belgium, near the small town Ypres, at the Langemarck Cemetery| In the early months of Blitzkrieg success against Allies on the Western Front, Adolf Hitler, high-ranking Wehrmacht officers and an honor guard appeared at the Belgian cemetery to commemorate an episode 26 years earlier in the first weeks of WW1 -- 1914no10:The first battle of Ypres [ID]. Langemarck [ID] holds thousands of bodies of German soldiers killed in that extended battle, and the memory of heroic achievement on that one day was now made even more mythical by virtue of the fact that Hitler had served in that battle as a young Corporal in the 167th Bavarian Infantry, had personally had to bear the national insult handed down at Versailles at the end of WW1, had gained unchecked power in the 1930s, and then moved to re-militarize, to resuscitate Germany, and now returned triumphant. WW2 thus was symbolized as the continuation of the sacred militaristic cause that had been on hold since the end of WW1. Hitler and the Nazi military establishment were not the only ones to look on WW2 in this way. Churchill and de Gaulle saw it that way, and Marechal [??sp] had said in 1919 that the Versailles settlements were "not a peace but a twenty-year armistice", calling the dates right on. Many have characterized the era 1914-1945 as Europe's second Thirty-Years War [??ID]. Among the strutting celebrants at Langemark essentially none had any vague forebodings about what lay ahead, 1940-1945

<>1940jy25:German Economics Minister Walther Funk delivered speech which outlined Nazi plan for a united west Europe [BNE:279-81]
*1940oc15:Less friendly plans for new east European territories under Nazi rule outlined [BNE:281-2]
*1942oc03:Denmark's role in new Nazi united Europe [BNE:282-4]

<>1940au:Mexico | Leon Trotsky assassinated, ending a 35-year political/revolutionary career, one of the most brilliant of the century

<>1940se03:English Channel the scene of aerial combat, a "dogfight", in which English pilot Richard Hillary was shot down and lived to tell the tale [Eye:533-7]

<>1940se07:se14; England | "London Blitz" began, described by Desmond Flower and Frances Faviell [Eye:537-41]. The aerial battlefield was reaching ever greater degrees of perfection


*1941mr29:England, Southend | Gas drill [2006mr03:TLS:7]
The domestic battlefield took on increasing importance

<>1940se25:German Third Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop informed USSR that Tripartite Act would soon be signed by the "Axis Powers" (Germany, Italy and Japan)
*--Ribbentrop insisted that the Axis was directed solely at USA, not for aggressive purposes but only to prevent USA from joining the European war to save England [RFP2,3:27-8]
*--se27:Tripartite Act signed [TXT] [RFP2,3:28-9]

<>1940no:Axis Powers (on German initiative) entered into negotiations with USSR over conditions under which USSR might join the Axis [RFP2,3:27-33]

<>1940de10:German leader Hitler delivered speech to German wage-laborers in which he subjected post-WW1 English imperialism to a severe critique [CCC2,2:1171-82]

<>1940de18:Germany concluded that USSR would not joint Axis and began planning "Operation Barbarossa", the invasion of the USSR [RFP2,3:33-6]

<>1941:German Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) published article "New Testament and Mythology" in which he tried to make the New Testament "modern" without losing hold of the charisma of the gospel [BMC4:668-70]

<>1941:German-born American émigré psychiatrist and social theorist Erich Fromm published Escape from Freedom [CCS:1074-94]

<>1941:Hungarian-born author Arthur Koestler "factual fiction", Darkness at Noon, exposed contradictions in a world communist movement which seemed to betray its own ideals [P20:141] He patterned the tragic hero on Nikolai Bukharin whose great promise for the Soviet Revolution had first suggested itself 20 years earlier

<>1941mr11:USA passed "Lend-Lease Act" [TXT]
*--Seriously undermined 1937my01:Neutrality Act [TXT] and 1939no04:Neutrality Act
*--USA inched closer to open hostility toward Hitler Germany

<>1941my:Half year before the USA was drawn directly into WW2, official efforts got seriously underway to mobilize for impending conflict. An Office of Scientific Research and Defense [OSRD] was created with the purpose of supporting and coordinating contributions of scientists, private enterprise and the military  [W#1] [W#2]
*--All combatants (current or future) perceived the need to create some form of military-industrial complex

<>1941je21:German Foreign Office outlined reasons for attack on USSR and instructed its Ambassador to USSR to prepare for impending invasion [RFP2,3:38-40]

<>1941je22:1945my08; WW2: 2nd phase = Hitler Germany vs. USSR, over 4 years (ca. 1520 days)
*--World War Two on eastern front opened with German invasion of USSR. Soviet political cartoonists displayed this as a diplomatic betrayal [pix], a unilateral abrogation of the 1939au23:Treaty
*--Stalin reacted with speeches over next months [RFP2,3:41-4]
*1941je:1941no; The first months of the war were desperate months for the USSR =
*--Peasants fled the Nazi Wehrmacht [pix]. It occasionally bogged down, but was essentially unstoppable [pix]
*--Soviet citizens, imitating events 330 years earlier, joined a volunteer narodnoe opolchenie [national host] =
 [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix]
*--A placard painted by the greatest of the Soviet poster artists, Dmitrii Moor [pix], showed the "motherland" calling all to serve the cause [pix]. Later posters offered practical military training advice to civilians [pix] [pix]
*--Moscow loaded in supplies of firewood (against hardships of impending winter, but also as a shield against enemy attacks), as here on Gorkii Street [pix]. Factories geared up to produce military hardware [pix]. And occasional little victories boosted morale, like this German light bomber brought down on Revolution Square in Moscow [pix]
*1941no07:Less than five months after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, at the time of the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution, celebrants marched past the viewing galleries on Red Square in Moscow straight to the front to engage the Wehrmacht on the western outskirts of the capital city. Compare a photo [pix] with a later propaganda poster [pix]
*1948:Winston Churchill had his version of the opening of the eastern front [RFP2,3:45-59]
*--The opening of the eastern front was of great significance to England. It allowed what might be considered an offshoot of the first disastrous phase of the war, the more successful northern African phase along the whole southern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea
*--WW2: third phase

<>1941je30:USSR created GKO [Gosudarstvennaia komiteta oborony; State Committee for Defense] to coordinate nation-wide total mobilization for total war. The economy was also a battlefield
*--Talented young planner during WW2, Nikolai Voznesenskii, later wrote The Economy of the USSR during World War II (1948)
*--However necessary such national mobilization, this promoted growth of the massive Soviet military-industrial complex and further consolidated Soviet-style statist-managerial control over the whole nation

<>1941au11:USA President Roosevelt and English Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the "Atlantic Charter" [TXT] as World War Two shifted decisively to the Soviet front

<>1941au25:Iran (as Persia was officially renamed in 1933) was occupied by two new Allies in the fight against Hitler Germany = in north Iran was occupied by USSR and in south by England. The Soviet-English mutual agreement was largely in line with a pre-Soviet treaty between tsarist Russia and England [ID]. The joint occupation continued through WW2
*--Strategic energy politics were joined with the tactical consideration of the need to control the Trans-Iranian railway for the supply of the USSR with wartime materials
*--Reza Shah abdicated in favor of his son and heir, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This allowed for a clean adjustment in policy appropriate to the new situation, and it preserved the Pahlavi dynasty. In British custody, Reza Shah was not allowed to go to Canada as he wished. The British government sent him first to Mauritius and then to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he died in July 1944
*--Iran had once again slipped under European imperialist domination
*--Soviet front in the war eased pressure on the English Island. After the debacle at Dunkirk, things looked very bleak for the British. Now the pressure was significantly relieved. With Nazi attention riveted on the USSR, Great Britain was more free to concentrate on protecting its imperialist holdings along the Mediterranean coast of NE Africa [MAP]

<>1941se:Nazi Wehrmacht took Kiev
*1941se:1944mr; USSR | Leningrad under 900-day siege.
*1942sp:1942su; Aleksandr Fadeev described life under siege [Eye:562-4]
*--Another major city became a battlefield, and for three years
\\
*2004fe06:St.Petersburg Times#914 | Survivors inspire siege novel by Matthew Brown [TXT]

<>1941se29:oc01; Moscow | In view of stalemate of ground war on western front, "Big Three" met about getting supplies to the eastern front. USA not yet in the war, but support for USSR was clear from June 24 Roosevelt announcement [US Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s 1948 memoir on the situation—RFP2,3:60-4]
*--Ukraine, Babi Yar near Kiev (as the meeting above got under way) Nazis transported 33,371 Jews to a wooded ravine, stripped them naked, opened fire with machine guns, and let them fall, or threw them, into the ravine [Tumarkin, Living:67]

<>1941no07:Moscow celebration of the 24th anniversary of October Revolution. Soviet Red Army troops marched past Vladimir Lenin's tomb on Red Square, directly to the western outskirts of the city to engage Wehrmacht troops. Moscow was saved

<>1941de07:1945au14; WORLD WAR TWO (third phase): USA joined directly in the fighting as the Pacific Front opened. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; USA entered Pacific & European wars. Pacific front lasted just over 3 1/2 years. USSR & USA now were formally allies
*--For US military attitude toward the USA/USSR alliance, see the memoirs of the US military administrator John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Co-operation with Russia (1947)
*--Eighty years prior to the outbreak of the Pacific war, Japan was forced to open itself to international commerce. In an effort to resist being overwhelmed by the industrialized powers, Japan initiated one of the most startling modernization programs in human history, administered by a closely coordinated managerial alliance between government and financial leaders. Soon it was "imperializing" rather than being "imperialized". And now it was about to be destroyed as an imperialist power
*1942:1945; USA established several concentration camps for certain US citizens of Japanese ancestry [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4]
*--WW2: fourth phase
\\
*--William H. McNeill, America, Britain and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941-1946 (NYC:1953)
*--Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (1957) explores the relationship between war policy and the emergence of the Cold War

<>1941de12:Germany | In Hitler's private Berlin apartment within the Reich Chancellery, Hitler declared that it was time to "clear the decks" on the "Jewish Question" without "sentimentality" or "pity"
*1941de25:Polish town Oswiecim ["Auschwitz" in German] in the Vistula River valley a few miles west of Kraków | Nazi occupational forces established a concentration camp which would become the major site of Nazi extermination of "undesirable" elements in Germany and its conquered territories -- Jews, Communists, radicals, Gypsies [Romany], homosexuals, the infirm or physically challenged, and any others who did not fit or stood up against the totalistic statism of the Nazi regime. This genocidal policy has come to be known as "the Holocaust" [W] (from the Greek holokaustos = burnt whole)
*1941:1945; Germany | Dachau concentration camp medical experiments described by a Nazi doctor at his Nuremburg war trial [Eye:555-9]
*1942su:+; Poland, not far from Warsaw | Treblinka camp was operational. From these months on, Nazi concentration camp officials dedicated themselves with amazing industrial-age vigor to genocidal Nazi policies [PWT2:365-75]
*--Gas chambers at Auschwitz Concentration or Extermination camp described by a survivor, Sophia Litwinska [Eye:554-5]
*1944jy23:Poland | Majdanek Concentration or Extermination camp (near Lublin) described by USA journalist Alexander Werth moving with the Soviet Red Army as it liberated eastern Europe from Nazi rule [Eye:600-3] A survivor of that camp, Y. Pfeffer, described his experience [P20:253 | PWT2:369-72]
*1944au:Poland | Birkenau Concentration or Extermination camp procedures described by Romanian Jewish doctor who worked there [Eye:604-6]
*1945ap15:Germany | Belsen Concentration Camp the first liberated by Allied forces on the western Front. Patrick Gordon-Walker described Belsen then [Eye:620-5]
*1945ap29:Germany | Dachau concentration camp liberated by USA troops. Turkish Catholic journalist Nerin E. Gun, remembered his liberation [P20:269]
*--Elie A. Cohen, a Dutch physician who was for three years held in Auschwitz, composed his memoirs, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (1953), as a social-psychological analysis of humans (prisoners) under total or concentrated management by other humans (guards) and drew general conclusions about totalitarian society from this intense particular expression of total statism [TXT summary]
*--One of the first to explore the relationship of Nazi concentration camps to the broader, everyday life aspects of "total statism" was Austrian-born Bruno Bettelheim. He wrote from personal experience as well as from the point of view of a trained and experienced psychologist [CWC:466-82]
*--For purposes of criminal and political punishment, removal or transportation to distant points, and concentration for purposes of forced labor, USSR employed "Government Administered Camps" [EG]. The acronym "GULag" combining GU (the initials of the Russian phrase "Glavnoe Upravlenie", central administration), with the German word for camp, "Lager". The Soviet GULag system grew in size and extent over the years between the introduction of Collectivization [ID] and the outbreak of WW2, and the system spawned a sorrowful but great tradition of "prison literature", e.g., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
*--As a form of state policy, transport or removal and "concentration" of peoples were not a Nazi or Soviet invention. These sometimes gruesome or sometimes merely illiberal policies had a history that stretched back at least to early European colonial and imperialist practice. The Nazis opened a new page with their policy of mass extermination
*--USA created camps for Japanese citizens during WW2
*--French theoriest Michel Foucault's later thoughts about discipline and punishment offered the broadest interpretive framework for the role of confinement and control in modern European culture
*--The main gates of the Nazi concentration camps had inscribed on them a mocking slogan "Arbeit macht frei" [Work makes you free] From WW1 into WW2 the European labor movement gravitated from impoverishment, through liberal welfare measures into statist regimentation. However, wage-labor continued to influence the course of events in the post-WW2 era
*--Removal, transportation and extermination of defined groups illustrated how domestic politics could also become a battlefield in an era of total war
\\
*--Alain Resnais, Nuit et brouillard [32 min. video-recording of original 1955 movie] Excerpt from Resnais' concluding words [TXT]
*--Hanna Arendt,   Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; enlarged in 1964)

<>1942:Austrian (Czech-born) political theorist Joseph Schumpeter, from 1932 until his death in 1950 a professor of economics at Harvard University, published Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [CCS:802-26 | CCS,2:436-60]

<>1942ja11:Malasia | Kuala Lumpur awaited Japanese occupation, as described by Ian Morrison [Eye:559-61]
*--Japan having great success in SE Asia

<>1942ja21:German commander Rommel opened northern African assault on British (largely colonial) troops, aiming eastward along the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea (N.Africa) toward the English imperialist possession Egypt (and thus toward the petroleum rich "Middle-East")

<>1942ap06:England no longer able to provide citizens white bread

<>1942my26:London | English-USSR anti-Hitler treaty signed
*--USSR Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov explained treaty [RFP2,3:65-6]

<>1942my30:German city Köln [Cologne] subject of mammoth English saturation bombing
*1945su:At the end of the war, English poet Stephen Spender visited and described the suffering and destruction in Cologne [P20:278]

<>1942je03;je07; Pacific, near Midway Island | Naval and air battlefield between USA and Japanese forces the turning point of the Pacific war even before six months were out
*--Japanese witness Mitsuo Fuchida described it as a fatal five minutes that might have gone one way or the other [Eye:564-6]

<>1942je12:Moscow, London, Washington DC | Three allied capitals announced firm intention to open "second front" -- the western front -- in the European war against Hitler. The war had fallen relatively quiet in western Europe after the first few weeks of Blitzkrieg. In six weeks in the spring of 1940, France and England had been swiftly routed on the Continent. The European war was now concentrated on the Soviet front (by implication the "first front" in WW2, though it is not our habit to designate it as such). Despite this statement of "firm intention", the second front in Western Europe was delayed two more years, and thus the war continued to be largely a German-Soviet conflict
*--The western Allies did, however, continue in their efforts to get "lend-lease" and other forms of aid to the USSR through the North Sea, over the Arctic waters north of the Scandinavian Peninsula and into the White Sea ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk
*--German submarines were extremely effective weapons against Allied sea-going transports and navies. In the five and one half years of WW2, submariners, numbering only 42,000 -- no more that three German Army divisions -- sank 2,775 Allied merchant ships bearing something like 14.5 million tons of military-industrial war supplies. Two-thirds of those 42,000 German sailors perished at sea. Technological advances in the underwater battlefield continued to be made [See Guenter Hessler, The U-Boat War in the Atlantic, 1939-1945]
*--In the early phases of WW2, western Allies were most firmly committed to northern Africa, the sensitive southern shores of the Mediterranean, rather than to the main field of battle on the European continent

<>1942je21:Northern African coastal stronghold Tobruk taken by Rommel. Wehrmach advances continued in the E. Mediterranean

<>1942jy29:de26; German soldier William Hoffman kept a diary of action at the front well into the Stalingrad Battle [P20:245 | PWT2:362-5]
*1942se:1943ja; Stalingrad under siege. The tide was about to turn on the eastern front [MAP]
*1942de:Battle described by Nazi soldier Benno Zieser [Eye:575-6]
*--Doomed German soldiers wrote moving letters home, but they were never sent. Soviet Red Army captured the many large sacks of mournful letters and allowed them to be published [Last Letters from Stalingrad (Summit)]
*1943fe04:USA reporter Alexander Werth described Stalingrad after Nazi capitulation [Eye:576-8]
*1962:German officer Joachim Wieder remembered Stalingrad: Memories and Reassessments [P20:248] One of the great battlefields of the 20th century left a major river-port city in total ruins [pix]

<>1942au19:France | Dieppe attacked by Canadian force in costly failure to establish continental beach head, a second front, witnessed by Ross Munro [Eye:566-9]

<>1942oc:USSR | Ukraine the scene of Nazi extermination of Jews, described by Hermann Graebe [Eye:569-71]

<>1942oc21:N.Africa | El Alamein battle began
*1942no04:Northern Africa, El Alamein the scene of decisive Nazi defeat, as described by General Bayerlein [Eye:571-3] Rommel in full retreat from E.Mediterranean

<>1942no06:Stalin lamented slow implementation of plan for second front [ORW:227-8]

<>1942no08:N.African invasion by Allies, under command of General Dwight David Eisenhower. Western allies concentrated on this southern front along Mediterranean shores rather than opening the second front in Europe proper
*--Soon French colonial authority re-established in Algeria. The  English imperialist possession, Egypt, was freed of German forces.  "Western" emphasis on the African battlefield illustrated the still vital desire to preserve imperial domains and, in that, an implied indirect hostility in relationship to the mortal interests of an ally, the USSR, the only Ally at that time fighting on the ground against the Nazi Wehrmacht

<>1942de:African desert warfare on the Mediterranean front described by English poet Keith Doublas who later died at Normandy Invasion [Eye:573-4]

<>1943:English astronomer James Jeans offered a few words on the question of free-will, on freedom and determinism, in Physics and Philosophy [BMC4:702-3]

<>1943ja:Stalingrad | German 6th Army encircled & defeated

<>1943fe12:USA President Roosevelt, in his radio address to the nation, discussed results of the three-power meeting (USA, England, France) at the Casablanca Conference. Three noteworthy features of this conference were the absence of Stalin or any other formal Soviet representation, the surprising presence of "France" in the person of Charles de Gaulle (then an émigré in London, fled two years earlier from total Nazi defeat) and the clear declaration that the Allies would fight until complete victory was achieved over Axis powers
*--In the meantime, they would concentrate on heavy saturation bombing of Nazi held western Europe and deployment of troops on the Mediterranean front
\\
*--Photos at Casablanca

<>1943fe17:USSR, Korsun Salient | Nazi Wehrmacht routed, as described by Soviet commander, Major Kampov [Eye:578-80]

<>1943fe23:Munich University. Students Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst executed for circulating anti-Nazi leaflets and for association with the university student organization, The White Rose. A leaflet [P20:259]
*1943jy13:Professor Kurt Huber and other members of White Rose dissident group executed
*--Germany began to feel an opening domestic battlefield as objections to Nazi policy mounted

<>1943my22:USSR dissolved Comintern (in its 24th year) [RFP2,3:67-70 | RFP3:417-20 | RWP1,3:168-71 | ORW:229-31] Fighting for its life against Hitler Germany, USSR only now realized the obvious = it was not effective to threaten with "internal war" (revolution) its most important allies in the battlefields of the international war

<>1943jy05:au23; USSR | Kursk battle, the greatest clash of modern mechanized armor ever. After nearly two hellish summer months, the battle ended in Nazi defeat
*--Consider the look of weary concentration on the face of this Soviet gunner [pix]
*--But also remember the contribution of Soviet workers in weapons factories relocated in the Urals [pix]
*--Consider these simple statistics from the Kursk battlefield = [TXT]
*--The Nazi Wehrmacht was on the run [pix]

<>1943jy10:Italian forces in Sicily invaded by western Allies from north Africa. The two-year-long Mediterranean front turned decisively in favor of western Allies

<>1943jy26:Italian Fascist leader Mussolini toppled from power. His remarkable 21-year career was over, though he lived on two more years. He survived these two years as accessory to the Nazi troops now holding Italy against allied forces but also against insurgent Italians; Mussolini was no longer "Il Duce"
*--Now German Nazi power had to be deployed against Allied invaders of Italy. The joke was this = Hitler claimed that it took as many German troops to deal with Italy as an ally as it took to deal with it as an enemy
*1945ap28:Mussolini captured and killed by partisans. Grizzly photos depict punishment inflicted by angry Italians upon Mussolini and associates [W]. The domestic battlefield became intense in Italy

<>1943jy27:German city Hamburg was destroyed by saturation firebombing. The firebombing was a central component of a thorough ten-day Allied aerial assault on the city. Techniques were designed to bomb urban centers in patterns and sequences so as to cause "fire storms". Intense heat at the center of the burning city drew heavy flame-hot winds from the outskirts to the center, igniting and thoroughly destroying all structures. Those who made it to bomb shelters were first suffocated then roasted or burnt to a crisp. One thousand men in uniform were killed, and 50,000 civilians perished in a very short period of time
*--Survivor Else Wendel described the attack [Eye:584-7]
*--In the weeks after bombing, furniture and other household items which had been confiscated from Jews sent to concentration camps were shipped to Hamburg and  marketed there to help restore the city
*1943de01:Hamburg police reported on this urban battlefield [BNE:284-6]
\\
*--Keith Lowe, Inferno: The devastation of Hamburg 1943
*--Frederick Taylor, on bombing of Dresden
*--Jörg Friedrich, Der Brant [Fire] about firebombing of helpless civilians

<>1943oc:Moscow Conference issued a "four-power declaration" (USA, USSR, England and China). Among other things, they pledged "to continue hostilities against those Axis powers with which they respectively are at war until such powers have laid down their arms on the basis of unconditional surrender" and "That they will confer and cooperate with one another and with other members of the United Nations [UNO] to bring about a practicable general agreement with respect to the regulation of armaments in the post-war period." [TXT]

<>1943no:USSR | The city Kiev was liberated from Nazi occupation and began rebuilding
*--1944sp:Though shattered, Kiev was returning to normal = [pix] [pix]. More on Kiev tramlines = [W]

<>1943no20:Pacific island Tarawa | Amphibious landing assault described by USA Marine Robert Sherrod, including the use of a new flaming chemical weapon on the  modern battlefield, napalm [Eye:587-8]

<>1943no28:de01; Iran | Teheran Conference [W]. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill (USSR, USA, Great Britain) [PHOTO] re. scope and timing of WW2, intention to create UNO [ID], and sovereignty and integrity of Iran

<>1943de01:Cairo Conference three-power declaration [TXT]. USA, China and England. Promised independent Korea, but USSR (not at Cairo conference) and USA split on this question at end of WW2

<>1944:Austrian-born economist Friedrich A. Hayek criticized state intervention into economic life in The Road to Serfdom [CWC:433-45 | CCS:840-60 | CCS,2:335-55]
*--Karl Polanyi (just below) expressed a view nearly the opposite to Hayek's
*--An English critic also disagreed with Hayek[ID]
*--Early 21st-century scholars returned to Adam Smith to expose weaknesses in Hayek's positions [ID]

<>1944:Hungarian (Vienna-born) economist Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation explored the reasons for the collapse of liberal/laissez faire systems in Europe [more]
*--Polanyi was driven from Austria as fascist political power was established there. He became an English citizen and was teaching in the USA when he finished his influential book
*--In 1947 he summarized his main arguments in an article titled "Our Obsolete Market Mentality" [CCS,2:247-61]
*--WW2 enlivened the European debate about liberalism, its meaning, its relevance, its future
\\
*-- [W] summary of Polanyi's leading ideas with many quotes

<>1944:French Catholic theologian, Professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris, Jacques Maritain published Christianity and Democracy [CCS:571-86 | CCS,2:823-38]
*--Maritain contributed to development of 20th-century European Christian or "Thomist" existentialism
*1931:He published a study of St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelic Doctor [BMC1:671-4 | BMC4:673-7]

<>1944:Swedish economist Karl Gunnar Myrdal’s research team, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, published the results of their study of African-Americans in the USA, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy [CCS:449-70 | CCS,1:844-65,922-33]

<>1944ap30:jy16; German dissident Protestant Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Nazi prison (where he would soon die), wrote letters in which he suggested a radical new Christian theology which relaxed its fixation on the vast, transcendent God and concentrated on Jesus Christ [BMC4:671-3]

<>1944je06:1945my08; WORLD WAR TWO (fourth phase) lasted just over 300 days: Western allies re-opened second (western) front when western Allies (i.e., USA with significant English and nominal French support) invaded European continent at Normandy
*--The second front had been promised for two years
*--Supreme Allied Commander (forgetting for the moment the Soviet allies and their commanders on the eastern front) Dwight D. Eisenhower remembered Operation Overlord [P20:264]
*--Eyewitness accounts [Eye:591-6]
*--The Normandy invasion required an unprecedented coordination of ground, sea and air power, production and supply, command and managerial logistics. In its dimensions and complexities, it was the epitome of the new industrial battlefield (with the earlier Battle of Kursk [ID] running a close second for that title)


Le Havre destroyed by ground action
[ source ]

<>1944je:1944se; England under 4-month German V-2 rocket attack. 8000 pilotless flying bombs were launched. The beauty of this new weapon on the modern scientific and industrial battlefield was that it was so fast and, since supersonic, so silent, the enemy did not know or could do nothing about it until the first heavy explosions rocked the target
*--Eyewitness Lionel King described [Eye:596-8]

<>1944jy:Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus letter explained his resistance to Nazi occupation of France [P20:256]
*--As the Soviet Army moved with ever greater speed toward Germany, and as the western Allies finally opened the second front, domestic insurgencies rose up everywhere against Nazi occupation. Under conditions of war, dissent became active as resistance

<>1944au01:Poland | Warsaw uprising against Nazi occupation broke out
*--Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski described the rising [P20:261]
*--This was a heroic but tragic moment of domestic insurgency within the vast international battlefield. It appeared to many that the Soviet Red Army purposefully delayed entering the city and reinforcing insurgents. The uprising was thus doomed to extermination at the hands of retreating Nazi forces
\\
*--Jews in Poland in WW2 [W]

<>1944se:USA diplomat George Frost Kennan wrote "Russia -- Seven Years Later" = "There will be much talk about the necessity for 'understanding Russia'; but there will be no place for the American who is really willing to undertake this disturbing task. The apprehension of what is valid in the Russian world is unsettling and displeasing to the American mind. He who would understand this apprehension will not find his satisfaction in the achievement of anything practical for his people, still less in any official or public [530-1] appreciation for his efforts. The best he an look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe that he has been." [Kennan,Mem:530-1] Kennan was soon in the thick of "understanding Russia"

<>1944oc:1945au; Pacific Front over the final ten months. USA experienced Kamikaze [divine wind] attacks, suicidal Japanese airships crashed on Allied naval vessels
*1945my09:Attack described by eyewitness Michael Moynihan [Eye:630-1]
*--Modern industrial war and ancient tradition combined artificially on the aerial and naval battlefield

<>1945:English economist Barbara Wootton criticized Hayek's extreme laissez faire doctrine in her book Freedom under Planning [CCS,2:356-72]. Her thesis here and in other works was that planning need not conflict at all with democratic freedoms

<>1945:Austrian-born political philosopher Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies (2vv)
*--When Popper delivered his telling critique of Karl Marx, here at the very dawn of the Cold War, "The West" applauded. When he traced his story to its roots and found Plato (a "Founding Father" in "The West") and discovered him to be the first important and profoundly influential enemy of the open society, applause fell silent
\\
*--[W]

<>1945fe04:fe11; Yalta Conference [TXT] declared = (1) war to complete defeat of Hitler Germany, followed by Four-power occupation | (2) UNO with Security Council and veto power [ID] | (3) Secret agreement about USSR entry into Pacific war against Japan 3 months after defeat of Hitler Germany, giving Sakhalin and Kurile islands and Port Arthur to USSR; joint USSR/Chinese administration of the Manchurian railroad [no consultation with China on this one] [ORW:231-6] These and related territorial agreements which the USSR entered into at this time [BNE:287-91 | RFP2,3:71-4]

<>1945fe14 (Saint Valentine's Day):Germany, Dresden, a refugee center in the final months of WW2, was destroyed. As Soviet troops advanced on the eastern front, they requested of the Allied bombing command that Dresden be "neutralized". US planes blanketed the city with percussive bombs during the day. By night, British planes covered the rubble with incendiary bombs. The attacks and the resultant fire storm killed over 130,000 of the enemy (mostly civilian enemies) in less than 24 hours [P20:277]
*--Destruction illustrated [pix]
*--American novelist Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden at this time and took shelter and survived in Slaughterhouse 5. His moving account of that experience bears that name as its title
*--Eyewitness Margaret Freyer described attack [Eye:608-12]
\\
*--Charles K. Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945, 4 vols. (1961)

<>1945ap14:my01; Germany, Berlin under 2-week siege, then taken by USSR when the Soviet Red Army entered the Nazi capital
*1945ap30:Berlin underground bunker | Adolf Hitler penned his Political Testament and then shot himself to death [P20:274] His 20-year career and nearly all who latched themselves to it came to a tragic end
*1945my01 (May Day):German citizen Claus Fuhrmann described Red Army entering Berlin [Eye:625-30]. English POW also witnessed fall of Berlin [Eye:614-18]
*--Hitler Germany was defeated, and Berlin was utterly destroyed = [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix]. Once again a major world city was a battlefield
*--More WW2 era photos by Ivan Shagin [W] [W]
*--The second phase of WW2 was over
*1948:As anti-Soviet passions rose in the early stages of the Cold War, German woman who suffered at the hands of victorious Soviet soldiers, Marie Neumann, wrote notes about her sorrowful experience [P20:271]

<>1945my28:Syrian capital Damascus shelled by French artillery in an effort to consolidate post-WW2 French imperialist authority in this colonial possession

<>1945je05:Germany, Potsdam | After Four-Power Declaration of victory over Hitler Germany, Soviets hosted victory banquet. Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery refused the invitation

<>1945je26:USA, San Francisco | Charter of the United Nations Organization [UNO official website] signed [CCC2,2:1232-51]
*--Avalon documents website [W#02] [W#03] [W#04] [W#05] [W#06] [W#07] [W#08] [W#09] [W#10] [W#11] [W#12]
*--UNO addressed some of the weaknesses of its predecessor, The League of Nations [LOOP], but on the whole the UNO replicated the fundamental weakness of the League = The sovereignty of the global nation-states remained intact [League and UNO document access]
*--Unwilling to address the central problem of nation-state sovereignty, the UNO gave less attention to the business of diplomacy and greater attention to world issues like education, economic development, health, disease, and hunger
*--As membership climbed to over 140, the General Assembly functioned as a diplomatic clearing house. Who knows what the lateral contact among and between these countries meant, below the stratospheric or intercontinental conflict of the USA and the USSR? That can be determined only by careful and detailed analysis of the auxiliary or outside agencies: UNESCO, etc.
\\
[W#1]

<>1945jy17:au02; Germany | Potsdam Conference reaffirmed first paragraph of Yalta Agreement, providing more specifically for Berlin, which was by this time occupied by the Soviet Red Army, to be divided into four parts as a feature of the Four-power -- USSR, USA, England and France -- occupation of Germany as a whole [RFP2,3:102-4]

<>1945au06:Asia | USSR joined the Pacific Front, precisely according to the Yalta agreement, with declaration of war on Japan and movement of troops along eastern-most stretch of Trans-Siberian railroad, spilling into Manchurian and Korean territories
*--More SE Asia
*--Delicate Soviet-Japanese neutrality, nurtured since beginning of WW2, now broken
*--On this very day, USA dropped A-bomb on Hiroshima [SWH:397-414] A new era in warfare was upon the globe
*--Six years earlier German-born physicist Albert Einstein wrote USA President Roosevelt an ambiguous warning that an atomic bomb was a theoretical possibility demonstrated by experiments already under way [BNE:286-7]. The very scientist who tipped the world in the direction of nuclear physics, and became the very icon for modern genius, became increasingly concerned about the technical results of his 40-year-old scientific achievement
*1945se09:Japan, Hiroshima | Marcel Junod visited and described [Eye:638-40]
*--Some have argued that this Atomic bomb attack was the opening salvo of another new era, the era of USA-USSR competition, called the "Cold War". In other words, the A-bombs are said to have been dropped on staggering Japan as a warning jab at USSR. The war ended on an ominous diplomatic note, just as it had begun

<>1945au09:USA dropped a second A-bomb, this time on Nagasaki
*--USA airman William T. Laurence described attack [Eye:631-8]
*--Website statistics and photos
*--The final industrial, engineering and scientific contribution to the 6-year-long WW2 battlefield, nuclear weaponry caste its noxious shadow over the next half century and more

<>1945au17:Indonesian independence denied by the Netherlands

<>1945au28:Soviet troops reached 38th parallel in Korea

<>1945se01:USA General George C. Marshall, "Biennial Report" (summary history of World War Two) [SPE2:960-3]

<>1945se02:Vietnam President Ho Chi Minh declared independence from French colonial rule [P20:326 | BNE:309-12]
*--The Viet Minh had for several years fought a guerilla war against imperialist Japan, which had come to replace previous French imperialist dominion
*1944fe:Congo, Brazzaville | France resolved to reconstruct a unitary French empire [BNE:306-9] (compare with all the stated ideals of Allied participation in WW2 [EG])
*--At war's end, France returned to reclaim its colonies in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia)
*--Ho Chi Minh appealed to USA to protect Vietnamese national independence, but USA refused
*--Map of world at end of WW2 showing dependent territories [W]

<>1945se11:oc02; London. Allied Council of Foreign Ministers meeting #1. USA Secretary of State Byrnes report [W]

<>1945se13:Iran demanded withdrawal of all Russian, English and US troops, now that WW2 was over
*1945se23:Egypt demanded revision of 1936:Treaty with England and thus a serious adjustment in its colonial subordination
*--The question was being raised in Iran and Egypt, in fact all around the world = Was WW2 a war of liberation from forcible subordination of weaker nationalities to stronger, or was it a war to restore and protect European imperialist subordination of weaker nationalities?

<>1945oc05:Paris | Charles de Gaulle created E'cole Nationale d'Administration [ENA] [ID] to train a French administrative or managerial elite. The guiding impulse was to recruit national leadership on a more democratic basis, on the basis of "careers open to talent"
*--By the 21st century, the school relocated in Strasbourg at the western edge of France on the Rhine River border with Germany In order to expand its services to the whole EU community
*--Official website
*--The school has also inspired educational programs in the Mideast and other areas of the "emerging world" [EG]

<>1945oc21:French Constituent Assembly revealed significant political shift "leftward". Communists took 152 seats and socialists 151

<>1945no14:1946oc01; Germany, Nuremburg. Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Tribunal... (42 volumes) This represented the first dramatic moment in which "war crimes" would be prosecuted according to something like international law [best described as trans-national law] in close institutional association with something like a trans-national court. The question presented itself to victorious Allies = Is this simply the familiar exercise of the power of the victor over the weakness of the defeated, or is this an actual historical novelty, the establishment of trans-national legal precedence? Max Rheinstein and Quincy Wright joined this debate [RWP1,2:178-200]
*--Indictment of individuals and organizations (Nuremberg: Secretariat of the International Military Tribunal, 1949) [CCC2,2:1183-93]
*--Auschwitz (Poland) concentration camp commandant Rudolf Hoess testified [TXT | P20:252]
*--Hermann Graebe’s sworn testimony at Nuremberg described mass slaughter of Jews and others in Dubno in Ukraine [P20:250]

<>1945de16:de21; Moscow Allied Council of Foreign Ministers (USA, USSR, England) interim meeting dealt further with post-war arrangements in defeated and/or occupied territories, especially on the Soviet eastern front [W]

Return to top
Next SAC

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|