On this date in 1938, Arkadi (or Arcadi) Berdichevsky, a Russian Jew run afoul of the (pre-KGB) NKVD, was executed in the Arctic Circle prison town of Vorkuta for leading a prisoners’ hunger strike. Though the powerful whom Stalin purged … Continue reading
Original Dublin broadsheet via James Kelly’s Gallows Speeches: From Eighteenth-Century Ireland: THE LAST SPEECH AND DYING WORDS OF PETER DALTON Who was executed near St. Stephen’s Green, on Saturday the 23d of August 1712. Good Christians, I Peter Dalton was … Continue reading
Most any sequence of days on the calendar would do for capturing Soviet citizens destroyed in Stalin’s terrible purges of the late 1930s. There are, of course, the great names — Zinoviev, the Old Bolshevik senior to Stalin; the Red … Continue reading
Tim Kaine, who governed the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2006 to 2010 and was just last month elected to the U.S. Senate, had a different service to perform on this date in 1996. Kaine saw his client, double-murderer Lem Tuggle, … Continue reading
Of executions, hangings, murders, and bombs people now write and speak as they used to speak about the weather. Children play at hangings. … Yes, this executioner at first hand knows that he is an executioner, and that he does … Continue reading