24 February 2010

Na Zdorovie!

(Red Army detachment sings on road  march, 1920. Image copyright Billie Love)

I feel the former and bleed the latter, though not at the moment. I live in a State that leans Red, though, my neighborhood is resolutely Blue.
 
I have been uncomfortable with the whole Red-Blue thing. We were all so militantly anti-Red in the American military that seeing the GOP colored in crimson makes me feel a little creeped out.
 
I talked to a Russian friend who reminded me of the celebration. She was celebrating by working, the way we capitalist tools commemorate so many of the public holidays.
 
The company blinks at us, and says we have the eleven really important ones when everyone is off and it would be impossible to do business anyway, and there are two “floating” holidays we could take to honor whatever sects or cults we worship in private.
 
That would be Saint Patrick’s day in my clan, but I am not going to go green on you for a few weeks. You look like I need a drink, by the way.
 
Not like I have little spiders crawling over my skin. That would be the feeling of some Russians this morning, rising from the celebrations of Red Army Day yesterday.
 
The term 'Red Army' naturally refers to the real owners of the color, which refers, symbolically, to the blood shed by the working class in its struggle against capitalism, not the life-blood of the capitalists being taxed by a rapacious government.
 
Anyway, I think if we could round up some additional Cold Warriors, I think that Red Army Day would be a good one to take as a “floating holiday.” Literally. We need all the comfort we can get this winter, and they say there is more snow coming tonight.
 
My pal says that she was taught that the day was selected by Leon Trotsky, my personal favorite Bolshevik, in honor of First victory of the Red Army over the Kaiser's German troops near Narva and Pskov.
 
As is true about a lot of places on the sandy Baltic plain, the towns were not great places to put down roots, since there always seemed to be someone headed across it, east or west.
 
Major engagements were conducted in the city in 1581, between the Swedes and the Russians, again with the same players in 1700 and 1704 during Veliki Petr’s Northern War; Between the Kaiser and the Estonians and the Red Vanguard. The big show swept over the town in 1944 and the Red Army seized the Narva Bridgehead.
 
The Great Patriotic War settled everyone’s hash for a half century, and finished off the legacy of the Teutonic Knights forever.
 
But that is not the reason for Red Army Day, which is decades older than the victory over Hitler. Trotsky was seeking to blot out the memory of the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg, in which the Germans crushed the Czar’s First and Second Armies. The Russians were kept off balance for more than a year, and the promised Second Front never materialized, enabling the Kaiser to concentrate on the slaughter of the West Front.
 
The battle was actually fought at a place once called Allenstein, thirty clicks to the east, but a clever staff officer suggested that General Ludendorff name it after the medieval Battle of Tannenberg (1410), in which the Teutonic Knights were crushed and expelled from their eastern provinces by the Poles and Lithuanians.
 
There was quite a monument thrown up there, begun about the time Trotsky was setting up the Red Army to fight the Civil War against the Whites. Leon took the first victory he had available to declare a holiday, since there were precious few available to the fledgling Communist Party of the Soviet Union. From 1923 onward, the 23rd of February was to be known as “Red Army Day.”
 
My friend recalls the day with some fondness from her days growing up in the former Soviet Union.
 
I don’t blame her, and what’s in a name, anyway? There is no monument at Tannenberg any more, nor, in point of fact, is there either a place by that name- or an “Allenstin.” The Germans were expelled in 1945, and the place re-named Olsztyn
 
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian holiday was re-christened “Defender of the Fatherland Day” in 1991, but is colloquially known as "Men's Day".
 
Since late 1990s, my friend says “it is still a government holiday when nobody works and everyone drinks.”
 
With more snow coming on this Russian-like winter, All I can do is give a tip of the hat to Leon Trotsy, and say "Na Zdorovie!"
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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