On September 5

On this day in ...

... 1915 (95 years ago today), as trench warfare dragged on across Europe, about 40 delegates from 11 countries opened a 6-day meeting, known as the Zimmerwald Conference in recognition of the Swiss municipality where it was held. Among those attending this 1st First International Socialist Conference were the exiled Russians Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The meeting would end on September 11 with a manifesto that demanded an immediate end to World War I:

[W]orkers within each country should try by any means necessary to convert the current capitalist struggle into a more enlightened one: an international workers’ revolution or civil war 'between the classes' that would spread throughout Europe, and eventually the world.

It further praised certain comrades, among them Rosa Luxemburg (above, near left), Clara Zetkin (far left), and Louise Saumoneau. (credit for 1911 photo)


(Prior September 5 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)