March 29 in Russian history

1814: In the early morning, Russian troops begin the battle of Paris. After the first assault, they are stopped by the artillery gunfire, but the assistance of the Prussian and Austrian allies allows them to throw away the French Imperial Guard. Russian troops enter the Montmartre hills. For the first time since 1437 a foreign army enters the French capital. One of the commanders of the glorious French army, Joseph Bonapart, fled, while the other, Auguste Marmont, sent truce envoys to the allied forces and agreed to capitulate. A year and a half later, the winning countries sign the treaty of the so called Holy Alliance. This Alliance was extremely interesting and deserves a separate article, but for now the most interesting thing for us is that the main idea behind the alliance was to establish the European peacekeeping forces. Unfortunately, Russian emperor Alexander I, who was the main proponent of this document, had a very special view of "peacekeeping". In his opinion, it was the alliance of god-blessed monarchies against liberal conspiracies.

1856: The end of the Crimean war. The war started in 1853, when the political landscape of Europe had significantly changed since the birth of the Holy Alliance. Revolutions in Belgium, France and interference of the alliance in the internal affairs of European countries led to the negative attitude towards Russia. There were other reasons, of course. Britain competed with Russia in Persia and sought to weaken the opponent. France attempted to increase influence in the Holy Land, controlled by Turkey. The Austrian position was, probably, influenced by other countres, because her anti-Russian position was inexplicable: only four years earlier Russia helped to suppress the rebellion in Hungary and saved the Austrian empire from dissipation. Anyway, the war had started. Russia successfully defeated the Turkish fleet near Sinop and the Turkish army in Bayazet, Kuruk Dar and Kars. Then the European countries interfered and landed in Crimea. After 11 months of siege, Russian troops abandoned the southern part of Sevastopol. Some more months later, Russia agreed to sign the peace treaty. According to the Second peace treaty of Paris, Russia lost the right to keep fleet and fortresses on the Black Sea. Russia returned Kars, settled by Georgians and Armenians, to Turkey and received back Sevastopol. Russia was also prohibited from protecting the Christian nations subjugated by the Ottoman empire. Russia lost much of the influence in Romania and Serbia.

1867: The Crimean war had shown that Russia was weaker than the European countries. Russia began to understand that it will be very difficult to keep the overseas territories, especially Alaska, where only 600-800 Russians lived at that time. In 1859, USA had already attempted to buy Alaska for $5,000,000, but the Russian government was too busy with the forthcoming abolition of serfdom and refused. By 1867, the Russian government became more interested in Middle Asia and the Far East, so it was decided to sell the Russian America to the United States. The US payed $7,200,000 and renamed Russian America to Alaska. For the USA, the importance of Alaska was lying in the political, rather than in the economical sphere. Had it not been for the Gold Rush of the 1896, Alaska could have remained the barren land for many more years.

That's it. So the victory in the war with Napoleon finally led to the loss of Alaska.

1945: Soviet troops liberate Gdansk (Danzig) and raise the Polish national flag over the city. The 2nd Ukrainian front crossed the borders of Austria, so ungrateful 100 years ago.

1969: Soviet ice hockey squad becomes the world champion for the seventh time in a row.

March 12 in Russian history

1899: The first international ice hockey match in Russia. Russian team Sport plays against the team of British citizens living in St.Petersburg. The game took place on the ice of Neva. The score is 4:4.

1940: The end of the Soviet-Finnish war known as the Winter War. On the one hand, USSR reached all the planned goals: the border was moved farther from Leningrad and Murmansk, obtained the Karelian isthmus, islands in the Gulf of Finland, Ladoga lake and territories in the North. On the other hand, the international prestige of the USSR both as a partner and as a possible enemy was seriously damaged. The consequences were much worse for Finland. The worst being that this war forced Finland to co-operate with the Nazi Germany, turning the country into the losing side of the WWII.

1964: General Pyotr Grigorenko is sent to the psychiatric investigation. General-major Grigorenko was born in 1907. In 1934 he graduated from the Academy of Military Engineering and in 1939 from the Academy of the Army General Staff. In 1939 he was granted an audience with A.Vyshinsky, the Prosecutor General of the USSR and informed him of "abuses of power" by the NKVD officials in Zaporozhye. The information was provided by Grigorenko's brother Ivan, who was arrested, and later released. Some time later a number of the organizers of repressions in Zaporozhye were arrested themselves. Grigorenko wrote later: "Only many years after I understood that the case ended to my satisfaction only because it coincided with the change of the leaders in NKVD. It was the new broom of Beria." After the war General Grigorenko works in the M.Frunze Military Academy. In 1961, he says a speech on a regional Communist Party congress, where he says: "We approve the draft programme where the cult of personality is condemned, but do we do everything possible to avoid the restoration of such cult?" He proposed to democratize the elections, to promote the accountability of the party authorities and their rotation, to abolish high salaries of the party officials. He was fired from the Academy after this speech.

In 1962-1964 Grigorenko works in the army on the Far East. In 1963 he creates "The Union of Struggle for Restoration of Leninism". He wrote leaflets where he demanded to dismiss bureaucrats, called for free elections, for the control of the people over the authorities, for the "replaceability" (is this the word for the possibility to dismiss the officials unable to cope with their tasks?) On the February 1, 1964 he and his sons who were also members of the Union, are arrested. He was excluded from the party, discharged to rank-and-file soldier, stripped of all awards and sent to the Leningrad special psychiatric hospital. After the resignment of Khrushchev he was release from the hospital. He wrote a book published only in Samizdat, where he accused Stalin of many errors in the first years of the war, which led to many tragedies. In 1967 he unofficially read lectures on the history of the World War II to the students of the Moscow State University.

The experience of the "Union of Struggle for Restoration of Leninism" led him to the conclusion that the underground resistance to the Soviet power is useless. "We know that in the underground one can meet only rats," he wrote. These words became the title of his book, which is available online in Russian (see В подполье можно встретить только крыс). In 1967 he supported the national movement of the Crimean Tatars, who demanded to allow them to return from deportation to Crimea. In 1969 he was sent to the psychiatric hospital again, where he was diagnosed in the following way: "suffers from a mental disorder in the form of pathological (paranoid) personality with reformatory ideas."

In 1974 under the pressure of the international community he was released. In 1976 he joined the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and becomes a co-founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. In 1977 he goes to the USA to meet with his son, who emigrated earlier. Some months later his Soviet citizenship was cancelled and he lost the right to return to the USSR. The US army offered him a position in the West Point academy, but Grigorenko refused: "I am a Soviet -- former Soviet -- general and I cannot teach our enemies." In 1987, Pyotr Grigorenko died in New York.

In 1997 President Yeltsin signed the decree "On the perpetuation of the memory of Grigorenko P.G.". President of Ukraine L.Kuchma awarded P.Grigorenko with the order "For the courage". An avenue in Kiev is named after P.Grigorenko. Crimean Tatars built a monument to the general in Simferopol.

March 2 in Russian history

Today's Day in Russian history will be unusual. It will be a collection of the events all over the world which happened on this day in 1960s, which afffected the lives of many people in the USSR and defined our mindsets for two-three decades

1964: The Beatles start filming The Hard Day's Night. The movie was not shown in the USSR, but the music became widely known and loved.

1965: USA begin operation "Rolling Thunder" in Northern Vietnam. The "American militarists and imperialists" became a cliché of the Soviet propaganda. Not without a reason, but by that time we already knew that the propaganda lies. Even in the cases when they were saying truth, we didn't believe them. For example, when we saw photos of poor districts of New York, we thought something like: "Ha, you won't cheat me anymore!" or "What they don't tell us is that their welfare payments are larger than our salary!" I sometimes think that if the Soviets didn't lie to their own citizens, USSR could have lasted much longer.

1968: Syd Barrett leaves Pink Floyd. Oh, we really loved PF. The Wall and the Dark Side of the Moon were the favourite albums of the intellectual wannabes. The sound of helicopter rolling from the speakers standing on a window-sill filled the yards. We knew a lot of legends about Syd Barrett, but as it turned out, none of them was even close to the reality.

1969: The incident on the Damansky (Zhenbao) island, when 30 Chinese soldiers crossed the border and killed a group of Soviet border guards. In the 1970s the war with China seemed inevitable. We sang humorous songs about Chinese paratroopers, told anecdotes about the Chinese crossing the border "in small groups, from 1 to 2 million men" and were reluctantly preparing to leave the dangerous cities to a village to wait till the war ends.

1970: Alexander Tvardovsky was forced to resign from the post of the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir literary magazine. Tvardovsky was a writer and a poet. In 1962, he published "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn in Novy Mir and turned the magazine into the favourite reading of the Soviet intelligentsia. His resignation became another symbol of the end of the liberalization of 1960s.

And, of course, I can't forget this anniversary: in 1859, a boy named Sholom Rabinovich, was born in Pereyaslav, near Kiev. 25 years later he grows into Sholom-Aleichem, one of the greatest authors writing in Yiddish. He was often called "the Jewish Mark Twain", which says a lot about his style and writings. In 1905, after pogroms, he was forced to emigrate. He spent his last years in Geneva and New York, where he at last met Mark Twain, who said that he thinks of himself as of the American Sholom-Aleichem.