Now listening to Piano Sonata No. 6 by Ludwig van Beethoven and Keep It Up by Loverboy...

On Broadway in Vancouver. Summer of 2018.

Broadway is a major east-west thoroughfare in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In Vancouver's numbered avenue grid system, it runs in place of a 9th Avenue, between 8th and 10th. The street has six lanes for most of its course. Portions of the street carry the British Columbia Highway 7 designation.

The route begins as "West Broadway" at the intersection of Wallace Crescent and 8th Avenue, in the affluent residential neighbourhood of West Point Grey, a few kilometres east of the University of British Columbia (UBC). Past Alma Street, Broadway takes over from 10th Avenue as one of Vancouver's major thoroughfares, as it enters Greek West Broadway (or Greektown) section of Vancouver's Kitsilano district. East of here are several blocks of generally trendy, upscale shops interspersed with low-rise apartment blocks and small supermarkets. The surrounding neighbourhoods generally consist of large, older homes dating from the early twentieth century, many of which have been subdivided into rental suites.

As Broadway approaches Arbutus Street, the commercial establishments become larger before transitioning into a mix of small to mid-size apartment blocks. East of Burrard Street, the apartment blocks get progressively taller, and commercial establishments larger and busier. Between Burrard and Main Street, Broadway can be considerably congested by vehicular traffic. Past Granville Street, Broadway yields completely to medium-to-large commercial structures and high-rise apartments and condominiums. Between Cambie and Main, the commercial establishments become smaller and somewhat more downscale.

At Ontario Street, two blocks west of Main, the route becomes "East Broadway." After bisecting Main and Kingsway, traffic on Broadway eases somewhat, and the character returns to a mix of small-to-medium apartment buildings and commercial establishments, interspersed with older homes - all considerably less affluent than those to the west. At Commercial Drive, Broadway passes by the Commercial–Broadway SkyTrain Station. Past here for several blocks, the neighbourhood consists predominantly of older residential homes.

As Broadway travels east of Renfrew Street, the neighbourhood once again becomes mixed, with older homes to the north and larger industrial, commercial, and warehouse establishments to the south. Broadway finally ends at Cassiar Street, just short of the Vancouver-Burnaby boundary, where it becomes the Lougheed Highway.

Broadway was created at the turn of the 20th century, along with other gridded roads south of False Creek, to meet the needs of an expanding population in Vancouver. The name of the route was changed from 9th Avenue to Broadway in 1909, at the behest of merchants around Main Street (at that time the hub of Vancouver commerce), who felt that it bestowed a more cosmopolitan air. Commercial establishments originally spread out around the intersections of Cambie and Main Streets, while the character of the rest of the route remained predominantly single-family dwellings.

By the 1970s, the length of Broadway had become a major arterial route in Vancouver, conveying commuters from downtown to the neighbourhoods of the west and east sides. With the growth of UBC and the expansion of the Vancouver General Hospital (one block south of Broadway between approximately Oak and Cambie), traffic demands accelerated. In the 1990s, the agency then responsible for public transit in Greater Vancouver — BC Transit — introduced an express bus route, the 99 B-Line, to help reduce congestion. The Vancouver transportation plan for Broadway notes that congestion is such that the bus service is at capacity, and will not be eased until a new rapid transit line is built paralleling the street. It is anticipated that the SkyTrain's Millennium Line will be extended to Central Broadway by 2021; the extension is expected to connect with Canada Line at Broadway-City Hall Station, at the intersection of Broadway and Cambie Street.

 

The Forgotten Story of the American Troops Who Got Caught Up in the Russian Civil War

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-doughboys-who-died-fighting-russian-civil-war-180971470/

It was 45 degrees below zero, and Lieutenant Harry Mead’s platoon was much too far from home. Just outside the Russian village of Ust Padenga, 500 miles north of Moscow, the American soldiers crouched inside two blockhouses and trenches cut into permafrost. It was before dawn on January 19, 1919.

Through their field glasses, lookouts gazed south into the darkness. Beyond the platoon’s position, flares and rockets flashed, and shadowy figures moved through tiny villages—Bolshevik soldiers from Russia’s Red Army, hoping to push the American invaders 200 miles north, all the way back to the frozen White Sea.

The first artillery shell flew at the Americans at dawn. Mead, 29, of Detroit, awoke, dressed, and ran to his 47-man platoon’s forward position. Shells fell for an hour, then stopped. Soldiers from the Bolshevik Red Army, clad in winter-white uniforms, rose up from the snow and ravines on three sides. They advanced, firing automatic rifles and muskets at the outnumbered Americans.

“I at once realized that our position was hopeless,” Mead recalled, as quoted in James Carl Nelson’s forthcoming book, The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America’s Forgotten Invasion of Russia. “We were sweeping the enemy line with machine gun and rifle fire. As soon as one wave of the enemy was halted on one flank another was pressing in on us from the other side.”

As the Red Army neared, with bayonets fixed on their guns, Mead and his soldiers retreated. They ran through the village, from house to house, “each new dash leaving more of our comrades lying in the cold and snow, never to be seen again,” Mead said. At last, Mead made it to the next village, filled with American soldiers. Of Mead’s 47-man platoon, 25 died that day, and another 15 were injured.

For the 13,000 American troops serving in remote parts of Russia 100 years ago, the attack on Mead’s men was the worst day in one of the United States’ least-remembered military conflicts. When 1919 dawned, the U.S. forces had been in Russia for months. World War I was not yet over for the 5,000 members of the 339th U.S. Army regiment of the American Expeditionary Force deployed near the port city of Archangel, just below the Arctic Circle, nor for the 8,000 troops from the 27th and 31st regiments, who were stationed in the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok, 4,000 miles to the east.

They had become bit players caught up in the complex international intrigue of the Russian Civil War. Russia had begun World War I as an ally of England and France. But the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, installed a communist government in Moscow and St. Petersburg that pulled Russia out of the conflict and into peace with Germany. By fall 1918, Lenin’s year-old government controlled only a part of central European Russia. Forces calling themselves the White Russians, a loose coalition of liberals, social democrats and loyalists to the assassinated czar, were fighting the Communists from the north, south, east and west.

Two months after the November 11, 1918, armistice that officially ended the war for the rest of Europe, as one million Americans in France were preparing to sail home, the U.S. troops in Russia found that their ill-defined missions had transformed into something even more obscure. Historians still debate why President Woodrow Wilson really sent troops to Russia, but they tend to agree that the two missions, burdened by Wilson’s ambiguous goals, ended in failures that foreshadowed U.S. foreign interventions in the century to come.

When Wilson sent the troops to Russia in July 1918, World War I still looked dire for the Allies. With the Russian Empire no longer engaged in the continental struggle, Germany had moved dozens of divisions to France to try to strike a final blow and end the war, and the spring 1918 German offensive had advanced to within artillery range of Paris.

Desperate to reopen an Eastern Front, Britain and France pressured Wilson to send troops to join Allied expeditions in northern Russia and far eastern Russia, and in July 1918, Wilson agreed to send 13,000 troops. The Allied Powers hoped that the White Russians might rejoin the war if they defeated the Reds.

To justify the small intervention, Wilson issued a carefully worded, diplomatically vague memo. First, the U.S. troops would guard giant Allied arms caches sent to Archangel and Vladivostok before Russia had left the war. Second, they would support the 70,000-man Czechoslovak Legion, former prisoners of war who had joined the Allied cause and were fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Third, though the memo said the U.S. would avoid “intervention in [Russia’s] internal affairs,” it also said the U.S. troops would aid Russians with their own “self-government or self-defense.” That was diplomacy-speak for aiding the White Russians in the civil war.

“This was a movement basically against the Bolshevik forces,” says Doran Cart, senior curator at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. “[But] we couldn’t really go in and say, ‘This is for fighting the Bolsheviks.’ That would seem like we were against our previous ally in the war.”

Wilson’s stated aims were so ambiguous that the two U.S. expeditions to Russia ended up carrying out very different missions. While the troops in north Russia became embroiled in the Russian Civil War, the soldiers in Siberia engaged in an ever-shifting series of standoffs and skirmishes, including many with their supposed allies.

The U.S. soldiers in northern Russia, the U.S. Army’s 339th regiment, were chosen for the deployment because they were mostly from Michigan, so military commanders figured they could handle the war zone’s extreme cold. Their training in England included a lesson from Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton on surviving below-zero conditions. Landing in Archangel, just below the Arctic Circle, in September 1918, they nicknamed themselves the Polar Bear Expedition.

Under British command, many of the Polar Bears didn’t stay in Archangel to guard the Allied arms cache at all. The British goal was to reach the Russian city of Kotlas, a railroad crossing where, they hoped, they might use the railway to connect with the Czechoslovak Legion in the east. So British officer Lieutenant General Frederick Poole deployed the Polar Bears in long arcs up to 200 miles south of Archangel, along a strategic railroad and the Dvina and Vaga rivers.

But they never got to Kotlas. Instead, the Allied troops’ overextended deployment led to frequent face-to-face combat with the Bolshevik army, led by Leon Trotsky and growing in strength. One company of Americans, along with Canadian and Scottish troops, fought a bloody battle with Bolshevik forces on November 11, 1918 -- Armistice Day in France.

“Events moved so fast in 1918, they made the mission moot,” says Nelson, author of The Polar Bear Expedition. “They kept these guys in isolated, naked positions well into 1919. The biggest complaint you heard from the soldiers was, ‘No one can tell us why we’re here,’ especially after the Armistice.” The Bolshevik Revolution had “dismayed” most Americans, Russia scholar Warren B. Walsh wrote in 1947, “mostly because we thought that the Bolsheviks were German agents or, at least, were playing our enemy’s game.” But with Germany’s defeat, many Americans -- including many Polar Bears -- questioned why U.S. troops were still at war.

While the Polar Bears played a reluctant role in the Russian Civil War, the U.S. commander in Siberia, General William Graves, did his best to keep his troops out of it. In August 1918, before Graves left the U.S., Secretary of War Newton Baker met the general to personally hand him Wilson’s memo about the mission. “Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite,” Baker warned Graves. He was right.

Graves and the AEF Siberia landed in Vladivostok that month with, as Graves later wrote, “no information as to the military, political, social, economic, or financial situation in Russia.” The Czechs, not the Bolsheviks, controlled most of Siberia, including the Trans-Siberian Railway. Graves deployed his troops to guard parts of the railway and the coal mines that powered it -- the lifeline for the Czechs and White Russians fighting the Red Army.

But Russia’s quickly shifting politics complicated Graves’ mission. In November 1918, an authoritarian White Russian admiral, Alexander Kolchak, overthrew a provisional government in Siberia that the Czechs had supported. With that, and the war in Europe over, the Czechs stopped fighting the Red Army, wanting instead to return to their newly independent homeland. Now Graves was left to maintain a delicate balance: keep the Trans-Siberian Railway open to ferry secret military aid to Kolchak, without outright joining the Russian Civil War.

Opposition to the Russia deployments grew at home. “What is the policy of our nation toward Russia?” asked Senator Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican from California, in a speech on December 12, 1918. “I do not know our policy, and I know no other man who knows our policy.” Johnson, a reluctant supporter of America’s entry into World War I, joined with anti-war progressive Senator Robert La Follette to build opposition to the Russia missions.

The Bolsheviks’ January 1919 offensive against American troops in north Russia -- which began with the deadly attack on Mead’s platoon -- attracted attention in newspapers across the nation. For seven days, the Polar Bears, outnumbered eight to one, retreated north under fire from several villages along the Vaga River. On February 9, a Chicago Tribune political cartoon depicted a giant Russian bear, blood dripping from its mouth, confronting a much smaller soldier holding the U.S. flag. “At Its Mercy,” the caption read.

On February 14, Johnson’s resolution challenging the U.S. deployment in north Russia failed by one vote in the Senate, with Vice President Thomas Marshall breaking a tie to defeat it. Days later, Secretary of War Baker announced that the Polar Bears would sail home “at the earliest possible moment that weather in the spring will permit” -- once the frozen White Sea thawed and Archangel’s port reopened. Though Bolshevik attacks continued through May, the last Polar Bears left Archangel on June 15, 1919. Their nine-month campaign had cost them 235 men. “When the last battalion set sail from Archangel, not a soldier knew, no, not even vaguely, why he had fought or why he was going now, and why his comrades were left behind -- so many of them beneath the wooden crosses,” wrote Lieutenant John Cudahy of the 339th regiment in his book Archangel.

But Wilson decided to keep U.S. troops in Siberia, to use the Trans-Siberian Railway to arm the White Russians and because he feared that Japan, a fellow Allied nation that had flooded eastern Siberia with 72,000 troops, wanted to take over the region and the railroad. Graves and his soldiers persevered, but they found that America’s erstwhile allies in Siberia posed the greatest danger.

Sticking to Wilson’s stated (though disingenuous) goal of non-intervention in the Russian Civil War, Graves resisted pressure from other Allies—Britain, France, Japan, and the White Russians—to arrest and fight Bolsheviks in Siberia. Wilson and Baker backed him up, but the Japanese didn’t want the U.S. troops there, and with Graves not taking their side, neither did the White Russians.

Across Siberia, Kolchak’s forces launched a reign of terror, including executions and torture. Especially brutal were Kolchak’s commanders in the far east, Cossack generals Grigori Semenov and Ivan Kalmikov. Their troops, “under the protection of Japanese troops, were roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people,” Graves wrote in his memoir. “If questions were asked about these brutal murders, the reply was that the people murdered were Bolsheviks and this explanation, apparently, satisfied the world.” Semenov, who took to harassing Americans along the Trans-Siberian Railway, commanded armored trains with names such as The Merciless, The Destroyer, and The Terrible.

Just when the Americans and the White Russian bandits seemed on the verge of open warfare, the Bolsheviks began to win the Russian Civil War. In January 1920, near defeat, Kolchak asked the Czech Legion for protection. Appalled at his crimes, the Czechs instead turned Kolchak over to the Red Army in exchange for safe passage home, and a Bolshevik firing squad executed him in February. In January 1920, the Wilson administration ordered U.S. troops out of Siberia, citing “unstable civil authority and frequent local military interference” with the railway. Graves completed the withdrawal on April 1, 1920, having lost 189 men.

Veterans of the U.S. interventions in Russia wrote angry memoirs after coming home. One Polar Bear, Lieutenant Harry Costello, titled his book, Why Did We Go To Russia? Graves, in his memoir, defended himself against charges he should’ve aggressively fought Bolsheviks in Siberia and reminded readers of White Russian atrocities. In 1929, some former soldiers of the 339th regiment returned to North Russia to recover the remains of 86 comrades. Forty-five of them are now buried in White Chapel Cemetery near Detroit, surrounding a white statue of a fierce polar bear.

Historians tend to see Wilson’s decision to send troops to Russia as one of his worst wartime decisions, and a foreshadowing of other poorly planned American interventions in foreign countries in the century since. “It didn’t really achieve anything—it was ill-conceived,” says Nelson of the Polar Bear Expedition. “The lessons were there that could’ve been applied in Vietnam and could’ve been applied in Iraq.”

Jonathan Casey, director of archives at the World War I Museum, agrees. “We didn’t have clear goals in mind politically or militarily,” he says. “We think we have an interest to protect, but it’s not really our interest to protect, or at least to make a huge effort at it. Maybe there are lessons we should’ve learned.”

Russia: Putin regime attacks anti-fascists and moves toward full-scale police dictatorship

https://marxist.com/putin-regime-attacks-anti-fascists-and-moves-toward-full-scale-police-dictatorship.htm

On 14 March, in Moscow, near the FSB building, a series of peaceful pickets was to be held against the “Network Case” and new constitutional amendments introduced by the regime. But the authorities decided that, on this day, they would prevent even legal protests – at any cost. Several special police units were deployed in order to arrest not only the protesters, but also the journalists covering the protests. As a result, more than 50 people were arrested.

From the very beginning, the authorities were nervous about the protest. As soon as it arrived at Lubyanka Square, more than a dozen police buses and cars surrounded the FSB administration building. The police switched from threats to arrests exactly at the moment when the first protester went to the picket.

From the very beginning, a section of the police units acted extremely brutally. At one point, desperate screams and the sounds of blows were heard coming from one of the police buses. A girl was trying to shout to people outside: "Help! They’re beating us! On the other side of the bus, they’re beating people!"

Even some activist journalists who were merely reporting were arrested. There were no obvious grounds for their arrest. At that moment, it became absolutely clear that the police intended to arrest everyone, no matter what they were there for. Nevertheless, some of the activists unfurled anti-fascist posters in defiance of this repression, and in defence of their rights.

One leader of the Left Front was also arrested, although he did not participate in picketing. Another of the arrested was a random passerby who also happened to be asthmatic. When he started having an asthma attack, the police refused to give him his inhaler. He was later helped by paramedics after enduring much suffering.

Among the detainees was also a student activist, Leonid Shaidurov, who did not take part in the picket. The police from the special forces brutally grabbed him and hit his head against the wall of the bus. He was later found near one of the hospital buildings, where he was taken after being detained at the police station. He was found on the street wearing nothing but a sweater and no jacket. He was unable to speak more than a few words. At that time, he had not eaten for 10 hours. He could not use his hand that was twisted by the police. He was forced to sign an explanatory protocol after being beaten and injected with an anaesthetic, having previously been starved, and denied access to legal and human rights’ advisors. Later, he was diagnosed with a concussion and a bone displacement in his arm.

We’ve already discussed the “Network case”, but now there is another cause for protest.

In December 2019, the regime began to prepare “public opinion” for the idea of ​​revising the Constitution of the Russian Federation. This was followed up by an announcement on 15 January, that 1) There is to be a change in the Constitution; 2) The Medvedev government is dismissed. Of course we are not talking about changes to democratise the Constitution. Quite to the contrary. It is more important to answer questions about what exactly the regime is preparing, and what the workers care about.

In summary the changes introduced by Putin to the Constitution, more or less come down to the further expansion of the already broad powers of the executive branch – in particular the president. In addition, the regime seeks, even at the level of formal declarations, to free itself from any previously accepted international obligations. It is important to note the blatant hypocrisy of the authorities on the issue of referenda. When it came to pension reform affecting the interests of millions of citizens, the regime did not consider it necessary to initiate such a procedure. Now it hastily conducts something that is more like a compulsory public opinion poll with a single function – formal self-legitimation.

The obvious goal here is further tightening the grip of the regime and strengthening authoritarianism. However, it should be noted that this process has been going on for a long time, either accelerating or slowing down. What is happening is not so much a sharp turn as a formal statement of how the bourgeois-republican elements in Russia were increasingly supplanted by the power politics of the executive branch, which stood guard over the counter-revolutionary order and the interests of the largest capitalists.

So the question is, are the amendments being prepared by Putin himself? Only in part. He has been a consolidating figure of the Bonapartist regime for 20 years. There are no reasons to believe that he intends to leave the post, except if he is booted out or if he dies. The point here is that both the state security services, which are the cornerstone of the current executive branch, and the big capitalists cannot help but feel anxiety about their own prospects in the context of the growing economic and social crisis. The inevitable deterioration of the position of the working majority will lead to an increase in the strike and protest movement, which at a certain stage will be able to raise the question of power and property. It is the latter that they are terribly afraid of. It is for the sake of the struggle against the labour movement that, on the one hand, police special forces are being trained and armed to the teeth, and on the other, new amendments to the Constitution are being prepared that can formally untie the ruling class from formal democratic “constraints”.

Great political uncertainty is associated with the year 2024, and the capitalists seek to prepare for it with different means. Strengthening authoritarianism and concentration of power is one of them.

The reaction to what was happening by the liberals and part of the left close to them was the cry: "Defend the 1993 Constitution!" That is, to participate in the referendum and vote “against”. But is the struggle for the 1993 document a real way out for the working people of the country? We should not forget the circumstances it was implemented under: tanks on the Kalinin bridge in Moscow, Yeltsin’s military coup, colossal falsifications, terror against the labour movement. The sole aim of that process, including in it the imposition of the constitution, was to consolidate privatisation and the counter-revolution. This is what the gentlemen liberals and liberal leftists are offering us as a means to protect the working people of the country now. That sort of "democracy" is reeked in the blood of the workers who paid with their lives in that bloody counterrevolution.

Moreover, such tactics are meaningless given the fact that the authorities have already officially announced that independent observers will not be allowed at the polling stations.

The bottom line is that, over the past years, this Constitution has been, on the whole, a more-or-less useless piece of paper. For the ruling class, it provides formalisation of its will, for the working class, it is a symbol of defeat, stolen power and dignity. It is not worth our strength and our protection.

Obviously, the real future of the country will not happen on paper, but in the struggle for the street and at the workplaces. This is where the real political and economic struggle lies.

If we, the working people, want to break out of the vicious spiral of falling into slavery and poverty, we must start by opposing this sham referendum. The only way out for the working class is not to rally behind the false choices imposed on us by the regime, but to take an independent stance. Only by mass actions, such as a political general strike, can we stand up against the ruling class.

But to prepare for this it is necessary to form independent trade unions and struggle committees at our workplaces and to unite this on a national level for coordinating the struggle in defence of the interests of the workers and poor. At the same time it is necessary to build a party of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary Socialist programme. That is the only programme which can solve the problems of the Russian masses. This is a difficult but important task that needs to be accomplished, because with these tools in hand, the working people, the most powerful force in the country, can begin to dictate their own conditions.

The events of 14 March strengthened us. They leave us not in fear, but in anger and readiness to fight for the overthrow of capitalism.