Christmas Every Day

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.

1963 A Trio of Deaths

November 22, 1963 is best known for the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy as he drove in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. Though he was unquestionably murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist sympathizer who had lived in the Soviet Union and supported Castro’s Cuba, a plethora of conspiracy theories has blamed everyone from mobsters, to the CIA, the military-industrial complex, and most unfairly, Lyndon Johnson. A vile piece of 1967 agit-prop called Macbird! likened LBJ to Macbeth who slew his king and who would in turn be slain by a Bobby-Kennedy figure. The worst blot on the assassination’s historical landscape was the 1991 Oliver Stone atrocity JFK.

Also dying on that day in 1963 were literary scholar and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis and dystopian author Aldous Huxley whose Brave New World presciently spoke of a future world of pleasure drugs and genetic manipulation.

In 1968 another disaster took place on this date: the Beatles issued “the White Album”.

1970

The death of Newsy Lalonde

Édouard Cyrille “Newsy” Lalonde was born in 1887 and became one of the great “Flying Frenchmen” of the Montreal Canadiens hockey club was well as an outstanding lacrosse player. He began play in the era just before the formation of the National Hockey League when now-long-forgotten teams from across the continent could bid for first-rate talent. This article is, therefore, a salute to the Saskatoon Sheiks, the Renfrew Creamery Kings, the Vancouver Millionaires, the Victoria Aristocrats, the New York (later Brooklyn) Americans, the Portland Buckaroos, and the Seattle Totems.

The nickname “Newsy” was derived from Lalonde’s work in a printing plant. Hockey players, like their baseball counterparts, used to have splendid nicknames. Herewith a tip of the Chippendale Biltmore to

Georges Vezina, “the Chicoutimi Cucumber”; Dave “the Hammer” Schultz; Garnet “Ace” Bailey; “Bashin’ Bill” Barilko; Bobby Hull, “the Golden Jet”; Eddie “the Eagle” Belfour; Reggie Leach, “the Riverton Rifle”; Frank Nighbor, the “Pemberton Peach”; André “Moose” Dupont; “Sweet Lou from the Soo” Nanne; Alf “The Embalmer” Pike (he was a mortician); Maurice “the Rocket” Richard and his little brother Henri “the Pocket Rocket”; Matts “the Norwegian Hobbit” Zuccarello.

And surely the greatest of all sports monikers: Max Bentley, “the Dipsy Doodle Dandy from Delisle”.

1497 

Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope

The disintegration of the Mongol Empire and the conquest of Constantinople and the Middle East by the Turks meant that European trade with Asia was in the hands of Muslim and Italian middle-men, making commerce both more expensive and less reliable. A number of states, particularly on the Atlantic coast, sought a direct sea-borne route to Asia; the Spanish, taking the advice of Christopher Columbus, tried sailing west, while the Portuguese sought a long-rumoured passage around Africa. Columbus, of course, bumped into the Americas (which he mistook for Asia) but expedition after expedition from Lisbon kept pushing farther and father down Africa’s inhospitable shoreline.

In 1486 Bartolomeu Diaz reached the southern tip of Africa and in 1497 a three-ship flotilla led by Vasco da Gama finally rounded the Cape to begin the long voyage north and on to India. His trip shocked the Arab world which had long had the monopoly of trade and intruded European sea-power into Asia. Soon the technologically-advanced ships of other western countries ventured into those waters and joined the Portuguese and Spanish in establishing trading empires that persisted until the 20th century.

1863 Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address

The second-greatest short speech in history.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

1885

Death of a Canadian rebel

Louis David Riel (1844-1885) was born into a family of Métis businessmen in the Red River colony of Rupert’s Land, what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba. Showing early promise he was given a French-language education in hopes that he might be the first Catholic priest from his community but, though intelligent, he dropped out of his studies and worked in the United States before returning to his home in 1868.

Rupert’s Land was at that moment under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company but it was soon to be transferred to the new nation of Canada. A flood of Ontario Protestant settlers had created tensions with the native, Métis and French-Canadian population and a nationalist sentiment arose. This was put to the test when a party from Canada attempted to make a survey of Red River land, threatening the locals who had no written title and whose traditional seigneurial river-lot land division would not easily fit the Canadian model. Riel led an armed group to oppose the Canadian interlopers and to assert that Métis concerns would have to be taken into account. When a pro-Canadian party armed in resistance the Métis imprisoned them and set up a Provisional Government to negotiate with Ottawa. While negotiations were going on in 1871 Riel foolishly ordered the execution of an obstinate Canadian, Thomas Scott, a deed that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Negotiations resulted in the creation of a new province of Manitoba, and settlement of land claims but a military expedition from Ontario forced Riel to flee to the United States to avoid arrest. Though elected to the Canadian Parliament in subsequent years he was never able to take his seat. He obtained a pardon for his actions but at the price of a 5-year exile. During his time in the United States Riel’s mental condition weakened; today he might be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia characterized by a religious mania and delusions of grandeur. He was institutionalized for two years; on his release he headed to the American West, settling in Montana and becoming an American citizen.

When Métis and native grievances in Saskatchewan grew intolerable in the 1880s, a delegation was sent to Riel to ask him to return to Canada and resume a leadership role. He did so but much of the white support he had initially won dissolved when his religious obsessions turned into megalomania and he began favouring armed resistance to the Canadian government. Open warfare broke out in 1885 with a number of native tribes and a faction of the Métis took up arms, seized hostages and clashed with local troops. Though the rebels achieved some fleeting victories a Canadian force under General Middleton crushed the rising at the Battle of Batoche in May.

Riel was put on trial for treason in Regina and was found guilty with a jury recommending mercy, given Riel’s shaky mental state. John A. Macdonald ordered the execution to go through. “Riel shall hang,” he proclaimed, “though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.” He was dispatched on  this date in 1885.