On March 27

On this day in ...
... 1989, in the 1st Soviet parliamentary election in which voters could choose candidates from parties other than Communist, millions of persons cast ballots, and "early results suggest[ed] that a number of Communist candidates have been rejected by the electorate." The election proved a milepost on the path to democracy in the state now known, again, as Russia.

(Prior March 27 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On October 25

On this day in ...
... 1962, at the U.N. Security Council in New York, the U.S. Ambassador to the United States, Adlai E.Stevenson, challenged his Soviet counterpart to explain the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba. When the Soviet ambassador declined to give an immediate answer (possibly because he lacked instructions from Moscow), Stevenson -- formerly an Illinois Governor (and before that, an attaché at the U.N. Charter conference in San Francisco) who'd become known for his wit in 2 unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Presidency -- went on the offensive. He told the Soviet envoy he could wait "till hell freezes over"; in the interim, he set up easels and displayed enlarged photographs (above left), evidence of the installations. High points in this video clip; more here and here on Stevenson and others who played a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 (prior InLawGrrls posts here, here, here, and here).



(Prior October 25 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 July 27

On this day in ...
... 1990 (20 years ago today), a Declaration of Sovereignty was adopted by the Supreme Soviet of Belarus, naming the Republic of Belarus (map below)

a sovereign state established on the basis of the realization by the Belarusian nation of its inalienable right to self-determination, state-language status of the Belarusian language, and the supremacy of the people in the determination of its destiny.

Thus did the Belarus (prior posts) break from the Soviet Union with which it had been affiliated since the end of World War II. This declaration was among many in 1990, "The Year of USSR Independence and Sovereignty Declarations," as Helsinki Watch, predecessor of Human Rights Watch, called it.

(Prior July 27 posts are here, here, and here.)

On April 18

On this day in ...
... 1989, Hilde Benjamin (right), the 1st woman to serve as East Germany's Minister of Justice, died, 7 months before the fall of the Berlin Wall that would precipitate the reunion of her country with its western counterpart. Born Hilde Lange 87 years earlier, she became a lawyer, married Georg Benjamin (brother of the philosopher Walter Benjamin), and joined the Communist Party. As a judge in the era when East Germany lay within the Soviet bloc, she presided over many show trial convictions, and so earned the nickname "Blutige Hilde"; that is, "Bloody Hilde."

(Prior April 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 February 20

On this day in ...
... 1980 (30 years ago today), The New York Times reported that "the White House reaffirmed today what officials termed a 'final and irrevocable' decision for the United States to boycott the Olympic Games in Moscow" (logo at right) slated for the summer of the same year.
The move -- spurred by President Jimmy Carter's opposition to the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan -- is worth recalling even as, now, we watch the ongoing Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada (logo at left).

(Prior February 20 posts are here, here, and here)

On January 10

On this day in ...
... 1910 (100 years ago today), a daughter, Galina Ulanova (right), was born to 2 dancers in St. Petersburg, Russia. She made her début as a ballerina at age 18 in the city of her birth, by then called Leningrad, and would become the Soviet Union's 1st prima ballerina. (photo credit © Bolshoi Ballet) Dancing in Britain in 1956, "she astonished critics and fans alike with her performances as Juliet and Giselle." Her visit to the United States 2 years later, however, provoked a political spat with the man who was then The New York Times' dance critic:

Miss Ulanova performed most of the greatest roles in classical ballet, including the leads in 'Giselle,' 'Swan Lake,' 'Cinderella' and 'Sleeping Beauty.' Such was her power that when Mr. Martin criticized -- mildly -- her performance in 'Swan Lake' during the 1959 New York tour, Pravda responded the next day by accusing him and The Times of being 'bent on continuing the cold war.'

Ulanova, depicted below in clips from her performances of "Giselle" and "Romeo and Juliet," died in Moscow in 1998.




(Prior January 10 posts are here and here.)

On January 9

On this day in ...
... 1962, in Havana, the Soviet Union and Cuba signed a bilateral trade agreement. Thus began a year that would also see Cuba expelled from the Organization of American States -- a decision that the OAS reversed just 6 months ago, as we posted -- and, of course, the U.S.-Soviet standoff known as the Cuban Missile Crisis (prior posts here, here, and here).

(Prior January 9 posts are here and here.)

On November 29

On this day in ...
... 1983, meeting in the chamber at right, the U.N. General Assembly adopted Resolution 37/37, in which it called for "the immediate withdrawal of the foreign troops from Afghanistan" -- that is, for the withdrawal of Soviet troops that had been in the Central Asian country for 3 years. As we've posted, it would be another 6 years before any such withdrawal came to pass. Decades later, as further discussed in Penelope Andrews' guest post above, U.S. President Barack Obama will give a televised address Tuesday on the future of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Those troops 1st entered the country after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

(Prior November 29 posts are here and here.)

On September 19

On this day in ...
... 1959 (50 years ago today), in what The New York Times said "probably was the first time that Disneyland had figured as a controversial subject in Soviet-United States relations," Soviet Premier "Nikita S. Khrushchev's temper exploded" when, on arriving in Los Angeles from New York, "he was told he could not go to Disneyland because security officials could not guarantee his safety." Khruschev questioned this Cold War-era incident:

'What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me?'

The then-4-year-old theme park (image credit) already had accommodated 15 million visitors, including dignitaries like U.S. President Harry S. Truman, without incident.

(Prior September 19 posts are here and here.)

On September 16

On this day in ...
... 1941, Iran's Reza Shah Pahlavi then Shah of Iran, abdicated his throne and was succeeded by his son, Crown Prince Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, 21. The stated reason for abdication by the man depicted on the 1941 Iranian banknote at right (credit) was "'failing health.'" But the change took place, according to a contemporary New York Times article, "as British and Russian forces" -- Allies in World War II who were concerned about Nazi German influence in oil-rich Iran -- "came within a few miles of Teheran in moves converging upon that capital." As we've posted, in 1979 the new Shah himself would be ousted from office. His son, also named Reza Pahlavi, surfaced during election protests at the beginning of this summer (about which IntLawGrrls posted here and here), "a leader of the Iranian exile groups working to overthrow the regime whose clerics and mullahs overthrew your father," as the Times put it.

(Prior September 16 posts are here and here.)

On August 23

On this day in ...
... 1924 (85 years ago today), Madeleine Riffaud (left) was born in Paris, France. When the Nazis occupied her city, the teenager adopted a codename and "joined the 20,000 strong Résistance in the French capital and became one of the 100,000 or so members nationwide." Decades later she told a Deutsche Welle reporter:

'I took the name of a German, out of respect for the author Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poems I loved. We were at war with the Nazis, not at war against the German people. So I became "Rainer" and remained so to the end of the occupation.'

In retaliation for an SS massacre of 600 in central France, Riffaud shot a German soldier to death -- an exploit she recalled in her poem Femmes avec fusils (p. 5) -- and was arrested. She would be released when Allies liberated the city. After World War II she became a journalist, poet, and war correspondent, covering wars in Algeria and Vietnam. (image credit)
... 1990, Armenia declared itself sovereign. It would become independent from the Soviet Union a year later. Today the country (flag at left), which is slightly larger than the state of Maryland, has a population estimated in the neighborhood of 3 million.

(Prior August 23 posts are here and here.)

On July 24

On this day in ...
1959 (50 years ago today), during a visit to an American exhibition in the Soviet Union, U.S. Vice President Richard M. Nixon (near left) got into a tense discussion with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (far left) about the merits of communism versus capitalism; their dispute became known as the "kitchen debate." (photo credit) The exhibition, which mirrored a Soviet exhibit that had taken place in the United States earlier that year, was intended to show Soviets facets of American life, such as homes, fashions, and cars. The discussion became heated after the 2 leaders were shown into the American model kitchen and Nixon said that even the washing machines, toasters, and juicers on display were common purchases American workers could afford, implying that the new gadgets were not readily available in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev replied,

'We have all these things in our new flats."

1920, Bella Abzug (right), American feminist, lawyer and politician, was born in the Bronx, New York. In the 1970s, Abzug served as the representative for the West Side of Manhattan for 3 Congressional terms. On her 1st day as a representative she called for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. She fought for national health insurance, money for day care centers, and housing. She cosponsored the Equal Rights Amendment, and she was one of the 1st members of Congress to call for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon. In the words of a colleague,

'She was one of the most exciting, enlightened legislators that ever served in the Congress.'

After leaving the House in January 1977, Abzug worked for women's rights for another 20 years, founding an international women's group that worked on environmental issues. She died on March 31, 1998. (photo credit)

(Prior July 24 posts are here and here.)

On July 21

On this day in ...
... 1970, about 400 miles south of Cairo, Soviet and Egyptian officials marked the start of the 12th and final power-turbine in the Aswan High Dam spanning the Nile River. The New York Times said that the ceremony commemorated at left, from which officials of the West were excluded, "marked the essential completion" of Egypt's "greatest engineering work since the construction of the Pyramids." It detailed as well how a U.S. backing-off from funding the dam had sparked geopolitical change in the region.
... 1856, Louise Blanchard was born in Waterloo, New York. Following her high school graduation, she taught school briefly. In 1876 a Buffalo architect hired her as a draftsman, and a few years later Louise Blanchard Bethune (right) and her husband ran their own architectural office. By age 33, when her child was 6, she had served as vice president of one professional organization, been elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and designed 75 buildings. Soon after she published an article entitled Women of Architecture. The 1st woman known to work as a professional architect in the United States, she designed a variety of commercial and public buildings. Still standing is a 1904 Renaissance-style building for which she received a $1 million commission, the Lafayette Hotel in Buffalo. Bethune died in 1913 in New York City.

(Prior July 21 posts are here and here.)

On July 16

On this day in ...
... 1862, in the middle of the Civil War and half a year before issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Ida B. Wells was born to a couple held in slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Ida attended Freedmen's School Shaw University, but dropped out of school and started working as a teacher at age 16 in order to keep her siblings together after their parents and an infant brother died from yellow fever. Eventually she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where her refusal to sit in the train car designated for blacks gave rise both to a high-profile court case and to her career as a crusading journalist. She became a co-owner and editor of a leading antisegregation newspaper and an investigative reporter who focused on the crime of lynching. She settled in Chicago, where she helped to organize an African-American boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, married and raised a family, and worked to improve the lot of the city's ever-growing African-American population. Wells traveled as far as Europe to speak in favor of racial equality before her death in Chicago in 1931. She is an IntLawGrrls transnational foremother, thanks to guest/alumna Lynne Henderson. As posted at Legal History blog, Wells also is the subject of a new biography, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (2008) (above left), by Smith College Professor Paula J. Giddings.
... 1945, about 6 weeks after Nazi Germany's surrender, leaders of 3 victorious Allied states -- Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union -- convened at Potsdam "to decide the future of a defeated Germany." Their conference (right) concluded on August 2 with issuance at this city southwest of Berlin of the Potsdam Declaration. It contained not only provisions for the division of Germany into 4 occupied zones, but also a warning, issued on July 26, which warned Japan that if it did not surrender the Allies would resort to

'[t]he full application of our military power, backed by our resolve,' which 'mean[t] the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.'

No surrender ensued, and atomic bombs were dropped on Japan on August 6 and 9. (photo credit)

(Prior July 16 posts are here and here.)

On June 25

On this day in ...
… 1950, the Korean War began with the crossing of the 38th parallel into South Korea by North Korean troops. In 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union had decided to dismantle the Japanese colonial system on the peninsula by dividing it into 2 occupation zones, American and Soviet. It is said that U.S. intelligence judged that the north could not take over the south without Soviet assistance and that the Soviets would not provide such assistance. But North Korea's Kim Il-sung, who was committed to unifying the country under his rule,managed to secure assent to military action from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The war that followed would devastate Korea, lead to a large expansion of the U.S. armed forces and America’s military presence around the world, and frustrate many on both sides by ending in an armistice that left the peninsula still divided. As we have posted, this conflict remains in a state of ceasefire-without-final-peace-treaty. (credit for photo of South Korean and U.N. troops withdrawing behind the 38th parallel)
… 1954 (55 years ago today), Judge Sonia Sotomayor (left) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and, as we've posted, the nominee for appointment to the Supreme Court, was born in the Bronx, New York. (photo credit) If confirmed, she would be the Court's 111th justice, its 1st Latina and its 3d woman. At the age of 8, Sotomayor was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Her father, a factory worker with a 3d-grade education who did not speak English, died a year later. Her mother raised her and her younger brother, Juan, now a physician. Her mother, a nurse who worked 6 days a week and whom the judge has described as her biggest inspiration, stressed the value of an education, buying Encyclopædia Britannica for her children.

(Prior June 25 posts are here and here.)

On June 23

On this day in ...
… 1683, William Penn signed the “Great Treaty” with the chiefs of the Lenni Lenape tribe to guarantee the peace among them. The area of land they where sharing was given to Penn by England's King Charles II. Penn later named this land Pennsylvania. On that day, William Penn reportedly said:

'We meet on the broad pathway of good faith and good-will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. We are the same as if one man’s body was to be divided into two parts; we are of one flesh and one blood.'

Tamanend, one of the chiefs, is said to have replied:

“We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.”

The Great Treaty was not broken until the Penn’s Creek Massacre of October 16, 1755. (credit for Penn's Treaty with the Indians, by Benjamin West, 1771)
… 1889 (120 years ago today), Anna Akhmatova (right), a poet credited with a large influence on Russian poetry, was born Anna Gorenko in Odessa, Ukraine. Her most accomplished works, Requiem, which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987, and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of the Stalinist Terror, a period during which she endured artistic repression as well as tremendous personal loss. She was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965. Two years before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was chosen president of the Writers' Union. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966. (credit for 1922 portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin)

(Prior June 23 posts are here and here.)

On June 2

On this day in ...
... 1924 (85 years ago today), President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, then posed with Osage men for the photo at right, taken on the White House lawn. (credit) Until that day Native Americans had been admitted to citizenship in the United States of America only by marriage to white men, through military service, or by a few other special means; they were not considered citizens by birth, nor permitted to citizenship through naturalization. The new statute provided:

'Be it enacted by the Senate and house of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.'

... 2005, Melita Norwood died at age 93. The Londoner had led a life unnoticed until 1999, when it was discovered that she'd been a Soviet spy for more than 4 decades. Norwood (left) had joined the Communist party in 1936. (photo credit) The she started working a clerk and a secretary for a metallurgical firm that worked on Britain's nuclear program, "and was soon passing research data to the NKVD, the Soviet spy network and predecessor of the KGB." An octogenarian, widow, and great-grandmother by the time she was exposed, she said her only regret was being caught:

'I thought I’d got away with it.'

(Prior June 2 posts are here and here.)

On May 28

On this day in ...
... 1959 (50 years ago today) , 2 females became "the first living creatures to survive a space flight." Both were monkeys -- Able, a 7-pound rhesus monkey, and Baker, a 1-pound squirrel monkey (left). (photo credit) They traveled at speeds of up to 10,000 mph during a flight that sent them 300 miles into space in a Jupiter missile. It began at Florida's Cape Canaveral and and ended 15 minutes later in the Atlantic Ocean near Puerto Rico. Another female, a dog named Laika, had died during a 1957 flight launched by the Soviet Union (right). (credit for photo of Bulgarian stamp)
... 1964 (45 years ago today), at a meeting held by the Palestinian National Congress at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed. (image credit)

(Prior May 28 posts are here and here.)