1937.doc

On April 25 I and two other important men were born: Adolph Hitler and William Shakespeare. The year of my bith was 1937. Some other important events occurred during that year. Here are some of them. 1937 In 1936-37 intense cold killed many young pines on the east side of the Sierra.]\ (Elna Bakker, 1971, An Island Called California. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles) Salvador Dali, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus The Parsley Massacre
Dominican President Rafael Trujillo ordered Dominican soldiers to kill the Haitians living along the borderland. The orders were in response to Trujillo?s assessment that the Haitians were impeding the Dominicans enjoyment of life along the borderlands. As a result, Trujillo devised a plan to eradicate the Haitian population in what is now referred to as the Parsley Massacre. The reason the event has such a name is that Dominican soldiers would approach people holding a piece of parsley and ask them to name it. Those that could not correctly pronounce the Spanish ?perejil? were assumed to be Haitian and killed. Over a span of just five days, between 20,000 and 30,000 Haitians were killed. What makes this case interesting is the fact that many of the Haitians killed were born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and belonged to Haitian communities along the borderlands, which actually made them Dominican citizens. On December 21, 1937, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. News clippings from the time quote theatre manager Ray Ducerne, who reported that advance ticket sales outpaced every other picture ever booked at the theatre, resulting in a sold-out opening night. Advance demand for tickets was so strong that sales were limited to four per person. More than 30,000 fans who couldn’t score one of the $5 tickets gathered outside the theatre just to be a part of the historic event. Video of Olivera Street, LA, 1937 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCn2zX9cFsg 1937 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the year 1937. Millennium: 2nd millennium Centuries: 19th century – 20th century – 21st century Decades: 1900s  1910s  1920s  – 1930s –  1940s  1950s  1960s Years: 1934 1935 1936 – 1937 – 1938 1939 1940 1937 by topic: Subject Archaeology Architecture Art Aviation Awards Comics Film Literature (Poetry) Meteorology Music (Country) Rail transport Radio Science Sports Television By country  Australia Canada China Ecuador France Germany Greece India Ireland Italy Japan Malaya Mexico New Zealand Norway Palestine Mandate Philippines Singapore South Africa Soviet Union United Kingdom United States Leaders Sovereign states State leaders Religious leaders Law Birth and death categories Births Deaths Establishments and disestablishments categories Establishments Disestablishments Works and introductions categories Works Introductions v t e 1937 in other calendars Gregorian calendar 1937 MCMXXXVII Ab urbe condita 2690 Armenian calendar 1386 ԹՎ ՌՅՁԶ Assyrian calendar 6687 Bahá'í calendar 93–94 Bengali calendar 1344 Berber calendar 2887 British Regnal year 1 Geo. 6 – 2 Geo. 6 Buddhist calendar 2481 Burmese calendar 1299 Byzantine calendar 7445–7446 Chinese calendar 丙子年 (Fire Rat) 4633 or 4573     — to — 丁丑年 (Fire Ox) 4634 or 4574 Coptic calendar 1653–1654 Discordian calendar 3103 Ethiopian calendar 1929–1930 Hebrew calendar 5697–5698 Hindu calendars  - Vikram Samvat 1993–1994  - Shaka Samvat 1859–1860  - Kali Yuga 5038–5039 Holocene calendar 11937 Igbo calendar 937–938 Iranian calendar 1315–1316 Islamic calendar 1355–1356 Japanese calendar Shōwa 12 (昭和１２年) Juche calendar 26 Julian calendar Gregorian minus 13 days Korean calendar 4270 Minguo calendar ROC 26 民國26年 Thai solar calendar 2480 This box: view talk edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to 1937. 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar, the 1937th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 937th year of the 2nd millennium, the 37th year of the 20th century, and the 8th year of the 1930s decade. Events[edit] January[edit] January 1 – Anastasio Somoza García becomes President of Nicaragua. January 11 – The first issue of Look magazine goes on sale in the United States. January 19 – Howard Hughes establishes a record by flying from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds. January 20 – Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes swears in Franklin D. Roosevelt for a second term. This is the first time Inauguration Day in the United States occurs on that date, on which it has occurred ever since; the change is due to the ratification in 1933 of the 20th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. January 23 – In Moscow, seventeen leading Communists go on trial, accused of participating in a plot led by Leon Trotsky to overthrow Joseph Stalin's regime and assassinate its leaders. January 26 – The U.S. state of Michigan celebrates its Centennial Anniversary of statehood. January 31 – The USSR executes 31 people for alleged Trotskyism.

January 19: Howard Hughes sets record. February[edit] February 5 – U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a plan to enlarge the Supreme Court of the United States. February 8 – Spanish Civil War: Falangist troops take Málaga. February 8 – February 27 – Spanish Civil War – Battle of Jarama: Nationalist and government troops fight to a stalemate. February 11 – A sit-down strike ends when General Motors recognizes the United Automobile Workers Union. February 16 – Wallace H. Carothers receives a patent for nylon. February 19 Airliner VH-UHH (Stinson) goes down over Lamington National Park, bound for Sydney, killing five people. Yekatit 12: During a public ceremony at the Viceregal Palace (the former Imperial residence) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, two Eritrean nationalists attempt to kill viceroy Rodolfo Graziani with a number of grenades. The Italian security guard fire into the crowd of Ethiopian onlookers. Authorities exact further reprisals, which include indiscriminately slaughtering native Ethiopians over the next three days, detaining thousands of Ethiopians at Danan and slaughtering almost 300 monks at Debre Libanos monastery. February 20 – Roberto Ortiz is elected president of Argentina. February 21 – The League of Nations Non-Intervention Committee prohibits foreign nationals from fighting in the Spanish Civil War. March[edit] March – The first issue of Detective Comics is published in the United States. Twenty-seven issues later, Detective Comics introduces Batman. The magazine goes on to become the longest continually published comic book in American history; it is still published as of 2013[update]. March 10 (dated March 14 (Passion Sunday)) – The encyclical Mit brennender Sorge ("With burning concern") of Pope Pius XI is published in Germany in the German language. Largely the work of Cardinals von Faulhaber and Pacelli, it condemns breaches of the 1933 Reichskonkordat agreement signed between the Nazi government and the Catholic Church, and criticises Nazism's views on race and other matters incompatible with Catholicism. March 17 – The Atherton Report (private investigator Edwin Atherton's report detailing vice and police corruption in San Francisco) is released. March 18 – New London School explosion: In the worst school disaster in American history in terms of lives lost, the New London School in New London, Texas, suffers a catastrophic natural gas explosion, killing in excess of 295 students and teachers. Mother Frances Hospital opens in Tyler, Texas, a day ahead of schedule in response to the explosion. March 19 – The encyclical Divini Redemptoris of Pope Pius XI, critical of communism, is published. March 21 Ponce massacre: A police squad, acting under orders from Governor of Puerto Rico Blanton Winship, opens fire on demonstrators protesting at the arrest of Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos, killing 17 people and injuring over 200. The first successful flying car, Waldo Waterman's Aerobile, makes its initial flight. March 26 In Crystal City, Texas, spinach growers erect a statue of the cartoon character Popeye. William H. Hastie becomes the first African American appointed to a federal judgeship in the United States. April[edit] April 1 Aden becomes a British crown colony. Bombing of Jaén in Spain by the Condor Legion of the Nazi German Luftwaffe. April 9 – The Kamikaze arrives at Croydon Airport in London; it is the first Japanese-built aircraft to fly to Europe. April 12 Dennis Banks birth; founder of AIM. Frank Whittle ground-tests the world's first jet engine designed to power an aircraft, at Rugby, England. NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the National Labor Relations Act is constitutional. April 17 – The animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series, featuring the debut of Daffy Duck, is released in the United States. April 20 – A fire in an elementary school in Kilingi-Nõmme, Estonia, kills seventeen students and injures fifty. April 25 – John Allison born at 7 a.m. in Los Angeles California April 26 – Spanish Civil War: Bombing of Guernica in Spain by the Condor Legion of the Nazi German Luftwaffe in support of the Francoists. Three-quarters of the town is destroyed and hundreds killed.[1] May[edit] May The Dáil Éireann passes the Executive Authority (Consequential Provisions) Act, 1937, which abolishes the office of Governor-General of the Irish Free State, retrospectively dated to December 1936. 17 million unemployed in the USA. May 1 – A general strike occurs in Paris, France. May 6 – Hindenburg disaster: In the United States, the German airship Hindenburg bursts into flame when mooring to a mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Of the 36 passengers and 61 crew on board, 13 passengers and 22 crew die, as well as one member of the ground crew. May 7 – Spanish Civil War: The German Condor Legion Fighter Group, equipped with Heinkel He 51 biplanes, arrives in Spain to assist Francisco Franco's forces. May 12 – The coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth takes place at Westminster Abbey, London. May 21 A Soviet station becomes the first scientific research settlement to operate on the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean. As one of the reprisals for the attempted assassination of Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, a detachment of Italian troops massacres the entire community of Debre Libanos, killing 297 monks and 23 laymen. May 27 – In California, the Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushes a button in Washington, D.C., signaling the start of vehicle traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge. May 28 – Neville Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. May 28 – In Germany Volkswagen Group is founded. May 30 Spanish Civil War: Spanish ship Ciudad de Barcelona is torpedoed. The Chicago Police Department shoot and kill ten unarmed demonstrators in Chicago in what is known as the Memorial Day massacre. June[edit] June 3 – Wallis Simpson marries The Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII), in France. June 8 The first total solar eclipse to exceed seven minutes of totality in over 800 years, is visible in the Pacific and Peru. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana premieres in Frankfurt, Germany. June 14 – Pennsylvania becomes the first (and only) of the United States to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday. June 21 – The coalition government of Léon Blum resigns in France. June 28 – Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) established in the United States, superseding the Emergency Conservation Work program. June – Picasso completes his painting Guernica. June/July – The Dáil Éireann debates and passes the draft new Constitution of Ireland, which is then submitted for public approval by plebiscite. July[edit] July 1 The Gestapo arrests pastor Martin Niemöller in Germany. In a referendum the people of the Irish Free State accept the new Constitution by 685,105 votes to 527,945. First alleged sighting of the White River Monster. July 2 Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappear after taking off from New Guinea during Earhart's attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. A guard takes his place at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Washington, D.C.; continuous guard has been maintained there ever since. July 4 – The Lost Colony historical drama is first performed at an outdoor theater in the location where it is set, Roanoke Island, North Carolina. July 5 The canned precooked meat product Spam is introduced by the Hormel company in the United States The highest recorded temperature in Canada, at Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan, is 45°C (113°F). July 7 Sino-Japanese War: Battle of Lugou Bridge (aka Marco Polo Bridge Incident): Japanese forces invade China (often seen as the beginning of World War II in Asia). Peel Commission proposes partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states.[2][3] July 11 – American popular composer George Gershwin dies in Los Angeles of a brain tumor, age 38. July 20 – The Geibeltbad Pirna is opened in Dresden, Germany. July 21 – Éamon de Valera is elected President of the Executive Council (prime minister) of the Irish Free State by the Dáil (parliament). July 22 – New Deal: The United States Senate votes down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States. July 24 – Alabama drops rape charges against the so-called Scottsboro Boys. July 25–31 – Sino-Japanese War: Battle of Beiping–Tianjin, a series of actions fought around Beiping and Tianjin, resulting in Japanese victory. July 28 – The Irish Republican Army attempts the assassination by bomb of George VI in Belfast. July 29 – Tungchow Mutiny: units of the East Hopei Army mutiny and kill Japanese troops and civilians in Tōngzhōu. July 31 – NKVD operative order 00447 «Об операции по репрессированию бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов» ("The operation for repression of former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements") is approved by the Politburo of the Soviet Union, initially as a 4-month plan for 75,950 people to be executed and an additional 193,000 to be sent to the Gulag. August[edit] August 2 – The Marihuana Tax Act Pub. 238, 75th Congress, 50 Stat. 551 (Aug. 2, 1937), is a significant bill on the path that will lead to the criminalization of cannabis. It was introduced to U.S. Congress by Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger. (The Act is now commonly referred to using the modern spelling as the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.) August 5 – The Soviet Union commences one of the largest campaigns of the Great Purge, to "eliminate anti-Soviet elements." Within the following year, at least 724,000 people are killed[citation needed] on order of the troikas, directed by Joseph Stalin. This was an offensive that targeted social classes (such as the kulaks), ethnic or racial backgrounds which were seen as non-Russian,[citation needed] and Stalin's personal opponents from the Communist Party and their sympathizers. August 6 – Spanish Civil War: Falangist artillery bombards Madrid. August 8 – Japan occupies Beijing. August 14 – The Battle of Shanghai. August 26 – Second Sino-Japanese War: Japanese aircraft attack the car carrying the ambassador of Great Britain during a raid on Shanghai. September[edit] September 2 – The Great Hong Kong Typhoon kills an estimated 11,000 persons. September 5 – Spanish Civil War: The city of Llanes falls to the Falangists. September 7 – CBS broadcasts a two-and-a-half hour memorial concert nationwide on radio in memory of George Gershwin, live from the Hollywood Bowl. Many celebrities appear, including Oscar Levant, Fred Astaire, Otto Klemperer, Lily Pons, and members of the original cast of Porgy and Bess. The concert is recorded and released complete years later in what is excellent sound for its time, on CD. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is the featured orchestra. September 17 – Abraham Lincoln's head is dedicated at Mount Rushmore. September 19 – Swiss professional ice hockey club HC Ambrì-Piotta founded. September 21 – George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. of London publishes the first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. September 25 – Second Sino-Japanese War: Battle of Pingxingguan: The Communist Chinese National Revolutionary Army defeats the Japanese. September 27 – The last Bali tiger dies.[citation needed] October[edit] October 1 The Marihuana Tax Act becomes law in the United States. U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Hugo Black, in a nationwide radio broadcast, refutes allegations of past involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. October 3 – Second Sino-Japanese War: Japanese troops advance toward Nanking. October 5 – Roosevelt gives his famous Quarantine Speech in Chicago. October 9 – Jimmie Angel lands his plane on top of Devil's Mountain; however, the plane gets damaged and he has to trek through the rainforest for help. October 13 – Germany, in a note to Brussels, guarantees the inviolability and integrity of Belgium so long as the latter abstains from military action against Germany. October 15 – Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not is first published. October 18–October 21 – Spanish Civil War: The whole Spanish northern seaboard falls into the Falangists' hands; Republican forces in Gijon, Spain, set fire to petrol reserves prior to retreating before the advancing Falangists. October 25 – Celâl Bayar forms the new (ninth) government of Turkey. November[edit] November 3 – Maurice J. Tobin resoundingly defeats former governor and mayor James Michael Curley in Boston's mayoral election. November 5 Spanish Civil War – 35,000 Republican supporters are massacred in Piedrafita de Babia, near León. World War II: In the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting and states his plans for acquiring "living space" for the German people (recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum). November 6 – Italy joins the Anti-Comintern Pact. November 9 – Second Sino-Japanese War: Japanese troops take Shanghai. November 10 – Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas announces the Estado Novo ("New State"), thence becoming dictator of Brazil until 1945. November 11 – The Kogushi sulfur mine collapse, in western Gunma, Japan, kills at least 245 people. December[edit] December 4 – The Dandy comic is first published in Scotland; it will still be running as of 2011[update]. December 11 – Italy withdraws from the League of Nations. December 12 USS Panay incident: Japanese bombers sink the American gunboat USS Panay. Mae West makes a risque guest appearance on NBC's Chase and Sanborn Hour, which eventually results in her being banned from radio. December 13 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Battle of Nanjing ends. The Japanese soldiers killed over 300,000 Chinese in 3 months, it is called "Nanking Massacre". December 16 – The original production of the musical Me and My Girl opens at the West End Victoria Palace Theatre in London. A later revival of this musical would win an award. December 21 – Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length traditionally animated film, premieres in selected theaters. December 25 – At the age of 70, legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini conducts the NBC Symphony Orchestra on radio for the first time, beginning his successful 17-year tenure with that orchestra. This first concert consists of music by Vivaldi (at a time when he was still seldom played), Mozart, and Brahms. Millions tune in to listen, including U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. December 29 – The new Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann) comes into force. The Irish Free State becomes "Ireland", and Éamon de Valera becomes the first Taoiseach (prime minister) of the new state. A Presidential Commission (made up the Chief Justice, the Speaker of Dáil Éireann, and the President of the High Court) assumes the powers of the new presidency, pending the popular election of the first President of Ireland in June 1938. The new constitution prohibits divorce. Date unknown[edit] Switzerland begins construction of its Border Line defences. The Vibora Luviminda trades union's sugar plantation strike on Maui island, Hawaii. Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti is the first to document a transorbital approach to the brain, which becomes the basis for the controversial medical procedure of transorbital lobotomy. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is published. Soviet industry produces about four times as much as it had in 1928. Births[edit] January–February[edit]

Vanessa Redgrave

Harald V of Norway January 1 – Anne Aubrey, British actress January 4 Grace Bumbry, American opera singer Dyan Cannon, American actress January 6 Nida Blanca, Filipina actress (d. 2001) Paolo Conte, Italian singer, Pianist and Composer Underwood Dudley, American mathematician January 8 – Dame Shirley Bassey, Welsh singer January 13 – George Reisman, American economist January 14 – Ken Higgs, English cricketer January 15 – Margaret O'Brien, American child actress January 18 Yukio Endo, Japanese gymnast (d. 2009) John Hume, Northern Irish politician; Nobel Peace Prize laureate January 19 – Giovanna Marini, Italian singer-songwriter January 21 – Prince Max, Duke in Bavaria, heir to the Bavarian Royal House January 22 – Joseph Wambaugh, American author January 25 – Ange-Félix Patassé, former President of Central African Republic (d. 2011) January 27 – John Ogdon, English pianist (d. 1989) January 29 – Bobby Scott, American musician, producer and songwriter (d. 1990) January 30 Vanessa Redgrave, English actress Boris Spassky, Russian chess grandmaster January 31 Philip Glass, American composer Suzanne Pleshette, American actress (d. 2008) February 1 Don Everly, American rock 'n' roll musician Garrett Morris, American comedian February 2 Magic Sam, American musician (d. 1969) Remak Ramsay, American actor Tom Smothers, American musician and comedian February 3 – Billy Meier, Swiss Prophet February 4 – Magnar Solberg, Norwegian biathlete February 8 – Manfred Krug, German actor and singer February 9 Francis William Lawvere, American mathematician Robert "Bilbo" Walker Jr., American blues guitarist February 10 – Roberta Flack, American soul singer February 11 – Bill Lawry, Australian cricketer February 12 – Charles Dumas, American athlete February 13 – Rupiah Banda, President of Zambia February 20 Robert Huber, German chemist; Nobel Prize laureate George Leonardos, Greek journalist and author Roger Penske, American race car driver Nancy Wilson, American singer February 21 – King Harald V of Norway February 25 Tom Courtenay, English actor Bob Schieffer, American television journalist March–April[edit]

Abdelaziz Bouteflika

Warren Beatty

Colin Powell

Jack Nicholson

Saddam Hussein March 2 – Abdelaziz Bouteflika, President of Algeria March 4 Graham Dowling, New Zealand cricketer Leslie Gelb, American president of the Council on Foreign Relations Yuri Senkevich, Russian cosmonaut (d. 2003) Barney Wilen, French jazz saxophonist (d. 1996) March 5 – Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria March 6 – Valentina Tereshkova, Russian cosmonaut, first woman in space March 8 – Juvénal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda (d. 1994) March 9 – Harry Neale, Canadian ice hockey coach and broadcaster March 17 – Frank Calabrese, Sr., American Gangster in the Chicago Outfit March 20 – Jerry Reed, American country musician (d. 2008) March 22 – Armin Hary, German athlete March 23 – Craig Breedlove, American race car driver March 27 – Thomas Aquinas Daly, American painter March 30 – Warren Beatty, American actor and director April 5 – Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State April 6 Merle Haggard, American country musician Billy Dee Williams, American actor April 7 – Louise Faulkner, missing Australian woman April 9 – Valerie Singleton, English television presenter April 10 – Bella Akhmadulina, Russian poet (d. 2010) April 16 – George "The Animal" Steele, American professional wrestler April 16 – Simeon II of Bulgaria, last reigning Tsar, later Prime Minister of Bulgaria from 2001-2005. April 17 – Ferdinand Piëch, Austrian engineer and business magnate April 18 Don Buchla, American electronic-instrument designer Jan Kaplický, British architect of Czech origin April 19 Elinor Donahue, American actress Joseph Estrada, former President of the Philippines April 20 – George Takei, American actor April 22 – Jack Nicholson, American actor April 27 Sandy Dennis, American actress (d. 1992) Robin Eames, Anglican prelate; Northern Irish clergyman and peace activist April 28 – Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq (d. 2006) April 29 – Jill Paton Walsh, English novelist May–June[edit]

Morgan Freeman May 1 – Una Stubbs, British actress May 2 – Gisela Elsner, German writer May 3 Hans Cieslarczyk, German football player Frankie Valli, American musician May 4 – Ron Carter, American jazz musician May 5 – Trần Đức Lương, President of Vietnam May 6 – Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, American boxer May 8 Carlos Gaviria Díaz, Colombian justice and politician Thomas Pynchon, American writer May 12 – George Carlin, American comedian (d. 2008) May 13 Trevor Baylis, English inventor Roch Carrier, Canadian writer Roger Zelazny, American writer (d. 1995) May 15 Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State Trini Lopez, American musician May 16 – Yvonne Craig, American actress May 17 – Hazel R. O'Leary, U.S. Secretary of Energy May 18 – Jacques Santer, Luxembourg politician, President of the European Council Brooks Robinson, American baseball player May 21 Sofiko Chiaureli, Georgian actress (d. 2008) John Fairfax, British ocean rower Mengistu Haile Mariam, former President of Ethiopia May 24 – Roger Peterson, pilot who flew the plane on The Day the Music Died (d. 1959) June 1 – Morgan Freeman, American actor June 2 – Sally Kellerman, American actress (MASH) June 3 Phyllis Baker, American professional baseball player (d. 2006) Crawford Hallock Greenewalt, Jr., American archaeologist (d. 2012) Solomon P. Ortiz, U.S. congressman from Texas June 4 – Gorilla Monsoon, American professional wrestler and announcer (d. 1999) June 7 – Neeme Järvi, Estonian conductor June 8 – Toni Harper, American child singer June 9 – Harald Rosenthal, German biologist June 10 – Luciana Paluzzi, Italian actress June 11 – Robin Warren, Australian pathologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine June 15 Waylon Jennings, American country singer (d. 2002) Alan Thornett, British Trotskyist activist June 16 – Charmian May, British actress (d. 2002) June 18 Wray Carlton, American football player Vitaly Zholobov, Soviet cosmonaut June 23 – Martti Ahtisaari, President of Finland June 25 – Keizō Obuchi, Prime Minister of Japan (d. 2000) June 26 – Robert Coleman Richardson, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013) June 28 – Ron Luciano, American baseball umpire and writer (d. 1995) July–August[edit]

Dustin Hoffman July 3 – Richard Petty, seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion July 4 – Sonja Haraldsen, Queen of Norway and wife to King Harald V of Norway July 6 Vladimir Ashkenazy, Russian pianist Ned Beatty, American actor July 7 – Tung Chee Hwa, Hong Kong administrator July 9 – David Hockney, English-born artist July 12 Bill Cosby, American actor and comedian Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of France July 14 – Yoshirō Mori, Japanese politician July 18 Roald Hoffmann, Polish-born chemist, Nobel Prize laureate Hunter S. Thompson, American author and journalist (d. 2005) July 20 Dick Hafer, American Christian cartoonist (d. 2003) Ken Ogata, Japanese actor (d. 2008) July 27 Anna Dawson, British actress Don Galloway, American actor (d. 2009) July 29 – Daniel McFadden, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate August 2 – Coenraad Bron, Dutch Computer Scientist August 4 – David Bedford, American musician August 5 – Herb Brooks, American hockey coach (d. 2003) August 6 – Barbara Windsor, English actress August 8 – Dustin Hoffman, American actor August 14 – Alberta Nelson, American actress (d. 2006) August 16 – David Anderson, Canadian politician August 18 Jean Alingué Bawoyeu, Chadian politician and former Prime Minister Willie Rushton, English comedian and cartoonist (d. 1996) August 20 Jim Bowen, English stand-up comedian and TV personality Jean-Louis Petit, French composer, conductor and organist August 21 Donald Dewar, First Minister of Scotland (d. 2000) Robert Stone, American novelist Chuck Traynor, American pornographer (d. 2002) August 26 Gennady Yanayev, former Soviet leader (d. 2010) Kenji Utsumi, Japanese voice actor and actor (d. 2013) August 27 – Alice Coltrane, American jazz harpist, organist, pianist and composer (d. 2007) August 29 – James Florio, Governor of New Jersey August 30 – Bruce McLaren, Founder of McLaren Racing August 31 – Bobby Parker (guitarist), from USA September–October[edit] September 4 Dawn Fraser, Australian swimmer Mikk Mikiver, Estonian actor and director (d. 2006) September 5 – William Devane, American actor September 6 Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada (Keith Gordon Ham), Hare Krishna guru Jo Anne Worley, American comedienne September 7 – Cüneyt Arkın, Turkish film actor September 11 – Paola Ruffo di Calabria, Queen of the Belgians September 15 King Curtis Iaukea, American professional wrestler (d. 2010) Robert Lucas, Jr., American economist, Nobel Prize laureate Fernando de la Rúa, President of Argentina September 16 – Keith Bosley, British broadcaster (retired), poet and translator September 17 – Ilarion Ionescu-Galați Romanian conductor September 19 – Abner Haynes, American football player September 28 – Rod Roddy, American television announcer (d. 2003) October 2 – Johnnie Cochran, American attorney (d. 2005) October 4 Jackie Collins, English author Franz Vranitzky, former Chancellor of Austria October 5 – Barry Switzer, American football coach October 10 – Bobby Charlton, English footballer October 15 – Linda Lavin, American actress (Alice) October 17 – Paxton Whitehead, English actor October 23 – Carlos Lamarca, Brazilian military turned guerrilla leader (d. 1971) October 24 John Goetz, American professional baseball player (d. 2008) Rosaria Piomelli, Americans architecture October 28 – Lenny Wilkens, American basketball player and coach November–December[edit]

Jane Fonda

Anthony Hopkins November 1 – "Whisperin" Bill Anderson, American country music singer-songwriter and game show host November 2 – Earl Carroll, American lead vocalist for The Cadillacs (d. 2012) November 4 – Michael Wilson, Canadian politician and diplomat November 5 Chan Sek Keong, third Chief Justice of Singapore Harris Yulin, American actor November 6 – Joe Warfield, American actor November 8 – Paul Foot, British journalist (d. 2004) November 10 – Zdeněk Zikán, Czech football player (d. 2013) November 11 – Stephen Lewis, Canadian politician and diplomat November 15 – Yaphet Kotto, American actor November 17 Peter Cook, English comedian and writer (d. 1995) Manuel Félix López, Ecuadorian politician (d. 2004) November 20 – Ruth Laredo, American pianist (d. 2005) November 21 – Ingrid Pitt, Polish-born British actress (d. 2010) November 26 – Boris Yegorov, Russian cosmonaut (d. 1994) December 1 Chuck Low, American actor Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, former President of Latvia December 3 – Bobby Allison, American race car driver December 7 – Kenneth Colley, English actor December 8 Michael Bowen, American artist (d. 2009) James MacArthur, American actor (d. 2010) Arne Næss, Jr., Norwegian mountaineer and businessman (d. 2004) December 9 – Darwin Joston, American actor (d. 1998) December 11 – Jim Harrison, American writer December 15 – Donald Goines, American novelist (d. 1973) December 17 – Kerry Packer, Australian businessman (d. 2005) December 21 – Jane Fonda, American actress and social activist December 26 Professor John Horton Conway, mathematician Gnassingbé Eyadéma, President of Togo (d. 2005) December 28 – Ratan Tata, Indian industrialist December 29 Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, President of the Maldives (1978–2008) Barbara Steele, British actress December 30 Gordon Banks, English footballer John Hartford, American musician and composer (d. 2001) Jim Marshall, American football player Noel Paul Stookey, American singer (Peter, Paul and Mary) December 31 Avram Hershko, Israeli biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Anthony Hopkins, Welsh actor Date unknown[edit] Cathie Jung, owner of the smallest waist on a living person (measuring just 15 in.). Deaths[edit] January–March[edit] January 2 – Ross Alexander, American actor (b. 1907) January 6 – André Bessette, Canadian religious leader (b. 1845) January 12 – Martin Johnson, American adventurer and documentary filmmaker (plane crash) (b. 1884) January 17 – Richard Boleslavsky, Polish film director (b. 1889) January 21 – Marie Prevost, Canadian actress (b. 1898) February 5 – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russian-born writer (b. 1861) February 7 – Elihu Root, American statesman and diplomat, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1845) February 11 – Walter Burley Griffin, American architect and town planner (b. 1876) February 24 – Guy Standing, British actor (b. 1873) February 27 – Charles Donnelly, Irish poet (b. 1915) March 8 – Howie Morenz, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1902) March 9 – Paul Elmer More, American critic and essayist (b. 1864) March 11 – Joseph S. Cullinan, American oil industrialist, founder of Texaco (b. 1860) March 12 – Charles-Marie Widor, French organist and composer (b. 1840) March 15 – H. P. Lovecraft, American writer (b. 1890) March 17 – Austen Chamberlain, English statesman, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1863) March 20 – Harry Vardon, English golf professional (b. 1870) March 22 Alfred Dyke Acland, British military officer (b. 1858) Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford, English aviatrix and ornithologist (plane crash) (b. 1865) March 29 – Karol Szymanowski, Polish composer (b. 1882) April–June[edit] April 10 – Ralph Ince, American film director (b. 1887) April 14 – Ned Hanlon, American baseball manager and MLB Hall of Famer (b. 1857) April 19 – William Martin Conway, British art critic and mountaineer (b. 1856) April 19 – William Morton Wheeler, American entomologist (b. 1865) April 21 – Saima Harmaja, Finnish poet (b. 1913) April 22 – Arthur Edmund Carewe, Armenian-American actor (b. 1884) April 24 – Lucy Beaumont, English actress (b. 1873) April 25 – Michał Drzymała, Polish rebel (b. 1857) April 27 – Antonio Gramsci, Italian Communist writer and politician (b. 1891) April 29 – William Gillette, American actor (b. 1853) May 1 – Snitz Edwards, Hungarian actor (b. 1868) May 4 – Noel Rosa, Brazilian songwriter (b. 1910) May 6 – 36 victims of the LZ 129 Hindenburg disaster. May 23 – John D. Rockefeller, American industrialist and philanthropist (b. 1839) May 25 – Henry Ossawa Tanner, American Artist (b. 1859) May 28 – Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist (b. 1870) June 2 – Louis Vierne, French composer (b. 1870) June 3 – Emilio Mola, Spanish Nationalist commander (plane crash) (b. 1887) June 7 – Jean Harlow, American film actress (b. 1911) June 10 – Robert Laird Borden, eighth Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1854) June 12 – Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Soviet Army officer and Red Army commander-in-chief (executed) (b. 1893) June 18 – Gaston Doumergue, French Prime Minister (b. 1863) June 19 – J. M. Barrie, Scottish novelist and dramatist (b. 1860) June 25 – Colin Clive, British actor (b. 1900) July–September[edit]

Guglielmo Marconi July 9 – Oliver Law, American labor organizer and Army officer (killed in battle) (b. 1899) July 11 – George Gershwin, American composer (b. 1898) July 13 – Victor Laloux, French architect (b. 1850) July 18 – Julian Bell, English poet (b. 1908) July 20 – Guglielmo Marconi, Italian-born inventor (b. 1874) August 11 – Edith Wharton, American writer (b. 1862) August 27 – Andrew W. Mellon, American banker and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (b. 1855) September 2 – Pierre de Coubertin, French founder of the modern Olympic Games (b. 1863) September 13 – Ellis Parker Butler, American humorist (b. 1869) September 14 – Tomas Masaryk, Czechoslovak president (b. 1850) September 21 – Osgood Perkins, American actor (b. 1892) September 22 – Ruth Roland, American actress (b. 1892) September 26 – Bessie Smith, African-American singer (b. 1894) September 29 – Ray Ewry, American athlete (b. 1873) October–December[edit] October 16 – Jean de Brunhoff, French writer (b. 1899) October 17 – J. Bruce Ismay, English businessman (b. 1862) October 19 – Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, New Zealand physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (b. 1871) October 26 – Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, Polish general (b. 1867) October 27 – John Goetz, American professional baseball player (b. 1937) November 6 – Johnston Forbes-Robertson, British stage actor (b. 1853) November 9 – Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1866) November 11 – Uryū Sotokichi, Japanese admiral (b. 1857) November 13 – Caroline Louise Dudley (aka Mrs. Leslie Carter), stage & screen actress (b. 1862) November 23 – Miklós Kovács Hungarian Slovene writer (b. 1857) November 17 – Jack Worrall, Australian cricketer and coach (b. 1860) November 23 Jagadish Chandra Bose, Indian physicist (b. 1858) George Albert Boulenger, Belgian naturalist (b. 1858) December 9 – Gustaf Dalén, Swedish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1869) December 12 – Alfred Abel, German actor (b. 1879) December 20 – Erich Ludendorff, German general (b. 1865) December 21 Ted Healy, American actor (b. 1896) Frank B. Kellogg, United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1856) December 25 – Newton D. Baker, United States Secretary of War (b. 1871) December 28 Herbert Bullmore, Scottish Rugby Union international, grandfather of Kerry Packer (b. 1874) Maurice Ravel, French composer (Bolero) (b. 1875) December 30 – Hans Niels Andersen, Danish businessman, founder of the East Asiatic Company (b. 1852) Date unknown[edit] Paul Behncke, German admiral (b. 1869) The 300,000 Chinese in Nanking, the Capital of China. Nobel Prizes[edit]
Physics – Clinton Joseph Davisson, George Paget Thomson Chemistry – Walter Haworth, Paul Karrer Physiology or Medicine – Albert von Szent-Györgyi Nagyrapolt Literature – Roger Martin du Gard Peace – Robert Cecil References[edit] Jump up ^ Journalist George Steer's report to The Times (London) connects Germany with the attack. Jump up ^ League of Nations Mandates - Palestine: Report of the Palestine Royal Commission. July 1937. Retrieved 2012-03-08.  Jump up ^ Schechtman, Joseph B. (1949). Population Transfers in Asia. New York: Hallsby Press. Retrieved 2012-03-08.  1937 WWII Timeline The 1930s Timeline: 1937 – from American Studies Programs at The University of Virginia Months in Year 1937: January February March April May June July August September October November December Events 1 - 150 of 273 Jan 1st - Anastasio Somoza becomes president of Nicaragua Jan 1st - Count Claus von Stauffenberg promoted to captain Jan 1st - US Army Air Corps physiological research laboratory completed, Ohio Jan 1st - Safety glass in vehicle windscreens becomes mandatory in Great Britain. Jan 5th - Fingleton & Bradman make record stand of 346 for 6th wkt Jan 5th - Only unicameral state legislature in US opens 1st session (Nebr) Jan 6th - Bradman scores 270 Aust v England at the MCG, incl 110 singles Jan 8th - -50°F (-45.6°C), San Jacinto, Nevada (state record) Jan 9th - Italian regime bans marriages between Italians & Abyssinians Jan 9th - Maxwell Anderson's "High Tor" premieres in NYC Jan 12th - Plow for laying submarine cable patented Jan 19th - Cy Young, Tris Speaker & Nap Lajorie elected to Baseball Hall of Fame Jan 19th - Millionaire Howard Hughes sets transcontinental air record (7h28m25s) Jan 20th - -45°F (-43°C), Boca, California (state record) Jan 20th - 1st Inauguration day on Jan 20th, (held every 4th years there-after) Jan 23rd - Karl Radek & 16 others go on trial in Stalin's great purge Jan 25th - 1st broadcast of "Guiding Light" on NBC radio Jan 25th - Miami-to-Tampa bus overturned in a canal, kills 13 Jan 25th - Soap Opera "Guiding Light" premieres on radio
Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin Jan 30th - 2nd of Stalin's purge trials; Pyatakov & 16 others sentenced to death Feb 1st - Stapleton, Staten Island becomes a customs-free port Feb 3rd - Bradman scores 212 (in 441 minutes!) in 5th Test Cricket v England Feb 4th - Jim Margie, Philadelphia, bowls 900 in 3 (unsanctioned) games Feb 5th - 1st Charlie Chaplin talkie, "Modern Times," released Feb 5th - FDR proposes enlarging Supreme Court, "court packing" plan failed Feb 6th - K Elizabeth Ohi becomes 1st Japanese-US female lawyer Feb 8th - Maxwell Anderson's "Masque of Kings," premieres in NYC Feb 10th - Ragnhild Hveger swims world free style record 400m (5:14.2) Feb 11th - 44-day sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint Mich ends Feb 12th - Cleveland (now St Louis) Rams granted an NFL franchise Feb 13th - "Prince Valiant" comic strip appears; known for historical detail Feb 13th - Bradman scores 123 SA v Queensland, 165 mins, 10-4s 1-6 in cricket Feb 13th - Maribel Vinson wins her 9th US figure skating championship Feb 13th - NFL Boston Redskins move to Wash DC
32nd US President Franklin D. Roosevelt Feb 13th - US female Figure Skating championship won by Maribel Vinson Feb 13th - US male Figure Skating championship won by Robin Lee Feb 16th - DuPont Corp patents nylon, developed by employee Wallace H Carothers Feb 16th - Jean Anouilh's "Le Voyageur Sans Baggage," premieres in Paris Feb 20th - 1st automobile/airplane combination tested, Santa Monica, Ca Feb 21st - Initial flight of the first successful flying car, Waldo Waterman's Arrowbile. Feb 21st - The League of Nations bans foreign national "volunteers" in the Spanish Civil War. Feb 24th - 1st US group hospital-medical cooperative authorized, Wash, DC Feb 26th - C Isherwood/WH Auden's "Ascent of F6," premieres in London Feb 27th - Bradman scores 169 in 5th Test Cricket v England in 223 minutes Mar 1st - 1st permanent automobile license plates issued (Ct) Mar 1st - Gov Wouters innaugrates the radio station on the Dutch Antilles Mar 1st - US Steel raises workers' wages to $5 a day Mar 2nd - Mexico nationalizes oil Mar 3rd - Australia snatch series against England 3-2 after being 2-0 down Mar 4th - 9th Academy Awards - "The Great Ziegfeld", Paul Muni & Luise Rainer wins Mar 7th - Bucharin, Jagoda & Rykov pushed out of CPSU in USSR Mar 14th - Battle of the Century: Fred Allen & Jack Benny meet on radio Mar 14th - Pope Pius XI publishes anti-nazi-encyclical Mit brennender Sorge Mar 15th - 1st blood bank forms (Chicago IL) Mar 15th - 1st state contraceptive clinic opens (Raleigh NC) Mar 16th - All but one senior fouls out of a scrimmage game between seniors & sophomores, but he holds on to win the game 35-32 Mar 18th - Gas explosion in school in New London Texas: 294 die Mar 18th - The human-powered aircraft, Pedaliante, flies 1 kilometre (0.62 miles) outside Milan. Mar 19th - Pope Pius XI publishes encyclical Divini redemptoris against communism
Spanish Dictator and General Francisco Franco Mar 20th - Franco offensive at Guadalajara, Spain Mar 21st - Ponce massacre, police kill 19 at Puerto Rican Nationalist parade Mar 23rd - LA Railway Co starts using PCC streetcars Mar 24th - Bus blew a tire, going out of control, killing 18 (Salem Illinois) Mar 24th - National Gallery of Art established by Congress Mar 25th - It is revealed Quaker Oats pays Babe Ruth $25,000 per year for ads Mar 25th - Italy & Yugoslavia sign non-aggression treaty (Pact of Belgrade) Mar 25th - Lionel Conacher misses on 1st Stanley Cup penalty shot Mar 25th - Wash Daily News is 1st US newspaper with perfumed advertising page Mar 26th - Joe DiMaggio takes Ty Cobb's advice & replace his 40 with 36 oz bat Mar 26th - Spinach growers of Crystal City, Tx, erect statue of Popeye Mar 26th - William H Hastie becomes 1st black federal judge (Virgin Islands) Mar 27th - Feyenoord-stadium official opens in Rotterdam Apr 1st - Aden becomes a British crown colony Apr 4th - 4th Golf Masters Championship: Byron Nelson wins, shooting a 283
Baseball Great Babe Ruth Apr 12th - Sir Frank Whittle ground-tests the first jet engine designed to power an aircraft at Rugby, England. Apr 15th - Stanley Cup: Detroit Red Wings beat NY Rangers, 3 games to 2 Apr 17th - Cartoon characters Daffy Duck, Elmer J Fudd & Petunia Pig, debut Apr 19th - 41st Boston Marathon won by Walter Young of Canada in 2:33:20 Apr 22nd - NYC college students stage 4th annual peace strike Apr 26th - German Luftwaffe destroys Basque town of Guernica in Spain Apr 27th - 1st US social security payment made Apr 28th - 1st animated cartoon electric sign displayed (NYC) Apr 28th - 1st commercial flight across Pacific, Pan Am Apr 30th - The Philippines holds a plebiscite for Filipino women on whether they should be extended the right to suffrage; over 90% would vote in the affirmative. May 1st - FDR signs act of neutrality May 3rd - Margaret Mitchell wins Pulitzer Prize for "Gone With the Wind" May 6th - Dirigible Hindenburg explodes in flames at Lakehurst, NJ (36 die) May 8th - 63rd Kentucky Derby: Charley Kurtsinger on War Admiral wins 2:03.2 May 9th - Reds beat Phillies 21-10 (Ernie Lombardi goes 6 for 6)
Author Margaret Mitchell May 10th - Busmen strike in London May 12th - George VI crowned King of England May 12th - St Louis Cards beat Philadelphia Phillies, 15-3 May 12th - Coronation of King George VI of Britain at Westminster Abbey. May 15th - 63rd Preakness: Charley Kurtsinger aboard War Admiral wins in 1:58.4 May 17th - Juan Negrin succeeds Largo Caballero as Spain's premier May 19th - John Murray/Allen Boretz' "Room Service," premieres in NYC May 25th - 1st airmail letter to circle globe returns to NY May 26th - Dutch Rail NV at law forms May 26th - San Francisco Bay's Golden Gate Bridge opens May 27th - Carl Hubbell wins his 24th consecutive game (since July 17, 1936) May 27th - Golden Gate Bridge, SF, dedicated May 28th - Golden Gate Bridge in SF opens to vehicular traffic May 28th - Neville Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom May 30th - 20th PGA Championship: Denny Shute at Pittsburgh FC Aspinwall PA
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain May 30th - Memorial Day Massacre - Chicago police shoot on union marchers, 10 die May 30th - Pitcher Carl Hubbell's 24th consecutive victory May 30th - Police kill 10 strikers at Republic Steel Plant in Chicago May 30th - 61,756, 2nd-largest crowd in Polo Grounds history, sees Dodgers ends Carl Hubbell's consecutive-game winning streak at 24 May 31st - 1st quadruplets to finish college (Baylor University) May 31st - Bkln Dodgers snap NY Giant Carl Hubbell's 24-game winning streak May 31st - German battleships bomb Almeria Spain May 31st - Indianapolis 500: Wilbur Shaw wins in 4:24:07.861 (182.789 km/h) Jun 1st - Chicago White Sox Bill Dietrich no-hits St Louis Browns, 8-0 Jun 1st - Prince Konoye becomes Japanese premier Jun 3rd - Josh Gibson HR's just 2 feet below rim of Yankee Stadium (580' drive) Jun 4th - Leon Blum becomes premier of People's front government of France Jun 5th - 69th Belmont: Charley Kurtsinger aboard War Admiral wins in 2:28.6 Jun 5th - Henry Ford initiates 32 hour work week Jun 6th - Phillies trailing 8-2 to St Louis, forfeit game
Ford Motor Company Founder Henry Ford Jun 8th - World's largest flower blooms in NY Botanical Garden, 12' calla lily Jun 11th - Marx Brothers' "A Day At The Races" released Jun 12th - 41st US Golf Open: Ralph Guldahl shoots a 281 at Oakland Hills Mich Jun 12th - USSR executes 8 army leaders as Stalin's purge continues Jun 13th - Joe DiMaggio hits 3 consecutive HRs against St Louis Browns Jun 13th - Stalin executes Rus officers Tuchachevski, Jakir, Putna & Uberevitch Jun 16th - Marx Brothers' "A Day At The Races" opens in LA Jun 17th - Marx Brothers' "A Day At The Races" opens in NY Jun 19th - Franco-troops conquer Bilbao Basques Jun 21st - French People's front government-Blum falls Jun 22nd - Joe Louis KOs James J Braddock in 18 for heavyweight boxing title Jun 25th - Cub Augie Galan becomes 1st player to switch hit HRs in a game Jun 26th - Test cricket debut of Len Hutton v NZ at Lord's, scores 0 & 1 Jul 1st - Britain begins using an emergency phone number (999) Jul 1st - Rev Martin Niemöller (Bekennende Kirche) arrested in Germany
Baseball Player Joe DiMaggio Jul 1st - Spanish bishops support Franco & fascists Jul 2nd - 57th Wimbledon Mens Tennis: Don Budge beats G von Cramm (6-3 6-4 6-2) Jul 2nd - Amelia Earhart & Fred Noonan disappear over Pacific Ocean Jul 2nd - 50th Wimbledon Womens Tennis: Dorothy Little beats J Jędrzejowska (6-2 2-6 7-5) Jul 5th - 117°F (47°C), Medicine Lake, Montana (state record) Jul 5th - Chicago Cub Frank Demaree gets 6 hits in 1st game & 2 in 2nd game Jul 5th - Joe DiMaggio's 1st grand slammer Jul 5th - Republican offensive by Brunete in Spain Jul 5th - Spam, the luncheon meat, was introduced into the market by the Hormel Foods Corporation. Jul 7th - 5th All Star Baseball Game: AL wins 8-3 at Griffith Stadium, Wash Jul 7th - Japanese & Chinese troops clash, (Marco Polo Bridge), becomes WW II Jul 9th - 72nd British Golf Open: Henry Cotton shoots a 290 at Carnoustie Golf Links Jul 10th - Dutch Django Reinhardts "Quintette, premieres in du Hot Club" Jul 12th - -13) Tupolev ANT-25 non-stop flight Moscow to San Jacinto Calif Jul 15th - Buchenwald Concentration Camp opens Jul 15th - Japanese attack Marco Polo Bridge, invade China Jul 19th - Entartete Art Fair opens in Munich Jul 19th - Joris Ivens' "Spanish Earth" premieres in Hollywood Jul 22nd - Irish premier Eamon de Valera wins elections Jul 22nd - Senate rejects FDR proposal to enlarge Supreme Court Jul 23rd - Isolation of pituitary hormone announced (Yale University) Jul 24th - Alabama drops charges against 5 blacks accused of rape in Scottsboro Jul 26th - End of the Battle of Brunete in the Spanish Civil War. Jul 27th - 32nd Davis Cup: USA beats Great Britain in Wimbledon (4-1) Jul 28th - Eddie Paynter scores 322 for Lancashire against Sussex Jul 28th - Richard Moore scores 316 for Hampshire against Warwickshire Jul 29th - Japanese troops occupies Peking & Tientsin Jul 29th - Tongzhou Incident Jul 30th - Phillies Dolph Camilli, plays 1st base & registers no put outs Jul 31st - Politburo enables Operative Order 00447: execute 193,000 Russians Aug 2nd - The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 is passed in America, essentially rendering marijuana and all its by-products illegal. Aug 5th - Ranger (US) beats Endeavour II (England) in 17th America's Cup Aug 6th - Franco-artillery fire on Madrid Aug 6th - Indians overturn Yankees' 7-6 win by a protest Aug 6th - US & USSR sign trade treaty
32nd US President Franklin D. Roosevelt Aug 8th - Bonneville Dam on Columbia River begins producing power Aug 13th - Japanese attack Shanghai Aug 13th - Battle of Shanghai begins. Aug 14th - China declares war on Japan Aug 14th - Detroit Tigers score 36 runs in double header vs St Louis Browns Aug 18th - 1st FM radio construction permit issued (W1X0J (WGTR) in Boston MA) Aug 24th - Republican offensive near Belchite Spain Aug 24th - In the Spanish Civil War, the Basque Army surrenders to the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie following the Santoña Agreement. Aug 25th - Japanese fleet blockades Chinese coast Aug 26th - Franco's troops conquer Santander Aug 26th - Pumping to build Treasure Island in SF Bay is finished Aug 27th - Brooklyn Dodger Fred Frankhouse no-hits Cin, 5-0 in 7 2/3 inn game Aug 27th - George E T Eyston sets world auto speed record at 345.49 MPH Aug 28th - Toyota Motors becomes an independent company. Aug 29th - Phila A's Bob Johnson is 2nd to get 6 RBIs in an inning (1st) Aug 30th - Joe Louis beats Tommy Farr in 15 for heavyweight boxing title Aug 31st - Det's rookie Rudy York sets record for HRs of 18 HRs in August Sep 1st - 4th NFL Chicago All-Star Game: All-Stars 6, Green Bay 0 (84,560) Sep 1st - Battle of Gijon in Spain begins Sep 2nd - US Housing Authority created by National Housing Act Sep 4th - Doris Kopsky, becomes 1st NABA woman cycling champion (4:22.4) Sep 5th - Spanish Civil War: Llanes falls. Sep 6th - Spanish Civil War: The start of the Battle of El Mazuco. Sep 8th - Pan Arab conference about Palestine opens Sep 8th - Yankees trailing 6-1 in 9th, score 8 to beat Boston 9-6 Sep 10th - 2nd American Football League plays 1st game (LA 21, Pittsburgh 0) Sep 10th - Cleveland (Los Angeles) Rams plays their 1st NFL game, lose 28-0 Sep 11th - 51st US Women's Tennis: Anita Lizana beats Jadwiga Jedrzejowska (6-4 6-2) Sep 11th - 57th US Men's Tennis: J D Budge beats G v Cramm (6-1 7-9 6-1 3-6 6-1) Sep 15th - WPA extends L-Taraval streetcar to SF Zoo (at Sloat Blvd) Sep 17th - 1st NFL game in Washington, DC; Redskins beat NY Giants 13-3
Writer and Academic J. R. R. Tolkien Sep 21st - J. R. R. Tolkien's 'The Hobbit' is published Sep 22nd - Forest fire kills 14 & injures 50 in Cody Wyoming Sep 22nd - Spanish Civil War: Peña Blanca is taken; the end of the Battle of El Mazuco. Sep 23rd - Yankees lose 9-5 but clinch pennant when Red Sox beat Detroit Sep 25th - "il duce" visits Berlin/named "the Fuhrer" to corporal 1st class Sep 25th - Battle of of P'ing-hsin-kuan Wutai Mountain Sep 27th - 1st Santa Claus Training School opens (Albion NY) Sep 27th - Balinese Tiger declared extinct. Sep 28th - FDR dedicates Bonneville Dam on Columbia River (Oregon) Sep 29th - Frans Slaats bicycles world record time (45,563 km) Sep 30th - 6th Ryder Cup: US, 8-4 at Southport & Ainsdale, England Oct 1st - Pullman Co formally recognizes Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Oct 2nd - FDR visits Grand Coulee Dam construction site in Washington State Oct 5th - Minister Romme says unemployment is 25% "quarter of Romme" Oct 7th - Johan Wagenaar's "Feestmars" premieres in Amsterdam Oct 10th - NY Yankees beat Giants 4 games to 1 in 34th World Series Oct 13th - A recorded trace of snow in Central Park NYC
Nobel Laureate Author Ernest Hemingway Oct 15th - Ernest Hemingway novel "To Have & Have Not" published Oct 15th - Rather than accept any trade offers, the Yanks release Tony Lazzeri Oct 21st - Dmitri Shostakovitch's 5th Symphony premieres Oct 21st - Franco-troops occupies Gijon Oct 25th - Belgian government of Zealand falls due to black money Oct 25th - Casey Stengel signs to manage Boston Bees Oct 31st - Spanish government moves from Valencia to Barcelona Nov 1st - Stalinists executed by shooting Pastor Paul Hamberg and seven members of Azerbaijan's Lutheran community (including three women). Nov 2nd - AL batting champ Charlie Gehringer wins MVP Nov 3rd - Maurice Archambaud bicycles world record for distance in one hour (45.796 km) Nov 3rd - NHL Howie Morenz Memorial Game: All-Stars beat Montreal 6-5 in Mont Nov 5th - Hitler informs his military leaders in a secret meeting of his intentions of going to war Nov 8th - The Nazi exhibition Der ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew") opens in Munich. Nov 9th - Japanese army conquers Shanghai Nov 9th - St Louis Cards Triple Crown winner Joe Medwick is named NL MVP
President and Dictator of Brazil Getulio Vargas Nov 10th - Brazilian dictator Getulio Vargas proclaims "Estado novo" Nov 11th - Messerschmidt ME-109V13 flies world record 610.4 kph Nov 11th - Nobel prize for physics awarded to C J Davisson & GP Thomson Nov 13th - NBC forms 1st full-sized symphony orchestra exclusively for radio Nov 15th - 1st congressional session in air-conditioned chambers Nov 17th - Britain's Lord Halifax visits Germany, beginning of appeasement Nov 21st - Dmitri Shostakovitch's 5th Symphony premieres in Lenningrad Nov 23rd - Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy," premieres in NYC Nov 23rd - Emile Janson becomes Belgian premier Nov 23rd - John Steinbeck's "Of Mice & Men" premieres in NYC Nov 25th - World's fair of Paris closes (31.2 million visitors) Nov 27th - Pro-labor musical revue "Pins & Needles" opens, produced by ILGWU Nov 29th - Prince Bernhard injured in auto accident in Netherlands Nov 30th - 3rd Heisman Trophy Award: Clint Frank, Yale (HB) Dec 1st - Japan recognizes Franco government
Spanish Dictator and General Francisco Franco Dec 7th - Dutch Minister Romme proclaims married women are forbidden to work Dec 7th - Red Sox acquire the contract of 19-year-old Ted Williams Dec 7th - Russian chess player Alekhine recaptures world title from Max Euwe Dec 11th - 25th CFL Grey Cup: Toronto Argonauts defeats Winn Blue Bombers, 30-7 Dec 11th - Italy withdraws from League of Nations Dec 12th - NBC & RCA sends 1st mobile-TV vans onto the streets of NY Dec 12th - Washington Redskins win NFL championship Dec 12th - Japanese aircraft shell & sink US gunboat Panay on Yangtze River in China. (Japan apologized & eventually paid US $2.2M in reparations) Dec 14th - Japanese troops conquer/plunder Nanjing Dec 16th - Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe attempt to escape from the American federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay; neither is ever seen again. Dec 20th - Bill O'Reilly takes 9-41 for NSW against South Australia Dec 21st - 1st feature-length color & sound cartoon premieres (Snow White) Dec 21st - O'Reilly completes 14-98 for cricket match, NSW v South Aust Dec 22nd - Lincoln Tunnel (NYC) opens to traffic Dec 23rd - First flight of the Vickers Wellington bomber.
Baseball Player Ted Williams Dec 24th - Dutch government recognizes Italian king Emanuel III as emperor of Abyssinia Dec 25th - Arturo Toscanini conducts 1st Symphony of the Air over NBC Radio Dec 25th - Queensland all out for 93 v SA in front of 10,436 Dec 27th - Bradman scores 246 SA v Queensland, 364 mins, 20 fours Dec 27th - German immigration officials with no explanation bar Juan Carlos Zabala (Arg), 1932 Olympic marathon champion, from entering Germany Dec 27th - Mae West performs Adam & Eve skit that gets her banned from NBC radio Dec 28th - Fascist Octavian Goga becomes PM of Romania/begins spread of Judaism Dec 29th - 2nd Irish constitution goes into effect; Irish Free State renamed Erie Dec 29th - Ireland adopts constitution (Irish Free State becomes Eire) Dec 29th - Lou Thesz beats E Marshall in St Louis, to become wrestling champ Dec 29th - Pan Am starts San Francisco-to-Auckland, New Zealand service Vol. 36 No. 14 · 17 July 2014 pages 34-35 | 3457 words The Dzhaz Age Stephen Lovell Moscow 1937 by Karl Schlögel Over the last thirty years, Karl Schlögel has been the most distinguished flâneur among historians of Russia. A sense of place – both as the setting for human encounters and something that conditions cultural and intellectual life – has informed much of his work. In 1984 he published Moskau lesen, an essayistic exploration of the Soviet capital, while his later books include a history of St Petersburg in the early 20th century which sees the city as a ‘laboratory of modernity’, and a study of Russian-German interactions through the prism of Berlin, which Schlögel christens ‘Europe’s Ostbahnhof’. In this latest book, however, the flâneur has to change his mode of transport. To represent Moscow in 1937, the leisurely intellectual stroll is traded for a bumpy ride on a witch’s broomstick. Moscow 1937 opens with the heroine’s flight in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which, for all its phantasmagoric trappings, provides an ethnographically grounded depiction of the city in the 1930s. Schlögel’s book, like Bulgakov’s, has stomach-churning narrative lurches. Bulgakov gives us a variety show that turns into a public execution; Schlögel has the NKVD co-ordinators of mass murder holding a public celebration in the Bolshoi Theatre to mark the twentieth anniversary of their organisation in December 1937. The grotesquerie is unavoidable. Schlögel’s task is to describe one of the most notoriously violent peacetime societies in modern history at its most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the number of victims in 1937-38 was lower than Conquest estimated. But the horror has not diminished. Rather the contrary: we now know far more about the Soviet phenomenon of death by quota. Besides taking aim at former oppositionists and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in the state apparatus, the Great Terror consisted of ‘mass operations’ against whole categories of the population that were deemed dangerous: priests, Poles, de-kulakised vagrants and many others. On the other hand, historians have painted Stalinist society as a new and distinctive civilisation. In attempting to launch itself into industrial modernity, it borrowed feverishly from the rest of the world (even if it tried to conceal the fact), but it remained distinctive, if only because of the scale of the civilising mission, the speed at which it was implemented, and the social backdrop against which it was conducted. For all the chaos, violence and squalor of the times, the 1930s saw the birth of a new social order based on industrialisation, coercion and mobilisation, but buttressed by patriotism and aspirations to a socialist version of self-betterment. While most historians see both terror and civilisation as important to understanding the Soviet experience of the 1930s, they tend to spend their time investigating either one or the other. Schlögel is the first to attempt to knit them together so intricately. The title of the German edition of his book (published in 2008) makes the point absolutely clear: Terror und Traum. As he notes à propos the frenzied pageantry of parades on Red Square, ‘Everything came together: confetti parade and death-sentence plebiscite, popular celebrations and thirst for revenge, carnival extravaganza and orgies of hatred.’ Representing this chaos – keeping it chaotic without rendering it nonsensical – is a stylistic and formal problem as much as a historiographical one. Schlögel’s solution is what he calls ‘stereoscopic’ vision. The text is divided into 39 chapters ranging in length from one page to more than thirty; it takes us swiftly back and forth between show trials and executions, ‘Soviet Hollywood’ and shop windows. The grand scale is combined with the vignette. Schlögel doesn’t just change topics; he changes tone and perspective. On occasion he passes judgment; at other times he lets documents speak for themselves. When the issue is the culpability of the Soviet leadership, there is no text more powerful than Operational Order No. 00447, of 30 July 1937, which listed nine distinct ‘groups subject to punitive measures’ and set out in advance how many people were to be executed in the various administrative units of the USSR. The Eastern Siberian Region, for example, was given an allocation of a thousand ‘first category’ arrestees; the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic a hundred; and Moscow five thousand. Schlögel’s account of the victims at the Butovo shooting range, one of the main killing sites of Moscow’s Great Terror, has a shattering specificity: we find a long list of victims, from illiterate peasants accused of Trotskyism to Fedor Golovin, chairman of the Second State Duma in 1907. Moscow 1937 is an act of remembrance as well as a work of history. It is one thing to know in the abstract that the late 1930s in the Soviet Union were a dark time, or even to be presented with a body count. It is quite another to be confronted with the physical and psychological particularity of what happened in 1937, to be forced to make the effort to grasp it in its totality. All too often – especially in Russia – the whole pre-1941 period becomes a blurry Time of Troubles. Yet, as Akhmatova wrote in the epilogue to Requiem, a cycle of poems in response to the Leningrad Terror, we must want to ‘call them all by name’. The most urgent sense-imposing question to be asked of the Terror is, quite simply: why did it happen? Although there had been instances of cataclysmic violence in Bolshevik Russia before 1937, the events of that year have always seemed mysterious in a way that is not true of the Civil War, where the revolutionary regime fought for its existence, or even of Collectivisation, where the Soviet leadership waged terrible war on a section of the population that was deemed to stand in the way of its main political and economic goals. In 1937, by contrast, we have, as Schlögel puts it, ‘arbitrariness, suddenness, shock, attacks out of the blue, and the disappearance and obliteration of the distinction between the real and the fantastic’. How was all this possible? Perhaps the oldest answer to this question, but one that bears repeating, lies in the political culture of the Bolshevik Party. Here was an inherently secretive and suspicious organisation with multiple sources of internal tension; as of the late 1930s, its sole method of conflict resolution was the public humiliation and physical destruction of those who lost the argument. Although Bolsheviks could be ruthless and outspoken in private, they adhered to the principle of democratic centralism: a combination of ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘follow the pack’. In other words, once they had lost a particular political struggle, they followed the public script. They also acted for all the world as if they believed what they were saying. At the gatherings of the Bolshevik elite, notably the Central Committee plenum of February-March 1937, which provided political momentum for much of the violence to come, language was unmoored from reality. In most political arenas, speakers recognise that there is a gap between rhetoric and action. Not so in Bolshevik Russia: if Trotskyism had to be eradicated and X was designated a Trotskyist, that meant X had to be eradicated too. The most poignant illustration of this point remains Bukharin’s account of himself at his show trial in March 1938. After agonising self-interrogation over the preceding 12 months of incarceration, he denied specific guilt but admitted general responsibility for ‘political crimes’. As his testimony made clear, the court drew no distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ crimes. In other words, if the party said he had conspired to commit terrorist actions against the state, he must have done so – even if he had been unaware of the fact. Before too long, the topsy-turviness of the times takes over: even now, after reading a succession of Stalin-era biographies, I begin to wonder, not why a particular functionary was shot, but why his colleague wasn’t. The culture of the Bolshevik Party was a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for the events of 1937. Only the wider context can help to explain why the carnage extended far beyond the Central Committee. ‘Terror from above’ was met halfway by ‘terror from below’. Violence was a form of release for the frustrations, humiliations and suffering of Soviet-style industrialisation and urbanisation. Presented with the opportunity to settle scores with their managers at factory meetings, industrial workers could be just as rhetorically skilled as members of the Central Committee – and often had a clearer sense of what they wanted to achieve. Better wages and housing were top of their agenda, but failing that they would settle for the arrest of their bosses. This was a society at the end of its tether. As Schlögel puts it, ‘A history of 1937 must also be a history of the physical and emotional exhaustion and of the limits of what can be done to human beings by disrupting their everyday existences but stopping short of the terrorising use of force. It is not only individuals that can “crack up”; societies can crack up too.’ In conditions of scarcity, danger and powerlessness, conspiracy theory was an emotionally satisfying and intellectually persuasive way of understanding the world. Perhaps the single most important factor, however, was that the Soviet Union was a ‘peacetime’ society only in the most literal sense. In the 1930s, a Stalinist conspiracy theorist didn’t have to work hard to prove that the world was a dangerous place. The whole economic and political project of Stalinism was predicated on the medium-term certainty of a major European war. The Soviet Union was also involved in genuine conflicts: in the east, border skirmishes with the Japanese in Manchuria; in the west, the Spanish Civil War, which the Stalinist media packaged as a proxy test of Soviet socialism. All the while, Soviet society was kept on a war footing. In Gorky Park, showcase of 1930s ‘cultured leisure’, one of the main attractions was a tower for parachute jumping. The constant war scares and talk of mobilisation might lead us to assume that the Soviet Union in the 1930s was an autarkic, closed society. As Schlögel shows in several chapters, this was far from the truth. The internationalism of Soviet society was evident above all at the heart of the establishment: many leading Bolsheviks had spent extended periods abroad, and the turn to ‘socialism in one country’ in the mid-1920s had tempered but not broken the ambition to turn the USSR into the hub of an international socialist network. Moscow was a pole of attraction for alienated or oppressed left-wing intellectuals from Europe and beyond. By 1937, many of them were living in squalid conditions, their social circle limited to fellow foreigners, waiting for the knock on the door from the NKVD. Foreign influence in the 1930s wasn’t limited to ideological matters. During the first Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union had paid for technology transfer on a massive scale. While that was scaled back after 1932, the Soviet elite continued to take inspiration from the world beyond. Boris Iofan, author of the winning design for the never constructed Palace of Soviets, spent his formative years in Rome and then enjoyed a Damascene moment on beholding Manhattan’s skyscrapers in 1934. Even more remarkably, the satirical duo Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, authors of the Soviet Union’s two finest comic novels, published in 1937 an admiring account of a coast to coast road trip they had taken in America. Most of all, however, the Soviet Union found itself intertwined with the outside world by virtue of its own ‘multinational’ (i.e. multiethnic) population. The dozens of ethnic groups in the USSR included several with large co-ethnic populations just over the border, in unfriendly states. When the time came for death by quota, Poles and Germans were high on the list. ‘National operations’ – that is, the targeted killing of members of particular ethnic groups – accounted for more than a third of the victims of the Great Terror. The rhetoric of the time insisted on clear divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘Soviet’ and ‘un-Soviet’. The reality, however, was that the Soviet Union of the 1930s was a messy and interconnected place where lines were more than usually hard to draw. Social distinctions were washed away by a tidal wave of migration. In the salons of Stalinism, the leading lights of the NKVD served as patrons of the arts and socialised with writers – until their own heads rolled. Perhaps most troubling for Soviet designs on modernity, the present still couldn’t shake off the past. The evidence was there in full view for any Muscovite: the Kremlin, after all, still stood. The architectural elite continued to be dominated by ageing luminaries such as Aleksei Shchusev (b.1873), whose prerevolutionary credits included the design for the Kazan Station in Moscow. The architects took three years longer than the writers to have their founding congress. And here, even more than in other branches of the Soviet arts, the concept of Socialist Realism remained resolutely nebulous. Schlögel’s book is at its most insightful when it asks how people made sense of the events of 1937. It has been one of the great puzzles of 20th-century history: did first-hand observers, or the Soviet public more generally, really believe in the guilt of the show trial defendants? How did people cope with the cognitive dissonance that must have resulted from the relentless proximity of violence? The most important construction project of the time, the Moscow-Volga canal, turned the quiet town of Dmitrov, a mere sixty kilometres north of Moscow, into a hub of the Gulag. Butovo was located in a dacha district. How, in the light of all this, could the NKVD top brass pull off holding a gala at the Bolshoi? Part of the answer is grimly prosaic: the regime made great efforts to keep terror separate from the Soviet dream. At Butovo strict measures of secrecy were taken, and the cast of executioners was limited. So successful was this campaign of concealment that the locations of the massacres came to light only fifty or more years later – not the least significant reason why commemoration of Stalin-era violence in Russia compares unfavourably with that of Nazi-era atrocities in Germany. Stalin’s regime was absolutely ruthless in its treatment of anyone who might be too well informed about what was going on. The Great Terror was also a purge of specialist knowledge, from geologists to census-takers. * Whatever the regime’s efforts to stage-manage events, the Soviet dream couldn’t have survived against the backdrop of terror without the participation of many sections of the population, or at any rate their willingness to suspend disbelief. More striking are the high-profile foreigners who, whatever their misgivings, played their part on the Stalinist stage set. Near the start of his book, Schlögel discusses Lion Feuchtwanger’s almost six-hour audience with Stalin on 8 January 1937, during which Feuchtwanger quickly ‘realised that I could talk frankly with this man’. As an exiled Jewish intellectual desperate to encourage resistance to fascism, Feuchtwanger had powerful personal reasons to believe (or at least, to suppress doubt). Even more poignantly, the returned émigré Nikolai Ustrialov, who had served in Kolchak’s government in Siberia before convincing himself that the Bolsheviks were the rightful custodians of the Russian nation, wrote himself into a frenzy in the mid-1930s professing his commitment to the Soviet cause. Later on, while under investigation, he would offer his diary as evidence of loyalty. (Naturally, he was shot.) Very few people in Soviet society had the opportunity to make the same ill-advised decision as Ustrialov had made, returning to Russia from physical safety abroad. But very many wanted to persuade themselves that their lives made sense. The new Soviet mass urban culture of the 1930s offered a panoply of sense-making possibilities. There were opportunities for ‘cultured’ strolling in Gorky Park. There were appealing myths in the cinema: socialist Cinderellas, Hollywood-on-the-Volga musicals. There were jolly tunes: Soviet ‘mass song’ injected vim into folk tradition, while Muscovites could also enjoy dzhaz (jazz had recently been pronounced non-decadent by Pravda) at many venues around the city. There was cultural enfranchisement: the endless events and publications to mark the centenary of Pushkin’s death are incomprehensible if we fail to understand that this reappropriated national poet was being made available to millions of newly literate Soviet people as ‘a shorthand name for access to education, literature, knowledge and the wider world’. There was adventure and spectacle in abundance. Aviators and polar explorers were the heroes of the age, and their exploits could now be followed in real time by listening to the radio. The Papanin expedition to the North Pole, whose members drifted south on an ice floe for nine months until they were rescued in February 1938, offered an impeccable metaphor for life in the Soviet 1930s: dangerous, but also offering excitement and opportunity. To a Soviet sensibility, freedom and life-threatening risk were two sides of the same coin. To find this situation exhilarating rather than paralysing, one needed to be a particular kind of person. Above all, one needed to be young. In the Soviet 1930s, as Schlögel writes, youth was a ‘habit of mind’. A future orientation was not only part of Zhdanov’s classic definition of Socialist Realism at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934; it was also an essential attribute for any Soviet person who wanted to make life liveable. The Bolshevik leadership, along with its small army of technicians, scientists, scholars, writers and artists, was attempting to establish a new space-time continuum for a country of 150 million people. While it had some success in creating a modern urban culture for an aspirational new generation, it had to reckon all the time with the possibility of failure. The most impressive logistical operation of 1937 was without doubt the first Soviet census, with a million enumerators and 200 million punched cards. But when it delivered the ‘wrong’ population figure, its administrators were arrested. At the end of the year, the regime exposed itself to an even more severe test of its nation-building credentials: the first ‘free’ and universal Soviet elections, without suffrage restrictions on social undesirables. Just as in the show trials, the regime believed its own rhetoric: the December elections would be an enactment of an integrated Soviet society without class divisions. What this meant was that anyone thought to be un-Soviet had to be rounded up in advance. In a grisly non-coincidence, the launch of the murderous campaign against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in summer 1937 took place in parallel with arrangements for the elections. In 1940 Vladimir Vernadsky, a world-renowned geochemist and extraordinarily outspoken observer, noted in his diary: ‘For the last twenty years no one has had the feeling that the regime is stable.’ Did Schlögel choose 1937 because that year represents in concentrated form all the tensions in the Soviet version of modernity? Or does he see it as a tipping point? On reading the transcripts of the Moscow show trials, he finds himself hearing ‘the roaring and cracking sounds you hear when a whole world collapses, the grinding noises when an entire nation is shifted onto a new track’. The metaphor is telling. A world had collapsed, a nation had been wrenched onto a new track – but where that track led was unclear. In his diary for 1941, Vernadsky placed his hopes on the aftermath of the war that had just begun. Schlögel denies that the Terror contains its own narrative resolution: it may be possible to say what caused 1937, but it’s much harder to say what it brought into being. The bewildering fact is that it would soon be swamped in the national consciousness by a cataclysm whose death toll was perhaps ten times as high. Anything approaching a ‘steady state’ for Soviet socialism would have to wait at least another decade. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about 1937, Schlögel suggests at the end, is that it leads nowhere.