November 16, 1920: The Russian Civil War Ends

November 16, 1920: The Government of South Russia evacuates the Crimea, Russia's Black Sea peninsula, the last stronghold of the White Movement, bringing an end to the Russian Civil War, in victory for the Red Army.

Russia was struck by 2 revolutions in 1917: The February Revolution, which toppled the Russian Empire and Czar Nicholas II; and the October Revolution, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, which toppled the provisional government of President Alexander Kerensky, installing a Communist government led by Vladimir Lenin.

But the Bolsheviks' seizure of power was not universally accepted, and the country descended into a conflict which became a full-scale civil war by May 1918. The two largest combatants were the Red Army, seeking the maintenance of Lenin's far-left state; and the forces known as the White Movement and its White Army, led mainly by the right-leaning officers of the Russian Empire, united around the figure of Alexander Kolchak.

What many people, particularly in America, do not understand is that Socialists and Communists are not only not the same, but are opposed to each other. In the Russian Civil War, the leftist opposition to the Bolsheviks included the Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries-Internationalists, and the Makhnovshchina, Ukrainian anarchists. And then there were the Green Armies, local militias opposed to both the Reds and the Whites.

Thirteen foreign states, concerned with the establishment of a Communist state, launched what became known as the Allied Intervention against the Red Army. These states included the United States, the British Empire (and, through them, troops from Canada, Australia, India and South Africa), France, Japan, China, Greece and Poland.

But the Red Army was too entrenched. In 1919, the White Army launched several offensives, which failed. In December, General Kolchak was betrayed and detained by the chief of the Allied military mission in Siberia, Maurice Janin, who handed him over to the Bolsheviks. They executed him on February 7, 1920.

Although the Bolsheviks were victorious, the territorial extent of the Russian state had been reduced, for many non-Russian ethnic groups had used the disarray to push for national independence.

In March 1921, during a related war against Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed. Soon, the Red Army moved into the Baltic and Caucasus states. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- the Soviet Union -- was officially founded.

Lenin died in office in 1924. Janin returned to his native France, and lived until 1946. Kerensky lived in exile until 1970.

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November 16, 1920 was a Monday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. And the NHL season didn't start until December 22. So there were no scores on this historic day.

August 16, 1920: The Miracle On the Vistula

August 16, 1920: The Soviet Red Army withdraws from the Polish capital of Warsaw, a key moment in the Polish-Soviet War. It becomes known as the Miracle On the Vistula.

After the collapse of the Central Powers, and the Armistice that ended World War I on November 11, 1918, Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that his new country negotiated with the now-dissolved German Empire. He sent the Red Army west to reclaim the Polish territory that was held by the Germans, because he viewed the newly independent Poland as a critical route for spreading communist revolutions into Europe.

Meanwhile, Polish leaders, including Józef Piłsudski, aimed to restore Poland’s pre-1772 First Partition borders and secure the country's position in the region. Throughout 1919, Polish forces occupied much of present-day Lithuania and Belarus, emerging victorious in the Polish-Ukranian War. However, Soviet forces regained strength after their victories in the Russian Civil War, and Symon Petliura, leader of the Ukrainian People's Republic, was forced to ally with Piłsudski in 1920 to resist the advancing Bolsheviks.

In April 1920, Piłsudski launched the Kiev offensive, with the goal of securing favorable borders for Poland. On May 7, Polish and allied Ukrainian forces captured Kiev, though Soviet armies in the area were not decisively defeated. The offensive lacked local support, and many Ukrainians joined the Red Army rather than Petliura’s forces. In response, the Soviet Red Army launched a successful counteroffensive starting in June 1920. By August, Red Army forces commanded by Mikhail Tukhachevsky approached the Polish capital of Warsaw and the nearby Modlin Fortress.

On August 16, Piłsudski counterattacked from the south, disrupting the enemy's offensive, forcing the Russian forces into a disorganized withdrawal eastward and behind the Neman River. It became known as Cud nad Wisłą: The Miracle On the Vistula. Estimated Russian losses were 10,000 killed, 500 missing, 30,000 wounded, and 66,000 taken prisoner, compared with Polish losses of some 4,500 killed, 10,000 missing, and 22,000 wounded.

The defeat crippled the Red Army: Lenin called it "an enormous defeat." In the following months, several more Polish follow-up victories secured Poland's independence. The war ended with a ceasefire on October 18, 1920, and peace negotiations led to the Peace of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921.

Poland’s eastern border was established, securing Polish control over parts of what would become parts of Ukraine and Belarus after World War II. Despite the Soviet defeat, the war resulted in the official recognition of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as Soviet states, undermining Piłsudski’s ambitions for an Intermarium federation led by Poland. Despite this, Poland's success at the Battle of Warsaw cemented its position as an important player in Eastern European geopolitics in the interwar period.

With independence secured, Marshal Piłsudski served as the nation's Chief of State from 1918 to 1922, and then as Prime Minister from 1926 to 1928. But his effect on the nation's elected leaders meant that he was, if not written into the law as such, then in practice, the nation's dictator from 1918 until his death in 1935.

Apparently, all dictators, even the enlightened ones,

feel the need to wear an epic mustache.

Tukhachevsky recovered, and became Chief of Staff of the Red Army, and by 1935 was a Marshal of the Soviet Union. But dictator Joseph Stalin found out that Tukhachevsky had blamed him for the loss of the Battle of Warsaw, and made him part of his military purge, executing him on June 12, 1937.

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August 16, 1920 was a Monday. Writer Charles Bukowski was born.

It was the off-season for the NHL. The NFL was one month away from being founded. The NBA was 26 years away.

There were only 4 games played in what would eventually be called Major League Baseball:

* The Cleveland Indians beat the New York Yankees, 4-3 at the Polo Grounds. This was the game in which Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was hit in the head by a pitch, leading to his death the next day, baseball's only on-field fatality. I have a separate entry for that event.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 6-4 at Fenway Park in Boston.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Chicago Cubs, 9-1 at Cubs Park in Chicago. It was renamed Wrigley Field in 1926.

* And the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-2 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.

January 27, 1945: The End of Auschwitz

January 27, 1945: The Soviet Union's Red Army discovers the Auschwitz concentration camp, saving the lives of the 8,100 prisoners still alive there. As Auschwitz was the camp with the most deaths in the Holocaust, January 27 has been commemorated as Holocaust Remembrance Day ever since.

I have titled this entry "The End of Auschwitz," not "The Liberation of Auschwitz," because the Soviet Union never "liberated" anything. Most of the survivors returned to a Poland that would be under Communist rule until 1989.

The camp opened in May 1940. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial of reasons. The first gassings took place in August 1941. The freight trains kept on coming in, under the gate with the lettering ARBEIT MACHT FREI -- "Work Makes Free." As far as the outside world knew, such places were slave labor camps, which was true, and was bad enough.

But few outside the Third Reich knew about the genocide. Over 1.3 million people were sent there, and 1.1 million were murdered, 960,000 of those being Jews, and 865,000 of those gassed on arrival. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, willful ignorance of disease, individual executions, beatings, or during medical experiments that the SS carried out with sadistic glee. There were 802 prisoners known to have tried to escape, 144 successfully. An uprising was launched on October 7, 1944, but it was doomed to failure.

The trains kept coming. Generals begged Chancellor Adolf Hitler to make trains available to send soldiers to the fronts, to stop the Soviets to the East, and the Americans, British, Canadians and French to the West. He told them, "No! I need the trains to kill the Jews!" He seemed to have accepted that the war was lost, but, always determined to exterminate Europe's Jews, he also seemed to have adopted a policy of, "If I'm going down, I'm taking as many of the enemy as I can with me."

As the Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, the SS sent most of the camp's population west on a death march to camps inside Germany and Austria. Those 8,100 remaining prisoners were essentially left to fend for themselves.

Georgii Elisavetskii, a Soviet soldier who entered one of the barracks, said in 1980 that he could hear other soldiers telling the inmates: "You are free, comrades!" But they did not respond, so he tried in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian. Then he used some Yiddish: "They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: 'Do not be afraid. I am a Colonel of Soviet Army, and a Jew. We have come to liberate you.'... Finally, as if the barrier collapsed... they rushed toward us, shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs."

The Soviets had first encountered a Nazi concentration camp on August 16, 1944, in Treblinka, Poland. A folk song would later commemorate Treblinka as "the biggest grave in the world."

In Germany itself, on April 11, 1945, American troops under the command of General George S. Patton liberated the Buchenwald camp in Weimar, Thuringia. On April 15, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen camp in Bergen, Lower Saxony. On April 22, the Red Army reached the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, outside Berlin.

On April 29, American troops under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower liberated the camp at Dachau, outside Munich. When Eisenhower saw the emaciated prisoners, many of them within days of death if they didn't receive medical treatment, he ordered photographers and film crews to come in and document it, because he knew that if no one did, then, one day, people would deny that the Nazis ever did such things. People have denied it, but "Ike" and the other Allied commanders got the proof.

Over 11 million people died in the Holocaust -- about as many as died from combat in all of World War I. Of those 11 million, over 6 million had been imprisoned for the reason that they were Jewish. Others were killed because they were of Slavic descent, and therefore of "an inferior race" to the German "Aryans"; or because they were Communists; or because they belonged to labor unions; or because, despite not fitting any of those other categories, they resisted the Nazis.

Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor from Lippstadt, Westphalia, had supported the Nazis at first. But when the Nazis began enforcing their ideology on Protestant churches, he led a resistance movement, and was imprisoned in 1938, first at Sachsenhausen, then at Dachau.

On January 6, 1946, in a speech in Frankfurt, he gave a speech whose exact wording has varied over the years, possibly losing something in translation. The most common version is this: "First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then, they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then, they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." He became an antiwar activist, and lived until 1984.

Auschwitz -- with the changing of national borders after The War, now in Oświęcim, in southern Poland -- is maintained as a museum and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

UPDATE: On the 80th Anniversary, January 27, 2025, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum released a statement:

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

This is true. It also took thought. Careful consideration that should have resulted in the idea of, "There is a group of people that is not doing as well as us, so we should help them, and raise them to our level." Instead, it resulted in the idea of, "There is a group of people that is less than us, and, for that reason, they must be eliminated."

And that kind of evil can never be tolerated.

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January 27, 1945 was a Saturday. That same day, at another German camp, at Ziegeghain, in Germany's Rhineland, U.S. Army Master Sergeant Robbie Edmunds stood up for the Jewish soldiers under his command. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. All of the NHL's "Original Six" teams were in action:

* The New York Rangers lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-0 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins, 11-3 at the Montreal Forum. Maurice "The Rocket" Richard, on his way to the NHL's 1st 50-goal season, scored his 34th, and had 2 assists. Dutch Hiller had 2 goals and an assist. Ray Getliffe had 2 goals. Elmer Lach had a goal and 4 assists.

* And the Detroit Red Wings beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 5-1 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

And while England's Football Association had shut Football League and FA Cup competition down for the duration of the war, there was Football League South play. Arsenal beat Fulham, 8-3 at White Hart Lane in Middlesex. Stan Mortensen, on loan to Arsenal during the war, scored 4 goals.

Yes, The Arsenal used the ground of their arch-rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, because their home, Arsenal Stadium, a.k.a. Highbury, in North London was appropriated by the government for defense purposes. The London Government Act 1963 redrew the boundaries of the city of London (not to be confused with "The City of London") so that White Hart Lane was inside the city for the first time.