On the 6th of March, 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, approached the US embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum.
She is seen below arriving in the United States the following month.
Tag Archives: Joseph Stalin
Bitter Harvest
While everybody knows about the Holocaust, there was another major genocide in Europe in the 20th century that is almost unknown.
The Holodomor, Stalin’s manufactured famine/genocide, is believed to have killed up to ten million people in Ukraine in the 1930s. Still denied by Moscow, this genocide has received little to no attention from the West, and none whatsoever from Hollywood.
A new film is due out now which tackles this topic, focusing on a Ukrainian Cossack couple. Keep an eye out for Bitter Harvest this month.
On this day: the execution of Seraphim Chichagov
In prison in 1937 X
Seraphim Chichagov, a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Saint Petersburg (named Leningrad under Soviet rule), was executed by firing squad on the 11th of December, 1937.
He was one of more than 20 000 political prisoners executed at Butovo firing range outside Moscow during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936-38.
Aged eighty-one at the time of his execution, Seraphim was ill and had lost most of his mobility. When he was arrested in his home on charges of spreading “monarchist propaganda”, Russian authorities had to carry him to prison on a stretcher.
Day of Remembrance
The 23rd of August is the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.
The image below depicts Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia attacking Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus and Georgia.
On this day: the Tiflis bank robbery
Russian police file on Joseph Stalin
On the 26th of June, 1907, armed Bolsheviks stole a bank cash shipment in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia). Using bombs and guns, the attackers surrounded military and police in Yerevan (now Freedom) Square.
Amongst those involved in organising the robbery were future Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Lenin.
Forty people were killed and fifty others were injured in the attack.
Yerevan Square in the 19th century. X
The equivalent of millions of dollars were stolen, but in the end much of the money could not be used to fund Bolshevik activities, as the banknotes’ serial numbers were known to authorities.
In Times Gone By... 
