Conflictive 20th Century
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- Porfirio Diaz, known for his long and autocratic rule of Mexico and his disdain for the poorer classes, was actually born into a lower-middle-class Spanish / Mixtec Indian family in Oaxaca. His father was a blacksmith and an innkeeper and died when Porfirio was only three years old. He was educated by the Catholic church in what was to be his preparation for entering the priesthood, but by age 16 Diaz realized he had no intention of becoming a priest. Many men of Oaxaca had joined the Mexican army to fight in the Mexican-American War of 1846, and at 18 Diaz did the same, but the war ended before he saw combat. He left the army and returned to Oaxaca to study law. There he became acquainted with Benito Juarez, the state's governor. The civil war of 1854 pitted Juarez and his liberal reformers against the dictatorship of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna--of "the Alamo" fame--and his supporters, mainly wealthy landowners and the Catholic Church. Diaz came out squarely on Juarez's side, and fled Oaxaca to join Juarez's revolutionary army. Diaz proved to be an able commander and defeated Santa Anna's forces in several key battles, earning a promotion to general. Juarez eventually triumphed and Santa Anna fled Mexico, but the victory didn't last long. Mexico was soon invaded by the French, on the pretext of collecting on loans from French bankers that Mexico couldn't pay. They overthrew Juarez and installed a member of the Hapsburg royal family as ruler, calling him Emperor Maximilian. Diaz again fought with Juarez against this French occupation, and upon Maximilian's overthrow and execution, Diaz resigned from the army and retired to Oaxaca. Juarez died and was succeeded by Sebastian Lerdo, whose administration was racked by internal squabbles, chaos and rebellions. Diaz was persuaded to lead a rebellion against Lerdo, and in 1876 Diaz's forces drove out Lerdo after defeating his army in several battles. Diaz took Mexico City and became president.
At first his regime instituted many needed reforms, settled the national debt and embarked on an ambitious program to modernize the country, bringing railroads and telegraph services to many areas of Mexico that didn't have them. He was succeeded at the end of his term in 1880 by his former Minister of War, but ran for president in the 1884 election and won handily. However, his administration grew more repressive the longer it stayed in power, and eventually it became allied with the very forces it had once fought. Diaz wanted to bring foreign investment into the country, and to that end he instituted a controversial program of wholesale "evacuations" of the poor from the cities to the countryside, so that foreign investors and tourists wouldn't see them and would be more inclined to invest their money in Mexico. Eventually his autocratic rule and repressive policies resulted in a series of rebellions and uprisings, led by such legendary Mexican figures as Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza, among others. In 1913 these leaders combined their forces in a final assault on Mexico City, Diaz's seat of government, defeated his armies and forced him to flee the country. Ironically, although he came to power in Mexico largely because of his fight against the French, he wound up spending his exile in Paris, where he died in 1915."Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!..." - Douglas Haig was born on 19 June 1861 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. He was a writer, known for The First World War (2003), Remembrance (1927) and Under Four Flags (1918). He died on 29 January 1928 in London, England, UK.1st Earl Haig, field marshal
- Horatio Herbert Kitchener was born in Ballylongford, Ireland on June 24, 1850, the son of Lt. Col. Henry Kitchener. After attending boarding school in Switzerland, Horatio was admitted to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, England in 1868. Commissioned as an officer in the Royal Engineers in 1871, he spent most of the next 28 years at British army posts in Africa, rising to the rank of major general. He led part of the British-Egyptian Expeditionary force in the reconquest of the Sudan from 1896 to 1898 against the Dervish Mahdists where at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898, he defeated the Mahdists and was later given the title Baron Kitchener of Khartoum, later elevated to earl.
During the 1899-1902 Boer War in South Africa, General Kitchener was assigned as chief of staff to the British commander, Lord Roberts. While General Sir Redvers Buller handled operations in the eastern theater of operations, Kitchener served as Roberts' second in command in the western theater, spearheading the British advance into the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal in early 1900, leading to the capture of the Boer capital of Pretoria. When Roberts and Buller returned to England in November 1900, Lord Kitchener succeeded Roberts as commander in chief for the drawn-out guerrilla phase of the war. From then on, Lord Kitchener directed the British campaign against General Louis Botha's Boer guerrillas launching hit-and-run raids against British posts everywhere in South Africa. In a long and brutal campaign, Kitchener imposed a "scorched earth" policy of burning crops, destroying Afrikaner farms and villages, and establishing a network of blockhouses across parts of South Africa which slowly tied down the Boers, impairing their commando raids. It was not until May 31, 1902 that the Boer leaders gave in and within months the last of the Boer guerrillas were starved into surrendering. Kitchener was then made commander of the British troops in India and promoted to Field Marshall.
y 1914 at the start of World War I, Kitchener was appointed secretary for war and placed in charge of organizing the British war effort. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Kitchener believed that the war would be long and costly, and accordingly instituted a massive recruiting drive. Almost 2.5 million British and Colonial troops were raised through this effort. In addition to the mass mobilization and supply of his armies, Lord Kitchener personally oversaw the British campaigns from the Near East, to the Western Front in France, to Africa. Kitchener was made a Knight of the Garter, Great Britain's highest honor in June 1915.
Lord Kitchener died in the line of duty on June 5, 1916 when, en route to a conference with the Russian high command in St. Petersburg, the ship he was on, the HMS Hampshire, struck a mine off the Orkney Islands. Kitchener was not among the few dozen survivors. He was then declared missing in action, and later declared dead. Had he survived, some experts believe that World War I would have ended a year earlier than it did. - Actor
- Producer
Francisco "Pancho" Villa was born Doroteo Arango to rural peasant parents in San Juan del Rio, Mexico, on June 5, 1878. He later took several aliases, the most popular and well-known being "Pancho Villa". Raised in poverty in Durango, he turned to cattle rustling and robbery as a young man. The turning point in his life, however, was the day his sister was attacked and raped by Mexican army troops. Villa wanted revenge against the whole world and soon turned from being simply a bandit leader into a full-fledged revolutionary with the aim of overthrowing Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. To that end Villa became an ally of another revolutionary, the urbane and educated Francisco I. Madero, and although the two were about as opposite from one another as it was possible to be, Villa soon became a diehard supporter of the diminutive Madero, whom he affectionately called "the little man". Madero appointed Villa a colonel in the revolutionary army. On May 11, 1911, Villa led a daring raid against the federal stronghold of Juarez, soundly defeating the government forces and securing Madero's position as the new president. After Diaz was driven from power and Madero installed as president, Villa went home. His stay there was not to be very long, however. Two years later Madero was overthrown and executed by renegade Gen. Victoriano Huerta. Enraged, Villa re-formed his army, now called the Army of the North, and became an important member of a coalition of anti-Huerta forces, among whom were such legendary Mexican figures as Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza.
Villa's mounted troops, called "Villistas", were highly mobile and seasoned by years of fighting against the Diaz regime. They inflicted a decisive defeat on Huerta's army in northern Mexico at the Battle of Zacatecas on June 23, 1913, then began a campaign to drive Huerta's forces south to their stronghold of Mexico City. By December, in conjunction with the armies of Carranza and Zapata, Villa captured Mexico City, forcing Huerta to flee and placing control of the government in the hands of the three rebel leaders. However, the following spring Villa was forced out of the triumvirate when he lost a power struggle with Carranza. In the ensuing conflict his troops were badly defeated by Carranza's army and Villa was forced to withdraw to his headquarters in Durango. There he resumed his life as a bandit, raiding isolated American border towns and mining camps as well as Mexican villages.
On March 9, 1916, troops under Villa's command raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, looted it, burned down much of it and caused the deaths of more than a dozen residents, although about 30 of their own men were killed by American soldiers and civilians defending the town (supposedly Villa was angered by the U.S. authorities allowing elements of Carranza's army, which was pursuing him, to cross through American territory as a shortcut in an attempt to get ahead of Villa and ambush him, and the raid was in retaliation for that). The U.S. government sent an expeditionary force into Mexico under Gen. John J. Pershing to capture Villa. However, Villa's maneuverability and superior knowledge of the terrain enabled him to elude the pursuing American troops, and Pershing's forces withdrew from the area the following year.
In 1920 the Carranza government struck a deal with Villa in which he agreed to halt his raids in exchange for settling down on a ranch in Canutillo and being appointed a general in the Mexican army. However, on June 20, 1923, Villa was ambushed and murdered in Parral by followers of Álvaro Obregón, a former army general, who feared that Villa would oppose their leader's candidacy for president in the upcoming elections. Immediately following his death the name of Pancho Villa was eliminated from all history books, children's books and all monuments in Mexico. It wasn't until 1975 (more than a half-century after his death) that both the Mexican and American governments felt safe enough to exhume his body, and when they did, they discovered that someone had stolen his head. After a large parade was held in his honor in Mexico, Pancho Villa's body was sent to the cemetery where many Mexican revolutionary heroes were buried, and he was finally given the proper burial he deserved.- Yat-sen Sun was born on November 12, 1866 in Hsiang-shan, Kwangtung Province, China. He was married to Ching-Ling Soong and Lu Mu-chen. He died on March 12, 1925 in Peking, China.
Sun was survived by his first and second wives, a daughter, and a son, Sun Fo. His first marriage, at the age of 18, to Lu Mu-chen (1867-1952) had been traditionally arranged. She was the mother of his three children. The elder of their two daughters, Chin-yen, died in 1913. Sun's second marriage, to Soong Ch'ing-ling, in Tokyo on 25 October 1914 was controversial because he and his first wife had not been divorced. Sun never divorced his first wife, nonetheless, Soong Ch'ing-ling remained Sun's constant companion until the end of his life.He succeeded Yuan Shikai, his opositor,
as the most influential leader in China. - Raymond Poincaré was born on 20 August 1860 in Bar-le-Duc, Meuse, France. He was a writer, known for The First World War (2003), Somewhere in France (1915) and France in Arms (1917). He was married to Henriette Poincaré. He died on 15 October 1934 in Paris, France.
- Born on December 18, 1863, the eldest son of Archduke Karl-Ludwig von Habsburg and his wife, Princess Annunziata di Borbone, Franz Ferdinand was third in line to the thrown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire upon his birth. After his cousin Crown Prince Rudolf committed suicide in 1889 and his father died in 1896, Franz Ferdinand became the heir of his aging uncle Emperor Franz Josef. He eloped with Countess Sophie Chotek in 1900, but this marriage was considered unequal and they were forced to renounce rights of rank and succession for their three children. A radical reformist, Franz Ferdinand had a number of new ideas he planned to implement when he became Emperor, one of them giving Slavs an equal voice in the empire. After the annexation of Bosnia by Austria, he decided to go on a tour of his new province in 1914 in hopes of fostering good will with his new subjects. A Serbian terrorist group called The Black Hand sent three of its members to murder Franz Ferdinand and his wife as they visited Sarajevo. Their first assassination attempt, throwing a bomb at the Archduke's car, failed, though a number of bystanders were wounded. The assassins almost gave up their plans, and one of them, Gavrilo Princip, wandered off down the street. Meanwhile, the Archduke and Archduchess decided to visit the wounded in the hospital, but their driver took a wrong turn and they ended up on the same street as Princip. Seizing his chance, Princip stepped forward and fired several times into the car, fatally wounding both Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. They were raced to the governor's mansion where they were pronounced dead. Not only did this act of violence orphan their three young children, it also set off a series of events that led directly to World War I.
- Czar Nicholas II of Russia was crowned in 1894, and was the last Emperor of Russia. He was born on 19 May, 1868, the first child of Tsarevitch Aleksandr III and his wife, Maria Fyodorovna. He was christened His Imperial Highness Nicholas Aleksandrovitch Romanov, Grand Duke of Russia. He was followed by three brothers and two sisters: Grand Duke Aleksandr (1869-1870), Grand Duke Georgy (1871-1899) Grand Duchess Ksenia (1875-1960), Grand Duke Michael (1878-19180 and Grand Duchess Olga (1882-1960). He was related to the Danish, British and German royal families. As a child, Nicholas wasn't quite as bright as his younger brothers, resulting in his father's belief that Nicholas, a somewhat shy and sensitive child, wasn't "man enough" to be Emperor of Russia, and he often derisively referred to his son as a girl. His father had already picked out a French princess to be Nicholas' wife, in order to cement relations with the French. Unfortunately for him, however, he further alienated his father when he fell in love with a German princess, Alix (aka Alexandra), and decided to marry her instead. Although dead set against this marriage, his father finally gave his reluctant blessing only on his deathbed, when he realized that if Nicholas were not allowed to marry Alix he would marry no one, thus placing the continuation of the Romanov dynasty in danger). In November of 1894, he married Her Ducal Highness Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse-Darstadt and By Rhine. They had five children: Grand Duchess Olga (b. 1895-1918), Grand Duchess Tatiana (b. 1897-1918), Grand Duchess Maria (b. 1899-1918), Grand Duchess Anastasia (b. 1901-1918) and Tsarevitch Aleksey (1904-1918).
Upon his ascension as the emperor of Russsia in 1894, he was given the following title: His Highness the Tsar Nicholas Aleksandrovitch Romanov, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, of Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese, of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogotia, Bialostock, Karelia, Tver, Yougouria, Perm, Viatka, Bulgaria, and other countries; Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, of Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belozero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk, Mstislav and, all the region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Cartalinia, Kabardinia and the provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian Princes and the Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig Holstein, of Storman, of the Ditmars, and of Oldenbourg.
After Nicholas became Czar, he determined to travel and see as much of the world outside of Russia as he could. However, in an ominous portent of things to come, during a tour of Japan an assassin rushed at him with a large sword, and Nicholas barely escaped with his life, although the would-be assassin managed to inflict a large gash on his forehead. In what can be seen as yet another bad omen, during his coronation a stampede occurred on a field near the scene when free food was being given out to the large crowds, and more than 1000 people died. In 1905 relations between Russia and Japan had deteriorated to a dangerous point, and there was talk of war. Nicholas was in fact in favor of a negotiated settlement and talks resulted in a compromise being offered by the Japanese, but Nicholas' advisers and generals persuaded him to reject the Japanese offer and declare war, which they were confident they would win handily. As it turned out, however, the ensuing Russo-Japanese War of 1905 was a devastating defeat for Russia, which lost much of its navy to the better trained, better equipped and better led Japanese forces, tens of thousands of its soldiers and large swaths of its territory.
The defeat caused even more discontent in the country, which had been building for quite some time among peasants, workers, students and an increasing number of members of the armed forces. In 1905 a crowd of demonstrators marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition to Nicholas asking for liberalization and reform. Although the demonstration was peaceful at first - Nicholas himself saw no danger in the situation and had in fact departed to his country estate for the weekend - things rapidly deteriorated, and before anyone could really figure out what happened, the troops surrounding the palace opened fire on the demonstrators (many of whom were carrying pictures and placards of Nicholas as proof of their devotion to him), killing many of them. Although it's believed now that Nicholas did not give orders for the soldiers to fire on the crowd, many Russians at the time believed that he had, and this began to solidify opposition to the monarchy's rule. The resulting political and domestic pressure forced Nicholas to convene the Duma, the Russian parliament, in August of 1905.
He then issued what was called the October Manifesto in which he promised to introduce basic civil liberties to the Russian populace, make the Duma more than just a rubber-stamp for the Czar--which many believed, rightly or wrongly, that it was--and give it legislative and oversight authority. Although relations between Nicholas and the Duma were at first good, they quickly deteriorated because Empress Alexandra did not like or trust its leadership. Nicholas wound up dissolving the Duma, adding fuel to the fires of revolution already building up in the country. As if Nicholas' political problems weren't enough, his son Alexei, who was born in 1904, turned out to have hemophilia, a disease which prevents blood from clotting properly. At that time it was tantamount to a death sentence, as no treatment for it existed. Alexandra, desperate for anything that might save her son's life, turned to a sinister mystic and "healer" from Siberia named Grigory Rasputin. Rasputin did seem to have a calming effect on the child, whose health appeared to improve, thus solidifying Rasputin's hold on the royal family (many at the time suspected that Rasputin was secretly hypnotizing the boy into believing that he was better, in order to strengthen his hold over the Empress). The Empress became totally dependent on Rasputin, and eventually came to believe that he and God were in direct contact about her son. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916 by a group of disgruntled Russian noblemen worried about his hold on the royal family (not to mention their own future at the court). In 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a member of "Young Bosnia", a fanatical Serbian nationalist secret society. It wasn't long before events snowballed and Europe was plunged into World War I. Russia entered the war on the side of the Allies against Germany and Austria-Hungary. At first Russian forces had considerable success against the German and Austrian armies and their Turkish allies on the Eastern front, but the fighting eventually turned into a combination of trench warfare and huge artillery barrages.
Through a combination of bad weather, poor logistics, low morale and staggeringly inept leadership, the Russian armies soon began incurring defeat after defeat and suffering huge losses (the Battle of Tannenberg alone cost them more than 100,000 dead). In 1915 Russia lost Poland to the Germans, and Nicholas himself decided to take over as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Since he was now personally prosecuting the war, domestic policy was basically left up to Empress Alexandra, who was not popular with the Russian people, especially since she herself was German. Political opposition to the regime increased. Unfortunately, Nicholas' military leadership was almost as inept as his generals', resulting in more defeats and even larger casualties for the Russian armies. The country was now being convulsed by strikes and riots, and many military units were mutinying and joining with revolutionary forces to take over cities from Nicholas' government. By March of 1917 popular opposition to the monarchy was so strong that Nicholas was forced to abdicate. Three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty came to an end. Aleksandr Kerensky, a former schoolmate of Vladimir Lenin, became the leader of the provisional government, which detained the Romanov family under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St. Petersburg. They were then transported to Siberia in August of 1917. By November of 1917, with the Russian military being torn apart by mutinies and revolts, the Bolsheviks ousted the provisional government to become the rulers of Russia. They took custody of the Romanov family and moved them to the city of Ekaterinburg. Lenin and his colleague Yakov Sverdlov urged the murder of the Czar and his family in order to shore up support for the Bolsheviks among the masses.
At 2:30 on the morning of July 17, 1918, a firing squad shot Czar Nicholas, his wife Empress Alexandra, their five children, their doctor and their personal assistants and royal secretaries. As proof of their death and to dispel stories that the royal family had managed to escape, parts of their bodies and some of the royal necklaces and jewelry were delivered to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow, although rumors persisted for years afterward that some of the family did in fact manage to bribe their would-be executioners and escape. - Kaiser William II was born on January 27, 1859 to a Prince and Princess of Prussia. His mother was the daughter of Queen Victoria. He grew up like any Prussian Prince, except for an arm that was deformed from birth. He admired his grandparents who became Kaiser and Empress when he was small. He also admired his English Grandmother Queen Victoria as well as Otto von Bismarck. During his formative years he had to deal with having brothers and sisters. His brother Henry even got married to their cousin Irene (their Aunt Alice's daughter). Because of the attention his parents gave to his arm he grew to detest them.
When William was in his late teens he fell in love with his cousin (the daughter of his Aunt Alice) but she did not love him and got married to Grand Duke Serge of Russia. A few years later he got married to a granddaughter of his grandmother's half-sister. They had several children. In 1888 when his father died he raided his desk to find anything that may have incriminated his father in something, but all that was found was papers about how bad he had been in his life. He was with his grandmother Queen Victoria when she died in 1901. Later that year he lost his mother as well. He did the same thing to his mother that he did with his father with the same results. Vickie had given all her papers to the British ambassador to Berlin a few days before she died.
After his mother died he continued to rule Germany in a back handed manner, and did not like the fact that his Uncle Edward was more powerful than he was. He did not like the fact that he was part of starting World War One because it pitted him against cousins, aunts, and uncles all over Europe and the Americas. His response to his cousin changing their last name to Windsor was that he would like to see the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha. After the war he had to give up his throne and he went to the Netherlands, where after the death of his first wife he married a second. He stayed married to his second wife till he died at the age of 82 in 1941. - Leopold, Prince of Hohenzollern (German: Leopold Stephan Karl Anton Gustav Eduard Tassilo Fürst Van Hohenzollern; 22 September 1835 - 8 June 1905) was the head of the Swabian branch of the House of Hohenzollern, and played a fleeting role in European power politics, in connection with the Franco-Prussian War. He was born into the dynasty's Sigmaringen branch, which inherited all the dynasty's Swabian lands when the Hohenzollern-Hechingen branch became extinct.The eldest son of Kaiser and one of the major generals in WWI, commanding the 5th Army and, following, the Army Group B
He proposed the end of war after the Battle of Verdun - Coming from an aristocratic Prussian family, Paul von Hindenburg joined the Prussian army as a young man, retiring as a general in 1913 at age 66. Recalled to duty during World War I, he was placed in command of the German forces at the battle of Tannenberg in 1914 against the Russians which, due to a combination of his skillful tactics and staggeringly incompetent leadership on the part of the Russian generals, resulted in a disastrous defeat for the Russian army, which lost an estimated 350,000 men. In 1916 he was made supreme commander of all German forces. He retired from the army again in 1919, but in 1925 returned to public life as a candidate for President of Germany, and won the election. He ran for re-election in 1932, not so much because he wanted to but because he was considered the only candidate who could beat Adolf Hitler, which he proceeded to do. Hindenburg had little use for Hitler and the Nazi party and did what he could to thwart their grab for power, but it was too little too late--in 1933, due to the Nazi party's gains in local and national elections and their majority of seats in the German parliament, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor, and later he signed the Enabling Act of 1933, which granted sweeping powers to the government formed by Hitler. Frustrated, frail and in poor health, Hindenburg died the next year.The loser of Occidental Front and future chancellor of Germany
- Joseph Joffre was born on 12 January 1852 in Rivesaltes, France. He died on 3 January 1931 in Paris, France.
- Ferdinand Foch was born on 2 October 1851 in Tarbes, France. He died on 20 March 1929 in Paris, France.
- Erich Ludendorff was born on 9 April 1865 in Kruszewnia, Prussia, Germany [now Kruszewnia, Wielkopolskie, Poland]. He was a producer, known for Es soll ein Schwert durch Deine Seele dringen (1918), Mutual Weekly, No. 146 (1917) and Die dritte Generation (1972). He was married to Mathilde Friederike Karoline Spiess and Margarethe Charlotte Catharina Schmidt. He died on 20 December 1937 in Tutzing, Bavaria, Germany.The winner of Oriental Front and first national-socialist candidate to chancellor
- Alexander Kerensky was born in Simbirsk, Russia, in 1881, the son of a lower-ranking nobleman in the Russian aristocracy. As a law student he gained renown for his skillful defense of socialist activists arrested by the Czarist police, which may well have contributed to his political party, the Socialist Revolution, being outlawed in 1912. That same year he was elected to the Russian Duma (Parliament).
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the Czar, Kerensky was named Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government. He was appointed Minister of War in May of that year, and since Russia was still involved in World War I, he made preparations for a new offensive against the Germans. Unfortunately, the Russian military had become dispirited, disenchanted and demoralized after a series of crushing defeats and staggering losses (the Battle of Tannenberg alone cost them more than 100,000 dead, brought about mainly because of stupefyingly inept and incompetent leadership), and its soldiers were in no mood or condition to continue fighting for a cause they no longer believed in. In addition, the Russian people themselves were sick of the war and the deprivations that came with it, and the country was being convulsed by strikes, riots and all manner of civil strife. In July of 1917 the Bolsheviks attempted to seize power in the city of Petrograd, and Kerensky sent Cossack troops there to crush the revolt. Later that month he was appointed Prime Minister. He found himself clashing with Gen. Kornilov, commander of the Russian army, who wanted to clamp down on the country and turn it into a military dictatorship. In November of 1917 the Bolsheviks again took advantage of the chaotic conditions in the country and mounted another revolt. This time Kerensky couldn't put it down, and as the revolt spread he was forced to flee Moscow. He sought refuge in London and became part of a Russian "government in exile", but his somewhat heavy-handed methods alienated many of the groups that formed the opposition, especially the White Russians. There was a strong resistance to the Bolsheviks inside Russia itself, and the White Russians had formidable military forces that fought them across Russia, but the resistance finally ended in the 1920s with the Red Army triumphant. Kerensky stayed in England, becoming the editor of a socialist revolutionary newspaper, "Dni", and wrote several books decrying the Communist takeover of his country. In 1940 he moved to the US, where he wrote more books and headed a foundation called the Study of War and Revolution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.
He died in New York City in 1970. - Additional Crew
- Writer
- Actor
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 - 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.- Pershing was born on a farm near Laclede, Missouri, to businessman John Fletcher Pershing and homemaker Ann Elizabeth Thompson. Pershing's great-great-grandfather, Frederick Pershing, whose name originally was Pfersching, emigrated from Alsace, leaving Amsterdam on the ship Jacob, and arriving in Philadelphia on October 2, 1749. Pershing's mother was of English descent. He also had five siblings: brothers James F. (1862-1933) and Ward (1874-1909), and sisters Mary Elizabeth (1864-1928), Anna May (1867-1955) and Grace (1867-1903); three other children died in infancy. When the Civil War began, his father supported the Union and was a sutler for the 18th Missouri Volunteer Infantry. General of the Armies John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing (September 13, 1860 - July 15, 1948) was a senior United States Army officer. His most famous post was when he served as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) on the Western Front in World War I, 1917-18.
Pershing rejected British and French demands that American forces be integrated with their armies, and insisted that the AEF would operate as a single unit under his command, although some American divisions fought under British command, and he also allowed all-black units to be integrated with the French army.
Pershing's soldiers first saw serious battle at Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Soissons. To speed up the arrival of the doughboys, they embarked for France leaving the heavy equipment behind, and used British and French tanks, artillery, airplanes and other munitions. In September 1918 at St. Mihiel, the First Army was directly under Pershing's command; it overwhelmed the salient - the encroachment into Allied territory - that the German Army had held for three years. For the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Pershing shifted roughly 600,000 American soldiers to the heavily defended forests of the Argonne, keeping his divisions engaged in hard fighting for 47 days, alongside the French. The Allied Hundred Days Offensive, which the Argonne fighting was part of, contributed to Germany calling for an armistice. Pershing was of the opinion that the war should continue and that all of Germany should be occupied in an effort to permanently destroy German militarism.
Pershing is the only American to be promoted in his own lifetime to General of the Armies rank, the highest possible rank in the United States Army. Allowed to select his own insignia, Pershing chose to use four gold stars to distinguish himself from those officers who held the rank of General, which was signified with four silver stars. After the creation of the five-star General of the Army rank during World War II, his rank of General of the Armies could unofficially be considered that of a six-star general, but he died before the proposed insignia could be considered and acted on by Congress.
Some of his tactics have been criticized both by other commanders at the time and by modern historians. His reliance on costly frontal assaults, long after other Allied armies had abandoned such tactics, has been blamed for causing unnecessarily high American casualties. In addition to leading the A.E.F. to victory in World War I, Pershing notably served as a mentor to many in the generation of generals who led the United States Army during World War II, including George Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Lesley J. McNair, George S. Patton, and Douglas MacArthur. - Communist leader. He was chief theorist, a leader in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions alongside Vladimir Lenin. As commissar for foreign affairs, Trotsky arranged the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. He next became head of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, which resulted in the deaths of over a million White Army soldiers and Cossacks, upon orders from Vladimir Lenin. He had Russian peasants and workers forcibly conscripted into the Red Army, but he proved to be a poor military leader and the Russian invasion of Poland in the 1920s was repulsed by Polish forces under Marshal Józef Pilsudski, with very heavy Russian losses. Trotsky and his arch-rival Joseph Stalin struggled for power after Lenin's death in 1924. Stalin eventually stripped Trotsky of his influence by 1929, and expelled him from Russia in 1936. Trotsky spent the rest of his life in exile, living in the home of Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera in Mexico. There he was writing and preaching revolution, until he was assassinated by Spanish communist Ramon Mercader, an assassin sent to kill Trotsky by Stalin, in 1940.
- Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the top generals in the Soviet army, was actually born into a family of the Russian nobility. He graduated from the Russian Military Academy shortly before World War I and fought during the war as a Second Lieutenant. Captured by German forces, he escaped from captivity on several occasions, only to be recaptured and imprisoned each time. The Germans finally threw him into Ingolstadt Fortress, which was used to house their most incorrigible prisoners and was considered escape-proof. Tukachevsky promptly escaped from it, eventually making his way back to the Russian lines, where he was decorated for bravery.
After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 he joined the Red Army, and was made an officer. His military abilities enabled him to rise rapidly through the ranks, and during the Russian Civil War that followed the Revolution, he was made commander of the Red forces defending Moscow. His successful defense of the city caught the eye of Communist commissar Lev Trotskiy, who placed him in command of the elite 5th Army with orders to capture Siberia from the White Russian forces of Gen. Aleksandr Kolchak. Tukhachevsky's innovative tactics hammered the White Russian army, and he not only recaptured Siberia but also defeated White Russian forces in the Crimea and carried his offensive into the Kuban area, where he used his cavalry to great effect and inflicted a crushing defeat on the White army. He mopped up the remaining White forces and over the next few years successfully put down several military revolts and peasant uprisings, in the process gaining a reputation as an effective but ruthless commander who used whatever tools and tactics were necessary to achieve his goals, including mass executions and chemical warfare.
His string of successes was broken during the Soviet-Polish War of 1920 when his armies were defeated in their attack on Warsaw by Polish forces led by Marshal Józef Pilsudski. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin attributed the defeat to what he considered Tukhachevsky's reckless tactics (at one point he disobeyed Stalin's orders for a direct attack on Warsaw, which he believed would fail, and attacked Lvov instead) and Tukhachevsky, for his part, blamed the defeat on what he believed was Stalin's constant interference with military operations for political reasons, and made no secret of his resentment. Stalin, never one to forgive real or imagined slights, didn't forget what he felt to be Tukhachevsky's insubordination. He also saw Tukhachevsky as a potential rival and set about to eliminate that possibility. When Stalin assumed the leadership of the Communist Party in 1929 he used the pretext of complaints from several of Tukhachevsky's subordinate officers to try to implicate him in alleged coup attempt, and his secret police "persuaded" several army officers to accuse Tukhachevsky of doing just that. The tactic didn't work, however, as Stalin couldn't muster enough support among the Politburo and the party hierarchy to eliminate Tukhachevsky, who still enjoyed considerable support because of his war record. Biding his time, Stalin put Tukhachevsky in charge of modernizing the Russian military. One of his more innovative ideas was to place an emphasis on the coordination of air and armored forces in an attack, a tactic that was put to good use in the later Soviet war with Germany.
Tukhachevsky's interests weren't solely confined to military matters, though. A violinist, he became great friends with famed Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the two often played together. The friendship no doubt saved Shostakovich's life when he and his music were denounced in the mid-1930s during the period known as "the great purges" and Shostakovich found himself in danger of arrest and possible execution. However, his friend Tukhachevsky intervened on his behalf with Stalin.
Tukhachevsky was promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935, and in that capacity visited Europe the next year, paying particular attention to France, Germany and Great Britain. Stalin began to grow suspicious of Tukhachevsky's popularity among his officers and men and also among the general public and, still having not forgotten his problems with the general during the Polish war of the 1920s, set out to eliminate him once and for all. He transferred his rival to the Volga Military District, away from his base of support, and finally in 1937 ordered the arrest and trial of Tukhachevky and seven other generals on charges of plotting with "foreign" elements during his European visit to overthrow the Communist government. At the secret court-martial signed confessions by Tukhachevsky's alleged "co-conspirators" were introduced that "proved" he had plotted with Nazi army officers and anti-Communist Russian exiles to overthrow and assassinate Stalin. On June 12, 1937, Tukhachevsky and the seven other generals were convicted, sentenced to death and executed. - Józef Klemens Pilsudski (5 December 1867 - 12 May 1935) was a Polish statesman who served as the Chief of State (1918-1922) and First Marshal of Poland (from 1920). He was considered the DE factors leader (1926-35) of the Second Polish Republic as the Minister of Military Affairs. After World War I, he held increasing dominance in Polish politics and was an active player in international diplomacy. He is viewed as a father of the Second Polish Republic re-established in 1918, 123 years after the final Partition of Poland in 1795.
- Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (28 September 1841 - 24 November 1929) was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 until 1920. A key figure of the Independent Radicals, he was a strong advocate of separation of church and state, amnesty of the Communards exiled to New Caledonia, as well as opposition to colonization. Clemenceau, a physician turned journalist, played a central role in the politics of the Third Republic, most notably successfully leading France through the end of the First World War.Revanchism
- David Lloyd George was born on 17 January 1863 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, England, UK. He was a writer, known for The First World War (2003), Hearst-Selig News Pictorial, No. 26 (1915) and Pathé News, No. 24 (1915). He was married to Frances Stevenson and Mrs. Lloyd George. He died on 26 March 1945 in Ty Newydd, Llanystumdwy, Gwynedd, Wales, UK.
- Mustafa was born in 1881 in Salonica, then an Ottoman Turkish city, in modern day Greece. His father, Ali Riza, a customs official-turned-lumber merchant, died when Mustafa was still a boy. His mother, Zubeyde, a devout and strong-willed woman, raised him and his younger sister by herself. First enrolled in a traditional Islamic religious school, he soon switched to a modern school. In 1893, he entered a military high school where his mathematics teacher gave him the second name Kemal (meaning perfection in Turkish) in recognition of young Mustafa's superior achievement. He was thereafter known as Mustafa Kemal.
In 1905, Mustafa Kemal graduated from the War Academy in Istanbul with the rank of Staff Captain. Posted in Damascus, Syria, then a part of the Ottoman Empire, he started with several colleagues a clandestine society called "Homeland and Freedom" to fight against the Sultan's despotism. In 1908, he helped the group of officers who toppled the Sultan. Mustafa Kemal's career flourished as he won his heroism in the far corners of the Ottoman Empire during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-12 as well as the Balakan Wars of 1913 in which he saw action in Albania and Tripoli, Libya. He also briefly served as a staff officer in Salonica and Istanbul and as a military attache in Sofia, Bulgaria.
In October, 1914, the Ottoman Empire offically entered World War I alongside Germany and Austria as part of the Central Powers fighting the Allies of Great Britian, France, Italy and Russia. In 1915, when the Dardanelles/Galipoli campaign was launched, Mustafa Kemal, recently premoted to Colonel, became a national hero by winning successive victories against the landing British French and ANZAC armies, pinning them down at their beacheads, which finally forced the invaders to evacuate Galipoli in January 1916. Promoted to General later that year, at age 35, he liberated two major provinces in eastern Turkey against the Russian armies. In the next two years, from 1917 to 1918, he served as commander of several Ottoman armies in Palestine, Aleppo, and elsewhere, achieving another major victory by stopping the British advance at Aleppo just before the war-weary Turkish armies agreed to an armistice with the British on October 31, 1918 which ended World War I in the Middle East. As a result of the Ottoman Empire's defeat, the Turks lost all of their Middle East territories with the exception of the traditional Turkish area around the region of Asia Minor.
On May 19, 1919, Mustafa Kemal Pasha landed in the Black Sea port of Samsun to start the Greco-Turkish War, (known to the Turks as the War of Independence.) In defiance of the Sultan's government, he rallied a liberation army in Anatolia and convened the Congress of Erzurum and Sivas which established the basis for the new national effort under his leadership. On April 23, 1920, the Grand National Assembly was inaugurated. Mustafa Kemal Pasha was elected as its President. Fighting on many fronts, he led his forces to victory against rebels and the invading Greek armies. Following the Turkish triumph at the two major battles at Izunu in Western Turkey, the Grand National Assembly conferred on Mustafa Kemal Pasha the title of Commander-in-Chief with the rank of Marshal. At the end of August 1922, the Turkish armies won their ultimate victory. Within a few weeks, the Turkish mainland was completely liberated, an armistice with Greece was signed, and the rule of the Ottoman dynasty was abolished.
In July 1923, the national government signed the Lausanne Treaty with Great Britain, France, Greece, Italy, and others countries which regonized the new country of Turkey. In mid-October, Ankara became the capital of the new Turkish State. On October 29, the Republic was proclaimed and Mustafa Kemal Pasha was unanimously elected President of the Republic. Kemal married Latife Usakligil in early 1923. The marriage ended in divorce in 1925.
The account of Kemal Atatürk's fifteen year Presidency (1923-1938) is a saga of dramatic modernization. With indefatigable determination, he created a new political and legal system based on a Swiss Civil Code, abolished the Islamic Caliphate and made both government and education secular, gave equal rights to women, changed the Turkish language by transfering the written language from the Arabic script to the Roman alphabet, and the attire from Islamic to Western, and advanced the arts and the sciences, agriculture and industry.
In 1934, when the surname law was adopted, the national parliament gave him the name "Atatürk" (Turkish for Father of the Turks). A heavy drinker most of his life, Atatürk developed liver and kidney problems durng the last year of his life. He died on November 10, 1938, at age 57. The "national liberator" and the "Father of modern Turkey" was dead. But his legacy to his people and to the world endures to this very day. - Additional Crew
Joseph Stalin (a code name meaning "Man of Steel") was born Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, the Transcaucasian part of the Russian Empire. His father was a cobbler named Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a drunkard who beat him badly and frequently and left the family when Joseph was young. His mother, Ekaterina Gheladze, supported herself and her son (her other three children died young and Jopseph was effectively an only child) by taking in washing. She managed, despite great hardship, to send Joseph to school and then on to Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, hoping he would become a priest. However, after three years of studies he was expelled in 1899, for not attending an exam and for propagating communist ideas and the books of Karl Marx.
Since 1898, Stalin became active in the Communist underground as the organizer of a powerful gang involved in a series of armed robberies. After robbing several banks in southern Russia, Stalin delivered the stolen money to Vladimir Lenin to finance the Communist Party. Stalin's gang was also involved in the murders of its political opponents; Stalin himself was arrested seven times, repeatedly imprisoned, and twice exiled to Siberia between 1902 and 1913. During those years he changed his name twice and became more closely identified with revolutionary Marxism. He escaped many times from prison and was shuttling money between Lenin and other communists in hiding, where his intimacy with Lenin and Bukharin grew, as did his dissatisfaction with fellow Communist leader Lev Trotskiy. In 1912 he was co-opted on to the illegal Communist Central Committee. At that time he wrote propaganda articles, and later edited the Communist paper, "Pravda" (Truth). As Lenin's apprentice he joined the Communist majority (Bolsheviks), and was responsible for the consolidation of several secret communist cells into a larger ring. Stalin's Communist ring in St. Petersburg and across Russia played the leading role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the revolution the Bolsheviks Communists grabbed the power, then Communists murdered the Tsar and the Russian royal family. Stalin and Lenin took over the Tsar's palaces and used the main one in Kremlin as their private residence.
Lenin appointed Stalin the People's Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet government and a member of the Communist Politburo, thus giving him unlimited power. Stalin led the "Reds" against anti-Communist forces known as the "Whites" and also in the war with Poland. He also organized "Red Terror" in Tsaritsin (later renamed Stalingrad). With his appointment as General Secretary to the Party Central Committee in 1922, a post he held for the next 30 years, until his death, he consolidated the power that would ensure his control of the country after Lenin's death in 1924. He also took, or gave himself, other key positions that enabled him to amass total power in the Party and Soviet government.
Stalin was known for his piercing eyes and terrifying stare, which he used to cow his opponents into submission during private discussions. In 1927 Stalin requested medical help for his insomnia, anger and severe anxiety disorder. His doctors diagnosed him as having "typical clinical paranoia" and recommended medical treatment. Instead, Stalin became angry and summoned his secret service agents. The next day the chief psychiatrist, Dr. Bekhterev, and his assistants died of poisoning. In addition, before the doctors' diagnosis about Stalin's mental condition could become known, he ordered the executions of intellectuals, resulting in the murders of hundreds of thousands of doctors, professors, writers, and others.
Stalin's policy of amassing dictatorial power under the guise of building "socialism in the country" resulted in brutal extermination of all real and perceived anti-Communist opposition. His purges of the Soviet military brought about the execution of tens of thousands of army officers, many of them experienced combat veterans of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Polish campaigns and other military operations (this decimation of the Russian officer corps would result in the Soviet Union's initial defeats at the hands of Nazi invaders at the beginning of World War II). He also isolated and disgraced his political rivals, notably Trotsky. Stalin's economic policies of strict centralized planning (i.e., the "five-year plans") resulted in the near ruination of the Soviet economy and mass famines in many areas of the Soviet Union, notably in Central Russia and the Ukraine. Popular resistance to Stalin's policies, such as nationalization of private lands and collective farming, by independent farmers ("kulaks"), brought about brutal retaliation, in which millions of kulaks were either forced off their land or executed outright. Altogether Stalin's economic and political policies resulted in the deaths of up to 10 million peasants during 1926-1934. Between 1934 and 1939 he organized and led massive purge (known as "The Great Terror") of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the Soviet people" were imprisoned, exiled or executed. In the late 1930s, Stalin sent some Red Army forces and material to support the Spanish Republican government in its fight against the rebels led by Gen. Francisco Franco and aided by troops and material from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Stalin made the Non-Aggression Pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939, which bought the Soviet Union two years' respite from involvement in World War 2. After the German invasion in 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of Generalissimus. He had no formal military training and scorned the advice of his senior officers, due to suspicion and his rising paranoia, actions that resulted in horrific losses to the Russian military in both men and material (not to mention civilian losses). He rejected military plans made by such experienced officers as Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and insisted they be replaced by his own plans, which led to even more horrific losses. Towards the end of WWII he took part in the conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Clement Attlee. The agreements reached in those conferences resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of postwar Castern and Central Europe.
From 1945 until his death Stalin resumed his repressive measures at home, resulting in censorship of the arts, literature and cinema, forced exiles of hundreds of thousands and the executions of intellectuals and other potential "enemies of the state". At that time he conducted foreign policies that contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Stalin had little interest in family life, although he was married twice and had several mistresses. His first wife (Ekaterina Svanidze, married c. 1904) died three years after their marriage and left a son, Jacob (also known as Yacov), an officer in the Russian army during World War II who was captured by the Nazis and died in a POW camp (his father refused German offers to exchange him for captured German officers). His second wife (Nadezhda Alliluyeva, married 1919) attempted to moderate his politics, but she died by suicide, leaving a daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, and an alcoholic son, Vasili Stalin, who later died in exile. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin launched attacks on such intellectuals as Osip Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many other cultural luminaries. Stalin personally intervened in the fate of "counterrevolutionary" Yiddish writers and changed their sentences from exile to execution. Thirteen of them were executed by the Soviet secret police; their leader, Perets Markish, was executed in the typical KGB manner by a single gunshot to the head on August 12, 1952, in Moscow.
Stalin died suddenly on March 5, 1953, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, after announcing his intention to arrest Jewish doctors, whom he believed were plotting to kill him. The "official" cause of death was announced as brain hemorrhage. Stalin's apprentice, Georgi Malenkov, took the power, but was soon ousted by Nikita Khrushchev. Three years after death, Stalin was posthumously denounced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 for crimes against the Party and for building a "cult of personality." In 1961 Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's Mausoleum, where it had been displayed since his death, and buried near the Kremlin wall. In 1964 Leonid Brezhnev dismissed Khrushchev and brought back some of Stalin's hard-line policies. After 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a series of liberal political reforms known as "glasnost" and "perstroika", and many of Stalin's victims were posthumously rehabilitated, and the whole phenomenon of "Stalinism" was officially condemned by the Russian authorities.In the twentieth century, no one made more victims than Stalin. His fame of violent man began in the Civil War.On power let millions perish from hunger or cold in forced marches. He invaded Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and after Finland and repressed ethnic minorities. Despite this, the Soviet propaganda presented him as a kind man, the "Comrade Great Leader."
He also had his merits, industrialized the U.S.S.R and never bowed to itself, deserving the name with which it is remembered in History: "Iron Man"- Writer
- Actor
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born in Predappio, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. He was the son of Alessandro Mussolini, a socialist, and Rosa Maltoni, a devout Catholic schoolteacher. In 1915, Mussolini married Donna Rachele Guidi. Together, they had five children. On October 31, 1922, at the age of 39, Mussolini became the Prime Minister of Italy. He was removed from power and placed under arrest by order of King Victor Emmanuel III in July 1943, but two months later was rescued by the Germans and installed as the puppet leader of a German client state, the Italian Social Republic. On April 28, 1945, Mussolini was shot dead by Italian Communists in Giulino di Mezzegra, Lombardy, Italy and his corpse was hung by its feet. He was 61 years old.Mafia avenged him, exchanging Lucky Luciano's freedom
by the Sicily invasion.- Born the fourth of six children to Austrian customs officer Alois Hitler--who had been married twice before--and the former Klara Polzl, Adolf Hitler grew up in a small Austrian town in the late 19th century. He was a slow learner and did poorly in school. He was frequently beaten by his authoritarian father. Things got worse when Adolf's older brother, Alois Jr., ran away from home. His mild-mannered mother occasionally tried to shield him, but was ineffectual. Adolf's attempt to run away at 11 was unsuccessful. At the age of 14 he was freed when his hated father died - an event that he did not mourn.
Hitler dropped out of high school at age 16 and went to Vienna, where he strove to become an artist, but was refused twice by the Vienna Art Academy. By this time Hitler had become an ardent German nationalist--although he was not German but Austrian--and when World War I broke out, he crossed into Germany and joined a Bavarian regiment in the German army. He was assigned as a message runner but also saw combat. Temporarily blinded after a gas attack in Flanders in 1918, he received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and was promoted from private to corporal. In 1918, when the war ended, Hitler stayed in the army and was posted to the Intelligence division. He was assigned to spy on several radical political parties that were considered a threat to the German government. One such organization was the German Workers' Party. Hitler was drawn by party founder Dietrich Eckart, a morphine addict who propagated doctrines of mysticism and anti-Semitism. Hitler soon joined the party with the help of his military intelligence ties. He became party spokesman in 1919, renamed it the National Socalist German Workers Party (NSDAP/NAZI) and declared himself its Führer (leader) one year later. In 1920 Hitler's intelligence handler, Munich-based colonel named Karl Haushofer, introduced the swastika insignia. In 1921 Haushofer founded the paramilitary Storm Troopers ("Sturmabteilung", or SA), composed of German veterans of WWI and undercover military intelligence officers. They helped Hitler to organize a coup attempt--the infamous "beer hall putsch"--against the Bavarian government in Munich in 1923, but it failed. The "rebels" marched on Munich's city hall, which was cordoned off by police. Hitler's men fired at the police and missed; the police fired back and didn't, resulting in several of Hitler's fellow Nazis being shot dead. Hitler himself was arrested, convicted of treason and sent to prison. During his prison time he was coached by his advisers and dictated his book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") to his deputy Rudolf Hess. He only served several months in prison before being released. By 1925 the Nazi party was in much better straits both organizationally and financially, as it had secured the backing of a large group of wealthy conservative German industrialists, who funneled huge amounts of money into the organization. Hitler was provided with a personal bodyguard unit named the "Schutzstaffel", better known as the SS. The Nazis began to gain considerable support in Germany through their network of army and WWI veterans, and Hitler ran for President in 1931. Defeated by the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler next attempted to become Chancellor of Germany. Through under-the-table deals with powerful conservative businessmen and right-wing politicians, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. One month later, a mysterious fire--which the Nazis claimed had been started by "terrorists" but was later discovered to have been set by the Nazis themselves--destroyed the Reichstag (the building housing the German parliament). Then Hitler's machine began to issue a series of emergency decrees that gave the office of Chancellor more and more power.
In March of 1933 Hitler persuaded the German parliament to pass the Enabling Act, which made the Chancellor dictator of Germany and gave him more power than the President. Two months later Hitler began "cleaning house"; he abolished trade unions and ordered mass arrests of members of rival political groups. By the end of 1933 the Nazi Party was the only one allowed in Germany. In June of 1934 Hitler turned on his own and ordered the purge of the now radical SA--that he now saw as a potential threat to his power--which was led by one of his oldest friends, a thug and street brawler named Ernst Röhm. Röhm's ties to Hitler counted for nothing, as Hitler ordered him assassinated. Soon President Hindenburg died, and Hitler merged the office of President with the office of Chancellor. In 1935 the anti-Jewish Nuremburg laws were passed on Hitler's authorization. A year later, with Germany now under his total control, he sent troops into the Rhineland, which was a violation of the World War I Treaty of Versailles. In 1938 he forced the union of Austria with Germany and also took the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia near the German border with a large ethnic German population, on the pretext of "protecting" the German population from the Czechs. In March 1939 Hitler overran the rest of Czechoslovakia. On 23 August 1939 Hitler and Joseph Stalin made a non-aggression treaty. In September of 1939 Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland. France and the British Commonwealth and Empire declared war on Germany. In 1940 Germany occupied Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, and launched a major offensive against France. Paris fell and France surrendered, after which Hitler considered invading the UK. However, after the German Air Force was defeated in the Battle of Britain, the invasion was canceled. The British had begun bombing German cities in May 1940, and four months later Hitler retaliated by ordering the Blitz. In 1941 German troops assisted Italy, which under dictator Benito Mussolini was a German ally, in its takeover of Yugoslavia and Greece. Meanwhile, in Germany and the occupied countries, a program of mass extermination of Jews had begun.
On June 22, 1941, German forces invaded the Soviet Union. In addition to more than 4,000,000 German troops, there were additional forces from German allies Romania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain and Finland, among others. Hitler used multinational forces in order to save Germans for the future colonization of the Russian lands. Following the detailed Nazi plan, code-named "Barbarossa," Hitler was utilizing resources of entire Europe under Nazi control to feed the invasion of Russia. Three groups of Nazi armies invaded Russia: Army Group North besieged Leningrad for 900 days, Army Group Center reached Moscow and Army Group South occupied Ukraine, reached Caucasus and Stalingrad. After a series of initial successes, however, the German Armies were stopped at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis for 900 days until the city of 4,000,000 virtually starved itself to death. Only in January of 1944 was Marshal Georgi Zhukov able to finally defeat the German forces and liberate the city, finally lifting the siege after a cost of some 2,000,000 lives. In 1943 several major battles occurred at Kursk (which became the largest tank battle in history), Kharkov and Stalingrad, all of which the Germans lost. The battle for Stalingrad was one of the largest in the history of mankind. At Stalingrad alone the Germans lost 360,000 troops, in addition to the losses suffered by Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Croatian and other forces, but the Russians lost over one million men. By 1944--the same year the Western allies invaded occupied Europe--Germany was retreating on both fronts and its forces in Africa had been completely defeated, resulting in the deaths and/or surrender of several hundred thousand troops. Total human losses during the six years of war were estimated at 60,000,000, of which 27,000,000 were Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and other people in Soviet territory. Germany lost over 11,000,000 soldiers and civilians. Poland and Yugoslavia lost over 3,000,000 people each. Italy and France lost over 1,000,000 each. Most nations of Central and Eastern Europe suffered severe--and in some cases total--economic destruction.
Hitler's ability to act as a figurehead of the Nazi machine was long gone by late 1944. Many of his closest advisers and handlers had already fled to other countries, been imprisoned and/or executed by the SS for offenses both real--several assassination attempts on Hitler--and imagined, or had otherwise absented themselves from Hitler's inner circle. For many years Hitler was kept on drugs by his medical personnel. In 1944 a group of German army officers and civilians pulled off an almost successful assassination attempt on Hitler, but he survived. Hitler, by the beginning of 1945, was a frail, shaken man who had almost totally lost touch with reality. The Russians reached Berlin in April of that year and began a punishing assault on the city. As their forces approached the bunker where Hitler and the last vestiges of his government were holed up, Hitler killed himself. Just a day earlier he had married his longtime mistress Eva Braun. Hitler's corpse was taken to Moscow and later shown to Allied Army Commanders and diplomats. Joseph Stalin showed Hitler's personal items to Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman at the Potsdam Conference after the victory. Hitler's personal gun was donated to the museum of the West Point Military Academy in New York. Some of his personal items are now part of the permanent collection at the National History Museum in Moscow, Russia.There must be something wrong with a person who did not like Brahms music.
He intended to do with Russia- for 1.000 years-what the English had done to Ireland for over 300 years.
Besides the English leaders, other people who served as model for Hitler were Julius Caesar and Charlemagne. - Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teoula Franco y Bahamonde was born on December 4, 1892, in Ferrol, Spain. He entered the Spanish Military Academy in 1907 and upon graduation three years later was commissioned as a lieutenant. His career path seemed assured after he was detailed to the colony of Spanish Morocco to fight against the Berber tribes and acquitted himself well. In 1916 he won the Battle of El Biutz, which stopped Berber attacks against Spanish outposts. In 1923 he was appointed commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion, and in 1926 at the age of 33 was named the army's youngest brigadier general.
Franco returned to Spain in 1927 to lead the National Military Academy. He was assigned to quell a miners' strike in the Masturias in 1934, and revealed himself to be a ruthless authoritarian by ordering the execution of over 2,000 miners and other workers who were "suspected" of being Marxists. Franco proved to be one of Spain's staunchest and most rabid anti-Communists, and as such was invited to take a leading role in a right-wing coup being planned by fellow officers to overthrow the government of the Republic of Spain, which had large numbers of Socialist and democratic members in its ruling circles. Franco accepted and, shortly after the revolt broke out on July 17, 1936, he was named commander of the nationalist forces with the title of "Generalísimo". Although he had hoped to seize control of the government quickly, the republican forces proved to be more formidable than Franco and his conspirators had counted on, and the struggle evolved into a full-scale civil war that lasted nearly three years. With much political, financial and material support from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, both of whom sent tanks, arms and even combat troops to aid him, Franco emerged as the victor, capturing the capital of Madrid on March 28, 1939, which ended the Spanish Civil War. Named "el caudillo" (the leader), dictator for life, Generalísimo Franco proved to be an astute political leader as well as a masterful military commander. Although he owed a great debt to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy for their aid, he managed to keep Spain officially neutral during World War II despite pressure from many senior political and military leaders in the government to enter the war on the side of the Axis Powers. Franco was initially keen to join the Axis, and wrote to Hitler offering to join the war on 19 June 1940. However by the end of the year he had decided to stay out of the conflict and let Spain recover from the terrible civil war that wrecked its economy and severely weakened its military. Nevertheless he provided considerable help to the Axis from 1940 to 1943. After the Axis Powers were defeated in 1945, Spain was isolated for many years before Franco tried allying himself with the west by pushing his anti-Communist "credentials". Spain was admitted into the United Nations in 1955 and was soon allied with the United States and other western powers. He served as supreme leader of Spain until his death on November 20, 1975, at the age of 82. - Reinhard Heydrich began his career as an officer in the post-World War I German navy. He was dishonorably discharged after becoming involved in an illicit love affair. The young woman became pregnant, but instead of marrying her, Heydrich met and soon got engaged to Lina von Osten. In 1930 Heydrich, now unemployed, was persuaded by his wife to join Adolf Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) party, which he did the next year; he also became a member of the SS at that same time. As one of its first officers, Heydrich was tasked by Heinrich Himmler to expand the small organization into an internal security force to monitor the Nazi party. The result was the creation of the SD (Sicherheistdienst [Security Service]), which was combined, in 1934, with the Gestapo (Gestaatspolizei, or state secret police) to form the much feared SS Security Police, which Heydrich--now an SS Brigadier General--commanded. He played a major role in the destruction of the SA, known as the "storm troopers", which was an internal security service set up by Hitler but which he now suspected of plotting against him; the organization was destroyed and many of its officers, including its leader, Ernst Röhm, were murdered in June of 1934. For his services Heydrich was made a Lieutenant-General in the SS.
At the start of World War II Heydrich became commander of the consolidated Reich security forces, which he formed into the Reich Security Central Office of the SS. Also, by this time, Heydrich had become a major figure in the rounding up and planned extermination of Europe's Jews. On his orders, the SS-Einsatzgruppen--Special Groups--were created for the purpose of hunting down, rounding up and exterminating Jews in Poland and Russia. Three years later, in 1942, he chaired the infamous Wannsee Conference, where the decision was made to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. Promoted to SS-General (Obergruppenfuhrer), Heydrich was made the Reich Governor of Czechoslovakia at the start of 1942. Aware of how powerful, cunning and dangerous Heydrich was, British intelligence agents put together an operation designed to kill him, and trained and dispatched three Czech exiles to Prague. The assassination was carried out in May of 1942. Heydrich died a short while later, on June 4th, the same day of the historic Battle of Midway in the Pacific.
If ever a truly monstrous and evil man existed, it was Reinhard Heydrich, one of the masterminds of the Holocaust. In a horrific act of revenge, called "Operation Reinhard," Hitler had the entire village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia--near where Heydrich was killed--exterminated. All male inhabitants above the age of 15 were shot; all other residents were sent to concentration camps, and the village itself was physically wiped off the face of the earth. Heydrich was buried with full honors. His grave on the Invalidenfriedhof in Berlin is now anonymous in order to prevent any form of remembrance.A lethal illusionist German with Jewish ancestry. - Writer
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Born in Blenheim Palace, the residence of his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His father was the Duke's third son, Lord Randolph Churchill. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of an American financier.
After passing through famous English public schools such as Harrow, he went on to fulfill his ambition for a life in the army. He fought in various parts of the British Empire until in 1900 when he won the Conservative seat in Oldham in the general election. From here until 1929 he held various offices in British Parliament.
The 1930s saw fascism grow in strength throughout Europe with dictators such as Italy's Benito Mussolini, Germany's Adolf Hitler and Spain's Francisco Franco. When the UK and France declared war on Germany in 1939, Neville Chamberlain was British Prime Minister. On May 10, 1940 Hitler's forces invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in order to invade France. Chamberlain was widely blamed for the failed British invasion of Norway, although realistically Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty was largely to blame for the failure of the Norwegian Campaign. Chamberlain recommended the King should ask Churchill to succeed him as Prime Minister. He made a speech on 13 May: "You ask: 'What is our policy?' I will say: 'It is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalog of human crime.' That is our policy. You ask: 'What is our aim?' I can answer in one word: 'Victory! Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.'"
The United States officially entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The US's participation was excellent news to Churchill and after success on D-Day and as the Nazi forces were gradually forced back, the war in Europe gradually drew to a close. He lost the 1945 General Election by a landslide, lost again in 1950, but was re-elected as Prime Minister in 1951 despite receiving fewer votes than Labour. Due to deteriorating health he retired in 1955. He died at Hyde Park Gate, London, on January 24, 1965 at the age of 90. He had succeeded in the uniting of thought and deed. He had succeeded in uniting everyone in the common purpose, inspiring them with fortitude and strength to face whatever hardships that would have to be incurred in the process of first surviving and ultimately winning the war. His daughter Mary wrote to him on his death bed: "I owe you what every Englishman, woman, and child owes you - liberty itself."
As one of the most significant British politicians of the 20th century, Churchill remains one of the country's most widely recognized figures. He has been played by an almost incalculable number of actors on screen, but three of the most notable and acclaimed screen portrayals were by Robert Hardy in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981) (which covers Churchill's life from 1929 to 1939), Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002) (also set in the 1930s before he became Prime Minister) and Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour (2017) (set in May 1940).
As well as a politician, Churchill was also an author and a prolific artist, who painted over 500 canvases, exhibited at the Royal Academy and at Paris, and sold paintings.Refusing any agreement with the Germans, Churchill had his big moment in Yalta, where England seemed to retain its power of the last 300 years. But the British people, fearing the future, not reelected him.- Haile Selassie I (23 July 1892 - 27 August 1975) was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. He rose to power as Regent Plenipotentiary of Ethiopia (Enderase) for Empress Zewditu from 1916. Haile Selassie is widely considered a defining figure in modern Ethiopian history, and the key figure of Rastafari, a religious movement in Jamaica which emerged shortly after he became emperor in the 1930s. He was a member of the Solomonic dynasty which claims to trace lineage to Emperor Menelik I, believed to be the son of King Solomon and Makeda the Queen of Sheba.
- Joachim von Ribbentrop was born on 30 April 1893 in Wesel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He was married to Anna Elisabeth Henkell. He died on 16 October 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany.
- Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov (1890 - 8 November 1986) was a Russian politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s onward. He served as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1930 to 1941 and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956.
- Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Pétain (24 April 1856 - 23 July 1951), commonly known as Philippe Pétain, was a French general who attained the position of Marshal of France at the end of World War I, during which he became known as The Lion of Verdun (French: Le lion DE Verdun). From 1940 to 1944, during World War II, he served as head of the collaborationist regime of Vichy France. Pétain, who was 84 years old in 1940, ranks as France's oldest head of state."Marechal de France"
- Maxime Weygand was a French military commander in World War I and World War II. Born in Belgium, Weygand was raised in France and educated at the Saint-Cyr military academy in Paris. After graduating in 1887, he went on to become an instructor at the Cavalry School at Saumur. During World War I, Weygand served as a staff officer to General (later Marshal) Ferdinand Foch. He then served as an advisor to Poland in the Polish-Soviet War and later High Commissioner of the Levant. In 1931, Weygand was appointed Chief of Staff of the French Army, a position he served until his retirement in 1935 at the age of 68.
In May 1940, Weygand was recalled for active duty and assumed command of the French Army during the German invasion. Following a series of military setbacks, Weygand advised armistice and France subsequently capitulated. He joined Philippe Pétain's Vichy regime as Minister for Defence and served until September 1940, when he was appointed Delegate-General in French North Africa. Weygand favored only limited collaboration with Germany and was dismissed from his post in November 1941 on Hitler's demand. Following the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, Weygand was arrested by the Germans and imprisoned at Itter Castle in Austria until May 1945. After returning to France, he was held as a collaborator at the Val-DE-Grâce but was released in 1946 and cleared of charges in 1948. He died in January 1965 in Paris at the age of 98. - François Darlan was born on 7 August 1881 in Nérac, Lot-et-Garonne, France. He died on 24 December 1942 in Algiers, Algeria, France [now Algeria].
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Tse-tung Mao, along with Yat-sen Sun and Kai-Shek Chiang, was one of the most important figures to modern Chinese history. Born to a peasant family--his father was a farmer--in Shaoshan, China, on December 26, 1893, Mao was raised in the grinding poverty of rural Hunan province, where he developed a hatred of the Imperial Chinese government while still a boy. In 1911 Mao left school to join the revolution against Manchu rule. In the years that followed, Mao grew increasingly more radical, and in 1921 became one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party. When a power struggle between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists erupted into open warfare in 1927, Mao proclaimed "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and eagerly joined the fight. Badly outnumbered by Chaing's army, the Communists were slowly driven out of eastern China and, on the brink of defeat, Mao led a retreat to the mountains of the northwest in 1934, a 6,000-mile trek that became known as "The Long March". Mao emerged as one of the top field commanders and became the chairman of the Chinese People's Communist Party.
After forming a new headquarters at Yenan, Mao remodeled the shattered Red Army into a powerful guerrilla force. By 1937 they were fighting the invading Japanese army from their bases in Manchuria. Striking a truce with the Nationalists, the Communists formed an uneasy alliance with Chaing's army to fight the invading Japanese. After the defeat of Japan in World War II in 1945, Mao's forces soon renewed their struggle against the Nationalists for control of China. By striking where Chiang was weak and cultivating the support of the rural peasants, the Communists were able to negate the Nationalist army's overwhelming superiority in men and materials, and by late 1948 the tide had turned against Chiang. In January 1949 Peking fell to the Red Army, forcing Chaing to flee into exile in Taiwan. In October, 1949 Canton, the last Nationalist stronghold, surrendered and on December 7, 1949, the last Nationalists fled to Taiwan, leaving Mao as the undisputed leader of the newly formed People's Republic of China.
Mao established control on China with a "rule of law" similar to the one in the Soviet Union and began to rebuild the war-torn country. A cunning, intelligent and frequently ruthless leader, Mao slowly helped China grow to become a world power. Relations with the US remained cold, and Mao sent Chinese "volunteers"--who were actually regular troops of the Chinese army--to fight with his Communist allies in North Korea in the early 1950s when they were on the verge of defeat after having initially invaded South Korea. Relations remained cold after China tested its first nuclear weapon in the late 1950s. Mao's so-called "five-year plans" to rebuild the farming and industrial economy cost the lives of millions of peasants and political opponents who spoke out against his policies. As relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated in the late 1960s, relations with the US slowly improved and in 1972 the US and China officially established diplomatic relations, with the US officially recognizing the People's Republic of China.
As he got older, Mao's legendary large appetite resulted in his being grossly overweight by age 60, and his being a heavy smoker also contributed to his growing health problems, but he still remained in firm control of his country. Mao died in 1976 at age 82.- Kai-Shek Chiang was born on 31 October 1887 in Hsikow, Chekiang, China. He was married to Madame Chiang. He died on 5 April 1975 in Taipei, Taiwan.Taiwan governor
- Gustaf Mannerheim was born on 4 June 1867 in Askainen, Finland. He was married to Anastasia Arapova. He died on 27 January 1951 in Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland.The leader of Finland and his hero during the Soviet invasion
- Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Communist President of Yugoslavia, and 1st Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement, was born as Josip Broz on May 7, 1892, in the village of Kumrovec, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Croatia). He was the seventh of 15 children born to Roman Catholic peasants. His blacksmith father, Franjo Broz, was a Croat, and his mother, Marija, was Slovene. After spending part of his childhood years with his maternal grandfather in Podsreda (present-day Slovenia), he returned to Kumrovec to attend school. He failed the first grade and left his formal education behind in 1905, to be apprenticed with a locksmith. As a journeyman locksmith he moved around the Empire.
The 18-year-old Broz joined the Croatian Social Democratic Party, and in 1913, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army. At the beginning of World War I, Broz, who had won a silver medal at an army fencing competition in May of 1914, was sent to Ruma. It was there he began to find himself and his life's calling, and was later arrested for anti-war propaganda and imprisoned. He was sent to Galicia to fight against the Russians and Serbs in 1915, and was seriously wounded by shellfire. In April 1915 his entire battalion was captured by the Russians.
The wounded Broz spent several months convalescing in a military hospital, where he learned to speak Russian. In the fall of 1916 he was sent to a work camp in the Ural mountains. While at the camp the first Russian Revolution of February 1917 (March, new style) occurred, culminating in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on March 15th. Broz was arrested for organizing demonstrations among the prisoners of war in April 1917, but he escaped and joined the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd after the first revolution), engaging in street fighting during the attempted Bolshevik coup d'etat in Petrograd on July 16-17, 1917.
The Bolshevik insurrection failed to spark a wider revolt and was crushed by forces loyal to Aleksandr Kerensky, head of the provisional government. Broz fled for Finland to try to avoid arrest, but he was captured and sent to prison. He escaped from a train taking him to another work camp and in November joined the Red Army in Omsk, Siberia, fighting with the Red Guards in the first years of the Russian Civil War, pitting Reds against Whites (royalists). Broz applied for membership in the Russian Communist Party in the spring of 1918.
The Treaty of Versailles incorporated the territory of Croatia into the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and when he returned to his village in 1920, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). Now employed as a metalworker, Broz became a union organizer. He was arrested after a Bosnian KPJ member assassinated the Yugoslav Minister of the Interior, which led to the outlawing of the KPJ. Broz switched his organizing activities to the underground, and in April 1927 he had ascended to the KPJ's Committee in Zagreb. As a KPJ committeeman he caught the attention of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Through Soviet influence, Broz was raised to the position of deputy of the Politburo of the KPJ Central Committee and named leader of the Croatian and Slovenian committees.
By 1934 parliamentary democracy in Yugoslavia had been replaced by a dictatorship under the Yugoslav king, and the KPJ remained banned. It was in this year, shortly after his release from his latest prison sentence, that Broz was named a full member of the KPJ Politburo and Central Committee. He adopted nomme de guerre "Tito" to use in his party work (possibly because "tito alba", the owl, a creature of the night, which also represents wisdom).
The newly nicknamed Tito went to the USSR in 1935, where he served in the Communist International's (Comintern) Balkan section. After a year with the Comintern, Tito, who apparently won the confidence of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, was named Secretary-General of the KPJ and returned to Yugoslavia to rebuild the party. Tito filled party posts with his hand-picked replacements. Eventually his position as Secretary-General of the KPJ was officially ratified by KPJ members at a secret meeting in Zagreb in 1940.
The Yugoslav government was pressured by Germany and Italy to join the Axis Powers. Initially it resisted, but finally threw in its lot with the Axis on March 25, 1941, under duress. On March 27th the government was overthrown by a pro-Western military coup in Belgrade, thus aborting Yugoslavia's alliance with the Axis. Ten days later, on April 6th, Yugoslavia was invaded by German, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops, and the Royal Yugoslav army was vanquished in less than two weeks, surrendering on April 17th.
When the Axis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Stalin ordered the KPJ to offer no resistance due to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact signed in August 1939. Despite ample warning, Stalin did not believe Adolf Hitler would attack the Soviet Union. What he did not know about the Axis incursion into Yugoslavia was that Hitler was securing his southern flank prior to the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the imminent invasion of the USSR. When Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, it now became a duty for a communist to defend his "motherland" by fighting the Axis powers. Tito called a meeting of the Central committee, which named him Military Commander. The partisans' struggle began with Tito's call to arms for the people of Yugoslavia with the slogan, "Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People!"
Their prior organization as underground communist cells used to functioning in secrecy and with the strictest discipline meant that Tito's partisans were very well-organized and extremely effective. His aim was not only to liberate Yugoslavia but establish the KPJ in liberated areas. Revolutionary governments were established in areas the partisans liberated, which foreshadowed the administrative structure of postwar Yugoslavia.
The non-communists, mostly Serbian Chetniks, also fought against the Axis and had the support of both the British and the Yugoslav government in exile. However, they were not seen as effective as Tito's partisans, and the US and the UK switched their support to the partisans after they successfully fought off ferocious Axis attacks from January to June 1943. The partisans were officially recognized at the Tehran Conference, with the result that Allied arms, supplies and agents were parachuted behind Axis lines to assist them. Stilll, Tito refused to cooperate with the government-in-exile in London.
After the February 1945 Yalta Conference, at which the parameters of postwar Europe were agreed upon, Marshal Tito consolidated his power and that of the KPJ by purging his government of non-communists. Tito signed an agreement with the USSR on April 5, 1945, that permitted "temporary entry of Soviet troops into Yugoslav territory". With the help of the Red Army, Tito's partisans won the war against the Axis and their collaborators. Tito then ordered foreign troops off of Yugoslav soil after V-E Day, and turned to eliminating domestic rivals, including members of the originally anti-fascist Chetnik movement (who eventually collaborated with the Germans to try to stop Tito) and the fascist Ustashe, who from the beginning had supported the Nazis as a vassal state in Croatia. Members of both organizations were summarily tried and executed en masse. General Dragoljub Draza Mihailovic, the Chetnik leader, was executed in March 1946.
Winning the rigged November 1945 elections, Tito imposed a new constitution on Yugoslavia. He further consolidated his power by organizing a strong army and a secret police force (the UDBA), both of which were personally loyal to him. In the postwar years Tito used the UDBA to eliminate Nazi collaborators. He also targeted Catholic priests and those who had opposed the communist-led war effort. The purge was eventually extended to include even those communists who did not agree with Tito.
Initially, the economy and society were collectivized in Soviet fashion, although he did not push for the collectivization of agriculture. Tito began to resent Stalin's constant meddling with his government and his suggestions on how Tito should run his economy. On his part, Stalin was unhappy with what he perceived as an independent foreign policy that was out of sync with Moscow. Stalin tried to depose Tito but would not go so far as to invade Yugoslavia, whose mountainous terrain had hamstrung Hitler's troops and was ideal territory for partisan attacks against an organized military force.
Tito denounced the Soviet policy of "... unconditional subordination of small socialist countries to one large socialist country." In response, Stalin had Tito and the KPJ expelled from the Cominform in June 1948. The USSR, through its Common Market-style organization called Comecon, boycotted Yugoslavia.
Through the vehicle of UDBA, Tito purged the KPJ of hardcore Stalinists, those that could not be "reeducated." He began decentralizing the economy, putting more power into the hands of workers' councils on the principle of workers' self-management. To keep himself in power and Yugoslavia independent of the USSR, he turned to the West for financial aid. The Greek civil war, pitting mostly Communists against the anti-Communist Greek government, sputtered out after Tito sealed off the border with Greece, effectively keeping arms, supplies and fighters from getting to the Communist rebels.
After the death of Stalin in March 5, 1953, Tito attempted a reconciliation with the USSR, meeting with new CPSU party boss Nikita Khrushchev in Belgrade in 1955. The meeting resulted in the Belgrade Declaration, which affirmed equality in relations between communist countries (although in the case of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, that equality was observed in the breach rather than the observance).
Freed to a degree of the Soviet threat, Tito's policy of "nonengagement" developed into a policy of "nonalignment." He overhauled his foreign policy to promote a non-aligned bloc between the West and the Warsaw Pact. Convening a meeting of 25 non-aligned states with India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956, a third, alternative neutral bloc came into being. Tito traveled extensively in the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s to promote non-alignment.
On the domestic front, Tito maintained a balance among the different ethnic groups and nationalities of his multi-ethnic country. It ensured stability for as long as the KPJ and the secret police maintained control of Yugoslavia. Tito's system of "symetrical federalism," while predicated upon the principle of equality among the six republics and two autonomous provinces, in fact played the nationalities off against each other.
His ties with the West encouraged trade, which helped boost Yugoslavia's standard of living. Yugoslavia's beaches became a top tourist destination for Western European tourists, due to their beauty, the relative openness of Yugoslav society and the favorable exchange rate, which made an excursion to Yugoslavia very affordable. The economy of some of the Yugoslav provinces, particularly Croatia and Slovenia, thrived during the Cold War.
Marshal Tito was styled President-for-Life in 1974. While he allowed a freer exchange of people and ideas than most of the countries in the communist bloc, the major question of his regime remained would Yugoslavia survive the death of Tito. Without a strongman and the monopoly on power enjoyed by the KPJ, backed up by the army and the secret police, would Yugoslavia remain a country?
Josip Broz Tito died on May 4, 1980 in a hospital in Ljubljana, Slovenia, after being gravely ill for almost four months. He was the last of the World War II leaders to leave the world stage, having outlived his patron, then nemesis Stalin by almost 30 years. The country that he kept together did not outlive him by much more than a decade. Croatian nationalists won the first free elections in their republic in April and May 1990. The independence of Slovenia was proclaimed on June 25, 1991. Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina proclaimed their independence on October 8, 1991 and March 3, 1992 respectively, triggering civil wars in those republics, which left Yugoslavia a rump federation consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro. - Emperor Showa (29 April 1901 - 7 January 1989), commonly known in English-speaking countries by his personal name Hirohito, was the 124th emperor of Japan, ruling from 25 December 1926 until his death in 1989. Hirohito and his wife, Empress Kojun, had two sons and five daughters; he was succeeded by his fifth child and eldest son, Akihito. By 1979, Hirohito was the only monarch in the world with the title "emperor". He was the longest-reigning historical Japanese emperor and one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the world.
- Isoroku Yamamoto was born on April 4, 1884, in Nagoka, Japan, the last of seven children. His first name "Isoroku" translates into the number "56", which was his father's age when he was born. He lived near Nagaoka, entered the Imperial Naval School at age 16 and was an ensign on a cruiser during the Battle of Tshushima on May 27, 1905, during the Russo-Japanese war, in which he lost two fingers on his left hand. He was adopted by the Yamamoto family and took their name. He was promoted to commander and transferred to Tokyo naval headquarters, and soon afterwards he married. He traveled to the US to study economics at Harvard and to also learn about petroleum. During World War I he discovered the importance of military aviation. He was fond of playing Go and Shogi, and was a guest at many dinner parties, picking up an aptitude for bridge and especially poker, at which he became extremely skillful. In 1923 he was appointed head of the air training base at Kasumiguara and became a naval attaché in Washington, DC. He returned to Japan a few years later and became Vice-Minister of the Navy. Favoring air power as a basis for war, Yamamoto championed new aircraft carriers for Japan's navy but opposed the Tripartite Pact of 1939, which formed an alliance among militarist Japan, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In August 1939 he was promoted to full admiral and became the commander-in-chief of Japan's Combined Naval Fleet. He did not wish to go to war with the US, knowing well the full industrial might and will of the Americans, who he believed would prevail in a war against Japan if only by attrition. However, once the military leaders decided on a war, Yamamoto devoted himself, albeit reluctantly, to the task of giving Japan the upper hand by masterminding the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which officially brought both Japan and the US into World War II. Having seen the Japanese defeat in the Battle of Midway in 1942, Yamamoto knew that Japan's chance of winning the war was lost. In 1943 he toured the Solomon Islands during the Battle of Guadalcanal, and took over naval operations. On April 18, 1943, American intelligence, which had been tracking Yamamoto's movements and looking for an opportunity to eliminate him, discovered that he was in a plane flying near the island of Bougainville. A squadron of fighters was quickly dispatched to intercept it, with orders to shoot it down at all costs. The fighters swarmed over Yamamoto's aircraft, and it was soon shot out of the sky, crashing in flames on the island and killing all aboard, including Yamamoto. He was 59 years old.
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Erwin Rommel, aka "The Desert Fox", was one of Adolf Hitler's most able generals during WWII. He joined the German army in 1910 and won awards for bravery in WW I. He was in the 7th Tank Division at the outbreak of WW II and headed the push to the English Channel. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, Rommel led the German army in Africa (known as The Afrika Korps) in its mostly successful North African campaign. He drove the British in Libya back to to El Alamein. This led to his promotion to the rank of Field Marshal. Eventually outmaneuvered by British Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery, he returned to Germany, where he was given charge of the defense of northern France. Implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, he chose suicide rather than execution.Desert Fox, commander of the 'Afrika Korps'.- Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein KG GCB DSO PC DL (17 November 1887 - 24 March 1976 Alton) was a British military officer during World War II sometimes referred to as "Monty". He attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He married Elizabeth Carver and had a son, named David.
He fought in the First World War, where he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and was shot twice, one in the chest, staying 3 hours on the battlefield until he was taken out and treated. During the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), Montgomery was the commanding officer of County Cork, Ireland, the largest county in the area. This conflict was notable for its ferocity and the reprisals carried out by UK forces. He was promoted to general in 1938. During the campaign in France in 1940, he commanded one of the British divisions, and evacuated at Dunkirk. - Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov was born on December 1, 1896, in the village of Strelkovka, Kaluga region, Russia. His parents were peasants. He served during the First World War in the Russian army under Tsar Nicholas II. He was awarded the Cross of St. George twice and promoted for his bravery in battle. He joined the Communist party after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, receiving his first Order of the Battle Red Banner for brutal extermination of non-Communist peasants.
Zhukov was not affected by the "Great Terror" and extermination of intellectuals by Joseph Stalin. His star rose quickly after the executions of much of the Red Army leadership by Stalin in 1937-1939. In 1939 Zhukov defeated Japan's Kwantung Army at the Battle of Halhin Gol. His victory became possible due to his detailed planning and skillful use of motorized artillery against the Japanese forces. For that achievement Zhukov was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and promoted to full general. During the Second World War Zhukov was appointed Chief of the Red Army General Staff for six months until July 1941.
Zhukov was the only top general who had a major disagreement with Stalin on how to resist the advancing Nazi armies. He attempted to convince Stalin that the city of Kiev could not be held and all troops should be evacuated. Stalin reprimanded Zhukov and dismissed him. Zhukov's fears were proven right wen Kiev was in fact taken by the Germans and 500,000 Russian soldiers were captured and shipped off to Nazi POW camps (many never returned). Stalin was not ashamed and sent Zhukov to organize the defense of Moscow. The Germans were stopped at Moscow not brilliant tactics or planning but by reinforcements rushed in from from Siberia and by the courage of simple soldiers and selfless support from the population. Stalin then sent Zhukov to defend Leningrad. There he organized an impenetrable defense of the city of 3.5 million. Unable to overcome the city's defenses, the Germans laid siege to it in hopes of starving the defenders out. The siege lasted more than 900 days and resulted in the destruction of the German forces that tried to take it, although the city itself lost many of its residents and the soldiers defending it.
Zhukov was assigned by Stalin to several important engagements during the course of the war. In 1942 he was assisted, albeit indirectly, in the defense of Stalingrad by diverting part of the besieging German forces by attacking Rzhev and Vyazma. In 1943 he was fully involved in the strategic planning of the final stages of the Battle of Stalingrad. There he focused on attacking the Romanian and Hungarian units of the German forces, which were more ill-equipped than German units. Stalingrad was won after each side lost under a million people. In July 1943 Zhukov orchestrated the Battle of Kursk, which became the largest tank operation in history. After that victory he went back to besieged Leningrad. There Zhukov led the offensive Operation Bagration in January 1944, which liberated the survivors of Leningrad from long and exhausting siege.
In 1945 Zhukov led the final assault on the Nazi Germany. He was the chief strategic planner for the Battle of Berlin. Under his command the city of Berlin was captured in April 1945, leading to capitulation of the Nazi Germany. He was appointed the first commander of the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, which later became East Germany. Zhukov led the Soviet Victory Parade at the Red Square in Moscow, where he inspected the troops and saluted to Stalin. He was awarded four times the Hero of the Soviet Union. After the victory Zhukov invited the Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the two toured the Soviet Union together in the summer of 1945.
Stalin's jealousy led to quick removal of Zhukov from Berlin to a smaller post in Odessa. Humiliated Zhukov supported Nikita Khrushchev. After the death of Stalin, he arrested the main Khrushchev's rival Lavrenti Beria and was appointed the Defence Minister in 1955. Zhukov urged Nikita Khrushchev to send the Red Army troops to suppress the Hungarian revolution in 1956. In 1957 he again supported Khrushchev against the neo-Stalinist hard liners, and was made a full member of the Presidium (Politburo) of the Communist Party. However, when Khrushchev initiated downsizing of the Red Army, Zhukov disputed and was expelled by Khrushchev under suspicion of a planned coup.
In 1964 Khrushchev was dismissed by Leonid Brezhnev who restored Zhukov to favor, though not to power. In 1965, at the important 20th anniversary of Victory gathering in Moscow, Zhukov received a much greater acclaim than Brezhnev. During the Cold War Brezhnev made himself four times Hero of the Soviet Union in an effort to match Zhukov's medal count. Zhukov remained a highly reputable, though controversial and enigmatic figure in the Soviet Union. He died on June 18, 1974, and was buried in Moscow.The man who won the World War II
His biography in the wikipedia is deservedly bigger than Hitler - Gerd von Rundstedt was born on 12 December 1875 in Aschersleben, Germany. He was married to Luise (Bila) von Goetz. He died on 24 February 1953 in Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany.His last command: Ardennas counter-attack
- George S. Patton III was a highly successful and highly controversial general who held Corps- and Army-level commands during World War II. Because of his great competence as a battlefield commander, Patton might have led the American troops during the invasion of Normandy; however, his impolitic ways and a degree of emotional instability (which manifested itself in the slapping of two soldiers suffering from shell-shock at an Army field hospital) put the kibosh on that. Patton was relieved of his command and put on ice for many months in order to recuperate. Instead, the command of the American forces on D-Day, went to his former deputy in North Africa, Omar N. Bradley.
Patton was known as "Blood & Guts" ("Our blood, his guts"), was a common gripe among his troops for his hard-driving discipline, which paid off in lower casualties and great success on the battlefield. With the exception of Douglas MacArthur, Patton ranks as the greatest general the United States put on the field during the Second World War. Patton achieved four-star rank for his battlefield exploits as one of the best commanders of mechanized forces on either side during the War. He succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower as the Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany, when Ike -- a five-star general -- was promoted to Army Chief of Staff.
On December 9, 1945, Patton became seriously injured after his automobile crashed with an American army truck at low speed. He began bleeding from a gash on his head, and complained that he was paralyzed and having trouble breathing. Taken to a hospital in Heidelberg, Patton was discovered to have a compression fracture and dislocation of the cervical third fourth vertebrae, resulting in a broken neck and cervical spinal cord injury that rendered him paralyzed from the neck down. He spent most of the next twelve days in spinal traction to decrease the pressure on his spine. He died at age 60 in his sleep of pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure.
On December 24, 1945, General George S. Patton was buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial alongside some wartime casualties of the Third Army, in accordance with his request to "be buried with his men". He was immortalized in the 1970 eponymous epic film, which won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (George C. Scott). This was President Richard Nixon's favorite film. - Writer
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi) was born on October 2, 1869, into a Hindu Modh family in Porbanadar, Gujarat, India. His father, named Karamchand Gandhi, was the Chief Minister (diwan) of the city of Porbanadar. His mother, named Putlibai, was the fourth wife; the previous three wives died in childbirth. Gandhi was born into the vaishya (business caste). He was 13 years old when married Kasturbai (Ba) Makhanji, through his parents arrangement. They had four sons. Gandhi learned tolerance and non-injury to living beings from an early age. He was abstinent from meat, alcohol, and promiscuity.
Gandhi studied law at the University of Bombay for one year, then at the University College London, from which he graduated in 1891, and was admitted to the bar of England. His reading of "Civil Disobedience" by David Thoreau inspired his devotion to the principle of non-violence. He returned to Bombay and practiced law there for a year, then went to South Africa to work for an Indian firm in Natal. There Gandhi experienced racism: he was thrown off a train while holding a valid first class ticket and pushed to third class. Later he was beaten by a stagecoach driver for refusing to travel on the foot-board to make room for a European passenger. He was barred from many hotels because of his race. In 1894, Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress. They focused on the Indian cause and British discrimination in South Africa. In 1897, Gandhi brought his wife and children to South Africa. He was attacked by a mob of racists, who tried to lynch him. He refused to press charges on any member of the mob. Gandhi became the first non-white lawyer to be admitted to the bar in South Africa.
During the South African War, Gandhi was a stretcher barer. He organized the Indian Ambulance corps of 300 Indian volunteers and hundreds of associates to serve wounded black South Africans. He was decorated for his courage at the Battle of Spion Kop. At that time Gandhi corresponded with Lev Tolstoy and expressed his admiration of the Tolstoyan principles of non-violence. In 1906 Gandhi, for the first time, organized a non-violent resistance against the Transvaal government's registration act. He called upon his fellow Indians to defy the new law in a non-violent manner and suffer the punishment for doing so. He was jailed on many occasions along with thousands of his supporters. Peaceful Indian protests caused a public outcry and forced the South African General J. C. Smuts to negotiate a compromise with Gandhi. However, Gandhi supported the British in World War I and encouraged Indians to join the Army to defend the British Empire, in compliance with the full citizenship requirement.
Back in India, Gandhi became active in the struggle for Indian Independence. He spoke at the conventions of the Indian National Congress, becoming one of its leaders. In 1918, Gandhi opposed the increasing tax levied by the British during the devastating famine. He was arrested in Champaran, state Bihar, for organizing civil resistance of tens of thousands of landless farmers and serfs. In jail Gandhi was on a hunger strike in solidarity with the famine stricken farmers. Hundreds of thousands of his supporters gathered around the jail. Gandhi was addressed by the people as Mahatma (Great Soul) and Bapu (Father). He was released. Then he represented the farmers in negotiation with the British administration. His effort worked. The tax collection was suspended and all prisoners were released. He declared that all violence was evil after the Amritsar massacre of 379 civilians by British troops, which traumatized the Indian nation. As the leader of the Indian National Congress party Gandhi launched "Swaraj", a campaign for independence and non-cooperation with the British authorities. He urged Indians to replace British goods with their own fabrics and goods. He was imprisoned from 1922-1924, being released after an appendectomy. During that time a Swaraj party was formed by his anxious opponents; it later dissolved back into the Congress.
On New Year's Eve, December 31, 1929, the Indian National Congress unfurled it's flag of independence. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru issued the Declaration of Independence on January 26, 1930. Gandhi planned to achieve stability through the secularization of India, as the only way of uniting Hindus and Muslims in one peaceful nation. The religious divide was growing under the British colonial rule, which prospered from the monopoly on the salt trade. Everyone needed salt. Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin: "If my letter makes no appeal to your heart, on the eleventh day of March I shall proceed with co-workers of the Ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the Salt Laws. I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man's standpoint. As the Independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil."
From March 12 to April 6, 1930, Gandhi made the famous Satyagraha ("Satya" - truth, "Agraha" - persuasion), The Salt March to Dandi. He walked on foot to the ocean in protest against the British salt monopoly and salt tax. He led thousands of Indians on a 240 mile (400 km) march from Ashram Ahmetabad to the village of Dandi on the ocean to make their own salt. For 23 days the two-mile long procession was watched by every resident along the journey. On April 6, Gandhi raised a grain of salt and declared, "With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire." Gandhi's plan worked because it appealed to people in every region, class, religion, and ethnicity. The successful campaign led to the reaction of the British government and imprisonment of over 60,000 people for making or selling salt without a tax. The British opened fire on the unarmed crowd and shot hundreds of demonstrators. Gandhi was arrested in his sleep on the night of May 4th, 1930. Eventually the British government, represented by Lord Irwin, signed the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in March 1931, agreeing to free all political prisoners. Gandhi was invited to London as the leader of the Indian National Congress, but he was disappointed with the British attempts to destroy his influence by dividing him from his followers.
Gandhi campaigned to improve the lives of the untouchables, whom he called Harijans (the children of God). He promoted equitable rights, including the right to vote in the same electorates as other castes. In 1934 Gandhi survived three attempts on his life. In 1936, he briefly resigned from the party, because his popularity was stifling the diversity of membership; ranging from communists and socialists to religious conservatives and pro-business groups. He returned to the head of the party with the Jawaharlal Nehru presidency. At the beginning of the Second World War Gandhi declared that India could not be a party to this war, unless it has independence. His "Quit India" campaign led to mass arrests on an unprecedented scale of struggle. He was arrested in Bombay (Mumbai) and was held for two years. During his captivity his wife passed away and his secretary also died. Gandhi was released in May of 1944, due to a necessary surgery. His campaign led to a release of over 100,000 political prisoners before the end of the war.
India won independence in 1947, followed by the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, and partition of India. Gandhi said, "Before partitioning India, my body will have to be cut into two pieces." About one million people died in the bloody riots until partition was reluctantly asserted by Gandhi as the only way to stop the Civil War. He urged the Congress Party to accept partition, and launched his last "fast-into-death" campaign in Delhi, calling for a stop to all violence. Gandhi also called to give Pakistan the 550,000,000 rupees in honor of the partition agreement. He tried to prevent instability and anger against India.
Gandhi was shot three times in the chest and died while on his way to a prayer meeting, on January 30, 1948. His assassins were convicted and executed a year later. The ashes of Mahatma Gandhi were split in portions and sent to all states of India to be scattered in rivers. Part of Gandhi's ashes rest in Raj Ghat, near Delhi, India. Part of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes are at the Lake Shrine in Los Angeles.- Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, in Allahabad, India. He was the son of Swaroop Rani and Motilal Nehru, a wealthy lawyer and a prominent leader of the Indian independence movement. The Nehru family belonged to the saraswat Brahmin caste. Nehru graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge University and came back to India in 1912. In 1916, by his parents' arrangement, he married 17-year-old Kamala from a Kashmiri business family in Delhi. He became the top political leader of the Indian National Congress Party along with his mentor, Mohandas K. Gandhi.
Nehru and his family made transformations in their upper class lifestyle. They followed Gandhi and abandoned fashionable British clothes and expensive possessions. Nehru and his family adopted the native language of Hindu, or Hindustani for their common use. Nehru also wore a khadi kurta and a Gandhi cap as an Indian nationalist uniform. When Nehru's father joined the Swaraj Party in opposition to Gandhi, Jawaharlal stayed with Gandhi. Together they led the nation of India to independence in 1947.
Nehru signed the first constitution of independent India in 1949. He was an outstanding public speaker. He served as the first Prime Minister of India from 1947 until May 27, 1964, the day he died. He was one of the founders of the international non-aligned movement. - George Catlett Marshall Jr. GCB (December 31, 1880 - October 16, 1959) was an American army officer and statesman. He rose through the United States Army to become Chief of Staff of the US Army under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, then served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense under Truman. Winston Churchill lauded Marshall as the "organizer of victory" for his leadership of the Allied victory in World War II. After the war, he spent a frustrating year trying and failing to avoid the impending Chinese Civil War. As Secretary of State, Marshall advocated a U.S. economic and political commitment to post-war European recovery, including the Marshall Plan that bore his name. In recognition of this work, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953."Marshall plan"
- Kim Il-sung (15 April 1912 - 8 July 1994) was a North Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he led from the country's establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of Premier from 1948 to 1972 and President from 1972 to 1994. He was also the leader of the Workers' Party of Korea (Wpk) from 1949 to 1994 (titled as Chairman from 1949 to 1966 and as General Secretary after 1966). Coming to power after the end of Japanese rule in 1945, he authorized the invasion of South Korea in 1950, triggering an intervention in defense of South Korea by the United Nations led by the United States. Following the military stalemate in the Korean War, a ceasefire was signed on 27 July 1953. He was the third longest-serving non-royal head of state/government in the 20th century, in office for more than 45 years.
- Douglas MacArthur (26 January 1880 - 5 April 1964) was an American military leader who served as General of the Army for the United States, as well as a field marshal to the Philippine Army. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s, and he played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. MacArthur received the Medal of Honor for his service in the Philippines campaign. This made him along with his father Arthur MacArthur Jr. the first father and son to be awarded the medal. He was one of only five to rise to the rank of General of the Army in the U.S. Army, and the only one conferred the rank of field marshal in the Philippine Army.
- Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein was an Egyptian politician who served as the second president of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. Nasser led the 1952 overthrow of the monarchy and introduced far-reaching land reforms the following year. Following a 1954 attempt on his life by a Muslim Brotherhood member, he cracked down on the organization, put President Mohamed Naguib under house arrest and assumed executive office. He was formally elected president in June 1956.
- Erich Ernst Paul Honecker (25 August 1912 - 29 May 1994) was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. He held the posts of General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and Chairman of the National Defence Council; in 1976, he replaced Willi Stoph as Chairman of the State Council, the official head of state. As the leader of East Germany, Honecker had close ties to the Soviet Union, which maintained a large army in the country.
- Imre Nagy was born on 21 February 1933 in Monor, Hungary. He died on 20 October 2013 in Törökbálint, Hungary.
- Argentinean politician, writer and army lieutenant general. Husband of Eva Perón (aka Evita; nee Eva Duarte) between 1945 and 1952. Founder of the Partido Laborista (Labour Party) which was later renamed as Partido Justicialista (Justicialist Party), also known as "Peronism". Three times President of Argentina (1946-1952; 1953-1955; 1973-1974), was one of the most important political figures of Argentinas' modern history as well as one of the most worldwide-known presidents of the South American country.
- Sukarno was born on 6 June 1901 in Surabaja, Java, Dutch East Indies. He died on 21 June 1970 in Jakarta, Indonesia.
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His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama (born Lhamo Döndrub, also known by his religious name, Tenzin Gyatso, shortened from Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso), is Tibet's head of state as well as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. He was recognized at age 2 as the reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In November 1950, His Holiness assumed full power of Tibet. He completed his Doctorate of Buddhist Philosophy in 1959, the same year that China attacked Tibet; after which he escaped to Dharamsala, India, where he has since led the Tibetan government in exile. On December 10th, 1989, His Holiness accepted the Nobel Peace Prize "on behalf of the oppressed everywhere and all those who struggle for freedom and work for world peace and the people of Tibet." In his acceptance statement, he declared, "This prize reaffirms our conviction that with truth, courage, and determination as our weapons, Tibet will be liberated. Our struggle must remain nonviolent and free of hatred."- Actor
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Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born in Birán, Holguin Province, Cuba, the fifth of nine children of Ángel María Bautista Castro y Argiz, a plantation owner originally from Galicia, Spain, who operated a plantation in Cuba's Oriente Province. His mother, Lina Ruz González, was a servant in his father's home who bore Fidel out of wedlock (they later were married several years after Angel's first wife died). Known as a rebellious, loud, and troublesome child, Fidel was sent to a Jesuit boarding school in Santiago de Cuba, where he was often teased by his wealthier classmates who called him a "peasant." He later attended Belen College before enrolling at the University of Havana, where he earned a law degree. After graduating from the university, Castro briefly practiced law, before he went on to marry Mirta Diaz-Balart, a wealthy philosophy student with family ties to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. They had a son, Fidelito, but after 5 years, the couple divorce and went their separate ways. After several years in prison and exile (he lived in Mexico and New York City before starting the revolution) Castro led an attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953. The attack, which was a major attack on Batista's hold of Cuba, found Castro once again imprisoned before he was released. After his release he went to the Yucatan, where he organized a rebel force that landed in Cuba in 1958 and after many successful battles, Castro rode triumphantly into Havana on January 8, 1959.- Writer
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Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born to a middle-class family in Rosario, Santa Fe Province, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. Disgusted by the corrupt Argentine military dictatorship, Guevara became a dedicated Marxist while in his teens. As a student he vowed to devote his life to revolutionary causes, and in 1953 he received a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires. He left Argentina later that year to take part in a Communist revolt in Guatemala. There he adopted his revolutionary nickname and nom de guerre of "Che", the local slang for "pal." When the revolution in Guatemala failed the following year, Che fled to Mexico where he was introduced to another Communist revolutionary in exile, Fidel Castro.
Joining Castro's July 26 Movement, named after the date of Castro's aborted 1953 revolution in Cuba, Guevara sailed with Castro and over 80 guerrillas to Cuba, where they landed on December 2, 1956, bent on overthrowing Gen. Fulgencio Batista's government. The invasion force was decimated by a combination of fierce attacks by government troops and air strikes, and Castro, Guevara and about 10 others fled to the Sierra Maestra mountains of southern Cuba and established a base there. In July 1957 Che was assigned command of half of Castro's forces and given the rank of Comandante, a title he shared only with Castro himself. For the next year and a half he led his insurgents against government forces in the province of Las Villas, aided by the growing hatred by the population of Batista's corrupt and brutal government. Castro's forces were bolstered by help in both recruits from and material assistance by the local population. Che's attack against and decisive defeat of government forces in Santa Clara in December 1958 sealed the fate of Batista's crumbling government. He fled into exile on January 1, 1959, and Castro's troops marched unopposed into Havana a week later. After Castro assumed power, Che became one of his most trusted advisers and a leading international revolutionary and was appointed Minister of Agriculture. In 1960 he wrote a book titled "Guerilla Warfare," a manual for Third World insurgents, as part of his plan to spread Communism throughout the world. Che resigned his government post in Cuba in 1965 and traveled widely to Africa and other insurgent hot spots in the world, including the Belgian Congo, where he organized local Communists in revolts against the colonial government and trained Cuban contingents there. The training included taking courses in French, it was the language of Belgium, the Congo's colonial power, and was also spoken by many locals. Guevara wanted to make sure his men were able to effectively communicate with the locals in their own language.
In November 1966 he surfaced in Bolivia to organize a revolt by local Communist insurgents. However, the "revolution" there didn't garner much support from the Bolivian peasantry, most of whom were poorly uneducated (or not educated at all) and spoke mostly local Indian dialects rather than Spanish, which made communication with them difficult. They also preferred to support the Bolivian government rather than a group of mostly foreign revolutionaries they neither knew nor trusted, and they often reported the locations and numbers of Che's forces to Bolivian military authorities. After a long and unsuccessful campaign during which Che's men were relentlessly pursued and whittled down by government troops, his "revolt" in Bolivia came to an abrupt end. On October 7, 1967, he and the surviving members of his group were ambushed and captured by government soldiers. Two days later, on October 9, Che was executed by a Bolivian firing squad, supposedly acting under orders from the CIA, which was training the Bolivian army.- Nikita Khruschev was born on April 17, 1894, into a family of peasants in the village of Kalinovka, Kursk region, Russian Empire. He was raised among agricultural and mining workers. He studied for only two years at grammar school as a child. After the Russian Revolution he joined the Red Army, then joined the Communist party in 1918 and made a career as a politician.
He was active in the Russian revolution and Civil War, when the intellectual elite was brutally killed as well as the family of Nickolas and Alexandra. The Civil War continued for decades in a form of the "Great Terror" and repressions under Joseph Stalin during the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Under orders from Moscow, Khrushchev participated in massive confiscations of food, crops, forage grains, and supplies, that left millions of peasants starving to death in famines of 1920s-30s. Some areas of Ukraine and Russia suffered so much that people later perceived WWII as liberation from the Soviet regime. In 1931 Khrushchev was promoted to Moscow, where he briefly studied at the Soviet Industrial Academy. In 1934 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and in 1935 - the 1st Secretary of the Moscow City Committee. In 1938 Khrushchev was appointed the 1st Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and promoted to Politburo.
During WWII Khrushchev was coordinating the defense of Ukraine, while his family was evacuated to Kuibyshev. In 1942-42 he was a political commissar during the battle of Stalingrad. There, frozen Nazi Armies were stopped and lost the battle to the Russian soldiers, who defended their land. Khrushchev was decorated and promoted in the Communist party. He was later a political commissar of the 1st Ukrainian Front, where his deputy was Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev patronized Brezhnev, whom he knew since 1931.
After the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953, and following the elimination of Stalin's inner circle, Khrushchev became the leader of the Communist Party on September 7, 1953. He completed the takeover after the execution of his main rival Lavrenti Beria in December 1953, with the help of the powerful Marshal Georgi Zhukov. Then Khrushchev promoted Leonid Brezhnev in hopes to have a steady ally in the coming power-struggles against the Stalinist conservatives.
In his historic speech on February 23, 1956, Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin for his brutal purges and massive executions of people. Khrushchev spoke behind closed doors at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. His speech was the "new order" message to the ruling Soviet elite. Not everyone liked it, regardless of its many historic benefits. In 1957 Khrushchev with backing from Leonid Brezhnev and Marshal Georgi Zhukov defeated the Stalinist conservatives Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov, and Lazar Kaganovich. Then Khrushchev exiled the powerful Marshal Georgi Zhukov and became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union.
Khrushchev's speech was designed to liberate people from Stalin's brutal regime based on manipulative methods of control by fear. The speech was addressed to the Soviet leadership as well as to the people of Russia and other republics, however, the Soviet leadership decided to keep the speech secret from the people. At the same time Khrushchev's speech was available in the rest of the world. After reading Khrushchev's speech, Moshe Dayan said that Soviet Union may disappear in 30 years, and he was off only by 5 years. Although Khrushchev was unable to see that far, he made efforts to liberate intellectuals and to clear innocent victims of the "Great Purges" under Stalin's regime.
In the late 1950's Khrushchev initiated the "Thaw" during the Cold War. Hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of Stalin's "Great Purges" were posthumously cleared of all charges and their sentences were reversed to full rehabilitation. Many surviving intellectuals, actors, like Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, Georgi Zhzhyonov, Vitali Golovin and others were allowed to return from imprisonment and Siberian exile. Film directors such as Sergei Parajanov, Eldar Ryazanov, Georgiy Daneliya made new kind of films. The First International Festival of Students and Youth was held in Moscow, in 1958. The First International Tchaikovsky Competition was held in Moscow, where the Texan pianist Van Cliburn became the first winner, and was praised by Khrushchev. Some performing artists, like Svyatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich were allowed to go on personal international concert tours.
Khruschev's "Thaw" liberated the Soviet life to a degree, that allowed some foreign books, movies and music, along with the other previously banned art, literature and music of Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturyan, publications of Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoschenko, Yuriy Olesha, and others. The 60's generation emerged during the "Thaw" with Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, Bulat Okudzhava, Vasiliy Aksyonov and other writers. They played an important role in liberation of the collective consciousness after decades of repressions under Joseph Stalin and in changing of some old bans, what later made possible the publication of Mikhail A. Bulgakov. Khrushchev personally approved the 1962 publication by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Stalin's "Gulag" prison-camps.
Khrushchev attacked those whom he failed to understand, like the Nobel Laureate writer Boris Pasternak, poet Andrei Voznesensky, and avant-garde artists. Khrushchev mismanaged agriculture by banning any private farming. His major mistake was forceful replacing of wheat by corn, which could not grow in Russian climate. This and other mistakes caused serious food shortages and the bloody popular uprising in Novocherkassk, in 1962. Khrushchev showed uncivilized and undiplomatic behavior at the UN conference by insulting other delegates verbally and by banging on the table with his fists and with his shoe. Khrushchev pushed the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He made risky political moves and was accused of losing control during the Cuban missile crisis, when the world came to the brink of a nuclear war.
Leonid Brezhnev dismissed Khrushchev on October 14, 1964, after Khrushchev's vacation at the Communist Party owned Black Sea resort. He was stripped of all privileges and lived under house arrest outside Moscow. After his death on September 11, 1971, Khrushchev was not buried officially like other Politburo members near the Kremlin. Instead, he was buried without an official ceremony at the Novodevichy Cemetery. The cold war continued. Khrushchev's historic speech denouncing Joseph Stalin was banned from publication until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. - En-lai Chou (Enlai Zhou) is wildly recognized as the most influential diplomat in the history of Communist China, but less commonly known as the right-hand man of Zedong Mao.
He was born in rural Hwaian, China, in 1898 (the exact date is unknown). The son of an imperial government bureaucrat, Chou was disillusioned by the Manchu court's concessions to the West and became a militant nationalist. He joined the socialist movement in 1917 while he was a student studying in Japan. Two years later, upon his return to China, he was arrested for being a leftist agitator. Upon his release in 1920 he fled to France, where he became an active corresponding member of the newly founded Communist Party. After finishing his Marxist studies, Chou went back to China in 1922 to join Yat-sen Sun, then cooperating with the Communists.
In 1924 he taught at Whampoa Military Academy, which was then under Communist control. In 1927, two years after Sun's death, fighting broke out between the Communist rebels and Nationalist troops loyal to Kuomintang leader Kai-Shek Chiang in Shanghai. During that time Chou became one of the top commanders of the Chinese People's Red Army, and by 1931 he became second-in-command with the rank of general alongside Mao. Chou played a key part in the Red Army's survival and took part in the "Long March" of 1934 when the Red Army, after suffering a string of defeats at the hands of the Nationalists, retreated across the country to rebuild their shattered forces. In 1937, after Japan invaded China from occupied Manchuria, Chou negotiated a truce between the warring Chinese armies to combat the Japanese. Throught the Second World War in China (1937-1945) Chou served as the Communists' chief liaison with Chiang Kai-shek, an assignment that signaled his transition from field commander to diplomat. As a result of his new role, Chou helped plan the overall strategy during the second civil war that broke out once again between the Communists and Nationalists after the defeat of Japan in late 1945, but he personally did not lead troops into combat again, for that was now solely Mao's job.
Following the Communist victory that resulted in the formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Chou was named premier and foreign minister. During his long political career, Chou played an important role in the negotiations that ended the Korean War (1950-1953)--in which China sent troops to fight alongside the Communist North Korean army--as well as the French war in Indochina (1946-1954), the US involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and the normalization of relations with the US in 1972. En-lai Chou died while in office in Peking (Bejing) from cancer on January 8, 1976, at the age of 77 or 78, second only to Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in the Communist hierarchy, who ironically later died in September that same year. - Charles André Joseph Marie DE Gaulle (22 November 1890 - 9 November 1970) was a French army officer and statesman who led Free France against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946 in order to restore democracy in France. In 1958, he came out of retirement when appointed President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) by President René Coty. He rewrote the Constitution of France and founded the Fifth Republic after approval by referendum. He was elected President of France later that year, a position to which he was reelected in 1965 and held until his resignation in 1969.
- Ho Chi Minh commonly known as Bác Ho or simply known as Bác, also known as Ho Chu), was a Vietnamese revolutionary and statesman. He served as Prime Minister of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1955 and as President from 1945 until his death in 1969. Ideologically a Marxist-Leninist, he served as Chairman and First Secretary of the Workers' Party of Vietnam.
- Nguyen Giap Vo was born on 25 August 1911 in An Xa, Vietnam. He was an actor, known for Vietnam: A Television History (1983), From Hollywood to Hanoi (1992) and Cold War (1998). He was married to Dang Bich Hai, Quang Thai and Minh Khai. He died on 4 October 2013 in Hanoi, Vietnam.nicknamed "Napoleon of Asia"
- Van Minh Duong was born on 16 February 1916 in My Tho, Indochina [now Vietnam]. He died on 6 August 2001 in Pasadena, California, USA.Big Minh
- Anwar Sadat was born on 25 December 1918 in Mit Abu al-Kum, Al-Minufiyah, Egypt. He was married to Jehan Sadat and Ehsan Madi. He died on 6 October 1981 in Cairo, Egypt.Nobel Prize together to Menachen Begin
he was killed by Khomeini's determination. - Menachem Begin was an Israeli politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of Israel. Before the creation of the state of Israel, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944, against the British mandatory government, which was opposed by the Jewish Agency. As head of the Irgun, he targeted the British in Palestine. Later, the Irgun fought the Arabs during the 1947-48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and its chief Begin was also noted as "leader of the notorious terrorist organization" by the British government and banned from entering the United Kingdom.Beginning with terrorism he was laureate
With Nobel Peace - Alexander Dubcek (27 November 1921 - 7 November 1992) was a Slovak politician who served as the First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) (de factors leader of Czechoslovakia) from January 1968 to April 1969. He attempted to reform the communist government during the Prague Spring but was forced to resign following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968.
- Gustáv Husák (10 January 1913 - 18 November 1991) was a Czechoslovak communist politician of a Slovak origin, who served as the long-time First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1969 to 1987 and the president of Czechoslovakia from 1975 to 1989. His rule is known as the period of the Normalization after the Prague Spring.
- Leonid Brezhnev was a communist leader of the Soviet Union who restored a conservative, centralized state, initially raising living standards and bringing the country to its height but ultimately causing economic stagnation and disproportionate military growth. This process exhausted the Soviet economy and eventually led to collapse of the Soviet Union.
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born on December 19, 1906, in Kamenskoe Russian Empire (now Dniprodzerzhynsk, Ukraine). He went to Dnepropetrovsk Industrial College. There he joined the Communist Party youth union (Komsomol) in 1923, and became a full member of the Communist Party in 1931. He had no adult memories of life under Tsar Nicholas II and was too young to have participated in the leadership feud after the death of Lenin. During the purges of the "Great Terror" under Joseph Stalin Brezhnev proved himself a loyal Stalinist, suitable for the ranks of the Communist hierarchy. In 1935 he was drafted in a tank school. There he started a career as Political Commissar; and in 1936 was transferred to Regional Government, rising to the Party Secretary of Dnepropetrovsk in 1939. On June 22, 1941, the day the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Brezhnev was assigned to evacuate military industries before the Nazis reached his city. During WWII Brezhnev was assigned as Political Commissar to Transcaucasian Front; then to 1st Ukrainian Front. There chief Political Commissar was Nikita Khrushchev, who patronized Brezhnev's career since 1931. He was promoted to chief Political Commissar of the 4th Ukrainian Front, rising to a Maj. General. He was in Prague on May 9, 1945 when the War ended. Brezhnev took part in the Victory Parade on June 22, 1945, on the Red Square in Moscow, and saluted to Joseph Stalin, who stood atop the mausoleum of Lenin.
Brezhnev was promoted by Nikita Khrushchev to 1st Communist Party Secretary of Moldavia in 1950. In 1952 he was promoted to the candidate member of the Politburo, and had a meeting with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. "What a handsome Moldavian", said Stalin of Brezhnev. The death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, was followed by Khrushchev's takeover as the Head of the Communist Party in September, 1953. Main opponents were eliminated in a series of political executions, including that of Lavrenti Beria in December, 1953. Others were exiled, or degraded, like Marshal Georgi Zhukov. The cast of Soviet Leadership was changed. In 1953 Brezhnev was made the Chief of Political Directorate of the Army and the Navy (GPU). In 1955 he was made the 1st Communist Party Secretary of Kazakhstan. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin in his Secret Speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Commuinst Party. In 1957 Brezhnev backed Khrushchev in a power-fight against Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov, and Lazar Kaganovich. In 1959 Brezhnev was promoted to Second Secretary of the Central Committee. In May 1960, he became the President of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of the Soviet Union.
Brezhnev, like many Soviet leaders, enjoyed many privileges, such as free villas and beach houses, valuable gifts, hunting and drinking parties. He was also using his secretaries and nurses for sex. But Brezhnev's adultery and alcoholism backfired in his own family - his daughter, Galina Brezhneva, modeled her personal life after her father and turned her life into an endless series of drinking parties and compromising love affairs. In 1961, while being married to a circus acrobat, Galina Brezhneva, then 32, met the 18-year-old actor Igor Kio, so she urgently divorced her husband and, using her name, eloped with the boy to a southern resort of Sochi. Her honeymoon lasted only 9 days. Enraged Soviet leader sent KGB to destroy her new family. Igor Kio was interrogated and pushed away from the Brezhnev's daughter, but she became revengeful and continued the affair with Kio for another three years, and later added more problems to her father's life.
In the late 50s and early 60s, the Soviet Union was undergoing liberalization, called "The Thaw" initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, who also initiated reforms in the Soviet government. While some people supported Khrushchev's reforms, many ranking communists were unhappy with the changes. Khrushchev's Thaw culminated in 1961 with the removal of Joseph Stalin's body from the Lenin's mausoleum on the Red Square, which further angered the hardliners. But at the same time, Khrushchev approved the construction of the Berlin Wall and caused many scandals while visiting foreign nations, which complicated international relations, culminating in Cuban Missile Crisis. Internal situation in the Soviet Union was rapidly deteriorating, because Khrushchev's agricultural reform failed, causing disastrous situation with food supplies, massive food lines triggered public unrest and Khrushchev thoughtlessly ordered the hungry people to be killed by the Red Army forces. Brezhnev used Khrushchev's mistakes to gain support for himself: he plotted a coup against Khrushchev and gathered several top-ranking communists to conspire against Nikita Khrushchev in order to stop his efforts to reform the Soviet Union.
On October 14, 1964, Brezhnev with co-conspirators Aleksey Kosygin and Nikolay Podgorny dismissed Nikita Khrushchev from office and denounced him. Khrushchev was forced into retirement under a house arrest on a small farm outside of Moscow. Brezhnev reversed liberalization, ended the "Khrushchev Thaw", and enforced censorship and total control over information, cultural life and education. In his May 1965 speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of Victory in WWII, Brezhnev mentioned Stalin positively. The onset of the "Cold war" caused 'freezing' of the Soviet economy. Entrepreneurial people went underground creating a parallel black market. The official economy relied on cheap labor and subsidies from oil and gas exports. The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex was somewhat efficient due to higher wages and ruthless control by the KGB and Soviet Army. Decay was still creeping into those bastions of communism. The arms race became unaffordable by the mid 1960's. 30% of the Soviet economy was directly or indirectly working for the arms race. Stockpiling of costly weapons undermined living standards that led to a fall in the birth rate, a shortage of labor, and an economic degradation. The country was pushed into a dead end.
Brezhnev played the script of Stalin which led the Soviet Union on a collision course with the world, and eventually to self-destruction. Control by fear and intimidation was back again. People were living hopeless lives having no choice. Workers of collective farms lived without identification documents up until 1970's. Undocumented citizens at collective farms were disposable. Migrants were used as industrial slaves, for symbolic pay. Wages were set by the state and did not depend on productivity or quality. The economy was governed by the state 5-year plan. This mostly ignored the world and domestic market signals; and lacked the incentives for innovation and efficiency. Teachers were forced to indoctrinate children of all ages from kindergartens through schools and universities. Total control and manipulation was demonstrated twice a year at annual May Day parades and Great Revolution parades on November 7. Military parades were accompanied by marching masses of industrial workers and managers, doctors and scientists, as well as teachers and students from all schools and universities. Exemplary obedient people were rewarded with better food and perks. Taming millions to obedience by fear and hunger led to a massive degradation of human rights, poor spirituality, lack of initiative and creativity, and decay of public health and vitality. The country of almost three hundred million people became stuck in stagnation, inefficiency, and apathy. Brighter students were taken into the military-industrial system, brainwashed and locked there for life with little choices. Opponents were locked in labor camps, mostly in Siberia. There, millions were working various hard labor jobs in grand-scale economic projects; like the Baikal-Amur railroad (BAM). Other dissidents were labeled as mentally ill and forcibly confined to mental hospitals. Since the Communist Revolution of 1917, people had been continually stripped of their land and property. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev the destruction of independent farming was finalized. By the 1960's poverty and anxiety pushed masses to migrate to cities. Mass-construction of cheap panel buildings was lagging behind. Millions of families shared poor housing, hostels, and dorms in cities. Villages were deserted. Collective farms decayed. Agricultural output fell below the levels of the Tsar's age. Seven thousand churches were destroyed across the Soviet Union. Spiritual life was dominated by ugly propaganda. People were blinded by fear and pushed to wrong values. Meaningful human virtues were replaced with fake ideals of ruthless communism. Propaganda idolized members of the Soviet Politburo, their portraits were decorating every school and factory along with countless portraits and statues of Vladimir Lenin.
Political manipulations and brainwashing of millions led to devaluation of life itself. Immoral behavior became a massive problem. In 1966 Brezhnev was asked not to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin, in a letter signed by 25 distinguished intellectuals, including Andrei Sakharov, Igor Tamm, Pyotr Kapitsa, Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, Valentin Kataev, Viktor Nekrasov, Petr Korin, Maya Plisetskaya, Oleg Efremov, Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, Georgi Tovstonogov, Mikhail Romm, Marlen Khutsiev, Boris Slutsky, Konstantin Paustovsky, Vladimir Tendryakov, Dmitri Shostakovich, and other Soviet luminaries. But Brezhnev's government retaliated with massive censorship. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was interrogated and intimidated. His writings were also banned. Trials of intellectuals like Andrey Sinyavskiy, Yuri Daniel, Joseph Brodsky, and others was only the tip of the iceberg. The head of KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, wrote a note on "Anti-Soviet activity of creative intellectuals". It listed the films '33' by director 'Georgi Danelia' and 'Na odnoi planet' by director Ilya Olshvanger. The KGB was angry at actors: "Today they play Lenin, tomorrow a merchant, after tomorrow a drunkard." Neo-Stalinist course was enforced by the leaders who were raised under Stalin and did not learn anything better than to abuse the enslaved people. Blinded leaders only tried to slow the movement to a dead end. Restrictions on travel and studies abroad blocked the learning of the achievements of other nations of the world. Information technology and computers made by Soviet Military Industries were incompatible and obsolete. Total control by the KGB led to stagnation and inefficiency. The brightest people defected and fled the Soviet gloom, causing the "Brain drain" in science and culture. In the 1970s the flow of Jewish emigration was initiated by reuniting families. The KGB caused financial and political obstacles to every emigrating person; but people were leaving at any cost. Aggressive foreign policy manifested in support for revolutionary regimes and spreading the Soviet political and military presence in Third World countries. National resources were wasted on controversial military operations at the expense of growing domestic problems including poverty and frustration of the people.
Brezhnev's regime crushed the Prague Spring of 1968, fought the Chinese Army over a border dispute in 1969, sent Soviet Tanks and Air Force to Egypt and Syria against Israel in the 1970's, as well as in North Vietnam against the French and Americans. The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 undermined international credibility of the Soviet Union. Andrei Sakharov wrote an open letter to Brezhnev calling for a stop to the war. 50 nations boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Crackdown on intellectual freedom and human rights included the use of psychiatric terror, arrests, and the exile of dissidents. The head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, declared Andrei Sakharov the "enemy No.1." Sakharov was forcefully exiled from Moscow to the militarized 'closed' city of Gorky. He was placed under tight surveillance and restricted from any contacts. His wife Yelena Bonner was also under tight surveillance.
During the 1970s Brezhnev's health declined dramatically as he became increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs; but on his 70th birthday he made himself a Generalissimus Marshal of the Soviet Union, similar to that of Joseph Stalin. Brezhnev accepted over 200 decorations and awards, including awards from all pro-Soviet governments, except China. Brezhnev accepted countless expensive gifts and amassed a collection of vintage cars and other bribes. His personal vanity and behavior was replicated at all levels of the Communist Party and led to massive corruption. The old Brezhnev lost his acting abilities and couldn't even read the script. People were joking. The ugly reality was reflected in its leader. The youngest Politburo Member Mikhail Gorbachev was contemplating reforms. Brezhnev suffered a stroke in May 1982. He died of a heart attack on November 10, 1982; and was buried by the Kremlin Wall. He was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who died just 16 months later. He was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko, who died in just 13 months. Then came Mikhail Gorbachev, but the country was already locked in a dying mode.
Brezhnev's daughter, Galina, was married four times and was regarded as a wild-child by the Soviet authorities. Her wild drinking parties often ended in escapades with younger men. In 1982, she was seen wearing jewels previously reported as stolen, she was also connected to jewel smugglers, so she was tried for stealing jewels from a celebrity, but was acquitted, while her powerful father was still the leader of the Soviet Union. Her third husband was convicted of bribery and corruption and sentenced to twelve years correction term in a hard-labor camp. In the 1990s, a British TV filmed a visit to the home of Galina Brezhneva, where she was interviewed while being drunk and demonstrating disgraceful behavior. At that time she was living with a mechanic who was 29 years younger. She remained impossible to deal with, so after numerous complaints from her neighbors and upon request of her own daughter, Galina Brezhneva was placed in a Moscow psychiatric hospital where she died in 1998. She was laid to rest in the prestigious Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow, Russia. Brezhnev's grandson, Andrei Brezhnev, joined the Communist Party of Russia in 2005. Brezhnev's granddaughter, Victoria, was robbed several times and is now divorced and unemployed. - Nicolae Ceausescu (1918 - 25 December 1989) was a Romanian communist politician and dictator. He was the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and the second and last Communist leader of Romania. He was also the country's head of state from 1967, serving as President of the State Council and from 1974 as President of the Republic, until his overthrow and execution in the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, part of a series of anti-Communist uprisings in Eastern Europe that year.
- Pol Pot was a Cambodian revolutionary, dictator, and politician who ruled Cambodia as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea between 1976 and 1979. Ideologically a Marxist-Leninist and a Khmer nationalist, he was a leading member of Cambodia's communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 until 1997 and served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. Under his administration, Cambodia was converted into a one-party communist state and perpetrated the Cambodian genocide.Executioner of his own people. Enemy number one of civilization, the biggest anathema born in a society.
Coming back to his country with insane ideas of his exile in Paris-including an erroneous interpretation of the "good savage" of Rousseau-
destroyed much of the culture of his Nation. - Kurt Waldheim was born on 21 December 1918 in Sankt Andrä-Wördern, Lower Austria, Austria. He was married to Elisabeth Ritschel. He died on 14 June 2007 in Vienna, Austria.
- Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (25 November 1915 - 10 December 2006) was a Chilean general who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, first as the leader of the Military Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981, being declared President of the Republic by the junta in 1974 and becoming the DE Facto dictator of Chile, and from 1981 to 1990 as DE Jure President after a new Constitution, which confirmed him in the office, was approved by a referendum in 1980.
- Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza Debayle (5 December 1925 - 17 September 1980) was a Nicaraguan dictator and officially the President of Nicaragua from 1 May 1967 to 1 May 1972 and from 1 December 1974 to 17 July 1979. As head of the National Guard, he was DE factors ruler of the country between 1972 and 1974, even during the period when he was not the DE Jure ruler.His father Anastasio Somoza García ordered the assassination of Augusto Cesar Sandino and his followers, starting a wave of violence.
The two Somoza (father and son) were killed in the exercise of power. - Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the former president and then self-proclaimed Emperior of the poverty-stricken Central African Republic, was born Bokassa Mgboundoulou in Bobangui, a village in what was then French Equatorial Africa, on February 22, 1921, one of 12 children of a village chief. When he was a child his father was beaten to death by officials of a French company that had business interests in the area because he would no longer provide villagers for forced labor at the company's operations. Bokassa's mother committed suicide shortly afterward, and his father's family decided to send him to a nearby school run by Christian missionaries. It was at that school that he became enamored of the works of a French author named Jean Bedel, and his teachers began to call him by that name, which he eventually used as his own. The missionaries wanted Bokassa to become a priest, but when they realized he had neither the aptitude nor the inclination to become one, he was sent to another school in Brazzaville. Upon graduating from that school in 1939, he was advised by his relatives that his best bet was to join the Free French Army in its fight against the French Vichy collaborationist forces and the German army. which he did in May.
He rose through the army ranks rather quickly and was promoted to sergeant major in less than two years. He took part in the capture of the city of Brazzaville from the Vichy and German forces, and in 1944 he was transferred to France, where he saw combat for the next year. After war's end he stayed in the army and was posted to what was then French Indochina, where he took part in operations against Viet Minh guerrillas in Saigon. He was awarded several medals for bravery by the French government for his actions in these battles. He was later transferred back to Brazzaville and was promoted to lieutenant, then eventually captain. When the French colony of Ubangi-Shari was granted independence in 1960 it took the name of Central African Republic, and two years later Bokassa left the French army to join the army of the CAR, eventually being promoted to colonel and appointed to head the army by the country's president, David Dacko, who was also his cousin.
Family ties, however, did not prevent tensions between Bokassa and Dacko. The country was in turmoil because of poverty, constant invasions by rebels from neighboring countries and rampant corruption by local and national government officials. Matters between Bokassa and Dacko came to a head in December of 1965, and Bokassa finally led a coup that unseated Dacko. He took control of the country on January 1, 1966, dissolving Parliament and promising elections "soon". Conditions in the country improved a bit at first, but that didn't last long and the country sank back into corruption and poverty, not helped by Bokassa's extravagant spending of what little money the country's treasury had. He narrowly missed being deposed in a coup organized by dissident troops in 1969. He was so angered by this that he reportedly had the coup's ringleader--a former army colleague and cabinet minister--brought before him, and Bokassa personally killed him.
In 1972 Bokassa declared himself president for life (and again narrowly avoided being by overthrown in a coup, in 1974). In 1977 he declared himself Emperor Bokassa and changed the name of the country to the Central African Empire, and had himself crowned in a gaudy, lavish coronation ceremony that cost, by most estimates, about $20 million--meanwhile, people outside the capital of the impoverished country were dying of starvation and disease. Conditions in the country became so bad and Bokassa's rule became so erratic and oppressive that France finally withdrew support from his regime, and in a rage Bokassa turned to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi for support. In an effort to secure that support Bokassa converted to Islam and changed his name to Salah Eddine Ahmed Bokassa, but he "reconverted" back to Catholicism and went back to using his own name when funds promised by Gadaffi never materialized.
In 1979 food riots erupted in the capital and Bokassa's forces opened fire on protesters, killing hundreds. In April of that year his government arrested hundreds of schoolchildren who refused to buy uniforms with Bokassa's picture sewn on them, as required by government edict. The children were thrown in prison and about 100 either died of suffocation when squeezed into crowded jail cells or were beaten to death by guards (and, according to some reporters, Bokassa himself, who was known to participate in executions he had ordered).
The incident caused international outrage. Bokassa's regime became even more repressive, and in September of that year French troops invaded the country in an operation to overthrow Bokassa and install former president Dacko. Bokassa escaped the country, fleeing by airplane to the Ivory Coast. He lived in exile there for four years before moving to France. In 1986 he flew back to the Central African Republic. He was immediately arrested--he had been tried in absentia by the new government and sentenced to death in 1980--and soon placed on trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to death again, but it was commuted by President Andre Kolingba to life in solitary confinement, and later to 20 years. Bokassa was released in 1993 during a general amnesty.
He died in Bangui, Central African Republic, in 1996 of a heart attack. - Idi Amin Dada Oumee was born in the rural village of Koboko, Uganda, in 1923, a member of the Kakwa tribe. Raised in the isolated farming country of northwestern Uganda, Amin received a scant education which left him functionally illiterate.
During the Second World War, at the age of 18, he enlisted in the British Army in the East African Rifles and fought in Burma against the Japanese. At the end of the war Amin joined the British 4th Ugandan Battalion. After distinguishing himself in the fight against Kenya's Mau Maus between 1953 and 1957, Amin was promoted to sergeant major and admitted to an officer training program. Despite his lack of formal education, he proved to be one of Uganda's most able military commanders.
In 1964, two years after Uganda was granted independence from Great Britian, Amin was appointed deputy chief of the nation's army and air force with the rank of colonel. When Amin's friend, Dr. Milton Obote, seized power in Uganda in February 1966, he placed Amin as his right-hand man in full command of the armed forces, promoting him to major general in 1968. By 1970 a rift had developed between the two men, both wanting more power.
On January 25, 1971, Amin overthrew Obote in a military coup, forcing him into exile. Amin then declared himself president and general, and a year later promoted himself to field marshal. Amin's victory over the authoritarian Obote regime was initially greeted with widespread support. However, that soon turned to hatred and fear when Amin began solidifying his absolute control over the nation. Within months after assuming office this large man (standing 6'4" and weighing 280 pounds) ordered the murder of over 5,000 members of the rival Acholi and Langi tribes which Obote and his supporters came from, beginning a reign of terror in Uganda from 1971 to 1979 in which at least 350,000 Ugandans were murdered by Amin and his secret police.
In 1972 Amin, angered over foreign residents' control of Ugandan commerce, ordered the expulsion of 55,000 Asian workers and businessmen and seized their businesses and assets for himself and his supporters. Amin also stole $1.5 billion in US and British foreign aid money and squandered it on military weapons, tripling the size of Uganda's army. In 1975 he declared himself president for life and embarked on a campaign to humiliate British nationals, climaxing in the summer of that year when he forced four Englishmen to carry him around in an Organization of African Unity rally in a sedan chair.
Amin received some international attention in June-July of 1976 when he allowed Palestinian and East German terrorists to use Entebbe airport as a base to hold a group of hostages from a hijacked Air France airliner from Israel. In a daring midnight raid on July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos freed the hostages. Although Amin claimed he was trying to negotiate the hostages' release, there was irrefutable evidence that he was indeed cooperating with and supporting the hijackers.
Although he converted to Islam, Amin was oppressive in his new religion and was a noted polygamist with at least five wives and 23 children. By 1977 Uganda's economy was in shambles with a failing infrastructure, and Amin began losing support almost everywhere. In an attempt to rally the Ugandan people for his support, Amin in the spring of 1978 ordered his army to invade neighboring Tanzania, occupying 400 square miles of the country, supposedly the beginning of his plan to conquer all of Africa for himself. After a slow start, a force of 6,000 Ugandan rebels-in-exile, aided by a slowly mobilized 50,000-strong Tanzanian army, launched a counter-offensive against Amin's 70,000-strong army in December 1978. Amin's forces, demoralized and unwilling to fight any longer for their leader, rapidly collapsed.
Although Col. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya sent troops and equipment to aid Amin's army, and the Palestine Liberation Organization sent some of its fighters, they were not sufficient to quell the popular uprising that ensued throughout Uganda and the approaching Tanzanian troops and Ugandan rebels. Amin's oppressive rule was brought to an end on April 11, 1979 when Tanzanian soldiers captured the Ugandan capital of Kampala, forcing Amin to flee into exile, taking most of his ill-gotten wealth and supporters with him. Amin first went to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia where he lived until his death in 2003. - Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the last Shah of Iran, his reign lasted from 1941 until his overthrow in 1979. He was educated in Switzerland and was familiar with the western ideas. In 1941, Britain and USSR occupied Iran and forced Reza Shah the Great to resign in favor of his son. Later the young Shah became the most important ally to the West in the Middle East.
With Iran's great oil wealth, the Shah became the pre-eminent leader of the Middle East, and Guardian of the Persian Gulf. He abolished the multi-party system of government such that he could rule through a one-party regime in autocratic fashion. He made major changes to curb certain ancient elite factions by breaking up all large and middle-sized estates for the benefit of more than six million small farmers. In what was called 'the White Revolution', he took a number of populist measures, including extending suffrage to women, to favor the people. He instituted exams for Islamic theologians to become established priests ("Mullahs"), which were widely unpopular and broke centuries old religious traditions.
His policies led to strong economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s but at the same time, opposition to his autocratic rule increased. On January 18, 1979, he and his family left Iran after over a year of uprising as he didn't want for a civil war to break out in the country. Following the Shah's departure, conservative Muslims led by Ayatollah Khomeini who had returned from exile, staged a revolution. And abolished the monarchy and unfortunately established an Islamic Republic that ruined the country and led to the pointless eight year Iran-Iraq war in which both countries suffered an incredible amount of unnecessary losses.
At the same time, The Shah's cancer had worsened and after over a year of exile, in which traveling from country to country seeking what he hoped to be a temporary residence. He was finally welcomed by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and remained there until his death on June 27, 1980. He is interred at Al-Refai Mosque in Egypt. - Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (17 May 1900 - 3 June 1989), also known as Ayatollah Khomeini, was an Iranian political and religious leader who served as the first supreme leader of Iran from 1979 until his death in 1989. He was the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which saw the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the end of the Persian monarchy. Following the revolution, Khomeini became the country's first supreme leader, a position created in the constitution of the Islamic Republic as the highest-ranking political and religious authority of the nation, which he held until his death. Most of his period in power was taken up by the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988. He was succeeded by Ali Khamenei on 4 June 1989.
- Deng Xiaoping was born on 22 August 1904 in Guang'an, Sichuan, China. He was married to Zhuo Lin, Zhang Xiyuan and Jin Weiying (Ah Jin). He died on 19 February 1997 in Peking, China.He transformed China in a contry with two systems: !.Political_comunism
2.Economic_capitalism - Muammar Abu Meniar el-Gaddafi was born in the North African desert, south of Sirte, Libya, in 1942 (the exact date is unknown; some sources day June 1, while others say sometime in September). The son of a poor Bedouin nomad, Gaddafi lived in his family's remote desert camp until he went away to school at age 9.
While a student at a secondary school at Sebha, Gaddafi was inspired by the speeches of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and became a committed Arab nationalist. Gaddafi organized his fellow students into revolutionary study groups at Sebha; he continued the practice at the University of Libya in Tripoli, where he received a history degree in 1963. Following his graduation, Gaddafi entered the Libyan Military Academy in Benghazi, where he found many of the cadets were sympathetic to his anti-Western nationalism.
Commissioned into the Libyan army in 1965, he began laying groundwork for an overthrow of the Libyan monarch, King Idris, whom he considered a pawn of the Western European nations. Within four years Gaddafi took control of the army and on September 1, 1969, he seized power in a carefully planned coup. Assuming command of the government as chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Council, Gaddafi declared himself commander-in-chief of Libya's armed forces and its government, with the rank of colonel. Gaddafi soon began implementing his long-dreamed plans for Libya by nationalizing all foreign banks and oil companies and insisting on closing down all European military bases in Libya. In 1970 Gaddafi seized the private assets of Libya's Italian and Jewish residents, driving them from the country.
Since assuming power, Gaddafi has given strong support to a wide variety of terrorist groups and regimes, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, Uganda, the Palestine Liberation Organization and its sub-groups, and the Irish Republican Army. Heavily supported by the Soviet Union, he fought an unsuccessful war against Egypt and a disastrous war against Chad and its ally France for control of the northern regions of the country. In an attempt to drive French forces out of the country Gaddafi sent an invasion force into Chad, only to see it annihilated by the poorly armed, minimally trained but highly motivated Chadian army. The survivors fled back to Libya, leaving behind large numbers of vehicles, equipment and weapons.
Gaddafi has provoked several incidents with the US, one of which led to an American retaliatory bombing raid on his headquarters in Tripoli on April 15, 1986. Gaddafi escaped with only minor injuries but his infant daughter was killed. In 1988 Libyan intelligence agents exploded a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing over 200 people.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US, Gaddafi worked to improve his relationship with the West. In exchange for his help in tracking down Islamic militants his government received concessions from the West, including the easing of various restrictions placed against it due to his terrorism of the 1980s.
In 2011, as part of the "Arab Spring", major civil unrest broke out in Libya aimed at removing Gaddafi from power. Gaddafi began a violent and repressive campaign against his own people and a civil war ensued, with Gaddafi forces on one side and rebels--a combination of students, ordinary people and army defectors-with air and logistical support from NATO, on the other. After an eight-month civil war, Gaddafi was captured by rebels in his hometown of Serte and soon afterward he was executed. - Saddam Hussein was a bloody and brutal dictator who kept his country of Iraq at war almost constantly after assuming power in 1979. At least one million people died due to the machinations of Saddam. After his regime was toppled by the U.S. invasion of 2003, he wound up on a gallows, his life terminated at the end of a hangman's noose.
Saddam invaded neighboring Iran in 1980 and waged war for seven years and 11 months, making it the longest conventional war in the 20th Century. Saddam had hoped to take advantage of what he perceived as the chaos of the Iranian revolution to settle border disputes and suppress his own Shi'ite Muslim population. (Iran is predominantly Shi'ite while Hussein was a Sunni Muslim.) The war ended in a stalemate with approximately 500,000 Iraqis and 400,000 Iranians dead. Both sides, major oil producers, suffered economic losses of half-a-trillion dollars. Saddam used poison gas against Iranian troops, an atrocity even Adolf Hitler didn't engage on the battlefields of World War II.
Beginning in 1986 and continuing through 1989, Saddam launched a deliberate campaign of genocide against the Kurds in northern Iraq. The campaign also targeted areas populated by other minorities, including Assyrians and Jews. In 1988, his forces launched a poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja that killed as many as 5,000 people and injured as many as 10,000. In all, Saddam's three-year-long genocide against the Kurds and other minorities claimed as many as 182,000 lives.
In 1990, the war-monger Saddam invaded Kuwait with the intention of looting and annexing the oil-rich country. An international coalition was put together by the first President George Bush and freed Kuwait but left Saddam in power. His son President George W. Bush put together a second coalition army dominated by American and British forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003 to depose the dictator.
The invasion was launched on the pretext that he possessed weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that had launched the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Both charges were false, but it led to Saddam's capture in December 2003. He was subsequently tried and executed by the Iraqi interim government for the killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites in 1982. His death sentence was carried out on December 30, 2006. - Pope John Paul II was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his death in 2005. He was elected pope by the second papal conclave of 1978, which was called after John Paul I, who had been elected in August to succeed Pope Paul VI, died after 33 days. Cardinal Wojtyla was elected on the third day of the conclave and adopted the name of his predecessor in tribute to him. Born in Poland, John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in the 16th century and the second-longest-serving pope after Pius IX in modern history.
- François Mitterrand was born in Jarnac on October 26, 1916. He was finishing his studies in Paris when he was called by the French army in September 1939. He was 3 times mentioned, then injured and imprisoned but he escaped in December 1941 during his transfer to another war camp. Back to France, he joined the Résistance where he had an important role. After the war, in November 1946, he was elected deputy in the Nièvre and had several ministerial responsibilities during the 10 first years of the Fourth Republic. He was Minister of the French Overseas Departments, which allowed him to show his will of decolonization, to calm different tensions in the colonies and to create personal and lasting relationships with African leaders; then he retired from this post in 1953 before becoming Secretary of State for the Home Department in 1954-1955 and Minister of Justice in 1956.
In 1958, he criticized the Fifth Republic and the way Charles de Gaulle became president and lost his deputy seat, which he got again in 1962 after a short time at the Senate. Then he became mayor of Château-Chinon in 1959 and president of the General Council of the Nièvre in 1964. When the constitution was modified in 1962, it said that French people would directly elect the President of the Republic; thus Mitterrand was the only left-side candidate in 1965 and was qualified for the second round where he had 45% against Charles de Gaulle. The next presidential elections (in 1969) were a disaster for the left-side parties (with Georges Pompidou's victory) but after the reform of the Socialist Party in Epinay in 1971, Mitterrand became definitely the candidate of the "Left Union" and after having failed again (but shortly) in 1974 against Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, he was elected in 1981 then again in 1988. His 14-years-long presidency mainly allowed him to take a lot of social measures that were expected by the workers, but also to abolish the death penalty, to modernize the penal code, to extend and enforce the freedom of speech, etc... He was also careful of the involvement of France in big international problems (especially in the name of peace), and comfimed the place of France within the European Union. He also allowed several "Big Projects" to be developed as the Pyramid of the Louvre, the Arche de la Défense and the National Library (which later took his name), and he also became one of the best political writer of the 20th century. Then he died from cancer, less than one year after having finished his second presidency, at the age of 79. - Ariel Sharon was an Israeli general and politician who served as the 11th Prime Minister of Israel from March 2001 until April 2006.
Sharon was a commander in the Israeli Army from its creation in 1948. As a soldier and then an officer, he participated prominently in the 1948 Palestine war, becoming a platoon commander in the Alexandroni Brigade and taking part in many battles, including Operation Bin Nun Alef. He was an instrumental figure in the creation of Unit 101 and the reprisal operations, as well as in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition, and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973. Yitzhak Rabin called Sharon "the greatest field commander in our history".
Upon retirement from the military, Sharon entered politics, joining the Likud party, and served in a number of ministerial posts in Likud-led governments in 1977-92 and 1996-99. As Minister of Defense, he directed the 1982 Lebanon War. An official enquirer found that he bore "personal responsibility" for the Sabra and Shatila massacre and recommended that he be removed as Defense Minister. His role in the massacre led to him being known as the "Butcher of Beirut" among Arabs.
From the 1970s through to the 1990s, Sharon championed construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He became the leader of the Likud in 2000, and was elected Prime Minister of Israel after defeating Ehud Barak in the 2001 prime ministerial election. He served as Israel's prime minister from 2001 to 2006, during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. As Prime Minister, Sharon orchestrated Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2004-05. Facing stiff opposition to this policy within the Likud, in November 2005 he left Likud to form a new party, Kadima. He had been expected to win the next election and was widely interpreted as planning on "clearing Israel out of most of the West Bank", in a series of unilateral withdrawals. After suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006, Sharon remained in a permanent vegetative state until his death in January 2014.
Sharon remains a highly polarizing figure in Middle East history. Israelis almost universally revere Sharon as a war hero and statesman who played a vital role in defining the country's borders. Palestinians revile Sharon as a war criminal, who suppressed their aspirations for statehood. - Additional Crew
Margaret Thatcher was born on October 13, 1925 in Grantham, England, the younger daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. Her father was a greengrocer and respected town leader, serving as lay-leader with their church, city-alderman and then as mayor. He taught Margaret never to do things because other people are doing them; do what you think is right and persuade others to follow you.
She attended Oxford University from 1943 to 1947 and earned a degree in Chemistry, but it was clear from early on that politics was her true calling. She stood as a Conservative candidate from Dartford in the 1950 and 1951 elections. She married Denis Thatcher in December 1951 and they had twin children, Mark Thatcher and Carol Thatcher. She practiced tax law for a time in the 1950s, but was elected to Parliament from Finchley in 1959. Two years later, she was appointed to the cabinet as Minister of Pensions. In 1970, she was appointed Minister for Education and earned the title "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher", for eliminating free milk for schoolchildren in a round of budget-cutting. After the Conservative Party lost both general elections in 1974, she defeated Edward Heath for the leadership of the party.
She was elected Prime Minister in May 1979 and served for eleven and a half years, longer than any other British Prime Minister in the 20th Century. As Prime Minister, she was staunchly capitalist and bent on wiping socialism from the face of Britain. During her tenure, she cut direct taxes, spending and regulations, privatized state-industries and state-housing, reformed the education, health and welfare systems, was tough on crime and espoused traditional values. Her time in office was eventful, having to contend with an economic recession, inner-city riots and a miners' strike.
Her first great triumph in office was the Falklands War in 1982, when she sent British troops to reclaim British possessions off the coast of South America that had been invaded and occupied by Argentina. The British won that war and it showed the world that Britain was once again a power to be reckoned with. Her time in office saw unprecedented economic prosperity among the middle and upper classes, but this was contrasted by unemployment levels not seen since the 1930s, a rise in homelessness and the end of Britain's major industries. She was a staunch political ally of Republican American President Ronald Reagan. They both advocated tough foreign and defence policies, but they also developed a constructive relationship with reforming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev which helped to bring the Cold War to an end. Thatcher also persuaded President George Bush to send troops to Saudi Arabia right after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Her staunch advocacy of the Poll Tax and her refusal to endorse a common currency for Europe led the Conservative party to force her out of office in a bloody internal coup. She was forced to resign as Prime Minister in November 1990. Since she left office, she was introduced to the House of Lords in 1992 as Baroness Thatcher. She travelled the world, touring the lecture circuit promoting her causes and was president of numerous organizations dedicated to her causes. In the last few years, her health suffered and she no longer spoke in public.- Leopoldo Galtieri was born on 15 July 1926 in Casero, Argentina. He was married to Lucía Gentile. He died on 13 January 2003 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
- Lech Walesa is a Polish statesman, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as the President of Poland between 1990 and 1995. After winning the 1990 election, Walesa became the first democratically elected President of Poland since 1926 and the first-ever Polish President elected in popular vote. A shipyard electrician by trade, Walesa became the leader of the Solidarity movement, and led a successful pro-democratic effort which in 1989 ended the Communist rule in Poland and ushered in the end of the Cold War.
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Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (July 18, 1918 - December 5, 2013) was the former leader of the African National Congress (ANC). He was known for his lifelong struggle against apartheid (enforced racial separation), which was instituted in South Africa in 1948. The ANC was soon declared a terrorist organization and banned by the South African government. Mandela was arrested in 1962 and imprisoned for life on "terrorist" charges, but in 1990, he was freed by South African president F.W. de Klerk. In 1994, Mandela was elected president of South Africa.
Two biographical films were made and Mandela and de Klerk (1997) focused on Mandela's life's struggles.Begining with terrorism he was laureate
With Nobel Peace- Osama bin Laden was the founding General Emir and NATO-FVEY designated criminal mastermind behind his militarist forces under the umbrella of Al-Qaeda, and the world's most sought-after militiaman since the 1998 raids on U.S. embassies in parts of East Africa accused by FBI at him, and then accused of single-handedly masterminding series-of-suicide-aircraft-piracies-colloquially-dubbed-as September 11 attacks by the CIA. He claimed indirect-liability for instigating suicide-hijackers in an exclusive interview later on but nevertheless, refuted the charges of being the mastermind by CIA & others. He used to release tapes endorsing militant acts by framing them as retaliatory, self-defense resistance-operations. Almost 10 years after the execution of 9/11 operation, on a late May 1, 2011 evening according to North American Eastern Daylight Time, 44th US President Barack Obama made an announcement that Osama had been summary-executed by US commandos in a hideout under a covert-op codenamed Operation Neptune Spear with OPTASK (operation task) to assassinate him.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Communist Party. He initiated the changes known as "perestroika" and "glasnost".
He was born Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev into a peasant family on March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolnoe, Stavropol province, Southern Russia. His father, named Sergei Gorbachev, was a tractor driver. His mother, named Maria Panteleyeva, was a peasant. His grandparents were deported and sentenced for nine years under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, for their success in becoming richer independent farmers known as kulaks. Young Gorbachev witnessed the destruction of traditional farming and degradation of villages, that caused massive exodus of people from their land and to gloomy industrial Soviet cities, where they were doomed to become brainwashed by propaganda and live in small flats under restricting political and economic conditions for the rest of their lives. During the Second World War Gorbachev survived the Nazi occupation of his land in Stavropol province in 1942-1943. After the war, Gorbachev chose to remain on his land, although it was now taken by the Communist Government, the ranks of which he would penetrate later. Gorbachev privately described his life and work on a Soviet collective farm as serfdom.
In 1947 Gorbachev shot to fame at the age of 16, after helping his father, a combine harvester operator, to harvest a record crop on a collective farm. For this achievement he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and was promoted to the Communist Party at the age of 21. From 1950 - 1955 he studied law on a State scholarship at Moscow State University. There he met his future wife, Raisa Maksimovna Gorbacheva (nee Titarenko), they married in September 1953, and their daughter, Irina, was born in January 1957. After a brief stint as a Government Lawyer in Stavropol, Gorbachev made a career as a ranking leader of Komsomol (Union of Young Communists), then as a Communist Party leader of Stavropol province, climbing to the ranks as Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At that time Gorbachev made his first travels outside of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet leaders were manipulating their own people into submission through fear and control, the West Europeans enjoyed freedom and prosperity that attracted East Germans and other Soviet satellites. Gorbachev learned his first lesson on his tour in East Germany, witnessing their rapid recovery after the Second World War. At the same time, in 1956, Yuri Andropov and Georgi Zhukov led the attack on Hungarian Revolution, and killed thousands of Hungarians who opposed the Soviet-imposed regime. Then Soviet leadership made more aggressive international actions by spreading military support to pro-communist regimes across the world and also by building the Berlin Wall and enforcing Soviet military and political domination in Eastern Europe. These Soviet actions alienated Europeans.
Open political discussions in the Soviet Union were not allowed under threat of prosecution, freedom of speech was never guaranteed, all media was owned and controlled by the Soviet government and independent activity was suppressed, and only some fragmented information was made available to ranking provincial communists, such as Gorbachev. In 1961 he attended the important 22nd Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, where Nikita Khrushchev announced his Utopian plan to surpass the USA per capita income in 20 years. At the same 22nd Congress, upon Khrushchev's instruction, Gorbachev, among other top communists received a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's anti-Stalin publication "One day of Ivan Denisovich" which criticized the brutality of Gulag prison-camps and the Soviet regime in general. That gave Gorbachev and some other young communists a hope that Khrushchev may change the brutal Soviet regime. However, in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was arrested and dismissed by pro-Stalin group led by Leonid Brezhnev who eventually established a remake of Stalinism for the next 18 years, albeit in a more grotesque and senile version of Soviet regime. Then Brezhnev's regime crushed the Prague Spring of 1968, fought the Chinese Army over a border dispute in 1969, sent Soviet Tanks and Air Force to Egypt and Syria against Israel in the 1970s, as well as in North Vietnam against the French and Americans. At that time Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa Maksimovna, were allowed to travel to the Western Europe and see the difference between reality in European countries and its distorted depiction by the Soviet propaganda. In 1972 he headed the Soviet official delegation to Belgium, then, in 1974 was made Member of the Supreme Soviet in charge of the Commission on Youth Affairs. During the 1970s Gorbachev enjoyed a highly privileged life of a ranking communist, having many perks such as a villa in a suburb of Moscow, a special limo with a chauffeur and guards, and regular luxurious vacations in Italy and in the South of France, all at the expense of the Communist Party. However, this allowed him to see the striking difference between the quality of life in the Western Europe and gloomy survival of masses in the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev witnessed that people were living hopeless lives having no choice. Workers of collective farms lived without identification documents up until the 1970s. Undocumented citizens at collective farms were disposable. Migrants were used as industrial slaves, for symbolic pay. Wages were set by the state and did not depend on productivity or quality. The economy was governed by the state 5-year plan. This mostly ignored the world and domestic market signals; and lacked the incentives for innovation and efficiency. Teachers were forced to indoctrinate children of all ages from kindergartens through schools and universities. Total control and manipulation was demonstrated twice a year at annual May Day parades and Great Revolution parades on November 7. Military parades were accompanied by marching masses of industrial workers and managers, doctors and scientists, as well as teachers and students from all schools and universities. Exemplary obedient people were rewarded with better food and perks. Taming millions to obedience by fear and hunger led to a massive degradation of human rights, poor spirituality, lack of initiative and creativity, and the decay of public health and vitality. The country of almost three hundred million people was stuck in stagnation, inefficiency, and apathy. Brighter students were taken into the military-industrial system, brainwashed and locked there for life with little choices. Opponents were locked in the "Gulag" prison-camps, mostly in Siberia. There, millions were working various hard labor jobs in grand-scale economic projects; like the Baikal-Amur railroad (BAM). Since the Communist Revolution of 1917, people had been continually stripped of their land and property. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev the destruction of independent farming was finalized. By the 1960s and 1970s massive poverty and anxiety pushed millions to migrate to cities. Mass-construction of cheap panel buildings was lagging behind. Millions of families shared poor housing, hostels, and dorms in cities. Villages were deserted. Collective farms decayed. Agricultural output fell below the levels of the Tsar's age. Tens of thousands of churches and monasteries were destroyed across the Soviet Union, and many churches were replaced by offices and halls of the Communist party. Spiritual life was dominated by ugly propaganda. People were blinded by fear and pushed to wrong values. Meaningful human virtues were replaced with fake ideals of ruthless Soviet communism. Propaganda idolized members of the Soviet Politburo, their portraits were decorating every school and factory along with countless portraits and statues of the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.
In November 1979 Gorbachev was promoted Candidate Member of the Politburo, then less than a year later, he was made Full Member of Politbureau, the highest rank in the Communist Party which gave him unlimited direct access to Brezhnev and Andropov. The latter also promoted Gorbachev to sub for him at several Politburo meetings, and gave him a huge power in decision-making. Gorbachev developed a personal friendship with another Politburo member, Eduard Shevardnadze, and the two were vacationing together at the prestigious Black sea resort of Pitsunda. At that time the invasion of Afghanistan, ordered by senile Brezhnev in 1979, seriously undermined international credibility of the Soviet Union. Andrei Sakharov wrote an open letter to Brezhnev calling for a stop to the war. 50 nations boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Crackdown on intellectual freedom and human rights included the use of psychiatric terror, arrests, and the exile of dissidents. The head of the KGB Yuri Andropov declared Andrei Sakharov the "enemy No. 1." Sakharov was forcefully exiled from Moscow to the militarized 'closed' city of Gorky. He was placed under tight surveillance and restricted from any contacts. His wife was also under tight surveillance. By his 70th birthday Brezhnev's health declined dramatically; but he made himself a Generalissimus Marshal of the Soviet Union, similar to that of Joseph Stalin. Brezhnev accepted over 200 decorations and awards, including awards from all pro-Soviet governments, except China. Brezhnev accepted countless expensive gifts and amassed a collection of vintage cars and other bribes. His personal vanity and behavior was replicated at all levels of the Communist Party and led to massive corruption. The old Brezhnev lost his acting abilities and couldn't even read the script. Massive disillusionment was reflected in cynical jokes about the Soviet life. The ugly reality in the Soviet Union was reflected in its senile leader. Gorbachev saw that outdated economic and political system in the Soviet Union was doomed, but propaganda was still brainwashing the minds of millions, because it was controlled by the privileged few top communists who lived in denial of the big reality.
The youngest Politburo Member, Mikhail Gorbachev, was contemplating reforms. Leonid Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov who died just 16 months later. He was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko, who died in just 13 months. In 1983 Politbureau member Rashidov committed suicide, then, in 1984 the powerful Defence Minister Ustinov died. While the Soviet Union was in a dying mode, the real world was rapidly growing into computer age that reshaped global community. The rigid Soviet System was incompatible with the constantly innovating world. USSR failed to respond to rapidly changing reality and alienated forward-thinking people even in the pro-Soviet countries. During the early 1980s Soviet Politbureau was torn between two viciously fighting groups of Communists, one was made of the old hard-liners led by Andrei Gromyko, the apprentice of Joseph Stalin. The other, pro-democracy group, was made of the forward-thinking members of the Politbureau who chose Gorbachev as their leader along with Aleksandr Yakovlev who was the brain behind Gorbachev's moves. With Gorbachev's support Yakovlev managed to change all hard-liners in the Soviet media and propaganda system. In March 1985 Gorbachev was made the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, becoming the first Soviet leader to have been born after the disastrous Russian Revolution of 1917. He announced reforms called 'perestroika' (aka.. restructuring) and 'glasnost' (aka.. opening up), and lifted the walls of propaganda and denial. However, Gorbachev's first reform on regulations related to manufacturing and trade of alcohol became an economic disaster, causing a serious economic damage to the Soviet Union's State budget with annual losses exceeding tens of billions of dollars. Although his reforms were supported by public, many communist hard-liners openly opposed Gorbachev. Eventually, by the late 1980s Gorbachev's push for economic liberalization resulted in emergence of co-operatives and other forms of independent businesses, making the movement to freedom irreversible.
In December of 1986, Gorbachev personally contacted Andrei Sakharov in his exile. Gorbachev ordered that the KGB should release Sakharov and return him to Moscow. Back in Moscow Sakharov continued his work as a humanitarian. A few months before his death, he was elected as a representative of the Academy of Sciences to the Supreme Soviet in 1989. Sakharov showed to the World what an independent thinker can do by going to the extremes of science. He invented a bomb that could bring the most horrible extermination of life, and then took a stand to ban his own invention for the salvation of planet Earth. Gorbachev had important meetings with Ronald Reagan culminating in their summit in Reikjavik, Iceland, and leading to a more stable political and military situation in the world, that resulted in reunification of Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989. At that time the Soviet hard-liners criticized Gorbachev's international moves, saying that he was not a leader, but rather a follower of Ronald Reagan's instruction: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall" when the state of world affairs did not allow Gorbachev to disobey without a risk of losing his face. He also followed recommendations by Margaret Thatcher on opening the "Iron Curtain" to allow the Russian people to see the world and learn about the diverse international reality and travel freely on their own. A first, Gorbachev skillfully used hidden buttons within the rigid structure of the Soviet power tainted by the long tradition of obedience, fear and intimidation, which was installed by dictator Joseph Stalin within the ranks of Communist bureaucracy. That fear of the man in Kremlin served Gorbachev's plans well, as he managed to overcome the resistance of hard liners in ending the ruling powers of the Communist Party. Soon Gorbachev began giving away many power buttons in Moscow, which allowed his rivals to gain strength and independently form opposition groups. Andrei Gromyko, the last living member of Joseph Stalin's old Politbureau, had criticized Gorbachev's methods as "weak leadership" and also said "He (Gorbachev) is unfit for the Hat" (where the Hat means Kremlin, or an allusion to the Tsar's crown of power). Such criticism was ignored by most of the younger members of the Communist Politbureau and Central Committee, because weak central leadership allowed provincial bosses to privatize state property at a fraction of its real value.
Gorbachev replaced his hard-line critic Andrei Gromyko with Eduard Shevardnadze as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, and both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze pushed for international détente and withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In another effort to add weight to his gradually eroding power, in March of 1990 Gorbachev updated his official title by adding a newly created post as President of the Soviet Union, albeit he was not really a democratically elected president. He surrounded himself with the political council of 15 top politicians, but he was lacking the grass-roots connections with masses and mid-level bureaucracy across the country. At that time Gorbachev began to experience powerlessness in his efforts to change the gigantic Soviet system, he was known for expressing his powerlessness by using profanities and anger at his meetings with the ranks of Soviet Government and industrial leaders. Gorbachev was facing an impossible task of modernizing the brittle structure of the Soviet Communism, especially the massive and inefficient Soviet military-industrial complex where opposition to reforms was the most organized, and inefficiency was dissembled as a military secret, like a catch-22, thus making it unreformable. Gorbachev himself was still perceived as the Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party, and that stigma became the weakest part of his image in the eyes of many open-minded and quickly learning people in the Soviet Union. His effort to gain political weight by adding a figure of Vice-President of the Soviet Union had failed and soon backfired. Gorbachev's fatal mistake was letting the Members of Politbureau to chose the Vice-President of the Soviet Union behind closed doors in Kremlin; the "chosen" one was a career communist Gennadi Yanayev who would very soon betray Gorbachev during the coup.
Eventually Gorbachev became overshadowed by a much stronger figure of Boris Yeltsin, who gained more popular support by pushing further economic and political reforms, and also criticized Gorbachev's manner of restructuring of the Soviet system as slow, indecisive and inefficient. The rivalry between two former Communist comrades ended in the August 1991 coup, when still powerful KGB and Soviet Army leaders tried to take the power away from both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Their coup failed just a couple days later, after the entire country watched Gennady Yanayev and his coup members on TV. "Let me say that Mikhail Gorbachev is now on vacation. He is undergoing treatment, himself, in our country. He is very tired after all these years and he will need time to get better." said Gennadi Yanayev before the cameras, and his hands were visibly trembling from fear. Gorbachev's disappearance during the coup was also seen as his grave weakness. Boris Yeltsin disposed his Communist ID card in front of the cameras and publicly denounced Gorbachev. Then all ranks of communists deserted the Communist Party in a massive exodus, and that was the end of the Soviet Union. All regional leaders were anxious to rule as presidents of their own independent states, and Yeltsin was already elected the president of Russia, the biggest part of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin met with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus and they made a treaty as independent states. By the end of December 1991 the Soviet Union became obsolete and Gorbachev retired after a formal signing of dissolution of the USSR.
Mikhail Gorbachev is still regarded in the Western world for his input in ending the Cold War and helping the reunification of Germany. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1990) and received numerous international awards, decorations and privileges, such as the Honorary German Citizenship. However, in Russia Gorbachev's political standing failed to gain any substantial public support. He received less than 1% of popular vote in the 1996 presidential elections in Russia, when his former rival Boris Yeltsin was elected for his second presidential term. In 2001 Gorbachev founded the Social Democratic Party of Russia, but later, in 2003, he had resigned from the party leadership and stayed away from most of the current Russian political forces and media. In contrast to Gorbachev's popularity all over the world, he fell in obscurity in Russia, largely because in the new era of the wild Russian capitalism his outdated views and experience became obsolete. Instead he turned to business of giving lecture tours and speeches internationally and selling photo-ops with him for money that goes to humanitarian causes; he also sold his name and image to commercials such as the Pizza Hut and other businesses. He has been running the business of the Gorbachev Foundation, which handles his international appearances, while keeping a low profile in the current political life of Russia. In 2005 he was awarded the Point Alpha Prize for his role in re-unification of Germany. In 2006 Gorbachev underwent a carotid artery surgery in Munich, Germany.- (1939-1993) Hero and martyr of Georgia's Independence. Son of the famous writer and poet Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (1893-1975)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zviad_Gamsakhurdia - Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1 February 1931 - 23 April 2007) was a Russian and Soviet politician who served as the first president of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism and Russian nationalism.
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Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974-77, and from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.
Rabin was born in Jerusalem to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and was raised in a Labor Zionist household. He learned agriculture in school and excelled as a student. He led a 27-year career as a soldier and ultimately attained the rank of Rav Aluf. As a teenager he joined the Palmach, the commando force of the Yishuv. He eventually rose through its ranks to become its chief of operations during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He joined the newly formed Israel Defense Forces in late 1948 and continued to rise as a promising officer. He helped shape the training doctrine of the IDF in the early 1950s, and led the IDF's Operations Directorate from 1959 to 1963. He was appointed Chief of the General Staff in 1964 and oversaw Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Rabin served as Israel's ambassador to the United States from 1968 to 1973, during a period of deepening U.S.-Israel ties. He was appointed Prime Minister of Israel in 1974 after the resignation of Golda Meir. In his first term, Rabin signed the Sinai Interim Agreement and ordered the Entebbe raid. He resigned in 1977 in the wake of a financial scandal. Rabin was Israel's minister of defense for much of the 1980s, including during the outbreak of the First Intifada.
In 1992, Rabin was re-elected as prime minister on a platform embracing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He signed several historic agreements with the Palestinian leadership as part of the Oslo Accords. In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with long-time political rival Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Rabin also signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. In November 1995, he was assassinated by an extremist named Yigal Amir, who opposed the terms of the Oslo Accords. Amir was convicted of Rabin's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Rabin was the first native-born prime minister of Israel and was the only prime minister to be assassinated and the second to die in office after Levi Eshkol. Rabin has become a symbol of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.- Additional Crew
Yasir Arafat was born Muhammad 'Abd Ar-Ra'uf Al-Qudwah Al-Husayni on August 24, 1929 in Cairo, Egypt, to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother. He was raised in Cairo but always considered himself Palestinian. In the late 1940s, while a student in Egypt, he became an ardent Arab nationalist and adopted the name Yasir, after Yasir al Birah, a famous Arab resistance leader. When Arafat as 14, he was involved in gunrunning for Arab guerrillas in Gaza, a task he continued to perform during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. After the war, Arafat entered the University of Cairo, earning a degree in engineering in 1955.
During his student days, he began to train secretly as a guerrilla, becoming an expert in demolitions and taking part in raids on British installations near the Suez Canal. After his graduation from the university, Arafat was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Egyptian army. He saw some combat at Port Said and Abu Kabir during the Suez war of October 29-November 6, 1956. In the mid-1960s, Arafat emerged as the chief military and political leader of the Palestinian homeland movement. From his residence in Kuwait where he ran a successful engineering concern, he published the major nationalist organ, Our Palestine, and established Al Fatah, an acronym for the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine.
In 1967, after the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, he became the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) where throughout the 1970s he directed the PLO in a series of terrorist attacks against Israel and its Western allies. In an effort to garner broader support for his movement in the 1980s he began to distance himself from the PLO's more violent factions like the Abu Nidal group, but has not firmly renounced terrorism as a means of achieving his goals to create a Palestinian state within Israel. He had residences in Gaza and Tunis, where the PLO has its headquarters. He died after a short illness in November 2004, aged 75.- Slobodan Milosevic (20 August 1941 - 11 March 2006) was a Yugoslav and Serbian politician who served as the president of Serbia within Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1997 (originally the Socialist Republic of Serbia, a constituent republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, from 1989 to 1992) and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. Formerly a high-ranking member of the League of Communists of Serbia (SKS) during the 1980s, he led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990 until 2003.
- Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (28 July 1954 - 5 March 2013) was a Venezuelan politician who was president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, except for a brief period in 2002. Chávez was also leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he led until 2012.