January 21, 1924 was the last in the life of the Soviet leader
Vladimir Lenin. The whole country was gripped by heartfelt grief and thousands
of people poured out into the freezing cold to bid farewell to their beloved
leader on whom they had pinned so much hope for a better life. The government
issued a special decree to have Lenin's body embalmed and placed inside
a mausoleum in the Red Square right under the Kremlin wall. Lenin's embalmed
body has been lying in state there for the past 75 years in open view of
everyone willing to see and pay respects to the man who turned around the
entire history of this country.
Lenin's death reignited the power struggle within the Communist
party once again putting against each other the two erstwhile enemies,
Joseph Stalin and Lev Trotsky, each of whom was leading his own group of
followers. The more cunning, cynical and power-hungry Stalin eventually
prevailed and Trotsky's men saw themselves being carefully phased out of
their posts…
During the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets, Stalin already
emerged as a true-blue Leninist presiding over the unanimous approval of
the first Soviet Constitution.
The Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon died three months after
Lenin leaving behind a will urging the Church to be loyal to the new Soviet
regime.
On February 1, the British government recognized the USSR. Austria,
Italy, France, China and other countries followed suit and, by the beginning
of 1925, all the great powers, except the United States, had established
diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
In 1924 Adolf Hitler, then a relatively unknown 35 year-old politician,
was released from jail. The would-be Fuhrer was born in Austria into the
family of a minor customs official. After his father's death in 1912, Adolf
Schikelgruber, which was his real name, failed to finish his schooling
and also failed to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Arts. With his
dreams of becoming a painter frustrated, Adolf eked out a precarious existence
by designing and peddling shabby postcards and posters. At the outbreak
of World War I, he volunteered for service with a Bavarian infantry regiment
and spent four years on the Western battle front where we was wounded twice
and promoted to the rank of a lance corporal. Blaming the German defeat
down on the evil machinations of Marxists and the Jews, Adolf Hitler, joined
a group of hardline nationalists where his outstanding public-speaking
abilities quickly won him leadership of the group which he eventually reorganized
into the National Socialist German Workers Party. In 1923 Hitler and his
associates tried to seize the Bavarian government and stage a march on
Berlin. On November 9th, the attempt, dubbed "the beer putsch"
fell through, Hitler was arrested but received only a minor sentence of
five years and less than a year later he was walking free again. For nine
months he was held at the fortress of Landsberg where he wrote the most
of Mein Kampf, an exposition of his political and racial ideas and a clarion
call for future political action. Still, the Nazis were eking out a generally
miserable exsistence during the Twenties, but with the arrival of the great
economic crisis after 1929, the Hitler movement became almost overnight
the strongest dynamic force in the German public life.
On June 12, 1924 America's 41st President, George Bush was born
in Milton, Maryland. Before his election as President, George Bush headed
the Central Intelligence Agency and, five years later, Ronald Reagan invited
him to be his Vice Presidential running mate. President Bush's popularity
peaked in 1991 after the success of the US-led Operation Desert Storm against
Iraq.
Another great American born in 1924 is Marlon Brando whose engrossing
stage image, trademark mutter and an acting manner all his own made him
one of Hollywood's most remembered superstars. Brando's brilliant performance
as the mafia kingpin Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's 1971 blockbuster
The Godfather, won him an Academy Award.
The great Indian film actor Radj Kapur was also born in 1924.
He owed his dream-come-true film career to his father in whose theater
the young Radj mastered many secrets of his future profession. During the
1940s Radj Kapur started appearing in movies and at the age of 23, he founded
the Radj Kapur Films studio in Bombay which has since grown into a giant
movie empire almost on par with Hollywood.
Russia's own version of Hollywood, the world-famous Mosfilm Studios
in Moscow was founded in the same year of 1924 and has since churned out
countless masterpieces of Russian and world cinema made by Sergei Eizenstein,
Sergei Bondarchuk, Andrei Tarkovsky and other outstanding directors.
1924 was the last in the life of the great Italian composer Giacomo
Puccini whose brilliant combination of melodious dramatism and exotic and,
at the same time, realistic, plots are very much vivid in his world-renowned
operas Manon Lescaut, La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot .
THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series
of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.
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