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 this day

On April 5, ...
.... 1971, Frances Phipps became the 1st woman to reach the North Pole. In 1953 she and her husband, arctic pilot Weldy Phipps, had established Atlas Aviation. The northernmost charter flight service in Canada, the company was located in Resolute Bay, in what is now the province of Nunavut.
... 1882, Natalia Sedova (left) was born. Perhaps best known as the 2d and last wife of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whom she accompanied into exile in Mexico, Sedova was an author. Among the works that she wrote was an "autobiography" of her husband. She died in 1962, having survived Trotsky and her 2 sons, all of whom died, it is believed, at the hands of political opponents.