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Advertising postcard map of European Russia, with inset images of a mounted Cossack lancer, a troika, and St. Petersburg.
Haidar-Pasha, or Haydarpaşa, train station in Constantinople, on the Sea of Marmora at the southeastern end of the Bosphorus. The station was the site of an explosion on September 6, 1917, as the Turks were preparing the Jildirim campaign. Two or three hundred cars of munitions and explosives were destroyed, losses the Turks could ill afford. From Jildirim: Deutsche Streiter auf heiligem Boden, Yildirim: German Soldiers on Holy Ground edited by Dr. Steuber, Chief General Physician, Retired, 1912/18 Army Physician in Palestine.
French pilot and officers in front of a Farman pusher biplane at an airfield in Salonica, Greece. Note the windscreen. Other planes and grounds crew can be seen in the background. The message on the reverse is dated February 28, 1917.
1898 map of St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, from a German atlas. Central St Petersburg, or Petrograd, is on the Neva River. Key landmarks include the Peter and Paul Fortress, which served as a prison, Nevski Prospect, a primary boulevard south of the Fortress, the Finland Train Station, east of the Fortress, where Lenin made his triumphal return, the Tauride (Taurisches) Palace, which housed the Duma and later the Petrograd Soviet.
A Bulgarian postcard of Red Army soldiers at rest, with rifles stacked, and reading newspapers or leaflets.
"Tuesday, 22nd AugustThe latest news from Moscow and Petrograd says the rioting has relaxed somewhat, but there are outbreaks of violence among the workers in the large factories and mills. . . . On the Russian North-West Front, the Russians, aided by Lettish troops, were unable to check a fierce offensive by Prussian forces on the Baltic seaport of Riga and the ancient city had been occupied by the enemy. . . .Wednesday, 23nd AugustRumour has it that Riga was not taken by the Germans, but given to them." ((1), more)
"the Ottoman calm, however, was somewhat disturbed presently by a series of detonations that shook the city. Two or three hundred cars of munitions and explosives blew up very mysteriously in the railway station of Haidar-Pasha. The accident was due, I am convinced, to the carelessness of the Turkish soldiers entrusted with the unloading of various laden with munitions, that were moored to the wharf. . . .That afternoon and all night the fire blazed devouring what had been the most spacious and modern railway station in Asia Minor and probably in the Balkans also; and reducing to ashes millions of pounds sterling in building and rolling material of war." ((2), more)
"The capture of Pogradec proved remarkably easy. On September 7 [1917] General Jacquemot, with a scratch division of such units of the 156th and 57th Divisions as were not on leave, began his advance through the wooded hills. At three in the afternoon of September 10 the first French units entered Pogradec. By the time he gave orders to halt the advance on September 12, Jacquemot had taken 414 Austrians and Bulgarians prisoner and had captured a considerable quantity of material and munitions. The French lost 44 men killed and had 131 wounded." ((3), more)
"General Kornilov proposed (1) the declaration of martial law in the city of Petrograd; (2) the transfer of all military and civil power to the Supreme Commander; (3) the resignation of all ministers, including the prime minister, and the temporary transfer of all ministerial business to deputy ministers, pending the formation of a cabinet by the Supreme Commander. Petrograd. August 26, 1917. V. Lvov." ((4), more)
". . . the government itself began to release us, for the same reason that it had called the Bolshevik sailors to guard the Winter Palace. I went straight from the Kresty to the newly organized committee for the defense of the revolution, where I sat with the same gentlemen who had put me in prison as an agent of the Hohenzollerns, and who had not yet withdrawn the accusation against me. . . . The Bolsheviks stepped into the harness, and were everywhere in the first line of the defense. The experience of Kornilov's mutiny completed that of the July days: once more Kerensky and Co. revealed the fact that they had no forces of their own to back them. The army that rose against Kornilov was the army-to-be of the October revolution. We took advantage of the danger to arm the workers whom Tzereteli had been disarming with such restless industry." ((5), more)
(1) Beginnings of the entries for September 4 and 5, (August 22 and 23, Old Style), 1917 from the diary of Florence Farmborough, an English nurse serving with the Russian Red Cross, recording the news from Moscow and the capital of Petrograd. Riga was a major port with a population of a quarter of a million, and was dangerously close to Petrograd. It was taken by German forces on September 3. In the days of which she wrote, General Lavr Kornilov was plotting a military coup against the government of Alexander Kerensky. In his memoir Russia and History's Turning Point, Kerensky wrote that Kornilov had ordered Russian troops to abandon Riga preferring 'the loss of territory to the loss of the army' (p. 298).
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 308, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
(2) Haidar-Pasha, or Haydarpaşa, is in Constantinople at the southwestern end of the Bosphorus on the Asian shore of the Sea of Marmora. The explosion destroyed, besides the railway station and rolling stock, warehouses and much of the harbor. Turkish forces were assembling at Aleppo in Syria to be prepared to deploy to Mesopotamia for the recapture of Baghdad, or to Palestine where the British were reinforcing their position. Estimates of the dead include hundreds of Turkish, German, and Austro-Hungarian troops, and 1,000 civilians (www.levantineheritage.com/haidarpasha-explosion.html, September 5, 2019). A mahona is a Turkish boat.
Four Years Beneath the Crescent by Rafael De Nogales, pp. 386, 387, copyright © 1926, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1926
(3) French General Maurice Sarrail commanded an Allied Army of French, British, Serbian, Russian, and Italian units opposing a Bulgarian army supported by German troops on the Salonica Front extending across northern Greece and into Serbia. Sarrail's spring 1917 offensive began May 8 and ended with little to show for his loss of 14,000 men. For the Allies, the rest of the summer was bleak: The British withdrew troops to Egypt for an offensive in Palestine. After a show trial, Dragutin Dimitrijević, known as Apis, a colonel in the Serbian Army and leader of the Black Hand Society that had plotted the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand and supplied weapons to the assassins, was executed for plotting against the Serbian Government and attempting to assassinate Serbian Regent Alexander. In June, the French forced Greek King Constantine to abdicate. Some French and Russian units mirrored in a small way the mutinous activities of their fellow soldiers on Western and Russian Fronts. From August 18 to 20, a large part of the city of Salonica itself was destroyed in a fire. The victory at Pogradec was a small bright spot in the Allied summer.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 158, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(4) Russian General Lavr Kornilov had been made Supreme Commander of the Russian Army on July 31, 1917. Although claiming to support the Russian Revolution, he opposed many of its reforms, and wanted to bring back the death penalty for deserters from the army, many of whom had simply left the front. He had begun planning a coup with conservative officers, financiers, and industrialists in the first days of the revolution. Vladimir Lvov was Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod in the first cabinet of the Provisional Government, and served as an intermediary between Kornilov and Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. Shocked by what Lvov proposed when the two men met on September 8, 1917 (August 26, Old Style), Kerensky asked him for a written summary of Kornilov's proposal for the Prime Minister to cede dictatorial powers to the General. They met in Petrograd, seat of the Russian government and center of revolutionary activity.
Russia and History's Turning Point by Alexander Kerensky, page 345, copyright © 1965 by Alexander Kerensky, publisher: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, publication date: 1965
(5) Leon Trotsky had been imprisoned at the Kretsky Prison after the 'July Days' in which anti-war and anti-government demonstrations on July 16 (July 3 Old Style), 1917 resulted in government ministers being threatened and over 100 people being killed. In the crackdown that followed, Bolsheviks were attacked and imprisoned, and some, including their leader Vladimir Lenin, fled Petrograd for safety. A month later, with General Lavr Kornilov attempting to march on the capital to seize power, the Government released the Bolsheviks, and armed them for the city's (and the government's) defense. The Winter Palace was the seat of the Russian government headed by Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. The Hohenzollerns were the German Royal family headed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The October Revolution would bring the Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks to power.
My Life: an Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky, page 318, publisher: Dover Publications, Inc., publication date: 2007
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