The biggest political highlight of 1921 was the Washington Conference
where representatives of nine countries sought to resolve the problems
they had failed to agree two years earlier in Paris. Among other things,
those were disarmament and the situation in the Asia-Pacific region. The
Washington Conference resulted in the signature of seven treaties and agreements,
including the five-power naval limitation treaty of naval armament which
imposed restrictions as to the number and the tonnage of the capital ships
owned by the United States, Britain, Japan, France and Italy. It was the
first arms limitation treaty ever signed and also the first time that Britain
formally recognized the demand to have its naval force stabilized with
that of the United States. After a lengthy debate, a nine-power treaty
was signed proclaiming respect for China's sovereignty, independence and
territorial and administrative integrity. The Great powers also pledged
not to seek China's partition into spheres of influence.
The peace conferences of the Twenties had a pacifying effect
on the overall situation in the world, which was now enjoying a much-deserved
lull without crises and sharp contradictions.
Six years of war, two revolutions and a Civil war, had literally
bled Russia white both economically and demographically, with millions
of people reduced to near starvation and widespread epidemics taking their
toll on the war-ravaged population… The overall state of disrepair was
most graphically evidenced by that fact that in 1921 this country's steel
production was equal to what it had been more than a hundred years ago
when Emperor Peter the Great ruled the land… The Russian society was a
shambles and its intellectual potential at an all-time low. Even though
the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious from the terrible upheavals of the
previous few years, they still found themselves in a serious quandary.
The sacrifices demanded of workers and peasants were tolerable in war,
but when the enemy was defeated, the mood changed. The living standards
of the urban laborers and peasants were falling fast and there were even
muted signs of growing discontent in the army. Revolutions all tend to
someday exhaust themselves and, fully aware of and scared by this normality,
Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolshevik leaders were increasingly awakening
to the need for making some far-reaching economic concessions. By springtime
it was already clear to all that the budding grapes of popular wrath threatened
to wipe out the Communist government and, eager to prevent such a development,
Lenin introduced his New Economic Policy which reaffirmed the right of
peasants to the ownership of their land, reduced the burden of taxation
and also permitted a certain amount of private business enterprise, especially
in trade. Under the circumstances it was the only way the Bolsheviks could
possibly fend off the looming crisis...
The year 1921 was the last in the life of the prominent geographer
and revolutionary, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin whose unworldly, almost saintly
character and cheerful endurance of hardships did much to win sympathy
for the anarchist movement which he supported. Continuously persecuted
for his political beliefs here in Russia, Pyotr Kropotkin spent half his
life living abroad, but even there he was not immune from official harassment,
endured several arrests and even spent four years behind bars at Lyons.
In 1917 he rejoiced at the March revolution in Russia and hastened back
to his own country where, reduced to silent inactivity by the November
coup of the Bolsheviks, he spent the rest of his life lying low and writing
articles on practical and moral aspects of anarchism.
Another great man to die in 1921 was Enrico Caruso who is still
considered the best operatic tenor the world has ever had. Throughout his
long stage career Caruso appeared in more than 50 French and Italian operas
and was the first singer whose qualities can be confirmed by posterity
through the phonograph.
Just as the great French writer Anatole France and the author
of the relativity theory Albert Einstein became the winners of the 1921
Nobel Prize, another outstanding physicist, Andrei Sakharov, was born in
Russia. As a 27 year old young man, he joined a team of nuclear physicists
who were developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Back in those days, Russia
was still fighting a cold war with the United States and the young scientist,
who later became widely known as the "father of the H-bomb",
was thus forced to contribute to the buildup of his country's military
muscle. Andrei Sakharov eventually became very active in the international
movement against nuclear weapons and their testing. His Committee for the
Advancement of Human Rights was the beginning of a large-scale human rights
movement in Russia. Angered by Sakharov's consistent criticism of their
1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet authorities exiled him to Gorky,
now Nizhny Novgorod. In 1986, with only three years left to live, Sakharov
was finally allowed to return to Moscow where he worked hard standing up
for the ideals he so staunchly believed in…
Alexander Dubcek was born in the same year with Andrei Sakharov.
The leader of the Czechoslovak Communist party, he defied the party dogma
launching the so-called Prague Spring liberalization campaign which invited
the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Stripped of all his posts and arrested, Alexander
Dubcek spent 20 long years as a political outcast before he made a strong
but very short-lived comeback in 1989…
THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series
of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.
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