Mussolini
Chiang Kai-shek
Lawrence of Arabia
Ho Chí Minh
Tito
Haile Selassie
Francisco Franco
Mao Tse-tung
Göring
Rudolf Hess
Nikita Khrushchev
Edgar Hoover
Saturday, February 8, 2020
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Mussolini
Chiang Kai-shek
Lawrence of Arabia
Ho Chí Minh
Tito
Haile Selassie
Francisco Franco
Mao Tse-tung
Göring
Rudolf Hess
Nikita Khrushchev
Edgar Hoover
Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945)
Benito Mussolini was an Italian politician, journalist, and leader of the National Fascist Party, ruling the country as Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943. He ruled constitutionally until 1925, when he dropped all pretense of democracy and set up a legal dictatorship. He was known as “Il Duce” translated into “the leader”. Mussolini was the founder of Italian Fascism.
In 1902, Mussolini immigrated to Switzerland, partly to avoid military service. He worked briefly as a stonemason in Geneva, Fribourg and Bern, but was unable to find a permanent job. He became active in the Italian socialist movement in Switzerland, working for a socialist paper, organizing meetings, giving speeches to workers and serving as secretary of the Italian workers' union in Lausanne. One year later he was arrested by the Bernese police because of his advocacy of a violent general strike, spent 2 weeks in jail, was deported to Italy, was set free and returned to Switzerland.
In 1904, having been arrested again in Geneva and expelled for falsifying his papers, he returned to Lausanne, where he attended the University of Lausanne's Department of Social Science. He returned to Italy to take advantage of an amnesty for desertion, for which he had been convicted in absentia. Since a condition for being pardoned was serving in the army, he joined the army. After serving for 2 years in the military he returned to teaching.
In 1909, Mussolini once again left Italy, this time to take the job as the secretary of the labor party in the Italian-speaking city of Trento, which at the time was part of Austria-Hungary. He also did office work for the local Socialist Party, and edited its newspaper “The Future of the Worker”. Returning to Italy, he spent a brief time in Milan, and then in 1910 he returned to his hometown, where he edited the weekly “The Class Struggle”. Mussolini thought of himself as an intellectual. He read a great deal of political philosophy in French and German, and translated excerpts from Nietzsche, and Kant.
In 1911, Mussolini participated in a riot, led by socialists, against the Italian war in Libya. He bitterly denounced Italy's "imperialist war", an action that earned him a 5-month jail term. One year later, he became the leading member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Prior to 1914, he was a keen supporter of the Socialist International, starting the series of meetings in Switzerland that organized the communist revolutions and insurrections that swept through Europe from 1917. Italian socialists were divided on whether to support the war or oppose it.
Mussolini was expelled from the PSI due to withdrawing his support for the party's stance on neutrality in WWI. He served in the Royal Italian Army during the war until he was wounded and discharged in 1917. Mussolini denounced the PSI, his views now centering on nationalism instead of socialism, and later founded the fascist movement. He supported the war because he believed the need for socialists to overthrow the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg monarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary who he claimed had consistently repressed socialism. He further justified his position by denouncing the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria for being reactionary powers. They pursued imperialist designs against Belgium and Serbia as well as historically against Denmark, France, and against Italians, since hundreds of thousands of Italians were under Hapsburg rule.
He claimed that the fall of Hohenzollern and Hapsburg monarchies and the repression of "reactionary" Turkey would create conditions beneficial for the working class. He also hoped that the Tzarist monarchy of Russia would be overthrown if they mobilized in support of the Entente powers of Britain and France believing that Russia entering the war would bring Russia to social revolution. He claimed that the war should be supported as a revolutionary war.
As Mussolini's support for the intervention solidified, he came into conflict with socialists who opposed the war. He attacked the opponents of the war and claimed that those proletarians who supported pacifism were out of step with the proletarians who had joined the rising interventionist vanguard that was preparing Italy for a revolutionary war. He began to criticize the Italian Socialist Party and socialism itself for having failed to recognize the national problems that had led to the outbreak of the war. He was expelled from the party due to his support of intervention and war.
After being ousted by the Italian Socialist Party for his support of Italian intervention, Mussolini made a radical transformation, ending his support for class conflict and joining in support of revolutionary nationalism transcending class lines. He formed the "Revolutionary Fasci for International Action" in 1914. “Fasci” is “League” in Italian. His nationalist support of intervention enabled him to raise funds from an armaments firm and other companies to convince socialists and revolutionaries to support the war. Further funding for Mussolini's Fascists during the war came from French sources who wanted Italian intervention on France's side.
Mussolini denounced socialism for failing to recognize that the war had made national identity and loyalty more significant than class distinction. He fully demonstrated his transformation in a speech that acknowledged the nation as an entity, a notion he had rejected prior to the war, saying:
“The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us! ... Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other”.
Mussolini continued to promote the need of revolutionary vanguard elite to lead society. He no longer advocated a proletarian vanguard, but instead a vanguard led by dynamic and revolutionary people of any social class. Though he denounced orthodox socialism and class conflict, he maintained at the time that he was a nationalist socialist and a supporter of the legacy of nationalist socialists in Italy's history. As for the Italian Socialist Party and its support of socialism, he claimed that his failure as a member of the party to revitalize and transform it to recognize the contemporary reality revealed the hopelessness of socialism as outdated and a failure.
These basic political views and principles formed the basis of Mussolini's newly formed political movement in 1914 who called themselves Fascists. At this time, the Fascists did not have an integrated set of policies and the movement was small, ineffective in its attempts to hold mass meetings, and was regularly harassed by government authorities and socialists. Antagonism between the interventionists and the Fascists, versus the anti-interventionist socialists resulted in violence between the Fascists and socialists. The opposition and attacks by the anti-interventionist revolutionary socialists against the Fascists and other interventionists were so violent that even democratic socialists who opposed the war said that the Italian Socialist Party had gone too far in a campaign of silencing the freedom of speech of supporters of the war. These early hostilities against the Fascists by the revolutionary socialists shaped Mussolini's conception of the nature of Fascism in its support of political violence to combat the violence from the opposition.
By the time Mussolini returned from service in the Allied forces of WWI fighting against Germany, very little remained of Mussolini the socialist. Indeed, he was now convinced that socialism as a doctrine had largely been a failure. In 1917 Mussolini got his start in politics with the help from the British security service MI5, to keep anti-war protesters at home and to publish pro-war propaganda. In 1918 Mussolini called for the emergence of a man "ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep" to revive the Italian nation. Much later Mussolini said he felt by 1919 that socialism as a doctrine was already dead and it continued to exist only as a grudge. An important factor in fascism gaining support in its earliest stages was that it claimed to oppose discrimination based on social class and strongly opposed all forms of class war. Fascism instead supported nationalist sentiments such as a strong unity, regardless of class, in the hopes of raising Italy up to the levels of its great Roman past.
Mussolini admired Plato's “The Republic”, which he often read for inspiration claiming that it expounded a number of ideas that fascism promoted, such as:
- rule by an elite promoting the state as the ultimate end,
- opposition to democracy,
- protecting the class system,
- promoting class collaboration,
- rejection of egalitarianism,
- promoting the militarization of a nation,
- demanding that citizens perform civic duties in the interest of the state, and
- utilizing state intervention in education to promote the development of future rulers of the state.
The "Republic” differed from fascism in that it did not promote aggressive war, but only defensive war. Also unlike fascism, it promoted very communist-like views on property. Plato was an idealist, focused on achieving justice and morality, while Mussolini and fascism were realist, focused on achieving political goals.
The idea behind Mussolini's foreign policy was that of spazio vitale (vital space), a concept in Fascism that was analogous to “Lebensraum” in German National Socialism. Though biological racism was less prominent in Fascism than in National Socialism, right from the start the “spazio vitale” concept had a strong racist undercurrent. Mussolini asserted there was a "natural law" for stronger peoples to subject and dominate "inferior" peoples such as the "barbaric" Slavic peoples of Yugoslavia. In the same way, Mussolini argued that Italy was right to follow an imperialist policy in Africa because he saw all black people as "inferior" to whites. The very fact that Italy was suffering from overpopulation was seen as proving the cultural and spiritual vitality of the Italians, who were thus justified in seeking to colonize lands that Mussolini argued - on a historical basis - belonged to Italy anyway, which was the heir to the Roman Empire.
The Fascisti formed armed squads of war veterans called black-shirts with the goal of restoring order to the streets of Italy with a strong hand. The black-shirts clashed with communists, socialists, and anarchists at parades and demonstrations. All of these factions were also involved in clashes against each other. The Italian government rarely interfered with the black-shirts' actions, owing in part to a looming threat and widespread fear of a communist revolution. The Fascisti grew rapidly. Within 2 years they transformed themselves into the National Fascist Party at a congress in Rome. In 1921 Mussolini won election to the Chamber of Deputies for the first time.
In 1922, about 30,000 Fascist black-shirts gathered in Rome to demand the resignation of the liberal Prime Minister and the appointment of a new Fascist government. King Victor Emmanuel III, refused the government request to declare martial law and handed over power to Mussolini by asking him to form a new government. Mussolini enjoyed a wide support in the military and among the industrial and agrarian elites; while the King and the conservative establishment were afraid of a possible civil war The King thought he could use Mussolini to restore law and order in the country, but failed to foresee the danger of a totalitarian evolution.
After removing all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes, Mussolini and his followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within 5 years he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. All teachers in schools and universities had to swear an oath to defend the fascist regime.
Newspaper editors were all personally chosen by Mussolini and no one who did not possess a certificate of approval from the fascist party could practice journalism. These certificates were issued in secret. Mussolini thus skillfully created the illusion of a "free press". The trade unions were also deprived of any independence and were integrated into what was called the "corporative" system. The aim, inspired by medieval guilds, was to place all Italians in various professional organizations or corporations, all under clandestine governmental control.
Large sums of money were spent on highly visible public works and on international prestige projects such as the Italian ocean liner SS Rex that was the fastest in the world, or aeronautical records such as the world's fastest seaplane the Macchi M.C.72 and the transatlantic flying boat cruise of Italo Balbo, which was greeted with much fanfare in the United States when it landed in Chicago in 1933.
Mussolini declared and recognized the independence of Vatican City. This was so much appreciated by the ecclesiastic hierarchy that Pope Pius XI acclaimed Mussolini as "the Man of Divine Direction". Mussolini received with disdain the League of Nations' economic sanctions imposed on Italy by initiative of London and Paris. In Mussolini's view, the move was a typically hypocritical action carried out by decaying imperial powers that intended to prevent the natural expansion of younger and poorer nations like Italy. In fact, although France and Britain had already colonized parts of Africa and committed atrocities in their colonies, the scramble for Africa had already finished.
The international mood was now against colonialist expansion and Italy's actions were condemned. Furthermore, Italy was criticized for its use of mustard gas and phosgene against its enemies and also for its zero tolerance approach to enemy guerrillas, authorized by Mussolini. Between 1936-1941 during operations to "pacify" Ethiopia, the Italians killed hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian civilians, and are estimated to have killed about 7% of Ethiopia's total population. The sanctions against Italy were used by Mussolini as a pretext for an alliance with Germany.
Reflecting the new pro-German foreign policy, in 1936, Mussolini agreed to form a Rome-Berlin Axis, sanctioned by a cooperation agreement with Nazi Germany and signed in Berlin. Mussolini believed that an alliance with Germany was preferable to an alignment with Britain and France as it was better to be allied with the strong instead of the weak.
In 1939, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain visited Rome, during which visit, Mussolini learned that though Britain very much wanted better relations with Italy, and was prepared to make concessions, it would not sever all ties with France for the sake of an improved Anglo-Italian relationship. With that, Mussolini grew more interested in the German offer of a military alliance, which had first been made in 1938. Racial laws were promulgated by Mussolinin in order to bring Italian Fascism ideology closer to German National Socialism.
Convinced that the war would soon be over with a German victory looking likely at that point, Mussolini decided to enter the war on the Axis side. Accordingly, Italy declared war on Britain and France in 1940. Mussolini regarded the war against Britain and France as a life-or-death struggle between opposing ideologies - Fascism and the masonic, democratic, capitalist world. He described the war as "the struggle of the fertile and young people against the sterile people moving to the sunset; it is the struggle between 2 centuries and 2 ideas".
By early 1942, Italy's military position had become untenable. The Italian home front was in bad shape as the Allied bombings were taking their toll. Factories all over Italy were brought to a virtual standstill due to a lack of raw materials, as well as coal and oil. Additionally, there was a chronic shortage of food, and what food was available was being sold at nearly confiscatory prices. Mussolini's once-ubiquitous propaganda machine lost its grip on the people. A large number of Italians turned to Vatican Radio or Radio London for more accurate news coverage. Discontent came to a head in 1943 with a wave of labor strikes in the industrial north—the first large-scale strikes since 1925. Some of the major factories in Milan and Turin stopped production to secure evacuation allowances for workers' families. The physical German presence in Italy had sharply turned public opinion against Mussolini. When the Allies invaded Sicily, the majority of the public there welcomed them as liberators.
Mussolini begged Hitler to make a separate peace with Stalin and send German troops to the west to guard against an expected Allied invasion of Italy. Mussolini feared that with the losses in Tunisia and North Africa, the next logical step would be an attack on the Italian peninsula. Within a few days of the Allied landings on Sicily, it was obvious Mussolini's army was on the brink of collapse. In 1943, soon after the start of the Allied invasion of Italy, the Grand Council of Fascism voted against Mussolini and prominent members of Mussolini's government had turned against him. He was summoned to the royal palace by King Victor Emmanuel III and told that he was being replaced. After Mussolini left the palace, he was arrested by Carabinieri on the king's orders. Mussolini was rescued from prison by German Special Forces.
In 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north, but was captured near Lake Como by Italian Communists and summarily executed with most of the members of their 15-man train, primarily ministers and officials of the Italian Social Republic. Their bodies were taken to Milan, where they were hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of the executions.
Chiang Kai-shek was a Chinese nationalist politician and a statesman. He was political and military leader who served as the leader of the Republic of China.
China emerged as one of the world's earliest civilizations in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning with the semi-legendary Xia dynasty which started in 2,000 BC. Since then, China has expanded, fractured, and re-unified numerous times.
In 1912, the Republic of China (ROC) replaced the last dynasty and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949, when it was defeated by the communist People's Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. The Communist Party established the People's Republic of China in Beijing, while the ROC government retreated to Taiwan with its present de facto capital in Taipei. Both the ROC and PRC continue to claim to be the legitimate government of all China.
Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China's economy has been one of the world's fastest-growing. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army and second-largest defense budget.
Chiang, who led the Republic of China between 1928 and 1975, was an influential member of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party, as well as a close ally of Sun Yat-sen's. Chiang took Sun's place as leader of the KMT following the Canton Coup in 1926. Having neutralized the party's left wing, Chiang then led Sun's long-postponed Northern Expedition, conquering or reaching accommodations with China's many warlords. Chiang was socially conservative, promoting traditional Chinese culture in the New Life Movement and rejecting both western democracy and Sun's nationalist democratic socialism in favor of an authoritarian government.
The New Life Movement was a government-led civic movement in 1930s to promote cultural reform and Neo-Confucian social morality and to ultimately unite China under a centralized ideology Chiang Kai-shek launched the initiative in 1934 as part of an anti-Communist campaign, and soon enlarged the campaign to target the whole nation. Chiang and his wife who played a major role in the campaign, advocated a life guided by 4 virtues - proper comportment, righteousness and justice, honesty and cleanness, and shame and the sense of right and wrong. All 4 virtues are built on “respect”. Respect others and respect yourself. The campaign proceeded with help from the Christian missionaries in China.
The Shanghai massacre of 1927 was the violent suppression of Communist Party of China organizations in Shanghai by the military forces of Chiang Kai-shek and conservative factions in the KMT. Following the incident, conservative KMT elements carried out a full-scale purge of Communists in all areas under their control, and even more violent suppression occurred in other cities. The purge led to an open split between KMT left and right wings, with Chiang Kai-shek establishing himself as the leader of the right wing.
Unable to maintain Sun's good relations with the communists, Chiang purged them in a massacre at Shanghai. At the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which later became the Chinese theater of WWII, Chiang was kidnapped and obliged to establish a Second United Front with the communists. In 1946, after the defeat of the Japanese, the American-sponsored attempt to negotiate a coalition government failed. The Chinese Civil War resumed, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong defeating the Nationalists and declaring the People's Republic of China in 1949.
After evacuating to Taiwan, Chiang's government continued to declare its intention to retake mainland China. Chiang ruled Taiwan securely as President of the Republic of China and General of the KMT until his death in 1975, just one year short of Mao's death. Once Chiang's government and army retreated to Taiwan, Chiang imposed martial law and persecuted critics in a period known as the "White Terror".
The White Terror began with the suppression of political dissidents following the anti-government uprising in Taiwan that was violently suppressed by the KMT-led Republic of China government. 10,000 Taiwanese were massacred and many more were imprisoned or just disappeared. The incident is one of the most important events in Taiwan's modern history and was a critical impetus for the Taiwan independence movement.
Following the surrender of Japan at the end of WWII, the Allied Forces handed temporary administrative control of Taiwan to the Republic of China (ROC), thus ending 50 years of Japanese colonial rule. Local inhabitants became resentful of what they saw as high-handed and frequently corrupt conduct on the part of the KMT authorities, their arbitrary seizure of private property and their economic mismanagement. The violence spread and led to indiscriminate lynching of Mainlanders. The uprising was violently put down by the military of the ROC, and the island was placed under martial law that lasted for 38 years from 1949 to 1987. This was the second longest period of martial law in the world, next to Syrian`s half-century martial law, which lasted from 1963 to 2011.
Chiang`s father and mother were members of a prosperous family of salt merchants. Chiang lost his father when he was 8. The young Chiang was inspired throughout his youth by the realization that the reputation of an honored family rested upon his shoulders. He was a mischievous child. When he was 3 years old he thrust a pair of chopsticks down his throat to see how far they would reach. They became stuck and were removed with great difficulty. Even at a young age he was interested in war, and directed mimic campaigns with a wooden sword and spear. Chiang grew up at a time in which military defeats, natural disasters, revolts, and the machinations of the empress had left the Manchu-dominated Qing Empire destabilized and in debt. Successive demands of the Western powers and Japan since the Opium War had left China in great debt.
In 1906 Chiang decided to pursue a military career. He left for Tokyo to attend a preparatory school for the Imperial Japanese Army Academy intended for Chinese students. There, he came under the influence of compatriots to support the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Qing and to set up a Han-dominated Chinese republic. Finishing his schooling, Chiang served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1909 to 1911. Chiang returned to China in 1911 after learning of the outbreak of an uprising. He served in the revolutionary forces. During Chiang's time in Shanghai, he was watched by British-administered police, who charged him with various felonies.
Chiang became a founding member of the KMT after the success of the 1911 Revolution. After the takeover of the Republican government and the failed Second Revolution in 1913, Chiang, like his KMT comrades, divided his time between exile in Japan and the havens of Shanghai where he cultivated ties with the city's underworld gangs.
In 1916, agents assassinated the leader of the Chinese Revolutionary Party in Shanghai and Chiang rose to the top. But most of the old Revolutionary Alliance comrades refused to join his exiled Chinese Revolutionary Party. One year later, Sun Yat-sen moved his base of operations to Canton (Guangzhou), and Chiang joined him in 1918. At this time Sun remained largely sidelined; and, without arms or money, was soon expelled from Canton and exiled again to Shanghai. For about 50 days, Chiang stayed with Sun, protecting and caring for him and earning his lasting trust.
Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) was a Chinese physician, writer, philosopher, calligrapher and revolutionary, the first president and founding father of the Republic of China (ROC). As the foremost pioneer and first leader of a Republican China, Sun is referred to as the "Father of the Nation" in the ROC later called Taiwan. Sun played an instrumental role in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China. He was appointed to serve as Provisional President of the ROC when it was founded in 1912. He later co-founded the Nationalist Party of China, serving as its first leader. Sun was a uniting figure in post-Imperial China, and he remains unique among 20th-century Chinese politicians for being widely revered among the people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Although Sun is considered to be one of the greatest leaders of modern China, his political life was one of constant struggle and frequent exile. After the success of the revolution, he quickly resigned from his post as President of the newly founded ROC and led successive revolutionary governments as a challenge to the warlords who controlled much of the nation. Sun's chief legacy resides in his developing of the political philosophy known as the Three Principles of the People:
- nationalism (non-ethnic, independence from imperialist domination),
- democracy, and
- the people's livelihood (free trade and modern tax reform).
Sun regained control of Canton in 1923 and undertook a reform of the KMT establishing a revolutionary government aimed at unifying China under the KMT. That same year, Sun sent Chiang to spend three months in Moscow studying the Soviet political and military system.
During his trip in Russia, Chiang met Leon Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, but quickly came to the conclusion that the Russian model of government was not suitable for China. Chiang Kai-shek returned to Canton and in 1924 was appointed by Sun to be Commandant of a military Academy. Chiang resigned from the office for one month in disagreement with Sun's extremely close cooperation with the Comintern, but returned at Sun's demand. The early years at the military academy allowed Chiang to cultivate a cadre of young officers loyal to both the KMT and himself.
Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, creating a power vacuum in the Kuomintang. The successor to Sun was forced into exile by Chiang following the Canton Coup - a purge of Communist elements of the Nationalist army in Canton undertaken by Chiang Kai-shek. The incident solidified Chiang's power turning him into the paramount leader of the country.
Chiang's expulsion of the Communists and their Soviet advisers led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Chiang carried out a purge of thousands of suspected Communists and dissidents in Shanghai, and began large-scale massacres across the country collectively known as the "White Terror". More than 12,000 people were killed in Shanghai. The killings drove most Communists from urban cities into the rural countryside, where the KMT was less powerful. In the year after over 300,000 people died across China in anti-Communist suppression campaigns, executed by the KMT.
One of the most famous quotes from Chiang was that he would rather mistakenly kill 1,000 innocent people rather than allow one Communist to escape. The White Terror in China took millions of lives, most of them in the rural areas. Having gained control of China, Chiang's party remained surrounded by "surrendered" warlords who remained relatively autonomous within their own regions. In 1928, Chiang was named director of the State Council, the equivalent to President of the country.
According to Sun Yat-sen's plans, the KMT was to rebuild China in 3 steps:
- military rule,
- political tutelage, and
- constitutional rule.
The ultimate goal of the KMT revolution was democracy, which was not considered to be feasible in China's fragmented state. Since the KMT had completed the first step of revolution through seizure of power in 1928, Chiang's rule thus began a period of what his party considered to be "political tutelage" in Sun Yat-sen's name. During this so-called Republican Era, many features of a modern, functional Chinese state emerged and developed.
The decade of 1928-1937 saw some aspects of foreign imperialism, concessions and privileges in China, moderated through diplomacy. The government acted to modernize the legal and penal systems, attempted to stabilize prices, amortize debts, reform the banking and currency systems, build railroads and highways, improve public health facilities, legislate against traffic in narcotics, and augment industrial and agricultural production. Not all of these projects were successfully completed.
Efforts were made towards improving education standards; and, in an effort to unify Chinese society, the New Life Movement was launched to encourage Confucian moral values and personal discipline. The national language was promoted as a standard tongue, and the establishment of communications facilities including radio were used to encourage a sense of Chinese nationalism in a way that was not possible when the nation lacked an effective central government.
Any successes that the Nationalists did make, however, were met with constant political and military upheavals. While much of the urban areas were now under the control of the KMT, much of the countryside remained under the influence of weakened yet undefeated warlords and Communists. Chiang often resolved issues of warlord obstinacy through military action, but such action was costly in terms of men and material.
Throughout his rule, complete eradication of the Communists remained Chiang's dream. After assembling his forces, Chiang led his armies against the newly established Chinese Soviet Republic. With help from foreign military advisers, Chiang's army finally surrounded the Chinese Red Army in 1934. The Communists, tipped off that a Nationalist offensive was imminent retreated and Mao Zedong rose from a mere military official to the most influential leader of the Communist Party of China.
Motivated by his sense of nationalism, Chiang viewed some Western ideas as foreign, and he believed that the great introduction of Western ideas and literature was not beneficial to China. He and Dr. Sun criticized intellectuals as corrupting the morals of China's youth.
The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student participants in Beijing in 1919, protesting against the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially allowing Japan to receive territories which had been surrendered by Germany. These demonstrations sparked national protests and marked the upsurge of Chinese nationalism, a shift towards political mobilization and away from cultural activities, and a move towards a populist base rather than intellectual elites.
The Northern Expedition was a military campaign launched by the National Revolutionary Army of the KMT against the norther regional government and other regional warlords in 1926 involving 300,000 soldiers from Nanjing and 700,000 soldiers from the coalition of the norther regions. The purpose of the campaign was to reunify China. It ended with the announcement that Manchuria would be accepting the authority of the Nationalist government in Nanjing. In 1929, an anti-Chiang coalition was formed to openly challenge the legitimacy of the Nanjing government.
The Central Plains War of 1930 was a civil war between the Nationalist KMT government in Nanjing led by Chiang Kai-shek and several regional military commanders that were former allies of Chiang during the Northern Expedition. It nearly bankrupted the Nationalist government and caused almost 250,000 casualties on both sides. Contrary to Communist propaganda that Chiang was pro-capitalism. He antagonized the capitalists of Shanghai, often attacking them and confiscating their capital and assets for the use of the government while he denounced and fought against communists. Chiang crushed pro-communist worker and peasant organizations and rich Shanghai capitalists at the same time. He continued Dr. Sun Yat-sen's anti-capitalist ideology, directing KMT media to openly attack capitalists and capitalism, demanding government controlled industry instead.
Chiang blocked Chinese capitalists from gaining any political power or voice within his regime. Once Chiang was done with his White Terror on pro-communist laborers, he proceeded to turn on the capitalists. Chiang viewed Japan, America, the Soviet Union, France and Britain as all being imperialists with nobody else's interests in mind but their own, seeing them as hypocritical to condemn each other for imperialism which they all practiced. He manipulated America, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union to regain lost territories for China as he viewed all the powers as imperialists trying to curtail and suppress China's power and national resurrection.
Chiang Kai-shek is attributed with 18 million deaths. In 1938, 900,000 Chinese civilians perishing in a man-made flood of the Yellow River by the Nationalist to stop Japanese advance. This was the largest act of environmental warfare in history.1.3 million Chinese civilians were starved or killed in order to fend off communist advance. 300,000 peasants and communist were killed in political repression. 2.5 million Chinese were starved to death due to grain being confiscated and sold to other peasants for the profit of Nationalist Government officials. 4.2 million Chinese perished before even entering combat due to starving to death or dying from disease.
In 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out. Chiang sent 600,000 of his best-trained and equipped soldiers to defend Shanghai. With over 200,000 Chinese casualties, Chiang lost the political cream of his trained officers. Though Chiang lost militarily, the battle dispelled Japanese claims that it could conquer China in 3 months and demonstrated to the Western powers that the Chinese would continue the fight. Nanjing fell to the Japanese resulting in the Nanking Massacre, an episode of mass murder and mass rape and looting committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing, killing 300,000 of them.
Having lost most of China's economic and industrial centers, Chiang withdrew into the hinterlands, stretching the Japanese supply lines and bogging down Japanese soldiers in the vast Chinese interior. As part of a policy of protracted resistance, Chiang authorized the use of scorched earth tactics, resulting in many civilian deaths. The dams around the city were deliberately destroyed by the Nationalist army in order to delay the Japanese advance, killing 500,000 people in the subsequent 1938 Yellow River flood.
The Nationalist army intentionally started the "fire of Changsha" as a part of the scorched earth policy. The fire destroyed much of the city, killed 20,000 civilians, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. The fire was begun without any warning to the residents of the city and the blaze contributed to a nationwide loss of support for the KMT.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the opening of the Pacific War, China became one of the Allied Powers. During and after WWII, Chiang held the support of the United States' China Lobby, which saw in them the hope of a Christian and democratic China. Chiang was even named the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the China war zone. At least half of the $100 million spent on construction of airbases was embezzled by Nationalist party officials.
Chiang played the Soviets and Americans against each other during the war. He first told the Americans that they would be welcome in talks between the Soviet Union and China then secretly told the Soviets that the Americans were unimportant and that their opinions would not be considered. Chiang also used American support and military power in China against the ambitions of the Soviet Union to dominate the talks, stopping the Soviets from taking full advantage of the situation in China with the threat of American military action against the Soviets.
After the war, 200,000 Chinese troops were sent by Chiang to northern Indochina to accept the surrender of Japanese occupying forces there, and remained in Indochina until 1946, when the French returned. The Chinese used the Vietnamese branch of the KMT to increase their influence in Indochina and to put pressure on their opponents. Chiang threatened the French with war unless the French and Ho Chi Minh's forces who were fighting against each other come to a peace agreement.
In 1946 he also forced the French to surrender all of their concessions in China and to renounce their extraterritorial privileges in exchange for the Chinese withdrawing from northern Indochina and allowing French troops to reoccupy the region. Following France's agreement to these demands, the withdrawal of Chinese troops began. Despite the withdrawal, many Vietnamese who considered themselves as Chinese continued to fight against the French government. Some of Chiang's army stayed to assist the struggle. Many even went to study in China then return to fight for the cause. Ho Chi Minh was one example.
In 1945, when Japan surrendered, Chiang's government was ill-equipped and ill-prepared to reassert its authority in formerly Japanese-occupied China, and it asked the Japanese to postpone their surrender until KMT authority could arrive to take over. American troops and weapons soon bolstered KMT forces, allowing them to reclaim cities. The countryside, however, remained largely under Communist control. For over a year after the Japanese surrender, rumors circulated throughout China that the Japanese had entered into a secret agreement with Chiang, in which the Japanese would assist the Nationalists in fighting the Communists in exchange for the protection of Japanese persons and property there.
Many top nationalist generals, including Chiang, had studied and trained in Japan before the Nationalists had returned to the mainland in the 1920s, and maintained close personal friendships with top Japanese officers. Chiang was offered control of all 1.5 million Japanese military and civilian support staff then present in China, before surrendering command of all Japanese military forces in Nanjing. The Japanese in China came to regard Chiang as a magnanimous figure to whom many Japanese owed their lives and livelihoods.
The Communists won the Civil War because they made fewer military mistakes than Chiang Kai-Shek, and because in his search for a powerful centralized government, Chiang antagonized too many interest groups in China. Furthermore, his party was weakened in the war against Japan. Meanwhile, the Communists told different groups, such as peasants, exactly what they wanted to hear, and cloaked themselves in the cover of Chinese Nationalism.
Following the war, the United States encouraged peace talks between Chiang and Communist leader Mao Zedong. Due to concerns about widespread and well-documented corruption in Chiang's government throughout his rule, the U.S. government limited aid to Chiang for much of the period of 1946 to 1948, in the midst of fighting against the People's Liberation Army led by Mao Zedong. Chiang's right-hand man, the secret police Chief Dai was both anti-American and anti-Communist. Dai ordered KMT agents to spy on American officers. Earlier, Dai had been involved with the Blue Shirts Society, a fascist-inspired paramilitary group within the KMT which wanted to expel Western and Japanese imperialists, crush the Communists, and eliminate feudalism. Chiang got rid of Dai by having Dai died in a plane crash.
Though Chiang had achieved status abroad as a world leader, his government deteriorated as the result of corruption and inflation. Chiang claimed that the KMT had failed, not because of external enemies but because of rot from within. The war had severely weakened the Nationalists, while the Communists were strengthened by their popular land-reform policies, and by a rural population that supported and trusted them. The Nationalists initially had superiority in arms and men, but their lack of popularity, infiltration by Communist agents, low morale, and disorganization soon allowed the Communists to gain the upper hand in the civil war.
In 1947, a new Constitution was written and Chiang was elected by the National Assembly as the first term President of the ROC. This marked the beginning of what was termed the "democratic constitutional government" period by the KMT political orthodoxy, but the Communists refused to recognize the new Constitution, and its government, as legitimate. Chiang resigned as President in 1949, as KMT forces suffered terrible losses and defections to the Communists. After Chiang's resignation the vice-president Li became China's acting president.
Shortly after Chiang's resignation the Communists halted their advances and attempted to negotiate the virtual surrender of the ROC. Li attempted to negotiate milder terms that would have ended the civil war, but without success. When it became clear that Li was unlikely to accept Mao's terms, the Communists issued an ultimatum, warning that they would resume their attacks if Li did not agree within 5 days. Li refused.
Li's attempts to carry out his policies faced varying degrees of opposition from Chiang's supporters, and were generally unsuccessful. Chiang especially antagonized Li by taking possession of and moving to Taiwan. He took with him US$200 million of gold and US dollars belonging to the central government that Li desperately needed to cover the government's soaring expenses. When the Communists captured the Nationalist capital of Nanjing, Li refused to accompany the central government as it fled.
Conflict between Chiang and Li persisted. Although he had agreed to do so as a prerequisite of Li's return, Chiang refused to surrender more than a fraction of the wealth that he had sent to Taiwan. Without being backed by gold or foreign currency, the money issued by Li quickly declined in value until it became virtually worthless.
Although he did not hold a formal executive position in the government, Chiang continued to issue orders to the army, and many officers continued to obey Chiang rather than Li. The inability of Li to coordinate KMT military forces led him to put into effect a plan of defense that he had contemplated in 1948. Instead of attempting to defend all of southern China, Li ordered what remained of the Nationalist armies to withdraw, hoping that he could concentrate all available defenses on a smaller, and more easily defensible, area. The object of Li's strategy was to maintain a foothold on the Chinese mainland in the hope that the United States would eventually be compelled to enter the war in China on the Nationalist side.
Chiang opposed Li's plan of defense because it would have placed most of the troops still loyal to Chiang under the control of Li and Chiang's other opponents in the central government. To overcome Chiang's intransigence Li began ousting Chiang's supporters within the central government. Because of the rivalry between Chiang and Li, Chiang refused to allow Nationalist troops loyal to him to aid in the defense of Canton, with the result that Communist forces occupied Canton in 1949.
Communist troops laid siege to the last KMT-controlled city in mainland China, where Chiang and his son directed the defense. Chiang Kai-shek, father and son, sang the ROC's national anthem while going to the airfield to be evacuated to Taiwan never to return to the mainland.
Chiang did not re-assume the presidency until 1950. In 1952, Chiang initiated a successful impeachment procedure against Li who was the vice-president in the National Assembly. Li was relieved of his duties in 1954. Chiang moved the government to Taipei, Taiwan, where he resumed his duties as President of the ROC in 1950. Chiang was reelected by the National Assembly to be the President in 1954, and again in 1960, 1966, and 1972. He continued to claim sovereignty over all of China, including the territories held by his government as well as territory the latter ceded to foreign governments.
In the context of the Cold War, most of the Western world recognized this position and the ROC represented China in the UN and other international organizations until the 1970s. During his presidency in Taiwan, Chiang continued making preparations in order to take back mainland China. He developed the ROC army in order to prepare for an invasion of the mainland, and to defend Taiwan in case of an attack by the Communist forces. Despite the democratic constitution, the government under Chiang was a one-party state, consisting almost completely of mainlanders.
The goal of retaking mainland China allowed the KMT to maintain a monopoly on power and the prohibition of opposition parties. The government's official line for these martial law provisions stemmed from the claim that emergency provisions were necessary, since the Communists and KMT were still in a state of war. Seeking to promote Chinese nationalism, Chiang's government actively ignored and suppressed local cultural expression, even forbidding the use of local languages in mass media broadcasts.
Under Chiang, the government recognized limited civil and economic freedoms, property rights personal and intellectual and other liberties. Despite these restrictions, free debate within the confines of the legislature was permitted. Under the pretext that new elections could not be held in Communist-occupied constituencies, the National Assembly members held their posts indefinitely. He was reelected by the National Assembly as president 4 times, in 1954, 1960, 1966, and 1972.
Believing that corruption and a lack of morals were key reasons that the KMT lost mainland China to the Communists, Chiang attempted to purge corruption by dismissing members of the KMT accused of graft. Some major figures in the previous mainland Chinese government fled to the United States. Though politically authoritarian and, to some extent, dominated by government-owned industries, Chiang's new Taiwanese state also encouraged economic development, especially in the export sector. A popular sweeping Land Reform Act, as well as American foreign aid during the 1950s, laid the foundation for Taiwan's economic success, becoming one of the Four Asian Tigers.
In 1975, 26 years after Chiang came to Taiwan, he died in Taipei at the age of 87.
Chiang's portrait hung over Tiananmen Square before Mao's portrait was set up in its place. Chiang was popular among many people and dressed in plain, simple clothes, unlike contemporary Chinese warlords who dressed extravagantly. Like Mao, Chiang is regarded as a controversial figure: supporters credit him with playing a major part in the Allied victory of WWII, detractors and critics denounce him as a dictator at the front of an authoritarian autocracy who suppressed and purged opponents and critics and arbitrarily incarcerated those he deemed as opposing to the KMT among others.
Chiang's legacy has been the target of heated debates because of the different views held about him. For some, Chiang was a national hero who led the victorious Northern Expedition against the Warlords in 1927, achieving Chinese unification, and who subsequently led China to ultimate victory against Japan in 1945. Some blamed him for not doing enough against the Japanese forces in the lead-up to, and during, the Second Sino-Japanese War, preferring to withhold his armies for the fight against the Communists, or merely waiting and hoping that the United States would get involved. Some also see him as a champion of anti-Communism, being a key figure during the formative years of the World Anti-Communist League.
During the Cold War, he was also seen as the leader who led Free China and the bulwark against a possible Communist invasion. However, Chiang presided over purges, political authoritarianism, and graft during his tenure in mainland China, and ruled throughout a period of imposed martial law. His governments were accused of being corrupt even before he even took power in 1928. He also allied with known criminals for political and financial gains. Chiang's efforts in developing Taiwan were mostly to make the island a strong base from which to one day return to mainland China, and that Chiang had little regard for the long-term prosperity and well-being of the Taiwanese people.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was a British archaeologist, military officer, diplomat, and writer. He was renowned for his liaison role during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia.
In 1910 and 1914 he worked as an archaeologist in Syria. Soon after the outbreak of war he volunteered for the British Army and was stationed in Egypt. In 1916, he was sent to Arabia on an intelligence mission and quickly became involved with the Arab Revolt, serving, along with other British officers, as a liaison to the Arab forces. Working closely with Emir Faisal, a leader of the revolt, he participated in and sometimes led military activities against the Ottoman armed forces, culminating in the capture of Damascus in 1918.
Faisal (1885-1933) became King of the Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920, and was King of Iraq from 1921-1933. He was the third son of Hussein bin Ali, who had proclaimed himself King of the Arab lands in 1916. Faisal fostered unity between Sunni and Shiite Muslims to encourage common loyalty and promote pan-Arabism in the goal of creating an Arab state that would include Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Fertile Crescent. While in power, Faisal tried to diversify his administration by including different ethnic and religious groups in offices. However, Faisal’s attempt at pan-Arab nationalism may have contributed to the isolation of certain religious groups.
After the war, Lawrence joined the Foreign Office, working with both the British government and with Faisal. In 1922, he retreated from public life and spent the years until 1935 serving as an enlisted man.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Wales out of wedlock to a family with ties to the nobility. His Anglo-Irish father Thomas Chapman had left his wife after he fell in love and had a son with a young Scotswoman who had been engaged as governess to his daughters. Despite having a happy childhood and youth, Lawrence was always something of an outsider, a bastard who could never hope to achieve the same level of social acceptance and success that those born legitimate could expect, and who was virtually unmarriageable as no girl from a respectable family would ever marry a bastard. Lawrence ran away from home in 1905 when he was 17 and served for a few weeks as a boy soldier.
In 1909, he set out alone on a 3-month walking tour of crusader castles in Ottoman Syria, during which he traveled 1,600 km on foot. A year later, he was offered the opportunity to become a practicing archaeologist in the Middle East. He learned Arabic and in 1914, the British military took him on as an archaeological smokescreen for a British military survey of the Negev Desert which was strategically important. In the event of war, any Ottoman army attacking Egypt would have to cross it. Following the outbreak of hostilities, Lawrence was posted to the intelligence staff in Cairo as his extensive travel in the area and knowledge of Arabic made him an obvious choice.
The situation during 1915 was complex. Within the Arabic-speaking Ottoman territories, there was a growing Arab-nationalist movement, including many Arabs serving in the Ottoman armed forces. They were in contact with Sharif Hussein, who was negotiating with the British, offering to lead an Arab uprising against the Ottomans. In exchange, he wanted a British guarantee of an independent Arab state including the north coast of the Red sea called Hejaz, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Such an uprising would have been very helpful to Britain in its war against the Ottomans, in particular greatly lessening the threat against the Suez Canal.
There was resistance from French diplomats, who insisted that Syria's future was as a French colony not an independent Arab state. There were also strong objections from the Government of India which, although nominally part of the British government, acted independently. Its vision was of Mesopotamia under British control serving as a granary for India.
At the Arab Bureau, Lawrence supervised the preparation of maps, produced a daily bulletin for the British generals operating in the theatre, and interviewed prisoners. He was a consistent advocate of an independent Arab Syria. The situation came to a crisis, as Sharif Hussein demanded an immediate commitment from Britain, with the threat that if this were denied, he would throw his weight behind the Ottomans. Meanwhile, unbeknown to the British officials in Cairo, the Sykes–Picot Agreement was being negotiated in London, which awarded a large proportion of Syria to France. Further, it implied that if the Arabs were to have any sort of state in Syria, they would have to conquer its 4 great cities: Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo.
The Revolt began in 1916 and after a few initial successes bogged down, with a real risk the Ottoman forces would advance along the coast of the Red Sea and recapture Mecca. Lawrence concluded that Faisal was the best candidate to lead the Arab Revolt. In 1917, on the way to Aqaba, Lawrence made a 300-mile personal journey northward. He met Arab nationalists, counseling them to avoid revolt until the arrival of Faisal's forces, and attacked a bridge to create the impression of guerrilla activity. A year later the Turks were offering a substantial reward for Lawrence's capture.
Lawrence successfully proposed a joint action with the Arab irregulars and forces against the strategically located but lightly defended city of Aqaba on the Red Sea. While Aqaba could have been captured by an attack from the sea, the narrow defiles leading inland through the mountains were strongly defended and would have been very difficult to assault. Lawrence carefully avoided informing his British superiors about the details of the planned inland attack, due to concern that it would be blocked as contrary to French interests. Aqaba fell to the Arab forces after a surprise overland attack, taking the Turkish defenses from behind.
After Aqaba, General Sir Edmund Allenby, became the new commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Lawrence became an adviser to Faisal and a person who had Allenby's confidence. At the age of 39, Lawrence was captured by the Ottoman military, heavily beaten, and sexually abused.
At the age of 46, two months after leaving military service, Lawrence was fatally injured in an accident on his motorcycle close to his cottage.
Ho Chí Minh was a Vietnamese Communist revolutionary leader. Ho was also Prime Minister (1945-55) and President (1945-69) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). He was a key figure in the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, as well as the People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. He led the independence movement from 1941 onward, establishing the Communist-ruled Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and defeating the French in 1954. He officially stepped down from power in 1965 due to health problems. Ho was also a writer, journalist, poet and polyglot.
The northern part of Vietnam was part of Imperial China for over a millennium, from 111BC-939AD. An independent Vietnamese state was formed in 939AD, following a Vietnamese victory. Vietnamese imperial dynasties flourished as the nation expanded geographically and politically into Southeast Asia, until the Indochina Peninsula was colonized by the French in the mid-19th century. Following a Japanese occupation in the 1940s, the Vietnamese fought French rule in the First Indochina War, eventually expelling the French in 1954.
Thereafter, Vietnam was divided politically into two rival states, North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam), and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam). Conflict between the two sides intensified in what is known as the Vietnam War, with heavy intervention by the United States on the side of South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. The war ended with a North Vietnamese victory in 1975.
Vietnam was then unified under a Marxist-Leninist government but remained impoverished and politically isolated. In 1986, the government initiated a series of economic and political reforms which began Vietnam's path towards integration into the world economy. By 2000, it had established diplomatic relations with all nations. Since 2000, Vietnam's economic growth rate has been among the highest in the world. Its successful economic reforms resulted in its joining the World Trade Organization in 2007. Vietnam remains one of the world's 4 remaining one-party socialist states officially espousing communism, the other 3 being China, Cuba and Laos.
As a young child, Ho studied with his father before more formal classes with a scholar. He quickly mastered Chinese writing, a prerequisite for any serious study of Confucianism, while honing his colloquial Vietnamese writing. His father was a Confucian scholar and teacher, and later an imperial magistrate in a small remote district who was demoted for abuse of power after an influential local figure died several days after having received 102 strokes of the cane as punishment for an infraction. Ho`s father was eligible to serve in the imperial bureaucracy but refused because it meant serving the French. This exposed Ho to rebellion at a young age.
Ho was involved in an anti-slavery demonstration of poor peasants in 1908. He claimed the 1908 revolt had been the moment when his revolutionary outlook emerged. He chose to leave school in order to find a chance to go abroad. Because his father had been dismissed, he no longer had any hope for a governmental scholarship and went southward to Saigon. He worked as a kitchen helper on a French steamer before beginning to travel the world by working on ships. He visited many countries from 1911 to 1917.
Following WWI, the group petitioned for recognition of the civil rights of the Vietnamese people in French Indochina to the Western powers but was ignored. Citing the principle of self-determination they requested the allied powers to end French colonial rule of Vietnam and ensure the formation of an independent government. Ho started delivering speeches on the prospects of Bolshevism in Asia and was attempting to persuade French Socialists to join Vladimir Lenin's Third Communist International.
In 1920 he began to write journal articles and short stories as well as running his Vietnamese nationalist group. 3 years later, he left Paris for Moscow where he was employed by the Comintern. 2 years after that he organized "Youth Education Classes" and occasionally gave socialist lectures to Vietnamese revolutionary young people living in Canton. These young people would become the seeds of a new revolutionary, pro-communist movement in Vietnam several years later. Chiang Kai-shek's 1927 anti-communist coup triggered a new era of exile for Ho.
He left Canton again and returned to Moscow serving as a senior agent undertaking Comintern activities in Southeast Asia. He remained in Thailand until 1929 when he moved on to India, then Shanghai. One year later in Hong Kong, he chaired a meeting with representatives from 2 Vietnamese communist parties in order to merge them into a unified organization, Communist Party of Vietnam. He was arrested one year later. To reduce French pressure for extradition, it was falsely announced in 1932 that Ho had died.
The British quietly released him in 1933. He moved to Moscow where he studied and taught. In 1938, Ho was allowed to return to China and served as an adviser to the Chinese Communist armed forces, which later forced China's government into exile on Taiwan.
In 1941, Ho returned to Vietnam to lead the Viet Minh independence movement. The Japanese occupation of Indochina that year, the first step toward invasion of the rest of Southeast Asia, created an opportunity for patriotic Vietnamese. The "men in black" were a 10,000 member guerrilla force that operated with the Viet Minh. He oversaw many successful military actions against the French and Japanese occupation of Vietnam during WWII, supported closely but clandestinely by the United States. He later fought against the French bid to reoccupy the country (1946–54). He was jailed in China by Chiang Kai-shek's local authorities before being rescued by Chinese Communists. Following his release in 1943, he returned to Vietnam.
Following the August Revolution in 1945 organized by the Viet Minh, Ho became Chairman of the Provisional Government (Premier of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and issued a Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Although he convinced the Emperor to abdicate, his government was not recognized by any country. He repeatedly petitioned American President Harry S. Truman for support for Vietnamese independence, but Truman never responded. In 1946, future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Ho became acquainted when they stayed at the same hotel in Paris. Ho offered Ben-Gurion a Jewish home-in-exile in Vietnam. Ben-Gurion declined.
In 1945, following the Emperor`s abdication, Ho read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam, under the name of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In Saigon, with violence between rival Vietnamese factions and French forces increasing, the British commander declared martial law. The Viet Minh leaders responded with a call for a general strike.
A force of 200,000 Republic of China Army troops arrived in Hanoi to accept the surrender of the Japanese occupiers in northern Indochina. Ho made a compromise with their general to dissolve the Communist Party and to hold an election which would yield a coalition government. When Chiang forced the French to give the French concessions in Shanghai back to China in exchange for withdrawing from northern Indochina, Ho had no choice but to sign an agreement with France in which Vietnam would be recognized as an autonomous state in the Indochinese Federation and the French Union. The agreement soon broke down. The purpose of the agreement, for both the French and Vietminh, was for Chiang's army to leave North Vietnam. Fighting broke out in the North soon after the Chinese left.
The Viet Minh then collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in 1945-6. The Communists eventually suppressed all non-Communist parties but failed to secure a peace deal with France. In the final days of 1946, after a year of diplomatic failure and many concessions in agreements, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam government found that war was inevitable. The bombardment by French forces at Hanoi only strengthened the belief that France had no intention of allowing an autonomous, independent state in Vietnam.
Ho, representing his government, declared war against the French, marking the beginning of the Indochina War. The Vietnam National Army, by then mostly armed with machetes and muskets immediately attacked, waging assault against French positions, smoking them out with straw bundled with chili pepper, destroying armored vehicles, holding off attackers by using roadblocks, landmines and gravel. After 2 months of fighting, the exhausted Viet Minh forces withdrew after systematically destroying any valuable infrastructure.
In 1946, when Ho traveled outside of the country, his subordinates imprisoned 2,500 non-communist nationalists and forced 6,000 others to flee. Hundreds of political opponents were jailed or exiled after a failed attempt to raise a coup against the Vietminh government. All rival political parties were hereafter banned and local governments were purged to minimize opposition later on. However, it was noted that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's first Congress had over two-third of its members come from non-Viet Minh political factions, some without election.
After fighting the French for several years, Ho decided to negotiate a truce. The French negotiators arrived at the meeting site: a mud hut with a thatched roof. Inside they found a long table with chairs and were surprised to discover in one corner of the room a silver ice bucket containing ice and a bottle of good Champagne which should have indicated that Ho expected the negotiations to succeed.
One demand by the French was the return to French custody of a number of Japanese military officers who had been helping the Vietnamese armed forces by training them in the use of weapons of Japanese origin, in order for them to stand trial for war crimes committed during WWII. Ho replied that the Japanese officers were allies and friends whom he could not betray. Then he walked out, to 7 more years of war.
In 1950, after the successful removal of the French border's blockade, Ho met with Stalin and Mao Zedong in Moscow after the Soviet Union recognized his government. They all agreed that China would be responsible for backing the Viet Minh. Mao's emissary to Moscow stated that China planned to train 60,000-70,000 Viet Minh in the near future. The road to the outside world was open for Viet Minh forces to receive additional supplies which would allow them to escalate the fight against the French regime throughout Indochina. In 1954, after the crushing defeat of French forces, France was forced to give up its fight against the Viet Minh. The Viet Minh murdered between 100,000 and 150,000 civilians during the war.
The 1954 Geneva Accords concluded between France and the Viet Minh, allowing the Viet Minh forces to regroup in the North whilst anti-communist groups settled in the South. All the parties at Geneva called for reunification elections, but could not agree on the details.
Ho's Democratic Republic of Vietnam relocated to Hanoi and became the government of North Vietnam, a communist-led one-party state. Following the Geneva Accords, there was to be a 300-day period in which people could freely move between the 2 regions of Vietnam, later known as South Vietnam and North Vietnam. More than 1 million North Vietnamese people fled to the South. It is estimated that as many as 2 million more would have left had they not been stopped by the Viet Minh. A much smaller number moved north.
Between 1953 and 1956, the North Vietnamese government instituted various agrarian reforms, including "rent reduction" and "land reform", which resulted in significant political oppression. During the land reform, 100,000 executions were carried out. Ho began urging the Politburo to send aid to the Viet Cong's uprising in South Vietnam. North Vietnam invaded Laos in 1959 and used 30,000 men to build a network of supply and reinforcement routes running through Laos that became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. It allowed the North to send manpower and materiel to the Viet Cong with much less exposure to South Vietnamese forces, achieving a considerable advantage.
In 1964, Ho sent combat troops southwest into officially neutral Laos and Cambodia. 320,000 Chinese volunteers went into North Vietnam to help build infrastructure for the country, thereby freeing a similar number to go south. By early 1965, U.S. combat troops began arriving in South Vietnam, first to protect the airbases and later to take on most of the fight, as more and more American troops were put in to replace Saigon troops who could not, or would not, get involved in the fighting. As fighting escalated, widespread aerial and artillery bombardment all over North Vietnam by the U.S. Air Force and Navy began.
In 1967, Ho and most of the Politburo of Workers Party of Vietnam met in a high-profile conference where they concluded the war had fallen into a stalemate, as the U.S. military presence forced the People's Army of Vietnam to expend the majority of their resources simply maintaining the Ho Chi Minh trail rather than in reinforcing their comrade's ranks in the South. With Ho's permission, the Viet Cong planned a massive offensive commenced in 1968, with the aim of taking much of the South by force and administering a heavy blow to the U.S. military.
The offensive was executed at great cost and with heavy casualties. The scope of the action shocked the world, which until then had been assured that the Communists were "on the ropes". The optimistic spin that the U.S. military command had sustained for years was no longer credible. The bombing of Northern Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail was halted, and U.S and Vietnamese negotiators held discussions on how the war might be ended. From then on, Ho and his government's strategy, based on the idea of avoiding conventional warfare and facing the might of the U.S. Army, which would wear them down eventually, while merely prolonging the conflict would lead to eventual acceptance of Hanoi's terms materialized.
Ho remained in Hanoi during his final years, demanding the unconditional withdrawal of all non-Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. By 1969, with negotiations still dragging on, Ho's health began to deteriorate from multiple health problems, including diabetes which prevented him from participating in further active politics. However, he insisted that his forces in the south continue fighting until all of Vietnam was reunited under his regime regardless of the length of time that it might take, believing that time was on his side.
With the outcome of the Vietnam War still in question, Ho Chí Minh died from heart failure at the age of 79.
He was not initially replaced as president, but a "collective leadership" composed of several ministers and military leaders took over, known as the Politburo. The former capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, was officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976.
The communist regime has maintained a personality cult around Ho since the 1950s in the North, and later extended it to the South, which it sees as a crucial part in their propaganda campaign about Ho and the Party's past. Ho is frequently honored in schools to schoolchildren. He is even glorified to a religious status as an "immortal saint" by the Vietnamese Communist Party.
Ho Chi Minh is considered one of the most influential leaders in the world. His thought and revolution inspired many leaders and people in Asia, Africa and Latin America during the decolonization movement on a global scale after WWII. Ho Chi Minh devoted his whole life to the national liberation of the Vietnamese people, contributing to the common struggle of peoples for peace, national independence, democracy and social progress.
Tito was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and statesman, serving in various roles for 37 years from 1943 until his death. During WWII he was the leader of the Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe. While his presidency has been criticized as authoritarian, and concerns about the repression of political opponents have been raised, many consider him a benevolent dictator. He was a popular public figure both in Yugoslavia and abroad. Viewed as a unifying symbol, his internal policies maintained the peaceful coexistence of the nations of the Yugoslav federation.
He became Chairman of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and went on to lead the WWII Yugoslav guerrilla movement, the Partisans. After the war, he was the Prime Minister, then President and later President for Life. Tito was the chief architect of the second Yugoslavia, a socialist federation that lasted from 1942 until 1992.
He was one of the founders of Cominform, the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties. It was the first official forum of the international communist movement since the dissolution of the Comintern, and confirmed the new realities after WWII, including the creation of an Eastern Bloc. The Comintern was the international communist organization that advocated world communism and intended to fight by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie.
The Comintern was founded after the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference in Switzerland which Vladimir Lenin had organized against those who refused to approve any statement explicitly endorsing socialist revolutionary action. Soon Tito became the first Comintern member to defy Soviet hegemony and the only one to manage to leave Comintern and begin with its own socialist program. Tito was a backer of independent roads to socialism referred to as "national communism".
In 1951 Tito implemented a self-management system that differentiated Yugoslavia from other socialist countries. A turn towards a model of market socialism brought economic expansion in the 1950s and 1960s and a decline during the 1970s. His internal policies included the suppression of nationalist sentiment and the promotion of the "brotherhood and unity" of the 6 Yugoslav nations.
The constituent 6 socialist republics that made up the country were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Serbia contained 2 Socialist Autonomous Provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo.
Tito ruled the country until his death in 1980. After an economic and political crisis in the 1980s and the rise of nationalism, Yugoslavia broke up along its republics' borders, leading to the Yugoslav Wars.
Tito was born in Croatia. At the age of 8, Tito entered primary school but only completed 4 years of school. After leaving school, he worked on the family farm. In 1907, his father wanted him to emigrate to the United States, but could not raise the money for the voyage. Instead when he was 15 years old he got a job in a restaurant, but soon tired of that work and approached a Czech locksmith for a 3-year apprenticeship. After completing his apprenticeship, Tito used his contacts to gain employment in Zagreb and joined the Metal Workers' Union, and participated in his first labor protest. He returned after a year and began a series of moves, first seeking work in Ljubljana then Trieste, and Zagreb, where he worked repairing bicycles and joined his first strike action on May Day. After a brief period of work in Ljubljana, he worked in a factory until it closed.
He obtained work in Czechoslovakia and discovered that the employer was trying to bring in cheaper labor to replace the local Czech workers. He and others joined successful strike action to force the employer to back down. Driven by curiosity, Tito moved and was briefly employed at the Škoda Works, then traveled to Munich in Bavaria. He also worked at the Benz car factory in Mannheim. By 1912 he had arrived in Vienna where he stayed with his older brother before getting work for Daimler. He was often asked to drive and test the cars. In 1913, when he was 21 years old, Tito was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army, for his compulsory 2 years of service. He was sent to a school for non-commissioned officers in Budapest, after which he was promoted to sergeant major, becoming the youngest sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian Army.
Soon after the outbreak of WWI in 1914, Tito was arrested for sedition for threatening to desert to the Russians and for claiming to hope that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be defeated. After his acquittal and release, his regiment served briefly on the Serbian Front before being deployed to fight against Russia. On one occasion, the scout platoon he commanded went behind the enemy lines and captured 80 Russian soldiers, bringing them back to their own lines alive. In 1915, he was seriously wounded and captured during a Russian attack and taken as a prisoner of war. Tito was transported east to a hospital established in an old monastery where he stayed in hospital for a year and learned Russian. Sent back to a POW camp, he was appointed to be in charge of all the POWs in the camp. During this time he became aware that the Red Cross parcels sent to the POWs were being stolen by camp staff. When he complained, he was beaten and put in prison.
During the February Revolution, a crowd broke into the prison and Tito ended up back in the POW camp. A Bolshevik he had met while working on the railway told Tito that his son was working in an engineering works in Petrograd, so in Tito walked out of the unguarded POW camp and hid aboard a goods train bound for that city, where he stayed with his friend's son. From Petrograd he tried to flee to Finland in order to make his way to the United States, but was stopped at the border. He was arrested along with other suspected Bolsheviks during the subsequent crackdown by the Russian Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. He was imprisoned, and when he was being returned to the POW camp he escaped again.
Local Bolsheviks told Tito that Vladimir Lenin had seized control of Petrograd and they recruited him to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1918, the anti-Bolshevik Czechoslovak Legion took control of parts of Siberia from Bolshevik forces, and Tito and his comrades went into hiding. He met a beautiful 14-year-old local girl who hid him then helped him escape. Tito again worked maintaining the local mill until 1919 when the Red Army recaptured the area from White forces.
He returned to marry the young girl who had helped him. He was 27 years old and she was 15. He and his pregnant wife returned to his homeland to find that his mother had died and his father had moved to Zagreb. He and his wife moved briefly to Zagreb where he worked as a waiter and took part in a waiter's strike. He also joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY).
After the assassination of the Minister of the Interior by a young communist in 1921, the CPY was outlawed. Due to his overt communist links, Tito was fired from his employment. He and his wife then moved and he took on work as a mill mechanic. After the arrest of the CPY leadership in 1922, Tito worked illegally for the party, distributing leaflets and agitating among factory workers. In the contest of ideas between those that wanted to pursue moderate policies and those that advocated violent revolution, Tito sided with the latter.
In 1924, Tito was elected to the CPY district committee, but after he gave a speech at a comrade's Catholic funeral he was arrested when the priest complained. Paraded through the streets in chains, he was held for 8 days and was eventually charged with creating a public disturbance. With the help of a Serbian Orthodox prosecutor who hated Catholics, Tito and his co-accused were acquitted. His brush with the law had marked him as a communist agitator, and his home was searched on an almost weekly basis. In 1925, Tito's employer died and the new mill owner gave him an ultimatum, give up his communist activities or lose his job. So, at the age of 33, Tito became a professional revolutionary.
The CPY concentrated its revolutionary efforts on factory workers in the more industrialized areas of Croatia and Slovenia, encouraging strikes and similar action. Tito moved to the Adriatic coast, where he started working at a shipyard to further the aims of the CPY. Tito built up the trade union organization in the shipyards and was elected as a union representative. A year later he led a shipyard strike, and soon after was fired. In 1926 he obtained work in a railway works near Belgrade. A year later he wrote an article complaining about the exploitation of workers in the factory, and after speaking up for a worker he was promptly sacked. Identified by the CPY as worthy of promotion, he was appointed secretary of the Zagreb branch of the Metal Workers' Union, and soon after of the whole Croatian branch of the union.
He was arrested, along with 6 other workers, and imprisoned. After being held without trial for some time, he went on a hunger strike. The trial was held in secret and he was found guilty of being a member of the CPY. Sentenced to 4 months' imprisonment, he was released from prison pending an appeal. On the orders of the CPY, Tito did not report to the court for the hearing of the appeal. Instead he went into hiding in Zagreb. Wearing dark spectacles and carrying forged papers, he posed as a middle-class technician in the engineering industry, working undercover to contact other CPY members and coordinate their infiltration of trade unions.
In 1928, Tito was one of 32 delegates to the conference of the Croatian branch of the CPY. During the conference, he condemned factions within the party. These included those that advocated a Greater Serbia agenda within Yugoslavia. Tito proposed that the executive committee of the Communist International purge the branch of factionalism, and was supported by a delegate sent from Moscow. After it was proposed that the entire central committee of the Croatian branch be dismissed, a new central committee was elected with Tito as its secretary.
The police eventually tracked him down with the help of a police informer. He was ill-treated and held for 3 months before being tried in court for his illegal communist activities. He was convicted and sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment. He was employed in the prison maintaining the electrical system. He chose as his assistant a middle-class Belgrade Jew who had been given a 20-year sentence for his communist activities. Their work allowed them to move around the prison, contacting and organizing other communist prisoners. After two and a half years in prison, Tito was accused of attempting to escape and was transferred to another prison where he was held in solitary confinement for several months. After completing the full term of his sentence, he was released, only to be arrested outside the prison gates and arrested to serve the 4-month sentence he had avoided in 1927. He was finally released from prison in 1934, but even then he was subject to orders that required him to report to the police daily. During his imprisonment, the political situation in Europe had changed significantly, with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the emergence of right-wing parties in France and neighboring Austria. He received word from the CPY to return to his revolutionary activities, and he rejoined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia.
The Croatian branch of the CPY was in disarray, a situation exacerbated by the escape of the executive committee of the CPY to Vienna in Austria, from which they were directing activities. Over the next 6 months, Tito traveled to Vienna, using false passports. As he was wanted by the police for failing to report to them, Tito adopted various pseudonyms, including "Tito". He used the latter as a pen name when he wrote articles for party journals in 1934, and it stuck. He gave no reason for choosing the name "Tito" except that it was a common nickname for men from the district where he grew up.
During this time Tito wrote articles on the duties of imprisoned communists and on trade unions. He was in Ljubljana when King Alexander was assassinated by the Croatian nationalist in 1934. In the crackdown on dissidents that followed his death, it was decided that Tito should leave Yugoslavia. He traveled to Vienna on a forged Czech passport where he joined the rest of the Politburo of the CPY. It was decided that the Austrian government was too hostile to communism, so the Politburo traveled to Czechoslovakia, and Tito accompanied them. Tito was elected as a member of the Politburo for the first time and sent to Moscow to report on the situation in Yugoslavia.
Tito was appointed to the secretariat of the Balkan section, responsible for Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. Tito lectured on trade unions to foreign communists, and attended a course on military tactics run by the Red Army, and occasionally attended the Bolshoi Theater. He toured the Soviet Union and then returned to Moscow to continue his work. He contacted his wife and son, but soon fell in love with an Austrian woman. He divorced his wife and married his new lover.
Tito worked to promote the new Comintern line on Yugoslavia, which was that it would no longer work to break up the country, and would instead defend the integrity of Yugoslavia against Nazism and Fascism. From a distance, Tito also worked to organize strikes at the shipyards and the coal mines near Ljubljana. He tried to convince the Comintern that it would be better if the party leadership was located inside Yugoslavia. A compromise was arrived at, where Tito and others would work inside the country and the Politburo would continue to work from abroad. The Politburo relocated to Paris, while Tito began to travel between Moscow, Paris and Zagreb using false passports.
In 1936 soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Tito returned to Moscow. At the time, Stalin's Great Purge was underway, and foreign communists like Tito and his Yugoslav compatriots were particularly vulnerable. Before the Purge really began to erode the ranks of the Yugoslav communists in Moscow, Tito was sent back to Yugoslavia by the Comintern in order to purge the CPY. Tito was assigned to recruit volunteers for the International Brigades being raised to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The initial attempt to send 500 volunteers to Spain by ship failed utterly, with nearly all the communist volunteers being arrested and imprisoned. Tito then traveled to Paris, where he arranged the travel of volunteers to France under the cover of attending the Paris Exhibition. Once in France, the volunteers simply crossed the Pyrenees to Spain. In all, he sent 1,192 men to fight in the war, but only 330 came from Yugoslavia, the rest being expatriates in France, Belgium, the US and Canada. Less than half were communists, and the rest were social-democrats and anti-fascists of various hues. Of the total, 671 were killed in the fighting and another 300 were wounded. Tito traveled several times between Paris and Zagreb organizing the movement of volunteers and creating a separate Communist Party of Croatia.
In 1937 he became acting General Secretary of the CPY. He later explained that he survived the Purge by staying out of Spain where the Soviet secret police NKVD was active, and also by avoiding visiting the Soviet Union as much as possible. When first appointed as general secretary, he avoided traveling to Moscow by insisting that he needed to deal with some indiscipline in the CPY in Paris. He also promoted the idea that the upper echelons of the CPY should be sharing the dangers of underground resistance within the country. He developed a new, younger leadership team that was loyal to him. On one of his visits to Moscow, he found that all Yugoslav communists were under suspicion. Nearly all the most prominent leaders of the CPY were arrested by the NKVD and executed, including over 20 members of the Central Committee. Both his ex-wife and his wife were arrested as "imperialist spies".
Several factors were at play in his survival; working class origins, lack of interest in intellectual arguments about socialism, attractive personality and capacity for making influential friends. Tito was well aware of the realities in the Soviet Union, later stating that he witnessed a great many injustices, but was too heavily invested in communism and too loyal to the Soviet Union to step back at this point. Tito's appointment as General Secretary of the CPY was formally ratified by the Comintern in 1939.
In 1941, German forces, with Hungarian and Italian assistance, launched an invasion of Yugoslavia. Croatia proclaimed independence and Tito responded by forming a Military Committee within the CPY. Attacked from all sides, the armed forces of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia quickly crumbled. After King Peter II and other members of the government fled the country, the remaining representatives of the government and military met with the German officials in Belgrade. They quickly agreed to end military resistance. Tito issued a pamphlet calling on the people to unite in a battle against the occupation. The CPY appointed Tito Commander in Chief of all project national liberation military forces.
Tito ordered his forces to assist escaping Jews. More than 2,000 Jews fought directly for him. Despite conflicts with the rival monarchic movement, Tito's Partisans succeeded in liberating some of the territories and organizing People's Committees to act as civilian governments. With the growing possibility of an Allied invasion in the Balkans, the Nazi led Axis began to divert more resources to the destruction of the Partisans main force and its high command. This meant, among other things, a concerted German effort to capture Tito personally. After the Partisans managed to endure and avoid these intense Axis attacks in 1943, Allied leaders switched their support to Tito.
King Peter II, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in officially recognizing Tito and the Partisans. This resulted in Allied aid being parachuted behind Axis lines to assist the Partisans. In 1944 a treaty was signed in an attempt to merge Tito's government with the government in exile of King Peter II. In 1944, King Peter II called on all Yugoslavs to come together under Tito's leadership and stated that those who did not were "traitors". With their strategic right flank secured by the Allied advance, the Partisans prepared and executed a massive general offensive which succeeded in breaking through German lines and forcing a retreat beyond Yugoslav borders. After the Partisan victory and the end of hostilities in Europe, all external forces were ordered off Yugoslav territory.
In 1945, the provisional government of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was assembled in Belgrade by Tito and allowed for either a republic or monarchy. This government was headed by Tito as provisional Yugoslav Prime Minister and included representatives from the royalist government-in-exile. In accordance with the agreement between resistance leaders and the government-in-exile, post-war elections were held to determine the form of government. Tito's pro-republican People's Front, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, won the elections with an overwhelming majority.
During the period, Tito evidently enjoyed massive popular support due to being generally viewed by the populace as the liberator of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav administration in the immediate post-war period managed to unite a country that had been severely affected by ultra-nationalist upheavals and war devastation, while successfully suppressing the nationalist sentiments of the various nations in favor of tolerance, and the common Yugoslav goal. After the overwhelming electoral victory, Tito was confirmed as the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. King Peter II was formally deposed by the Yugoslav Constituent Assembly. The Assembly drafted a new republican constitution soon afterwards.
The State Security Administration was also formed as the new secret police. Yugoslav intelligence was charged with imprisoning and bringing to trial large numbers of Nazi collaborators. This included Catholic clergymen in Croatia for their involvement with the Nazis. Croatia was a Nazi puppet state created on the territory of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia in 1941. Mass murder occurred throughout 1941. After the first Croatian concentration camp was opened, a law was passed to establish a network across the country, in order to exterminate ethnic and religious minorities.
Atrocities at one of the camps were encouraged by some Franciscan friars. Many Catholic clerics participated directly or indirectly in campaigns of violence. A particularly notorious example was the Franciscan friar known as "Friar Satan" who administered one camp where over half a million inmates were killed. The Roman Catholic Archbishop in Sarajevo supported the forcible conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicism. His diocesan newspaper wrote: "There is a limit to love. The movement of liberation of the world from the Jews is a movement for the renewal of human dignity. Omniscient and omnipotent God stands behind this movement."
The Archbishop appropriated Jewish property for his own use, but was never legally charged. Another priest served as chief of the security police in Sarajevo, and he initiated many anti-Semitic actions. One priest wrote that clergy should put down the prayer book and take up the revolver. Another wrote: "to kill children at least 7 years of age was not a sin".
Prime Minister Tito met with the Archbishop of 2 days after his release from imprisonment. The Archbishop condemned alleged Partisan war crimes. The 2 could not reach an agreement on the state of the Catholic Church. The following year he was arrested again and put on trial.
The Vatican excommunicated Tito and the Yugoslav government for sentencing the Archbishop to 16 years in prison on charges of assisting terror and of supporting forced conversions of Serbs to Catholicism.
In the first post war years Tito was widely considered a communist leader very loyal to Moscow, indeed, he was often viewed as second only to Stalin in the Eastern Bloc. In fact, Stalin and Tito had an uneasy alliance from the start, with Stalin considering Tito too independent.
Unlike other new communist states in east-central Europe, Yugoslavia liberated itself from Axis domination with limited direct support from the Red Army. Tito's leading role in liberating Yugoslavia not only greatly strengthened his position in his party and among the Yugoslav people, but also caused him to be more insistent that Yugoslavia had more room to follow its own interests than other Bloc leaders who had more reasons to recognize Soviet efforts in helping them liberate their own countries from Axis control. Although Tito was formally an ally of Stalin after WWII, the Soviets had set up a spy ring in the Yugoslav party as early as 1945, giving way to an uneasy alliance.
Tito was openly supportive of the Communist side in the Greek Civil War, while Stalin kept his distance, having agreed with Churchill not to pursue Soviet interests there. In 1948, motivated by the desire to create a strong independent economy, Tito modeled his economic development plan independently from Moscow, which resulted in a diplomatic escalation followed by a bitter exchange of letters in which Tito wrote that "We study and take as an example the Soviet system," but develop it in a different form.
The Soviets rebuked Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) for failing to admit and correct its mistakes, and went on to accuse them of being too proud of their successes against the Germans, maintaining that the Red Army had saved them from destruction. In 1949 the crisis nearly escalated into an armed conflict, as Hungarian and Soviet forces were massing on the northern Yugoslav frontier. The other member countries expelled Yugoslavia, citing nationalist elements that had managed in the course of the past 5 or 6 months to reach a dominant position in the leadership of the CPY. The assumption in Moscow was that once it was known that he had lost Soviet approval, Tito would collapse.
Stalin remarked that “I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,” The expulsion effectively banished Yugoslavia from the international association of socialist states, while other socialist states of Eastern Europe subsequently underwent purges of alleged "Titoists". Stalin took the matter personally and arranged several assassination attempts on Tito, none of which succeeded. In a correspondence between the 2 leaders, Tito openly wrote:
“Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured 5 of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle. If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second.”
One significant consequence of the tension arising between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was Tito's decision to begin a large scale repression against any real or alleged opponent of his own view of Yugoslavia. This repression was not limited to known and alleged Stalinists, but included also members of the Communist Party or anyone exhibiting sympathy towards Soviet Union. This period of strong repression lasted until 1956 and was marked by significant violations of human rights. Tito sent tens of thousands of political opponents served in forced labor camps and hundreds died.
Tito's estrangement from the USSR enabled Yugoslavia to obtain US aid. Still, he did not agree to align with the West, which was a common consequence of accepting American aid at the time. The event was significant not only for Yugoslavia and Tito, but also for the global development of socialism. It was the first major split between Communist states, casting doubt on Comintern's claims for socialism to be a unified force that would eventually control the whole world. Tito became the first and the only successful socialist leader to defy Stalin's leadership. This rift with the Soviet Union brought Tito much international recognition, but also triggered a period of instability. Tito's form of communism was labeled "Titoism" by Moscow, which encouraged purges against suspected "Titoites'" throughout the Eastern bloc.
After Stalin's death in 1953, relations with the USSR were relaxed and he began to receive aid as well from the Soviet Union. In this way, Tito played East-West antagonism to his advantage. Instead of choosing sides, he was instrumental in kick-starting the Non-Aligned Movement, which would function as a 'third way' for countries interested in staying outside of the East-West divide. In 1950, the National Assembly supported a crucial bill about "self-management", a type of cooperative independent socialist experiment that introduced profit sharing and workplace democracy in previously state-run enterprises which then became the direct social ownership of the employees.
In 1953, they established that the law on self-management was the basis of the entire social order in Yugoslavia. After Stalin's death Tito rejected the USSR's invitation for a visit to discuss normalization of relations between the 2 nations. Khrushchev visited Tito in Belgrade in 1955 and apologized for wrongdoings by Stalin's administration. Tito visited the USSR in 1956, which signaled to the world that animosity between Yugoslavia and USSR was easing. However, the relationship between the USSR and Yugoslavia reached another low in the late 1960s.
The Tito-Stalin split had large ramifications for countries outside the USSR and Yugoslavia. It has been given as one of the reasons for the purge in Czechoslovakia, in which 11 high-level Communist officials were executed. Stalin put pressure on Czechoslovakia to conduct purges in order to discourage the spread of the idea of a "national path to socialism," which Tito espoused.
Under Tito's leadership, Yugoslavia became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1961, Tito co-founded the movement with Egypt's Nasser, India's Nehru, and Indonesia's Sukarno leading to strong ties with third world countries. This move did much to improve Yugoslavia's diplomatic position. Tito's foreign policy led to relationships with a variety of governments.
Tito was notable for pursuing a foreign policy of neutrality during the Cold War and for establishing close ties with developing countries. Tito's strong belief in self-determination caused early rift with Stalin and consequently, the Eastern Bloc. His public speeches often reiterated that policy of neutrality and cooperation with all countries would be natural as long as these countries did not use their influence to pressure Yugoslavia to take sides. Relations with the United States and Western European nations were generally cordial.
Yugoslavia had a liberal travel policy permitting foreigners to freely travel through the country and its citizens to travel worldwide, whereas it was limited by most Communist countries. A number of Yugoslav citizens worked throughout Western Europe. Tito met many world leaders during his rule, such as Soviet rulers Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev; Egypt's Nasser, Indian politicians Nehru and Indira Gandhi; British Prime Ministers Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher; U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; other political leaders, dignitaries and heads of state that Tito met at least once in his lifetime included Che Guevara, Castro, Arafat, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Georges Pompidou, Queen Elizabeth II, Kim Il Sung, Sukarno, Suharto, Idi Amin, Haile Selassie, Gaddafi, Erich Honecker, Ceaușescu and Kádár. Close to 100 foreign heads of state visited Tito at the island residence, along with film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Carlo Ponti, and Gina Lollobrigida.
Because of its neutrality, Yugoslavia would often be rare among Communist countries to have diplomatic relations with right-wing, anti-Communist governments. Yugoslavia was the only communist country allowed to have an embassy in Stroessner's Paraguay. One notable exception to Yugoslavia's neutral stance toward anti-communist countries was Chile under Pinochet; Yugoslavia was one of many countries which severed diplomatic relations with Chile after Allende was overthrown. Yugoslavia also provided military aid and arms supplies to staunchly anti-Communist regimes such as that of Guatemala.
In 1963, the country changed its official name to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Reforms encouraged private enterprise and greatly relaxed restrictions on religious expression. Tito subsequently went on a tour of the Americas. In Chile, 2 government ministers resigned over his visit to that country. Tito claimed that neutralism did not imply passivity but meant "not taking sides". In 1967, Yugoslavia was the first communist country to open its borders to all foreign visitors and abolish visa requirements.
In the same year Tito became active in promoting a peaceful resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict. His plan called for Arabs to recognize the state of Israel in exchange for territories Israel gained. In 1968, Tito offered Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubček to fly to Prague on 3 hours notice if Dubček needed help in facing down the Soviets. In 1969, Tito removed generals in the aftermath of the invasion of Czechoslovakia due to the unpreparedness of the Yugoslav army to respond to a similar invasion of Yugoslavia.
In 1971, Tito was re-elected as President of Yugoslavia by the Federal Assembly for the sixth time. In his speech before the Federal Assembly he introduced 20 sweeping constitutional amendments that would provide an updated framework on which the country would be based. The amendments provided for a collective presidency, a 22-member body consisting of elected representatives from 6 republics and 2 autonomous provinces. The body would have a single chairman of the presidency and chairmanship would rotate among 6 republics.
When the Federal Assembly fails to agree on legislation, the collective presidency would have the power to rule by decree. Amendments also provided for stronger cabinet with considerable power to initiate and pursue legislature independently from the Communist Party. The new amendments aimed to decentralize the country by granting greater autonomy to republics and provinces. The federal government retained authority only over foreign affairs, defense, internal security, monetary affairs, free trade within Yugoslavia, and development loans to poorer regions. Control of education, healthcare, and housing was exercised entirely by the governments of the republics and the autonomous provinces.
Tito's greatest strength, in the eyes of the western communists, had been in suppressing nationalist insurrections and maintaining unity throughout the country. It was Tito's call for unity and related methods that held together the people of Yugoslavia. This ability was put to a test several times during his reign, notably during the Croatian Spring when the government suppressed both public demonstrations and dissenting opinions within the Communist Party. In 1974, the new Constitution was passed, and the aging Tito was named president for life, a status which he would enjoy for 5 years.
As the head of a highly centralized and oppressive regime, Tito wielded tremendous power with his authoritarian rule administered through an elaborate bureaucracy which routinely suppressed human rights. The main victims of this repression during the first years were known and alleged Stalinists, but during the following years even some of the most prominent among Tito's collaborators were arrested. The repression did not exclude intellectuals and writers. Even if after the reforms of 1961 Tito's presidency had become comparatively more liberal than other communist regimes, the Communist Party continued to alternate between liberalism and repression.
Yugoslavia managed to remain independent from Soviet Union and its brand of communism was in many ways the envy of Eastern Europe, but Tito's Yugoslavia remained a tightly controlled police state. Outside the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than all of the rest of Eastern Europe combined. Tito's secret police was modeled on the Soviet KGB, its members were ever-present and often acted extra-judicially, with victims including middle-class intellectuals, liberals and democrats.
Tito's Yugoslavia was based on respect for nationality, although Tito ruthlessly purged any flowerings of nationalism that threatened the Yugoslav federation. However, the contrast between the deference given to some ethnic groups and the severe repression of others was sharp. Yugoslav law guaranteed nationalities to use their language, but for ethnic Albanians the assertion of ethnic identity was severely limited. Almost half of the political prisoners in Yugoslavia were ethnic Albanians jailed for asserting their ethnic identity.
Yugoslavia's postwar development under Tito was significant but inferior to that of any European country adopting more market-based models and just similar to the economic development showed by countries adopting similar systems to that of Yugoslavia, such as Hungary or Bulgaria. From an economic perspective, the model implemented by Tito relied on debt and was not built on a stable foundation. By 1970 debt was not anymore contracted to finance investment, but to cover current expenses. The country ran into a deep economic crisis, marked by significant unemployment and inflation.
After the constitutional changes of 1974, Tito began reducing his role in the day-to-day running of the state. Tito became increasingly ill over the course of 1979. In 1980, Tito was diagnosed with circulation problems in his legs. His left leg was amputated soon afterward due to arterial blockages.
He died of gangrene when he was 88.
Tito sought to improve life. Unlike others who rose to power on the communist wave after WWII, Tito did not long demand that his people suffer for a distant vision of a better life. After an initial Soviet-influenced bleak period, Tito moved toward radical improvement of life in the country. Yugoslavia gradually became a bright spot amid the general grayness of Eastern Europe. At the time of his death, speculation began about whether his successors could continue to hold Yugoslavia together. Ethnic divisions and conflict grew and eventually erupted in a series of Yugoslav wars a decade after his death.
The sign that the robustness of the Yugoslav economy was an illusion appeared immediately after Tito’s death, when the country could not repay the massive debt accumulated between 1961 and 1980. Between 1961 and 1980 external debt of Yugoslavia increased exponentially at the unsustainable pace of over 17% per year. Indeed, the actual structure of the economy had formed in such a way that the future survival of the economy relied on the exclusive condition of future enlargement of the debt.
After Tito's death, tensions between the Yugoslav republics emerged and in 1991–92 the country disintegrated into a series of wars, inter-ethnic conflict and unrest that lasted the rest of the decade, and which continue to impact many of the former Yugoslav republics.
Haile Selassie I, also known as Ras Tafari was Ethiopia's regent for 14 years, from the time he was 24, till he was 38 and then emperor for 44 years till he was 82 years old.
Some of the oldest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans has been found in Ethiopia. The oldest hominid discovered in Ethiopia is over 4 million years old from the region where modern humans first set out for the Middle East and places beyond.
The first Afroasiatic-speaking populations settled in the Horn region during the ensuing Neolithic era 17,000 years ago. Tracing its roots to the 2nd millennium BC, Ethiopia's governmental system was a monarchy for most of its history.
During the late 19th-century scramble for Africa, Ethiopia was one of the nations to retain its sovereignty and the only territory in Africa to defeat a European colonial power. In 1974, the Ethiopian monarchy under Haile Selassie was overthrown by a communist military government backed by the Soviet Union. In 1987, the communists established the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, but it was overthrown in 1991 by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.
A majority of the population adheres to Christianity whereas around a third follows Sunni Islam. A substantial population of Ethiopian Jews also resided in Ethiopia until the 1980s.
Selassie was a member of the Solomonic Dynasty, the former ruling Imperial House of the Ethiopian Empire. Its members claim patrilineal descent from King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba. His grandmother was a sister to the mother of Menelik II, the Emperor who defeated the Italians when they tried to colonize Ethiopia in 1895.
The First Italo-Ethiopian War (1895–1896), was won by Ethiopia. The war with Italy originated from a disputed treaty which, the Italians claimed, turned the country into an Italian protectorate. Italy was supported by the 2 other triple alliance members Germany and Austria. Much to their surprise, they found that Ethiopian ruler Menelik II, rather than being opposed by some of his traditional enemies, was supported by them. Ethiopia was supported by Russia with military advisers, army training, and the sale of weapons for Ethiopian forces during the war. Ethiopia was also supported diplomatically by the United Kingdom and France in order to prevent Italy from becoming a colonial competitor.
In 1893, the Italian army invaded Ethiopia from Italian Eritrea. Full-scale war broke out 2 years later with Italian troops having initial success until Ethiopian troops counter attacked Italian positions and forced its surrender. Italian defeat came when the Ethiopian army dealt the heavily outnumbered Italians a decisive blow and forced their retreat back into Eritrea. This was not the first African victory over Western colonizers, but it was the first time such an indigenous African army put a definitive stop to a colonizing nation's efforts.
In 1924, when he was 32, Tafari toured Europe and the Middle East. The Ethiopians and their rich, picturesque court dress were sensationalized in the media. The primary goal of the trip to Europe was for Ethiopia to gain access to the sea. In Paris, Tafari found out that this goal would not be realized, due to imperialistic interests. To guard against economic imperialism, Tafari required that all enterprises have at least partial local ownership.
Throughout Tafari's travels in Europe, the Levant, and Egypt, he and his entourage were greeted with enthusiasm and fascination. He was accompanied by sons of generals who contributed to the victorious war against Italy a quarter century earlier. In 1930, at the age of 38, Tafari was crowned "Emperor of Ethiopia". His coronation was attended by royals and dignitaries from all over the world.
Beginning in Jamaica in the 1930s, the Rastafari movement perceived Emperor Haile Selassie as a messianic figure to lead a future golden age of eternal peace, righteousness, and prosperity. Rastafari originated among impoverished and socially disenfranchised Afro-Jamaican communities in 1930s Jamaica. The movement developed after several Christian clergymen proclaimed that the crowning of Haile Selassie as Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930 fulfilled a Biblical prophecy. In the 1960s and 1970s it gained increased respectability within Jamaica and greater visibility abroad through the popularity of Rasta-inspired reggae musicians like Bob Marley. Haile Selassie is revered by Rastafaras as the returned messiah of the Bible, God incarnate. Many Rastas hope for the resettlement of the African slave diaspora in Ethiopia or Africa more widely, referring to this continent as the Promised Land of "Zion". Communal Rastafari meetings are typified by music, chanting, discussions, and the smoking of cannabis.
In 1931, Tafari introduced Ethiopia's first written constitution providing for a bicameral legislature. The constitution kept power in the hands of the nobility, but it did establish democratic standards among the nobility, envisaging a transition to democratic rule. The constitution limited the succession to the throne to the descendants of Haile Selassie, a point that met with the disapprobation of other dynastic princes.
Ethiopia became the target of renewed Italian imperialist designs in the 1930s. Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime was keen to avenge the military defeats Italy had suffered in Ethiopia in their failed attempt to conquer the country. Compared to the Ethiopians, the Italians had an advanced, modern military which included a large air force. The Italians would also come to employ chemical weapons extensively throughout the conflict, even targeting Red Cross field hospitals in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1939), was won by Italy. In 1935, the Italians invaded Ethiopia. Tafari`s armies were able to launch an offensive and the Italians were forced back in places and put on the defensive. A year later, following the defeat and destruction of his armies, the emperor was defeated and retreated in disarray. As the army withdrew, the Italians attacked from the air along with rebellious tribesmen on the ground, who were armed and paid by the Italians. Mussolini declared Ethiopia an Italian province and the royal family fled in exile to a residence in Jerusalem as Tafari claimed descent from the House of David. Ethiopia was consolidated with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
Tafari went to Geneva to address the League of Nations where he asserted that his people were being slaughtered by chemical weapons.. He denounce to the world that special sprayers were installed on board Italian aircraft so that they could vaporize, over vast areas of territory, a fine, death-dealing rain. Soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes, and pastures were drenched continually with this deadly rain in order to kill off systematically all living creatures. His speech made him an icon for anti-fascists around the world.
Tafari lived in exile for 5 years between 1936 and 1941 in England. The emperor's pleas for international support took root in the United States, particularly among African-American organizations. British forces coordinated military efforts to liberate Ethiopia and defeated Italy with help from Commonwealth countries and Ethiopian patriots. In 1941, he entered the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa and personally addressed the Ethiopian people, 5 years to the day since his 1936 exile.
In 1942, Tafari abolished the legal basis of slavery throughout the empire and imposed severe penalties, including death, for slave trading. After WWII, Ethiopia became a charter member of the United Nations. 6 years later, he donated a piece of land for the use of people of African descent from the West Indies. Numerous Rastafari families permanently settled there to live as a community.
In 1950, the UN General Assembly established the federation of Eritrea, the former Italian colony into Ethiopia. Eritrea was to have its own constitution, which would provide for ethnic, linguistic, and cultural balance, while Ethiopia was to manage its finances, defense, and foreign policy. In keeping with the principle of collective security, for which he was an outspoken proponent, Tafari sent a contingent to take part in the Korean War by supporting the United Nations Command.
In 1955, Tafari introduced a revised constitution which was criticized for reasserting the indisputable power of the monarch and maintaining the relative powerlessness of the peasants. He retained effective power, while extending political participation to the people by allowing the lower house of parliament to become an elected body. Party politics were not provided for.
In 1959, Tafari changed the Ethiopian church-state relationship by introducing taxation of church lands, and by restricting the legal privileges of the clergy, who had formerly been tried in their own courts for civil offenses. A year later while he was on a state visit to Brazil, his Imperial Guard forces staged an unsuccessful coup. The coup d'état was crushed by the regular army and police forces. The coup attempt lacked broad popular support, was denounced by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and was unpopular with the army, air force and police. Nonetheless, the effort to depose the emperor had support among students and the educated classes. Student populations began to empathize with the peasantry and poor, and to advocate on their behalf. The coup spurred him to accelerate reform, which was manifested in the form of land grants to military and police officials.
Tafari continued to be a staunch ally of the West, while pursuing a firm policy of decolonization in Africa, which was still largely under European colonial rule. The UN conducted a lengthy inquiry regarding the status of Eritrea, with the superpowers each vying for a stake in the state's future. Britain, the administrator at the time, suggested the partition of Eritrea between Sudan and Ethiopia, separating Christians and Muslims. The idea was instantly rejected by Eritrean political parties, as well as the UN.
A UN plebiscite voted 46 to 10 to have Eritrea be federated with Ethiopia. Eritrea would have its own parliament and administration and would be represented in what had been the Ethiopian parliament and would become the federal parliament. Tafari would have none of European attempts to draft a separate Constitution under which Eritrea would be governed, and wanted his own 1955 Constitution protecting families to apply in both Ethiopia and Eritrea. Tensions between independence-minded Eritreans and Ethiopian forces culminated and the 30-year Eritrean Struggle for Independence began in 1961. Tafari dissolved the federation, shut down Eritrea's parliament and declared Eritrea the fourteenth province of Ethiopia.
In 1964, Tafari initiated the concept of the United States of Africa, a proposition later taken up by Muammar Gaddafi. Student unrest became a regular feature of Ethiopian life in the 1960s and 1970s. Marxism took root in large segments of the Ethiopian intelligentsia, particularly among those who had studied abroad and had thus been exposed to radical and left-wing sentiments that were becoming popular in other parts of the globe. Resistance by conservative elements at the Imperial Court and Parliament, and by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, made Tafari`s land reform proposals difficult to implement, and also damaged the standing of the government, costing him much of the goodwill he had once enjoyed. This bred resentment among the peasant population. Efforts to weaken unions also hurt his image.
In 1966, Tafari visited Jamaica. Approximately 100,000 Rastafari descended on the airport in Kingston to hear and see and welcome the man who they considered to be their messiah. Cannabis was openly smoked causing a haze of ganja smoke to fill the air like a fog. Tafari told the crowd that they should not emigrate to Ethiopia until they had first liberated the people of Jamaica.
Outside of Ethiopia, Tasfari continued to enjoy enormous prestige and respect. As the longest-serving head of state in power, he was often given precedence over other leaders at state events, such as the state funerals of John F. Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle, the summits of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the 1971 celebration of the 2,500 years of the Persian Empire.
Human rights in Ethiopia under Tafari`s regime were poor with civil liberties and political rights considered not to be “free” in the last years of Tafari's rule. Common human right abuses included imprisonment and torture of political prisoners and very poor prison conditions. The Ethiopian army also carried out a number of these atrocities while fighting the Eritrean separatists. This was due to a policy of destroying Eritrean villages that supported the rebels. There were a number of mass killings of hundreds of civilians during the war in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Famine killed up to 200,000 Ethiopians between 1972 and 1974. Although the region is infamous for recurrent crop failures and continuous food shortage and starvation risk, this episode was remarkably severe. The famine and its image in the media undermined popular support of the government. The crisis was exacerbated by military mutinies and high oil prices, the latter a result of the 1973 oil crisis.
The 1973 oil crisis began when the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries proclaimed an oil embargo. The embargo was targeted at nations perceived as supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War. By the end of the embargo a year later, the price of oil had quadrupled globally. The embargo caused an oil crisis, or "shock", with many short- and long-term effects on global politics and the global economy. It was later called the "first oil shock", followed by the 1979 oil crisis, termed the "second oil shock”. The international economic crisis triggered by the oil crisis caused the costs of imported goods, gasoline, and food to skyrocket, while unemployment spiked. Tafari`s once unassailable personal popularity fell and a group of dissident army officers instigated a coup against the emperor's faltering regime.
In 1974, 4 days of serious riots in Addis Ababa against a sudden economic inflation left 5 dead. The emperor responded by announcing on national television a reduction in petrol prices and a freeze on the cost of basic commodities. This calmed the public, but the promised 33% military wage hike was not substantial enough to pacify the army, which then mutinied, beginning in Asmara and spreading throughout the empire. Tafari again went on television to agree to the army's demands for still greater pay. Despite the many concessions, discontent continued with a 4-day general strike that paralyzed the nation. Tafari was placed under house arrest. in the Grand Palace believing that he was still Emperor of Ethiopia. 60 former high officials of the imperial government were executed without trial.
A year later, Haile Selassie was reported by the government to have died of respiratory failure. His doctor, denied that complications had occurred and rejected the government version of his death.
Francisco Franco was a Spanish general who ruled over Spain as a military dictator for 31 years from 1939 until his death. As a conservative and a monarchist, he opposed the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a socialist secular republic in 1931. In the 1936 elections, the conservative right wing lost by a narrow margin and the leftist Popular Front came to power. Franco followed other generals in attempting a failed coup that precipitated the Spanish Civil War. With the death of the other generals, he quickly became his faction's only leader.
Franco gained military support from various regimes and groups, especially Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In 1939 Franco won the war which claimed 500,000 lives and he established a military dictatorship. He proclaimed himself Head of State and Government under the title El caudillo, a term similar to Il duce for Benito Mussolini and Der Führer for Adolf Hitler. Franco merged the fascist and traditionalist political parties in the rebel zone, as well as other conservative and monarchist elements and he outlawed the rest of political parties. Spain became a one-party state.
Upon his rise to power, Franco implemented policies that were responsible for the repression and deaths of 400,000 political opponents and dissenters, through the use of forced labor and executions in the concentration camps his regime operated. Despite maintaining an official policy of neutrality during WWI, he provided military support to the Axis in numerous ways. He allowed German and Italian ships to use Spanish harbors and ports. Spain imported war materials for Germany, and fought against the Soviet Union. Spain was isolated by the international community for nearly a decade after WWII.
By the 1950s, the nature of his regime changed from being openly totalitarian and using severe repression to an authoritarian system with limited pluralism. During the Cold War, Franco was one of the world's foremost anti-Communist figures. His regime was assisted by the West and it was asked to join NATO. After chronic economic depression in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he presided over the Spanish miracle, pursuing economic liberalization. He restored the monarchy making King Juan Carlos I his successor, who led the Spanish transition to democracy. After a referendum, a new constitution was adopted, which transformed Spain into a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy.
Born into a military family, Franco was to follow his father into the Navy, but as a result of the Spanish–American War the country lost much of its navy as well as most of its colonies. Not needing any more officers, the Naval Academy admitted no new entrants from 1906 to 1913. To his father's chagrin, Franco decided to try the Spanish Army. In 1907, he entered the Infantry Academy graduating in 1910 as a lieutenant. 2 years later, he obtained a commission to Morocco. Spanish efforts to occupy their new African protectorate provoked the protracted war (1909-1927) with native Moroccans. Their tactics resulted in heavy losses among Spanish military officers, and also provided an opportunity to earn promotion through merit.
In 1916, aged 23 and already a captain, he was shot by enemy machine gun fire. He was badly wounded in the abdomen, specifically the liver. He was promoted to major, making him the youngest major in the Spanish army. From 1917-1920, he served in Spain. Franco became the Spanish Foreign Legion's second-in-command and returned to Africa. In 1923, he was made commander of the Legion. He married, and 3 years later, the couple had a daughter. Promoted to colonel and later to brigadier general he became the youngest general of Europe.
With the fall of the monarchy in 1931, Franco did not take any notable stand. But the closing of the Academy provoked his first clash with the Spanish Republic. He was a firm believer in the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy in which Jews, Freemasons, Communists, and other leftists alike allegedly sought the destruction of Christian Europe, with Spain the principal target.
New elections held in 1933 resulted in a center-right majority. In opposition to this government, a revolutionary communist/anarchist movement broke out a year later. This uprising was rapidly quelled in most of the country, but gained a stronghold with the support of the miners' unions. Franco was put in command of the operations directed to suppress the insurgency. After 2 weeks of heavy fighting and a death toll estimated between 1,200 and 2,000, the rebellion was suppressed. The insurgency sharpened the antagonism between Left and Right. Franco who was seen as a left-leaning officer was prepared to use troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy.
Franco described the rebellion as a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism. Though the colonial units sent to the north by the government at Franco's recommendation consisted of the Spanish Foreign Legion, the right wing press portrayed the rebels as lackeys of a foreign Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.
Two wide coalitions formed: the Popular Front on the left ranging from Republican Union to Communists, and the Frente Nacional on the right. In 1936, the left won by a narrow margin. Growing political bitterness surfaced again. The government and its supporters, the Popular Front, had launched a campaign against the Opposition whom they accused of plotting against the Republic. According to the right-wing opposition, the real enemies of the Republic were not on the Right but on the Left; Spain was in imminent danger of falling under a "Communist dictatorship", and therefore by fighting the democratically elected Popular Front, they were merely doing their duty in defense of law and order and of the freedom and the fundamental rights of the Spanish people.
The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 and officially ended with Franco's victory in 1939, leaving 500,000 dead. The nationalist side was supported by Fascist Italy and later by Nazi Germany. They were opposed by the Soviet Union and communist, socialists and anarchists within Spain. Because Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin used the war as a testing ground for modern warfare, the Spanish Civil War, along with WWII, was part of a European Civil War lasting from 1936 to 1945 and characterized mainly as a left/right ideological conflict.
Republicans loyal to the left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, in alliance with the Anarchists and Communists, fought against the Nationalists, a Catholic, and largely aristocratic group led by General Francisco Franco. The war has often been portrayed as a struggle between democracy and fascism, particularly due to the political climate and timing surrounding it. In early 1939, the Nationalists achieved victory, and ruled Spain until Franco's death.
The coup against the government was supported by military units in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, however, rebelling units in some important cities such as Madrid, and Barcelona did not gain control, and those cities remained under the control of the government. Spain was thus left militarily and politically divided. The Nationalists and the Republican government fought for control of the country.
The Nationalist forces received munitions, soldiers, and air support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, while the Republican (Loyalist) side received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, continued to recognize the Republican government, but followed an official policy of non-intervention.
The Nationalists advanced from their strongholds in the south and west, capturing most of Spain's northern coastline in 1937. They also besieged Madrid and the area to its south and west for much of the war. After much of Catalonia was captured in 1938 and 1939, and Madrid cut off from Barcelona, the Republican military position became hopeless. Madrid and Barcelona were occupied without resistance, Franco declared victory and his regime received diplomatic recognition from all non-interventionist governments. Thousands of leftist Spaniards fled to refugee camps in southern France. Those associated with the losing Republicans were persecuted by the victorious Nationalists. With the establishment of a dictatorship led by General Franco in the aftermath of the war, all right-wing parties were fused into the structure of the Franco regime.
The war became notable for the passion and political division it inspired and for the many atrocities that occurred, on both sides. Organized purges occurred in territory captured by Franco's forces so they could consolidate their future regime. A significant number of killings also took place in areas controlled by the Republicans.
Franco executed 200 senior officers loyal to the Republic. He requested help from Benito Mussolini, who responded with an unconditional offer of arms and planes. Along with Hitler's support, Franco was able to ensure control of Spain. By 1939 only Madrid and a few other areas remained under control of the government forces. While the loyalist forces presented the war as a struggle to defend the Republic against Fascism, Franco depicted himself as the defender of "Catholic Spain" against "atheist Communism." 70,000 people were executed during the civil war. Franco's victory was followed by thousands of summary executions and imprisonments, while many were put to forced labor, building railways, digging canals, and drying out swamps.
Between 1939 and 1943, the number of victims of the "White Terror" due to executions and hunger or illness in prisons was 200,000. Leftists suffered a high death toll. The Spanish intelligentsia and atheists were also targeted for liquidation, as well as military and government figures who had remained loyal to the Madrid government during the civil war. After the Fall of France in 1940, Spain adopted a pro-Axis stance.
In 1941, Franco ordered his provincial governors to compile a list of Jews while he sided and made an alliance with the Axis powers. Franco supplied Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Nazis' Final Solution, with a list of 6,000 Jews in Spain, but he publicly stopped an outbreak of discrimination against Jews and refused to deport Jews to Germany and Spanish diplomats extended their diplomatic protection over Jews in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans. Spanish Jews in the army served Franco with the same conditions as anyone else.
In 1947 Franco proclaimed Spain a monarchy, but did not designate a monarch. Franco left the throne vacant until 1969, proclaiming himself as a de facto regent for life. The aftermath of the Civil War was socially bleak: many of those who had supported the Republic fled into exile. Spain lost thousands of doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, judges, professors, businessmen and artists. Many of those who had to stay lost their jobs or lost their rank. Sometimes those jobs were given to unskilled and even untrained personnel. This deprived the country of many of its brightest minds, and also of a very capable workforce. However, this was done to keep Spain's citizens consistent with the ideals sought by the Nationalists and Franco.
By the start of the 1950s Franco's state had become less violent, but during his entire rule, non-government trade unions and all political opponents across the political spectrum, from communist and anarchist organizations to liberal democrats and Catalan or Basque separatists, were either suppressed or tightly controlled by all means, up to and including violent police repression. Trade unions were outlawed and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party was banned while the Communist Party went underground. The Basque Nationalist Party went into exile, and in 1959 an armed group was created to wage a low-intensity war against Franco.
Franco's Spanish nationalism promoted a unitary national identity by repressing Spain's cultural diversity. Bullfighting and flamenco were promoted as national traditions while those traditions not considered "Spanish" were suppressed. His view of Spanish tradition was somewhat artificial and arbitrary: while some regional traditions were suppressed. He used language politics in an attempt to establish national homogeneity. He promoted the use of Castilian Spanish and suppressed other languages such as Catalan, Galician, and Basque. The legal usage of languages other than Castilian was forbidden. All government, notarial, legal and commercial documents were to be drawn up exclusively in Castilian and any documents written in other languages were deemed null and void. The usage of any other language was forbidden in schools, in advertising, and on road and shop signs. For unofficial use, citizens continued to speak these languages.
On the other hand, the Catholic Church was upheld as the established church of the Spanish State, and it regained many of the traditional privileges it had lost under the Republic. Civil servants had to be Catholic, and some official jobs even required a "good behavior" statement by a priest. Civil marriages which had taken place in Republican Spain were declared null and void unless they had been confirmed by the Catholic Church. Divorce was forbidden, along with contraceptives and abortion. Student revolts at universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s were violently repressed by the heavily Armed Police. Plainclothes secret police worked inside Spanish universities. In 1954, homosexuality, pedophilia and prostitution were made criminal offenses.
Francoism professed a devotion to the traditional role of a woman in society - being a loving child to her parents and brothers, being faithful to her husband, and residing with her family. Official propaganda confined the role of women to family care and motherhood. Immediately after the war most progressive laws passed by the Republic aimed at equality between the sexes were nullified. Women could not become judges, or testify in a trial. They could not become university professors. Their affairs and economic lives had to be managed by their fathers and husbands. Even in the 1970s a woman fleeing from an abusive husband could be arrested and imprisoned for "abandoning the home." Until the 1970s a woman could not have a bank account without a co-sign by her father or husband.
The Civil War ravaged the Spanish economy. Infrastructure had been damaged, workers killed, and daily business severely hampered. For more than a decade after Franco's victory, the devastated economy recovered very slowly. Franco initially pursued a policy of protectionism, cutting off almost all international trade. The policy had devastating effects, and the economy stagnated. Only black marketeers could enjoy an evident affluence. On the brink of bankruptcy, a combination of pressure from the US, the IMF and the technocrats from the Vatican's Opus Dei managed to convince the regime to adopt a free market economy. Many of the old guard in charge of the economy was replaced by "technocrata", despite some initial opposition from Franco.
From the mid-1950s there was modest acceleration in economic activity after some minor reforms and a relaxation of controls. But the growth proved too much for the economy, with shortages and inflation breaking out towards the end of the 1950s. When Franco replaced his ideological ministers with the apolitical technocrats, the regime implemented several development policies that included deep economic reforms. After a recession, growth took off from 1959, creating an economic boom that lasted until 1974, and became known as the "Spanish Miracle".
Concurrent with the absence of social reforms, and the economic power shift, a tide of mass emigration commenced to other European countries, and to a lesser extent, to South America. Emigration helped the regime in 2 ways. The country got rid of populations it would not have been able to keep in employment, and the emigrants supplied the country with much needed monetary remittances.
During the 1960s, the wealthy classes of Francoist Spain experienced further increases in wealth, particularly those who remained politically faithful, while a burgeoning middle class became visible as the "economic miracle" progressed. International firms established factories in Spain where salaries were low, company taxes very low, strikes forbidden and workers' health or state protections almost unheard of. State-owned firms like the car manufacturer SEAT, truck builder Pegaso and oil refiner INH, massively expanded production.
Furthermore, Spain was virtually a new mass market. Spain became the second-fastest growing economy in the world between 1959 and 1973, just behind Japan. By the time of Franco's death in 1975, Spain still lagged behind most of Western Europe but the gap between its per capita GDP and that of the leading Western European countries had narrowed greatly, and the country had developed a large industrialized economy.
Franco was reluctant to enact any form of administrative and legislative decentralization and kept a fully centralized government based on the model of the French centralized State. The main drawback of this kind of management was that government attention and initiatives were irregular, and often depended more on the goodwill of regional Government representatives than on regional needs. Thus inequalities in schooling, health care or transport facilities increased.
The Basque Country and Catalonia were among the regions that offered the strongest resistance to Franco in the Civil War. Franco dissolved the autonomy granted to the Basque Country and Catalonia. Franco abolished the official statute and recognition of the Basque, Galician, and Catalan languages. He returned to Castilian as the only official language of the State and education. The Franco era corresponded with the popularization of the compulsory national educational system and the development of modern mass media, both controlled by the State and in the Castilian language, and heavily reduced the number of speakers of Basque, Catalan and Galician.
At the end of WWII, Spain's fascist dealings made it an international pariah and the country was kept out of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan and NATO. In the 1950s, however, Spain's strategic location and Franco's anti-communist hostility towards the Soviet Union led the United States of America to reconsider its position towards Spain and it entered into a trade and military alliance as part of its policy of containment.
In 1969 Franco designated Prince Juan Carlos as his heir-apparent. In 1974, the aged Franco fell ill from various health problems including Parkinson's disease, and Juan Carlos took over as Acting Head of State. A year later he fell into a coma and was put on life support. Franco's family agreed to disconnect the life-support machines. He was 82 years old. For 40 years, Spaniards, and particularly children at school were told that Divine Providence had sent him to save Spain from chaos and poverty.
A highly controversial figure within Europe and abroad, Franco was a divisive leader. Supporters credit his strong anti-communist and nationalist views, economic policies, preservation of traditional Spanish practices and support of the Monarchy of Spain as positive influences over the nation. Critics disparage him as an autocratic dictator who violently suppressed opposition and dissent, banned culture seen as non-Spanish, used concentration camps and forced labor, and provided much support to the Axis Powers during WWII.
Mao was a Chinese communist revolutionary and founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he ruled as an autocrat from its establishment in 1949, until his death. His Marxist–Leninist theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism.
Born the son of a wealthy farmer, Mao adopted a Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist outlook in early life, particularly influenced by the events of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and May Fourth Movement of 1919. Mao adopted Marxism–Leninism while working at Peking University and became a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC), leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927. During the Chinese Civil War between the nationalist Guomindang party (GMD) and the CPC, Mao helped to found the Red Army, led the Jiangxi Soviet's radical land policies and ultimately became head of the CPC during the Long March. The CPC temporarily allied with the GMD under the United Front during the Second Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1945. After Japan was defeated by USA ending WWII, China's civil war resumed and in 1949 Mao's forces defeated the Nationalists who withdrew to Taiwan.
In 1949, Mao proclaimed the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), a one-party state controlled by the CPC. In the following years Mao solidified his control through land reform campaigns against landlords, and perceived enemies of the state he termed as "counter-revolutionaries". In 1957, he launched the “Great Leap Forward” campaign that aimed to rapidly transform China's economy from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. The campaign contributed to a widespread famine, whose death toll is estimated to be as high as 45 million.
In 1966, he initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a program to remove "counter-revolutionary" elements of Chinese society that lasted 10 years and which was marked by violent class struggle, widespread destruction of cultural artifacts and unprecedented elevation of Mao's personality cult. In 1972, Mao welcomed American President Richard Nixon in Beijing, signaling a policy of opening China. Mao suffered a series of heart attacks in 1976, and died aged 82.
A controversial figure, Mao is regarded as one of the most important individuals in modern world history, and is also known as a theorist, military strategist, poet and visionary. Supporters credit him with driving imperialism out of China, modernizing China and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, and increasing life expectancy as China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million during the period of his leadership.
In contrast, critics consider him a dictator comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, as well as a perpetrator of systematic human rights abuses who was responsible for an estimated 70 million deaths through starvation, forced labor and executions, ranking his tenure as the top incidence of genocide in human history.
Göring was a German political and military leader as well as one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. he was a veteran WWI fighter pilot. An early member of the Nazi Party, Göring was among those wounded in Adolf Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. While receiving treatment for his injuries, he developed an addiction to morphine which persisted until the last year of his life. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Göring was named as Minister Without Portfolio in the new government. One of his first acts as a cabinet minister was to oversee the creation of the Gestapo, which he ceded to Heinrich Himmler in 1934.
Following the establishment of the Nazi state, he amassed power and political capital to become the second most powerful man in Germany. In 1935, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the air force, a position he held until the final days of the regime. Upon being named head of the Four Year Plan in 1936, he was entrusted with the task of mobilizing all sectors of the economy for war, an assignment which brought numerous government agencies under his control and helped him become one of the wealthiest men in the country. After the Fall of France in 1940, he was bestowed the specially created rank which gave him seniority over all officers in Germany's armed forces.
By 1941, Göring was at the peak of his power and influence, and Hitler designated him as his successor and deputy in all his offices. As WWII progressed, his standing with Hitler and with the German public declined after the Luftwaffe proved incapable of preventing the Allied bombing of German cities and resupplying surrounded German forces in Stalingrad. Göring's name is closely associated with the Nazi plunder of Jewish property. He increasingly withdrew from the military and political scene to devote his attention to collecting property and artwork, much of which was taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Informed that Hitler intended to commit suicide, he sent a telegram to Hitler requesting permission to assume control of the Reich. Considering it an act of treason, Hitler removed him from all his positions, expelled him from the party, and ordered his arrest.
After the war, Göring was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials. He was sentenced to death by hanging, but committed suicide by ingesting cyanide the night before the sentence was to be carried out.
Göring`s father, Heinrich was a former cavalry officer and had been the first Governor-General of the German protectorate of Namibia. He had 5 children from a previous marriage. Göring was the fourth of 5 children by Heinrich's second wife, a Bavarian peasant. At the time that he was born, his father was serving as consul general in Haiti, and his mother had returned home briefly to give birth. She left the 6-week-old baby with a friend in Bavaria and did not see the child again for 3 years, when she and Heinrich returned to Germany.
Göring's godfather was Dr. Hermann Epenstein, a wealthy Jewish physician and businessman his father had met in Africa. Epenstein provided the Göring family, who were surviving on Heinrich's pension, first with a family home in Berlin, then in a small castle near Nuremberg. Göring's mother became Epenstein's mistress around this time, and remained so for some 15 years.
Interested in a career as a soldier from a very early age, Göring enjoyed playing with toy soldiers and dressing up in a Boer uniform his father had given him. He was sent to boarding school at age 11, where the food was poor and discipline was harsh. He sold a violin to pay for his train ticket home, and then took to his bed, feigning illness, until he was told he would not have to return. He continued to enjoy war games.
After completing the pilot's training course, he was seriously wounded in the hip in aerial combat, he took nearly a year to recover. He steadily scored air victories. In 1918, he was made commander of the famed "Flying Circus". His arrogance made him unpopular with the men of his squadron.
Like many other German veterans, he was a proponent of the belief which held that the German Army had not really lost the war, but instead was betrayed by the civilian leadership: Marxists, Jews, and especially the Republicans, who had overthrown the German monarchy. He joined the Nazi Party in 1922 after hearing a speech by Hitler. He was later appointed a Lieutenant General.
Hitler and the Nazi Party held mass meetings and rallies in Munich and elsewhere during the early 1920s, attempting to gain supporters in a bid for political power. Inspired by Benito Mussolini's March on Rome, the Nazis attempted to seize power in 1923 in a failed coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Göring, who was with Hitler heading up the march to the War Ministry, was shot in the leg. 14 Nazis and 4 policemen were killed. Many top Nazis, including Hitler, were arrested. He was smuggled to Innsbruck, where he received surgery and was given morphine for the pain. This was the beginning of his morphine addiction, which lasted until his imprisonment at Nuremberg. Meanwhile, the authorities in Munich declared Göring a wanted man. The Görings, acutely short of funds and reliant on the good will of Nazi sympathizers abroad, moved from Austria to Venice. In 1924 they visited Rome where Göring met Mussolini, who expressed an interest in meeting Hitler, who was by then in prison.
Göring had become a violent morphine addict. He was certified a dangerous drug addict, violent to the point where he had to be confined to a straitjacket, but his psychiatrist felt he was sane. The condition was caused solely by the morphine. Weaned off the drug, he left the facility briefly, but had to return for further treatment. He returned to Germany when an amnesty was declared in 1927 and resumed working in the aircraft industry. Hitler, who had written Mein Kampf while in prison, had been released in 1924.
The economy had recovered, which meant fewer opportunities for the Nazis to agitate for change. In the 1928 elections the party only obtained 12 seats out of an available 491. Göring was elected as a representative from Bavaria. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 led to a disastrous downturn in the German economy, and in the next election, the party won 107 seats. In May 1931, Hitler sent Göring on a mission to the Vatican, where he met the future Pope Pius XII. In the 1932 election, the Nazis won 230 seats to become far and away the largest party in the Reichstag. By longstanding tradition, the Nazis were thus entitled to select the President of the Reichstag, and were able to elect Göring for the post.
The Reichstag fire occurred in 1933. Göring was one of the first to arrive on the scene. A communist radical was arrested and claimed sole responsibility for the fire. He immediately called for a crackdown on communists. At the Nuremberg trials, it was testified that he admitted responsibility for starting the fire. The Nazis took advantage of the fire to advance their own political aims. The Reichstag Fire Decree, passed the next day on Hitler's urging, suspended basic rights and allowed detention without trial. Activities of the German Communist Party were suppressed, and some 4,000 communist party members were arrested. He demanded that the detainees should be shot but the head of the political police ignored the order.
When Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Göring was appointed as minister without portfolio. Himmler hoped to create a unified secret police force for all of Germany, and Göring established a Prussian police force called the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo and handed over control of the Gestapo to Himmler in 1934.
One of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which had been in place since the end of WWI, stated that Germany was not allowed to maintain an air force. After the 1926, police aircraft were permitted. Göring was appointed Air Traffic Minister and Germany began to accumulate aircraft in violation of the Treaty By 1935 the existence of the Luftwaffe was formally acknowledged, with Göring as Reich Aviation Minister.
In 1936 Hitler announced that the German rearmament programme must be sped up and named Göring to undertake this task. Göring created a new organization to administer the Plan and drew the ministries of labor and agriculture under its umbrella. He bypassed the economics ministry in his policy-making decisions. Huge expenditures were made on rearmament, in spite of growing deficits. Hitler took over as supreme commander of the armed forces and created subordinate posts to head the 3 main branches of service.
Göring became concerned with the lack of natural resources in Germany, and began pushing for Austria to be incorporated into the Reich. Hitler had always been in favor of a takeover of Austria, his native country. He met in 1938 with Austrian chancellor threatening invasion if peaceful unification was not forthcoming. The Nazi party was made legal in Austria to gain a power base, and a referendum on reunification was scheduled. German troops that had been massing on the border marched into Austria, meeting no resistance.
Göring contacted the British government with the idea that he should make an official visit to discuss Germany's intentions for Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain was in favor of a meeting, and there was talk of a pact being signed between Britain and Germany. In 1938, Göring visited Warsaw to quell rumors about the upcoming invasion of Poland. He had conversations with the Hungarian government that summer as well, discussing their potential role in an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Göring and other speakers denounced the Czechs as an inferior race that must be conquered. Chamberlain met with Hitler in a series of meetings that led to the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938 which turned over control of the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Göring threatened Czechoslovak president with the bombing of Prague and there was an agreement accepting the German occupation of the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia.
Although many in the party disliked him, before the war Göring enjoyed widespread personal popularity among the German public because of his perceived sociability, color and humor. As the Nazi leader most responsible for economic matters, he presented himself as a champion of national interests over allegedly corrupt big business and the old German elite. The Nazi press was on his side. In Britain and the United States, some viewed him as more acceptable than the other Nazis and as a possible mediator between the western democracies and Hitler.
Göring and other senior officers were concerned that Germany was not yet ready for war, but Hitler insisted on pushing ahead as soon as possible. When the invasion of Poland, the opening action of WWII, began, Hitler designated Göring as his successor as Führer of all Germany, "If anything should befall me". Big German victories followed one after the other in quick succession. With the help of the Luftwaffe, the Polish Air Force was defeated within a week.
The UK had declared war on Germany immediately after the invasion of Poland and Hitler began preparations for an invasion of Britain. As part of the plan, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had to be neutralized. Bombing raids commenced on British air installations and on cities and centers of industry. Göring hoped that a victory in the air would be enough to force peace without an invasion.
After the Fall of France, Hitler awarded Göring the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross for his successful leadership. During the 1940 Hitler promoted him to a special rank making him the top ranking soldier of all Germany until the end of the war.
Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941. Initially the Luftwaffe was at an advantage, destroying thousands of Soviet aircraft in the first month of fighting. Hitler and his top staff were sure that the campaign would be over by Christmas, and no provisions were made for reserves of men or equipment. But, by July, the Germans had only 1,000 planes remaining in operation, and their troop losses were over 213,000 men. The choice was made to concentrate the attack on only one part of the vast front. Efforts was directed at capturing Moscow.
Hitler ordered a halt to its advance to Moscow and temporarily diverted the troops north and south to aid in the encirclement of Leningrad and Kiev. The pause provided the Red Army with an opportunity to mobilize fresh reserves. Poor weather conditions, fuel shortages, a delay in building aircraft bases in Eastern Europe, and overstretched supply lines were also factors. Hitler did not give permission for even a partial retreat until mid-January 1942. By this time the losses were comparable to those of the French invasion of Russia in 1812.
Göring promised that the Luftwaffe would be able to deliver a minimum of 300 tons of supplies to the trapped men every day. On the basis of these assurances, Hitler demanded that there be no retreat; they were to fight to the last man. The remnants of the German Sixth Army, some 91,000 men out of an army of 285,000, surrendered in 1943. Only 5,000 of these captives survived the Russian prisoner of war camps to see Germany again. Meanwhile, the strength of the US and British bomber fleets had increased. Based in Britain, they began operations against German targets. The first thousand-bomber raid was staged on Cologne in 1942. Air raids continued on targets further from England after auxiliary fuel tanks were installed on US fighter aircraft. Göring refused to believe reports that American fighters had been shot down as far east as Aachen in 1943.
His reputation began to decline. From that point inwards, the Luftwaffe began to suffer casualties in aircrews it could not sufficiently replace. By targeting oil refineries and rail communications, Allied bombers crippled the German war effort by late 1944. German civilians blamed Göring for his failure to protect the homeland. As he lost Hitler's trust, he began to spend more time at his various residences. Hitler, in a lengthy diatribe against his generals, first publicly admitted that the war was lost and that he intended to remain in Berlin to the end and then commit suicide. He also stated that Göring was in a better position to negotiate a peace settlement. In 1941, a week after the start of the Soviet invasion, Hitler had issued a decree naming him his successor in the event of his death.
Göring was the second-highest-ranking Nazi official tried at Nuremberg. The prosecution leveled an indictment of 4 charges, including a charge of conspiracy; waging a war of aggression; war crimes, including the plundering and removal to Germany of works of art and other property; and crimes against humanity, including the disappearance of political and other opponents; the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners of war; and the murder and enslavement of civilians, including what was at the time estimated to be 5,700,000 Jews.
On several occasions over the course of the trial, the prosecution showed films of the concentration camps and other atrocities. Everyone present, including Göring, found the contents of the films shocking. He said that the films must have been faked. It had been impossible to oppose Hitler or disobey his orders; to do so would likely have meant death for oneself and one's family. When testifying on his own behalf, Göring emphasized his loyalty to Hitler, and claimed to know nothing about what had happened in the concentration camps, which were under Himmler's control. He gave evasive, convoluted answers to direct questions and had plausible excuses for all his actions during the war. He used the witness stand as a venue to expound at great length on his own role in the Reich, attempting to present himself as a peacemaker and diplomat before the outbreak of the war.
Göring was found guilty on all 4 counts and was sentenced to death by hanging. The judgment stated:
“There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Göring was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labor programme and the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad.”
Göring made an appeal asking to be shot as a soldier instead of hanged as a common criminal, but the court refused. Defying the sentence imposed by his captors, he committed suicide with a potassium cyanide capsule the night before he was to be hanged.
The confiscation of Jewish property gave him the opportunity to amass a personal fortune. Some properties he seized himself or acquired for a nominal price. In other cases, he collected bribes for allowing others to steal Jewish property. He was known for his extravagant tastes and garish clothing. He had various special uniforms made for the many posts he held. Goebbels and Himmler were far more antisemitic than Göring, who mainly adopted that attitude because party politics required him to do so. He required the registration of all Jewish property. Options for the disposition of the Jews and their property were discussed. Jews would be segregated into ghettos or encouraged to emigrate, and their property would be seized.
Rudolf Hess was a prominent politician in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, he served in this position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom during WWII. He was taken prisoner and eventually was convicted of crimes against peace, serving a life sentence until his suicide.
Hess enlisted as an infantryman at the outbreak of WWI. He was wounded several times over the course of the war and was awarded the Iron Cross in 1915. Shortly before the war ended, Hess enrolled to train as an aviator, but he saw no action in this role. He left the armed forces in 1918. In 1919, Hess enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied geopolitics under a proponent of the concept of Lebensraum ("living space"), which later became one of the pillars of Nazi Party ideology. Hess joined the party in 1920, and was at Hitler's side for the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, a failed Nazi attempt to seize control of the government of Bavaria. Whilst serving time in jail for this attempted coup, Hess helped Hitler write his book, Mein Kampf, which became a foundation of the political platform of the Nazi party.
After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Hess was appointed Deputy Führer and received a post in Hitler's cabinet. He was the third most powerful man in Germany, behind only Hitler and Göring. In addition to appearing on Hitler's behalf at speaking engagements and rallies, Hess signed into law much of the legislation, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped the Jews of Germany of their rights in the lead-up to the Holocaust.
Hess continued to be interested in aviation, learning to fly the more advanced aircraft that were coming into development at the start of WWII. In 1941 he undertook a solo flight to Scotland, where he hoped to arrange peace talks. Hess was immediately arrested on his arrival and was held in British custody until the end of the war, when he was returned to Germany to stand trial in the Nuremberg Trials of major war criminals in 1946. During much of the trial, he claimed to be suffering from amnesia, but later admitted this was a ruse. Hess was convicted of crimes against peace and conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes and served a life sentence. Still in custody, he died by suicide in 1987 at the age of 93. After his death, the prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
Hess, the oldest of 3 children, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, into the ethnic German family of a prosperous merchant from Bavaria. The family lived in a villa on the Egyptian coast near Alexandria, and visited Germany often from 1900, staying at their summer home. He attended a German language Protestant school in Alexandria from 1900 to 1908, when he was sent back to Germany to study at a boarding school. He demonstrated aptitudes for science and mathematics, but his father wished him to join the family business, Hess & Co., so he sent him in 1911 to study in Switzerland. After a year there, Hess took an apprenticeship at a trading company in Hamburg.
Within weeks of the outbreak of WWI, Hess enlisted. He was awarded the Iron Cross, second class, and promoted to corporal in 1915. After additional training, he was promoted to senior non-commissioned officer. Hess was promoted to platoon leader of a company serving in Romania. He was wounded and sent to a hospital in Hungary and eventually back to Germany, where he recovered in hospital closer to home at his father's request. While still convalescing, Hess had requested to enroll to train as a pilot, and received basic flight training in 1918 and advanced training in France and assigned to a Bavarian fighter squadron equipped with biplanes. He saw no action as the war ended before he had the opportunity. The family fortunes had taken a serious downturn, as their business interests in Egypt had been expropriated by the British. Hess joined an antisemitic right-wing group, and a volunteer paramilitary organization.
Bavaria witnessed frequent and often bloody conflicts between right-wing groups as they fought for control of the state during this period. Hess was a participant in street battles and led a group which distributed thousands of antisemitic pamphlets in Munich. He later said that Egypt made him a nationalist, the war made him a socialist, and Munich made him an anti-semite. In 1919, Hess enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied history and economics. His geopolitics professor was proponent of the concept of Lebensraum ("living space"), which he cited to justify the proposal that Germany should forcefully conquer additional territory in Eastern Europe. Hess later introduced this concept to Adolf Hitler, and it became one of the pillars of Nazi Party ideology. Ilse, a fellow student at the university, met Hess in when they by chance rented rooms in the same boarding house. They married in 1927 and their son was born 10 years later.
After hearing Hitler speak for the first time in 1920 at a Munich rally, Hess became completely devoted to him. They held a shared belief in the stab-in-the-back myth, the notion that Germany's loss in WWI was caused by a conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks rather than a military defeat. Hess joined the Nazi party and as the party continued to grow, holding rallies and meetings in ever larger beer halls in Munich, he focused his attention on fundraising and organizational activities. In 1921 he was injured while protecting Hitler when a bomb planted by a Marxist group exploded during a party event. Hess helped organize and recruit early membership.
Meanwhile, problems continued with the economy; hyperinflation caused many personal fortunes to be rendered worthless. When the German government failed to meet its reparations payments and French troops marched in to occupy the industrial areas along the Ruhr in 1923, widespread civil unrest was the result. Hitler decided the time was ripe to attempt to seize control of the government with a coup d'état modeled on Benito Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome. Hess was with Hitler on the night when he stormed a public meeting organized by Bavaria's de facto ruler, and announced that the national revolution had begun, declaring the formation of a new government. The next day, Hitler and several thousand supporters attempted to march to the Ministry of War in the city center. Gunfire broke out between the Nazis and the police. 14 marchers and 4 police officers were killed and Hitler was arrested.
Hess took a few of the dignitaries hostage, driving them to a house about 50km from Munich. When Hess left briefly to make a phone call the next day, the hostages convinced the driver to help them escape. Hess was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the attempted coup, which later became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler was sentenced to five years imprisonment, and the Nazi party was outlawed.
Both men were incarcerated in the same prison, where Hitler soon began work on his memoir, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), which he dictated to fellow prisoners Hess. In 1930 it was released and became a best-seller. This book, with its message of violent antisemitism, became the foundation of the political platform of the Nazi party. Hitler was released on parole and Hess was released 10 days later. The ban on the Nazi party was lifted in 1925, and the party grew to 100,000 members in 1928 and 150,000 in 1929. They received only 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1928 election, but support increased steadily up until the seizure of power in 1933.
Hitler named Hess his private secretary in 1925 and named him as personal adjutant 4 years late. Hess accompanied Hitler to speaking engagements around the country and became his friend and confidante. Hess was one of the few people who could meet with Hitler at any time without an appointment.
In 1933, Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, his first step in gaining dictatorial control of Germany. Hess was named Deputy Führer and was appointed to the cabinet, with the post of Reich Minister without Portfolio. Hess was responsible for several departments, including foreign affairs, finance, health, education and law. All legislation passed through his office for approval, except that concerning the army, the police and foreign policy, and he wrote and co-signed many of Hitler's decrees. An organizer of the annual Nuremberg Rallies, he usually gave the opening speech and introduced Hitler.
Hess also spoke over the radio and at rallies around the country, so frequently that the speeches were collected into book form in 1938. Hess acted as Hitler's delegate in negotiations with industrialists and members of the wealthier classes. Hitler instructed Hess to review all court decisions that related to persons deemed enemies of the Party. He was authorized to increase the sentences of anyone he felt got off too lightly in these cases, and was also empowered to take "merciless action" if he saw fit to do so. This often entailed sending the person to a concentration camp or simply ordering the person killed.
Hess was given the rank of Obergruppenführer in the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1934, the second-highest SS rank. The Nazi regime began to persecute Jews soon after the seizure of power. Hess's office was partly responsible for drafting Hitler's Nuremberg Laws of 1935, laws that had far-reaching implications for the Jews of Germany, banning marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans and depriving non-Aryans of their German citizenship. Hess's friend Haushofer and his family were subject to these laws, as Haushofer had married a half-Jewish woman, so Hess issued documents exempting them from this legislation.
Hess did not build a power base or develop a coterie of followers. He was motivated by his loyalty to Hitler and a desire to be useful to him. He did not seek power or prestige or take advantage of his position to accumulate personal wealth. He lived in a modest house in Munich. Although Hess had less influence than other top Nazi officials, he was popular with the masses. After the Invasion of Poland and the start of WWII in 1939, Hitler made Hess second in line to succeed him, after Göring.
Hess was obsessed with his health to the point of hypochondria, consulting many doctors and other practitioners for what he described to his captors in Britain as a long list of ailments involving the kidneys, colon, gall bladder, bowels and heart. Like Hitler, Hess was a vegetarian, and he did not smoke or drink. He brought his own food when he dined with Hitler, claiming it was biologically dynamic, but Hitler did not approve of this practice, so he discontinued taking meals with the Führer.
Hess was interested in music, enjoyed reading and loved to spend time hiking and climbing in the mountains with Ilse. He and his friend Haushofer shared an interest in astrology, and Hess also was keen on clairvoyance and the occult. Hess continued to be interested in aviation. He won an air race in 1934. He placed sixth of 29 participants in a similar race held the following year. With the outbreak of WWII, Hess asked Hitler to be allowed to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, but Hitler forbade it, and ordered him to stop flying for the duration of the war. Hess convinced him to reduce the ban to one year.
As the war progressed, Hitler's attention became focused on the conduct of the war, to the exclusion of all else. Hess, not directly engaged in either of these endeavors, became increasingly sidelined from the affairs of the nation and from Hitler's attention. Hess boldly decided to attempt to bring Britain to the negotiating table by traveling there himself to seek meetings with the British government. Hess took off in 1941 in his specially prepared aircraft It was the last of several attempts to depart on his mission; previous efforts had to be called off due to mechanical problems or poor weather. On his last successful attempt, he parachuted out of the plane. Hess considered this achievement to be the proudest moment of his life.
Before his departure from Germany, Hess addressed a letter to Hitler that detailed his intentions to open peace negotiations with the British. After reading the letter, Hitler let loose an outcry heard throughout and sent for a number of his inner circle, concerned that a putsch might be underway. Hitler described Hess's actions as one of the worst personal blows of his life, as he considered it a personal betrayal.
Hitler worried that his allies, Italy and Japan, would perceive Hess's act as an attempt by him to secretly open peace negotiations with the British. Hitler contacted Mussolini specifically to reassure him otherwise. For this reason, Hitler ordered that the German press should characterize Hess as a madman who made the decision to fly to Scotland entirely on his own, without Hitler's knowledge or authority. Some members of the government, including Göring and Propaganda Minister Goebbels, believed this only made matters worse, because if Hess truly were mentally ill, he should not have been holding an important government position.
Hitler stripped Hess of all of his party and state offices, and secretly ordered him shot on sight if he ever returned to Germany. He abolished the post of Deputy Führer, assigning Hess's former duties to Bormann who used the opportunity afforded by Hess's departure to secure significant power for himself. Meanwhile, Hitler initiated a flurry of hundreds of arrests of astrologers, faith healers and occultists. The campaign was part of a propaganda effort by Goebbels and others to denigrate Hess and to make scapegoats of occult practitioners.
Some speculated that Hitler had sent Hess to deliver a message informing Winston Churchill of the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and offering a negotiated peace or even an anti-Bolshevik partnership. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin believed that Hess's flight had been engineered by the British. Hess, who had prepared extensive notes to use during this meeting, spoke to them at length about Hitler's expansionary plans and the need for Britain to let the Nazis have free rein in Europe, in exchange for being allowed to keep its overseas possessions.
Churchill issued orders that Hess was to be treated well, though he was not allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio. 3 intelligence officers were stationed onsite and 150 soldiers were placed on guard. Hess was allowed to write to his family, take walks on the grounds and car trips into the surrounding countryside. He had access to newspapers and other reading materials. Hess continued to complain on and off of memory loss and made a second suicide attempt in 1945, when he stabbed himself with a bread knife. The wound was not serious, requiring 2 stitches. Despondent that Germany was losing the war, he took no food for the next week, only resuming eating when he was threatened with being force-fed. When Germany surrendered unconditionally, Hess facing charges as a war criminal was transported to Nuremberg for his trial.
Hess was tried with this first group of 23 defendants, all of whom were charged with 4 counts;
- conspiracy to commit crimes,
- crimes against peace,
- war crimes and
- crimes against humanity
On his arrival in Nuremberg, Hess was reluctant to give up some of his possessions, including samples of food he said had been poisoned by the British. He proposed to use these for his defense during the trial. The samples were sealed and confiscated. Hess did not acknowledge the validity of the court and felt the outcome was a foregone conclusion. He was thin when he arrived but was deemed to be in good health. Because of his previous suicide attempts, Hess was handcuffed to a guard whenever he was out of his cell.
Almost immediately after his arrival, Hess began exhibiting amnesia. Medical personnel who examined Hess reported he was not insane and was fit to stand trial and was most likely faking his amnesia to avoid the death sentence. Efforts were made to trigger his memory, including bringing in his former secretaries and showing old newsreels, but he persisted in showing no response to these stimuli. The prosecution pointed out that the timing of Hess's trip to Scotland, only 6 weeks before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, could only be viewed as an attempt by Hess to keep the British out of the war.
Hess was found guilty on 2 counts:
- crimes against peace (planning and preparing a war of aggression), and
- conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes.
He was found not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was given a life sentence.
The prison had a small library, and inmates were allowed to file special requests for additional reading material. Writing materials were limited; each inmate would be allowed 4 pieces of paper per month for letters. The prisoners were not allowed to speak to one another without permission and were expected to work in the facility, helping with cleaning and gardening chores. The inmates were taken for outdoor walks around the prison grounds for an hour each day, separated about 9m apart. Some of the rules became more relaxed as time went on.
Visits of half an hour per month were allowed, but Hess forbade his family to visit. By this time he was 32 years old and Ilse 69; they had not seen each other since his departure from Germany in 1941. Hess's health problems, both mental and physical, were ongoing during his captivity. He cried out in the night, claiming he had stomach pains. He continued to suspect that his food was being poisoned and complained of amnesia and he attempted another unsuccessful suicide in 1977.
Conditions were far more pleasant in the 1980s than in the early years; Hess was allowed to move more freely around the cell block, setting his own routine and choosing his own activities, which included television, films, reading and gardening. A lift was installed so he could more readily access the garden, and he was provided with a medical orderly from 1982 onward.
Hess died at the age of 93 in a summer house that had been set up in the prison garden as a reading room. He took an extension cord from one of the lamps, strung it over a window latch, and hanged himself. A short note to his family, thanking them for all they had done, was found in his pocket. The prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
Nikita Khrushchev was a Soviet statesman who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for 11 years from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, for 6 years from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.
Khrushchev was employee as a metal worker during his youth, and he was a political commissar during the Russian Civil War. He worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. He supported Joseph Stalin's purges, and approved thousands of arrests. In 1938, Stalin sent him to govern Ukraine, and he continued the purges there. During WWII, Khrushchev was again a commissar, serving as an intermediary between Stalin and his generals. Khrushchev was present at the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in throughout his life. After the war, he returned to Ukraine before being recalled to Moscow as one of Stalin's close advisers.
Stalin's death in 1953 triggered a power struggle, and after several years Khrushchev emerged victorious. In 1956, he denounced Stalin's purges and ushered in a less repressive era in the Soviet Union. His domestic policies, aimed at bettering the lives of ordinary citizens, were often ineffective, especially in agriculture. Hoping eventually to rely on missiles for national defense, Khrushchev ordered major cuts in conventional forces. Despite the cuts, Khrushchev's rule saw the most tense years of the Cold War, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Khrushchev's popularity was eroded by flaws in his policies. This emboldened his potential opponents, who quietly rose in strength and deposed the Premier in 1964. However, he did not suffer the deadly fate of previous losers of Soviet power struggles, and was pensioned off with an apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the countryside.
The East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th century.
In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus' ultimately disintegrated into a number of smaller states. Most of the Rus' lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion and became tributaries of the nomadic Golden Horde in the 13th century. The Grand Duchy of Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities and achieved independence from the Golden Horde.
By the 18th century, the nation had greatly expanded through conquest, annexation, and exploration to become the Russian Empire, which was the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east.
Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the largest and leading constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world's first constitutionally socialist state. The Soviet Union played a decisive role in the Allied victory in WWII, and emerged as a recognized superpower and rival to the United States during the Cold War.
The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world's first satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the world's second largest economy, largest standing military in the world and the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, 12 independent republics emerged from the USSR.
Nikita Khrushchev was born near the present Ukrainian border. His parents were poor peasants of Russian origin. Khrushchev worked as a herdsboy from an early age. He was schooled for 4 years. His teacher was a freethinker who upset the villagers by not attending church. She gave Khrushchev books which had been banned by the Imperial Government and urged Khrushchev to seek further education, but family finances did not permit this.
Upon completing an apprenticeship as a metal fitter, the teenage Khrushchev worked as a railwayman, and as a miner. He lost that job when he collected money for the families of the victims of the Lena Goldfields Massacre in 1912 where goldfield workers on strike in northeast Siberia were fired on by soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army, causing hundreds of casualties. The incident did much to stimulate revolutionary feeling in Russia. The strike had been provoked by exceptionally harsh working conditions, and when the strike committee was arrested, a large crowd marched in protest. Khrushchev was hired to mend underground equipment where his father was the union organizer. He distributed copies and organize public readings of Pravda (Truth) a broadsheet newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
When WWI broke out in 1914, Khrushchev was exempt from conscription because he was a skilled metal worker. He was employed by a workshop that serviced 10 mines, and he was involved in several strikes that demanded higher pay, better working conditions, and an end to the war. In 1914, he married the daughter of the elevator operator at the mine. After the abdication of Tzar Nicholas II in 1917, the new Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd had little influence over Ukraine.
Khrushchev was elected to the worker's council and soon became its chairman. He did not join the Bolsheviks until 1918, the year in which the Russian Civil War started between the Bolsheviks and a coalition of opponents known as the White Army. Khrushchev's delay in affiliating himself with the Bolsheviks was because he felt closer to the Mensheviks who prioritized economic progress, whereas the Bolsheviks sought political power. When the Bolshevik government concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers, the Germans occupied the region and Khrushchev was forced to flee.
He was mobilized into the Red Army as a political commissar. The post of political commissar had recently been introduced as the Bolsheviks came to rely less on worker activists and more on military recruits. Its functions included indoctrination of recruits in the tenets of Bolshevism, and promoting troop morale and battle readiness. Beginning as commissar to a construction platoon, Khrushchev rose to become commissar to a construction battalion and was sent from the front for a two-month political course. The wars had caused widespread devastation and famine and disease.
The Bolshevik movement was split by Lenin's New Economic Policy, which allowed for some measure of private enterprise and was seen as an ideological retreat by some Bolsheviks. While Khrushchev's responsibility lay in political affairs, he involved himself in the practicalities of resuming full production at the mines after the chaos of the war years. He briefly joined supporters of Leon Trotsky against those of Joseph Stalin over the question of party democracy. In 1925, Khrushchev was elected a non-voting delegate to the USSR Communist Party in Moscow. 3 years later in 1928, Khrushchev was transferred to Kiev, where he served as second-in-command of the Party organization there.
In 1934 Khrushchev became Party leader and a member of the Party's Central Committee. He attributed his rapid rise to his acquaintance with Stalin's wife who spoke well of him to her husband. While head of the Moscow city organization, Khrushchev administered the construction of the Moscow Metro, a highly expensive undertaking. He took considerable risks in the construction and spent much of his time down in the tunnels.
Khrushchev greatly admired Stalin and treasured informal meetings with him and invitations to Stalin's dacha, while Stalin felt warm affection for his young subordinate. Beginning in 1934, Stalin began a campaign of political repression known as the Great Purge, during which millions of people were executed or sent to the Gulag and Khrushchev expressed his vehement support.
“Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary, fascist dogs of the Trotskyite- gang. That word is execution.”
Khrushchev assisted in the purge of many friends and colleagues in Moscow. Of 38 top Party officials in Moscow city and province, 35 were killed and the 3 survivors were transferred to other parts of the USSR. Of the 146 Party secretaries of cities and districts outside Moscow city in the province, only 10 survived the purges. Almost everyone who worked with Khrushchev was arrested. By Party protocol, Khrushchev was required to approve these arrests, and did little or nothing to save his friends and colleagues.
Party leaders were given numerical quotas of "enemies" to be turned in and arrested. In 1937, the Politburo set a quota of 35,000 enemies to be arrested in Moscow province; 5,000 of these were to be executed. Khrushchev asked that 2,000 wealthy peasants or kulaks living in Moscow be killed in part fulfillment of the quota. 2 weeks after receiving the Politburo order, Khrushchev reported to Stalin that 41,305 "criminal and kulak elements" had been arrested and 8,500 of them executed.
Khrushchev had no reason to think himself immune from the purges, and in 1937, confessed his own 1923 flirtation with Trotskyism. Stalin took the confession in his stride, and, after initially advising him to keep it quiet, suggested that Khrushchev tell his tale to the Moscow party conference. Khrushchev did so, to applause, and was immediately reelected to his post. He was also denounced by an arrested colleague. Stalin told Khrushchev of the accusation personally, looking him in the eye and awaiting his response. Had Stalin doubted his reaction, he would have been categorized as an enemy of the people then and there. Nonetheless, Khrushchev became a candidate member of the Politburo in 1938 and a full member a year later.
Stalin appointed Khrushchev as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine, and he duly left Moscow for Kiev. Ukraine had been the site of extensive purges, with the murdered including professors whom Khrushchev greatly respected. The high ranks of the Party were not immune; the Central Committee of Ukraine was so devastated that it could not convene a quorum. After Khrushchev's arrival, the pace of arrests accelerated. All but one member of the Ukrainian Politburo Organizational Bureau and Secretariat were arrested. Almost all government officials and Red Army commanders were replaced. During the first few months after Khrushchev's arrival, almost everyone arrested received the death penalty.
"Comrades, we must unmask and relentlessly destroy all enemies of the people. But we must not allow a single honest Bolshevik to be harmed. We must conduct a struggle against slanderers.”
When Soviet troops invaded the eastern portion of Poland in 1939, Khrushchev accompanied the troops at Stalin's direction. A large number of ethnic Ukrainians lived in the invaded area. Many inhabitants initially welcomed the invasion, though they hoped that they would eventually become independent. Khrushchev's role was to ensure that the occupied areas voted for union with the USSR.
Through a combination of propaganda, deception as to what was being voted for, and outright fraud, the Soviets ensured that their new territories would elect assemblies which would unanimously petition for union with the USSR. When the new assemblies did so, their petitions were granted by the USSR Supreme Soviet, and Western Ukraine became a part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Clumsy actions by the Soviets, such as staffing Western Ukrainian organizations with Eastern Ukrainians, and giving confiscated land to collective farms rather than to peasants, soon alienated Western Ukrainians, damaging Khrushchev's efforts to achieve unity.
When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, in 1941, Khrushchev was still at his post in Kiev. Stalin appointed him a political commissar, and he served on a number of fronts as an intermediary between the local military commanders and the political rulers in Moscow. Stalin used Khrushchev to keep commanders on a tight leash, while the commanders sought to have him influence Stalin. As the Germans advanced, Khrushchev worked with the military in an attempt to defend and save Kiev. Handicapped by orders from Stalin that under no circumstances should the city be abandoned, the Red Army was soon encircled by the Germans.
In 1942, Khrushchev was on the Southwest Front. The Soviet offensive initially appeared successful, but within 5 days the Germans had driven deep into the Soviet flanks, and the Red Army troops were in danger of being cut off. Stalin refused to halt the offensive, and the Red Army divisions were soon encircled by the Germans. The USSR lost 267,000 soldiers, including more than 200,000 men captured, and Stalin recalled Khrushchev to Moscow. While Stalin hinted at arresting and executing Khrushchev, he allowed the commissar to return to the front by sending him to Stalingrad. After Germans were forced into retreat, Khrushchev served in other fronts of the war. He was attached to Soviet troops which turned back the last major German offensive on Soviet soil. He accompanied Soviet troops as they took Kiev in 1943, entering the shattered city as Soviet forces drove out German troops.
As Soviet forces met with greater success driving the Nazis westwards back towards Germany, Khrushchev became increasingly involved in reconstruction work in Ukraine. He was appointed Premier of the Ukrainian in addition to his earlier party post, one of the rare instances in which the Ukrainian party and civil leader posts were held by one person.
Almost all of Ukraine had been occupied by the Germans, and Khrushchev returned to his domain in late 1943 to find devastation. Ukraine's industry had been destroyed, and agriculture faced critical shortages. Even though millions of Ukrainians had been taken to Germany as workers or prisoners of war, there was insufficient housing for those who remained. One out of every 6 Ukrainians was killed in WWII. Khrushchev sought to reconstruct Ukraine, but also desired to complete the interrupted work of imposing the Soviet system on it, though he hoped that the purges of the 1930s would not recur.
As Ukraine was recovered militarily, conscription was imposed, and 750,000 men aged between 19 and 50 were given minimal military training and sent to join the Red Army. Other Ukrainians joined partisan forces, seeking an independent Ukraine. Khrushchev rushed from district to district through Ukraine, urging the depleted labor force to greater efforts. He made a short visit to his birthplace finding a starving population, with only a third of the men who had joined the Red Army having returned. He did what he could to assist his hometown. Despite his efforts, in 1945, Ukrainian industry was at only a quarter of pre-war levels, and the harvest actually dropped from that of 1944, when the entire territory of Ukraine had not yet been retaken.
In an effort to increase agricultural production, the collective farms were empowered to expel residents who were not pulling their weight. The farm leaders used this as an excuse to expel their personal enemies, invalids, and the elderly, and nearly 12,000 people were sent to the eastern parts of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev viewed this policy as very effective, and recommended its adoption elsewhere to Stalin. He also worked to impose collectivization on Western Ukraine. While he hoped to accomplish this by 1947, lack of resources and armed resistance by partisans slowed the process. The partisans, many of whom fought as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA), were gradually defeated, as Soviet police and military reported killing 110,825 "bandits" and capturing a quarter million more between 1944 and 1946. About 600,000 Western Ukrainians were arrested between 1944 and 1952, with one-third executed and the remainder imprisoned or exiled to the east.
The war years of 1944 and 1945 had seen poor harvests, and 1946 saw intense drought in Ukraine and Western Russia. Despite this, collective and state farms were required to turn over 52% of the harvest to the government. The Soviet government sought to collect as much grain as possible in order to supply communist allies in Eastern Europe.
Khrushchev set the quotas at a high level, leading Stalin to expect an unrealistically large quantity of grain from Ukraine. Food was rationed, but non-agricultural rural workers throughout the USSR were given no ration cards. The inevitable starvation was largely confined to remote rural regions, and was little noticed outside the USSR. Realizing the desperate situation in late 1946, Khrushchev repeatedly appealed to Stalin for aid, to be met with anger and resistance on the part of the leader. When letters to Stalin had no effect, Khrushchev flew to Moscow and made his case in person. Stalin finally gave Ukraine limited food aid, and money to set up free soup kitchens. However, Khrushchev's political standing had been damaged and the Ukrainian Central Committee removed Khrushchev as party leader.
Khrushchev's final years in Ukraine were generally peaceful, with industry recovering, Soviet forces overcoming the partisans, and better-than-expected harvests. Collectivization advanced in Western Ukraine, and Khrushchev implemented more policies that encouraged collectivization and discouraged private farms. These sometimes backfired, however: a tax on private livestock holdings led to peasants slaughtering their stock. With the idea of eliminating differences in attitude between town and countryside and transforming the peasantry into a "rural proletariat", Khrushchev conceived the idea of the "agro-town". Rather than agricultural workers living in villages close to farms, they would live further away in larger towns which would offer municipal services such as utilities and libraries, which were not present in villages. He completed only one such town before his 1949 return to Moscow, dedicating the town to Stalin as a 70th birthday present.
Stalin feared conspiracies in Moscow matching those which the ruler believed to have occurred in Leningrad in which many of that city's Party officials had been falsely accused of treason. At this time, the aging leader rarely called Politburo meetings. Instead, much of the high-level work of government took place at dinners hosted by Stalin. These sessions were attended by Khrushchev and Stalin's inner circle and were accompanied with showings of cowboy movies that Stalin loved to see.
In 1950, Khrushchev began a large-scale housing program for Moscow. A large part of the housing was in the form of 5 or 6 story apartment buildings, which became ubiquitous throughout the Soviet Union; many remain in use today. Khrushchev had prefabricated reinforced concrete used, greatly speeding up construction. These structures were completed at triple the construction rate of Moscow housing. They lacked elevators or balconies. In 1995, almost 60,000,000 residents of the former Soviet Union still lived in these buildings.
In 1953, Stalin suffered a massive stroke, apparently on rising after sleep. Stalin had left orders not to be disturbed, and it was 12 hours until his condition was discovered. Even as terrified doctors attempted treatment, Khrushchev and his colleagues engaged in intense discussion as to the new government. Khrushchev reflected on Stalin in his memoirs:
“Stalin called everyone who didn't agree with him an enemy of the people. He said that they wanted to restore the old order, and for this purpose, the enemies of the people had linked up with the forces of reaction internationally. As a result, several hundred thousand honest people perished. Everyone lived in fear in those days. Everyone expected that at any moment there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night and that knock on the door would prove fatal. People who Stalin did not like were annihilated, honest party members, irreproachable people, loyal and hard workers for our cause who had gone through the school of revolutionary struggle under Lenin's leadership.”
In 1953, Stalin's death was announced, as was the new leadership. Khrushchev was relieved of his duties as Party head for Moscow to concentrate on unspecified duties in the Party's Central Committee. Beria who succeeded Stalin as the new leader launched a lengthy series of reforms which rivaled those of Khrushchev during his period of power and even those of Mikhail Gorbachev a third of a century later. One proposal, which was adopted, was an amnesty which eventually led to the freeing of over a million prisoners.
Another, which was not adopted, was to release East Germany into a united, neutral Germany in exchange for compensation from the West, a proposal considered by Khrushchev to be anti-communist. Khrushchev allied with others to block many proposals and slowly picked up support from other Presidium members. However, Beria was forced to resign from the secretariat of the Central Committee. This came due to concerns that he was acquiring too much power. The major beneficiary was Khrushchev. His name appeared atop a revised list of secretaries, indicating that he was now in charge of the party. Beria was tried in secret, and executed with 5 of his close associates. The power struggle in the Presidium was not resolved by the elimination of Beria.
Khrushchev, with his power base in the Party, sought to both strengthen the Party and his position within it. While, under the Soviet system, the Party was to be preeminent, it had been greatly drained of power by Stalin, who had given much of that power to himself and to the Politburo. Khrushchev saw that with the Presidium in conflict, the Party and its Central Committee might again become powerful. Khrushchev carefully cultivated high Party officials, and was able to appoint supporters as local Party bosses, who then took seats on the Central Committee.
He presented himself as a down-to-earth activist prepared to take up any challenge. He arranged for the Kremlin grounds to be opened to the public, an act with "great public resonance". He sought reforms to agriculture including plans to have hundreds of thousands of young volunteers to settle and farm areas of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan. While the scheme eventually became a tremendous disaster for Soviet agriculture, it was initially successful. In addition, Khrushchev possessed incriminating information on his opponent taken from Beria's secret files.
Soon after Khrushchev took power, he sought a peace treaty with Austria, which would allow Soviet troops then in occupation of part of the country to leave. By 1955, thousands of political prisoners had returned home, and told their experiences of the gulag labor camps. Continuing investigation into the abuses brought home the full breadth of Stalin's crimes to his successors. Khrushchev believed that once the stain of Stalinism was removed, the Party would inspire loyalty among the people. 40 years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev applauded Khrushchev for his courage in taking a huge political risk and showing himself to be "a moral man after all".
As word leaked of the power struggle, members of the Central Committee, which Khrushchev controlled, streamed to Moscow, many flown there aboard military planes, and demanded to be admitted to the meeting. While they were not admitted, there were soon enough Central Committee members in Moscow to call an emergency Party Congress, which effectively forced the leadership to allow a session of the Central Committee. At that meeting, the 3 main conspirators were accused of factionalism and complicity in Stalin's crimes and expelled. Khrushchev completed the consolidation of power by by establishing a USSR Defense Council, led by himself, effectively making him commander in chief.
After completing his takeover of mainland China in 1949, Mao Zedong sought material assistance from the USSR, and also called for the return to China of territories taken from it under the Tzars. As Khrushchev took control of the USSR, he increased aid to China, even sending a small corps of experts to help develop the newly communist country. The Soviet Union spent 7% of its national income between 1954 and 1959 on aid to China. On his 1954 visit to China, Khrushchev agreed to return some territories to China, though he was annoyed by Mao's insistence that the Soviets leave their artillery as they departed.
Mao bitterly opposed Khrushchev's attempts to reach a rapprochement with more liberal Eastern European states such as Yugoslavia. Khrushchev's government, on the other hand, was reluctant to endorse Mao's desires for an assertive worldwide revolutionary movement, preferring to conquer capitalism through raising the standard of living in communist-bloc countries. Mao believed that de-Stalinization was a mistake, and a possible threat to his own authority. When Khrushchev visited Beijing in 1958, Mao refused proposals for military cooperation. The Soviets had planned to provide China with an atomic bomb complete with full documentation, but in 1959, amid cooler relations, the Soviets destroyed the device and papers instead.
In 1955, Khrushchev abandoned Stalin's plans for a large navy, believing that the new ships would be too vulnerable to either conventional or nuclear attack. Khrushchev sought to eliminate many conventional weapons, and defend the Soviet Union with missiles. He believed that unless this occurred, the huge Soviet military would continue to eat up resources, making Khrushchev's goals of improving Soviet life difficult to achieve.
Khrushchev's open criticism of Stalin sparked considerable liberalization in Poland and Hungary. In 1956, a worker's strike in Poland developed into disturbances which left more than 50 dead. When Moscow blamed the disturbances on Western agitators, Polish leaders ignored the claim, and instead made concessions to the workers. With anti-Soviet displays becoming more common in Poland, and crucial Polish leadership elections upcoming, Khrushchev and other Presidium members flew to Warsaw. While the Soviets were refused entry to the Polish Central Committee plenum where the election was taking place, they met with the Polish Presidium. The Soviets agreed to allow the new Polish leadership to take office, on the assurance there would be no change to the Soviet-Polish relationship.
The Polish settlement emboldened the Hungarians, who decided that Moscow could be defied. In 1956, a mass demonstration in Budapest turned into a popular uprising. In response to the uprising, Hungarian Party leaders installed reformist Premier Imre Nagy. Soviet forces in the city clashed with Hungarians and even fired on demonstrators, with hundreds of both Hungarians and Soviets killed. Nagy called for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of Soviet troops, which a Khrushchev-led majority in the Presidium decided to obey, choosing to give the new Hungarian government a chance. Khrushchev assumed that if Moscow announced liberalization in how it dealt with its allies, Nagy adhered to the alliance with the Soviet Union. However Nagy announced multiparty elections, and that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact.
Two members of the Nagy government appeared in Ukraine as the self-proclaimed heads of a provisional government and demanded Soviet intervention, which was forthcoming. The next day, Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian uprising, with a death toll of 4,000 Hungarians and several hundred Soviet troops. Nagy was arrested, and was later executed. Despite the international outrage over the intervention, Khrushchev defended his actions for the rest of his life. Damage to Soviet foreign relations was severe, and would have been greater were it not for the fortuitous timing of the Suez crisis, which distracted world attention. In the aftermath of these crises, Khrushchev made the statement for which he became well-remembered, "We will bury you". While many in the West took this statement as a literal threat, Khrushchev stated that he was not referring to a literal burial, but that, through inexorable historical development, communism would replace capitalism and "bury" it.
Khrushchev greatly improved relations with Yugoslavia, which had been entirely sundered in 1948 when Stalin realized he could not control Yugoslav leader Josip Tito. Khrushchev led a Soviet delegation to Belgrade in 1955. Though a hostile Tito did everything he could to make the Soviets look foolish including getting them drunk in public, Khrushchev was successful in warming relations. During the Hungarian crisis, Tito initially supported Nagy, but Khrushchev persuaded him of the need for intervention. Still, the intervention in Hungary damaged Moscow's relationship with Belgrade, which Khrushchev spent several years trying to repair. He was hampered by the fact that China disapproved of Yugoslavia's liberal version of communism, and attempts to conciliate Belgrade resulted in an angry Beijing.
After assuming power, Khrushchev allowed a modest amount of freedom in the arts. In 1958, however, Khrushchev ordered a fierce attack on Boris Pasternak after his novel Doctor Zhivago was published abroad as he was denied permission to publish it in the Soviet Union. Pravda described the novel as "low-grade reactionary hackwork", and the author was expelled from the Writer's Union. To make things worse from Khrushchev's perspective, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which, under heavy pressure, he declined. Once he did so, Khrushchev ordered a halt to the attacks on Pasternak.
Khrushchev believed that the USSR could match the West's living standards and was not afraid to allow Soviet citizens to see Western achievements. Stalin had permitted few tourists to the Soviet Union, and had allowed few Soviets to travel. Khrushchev let Soviets travel. 700,000 Soviet citizens traveled abroad in 1957. He also allowed foreigners to visit the Soviet Union, where tourists became subjects of immense curiosity. Under Khrushchev, the special tribunals operated by security agencies were abolished. These tribunals had often ignored laws and procedures. Under the reforms, no prosecution for a political crime could be brought even in the regular courts unless approved by the local Party committee. This rarely happened. There were no major political trials under Khrushchev, and at most several hundred political prosecutions overall. Instead, other sanctions were imposed on dissidents, including loss of job or university place, or expulsion from the Party. During Khrushchev's rule, forced hospitalization for the "socially dangerous" was introduced. Political terror as an everyday method of government was replaced under Khrushchev by administrative means of repression.
In 1958, Khrushchev opened a Central Committee meeting to hundreds of Soviet officials; some were even allowed to address the meeting. For the first time, the proceedings of the Committee were made public in book form, a practice which was continued at subsequent meetings. This openness, however, actually allowed Khrushchev greater control over the Committee, since any dissenters would have to make their case in front of a large, disapproving crowd. In 1959, Khrushchev announced a goal of overtaking the United States in production of milk, meat, and butter. Local officials, with Khrushchev's encouragement, made unrealistic pledges of production. These goals were met by forcing farmers to slaughter their breeding herds and by purchasing meat at state stores, then reselling it back to the government, artificially increasing recorded production.
While visiting the United States in 1959, Khrushchev was greatly impressed by the agricultural education program and sought to imitate it in the Soviet Union. At the time, the main agricultural college in the USSR was in Moscow, and students did not do the manual labor of farming. Khrushchev proposed to move the programs to rural areas. He was unsuccessful, due to resistance from professors and students, who never actually disagreed with the premier, but who did not carry out his proposals as they preferred to stay in their universities in the city and dreaded to work on the collective farms remote in the countryside.
The premier believed that Western science flourished because many scientists lived in university towns isolated from big city distractions, and had pleasant living conditions and good pay. He sought to duplicate those conditions in the Soviet Union and founded several academic towns. Khrushchev's attempt was generally successful, though his new towns and scientific centers tended to attract younger scientists, with older ones unwilling to leave Moscow or Leningrad.
In 1959, the anti-religious campaign of the Khrushchev era began. It was carried out by mass closures of churches. Monasteries and convents were banned. The campaign also included a restriction of parental rights for teaching religion to their children, a ban on the presence of children at church services and a ban on administration of the Eucharist to children over the age of 4. Khrushchev additionally banned all services held outside of church walls. He required that the personal identities of all adults requesting church baptisms, weddings or funerals be recorded.
Since the 1940s, Khrushchev had advocated the cultivation of corn in the Soviet Union. He established a corn institute in Ukraine and ordered thousands of acres to be planted with corn. The corn experiment was not a great success, and he later wrote that overenthusiastic officials, wanting to please him, had over-planted without laying the proper groundwork, and as a result corn was discredited as a silage crop.
Food prices were raised, particularly on meat and butter by 25-30%. This caused public discontent which escalated to a strike and a revolt against the authorities. The revolt was put down by the military. 22 people were killed, 87 wounded, 116 demonstrators were convicted of involvement and 7 of them executed. Information about the revolt was completely suppressed in the USSR. In 1963, drought struck the Soviet Union. The shortages resulted in bread lines and Khrushchev exhausted the nation's hard currency reserves and expended part of its gold stockpile in the purchase of grain and other foodstuffs.
Khrushchev also proposed to restructure Soviet high schools. While the high schools provided a college preparatory curriculum, in fact few Soviet youths went on to university. Khrushchev wanted to shift the focus of secondary schools to vocational training where students would spend much of their time at factory jobs or in apprenticeships and only a small part at the schools. In practice, what occurred is that schools developed links with nearby enterprises, and students went to work for only one or two days a week. The factories and other works disliked having to teach, while students and their families complained that they had little choice in what trade to learn.
The first visit by a Soviet premier to the United States resulted in an extended media circus. Khrushchev brought his wife and adult children with him, though it was not usual for Soviet officials to travel with their families. Khrushchev visited New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco visiting a supermarket and Pittsburgh and Washington concluding with a meeting with U.S. President Eisenhower where he engaged in an improvised yet jovial debate over the respective merits of capitalism and communism. Khrushchev was supposed to visit Disneyland, but the visit was canceled for security reasons, much to his disgruntlement. While visiting IBM's new research facilities, he expressed little interest in computer technology, but he greatly admired the self-service cafeteria, and, on his return, introduced self-service in the Soviet Union.
In 1960 Khrushchev made his second and final visit to the United States. He had no invitation, but had appointed himself as head of the USSR's UN delegation. He spent much of his time wooing the new Third World states which had recently become independent. The U.S. restricted him to the island of Manhattan, with visits to an estate owned by the USSR on Long Island. The notorious shoe-banging incident occurred during a debate over a Soviet resolution decrying colonialism. He was infuriated by a statement from a delegate which charged the Soviets with employing a double standard by decrying colonialism while dominating Eastern Europe, Khrushchev demanded the right to reply immediately accusing the delegate of being "a fawning lackey of the American imperialists". The delegate resumed his speech, and accused the Soviets of hypocrisy. Khrushchev yanked off his shoe and began banging it on his desk.
Khrushchev considered U.S. Vice President Nixon a hardliner, and was delighted by his defeat in the 1960 presidential election. He considered the victor, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, as a far more likely partner for détente, but was taken aback by the newly inaugurated U.S. President's tough talk and actions in the early days of his administration. Khrushchev achieved a propaganda victory in 1961 with the first manned spaceflight and with Kennedy's failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. While Khrushchev had threatened to defend Cuba with Soviet missiles, the premier contented himself with after-the-fact aggressive remarks. The failure in Cuba led to Kennedy's determination to make no concessions at the summit scheduled to deal with East Berlin and a test-ban of nuclear bombs.
Both Kennedy and Khrushchev took a hard line, with Khrushchev demanding a treaty that would recognize the 2 German states and refusing to yield on the remaining issues obstructing a test-ban treaty. Kennedy on the other hand had been led to believe that the test-ban treaty could be concluded at the summit, and felt that a deal on Berlin had to await easing of East-West tensions. An indefinite postponement of action over Berlin was unacceptable to Khrushchev if for no other reason than that East Germany was suffering a continuous "brain drain" as highly educated East Germans fled west through Berlin. While the boundary between the 2 German states had elsewhere been fortified, Berlin, administered by the 4 Allied powers, remained open.
Khrushchev authorized East German leader Walter Ulbricht to begin construction of what became known as the Berlin Wall, which would surround West Berlin. Construction preparations were made in great secrecy, and the border was sealed off in the early hours of Sunday in 1961, when most East German workers who earned hard currency by working in West Berlin would be at their homes. The wall was a propaganda disaster, and marked the end of Khrushchev's attempts to conclude a peace treaty among the 4 Powers and the 2 German states. That treaty would not be signed until 1990, as an immediate prelude to German reunification.
In 1960, Khrushchev took advantage of improved relations with the U.S. to order a reduction of one-third in the size of Soviet armed forces, alleging that advanced weapons would make up for the lost troops. While conscription of Soviet youth remained in force, exemptions from military service became more and more common, especially for students. The Soviets had few operable ICBMs; in spite of this Khrushchev publicly boasted of the Soviets' missile programs, stating that Soviet weapons were varied and numerous. He hoped that public perception that the Soviets were ahead would result in psychological pressure on the West and political concessions.
The Soviet space program, which Khrushchev firmly supported, appeared to confirm his claims when the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 into orbit, a launch many westerners, including United States Vice President Richard Nixon were convinced was a hoax. When it became clear that the launch was real, and Sputnik 1 was in orbit, Western governments concluded that the Soviet ICBM program was further along than it actually was. For years, Khrushchev would make a point of preceding a major foreign trip with a rocket launch, to the discomfiture of his hosts. The United States learned of the primitive state of the Soviet missile program from overflights in the late 1950s, but only high U.S. officials knew of the deception.
In 1962, Khrushchev divided Party committees into 2 parallel structures, one for industry and one for agriculture. Khrushchev also ordered that one-third of the membership of each committee be replaced at each election. This decree created tension between Khrushchev and the Central Committee and upset the party leaders upon whose support Khrushchev had risen to power. In 1962, superpower tensions culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet Union sought to install medium range nuclear missiles in Cuba, about 140km from the U.S. coast. Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro was reluctant to accept the missiles, and, once he was persuaded, warned Khrushchev against transporting the missiles in secret.
Kennedy addressed his nation by television, revealing the missiles' presence and announcing a blockade of Cuba. Khrushchev and his advisers feared an invasion of Cuba and they ordered Soviet commanders in Cuba that they could use all weapons against an attack, except atomic weapons. He offered Kennedy terms for the withdrawal agreeing to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba and a secret promise that the U.S. would withdraw missiles from Turkey, near the Soviet heartland. The resolution was seen as a great defeat for the Soviets, and contributed to Khrushchev's fall less than 2 years later. Castro had urged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the U.S. in the event of any invasion of Cuba, and was angered by the outcome.
In 1963, Kennedy publicly recognized the Soviet people's suffering during WWII, and paid tribute to their achievements. Khrushchev negotiated a test ban treaty. Plans for a second Khrushchev-Kennedy summit were dashed by the U.S. President's assassination. The new U.S. President, Lyndon Johnson, hoped for continued improved relations but was distracted by other issues and had little opportunity to develop a relationship with Khrushchev before the premier was ousted.
In 1964, Supreme Soviet presidium chairman and nominal head of state Leonid Brezhnev began discussing Khrushchev's removal with his colleagues. While Brezhnev considered having Khrushchev arrested as he returned from a trip to Scandinavia, he instead spent time persuading members of the Central Committee to support the ousting of Khrushchev, remembering how crucial the Committee's support had been to Khrushchev in defeating the Anti-Party Group plot. Brezhnev was given ample time for his conspiracy. Khrushchev was absent from Moscow for a total of 5 months that year.
The conspirators, led by Brezhnev struck while Khrushchev was on vacation. Brezhnev called Khrushchev to notify him of a special Presidium meeting to be held the following day, ostensibly on the subject of agriculture. Khrushchev was informed of his ouster and told not to resist. Khrushchev did not resist, and the plotters' coup went off smoothly. Khrushchev was then taken to the Kremlin, to be verbally attacked by Brezhnev. He had no stomach for a fight, and put up little resistance. In 1964, the Presidium and the Central Committee each voted to accept Khrushchev's "voluntary" request to retire from his offices for reasons of "advanced age and ill health." Brezhnev was elected First Secretary while Alexei Kosygin succeeded Khrushchev as premier.
“I'm old and tired. Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution. I won't put up a fight.”
Khrushchev was granted a pension and was assured that his house and dacha were his for life. Following his removal from power, he fell into deep depression. He received few visitors, especially since his security guards kept track of all guests and reported their comings and goings. In 1965, he and his wife were ordered to leave their house and dacha to move to an apartment and to a smaller dacha. The depression continued, and his doctor prescribed sleeping pills and tranquilizers.
Khrushchev died of a heart attack in a hospital near his home in Moscow. He was denied a state funeral with interment in the Kremlin Wall.
Khrushchev let in fresh air and fresh ideas, producing changes which time already has shown are irreversible and fundamental. Many of Khrushchev's innovations were reversed after his fall.
- the requirement that one-third of officials be replaced at each election was overturned, as was
- the division in the Party structure between industrial and agricultural sectors.
- his vocational education program for high school students was also dropped, and
- his plan for sending existing agricultural institutions out to the land was ended.
- when new housing was built, much of it was in the form of high rises which lacked elevators or balconies rather than Khrushchev's low-rise structures.
- some of Khrushchev's agricultural projects were also easily overturned. Corn became so unpopular in 1965 that its planting fell to the lowest level in the postwar period.
Khrushchev began to change the economic base of the country, away from heavy industry beginning light, consumer industries. People were required to register to attend church and were warned that church-going would bar them from party membership, from promotion, from better housing and better schools.
The basic agricultural problems, which Khrushchev had tried to address, remained. While the Soviet standard of living increased greatly in the 10 years after Khrushchev's fall, much of the increase was due to industrial progress. Agriculture continued to lag far behind, resulting in regular agricultural crises, especially in 1972 and 1975.
Brezhnev and his successors continued Khrushchev's precedent of buying grain from the West rather than suffer shortfalls and starvation. Neither Brezhnev nor his colleagues were personally popular, and the new government relied on authoritarian power to assure its continuation. The KGB and Red Army were given increasing powers. The government's conservative tendencies led to the crushing of the "Prague Spring" of 1968.
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after WWII. It began in 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and continued until the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms. While the Soviet military had predicted that it would take 4 days to subdue the country the resistance held out for 8 months.
The Prague Spring reforms were a strong attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel. Dubček oversaw the decision to split into 2, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. Czechoslovakia remained Soviet-controlled until 1989, when the Velvet Revolution ended pro-Soviet rule peacefully, undoubtedly drawing upon the successes of the non-violent resistance of the Prague Spring 20 years earlier.
Throughout the Brezhnev years and the lengthy interregnum that followed, the generation which had come of age during the 'first Russian spring' of the 1950s awaited its turn in power. As Brezhnev and his colleagues died or were pensioned off, they were replaced by men and women for whom the first wave of de-Stalinization had been a formative experience, and these 'Children of Twentieth Congress' took up the reins of power under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues. The Khrushchev era provided this second generation of reformers with both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.
Khrushchev had many contradictory personality traits. He was once a Stalinist and became an anti-Stalinist. He was a communist believer who became a cynic. He could be a self-publicizing poltroon and at the same time a crusty philanthropist. He was a trouble-maker and a peacemaker, a stimulating colleague and a domineering boor, a statesman and a politician who was out of his intellectual depth.
Edgar Hoover was an American detective and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. He was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigation, the FBI's predecessor, in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for 36 years until his death at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernization to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.
Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI, and to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten sitting presidents.
Hoover's secret files kept presidents from firing him. Richard Nixon admitted that one of the reasons he did not fire Hoover was that he was afraid of reprisals against him. President Harry S. Truman said that Hoover transformed the FBI into his private secret police force:
“... we want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”
Among his family, he was the closest to his mother, who was their moral guide and disciplinarian.
Hoover lived in Washington, D.C. for his entire life. He sang in the school choir, participated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, and competed on the debate team. During debates, he argued against women getting the right to vote and against the abolition of the death penalty. The school newspaper applauded his "cool, relentless logic." Hoover stuttered as a boy, which he overcame by teaching himself to talk quickly, a style that he carried through his adult career. He eventually spoke with such ferocious speed that stenographers had a hard time following him. Hoover was 18 years old when he accepted his first job, an entry-level position as messenger in the orders department, at the Library of Congress.
“This job [...] trained me in the value of collating material. It gave me an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence.”
While a law student, Hoover became interested in the prolonged campaigns against fraud, vice, pornography, and birth control. Immediately after getting his degree, Hoover was hired by the Justice Department to work in the War Emergency Division. The job didn't pay too much, but he was exempt from the draft. He soon became the head of the Division's Alien Enemy Bureau, authorized by President Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of WWI to arrest and jail allegedly disloyal foreigners without trial. He received additional authority from the 1917 Espionage Act. Out of a list of 1,400 suspicious Germans living in the U.S., the Bureau arrested 98 and designated 1,172 as arrestable.
In 1919, Hoover became head of the Bureau of Investigation's new General Intelligence Division, also known as the Radical Division because its goal was to monitor and disrupt the work of domestic radicals. America's First Red Scare was beginning, and one of Hoover's first assignments was to carry out raids. Hoover monitored a variety of U.S. radicals with the intent to punish, arrest, or deport those whose politics they decided were dangerous. 2 years later, Hoover rose in the Bureau of Investigation to deputy head and, in 1924, the Attorney General made him the acting director. When Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, it had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents. Hoover fired all female agents and banned the future hiring of them.
Hoover was sometimes unpredictable in his leadership. He frequently fired Bureau agents, singling out those he thought "looked stupid like truck drivers", or whom he considered "pinheads". He also relocated agents who had displeased him to career-ending assignments and locations. Hoover often praised local law-enforcement officers around the country, and built up a national network of supporters and admirers in the process.
In the early 1930s, criminal gangs carried out large numbers of bank robberies in the Midwest. They used their superior firepower and fast getaway cars to elude local law enforcement agencies and avoid arrest. Many of these criminals frequently made newspaper headlines across the United States, particularly John Dillinger who became famous for repeatedly escaping from jails and police traps. The gangsters enjoyed a level of sympathy in the Midwest, as banks and bankers were widely seen as oppressors of common people during the Great Depression.
The robbers operated across state lines, and Hoover pressed to have their crimes recognized as federal offenses so that he and his men would have the authority to pursue them and get the credit for capturing them. Hoover was credited with several highly publicized captures or shootings of outlaws and bank robbers, even though he was not present at the events. These included those of Machine Gun Kelly in 1933 and of Dillinger in 1934.
The robbers operated across state lines, and Hoover pressed to have their crimes recognized as federal offenses so that he and his men would have the authority to pursue them and get the credit for capturing them. Hoover was credited with several highly publicized captures or shootings of outlaws and bank robbers, even though he was not present at the events. These included those of Machine Gun Kelly in 1933 and of Dillinger in 1934.
In 1935, the Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1939, the FBI became pre-eminent in the field of domestic intelligence, thanks in large part to changes made by Hoover, such as expanding and combining fingerprint files in the Identification Division and to compile the largest collection of fingerprints to date. Hoover helped to expand the FBI's recruitment and create the FBI Laboratory, a division established in 1932 to examine and analyze evidence.
During the 1930s Hoover persistently denied the existence of organized crime, even while there were numerous shootings as a result of Mafia control of and competition over the Prohibition-created black-market. Hoover had a reputation as "an inveterate horse-player" known to send Special Agents to place $100 bets for him. Gangster Frank Costello helped encourage this view by feeding Hoover tips on sure winners. Hoover said the Bureau had "much more important functions" than arresting bookmakers and gamblers.
While Hoover had fought bank-robbing gangsters in the 1930s, anti-communism was a bigger focus for him after WWII, as the Cold War developed. During the 1940s through mid-1950s, he seemed to ignore organized crime of the type that ran vice rackets such as drugs, prostitution, and extortion. He denied that any Mafia operated in the U.S. In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover's unwillingness to focus FBI resources on the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors.
In 1957 the FBI was embarrassed by newspaper front page headlines that a nationwide Mafia syndicate thrived unimpeded by the nation's "top cops". Hoover immediately changed tack, and during the next 5 years, the FBI investigated organized crime heavily. Hoover was concerned about what he claimed was subversion, and under his leadership, the FBI investigated tens of thousands of suspected subversives and radicals. According to critics, Hoover tended to exaggerate the dangers of these alleged subversives and many times overstepped his bounds in his pursuit of eliminating that perceived threat. Hoover, perhaps at the behest of Richard Nixon, investigated ex-Beatle John Lennon by putting the singer under surveillance.
The FBI investigated rings of German saboteurs and spies starting in the late 1930s, and had primary responsibility for counterespionage. The first arrests of German agents were made in 1938 and continued throughout WWII. During this time period President Roosevelt, out of concern over Nazi agents in the United States, gave qualified permission to wiretap persons suspected of subversive activities. He went on to add, in 1941, that the United States Attorney General had to be informed of its use in each case. The Attorney General left it to Hoover to decide how and when to use wiretaps, as he found the whole business distasteful.
The FBI participated in a pre-WWII joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States. They did not initially realize that espionage was being committed, but the Soviet's multiple use of one-time pad ciphers which with single use are unbreakable created redundancies that allowed some intercepts to be decoded. These established that espionage was being carried out. Hoover kept the intercepts – America's greatest counterintelligence secret – in a locked safe in his office. He chose to not inform anyone until in 1952 he informed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of his eavesdropping project a decade before.
In 1946 Attorney General authorized Hoover to compile a list of potentially disloyal Americans who might be detained during a wartime national emergency. In 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War, Hoover submitted to President Truman a plan to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain 12,000 Americans suspected of disloyalty without trial. Truman did not act on the plan. In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute people for their political opinions, most notably communists.
Some of his aides reported that he purposely exaggerated the threat of communism to ensure financial and public support for the FBI. At this time he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO, first used to disrupt the Communist Party USA. Hoover went after targets that ranged from suspected everyday spies to larger celebrity figures such as Charlie Chaplin that he saw as spreading Communist Party propaganda. Methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents, and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations and included inciting violence and arranging murders. This program remained in place until it was exposed to the public in 1971.
Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. Hoover personally directed the FBI investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, just days before Hoover testified in the earliest stages of the Warren Commission hearings, President Lyndon B. Johnson waived the then-mandatory U.S. Government Service Retirement Age of 70, allowing Hoover to remain the FBI Director "for an indefinite period of time."
The House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report in 1979 critical of the performance by the FBI, the Warren Commission, and other agencies. The report criticized the Hoover's reluctance to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President. When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, Hoover had just turned 74. There was a growing sentiment in Washington, D.C., that the aging FBI chief needed to go, but Hoover's power and friends in Congress remained too strong for him to be forced into retirement.
Hoover remained director of the FBI until he died of a heart attack in his Washington home, when he was 77 years old.
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Juan Perón, Imre Nagy, Goebels, Golda Meir, Al Capone, Himmler, Albert Speer, Faisal Al Saud
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Juan Perón, Imre Nagy, Goebels, Golda Meir, Al Capone, Himmler, Albert Speer, Faisal Al Saud
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