Christmas Every Day

1931 Destruction of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral

The new government of the Soviet Union was determined to be the world’s first atheist state. It murdered or imprisoned thousands of priests, seized church property, and actively discouraged the practice of religion, be it Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. It sponsored the League of the Militant Godless, an organization which sought to inculcate atheism into the population.

Russia’s spectacular Orthodox churches, however, stood as visible reminders of a spiritual power which the Soviets wished to be rid of. Some churches were converted into museums of atheism, some were used as potato warehouses and, in 1931, the largest Christian church in the country was ordered destroyed. Tons of gold on the dome and interior were stripped away and some of the glorious mosaics were saved but much of the church where Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” was premiered was doomed. On December 5, a series of explosions levelled the building so thoroughly that it took a year just to clear away the rubble. For years the site remained a large outdoor swimming pool.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, plans were made to rebuild a replica of the original on the same site, financed largely by ordinary citizens of Moscow. Work began in 1992 and the cathedral was consecrated in 2000, the year in which the murdered Czar Nicholas II and his family were canonized as saints.

1824 American presidential election controversy

Those Americans who complain that their candidate for president was not elected despite having won a plurality of the popular vote; those who complain about “fake news” influencing the election; and those with qualms about the electoral college, should examine the election of 1824.

When voting ended on December 2, 1824, Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson was found to have received the most votes (41.4%), outpolling John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford and Henry Clay. All four were from the Democratic-Republican Party which had failed to unite behind a single candidate. Jackson, however, had fallen short in electoral college votes — needing 131 to win, he had received only 90. The Twelfth Amendment of the constitution stated:

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. 

Thus, the 1824 election rested in the hands of the House of Representatives on February 29, 1825. Henry Clay, who detested Jackson, threw his support behind Adams with the result being an upset victory for the man from Massachusetts. Rumours accused Clay of having been bribed by Adams with the offer of the position of Secretary of State, the so-called Corrupt Bargain — and indeed, that was the post taken up by Clay in the Adams administration.

The 1828 rematch saw Jackson at last triumph over Adams.

1934 The Murder of Sergei Kirov

Revolutions eat their own children, the saying goes. This was certainly true in the case of the Russian Revolution which produced the world’s first Communist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Few of those who led the revolution survived to old age, most often falling victim to their fellow Bolsheviks.

Sergei Kirov was considered a leading light of the young USSR. He had paid his dues as a revolutionary in his youth, taking part in the 1905 uprising and continuing to back Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik faction in the Russian Civil War as a commissar in the Caucasus. He had been named Communist Party chief in Leningrad (formerly St Petersburg) in 1926 and was very popular with party insiders. Though Kirov was a supporter of Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, his growing renown made the paranoid Stalin suspicious. When Kirov looked to be favouring a relaxation of some of the dictator’s harsher economic policies, his fate was sealed; Stalin ordered him assassinated.

The choice of murderer fell on disgruntled Leonid Nikolayev who was given money and a pistol; most of Kirov’s security detail had disappeared and the entrance to his offices were left unguarded. On December 1, Nikolayev shot and killed Kirov.

Blaming fascist opponents of Communism, Stalin ordered swift retribution. Nikolayev  was swiftly executed, followed by most of his family. Prisoners, already under arrest, were deemed to be part of this international plot, and were exterminated, as were any officials involved in arranging the murder. But these were just the start. Stalin used the murder to eliminate high-ranking Bolsheviks whom he deemed to be his opponents. Leaders of the 1917 revolution like Kamenev and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and later executed after show trials. Over all, the purges of the 1930s took at least a million lives, sent millions more into exile and eviscerated the highest levels of the party and military.

1872 Birth of John McCrae

John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario into a family of soldiers and doctors. McCrae became both, serving as an artillery officer in the Boer War and becoming a physician. When the First World War began, he was appointed to the rank of major and made the Medical Officer of an artillery unit. In 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres on the Western Front a close friend of his was killed, inspiring McCrae to write the poem for which he is best known.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Though the poem is often read nowadays as a tragic anti-war piece, McCrae meant it otherwise, as a prod to enlistment and service. It inspired a number of enthusiastic responses including:

America’s Answer

R.W. Lillard

Rest ye in peace, ye Flanders dead
The fight that you so bravely led
We’ve taken up. And we will keep
True faith with you who lie asleep,
With each a cross to mark his bed,
And poppies blowing overhead,
When once his own life-blood ran red
So let your rest be sweet and deep
In Flanders Fields.

Fear not that ye have died for naught;
The torch ye threw to us we caught,
Ten million hands will hold it high,
And freedom’s light shall never die!
We’ve learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders’ fields.

McCrae never lived to return from the war. He succumbed to pneumonia in January 1918 and is buried in France.

1781 The Zong Massacre

On August 18th 1781, the sailing ship Zong sailed from Accra on the Gold Coast of Africa with a crew of 17 and a hold full of slaves — 441 of them, more than twice as many as could have been transported safely. By late November the ship had reached the Caribbean but was still some way from its Jamaican destination and running low on water. Several sailors and dozens of slaves had already died, and the captain was ill, leaving a drunkard in charge of the vessel.  The crew decided that they had to dispose of some of their cargo in order to save the rest so on November 29, they began to toss their African captives overboard.

This mass murder was deemed to be a prudent financial decision, for if the slaves died after reaching land, the Liverpool ship-owners would not be able to collect insurance on their property (valued at £30 a head). If the slaves died a natural death at sea, insurance claims could not be made either. However, if some slaves were killed in order to save the rest of the merchandise or the ship, then a claim could be made on the principle that a captain who jettisons part of his cargo in order to save the rest can claim for the loss from his insurers. In the end, 133 Africans were tossed into the sea.

The insurance company, however, refused to pay and the case went to court in England where it caused a huge wave of hostility to the slave trade. The shipowners had precedent on their side, claimed that the deaths were necessary and that payment should be made as if it were any cargo, not human life, that was being jettisoned. Their opponents argued that the taking of innocent life, even in self-defence, was unjustified. Moreover, it had rained heavily on the voyage providing ample water for the ship, but the killings had continued. The courts eventually ruled in favour of the insurers. No one was ever prosecuted for the mass murder but the case inspired the anti-slavery movement and led, first to laws hindering the abuses of the trade, and then eventually abolishing it all together.

1887 Birthday of a loyal Nazi

Ernst Julius Günther Röhm was born in Bavaria in 1887. During Word War I he fought on the western front, took part in the battle for Verdun, was wounded on a number of occasions and won the Iron Cross. He ended the war as a captain and remained with the army during the first few years of peace. He participated in the suppression of a Communist rising in Münich in 1919 as a member of the voluntary paramilitary  Freikorps. That same year he joined the German Workers’ Party which, under Adolf Hitler, another army veteran, became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or Nazis). When Röhm took part in the attempted Nazi coup in Münich in 1923, he was imprisoned briefly and resigned from the army. Nonetheless he was elected to the Reichstag as a member for a right-wing group and was instrumental in building up a militia to replace the banned Nazi paramilitary. After a quarrel with Hitler he migrated to Bolivia where he served as an army officer until 1930 when Hitler summoned him back to Germany.

Röhm became head of the Sturmabteilung (the SA), the Nazi party’s massive private army of Brownshirts, a force that would grow to 3,000,000 men. In the run-up to the elections of 1933 that brought Hitler to power, the SA fought street wars against the Social Democrats, Communists and those who were deemed opponents of Nazi ambitions. They broke up political meetings, attacked Jews and opposition newspapers, and aided workers in their strikes against big business.

When Hitler became Chancellor, the SA expected to reap the benefits in terms of power and personal rewards but they were to be disappointed. Röhm and many of his followers were genuine socialists and opponents of capitalism; they were dismayed to find Hitler cozying up to industrialists, officers of the regular army, and members of the ruling class that the Nazi revolution was supposed to be rid of. Hitler feared the army of street-fighters that he no longer needed and whose brutishness was embarrassing. Other Nazi leaders had pointed to Röhm’s open homosexuality as a public relations liability and fed the Führer false stories of a coup that was being planned by the Brownshirts. In 1934 Hitler met secretly, on the battleship Deutschland, with army and navy leaders who dreaded being submerged into the SA (Röhm had demanded being made Minister of Defence); in return for their pledge of loyalty they persuaded Hitler to reduce the power of the SA and dismiss Röhm.

The dismissal was a brutal one. On June 30, 1934, in the “Night of the Long Knives”, Hitler’s personal security force, the black-clad SS, rounded up Röhm and other SA leaders, as well as a gaggle of politicians Hitler wanted to eliminate. They were executed without trial, dumbfounded by this turn of events which they thought the Chancellor knew nothing about, many of them dying with “Heil Hitler” on their lips. Röhm, in his cell, was given the option of suicide but he refused, saying, “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.” He was shot to death by an SS officer.

2009 The Nevsky Express is bombed

Twenty-seven people died and another 130 people were hurt in a blast which hit the last three carriages of the high-speed Moscow-to-St Petersburg Nevsky Express. At first, the incident was blamed an an electrical fault but various terrorist groups began to claim credit for the outrage. Finally, blame was credibly settled on the forces of Dokka Umarov (aka Dokka Usman), the head of the so-called Caucasus Emirate, a pan-Islamic jihadist movement.

Since the sixteenth century, the Russian empire had been expanding eastward on to the vast steppes populated largely by Muslim peoples. In the 1700s they penetrated the Caucasus, meeting resistance from the fierce mountain tribes and the Persians who also controlled the area. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the Russian hold on these territories became relatively secure. That did not mean that opposition ceased. There were a number of risings by Chechens, Dagestanis and Ingushetians culminating in the proclamation of an independent Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus in the dying days of the Romanov dynasty. Independence was crushed by the nascent Soviet Union which absorbed these peoples in backward federal republics. When the Soviet Union collapsed, separatist movements started up again, engaging in attacks (often vile and terroristic) on Russian forces and their collaborators. Some of the rebels wanted only independence, but a significant wing, led by Dokka Umarov, wanted a unified Islamic state and were prepared to spread violence into Russia proper to gain their ends.

In 2012 a Russian court convicted ten suspects from  the North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia for the bombing; nine of them were from the same family of separatist activists. Umarov seems to have been poisoned, probably by opponents inside his movement.