Pointless And Fun, Fun But Pointless

One night in 1984, I was cutting up an encyclopedia to make a poster for a punk rock band that I knew.  I started this collage essay on Russia and the First World War and gave up on it that same night.  I just now found this while going through a box of paper any normal person would have thrown away.  Presented here in all of it's research and layout glory!

The guns of August.  I was still in the Corps and taking Russian classes, I thought they would be needed.  "Is this the road to Sverdlovsk"? and "Where have you hidden your potatoes"?  might have been useful phrases to know, I felt sure at the time.

But all of us Cold Warriors were... deceived.

The "Russian Colossus" turns out to be a newspaper myth.  Mobilization over the sprawling country with inadequate railways and roads took forever.  At the battles of Masurian Lakes and Tannenberg the Russians attacked the Germans, got split up and surrounded, and destroyed.  General Samsonov shot himself, always a bad sign.  The Germans, however, sent a whole corps to the fight, fatally weakening the Schlieffen plan.  They would go on to be stopped by the French at the Marne, insuring a 4 year stalemate of hideous proportions.

Among other Russian tactics was using radio signals in the clear, uncoded.  You wonder what they were thinking.

Revolution.  A Kingdom of Sickness becomes an Empire of Death.  Stalin had Lenin poisoned.  Both of them were mass murderers, at least Stalin robbed banks and got thrashed by the Poles, Lenin never received so much as a scratch while grabbing power.

While Stalin's involvement was never proven, the murder of Sergei Kirov kicked off the mass incarcerations and show trials that were to almost fatally weaken the Soviet Union.  Kirov was assassinated with the help of the NKVD, no evidence has ever been found to prove Stalin had anything to do with it.  So what?  No evidence exists that Hitler ordered the Final Solution, does anyone think it happened without him knowing about it?

Stalin was in this up to his neck, and should have been killed immediately after Kirov.

I must have given up about this time.  I think I was about to start on Germany and the Weimar republic, judging from Hindenburg and the George Grosz snippet.  I have no idea why Richthofen is in this.  I have no idea why I even made this, drugs were involved to say the least.

Bonus!

Here is a postcard I got from John Keegan after I pointed out a very minor mistake in The Face of Battle.  That's Sir John to you.