On February 25

On this day in ...

... 1956 (55 years ago today), in an address that the BBC called "sensational," former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was reviled "as a brutal despot" by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev (right). The latter told an assembly of the Communist Party of the "regime of 'suspicion, fear, and terror' built up under the former dictator," who'd ruled from 1924 till his death in 1953. (photo credit) Khrushchev said his goal was to bring to an end what he called "the 'Stalin cult' that has held Soviet citizens in its thrall for 30 years." Americans and Britons would learn of the "Secret Speech" the following month, but it would not be published in Russia until 1988. It's estimated that during Stalin's rule "20 million died in labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions."

(Prior February 25 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On October 14

On this day in ...
... 1916, Rutgers University benched all-American athlete Paul Robeson (left), because the Washington and Lee football team it faced refused to take the field against a squad that included an African-American player. (photo credit) Robeson went on to Fame, and not only in the College Hall of that name. He would graduate from Columbia Law School and study languages at the University of London; become a "superbly talented" actor and singer; and engaged in political activism on issues such as the Spanish Civil War, workers' rights, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. He was called to testify before anti-Communist inquiries in state and federal legislatures, and for years during the 1950s was denied a passport to travel on account of his views. Robeson died in 1976 at age 77.

(Prior October 14 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 7

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), a daughter was born in Concord, New Hampshire, to emigrants from Ireland who espoused socialism and feminism. Their daughter, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (left), would work for both throughout her life. She gave her 1st public speech, "On Women Under Socialism," as a teenager. Her oratory soon got her kicked out of high school, and she became a full-time Industrial Workers of the World organizer. For this group -- whose slogan was "One Big Union," and which was known colloquially as the "Wobblies" -- Flynn, nicknamed "Rebel Girl," organized children, women, and men who worked in industries across the United States. In the wake of World War I she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union; in 1940 the ACLU kicked her off its executive board because she belonged to the Communist Party. That membership also prompted a 9-month trial -- at which she defended herself -- that ended in a Smith Act conviction and a prison sentence served at Alderson federal prison for women. (Among the lawyers who represented Flynn at points in her career was Mary M. Kaufman, previously among the women U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg.) Having become in 1961 the 1st woman Chair of the U.S. Communist Party, Flynn died in Moscow on September 5, 1964. The Soviet government of Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave her "a full-scale state funeral in Red Square."

(Prior August 7 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 5

On this day in ...
... 1940 (70 years ago today), in Ottawa, the Cabinet formed in response to World War II outlawed 16 Nazi, Fascist, and Communist organizations under Canada's wartime emergency legislation. (credit for flag in use in Canada ca. 1940) Leaders of the now-illegal groups were jailed.

(Prior posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 9

On this day in ...
... 1987, Clare Boothe Luce died from cancer. She'd been born in New York City 84 years earlier, the daughter of a businessman and a "chorus girl." She married a rich, older man, then divorced and began a journalism career that culminated in her editorship of Vanity Fair. In 1935 she married Henry R. Luce, a conservative publisher whose magazine empire included Time. After serving a couple terms in the 1940s as a Republican Member of Congress, Boothe Luce was named Ambassador to Italy -- "stirring controversy because of Mrs. Luce's Catholicism, her lack of diplomatic experience and because she was a woman" -- and, later, to Brazil. Throughout her political career Boothe Luce was a "hard-line anti-Communist." The quotable Boothe Luce is most remembered by this IntLawGrrl for her deliciously nasty play The Women (1936). (credit for photo of 1st Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and U.S. Rep. Clare Boothe Luce)
... 1988 (20 years ago today), in the capital city of Riga, Latvians launched "a mass movement to press Moscow for greater independence from the Soviet Union." Among the demands that the new Latvijas Tautas Fronte made was that of "the right to self-determination." The Baltic country (flag at left) would declare itself independent, and be recognized as such, in 1991.

On August 29

On this day in ...
... 1982, 67 years to the day after she was born in Stockholm, Sweden, Ingrid Bergman died from cancer at her home in London, England. Star of Casablanca (1942) (right) and other Hollywood movies, Bergman had been box-office gold in the United States until 1949, when she gave birth to a child with her lover, Italian film director Roberto Rossellini, before divorcing her Swedish husband. (photo credit) The "scandal ... rocked the movie industry, forced her to stay out of the United States for seven years and made her life as tempestuous as many of her roles. ... She was even condemned on the floor of the United States Senate," an attack that 22 years later would spur the entry of a Senatorial apology into the Congressional Record. In a bit of understatement, her New York Times obituary observed: "In a sense, she became a barometer of changing moral values in the United States."
... 1991, in Moscow, by a vote of 283 to 29, the Soviet Parliament voted to suspend all activities of the Communist Party. By this vote, the New York Times wrote, "[T]he party of Lenin had been relegated to the dustbin of history."

On August 24

On this day in ...

... 1215, the Magna Carta (left) -- the document in which King John, in June of the same year, agreed to accord certain liberties to certain Englishmen -- was declared null and void by Pope Innocent III (below right), on the grounds that it was "an agreement exacted by force, which was shameful, demeaning illegal, unjust and derogatory to the king's rights and dignity."




... 1954, the Communist Party effectively was outlawed in the United States when the Communist Control Act went into effect. The legality vel non of the act was never reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On June 9

On this day in ...
... 1954, in Washington, D.C., 1954, the tide turned against U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), who had spearheaded a Cold War Red Scare. When McCarthy (above, at right) attacked a colleague of Army counsel Joseph N. Welch (above, at left), stating that the colleague "had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild 'long after it had been exposed as the legal arm of the Communist party,'" Welch retorted:

'Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?'

Text and audio of the McCarthy-Welch exchange are here.
... 1949, Dr. Kiran Bedi (below right) was born in Amritsar, India. In 1972, she became the 1st woman in India's Police Service, a career she pursued until her retirement last year. The onetime tennis champion earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Social Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1993. She has worked extensively with the United Nations, as the Police Advisor to the Secretary-General in the Department of Peace Keeping Operations and as India's representative in forums on crime prevention, drug abuse, police and prison reforms, and women’s issues. Awarded the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service -- an honor sometimes called the Asian Nobel Prize -- Bedi has founded 2 NGOS, Navjyoti and India Vision Foundation.

German Women WWII Slaves Seek Recognition

As Holocaust compensation payments reach completion in Germany for both German and non-German wartime slave laborers, over 1000 German women who’d been slave laborers in Siberian labor camps are excluded from German fund set up to compensate Germans imprisoned by Communist authorities for political reasons. Of the roughly 20,000 young German women and girls taken prisoner by the Red Army and forced to do heavy manual labor for over 4 years, fewer than 2000 are estimated to survive. Released into East Germany in 1949, the women were forbidden to discuss their experiences and have been excluded from the fund to compensate former political prisoners because they were never put on trial. Arnold Vaatz, a legislator in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party has, like Merkel, spent years campaigning for the political prisoners, and he's trying to get another bill passed to create a 5-million-euro package for these women, who say they are less concerned about the money than about the recognition and respect they’ve been seeking for almost 60 years.