Light the string — aka the fuse — throw and kaboom! The Soviet dictator is back in vogue, pitting Stalinists against a Russian civil society desperate to keep the memory of his victims alive. Lazar Kaganovich helped build the system Soviet dictator Josef Stalin came to rule.
When the FBI arrested letter-bombing anarchist Ted Kaczynski, some Montana journalism students turned a hunch and a little luck into iconic images. A designer in Italy saw haute couture where others saw a bottle stopper. An anti-immigrant killer hit the streets of Stockholm against a backdrop of xenophobic politicking. How Finland got out of Russia while the getting was good.
In here, the world slows down for the time it takes to sip your tea. Long before the heroines of the world wars, a Russian woman earned honor on the battlefield … but she had to dress like a man to get it. Some important moments from the past have been locked away for ages.
The LeanIn generation could learn a thing or two from these pioneers. Facebook Twitter Love this? A Palestinian demonstrator throws a petrol bomb towards Israeli security forces during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron on April 4, Nationalist troops in the Spanish Civil War, By the time the Hungarian Uprising was crushed by the Red Army, the street-fighters of Budapest had destroyed an estimated Soviet tanks, three-quarters of that number with Molotov cocktails or similar variants of improvised explosive devices.
Although its usefulness against contemporary tanks has greatly diminished, it retains its power as a symbol of defiance. There is some debate over the exact date and location of the first battle in which one side or the other deployed large numbers of petrol bombs. But historians generally agree that the first formal deployment of the Molotov cocktail by an organized army occurred during the Spanish Civil War in September, One of the vital points on its expanding perimeter was the ancient city of Toledo, some 30 miles southwest of downtown Madrid and near one of the major highways linking the capitol to the Mediterranean ports where the Loyalists received the bulk of their foreign arms shipments, including the first significant shipment of modern tanks and mechanized artillery sent to them by Josef Stalin.
Both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were gearing-up to send even bigger shipments to Franco, but conspicuously absent were up-to-date anti-tank weapons.
Such cannon were urgently needed as a defense against the large formations of T and T tanks the Loyalists were massing just east and north of Toledo. By contrast, incendiary devices like a Molotov only give off heat and light. They are typically made with a glass bottle or jar, a burning wick, and a flammable substance like gasoline. You throw them, they break, fire happens. This might not seem like a big distinction, but in practice, it means that a Molotov is more likely to damage property than it is to kill people.
A grenade, on the other hand, is specifically designed to kill or wound large numbers of people and would be considered armed violence. Now, with protests against police violence still raging across the US, these civilian weapons are becoming a more common sight at demonstrations in America. The war began with a bombardment of Helsinki, which Soviet foreign minister Vychaeslav Molotov claimed was a humanitarian aid drop.
Soon, fascist Germany and Italy sent huge numbers of troops and weapons to Franco, and Britain, the US, and France looked the other way. The Republicans might not have had fascist friends to fight for them, but they did have 45, volunteers from around the world who were more than happy to firebomb a fascist.
Just like the people Kadivar studies, these volunteers were fighting for democracy. In some instances, they were exiles from Italy or Germany and knew that rolling back fascism was the only way they would ever return home. These volunteers became the International Brigades, and again they made up for a lack of training with a surfeit of motivation and glass bottles full of petrol.
Their heroics would be profiled by everyone from Ernest Hemmingway to Langston Hughes. Like the Finns, the Spanish Republicans have gone down in history as heroes who fought against overwhelming odds and lost. By the time the International Brigades left Barcelona in the writing was on the wall, the Spanish Republic was doomed and with it the last hope of peacefully stopping fascism.
They also knew how to fight it: with a bottle, a rag, and a can of petrol.
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