Weekend Roundup

• Martha S. Jones published an op-ed in WaPo and was prominently quoted in an NYT story this week about the discovery that Johns Hopkins owned enslaved persons. They are the fruit of the project she directs, Hard Histories at Hopkins.
  

• The African American History Collection of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan relating to slavery, abolition movements, and various aspects of African American life, largely dating between 1781 and 1865, is now online. 
  

• 

  William O. Douglas (LC)
  

  We are grateful to John Q. Barrett for bringing to our attention this quite arresting interview of William O. Douglas from 1966, which we understand he found here.
  

• The Evolution of Judicial Retirement, by Jake Kobrick, another in a series of posts by the Federal Judicial Center, went up this week.
  

• The Harvard Law School Library’s Nuremberg Trials Project supplies documents for “The World’s Biggest Murder Trial: Nuremberg" (Harvard Law Today).

• LHB October guest blogger Stefan B. Kirmse will have a virtual book event on The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia on Monday, Dec.15 at 6-7.30pm Central European Standard Time. You can register here. 

• The latest from Lawbook Exchange: Scholarly Law and Legal History.
  

• LHB congratulates Risa Goluboff on her reappointment as dean of UVA Law.
  

• Local Legal History from Washington County, PA and Madison County, TX.
  

  Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

The siege of Pavlov’s House (26 September 1942 till 25 November 1942)

The house built parallel to the embankment of the river Volga, Prior to the war, the four story building Pavlov’s House had served as a residential building for employees of the regional consumer union. It was considered one of the most prestigious apartment complexes of Stalingrad, as it overlooked 9 January Square.

The beginning of the war in Russia came as a surprise to the Soviet government, even though they had been repeatedly warned by other countries that Nazi Germany was planning an attack on Russia.

The German offensive to capture Stalingrad began on 23 August 1942, using the German 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. In this new form of urban warfare, frontlines were constantly shifting block by block, and every building was a fortress waiting to be stormed. One of the most notable of these urban strongholds was given the moniker "Pavlov's House."

In September 1942, the house was attacked by German soldiers, and a platoon of the Soviet 13th Guards Rifle Division was ordered to seize and defend it.

Captured by Red Army Sergeant Jacob Pavlov, a low-level noncommissioned officer in the last weekend of September, the house allowing the defenders to observe and fire into German occupied territory.

The building was not just important because it stuck into German defenses , but for the fact that a grain mill converted into a Soviet command post and staging ground was only 300 yards into Soviet lines behind the house.

This allowed for constant communication between the observation stronghold and Soviet HQ. All of these factors of course made the house a constant target for German offensives, which is where the fame of Sergeant Pavlov and his defense originates.

In keeping with Stalin's Order No. 227 - "not one step back", Sgt. Pavlov was ordered to fortify the building and defend it to the last bullet and the last man. Taking this advice to heart, Pavlov ordered the building to be surrounded with four layers of barbed wire and minefields, and set up machine-gun posts in every available window facing the square.

From their vantage point, they could strike at the Panzers with impunity. They were not only a symbol of the resistance against the Germans, but they were also proven deadly. The Germans would routinely attempt to take the house almost daily, only to fail every time. Pavlov’s House stood for fifty-eight days, until the defenders and the civilians found hiding in the basement were finally relieved in November.

The siege of Pavlov’s House (26 September 1942 till 25 November 1942)

Red Army of Russia

The Soviet army today is essentially a conventional army that is the product of Imperial Russian military tradition passed on directly to the Soviets via the Imperial army officers who joined the Red Army in the 1920's.

Red Army was formed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Its first civilian leader was Leon Trotsky, who proved a brilliant strategist and administrator. The Red Army began life as a small volunteer force of proletarians from the major urban citadels of Bolshevik power in northern and central Russia.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Russia entered a period of civil war that lasted until the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922. The main forces involved in this unrest were the Red Army, who were pitted against the counter –revolutionaries or “white Russian” ranging from moderate socialists to conservatives advocating the restorations of the tsarist regime.

By the end of the civil war against the Whites and the various armies of foreign intervention, in the autumn of 1920, Red Army had grown into a mass conscript army of five million soldiers, 75 per cent of them peasants1 by birth - a figure roughly proportionate to the size of the peasant population in Russia..
Red Army of Russia

William Henry Jackson

Mr. Jackson got around. We've previously seen pictures he took in Florida, the Old West, and Mexico. These were taken in Russia (Siberia).

Convict railway workers, Ussuri region, Siberia, 1895

 

Convicts lined up outside dormitory at Khabarovsk, 1895

 

Goldi woman, wife of village chief, smoking pipe, 1895

 

Goldi along the the Amur River, north of Khabarovsk, 1895

 

Goldi chiefs in best clothes, north of Khabarovsk, 1895

 

Goldi family group, north of Khabarovsk, 1895

 

Goldi tribesmen acting out folk drama, "The repulse of the kidnapper", 1895

 

Goldi village along the Amur River, north of Khabarovsk, 1895

 

Goldi village on the Amur, north of Khabarovsk, 1895

 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

Barbecue. Samarkand

  

Monks at work. Planting potatoes

 

Ostrechiny

 

People in Dagestan

 

The mullahs in the mosque of Azizia. Batum

Battle of Neva (Russia and Swedes) in 1240

Novgorod and Sweden were competitors both for dominance over Finnic tribes north of the Novgorod lands and for control over access to the Gulf of Finland.

The Swedish invasion occurred at a time when the Mongols had just completed their conquest of Vladimir-Suzdal’ and much of the northeastern Rus’ and were preparing their attack on Kiev.

According to the Russian, an army of Swedes, Norwegians and Finns and Tavastians descended on the Neva with the intention of conquering Novgorod Republic. Novgorod Republic was a large medieval Russian state

The Swedes were led by Birgir Magnusson, son-in-law to the King of Sweden and were augmented by Norwegian and Finnish troops.

Prince Alexander Yaroslavich of Novgorod defeated it with a small force of Novgorodians and some men from Ladoga.

Alexander pursued a policy of compromise with Russians Mongol rulers following the conquest of 1237-40. This enabled him to beat off attacks by Sweden.

They defeated the Swedes in July 15, 1240 in a bloody battle on the banks of Neva.

Corpses of high ranking Swedes were sunk in three boats and others were buried in pits.

Twenty Novgorodians were killed and an unspecified number of Ladoga townsfolk.
Battle of Neva (Russia and Swedes) in 1240 

Bloody Sunday (Russia 1905)

Bloody Sunday (Russia 1905)
In 1914 Russia was considered backward by the standard of Western industrial society. Russia still recalled a recent feudal past.

Twelve years earlier in 1905 the workers of St. Petersburg (the Germanic name was change to its Russian equivalent, Petrograd, in 1914 with the outbreak of hostilities with the Central Powers) protested hardships due to cyclical downturns in the economy.

Urban workers appealed to the Tsar as “little father” for relief for their hardships. On Sunday in January 1905 the tsar’s troops fired on a peaceful mass demonstration in front of Winter Palace. A thousand were killed, including many women and children, who were appealing to the tsar for relief.

The event, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, set-off a revolution that spread to Moscow and the countryside.

 In October 1905 the regime responded to the disruptions with a series of reforms that legalized political parties and established the Duma, or national parliament Peasants, oppressed with their own burdens of taxation and endemic poverty, launched mass attacks on big landowners throughout 1905 and 1906.

The government met workers’ and peasants’ demands with return a repression in 1907. In the half-decade before the Great War, the Russian state stood as an autocracy of Parliamentary concession blended with severe police control.
Bloody Sunday (Russia 1905)