On March 18

On this day in ...
... 1980 (30 years ago today), a painter celebrated for her work in the 1920s and 1930s, Tamara de Lempicka, died at her home in her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She'd been born Maria Górska 81 years earlier in Warsaw, Poland. She fled Russia with her 1st husband during the Bolshevik Revolution and became a painter of celebrities, based initially in Paris and later, as World War II waged, in the United States. She was renowned for her distinctive, angular style, epitomized in the 1925 self-portrait at right. (image credit)

(Prior March 18 posts are here, here, and here)

On February 26

On this day in ...
... 1869, Nadezhda Krupskaya (right) was born in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire, to educated, working parents. Sometime after her studies at a gymnazium, she met the Marxist Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov. Political soulmates, the two were jailed, then married, and then lived in exile before her husband Lenin, as he then was known, spearheaded the Bolshevik Revolution against the czars and became the 1st leader of the Soviet Union. She herself remained active in politics and pressed many causes, among them library reform centered on purging libraries of nonsocialist materials. Krupskaya died in 1939, more than a dozen years after her husband.

(Prior February 26 posts are here, here, and here)

On July 16

On this day in ...
... 1918 (90 years ago today), overnight, Bolsheviks executed the Russian royal family at Yekaterinburg. Four days later the New York Times reported that only "Nicholas Romanoff, ex-Czar of Russia," had been killed, and that "[t]he former Empress and Alexis Romanoff, the young heir, have been sent to a place of security." In point of fact, all 3, plus 3 Romanoff daughters, their physician, and 3 servants, were executed at the same time. Just yesterday, the Russian Orthodox Church called upon authorities to "state that assassination of the tsar family was a crime and condemn it in compliance with people's will." Meanwhile, Tsar Nicholas II and former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, are "neck and neck," "battling ... for first place" in an online popularity contest. (credit for 1913 photo of Russian royal family)
... 1945, "[a]t precisely 5:30 a.m." on a Monday in the New Mexico desert, "the nuclear age began" as the scientists of the Manhattan Project watched the 1st successful test -- named the Trinity Test -- of the atomic bomb.