It’s a trivial observation that Russia is really big, but it does bear noticing that Russia is really big. Nine time zones big, after cutting back from eleven.
As a consequence, when the boss goes off the rails — as such characters have been wont to do — and given the transport and communications infrastructure of an industrial state, one man’s paranoia in Moscow can wreck lives from the Dnieper to the Pacific.
Two dates this weekend from the height of Stalin’s 1937 purges see a Mongolian and a Finn who each thought themselves good communists destroyed in Moscow by the system they supported.
On this day..
- 1954: Jonas Žemaitis, Lithuanian Forest Brother
- 1766: John Clark and James Felton
- 1736: James Matthews and Elizabeth Greenley
- 1936: Vladimir Mutnykh, Bolshoi director
- 2009: Hu Minghua and Su Binde, child abductors
- 1948: Hans Karl Möser, for rocketry
- 1933: Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes lynched in St. James Park
- 1678: William Staley, "the prologue to the bloody tragedy"
- 1937: Peljidiin Genden, former Mongolia Prime Minister
- 1940: Jilava Massacre
- 1600: Hansel Pappenheimer, following his family
- 1849: Sheikh Bouzian, defending Zaatcha
- 1919: Felipe Angeles
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