It’s difficult to know where to start this month. I mean…woah. There was drama going down all over the world in January 1912. The UK? Well, the Boy Scouts Association was granted corporate status by a Royal Charter, and the National Telephone Company was taken over by the Post Office. I KNOW, right? In the States, it was very cold, with record-breaking low temperatures in Iowa, Minnesota and Maryland. Ooooh! Elsewhere, the International Opium Convention was signed at The Hague (sadly not an agreement by world leaders to get high together every month, but rather the world’s first drug control treaty), the smallest earth-moon distance of the century was recorded (356,375 kilometres, now that you ask), and an amateur astronomer might have seen a big black object flying across the moon (but probably didn’t). Seriously. Cannot. Take. The. Excitement.
Right. Now that I’ve gotten all the really good stuff out of the way, I hope you won’t mind me indulging myself with the story that actually did capture my interest this month. Why would you mind? Well, the story is a bit Communist-y, you see, and while I might be a teeny bit obsessed with Soviet Union politics, I realise I’m really in the minority with that. It’s also not even really a ‘story’ per se; this particular event wasn’t reported in the news, which isn’t all that surprising considering only eighteen people participated, and all of them were sworn to secrecy. However it’s worth mentioning, because within five years, those eighteen people would be participating in a brand new event…one which was definitely newsworthy, and which would completely transform the world. I am talking, of course, about the Russian Revolution.
So, what was so important about January 1912? Well, from the 5th to the 17th of the month, a rather well-known figure named Vladimir Lenin was chairing the sixth conference of his Bolshevik faction in Prague. The Bolsheviks, along with the opposing Mensheviks, were a major faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and it was at this conference that Lenin made the decision to breakaway from the rest of the party and form a true Marxist Party. This party would not be interested in mere reform, with working alongside their supposed enemy, the bourgeoisie (the middle classes), or even moving into legal spheres of influence. No, the new party would be bad-ass. They wanted revolution as soon as possible, and those level-headed, reasonable, law-abiding (well, as far as Communists in Tsarist Russia could be) Mensheviks were quite simply getting in their way. As I said above, it would take only five years for this breakaway party to fulfil Lenin’s wishes by seizing power in Russia…and it would be over seventy years before that power was finally destroyed. A small group of men holding a few secret meetings in Prague; that’s all it took to effectively shape twentieth century politics throughout the world. It makes you think: what could be going on behind closed doors right now? What decisions are being made, completely out of the public sphere of interest, that could go on to change our lives completely? I’ll let you dwell on that, while I go and look for (frankly, far less terrifying) UFOs landing on the moon.
