Themed Set: Russian Revolutions That Weren’t
August 28th, 2009 Headsman
Desperate, violent social upheaval seems to go with Russia like black bread with pickled herring.
“How can you make a revolution without executions?” Lenin once asked.
As he knew — very well he knew — that also happens to be a preferred tool of counterrevolution.
And for every successful revolution, there are dozens of abortive attempts — failed coups d’etat — empty plots that never get off the drawing board — to harvest the heads of a new order’s would-be engineers.
Russia/the USSR had flesh-rending struggles for power in the early 20th century. These are a few casualties whose revolutions didn’t take … and who, given the opportunity, would have hewed to Lenin’s own maxim with respect to the opponents who chanced to get the better of them.
(This “themed set” is actually a rewrite from the original — product of discovering a little too late a bad date in the database. This discovery did actually solve some editorial complications, but obviously would have been less embarrassing had it been effected before pressing “submit”. Oh, well. Blawg.
Although the text below is no longer operative, it is included for transparency, historical completeness, and because we are loathe to abandon any Lebowski reference no matter how ill-founded.)
Themed Set: They Were Russian Nazis, Dude?
Are we gonna split hairs here?
Even genocide isn’t completely black and white. Although wielded by a distinctly anti-Slavic power, fascism found collaborators among the peoples who figured to be enslaved, murdered, and exiled.
And no surprise, in the scheme of things.
The lines of battle, both literal and rhetorical, always conceal a million complex interactions between peoples meeting — for it is still a manner of meeting, through gunsights.
Whether driven by ideology or merely driven to the wall by the Hobson’s choice between collaboration and resistance in a war between two of history’s cruelest state edifices, some set of people will always be driven in a conflict to side-choosing that others find treacherous.
Maybe you. Maybe me. And maybe Executed Today‘s next three.
On this day..
- 1955: Emmett Till lynched - 2020
- 1588: Eight Catholics after the defeat of the Spanish Armada - 2019
- 476: Orestes, father of the last Roman Emperor - 2018
- 388: Magnus Maximus, minimized - 2017
- 1628: Edmund Arrowsmith, Catholic priest - 2016
- 1648: Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, royalists - 2015
- 1948: Ragnar Skancke, the last executed in Norway - 2014
- 1765: Three Burglarious Johns - 2013
- 1987: Dale Selby Pierre, Hi-Fi Murderer - 2012
- 1941: Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Indochina Communist cadre - 2011
- 1793: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine - 2010
- 1944: Bronislav Kaminski, Waffen SS collaborator - 2009
- 1807: James McLean, twice - 2008
Entry Filed under: Themed Sets
