Tsar-Crossed Rulers

This week has marked another crucial centennial or two from World War I, so here we go with another installment of Slainback Saturday editorial cartoons.

"The New Czar" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 30, 1918

Nikolai II Romanov, his wife and children, their doctor and three servants were summarily executed by their Bolshevik captors in the basement of Ipatiev house, Yekaterinburg (present-day Sverdlovsk), 100 years ago July 17 shortly after 2:00 a.m. News of their deaths reached the rest of the world some ten days later.

"Overthown" by Sydney Joseph Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June 29, 1918

The reason given by the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet of the Workers' and Peasants' Government for the execution of the deposed tsar and his retinue was that White Guard forces were closing in on the Ipatiev house hoping to free the royal family. Indeed, the Bolshevik government was not yet firmly established against royalist and pro-Kerensky counterrevolutionary forces which were very much active in Moscow and elsewhere. But Sydney Greene's prediction of an overthrow of the Bolsheviks would prove to be 74 years premature.

"Where Are You Running" in La Victoire, Paris, ca. June, 1918

The Nelson Harding cartoon at the top of this post is the only one I've come across to address the death of the tsar at all directly. The execution of his entire family was no doubt profoundly shocking to his royal cousins on the Hohenzollern and Windsor (until recently Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) thrones. Otherwise, many in the Western World had had little sympathy for Nikolai personally; he had been an ineffective autocrat with a bloody history. The Central Powers had planned to replace him with a compliant monarch after stripping Russia of its antebellum western territories from Finland to Ukraine.

"Nothing Can Move Me, Comrade" by Ibarski (?) in Mucha (Polish), Moscow,  ca. June, 1918

Neither did any outside government have any sympathy for the Bolsheviks. True, the international socialist community had high hopes for this infant Russian government, but everyone else from the crowned and elected heads of state to the ink-stained wretches toiling at their drawing boards expected that popular unrest and weak foreign policy would quickly doom Lenin and his cohorts.

"The International Squirrel Cage" by Jay "Ding" Darling, June, 1918

Things would settle down before long. The importance of the massacre of the Romanov family was that, for Russia, there was now no going back.

"Wilson der Demokrat" by Thomas Theodor Heine in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 13, 1918

Which didn't stop Thomas Heine at the relatively left-leaning Simplicissimus from encouraging Russian communists to vigilance against American imperialist meddling. The Phrygian cap worn by the Russian bear has been a symbol since Greek antiquity of liberty and republican government (Marianne, the embodiment of post-royal France, is always shown wearing one).

I have no explanation for the food-based idioms in this next cartoon. I've translated the German very literally; someone else will have to explain what Germans find so particularly distasteful about mushroom soup.

Detail of "Illustrierte Rückblicke vom 1. April bis zum 30. Juni 1918" by Gustav Brandt in Kladderadatch, Berlin, July 14, 1918

The above two panels from a two-page feature by Gustav Brandt will serve as a transition to the other major story at the end of June, 1918. You wouldn't know it from that lower panel, but the Italian army, with British, French and American materiel support, was finally making progress repulsing Austrian and German troops occupying much of Trentino, Veneto, and Friuli.

"L'Incubo di Carluccio" by Gabriele "Rata Langa" Galanta in L'Asino, Rome, July 7, 1918

Austro-Hungarian and German forces planned a full frontal attack at 3:00 a.m. on June 15; but the new Italian commander, Armando Diaz, learned of the enemy's plans and ordered the Italian artillery to open fire all along their front half an hour earlier. The Austrians suffered heavy casualties in their crowded trenches; some of their units retreated, but others managed to advance across the rising Piave River. This left them further exposed and unable to resupply themselves when Diaz renewed the Italian charge. Ultimately, Emperor Karl ordered a retreat on June 20; and by battle's end, Italy had recovered all lost territory south of the river.

"The Spirit of Garibaldi" by Sydney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June 25, 1918

It was only natural for Sydney Greene, considering his newspaper's Italian-American readership, to cheer the Italian successes; but many other American cartoonists were happy to draw cartoons similar to the one above.

"Exceeded His Instructions" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 25, 1918