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Jewel Carmen
|Jewel Carmen
|Florence Lavina Quick
July 13, 1897
Danville, Kentucky, U.S.
|March 4, 1984
(aged 86)
San Diego, California, U.S.
|Other names
|Evelyn Quick
Florence La Vinci
Jewell Carman
|Years active
|Roland West (m. 1918–35)
Jewel Carmen (July 13, 1897 – March 4, 1984) was an American silent film actress.
Early life and career[edit]
Born Florence Lavina Quick in Danville, Kentucky, Carmen made her film debut in the 1912 film The Will of Destiny. She went on to appear in Daphne and the Pirate (1916), opposite Lillian Gish and D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916).
Lawsuits against Fox[edit]
In 1917, Carmen contracted with Fox Film Corporation, but finding the deal unsatisfactory opened a new contract with the Keeney Corporation in 1918 while her first contract remained in effect.[1][2] Fox sent Keeney notice of their prior contract, warning that they would hold Keeney responsible for assisting her in breaking it,[1] promising to indemnify Keeney against legal retaliation.[3] Carmen launched two lawsuits against Fox, one to attempt to free herself of the obligation of living up to her contract and another to seek redress for their interference with her contract with Keeney.[3]
Key to the issues was the question of where the contracts had been made: New York or California. Fox's offices were located in New York; Carmen was a resident of California. By California law, Carmen was an adult at the time of signing the contract; by New York law, which granted majority at 21, she was not. If not an adult, she could not be legally held to the document she had signed.[4] Though Carmen initially won the first lawsuit, having the contracts set aside and receiving damages of $43,500 from Fox, the decision was overturned on appeal because she had "unclean" hands, having herself treated Fox unfairly.[3][5][6][7] However, she won her second case because Fox's interference with her employment with Keeney had been outside the law, though Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo made clear that he did not approve of the legal loophole that allowed Carmen to break her contract with Fox.[3][8]
Later years and death[edit]
Carmen later became known for her connection to the scandal surrounding the death of actress Thelma Todd. She was the wife of Roland West, who had an extramarital affair with Todd and who came under suspicion following Todd's death of carbon monoxide poisoning.[9]
Todd died in a garage attached to the home where Carmen's parents lived, which Carmen had formerly shared with West.[10] The death was suspicious for a number of factors, including that Todd was allegedly spotted or spoken to several times the day after her purported time of death; Carmen herself testified before the grand jury that she had seen Todd somewhere with another man.[11] After the scandal broke, Carmen's marriage to West ended, and she retired from the public eye.[9]
Carmen died of lymphoma on March 4, 1984 at the age of 86.
|The Will of Destiny
|Credited as Florence La Vinci
|The Professor's Daughter
|Credited as Evelyn Quick
|A Life in the Balance
|Credited as Evelyn Quick
Alternative titles: Crashing Through
Potted Plays No. 7
|Professional Jealousy
|Credited as Evelyn Quick
|He and Himself
|Credited as Evelyn Quick
|Four Queens and a Jack
|The Girl
|Credited as Evelyn Quick
|Their Husbands
|Credited as Evelyn Quick
|Daphne and the Pirate
|Credited as Jewell Carman
|Sunshine Dad
|The Children in the House
|Jane Courtenay
|Flirting with Fate
|Gladys, the Girl
|Alternative title: The Assassin
|The Half-Breed
|Alternative title: The Carquinez Woods
|Favorite of the Harem
|Manhattan Madness
|American Aristocracy
|Geraldine Hicks
|The Kingdom of Love
|Violet Carson
|A Tale of Two Cities
|Lucie Manette
|American Methods
|Claire de Beaulieu
|To Honor and Obey
|Rose Delvane
|The Conqueror
|Eliza Allen
|When a Man Sees Red
|Captain Sutton
|Les Misérables
|Cosette at age 18
|The Girl with the Champagne Eyes
|Nellie Proctor
|The Bride of Fear
|Ann Carter
|Mary Anderson
|Fallen Angel
|Jill Cummings
|Alternative title: Paying the Piper
|Lawless Love
|LaBelle Geraldine
|Alternative title: Above the Law
|The Silver Lining
|The Angel
|Little Mrs. Smith
|You Can't Get Away with It
|The Bat
|Miss Dale Ogden
- Notes
- ^ a b American Law Reports Annotated, 1211.
- ^ Kaufman, 228.
- ^ a b c d Kaufman, 229.
- ^ American Law Reports Annotated, 1212.
- ^ American Law Reports Annotated, 1210, 1213.
- ^ Carmen v. Fox Film Corp. 269 F. 928 (2nd Cir., 1920); cert denied, 255 U.S. 569, 41 S.Ct. 323 (1921)
- ^ Field, Richard H.; Benjamin Kaplan; Kevin M. Clermont (2007-04-10). Civil Procedure- Materials for a Basic Course. New York, New York: Foundation Press. pp. 1077–79. ISBN 978-1-59941-145-3.
- ^ Cf. American Law Reports Annotated.
- ^ a b Wright, David (2002). Joyita: Solving the Mystery. Auckland University Press. p. 3. ISBN 1-86940-270-7.
- ^ Donati, William (2000). Ida Lupino: A Biography. University Press of Kentucky. p. 39. ISBN 0-8131-0982-5..
- ^ Nash, Jay Robert (2004). Great Pictorial History of World Crime. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 250. ISBN 1-928831-22-2.
- Bibliography
- Burdett A. Rich and M. Blair Wailes, eds. (1921). American Law Reports Annotated. 15. Retrieved 2008-12-10.
- Kaufman, Andrew L. (1998). Cardozo. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-09645-2.
External links[edit]
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jewel Carmen.


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Failed movie magic: Five films to avoid at theaters this week
Photo: Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount Pictures
G.I. JOE: RETALIATION -- This action sequel has a high body count (but little blood) and a great ninja sequence, but mostly it plays like a blast from the 1980s.
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How I Became Authentically Digital - An Introduction to the Windows 8 UI Design Language
- Date: to
- Day 1
- Speakers: Shane Morris
Right click "Save as…"Slides (view online)
Thanks to Microsoft's minimalist, type-centric UI design language, designing great looking user interfaces seems more attainable than ever. But designing a great app for Windows 8 or Windows Phone requires more than just following the 'syntax'. In this session we'll look at the principles behind Metro, and how you can use them to design user experiences that don't just look good, but are easy to use and effectively communicate your app's unique personality.
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Carolyn D. Pierce, 83, of Clay City, passed away Thursday, December 13, 2012, at Ozark Riverview Manor, in Ozark, Mo.
Graveside services will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday, December 18 in Clay City Cemetery. J.D. Lee and Sons Funeral Home in Rogersville, Mo., is in charge of arrangements.
Carolyn was born March 22, 1929, in Savannah, Ga., the daughter of the late Stephen M. and Hazel G. (Brewer) Tillman. She was united in marriage in 1954 to Raymond N. Pierce. He preceded her in death in 1990.
She was a member of Belleview Methodist Church. She worked in clerical and secretarial positions for a bank and hospital, and later for an insurance office, sawmill and desk clerk for a local motel. She was known affectionately as "Maude" to oilfield workers in the 1970s and '80s for relaying information via CB radio before the cell-phone era. She enrolled and completed Auctioneer school in Iowa. She enjoyed music, going to local dances, watching television and western movies and extending birthday wishes to family and friends.
Carolyn is survived by a son, Clay Pierce and his wife, Rene, of Ozark, Mo.; a daughter, Carol Jan Fildes, of Port Richey, Fla.; a brother, Thomas Tillman, of Charlotte, N.C.; a sister, Mary Jane Balford, of Eva, Ala.; a granddaughter, Nicole Pierce, of Monett, Mo.; several nieces and nephews; and many friends.
Memorials may be made to Shriners Hospitals for Children, c/o Abou Ben Adhem Shrine, 601 St. Louis Street, Springfield, MO 65806.
Condolences may be made at www.jdleeandsons.com.
Location, ST | website.com


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That was sarcasm and snark-douchebaggery, hardly constructive criticism. Your name suits you perfectly.
This member has provided no bio about themself...
That was sarcasm and snark-douchebaggery, hardly constructive criticism. Your name suits you perfectly.
Keep up the awesome work!
Just wanted to say a really big thank you for all the hard work that you and the entire Indie Stone team has put into the making of PZ, I'm one of the many lurkers who has been watching constantly from the very beginning and have been disappointed by the reaction of so many of the more audible members of the community. You are all doing a fantastic job bringing something new and creative to the gaming world that has been severely needed for many years now. I eagerly await the bright future in store for TIS and your games. :)
I really look forward to playing around with PZ again, keep up the awesome work!
Doesn't even work for a lot of people, myself included. Can not get past the load screen no matter what instructions I follow. Waste of money and time for me.
Great game, I have finished it and reached the level 13 cap with most achievements. I'd would love to see a higher level cap and perhaps some more RPG elements to it, a larger variety of upgrades to the base would be awesome too. :)
This game looks like good fun, downloading and tracking it now. :)


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Our range of chains is known for their exquisite beauty and availability in various shades, colours and sizes. Our chains boast of high quality, corrosion resistance, optimum usage and affordable prices.
Note: Only bulk orders accepted (i.e above 50 units)
With our vast industry experience, we offer an elegant collection of key chains. These key rings are developed under the supervision of quality controller to ensure longer working life and alluring look. Our key rings are appreciated by our clients located across all over the globe.


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I'm needing a little help on doing the higher english writing NAB.
I've decided on writing a discursive essay about Graffiti: Art or Vandalism?
I've done some research on each side of the argument but I'm finding it hard to divide it in to main points. Like how should I split it? What should the main points be? Argh! It's my first time writing a discursive for english since standard grade, and then I wasn't even great anyways I think its the stucture and content thats confusing me the most about this!
I should've picked a short story or reflective (although I really hate them)
Can anybody help me please? Obviously not do the essay, but outline a structure or something or a rough guide to write a general higher essay
Discursive Essay NAB Help - English
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This is the way I laid mine out;
First point (1 pro & 1 con)
Second point (1 pro & 1 con)
Third point (1 pro & 1 con)
To get the 'discussion' started I quoted a few controversial lines from the Bible in my introduction then went on to introduce the actual topic. Each time I took a new paragraph I tried to link it on from the paragraph before it to make it flow better. In my conclusion I gave my opinion on the topic which was gained from the points raised before in my essay.
Thats just a few small things I did for my NAB essay. I've yet to sit the actual NAB but my teachers corrected it and gave me a B so a definite pass. Hope this helps you a little.
Also, have a read through these two websites it may help you out a little more:
Good luck
try idebate.org
Thanks for replies, I think my problem is that its just not organised enough!
Gonna sort through all the notes I have and try and group them in to points.
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Recent projects from Craftsy Sewing classes:
Offer some kudos...
Join the conversation...
Ask a question...
Add your comment...
|Here are some details about my project:
|Home Decor
|Whimsical, Mod, Holiday
What are you most proud of? I quilted the background of the tree and bulb pillow covers before I appliqued the designs on the front. This adds texture and richness and I love the look. Use any favorite decorative stitch on your machine, use your quilting foot and that little rod that attaches so you can sew in even rows. Wonderful results!
What advice would you give someone starting this project? It's very easy, go for it! I stitched a few strips together, then cut the V shape for the tree. Same with the bulb - sew a few strips together, then cut out the circle. I stitched the raw edges with a decorative stitch. I made 2 of the striped pillow covers, one tree and one bulb and covered the pillows on my sofa and chairs in the living room - wow! It was a great holiday look. Now to find something to cover them for spring! The back is two overlapping pieces of fabric with the overlapping edges hemmed. Lay them RST with front of pillow, sew all around and turn inside out through the overlapping opening. You just can't get easier than this!


text: March 03, 2013 An after-hours party will take BB&T Charleston Wine + Food Festival attendees around the world. Saturday night's Party Around the World at the Visitor Center Bus Shed offered up an international twist compared to 2012's Festival After Hours as an even wider variety of food, drinks, performers and music were on-hand. Folks experienced beverages and cuisine representing countries including China, Italy, Germany, Spain and Mexico at this event put on by the Art Institute of Charleston. The featured beverages of the night were mixed with Milagro Tequila, Solerno Blood Orange Liqueur and Van Gogh Vodka. Guests were encouraged to dress in attire inspired by their favorite featured country, and they sure didn't disappoint.


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Northwest NEWS
ovember 23, 1998
More home & garden
Scrapbook/CPR classes at Bothell Parks & Rec
Bothell Parks and Rec. will offer a Scrapbook Making Class just in time for the holidays Dec. 3 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Adult Daycare Center, 9929 NE 180th, Bothell. Participants will learn how to turn photos and memorabilia into keepsake, photo-safe albums in time for meaningful Christmas gifts. Class fee is $10 including instruction, handouts, and supplies needed for the first page.
Heartsaver CPR will be offered for the final time in 1998 Dec. 2 from 7 to 10 p.m. at Fire House #42 in Bothell. Preregistration is required. For information or registration, call (425) 486-3256, ext. 4377.
Vineyard Salon collects donations for Northwest Harvest
The Vineyard Salon & Day Spa, 14467 Woodinville-Redmond Rd., is a site for holiday drop-offs for Northwest Harvest now through Dec. 31. For details, call the spa at (425) 485-4003 or Northwest Harvest at (206) 625-0755.
Winter classes at the Herbfarm
Winter classes and holiday workshops begin in November at the Herbfarm in Fall City, ranging from Herbal Papermaking and Handmade Baskets to Festive Herbal Cordials and Cooking with Grains. Details of classes can be found in a free flyer by calling (425) 222-7103, or online at


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Prior Park First School pupils were treated to a sports lesson with a difference from local sprinter Cameron Tindle.
Pupils in Class 4 wrote letters asking Cameron, a Berwick Academy pupil himself, to come and give them a talk about running, and he duly obliged.
He turned up at his old school with starting blocks to show the youngsters how to make the perfect start, illustrating the technique that contributes to his speed.
Cameron, who trains with the Edinburgh Athletic Club, also spoke to Class 4 about the importance of nutrition, diet and a healthy lifestyle. He later showed his young fans the rewards of such an approach, letting the pupils see his trophy collection.


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With all our adventures here in China, it is still amazing that we were able to arrange for a night with a host family. For half of the day, the students helped prepare Japanese Curry for the banquet where we would meet our host families. Before I begin, I guess I should revise my last statement by explaining helping as mainly test tasting and explaining that we still don't know why Japanese Curry represents American cuisine. Nevertheless, the curry was good and we got to relax before beginning our trip "home". As we got to the banquet, we met several of the English speaking students from previous meetings and caught up on what we had missed with them. The students and parents also made food for us and we made our way around talking and eating. After the food was gone and the rain had started, I met Kim, my host parent. We had met her several times before and she was responsible for helping us organize our trip in China. We were both excited to meet each other and live together. She told us about her family, especially her son, Roger, her pride as a mother. When we got to her house, she gave us a tour, introduced us to her family, and explained certain paintings they had in the house. One of the paintings was by her husband who painted Peonies and explained the importance of watercolors in Chinese art. He told us that water emphasized the importance of flow in the painting. Kim also explained the paintings by a famous artist that represented traditional Chinese sayings like Race towards the Sun and Here we share a cup of Tea. Through these paintings I noted Chinese hospitality and also some similarities with Western sayings like Reach for the Stars. That night I talked with Steven, Kim's husband, about politics and with Kim about her hopes of setting up an exchange program for her students.
The next day, her husband cooked the most delicious meal I have ever had in China. He cooked sweet n' sour chicken, bar-b-qued pork, chicken wings, two types of eggplant, green beans, shredded pork, and later steamed buns and crab. While eating this meal, I was reaffirmed of the fact that home cooking always is better than eating out.
Later we went shopping, looking at the community, and down local streets to see how everyone lives. Kim told me about her love of ice cream, something we both share, and some of her trips in the United States. I was sorry to leave their house early. We talked about so many differences between Western and Chinese culture as well as our happy experiences in China. Kim's mother cried for us as she explained the sadness of a child being away from their parent which really emphasized how important family is to the Chinese and how blessed we were to be accepted into their home. At the end of the night, Kim drove me back on her moped, officially establishing that I have travelled by every piece of transportation in China.
Lauren VanHook
Last night was one that reminded me of the conversation in Plato's The Republic. My host father, Steven, is a professor at the college and stated that he loved talking about politics. We began with the opening question of how one could unify the world and bring everyone together, especially under a government. He proposed that the best way to establish harmony was if everyone gathered under one consciousness, forgoing personal preferences for the sake of the group. By everyone joining the political consciousness and taking the time to examine all aspects of a situation before reaching a conclusion then we could achieve world harmony. I, however, advocated that a form of personal identity and opinion was necessary (if on a small scale) for happiness to still exist within such a system. Using American promoted values, I explained how personal identity and expression gave a person pride, strength, and confidence behind their work. He agreed that the American values should be incorporated into the system because such democratic values were better than most current systems, but he still maintained that the collective consciousness was the most important since it could most effectively assign justice. Which brings us to the Socratic part of the debate. I asked him how justice could be dealt out since it is hard to measure and there is no agreed consensus about the appropriate universal laws. Steven explained that the only way was to create a universal law that prevented harm to others and if harm was placed on a person, then physical punishment would correct such crimes. I immediately disagreed since crime can be interpreted differently and there is always more than physical damage associated with a crime. Damage such as psychological damage cannot be as easily measured but also is a consequence of crime. In order to establish equilibrium, the emotional trauma must also be addressed. Throughout the conversation we debated these principles, occasionally adding in real world examples from the US, China, Japan, Greece, Germany, and other countries. As the debate progressed, it was interesting to see the incorporation of principles from our backgrounds forming our arguments. Steven emphasized the establishment of community, something I've noticed reoccur in conversations with some of the people here. Meanwhile, Steven noted my western influence from the US. Eventually the debate came to an abrupt close as Ashley fell asleep during the Steven and I's debate. We never fully came to a resolution to the discussion, but it was certainly a debate that intertwined both our cultures.
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March 20, 2013 Game Story from College of Charleston vs. George Mason game at TD Arena at 7 p.m.Length: 12-15 inchesphoto: yes
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The body of a 26-year-old Metairie woman, badly beaten, was discovered Friday along a gravel road off U.S. 90 in Waggaman.
The Jefferson Parish coroner's office is trying to determine how she was killed.
A unnamed worker who found the body said the woman appeared to have been beaten pretty badly. She was fully clothed, and her stomach appeared to be distended, the worker told a reporter.
Col. John Fortunato of the Sheriff's Office said the woman was wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans and one pink and white Nike sneaker. He said she is thought to be middle age.
Fortunato said that woman was discovered about 3:45 p.m. by a worker who was spraying for weeds along the gravel road in the 5900 block of U.S. 90, near the Highway 90 Landfill.
Anyone with information may call the Sheriff's Office at 504.364.5300 or Crimestoppers at 504.822.1111 or 877.903.7867.


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Man dies after shooting on Erie's east side
A man shot early Saturday died at UPMC Hamot roughly seven hours later, Erie police said.
Erie police said a 39-year-old Erie man was shot in the chest near the intersection of East 11th and Wayne streets at about 2:45 a.m. Saturday.
The man was transported to UPMC Hamot, where he was initially listed in critical condition.
Erie County Deputy Coroner Korac Timon said the man was pronounced dead Saturday at 9:58 a.m. The Coroner's Office will conduct an autopsy on the body early Monday, he said.
Timon described the man's death as a "suspected homicide" but said the coroner won't officially deem it a homicide until the end of the autopsy.
Neither police nor the Coroner's Office has identified the man.
The shooting occurred outside the Bearded Lady rental hall on the northeast corner of East 11th and Wayne streets, Erie Police Chief Randy Bowers said.
Approximately 150 people were at the hall, Bowers said.
Officers arrived to find the victim outside the hall, Bowers said.
"He is the victim of what appears to be two gunshot wounds to the upper torso,'' Bowers said.
Police said they have no suspects yet in the shooting and were unable to speak to the victim before he died.
"We know there was a large gathering there, but nobody would give any information to the police,'' Bowers said.
Some neighbors in the area told police they heard people arguing before the gunshots, Bowers said.
"We know that there are people who saw what happened to this man,'' Bowers said. "What we don't know is why nobody wants to share information with police so we can investigate it and prosecute it.''
If the shooting is ruled a homicide, it would be the eighth homicide in Erie so far this year. There were five homicides in the city in 2013.
Anyone with information on the shooting is asked to call Erie Bureau of Police Detective Lt. Jon Peters at 870-1159 or the Erie police officer in charge at 870-1120.
SEAN MCCRACKEN can be reached at 870-1714 or by e-mail.
RON LEONARDI can be reached at 870-1680 or by e-mail.


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Colm Tóibín is one of Ireland's most popular and prolific contemporary prose writers. He is the author of five novels, a collection of short stories, a play, three travel books, a brace of historical studies and a couple of volumes of essays. He has also edited several books of criticism, a lengthy anthology of Irish fiction, collections of essays and two books of creative writing. In addition, he has written scores of uncollected articles and reviews, and over the years he has been a prominent columnist, features writer and cultural commentator. Many of Tóibín's books have been highly praised, and he has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours since the publication of his first novel, The South (1990). …
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Delaney, Paul. "Colm Tóibín". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 September 2008
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on January 27, 2013 - 1:03 PM
The Buffalo Niagara Enterprise business marketing group has its focus firmly to the north.
Seven months after Empire State Development closed its Toronto office in a cost-cutting move, the Buffalo Niagara Enterprise hired Lee Meister, the same Canadian business consultant who represented the state, as the local group's representative in Canada's largest city.
The move helps fill what had been a growing void caused by the shutdown of the Canadian consulate and the closing of the state's economic development office in Toronto in April.
BNE officials decided the Canadian market was too important to be without a representative in one of its biggest markets – one that the business group has long focused on as a fertile market for new business ventures.
"We were all left … looking around wondering what short-term strategies and longer-term things we'd like to put in place to try to capture as much of the services that were evacuated out of the community," said Thomas A. Kucharski, the president of Buffalo Niagara Enterprise.
"It was something that we knew we had to do, regardless of where the Buffalo Billion goes, where the regional development council goes, where the [Buffalo Niagara] Partnership and all their partners go with what they're doing to try to offset the [closing of the] consulate. We still needed to have somebody on the ground in southern Ontario and the [Greater Toronto Area]," Kucharski said.
"It's a BNE contract, but it's really something that will benefit the entire region," he added.
Canada has been accounting for a big share of the projects that the BNE lists as ventures that it played a significant role in landing. Two-thirds of the 12 project "wins" claimed by the BNE from July 2011 through June 2012 involved Canadian companies. Since the BNE was founded 10 years ago, Canada has accounted for 57 projects that the BNE claims as "wins," funneling $511 million in investment and 1,361 new jobs to the region.
"This is a need that has been identified. It's a void we're trying to step up and fill, and it's something that's going to benefit the entire region. All of our economic development partners will benefit," said Paul Pfeiffer, a BNE spokesman.
The challenge – one that's made even tougher with the economy remaining sluggish – is converting interest on the part of companies into an actual commitment to do a project.
"One thing that's really important in going from an expression of interest in exporting to actually putting a facility here is the sequence of events in how you develop that opportunity," Kucharski said. "The fat part of the curve is companies with 15, 20 to 40 employees."
Immigration issues are important, and those hurdles can be both time-consuming and potential deal-breakers, which is why the BNE tries to guide Canadian firms through the sometimes complex process.
"If you don't get your visa, all that effort has gone to waste. If you don't have your immigration house in order, really all of the other stuff is moot because the opportunity won't develop," he said. "In a couple of projects, we've come perilously close to that happening."
Every contact is taking on more importance these days, because the weak economy has made it harder to land projects.
The BNE's 12 "wins" during the last year was the second-weakest tally in the past decade, although it still met the business development and marketing group's goals.
The 12 projects are expected to bring 473 new jobs to the region, paying an average of $44,142, which is about 10 percent higher than the slightly more than $40,000 a year that the average job in the Buffalo Niagara region pays, the business group said in its annual report. The job creation is about on par with the 465 new positions that the 14 project wins from 2010-11 were expected to create.
The BNE's project wins are down from their pre-recession level. Part of that stems from the group's more focused approach on targeted industries, from life sciences and logistics to advanced manufacturing and back office work. Investment levels, which dropped sharply during the recession, last year were on par with the low end of the group's range leading up to the downturn.
Nearly all of the $225.6 million in investment comes from a single project – the $206 million yogurt plant that Muller Quaker Dairy plans to build in Batavia, which is expected to create 186 jobs, or more than a third of all the jobs generated by the BNE-backed projects.
The project capped a long effort spearheaded by officials in Genesee County, who spent about nine years laying the groundwork to prepare a site in Batavia so it would be ready when opportunities arose. About $8 million was spent acquiring land to form the business park and adding infrastructure suitable for food processors, according to Steven G. Hyde, president and chief executive officer of the Genesee County Economic Development Center.
That effort paid off when the Muller Quaker Dairy project came along.
"The land was ready, and the willingness of the local people was great," said Kathy Alfano, director of economic development at Pepsico, a partner in the yogurt plant. "We like to be in a community where people want us. And up here, people wanted us."
The BNE said its goal during the current fiscal year, which runs through June, is to secure 10 project wins and attract $60 million in investment, which would be the second-lowest in both categories over the past decade. The group said it hopes to retain or attract 700 jobs, down from 810 during in 2011-12.
email: firstname.lastname@example.com


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House prices in Holly Park Estate, London N4
Market activity
Average price paid £327,750 Sales 2 Current average value £594,586 (Zoopla Zed-Index) Value change £14,361 ▲ 2.48%
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Properties near Holly Park Estate London N4More about N4
- For sale 8 photos £525,000 2 bedroom flat for sale Crouch Hill, Stroud Green N4 Listed on 29th Sep 2016
- To rent 19 photos £1,950 pcm 3 bedroom flat to rent Holly Park Estate, London N4 Listed on 29th Sep 2016
- Properties for sale near Holly Park Estate London N4
- Properties to rent near Holly Park Estate London N4
Data on sold house prices, such as the results above for Holly Park Estate London N4, is supplied to us via monthly updates from the Land Registry for England and Wales and from the Registers of Scotland for Scotland. There may be a delay of up to 3 months from when a property is actually sold to when it becomes officially recorded with Land Registry and/or Registers of Scotland. We provide data on house prices for information only, on an 'as is' basis as supplied to us and accept no liability for any errors or omissions. If you have identified any incorrect information in, please Report an error.


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We have recently been appointed as a Business Service Partner to the Intellectual Assets Centre.
The Intellectual Assets Centre is a first in Scotland and indeed in Europe. It aims to help businesses to derive value from their intellectual assets. Supported by the Scottish Government, the centre was developed in response to the demand from businesses to learn more about their intellectual assets, as the value of unexploited intellectual assets lying in Scottish companies is judged to be several billion pounds.
As a Business Service Partner, we are one of the professional services firms to which the centre can refer clients for more specialised intellectual property advice. We also deliver training sessions and clinics in conjunction with the centre. These are designed to help individuals and small businesses protect and exploit their intellectual assets.
This appointment is recognition of our credentials in the field of Intellectual Property and our desire to help Scottish industry to realise the value associated with intellectual assets.


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It took nearly a decade, but the Idaho Steelheads finally got a little bit of revenge against the South Carolina Stingrays.
Orlando vs. South CarolinaWhen: Tonight, 7:05 p.m. Where: North Charleston ColiseumTickets: $5, 744-2248
The last time the Stingrays faced the Steelheads was in 2004, and South Carolina won both games 3-1 and 4-2 at the old Bank of America Arena.
Austin Fyten scored a goal and added an assist, and Tyler Beskorowany stopped 37 shots to lead the Steelheads past South Carolina, 4-3, on Friday night before a crowd of 2,656 at the North Charleston Coliseum.
The Steelheads, one of the top teams in the ECHLs Western Conference, improved to 26-10-5 (57 points). The Stingrays fell to 20-22-4 (44 points).
The Stingrays and Steelheads are two of the most storied franchises in ECHL history with five ECHL Kelly Cup championships between the two teams. The Steelheads made the 2,000-mile trek from Idaho, landing in Atlanta and making the five-hour drive to the Lowcountry late Thursday night.
The Steelheads appeared to be suffering from a case of jet lag during the opening period. The Stingrays dominated the first period, recording a season-high 17 shots, but had nothing to show for it as the game remained scoreless going into the first intermission.
We had a great first period, a lot of puck possession inside their zone, and we had some grade-A scoring chances, said Stingrays coach Spencer Carbery.
But when youre facing a goalie like Tyler Beskorowany youve got to dig a little bit deeper. You have to get to those dirty areas and then youve got to give a second effort to get a goal.
The Steelheads power play, which recorded two goals in two chances, proved to be the difference in the game.
They were able to score way too easy on their power play, Carbery said.
It took them less than a minute to score each time. We didnt do a good job of getting into shooting lanes.
After Ian Watters power play goal for Idaho, Justin Courtnall tied the game after a nice pass from Scooter Vaughan midway through the second period.
The Steelheads extended their lead to 3-1 on goals from Sam Carrick and Fyten.
But Tyler McNeely, who finished with two goals, scored too cut the gap to 3-2 just 3:13 into the final period.
Andrew Carroll pushed the Idaho lead back to two goals, 4-2, with his power play goal.
McNeely got the final goal of the night with two seconds left in regulation.
We did some good things, but not enough good things to beat a team like Idaho, Carbery said.
The Stingrays play host to the Orlando Solar Bears today at 7 p.m. at North Charleston Coliseum and again at 3 p.m. on Sunday.
Idaho 0 2 24
South Carolina 0 1 23
First Period: No goals. Penalties: No penalties.
Second Period: 1. I, Watters 3 (Cullity, Isaacs), 7:09 (PP). 2. SC, Courtnall 3 (Vaughan), 10:58. 3. I, Carrick 10 (Robinson, Toews), 11:57. Penalties: Toews, I (bench - too many men), 2:53; Mangan, SC (bench - too many men), 6:07; Toews, I (bench - too many men), 17:44.
Third Period: 4. I, Fyten 13 (Isaacs), 1:10. 5. SC, McNeely 10 (Dee, Vidmar), 3:13. 6. I, Carroll 10 (Cullity, Fyten), 16:17 (PP). 7. SC, McNeely 11 (Cherniwchan, Dee), 19:58 (PP). Penalties: Robinson Idh (hooking), 5:59; Bidlevskii Sc (closing hand on puck), 15:36; Fyten Idh (roughing), 19:37.
Shots on Goal: Stingrays 17-8-15-40; Idaho: 9-11-4-24. Penalties: Stingrays 4-8; Idaho 2-4. Power Play: Stingrays 1 for 4; Idaho 2 for 2. Goalies: Stingrays Jeff Jakaitis (4-4-2) 24 shots, 20 saves. Idaho Tyler Beskorowany (11-8-4) 40 shots, 37 saves. A: 2,569.


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Top Definition
A Billpay game is a winner take all game specifically designed to get the losing players to pay for one or all of the winning player's bills or other financial obligations for a month.Typically one bill is covered (like a phone bill) by the pooled funds of the participating players.
"Let's play a Billpay game and when I win, you guys have to cover my cable bill!"
by StartRaising October 28, 2011
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Can you define these popular missing words?


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Cardinals And Rangers Make Perfect Fit For Trade Talk
Source: Matt Snyder, CBS Sports
Please note that this isn't a report of actual interest but instead speculation that two clubs make a natural fit in possible trade talk.
The Cardinals sending a young starting pitcher to the Rangers for a shortstop makes an awful lot of sense, too.
A few days ago, a report from St. Louis pointed out that the Cardinals have tons of starting pitching depth and that it's "increasingly likely" either Lance Lynn or Shelby Miller is shopped in hopes of landing a shortstop.
And wouldn't you know it, Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported Wednesday that the Rangers are "pondering whether" to trade a middle infielder.
So Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak placing a call to Rangers GM Jon Daniels sounds like an ideal offseason decision.


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dolphin scinece
Images on March 13th, 2014 by Fatnhornee43 | Report This Post | Add to favoritespublish in
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Sorry, didn't they try and get them to attach mines to ships?
Almost as mad as the bomber bats in WWII
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'Digital assets': the new frontier for estate planning
So much of our lives are spent online -- banking, shopping, social networking -- that a new category of personal property has emerged, known to estate planners as "digital assets."
Digital assets include any work or possessions stored on a computer and the Internet. They include photos, videos, e-mails and playlists. People also store medical records and tax documents. As more financial institutions encourage account owners to sign up for paperless statements, the list -- and potential value -- continues to grow.
Each of these assets might even require different usernames and passwords.
Pittsburgh attorney Raymond Parker said for about the past five years he has asked his clients to do an inventory of their physical and digital assets when they are writing a last will and testament.
"Because digital accounts and assets are a significant part of the financial footprint of many clients, they would have an incomplete estate plan if those assets and accounts were not considered as part of the planning process," Parker said.
While every adult should create a will to protect and provide for loved ones, a survey in April by San Francisco-based legal services firm Rocket Lawyer found a majority of Americans (61 percent) have not gotten around to it.
When someone dies without a will the state decides how the property is distributed.
-- wire report


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8 ways money can buy you happiness
POSTED: 09:10 AM MDT Aug 20, 2012 UPDATED: 12:00 AM MDT Apr 04, 2014
Find out eight ways that money really can buy you meaningful happiness.
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Going for the Sweep in Cedar Rapids
Another solid win for the Chiefs last night, what a clutch home run by Jacob Wilson on an 0-2 count with two outs and two on in the 7th. The best thing about baseball is that you can never predict what will happen. The Chiefs scored 4 runs over 18 innings in two straight losses at home to West Michigan on Saturday and Sunday. Since then the offense has put up 7, 8 and 8 the last three games, two of those coming against the #1 team in the league in Cedar Rapids.
Check out the rain from last night, this is off my iPhone so the quality isn't the best but you can get an idea of the rain in the lights as Adam Brett Walker struck out late in the contest.
It is always fun to be in position to get a sweep, especially on the road. Peoria earned a sweep here June 14-16, their first in Cedar Rapids since 2007 and have a chance at another one tonight with Chris Perry on the hill. A win would go a long way for this team proving to itself that it can win against the good teams on the road. So far in 2013 the Chiefs are 25-28 on the road and 7-10 in the second half thanks to this current 4-game win streak.
Kane County and some familiar faces will be in this weekend. Will be nice to say hello to Sheldon McDonald, Andrew McKirahan and Reggie Golden who were not with the Cougars when we last played them in May. It is going to be a fun weekend at Dozer Park with the Joe Girardi Spalding High School bobble head and Fireworks on Saturday along with the Nickelodeon day guests and Sonic Super Kids Sunday. Get your tickets now!
Thanks for reading and talk to you at 6:20 on the broadcast.


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The final of our recent "fancy dress" ideas that you can make with kids. Lots of no sew costumes, that should sort you out for any upcoming Fancy Dress party of Halloween. With these simple masks, you can be ANYTHING you like, and let your imagination go wild with these simple paper masks, all made from one A4 piece of coloured card and some embellishments.
Materials per mask: 1 A4 sheet of coloured card, embellishments (funky foam, felt, pompoms, more card etc whatever you have at home), scissors, glue, elastic (optional)
- Use a scrap piece of paper first to measure the width of your face and where the eyes will go. Or use our Superhero Mask template to form a basis for your mask – trace it on a large piece of paper and then BEFORE cutting it design your mask around it.
- Use this as a template to create you monsters and animals – we went for a cat, Yoda and an alien!
- Embellish with contrasting colours.
- To wear, we added some paper "handles" as you would find on a pair of glasses. Fiddle with the length for a perfect fit or use a piece of elastic to secure.
You can either dress in black or see what items of clothing you have got at home to suit your characters.


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March 01, 2014 Girls attended Cinderella Day on Saturday to search through gently used prom dresses, shoes, jewelry and other items at no cost.
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Last week it was announced that Slovakian born Adriana Ceranova will be the new model for Wonderbra. Adrianna will follow in the footsteps of Eva Herzigova who starred in the now iconic 'Hello Boys' campaign.
Here's a sneaky peek at some of the amazingly gorgeous shots that will be used across the ad campaign.
We are loving Adriana! What do you think of the new Wonderbra model?
Speak soon,


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* The Nazi-Soviet conflict was rooted in the rise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) under Josef Stalin as a threat to Europe. Stalin had not appeared to be a natural leader in the early days of the Soviet regime, but a combination of deviousness, ruthlessness, and a complete lack of ethics brought him to the top. From his position at the tip of the pyramid, Stalin created a society rooted in terror and oppression.
* The name of Josef Stalin is recognized by all as arguably the most powerful, successful, and brutal tyrant of the 20th century, but his origins hardly hinted at what he would become.
Although Stalin's life is carpeted with layers of half-truths, myths, and lies, he is believed to have been born in Gori, Georgia, then part of the Tsarist Russian empire, on 21 December 1879, which by the "old calendar" then in use was 9 December 1879. He was the only surviving child of Vissarion and Yekaterina Dzugashvili, a cobbler and housecleaner respectively. What kind of an upbringing it was is unclear. The family was without doubt poor, but though some believe that Vissarion Dzugashvili was a drunken and brutal father, there is no strong evidence that he was any rougher than was the norm for his place in society, and his son never made much of any childhood problems. It is known that Josef was raised speaking Georgian and did not learn Russian, a much different language, until he was about 8 or 9. He would speak Russian with a strong Georgian accent to the end of his days, long after he had turned his back on all things Georgian.
The young Josef Dzugashvili demonstrated a youthful bent towards theological studies. He excelled at his efforts, and in 1894 won a scholarship to attend a seminary in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where he worked to become an Eastern Orthodox minister. He came of age there, becoming a young man described as strong, with big hands, but short, only about 162 centimeters (5 feet 4 inches) tall. He would always be self-conscious about his height, later in his prime wearing platform shoes; ensuring that he had a wooden step to stand on when he gave speeches; and making very sure that official photographs did nothing to suggest his short stature. His left arm was stiff and shorter than his right, the result of a childhood injury, and his face was pocked with smallpox scars, the result of a near-fatal struggle with the disease in his youth.
His coming of age in Tiflis was not merely physical but intellectual. Once in the big city, he was exposed to radical ideas popular among the student community that were hardly heard of in Gori. As if to push him in that direction, the seminary's rules were strict and absurdly hidebound, even going so far as to ban the reading of "subversive" literature by the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; students who were seen as suspicious were spied on, and harassed mercilessly. It was not an environment that instilled respect for authority. He gradually discarded his Christianity in favor of a more modern religion: Marxism.
* Josef Dzugashvili almost ready to graduate from the seminary when he was expelled in 1899. He gravitated towards the life of a professional revolutionary, holding down various jobs while he spread the gospel of Karl Marx among the Georgian proletariat. The Tsarist police had little patience for his activities and arrested him in April 1902. After stints in jail in Georgia, he was exiled to Siberia in July 1903. Tsarist exile in Siberia might have sounded harsh, but it was, particularly in comparison with later standards, easy-going and not very strict. He escaped and returned to Georgia in early 1904.
In 1903, the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party had split into two factions, the "Mensheviks" and the "Bolsheviks". The Bolsheviks were the more extreme group, led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who had taken the name of "Lenin". Although Dzugashvili played no significant role in the Russian 1905 Revolution, he met Lenin late at a congress late in that year, and gradually became a hardcore Bolshevik. He may have participated in a number of heists intended to provide funding for the party, but like so much of Stalin's life the facts are murky.
Dzugashvili married a Georgian woman named Yekaterina Svanide that same year, 1905. Not much is known about the marriage other than that she bore him a son, Yakov, in 1907, and then died later that year. Yakov went into the care of his maternal grandparents while his father continued his work for the Bolsheviks -- to be arrested again in 1908, and sentenced to exile in Siberia for a second time. He escaped once more in 1909, to be arrested and exiled for a third time in 1910, serving out the remainder of his sentence and being released in June 1911. Under the terms of his parole, he was not allowed to go to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, or the Caucasus, but he went to Saint Petersburg anyway. The Tsarist police arrested him for a fourth time in late 1911 and packed him off to Siberia again.
In 1912, while Dzugashvili was in exile in Siberia, Lenin, then in Prague, formally split his Bolsheviks off from the Mensheviks, and formed a party Central Committee. Although Lenin had misgivings about Dzugashvili, finding him crude, quarrelsome, and overbearing, the Bolsheviks were not doing well at the time, and Dzugashvili had undoubted drive and ability. Lenin made him a member of the Central Committee. Dzugashvili was pleased with the news, celebrating his promotion by escaping in March 1912, and traveling to Saint Petersburg. He was arrested in May 1912, to be shipped back to Siberia for a fifth time. He escaped again during the summer.
Dzugashvili had been known for some time by his colleagues in the revolutionary movement as "Koba", meaning "the Boss", in honor or derision of his bossy ways. Some sources claim this nickname went back to his childhood. He had also used a number of pseudonyms in his writings in revolutionary newspapers, including "Stalin", meaning "Steel". Over the next few years, he would become so fond of this name that it would become the name everyone knew him by. "Dzugashvili", after all, was something of a mouthful. Even in 1915 Lenin had to ask a colleague to "find out the name of Koba -- Josef D. ... We have forgotten it."
Stalin went to Vienna in 1913, only to be arrested on his return in March, and shipped off, for the sixth and last time, to Siberia, to a very remote town from which escape was difficult. He adjusted to the relaxed life in exile. He had a remarkable freedom of movement, even going to regional meetings of Marxists. He may have had an affair with a local woman and fathered a bastard, though once again details are lacking. After Russia went to war with the Central Powers in 1914, Stalin had to submit to a medical examination to determine if he should be drafted into the Tsar's army, but he was rejected on account of his bad arm and other defects.
In March 1917 (February by the old calendar), the government of Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown, leading to a chaotic period in which factions fought for power. Stalin and other Marxist exiles went to Petrograd -- previously Saint Petersburg, later Leningrad; in the present day, Saint Petersburg again -- where he became a staff member for the party newspaper, "Pravda (Truth)".
In November 1917 (October in the old calendar), the Bolsheviks seized control. Lenin knew that his new Bolshevik state would not survive if the Central Powers continued their war in the East, so he pushed for a peace agreement at almost any price, signing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, which ceded control of vast areas of what had been eastern Imperial Russia, from Finland to the Ukraine, to the Central Powers. The Central Powers were forced to sue for peace in the fall of that year and the treaty would then be repudiated, though the rearrangement of the map of Eastern Europe meant that lands such as Poland and Finland would become independent.
The end of World War I did not mean peace in Russia. A full-blown civil war broke out in the summer of 1918, with Bolshevik "Red" forces grappling with larger but more poorly organized reactionary "White" forces. It was a particularly dirty sort of war, with each side striving to outmatch the other in ruthlessness and brutality. Despite the fact that the Whites were supported by Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States, and time after time, the Reds found themselves hanging by a thread, the thread held, the Reds proving skilled at shuttling forces around as needed by train. By November 1920, they had overcome the Whites.
Although Stalin would later play up his role in the Bolshevik Revolution, his contribution was minor at best, and as some historians have pointed out, his career as a revolutionary was mostly marked by being arrested. Furthermore, revolution had been his sole career; he had absolutely no other marketable skills. However, the civil war brought his star to the top. At the beginning of the conflict, he was sent south to Volgograd -- previously Tsaritsyn and later Stalingrad -- to coordinate the supply of food for the region, this being his first major operational assignment for the Bolshevik regime. With the approach of White forces, he took on a military role, appointing a long-time revolutionary colleague, Kliment Voroshilov, to command forces on the front.
In principle, the entire Red Army was under command of Lev Bronstein -- better known as Leon Trotsky, Trotsky having been the name of one of his jailers -- and Voroshilov was supposed to take orders from him. In practice Stalin would receive orders from Trotsky and scribble on them: TO BE IGNORED -- before passing them on to Voroshilov. Stalin was playing cagey and Trotsky blamed Voroshilov for failing to follow his orders, but when Trotsky sent an officer south to take charge, both Stalin and Voroshilov simply refused to obey. This insubordination led to a political feud, with Trotsky going so far as to consider sending Red Army forces south to impose his will.
Stalin was finally recalled to Moscow in October 1918. Despite Stalin's insubordination, Lenin had been impressed by his decisiveness, take-charge attitude, and ruthlessness in the south. That outweighed Stalin's disobedience, and even the fact that Stalin hadn't been notably competent: the Reds outnumbered the Whites on the front, and Lenin commented that Stalin had racked up tens of thousands of unnecessary casualties. Still, the Bolsheviks lacked people with any leadership ability, and during the rest of the civil war Stalin was sent to one front after another to deal with emergencies.
Stalin got things done, and if his methods were inclined to the brutal and crude, that was not a problem as far as Lenin was concerned; in fact, it even seemed admirable. If Stalin's solutions were not always tidy and brilliant, they were still solutions. Lenin did find Stalin exasperating -- in his reports to Moscow, Stalin portrayed himself as a military genius -- but Lenin remained confident in him. In contrast, the antagonism between Trotsky and Stalin continued to grow.
The civil war led to social breakdown and a massive famine in 1921, in which millions of people starved to death. Many more would have died had it not been for the American Relief Administration, managed with great effectiveness by Herbert Hoover, later a US president. Stalin was tasked with working on famine relief on the Soviet side, but much of his activity along that line focused on doing what he could to frustrate the relief effort. The Americans were counter-revolutionaries, after all, and could be up to no good. When the relief effort ended, Stalin arrested Soviet officials who had worked with the Americans and would have had them shot, but was forced to bend to loud objections from Hoover and others.
The famous Red reporter John Reed met Stalin not long before Reed's death in 1920. Reed's observations on Stalin were at least half astute: "He's not an intellectual like the other people you will meet. He's not even particularly well-informed, but he knows what he wants. He's got will-power, and he's going to be on the top of the pile one of these days." In April 1922, Lenin appointed Stalin as Chairman of the Central Committee.
* During the time of civil war, in 1918 Stalin married again, a teenager named Nadezhda Alliluyeva, his personal secretary. He had known her since she was little, since she was the daughter of a fellow revolutionary, Sergei Alliluyeva. A picture of her at 13 shows a very pretty little girl, with dark eyes, and dark hair tied with a ribbon. She was raised as a good revolutionary and, young and naive, was taken with Stalin, who was strong-willed, committed to the cause, and on the rise. She would not be the last person to be naive about Stalin.BACK_TO_TOP
* In May 1922, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin suffered the first in a series of strokes, a process that ended in his death on 21 January 1924. At his death, the USSR was a land of 200 million people that covered a sixth of the surface of the Earth. The Soviet people had endured a world war, revolution, and a civil war. With Lenin gone, they faced a transition to new leadership.
Joseph Stalin was delighted to hear of Lenin's death; Stalin's secretary said: "I never saw him in a happier mood." Relations between Lenin and Stalin had been going downhill for some time, and it is likely that if Lenin had lived longer and been in better health, Stalin would have found himself demoted or cast out of the government's inner circle. Luck had intervened, and now Stalin and Leon Trotsky were the front-runners to take charge of the Revolution.
Lenin had written a document stating recommendations for a successor, and discussed the merits and faults of both Stalin and Trotsky. In a postscript, however, he emphasized Stalin's faults, and suggested that Stalin be removed from the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR and be replaced by another who was "more loyal, more courteous, and more considerate of comrades, less capricious, etc." Although Lenin's widow Krupskaya tried to make the document public, infighting in the inner circles of the Communist Party leadership conspired to suppress it. It was only shown to a select few during the 13th Party Congress, and the readers were sworn to secrecy. Josef Stalin was now on track towards supreme authority over the USSR.
The political organization of the system Lenin left behind him consisted of three primary components:
The relative authority of these components remains confusing, particularly since it varied over time. Stalin had become the party secretary -- AKA first secretary or general secretary -- of the CPSU in 1922; with Lenin gone, he began a gradual effort to centralize power in the hands of the party secretary, and consolidate the authority of the CPSU over the executive branch of the government.
By 1928, Stalin had succeeded in getting ahead of potential competitors for power in the Party. Old comrades and rivals Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev had unwisely joined forces with him to send Trotsky into exile, only to be then sidelined. Nikolai Bukharin, one of the intellectual founders of the Revolution, was forced to make a public confession of his errors. Those who were useful to Stalin and did not seem inclined to challenge his authority, such as Vyacheslav Skryabin, an old Politburo colleague who had taken the name of "Molotov (Hammer)", and Anastas Mikoyan, would be content to ride on Stalin's coattails, though they would eventually learn it was a very hazardous means of transportation: Stalin would send members of both Molotov's and Mikoyan's families to prison.
There were other power centers, such as the military, that existed outside the Party. To gain control of them, Stalin needed to extend the reach of the Party over every aspect of Soviet life. Once under such central control, the entire nation would be geared to serve Stalin's ambitions, and then Soviet power could be extended beyond its borders. Of course, such ambitions could be ideologically painted with the belief that in the struggle between Communism and Capitalism, the historical dialectic dictated that Communism would prevail. However, underneath all the Communist doubletalk, Stalin simply wanted power, and would stop at nothing to get it.
Stalin was not the only leader with ambitions beyond the borders of his homeland. By this time, Mussolini had made Italy a Fascist state; the Japanese were looking towards expansion at the expense of their weak Chinese neighbor; and in Germany Adolf Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party was becoming a political power to be reckoned with.
* At the end of the 1920s, 98% of the land of the USSR and the nation's food supply was in the hands of the peasantry. To begin his consolidation of power, Stalin had to bring the peasantry under control. Lenin had tried to do this and been forced to back off, since in response to the state seizure of their property, the peasants had simply killed their livestock and destroyed their grain stocks, helping bring on the famine of 1921.
Stalin intended to succeed, whatever the cost, where Lenin had failed. He initiated a program of forced collectivisation, essentially dispossessing the peasantry and reducing them to servitude. This was a far-reaching and brutal measure in a country that was mostly agrarian, the opening shot of Stalin's war on the Soviet Union's own citizens. Stalin knew that the action would cause great economic dislocation, but he was willing to pay that price to get the control he wanted. The suffering that it would cause was a matter of no concern to him; nor was the fact that the collectivisation effort would all but cripple Soviet agriculture.
Forced collectivisation would lead to the starvation of millions, to the imprisonment of millions more. Hundreds of thousands would be simply murdered in hidden courtyards, after confessions extracted by torture and contemptible sham trials. Stalin encouraged a bizarre class struggle, creating a group of "rich peasants" named "kulaks" and labeling them as oppressors, which simply set the very poorest peasants against those who, say, had an extra cow or the like. The big landowners had been driven off or otherwise dealt with and so the war against the kulaks was almost a complete fraud, a way of terrorizing all the peasants and shrewdly using petty envy as a weapon in the terror.
The Soviet propaganda machine managed to maintain the USSR's image in the West as a progressive country. Western intellectuals in particular would be taken in and proclaim the USSR the wave of the future. Conveniently, in 1928, the famed Russian writer Maxim Gorky returned to the USSR after living in Italy for a number of years. Gorky regarded the peasantry as subhuman, and he would prove useful to Stalin by writing propaganda to support the wave of brutality against the kulaks that was to sweep the country. Gorky would eventually outlive his usefulness. His abrupt death in 1936 is suspected to have been at Stalin's orders.
By the end of 1929, forced collectivisation was in full force in the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus. Arrests were made in a million households, with fathers sent off to new forced-labor camps and the families deported to Siberia. The first wave swept off the more prosperous level of the peasantry. In the winter of 1930, the sweep went lower, scything through the poorer peasantry. 120 million people in 600,000 communities were confronted with expropriation, eviction, and transportation. An internal passport system kept the movements of the peasantry under control. They would go where Stalin wanted them to go and nowhere else.
The terror was carried out by special food detachments, recruited from young men from the towns who had few attachments to the peasantry, and the increasingly powerful security apparatus, then known as the "OGPU", originally Lenin's "Cheka". There were many small uprisings, all of which were brutally crushed. A million peasants died of starvation in the north Caucasus. Five million died in the Ukraine when their grain disappeared into the Soviet apparatus. Villages became ghost towns. Three million men went into the network of prison camps that was at first known by the acronym "STON" (which translates literally into English as "Moan") and would later become known as the "Gulag". There they would work on everything from canals to power plants to the Moscow subway, building a new Soviet state on their blood and bones.
Most would be worked to death within a few months of their arrival, reduced to "camp dust", as the saying had it. Stalin needed prisoner labor to achieve his goals. There was no need to worry about their well-being. Calculations were performed to show that it was more economically cost-effective to work prisoners to death over a few months on a starvation diet than to keep them alive. Those that survived would usually be broken for the rest of their lives, their health ruined and their heads full of a disorderly jumble of realities and fantasies: when realities are more terrible than nightmares, it becomes impossible to tell the two apart. As for those who died in endless ranks, there were still many more where they came from, and if the ones that fell were also people who were suspected of not being completely obedient, so much the better.
* In March 1930, Stalin published an article on collectivisation, praising its success. In the meantime, he was looking for other means of extending his control over the Soviet state. In 1928, Stalin had instituted the first Soviet "Five-Year Plan", an aggressive program of industrialization and exploitation of the USSR's resources. Factories, dams, railroads, and mines were to be brought into being to fuel the growth of the Soviet state.
Such a major effort demanded strict control. The first sign of how that control would be achieved occurred when 55 miners were put on trial at Shakti, accused of conspiring with foreign powers to wreck the mines of the Donetz basin. 11 were sentenced to death and executed, the rest were sent off the prison camps from which few, if any, returned. Stalin proclaimed: "We have internal enemies, we have external enemies. This, comrades, must not be forgotten for a single moment."
If the Five Year Plans didn't meet their goals, someone would have to pay, and it would be "saboteurs" who conspired against the Soviet state. Ridiculous plots were fabricated and given substance with confessions squeezed out of helpless prisoners, who were then were shipped off to the prison camps and worked to death. Outsiders saw their dazzling and great contributions to Soviet might, and knew nothing of the suffering and despair that had built them.
* As Stalin's power and authority rose, his marriage deteriorated. Nadezhda bore him a second son, Vasily, in 1921, and a daughter, Svetlana, in 1926. Vasily would eventually go by his father's family name of Stalin, while Svetlana would go by her mother's family name of Alliluyeva. Stalin's first son, Yakov, came to live with them, but although Yakov got along well with Nadezhda, his father disliked him. Those who knew Yakov described him as gentle and serene; his father was neither. He belittled Yakov continuously, and when the young man attempted suicide, Stalin could only say: "Hah! He couldn't even shoot straight!" Yakov then left the household, moving to Leningrad to live with his stepmother's family.
Svetlana was her father's favorite, and he wrote her endearing letters. However, Stalin was what he was, crude and coarse and bullying, and whatever affection there was between him and Nadezhda gradually faded out. Nadezhda fell into depressions and apathy. She went to live with her parents for a time and sought help from a neurologist. A picture of Nadezhda from 1932 shows her bundled up against the cold and snow in cap and long winter coat, still pretty but seeming burdened.
She shot and killed herself on the night of 8 November 1932. One contributing factor appears to have been an incident in which she reported to Stalin horror stories she had heard of the sufferings of the peasantry under the state's famine policies. She had been enlightened about this matter by fellow students at a textiles class she was taking; Stalin's reaction was to order the arrest the students. There had also been a scene between Stalin and Nadezhda that evening in which he had become abusive, and there are clues that she had heard Stalin was in the company of another woman. There are suspicions that Stalin murdered her. Having no conscience to speak of he was certainly capable of it, but those around him reported later that he was deeply shaken and felt betrayed by her death.
Stalin had no great interest in his children afterward. He never married again, though some suspect that an attractive woman servant in his household served him at night as well as during the day. Such social contacts as he had degenerated into crude dinner and drinking sessions with his cronies, possibly best captured in spirit by the sordid drunken bashes of the revolutionary pigs in George Orwell's savage little satirical novel ANIMAL FARM. Stalin would toy with his guests at these functions; they went along with whatever he wanted them to do, and pretended to be cheerful about it. Stalin would drink, but he was rarely as drunk as he pretended to be. He preferred to pressure others to drink and then see what they said when the booze had loosened their tongues.BACK_TO_TOP
* As Stalin turned the screws on internal enemies, real and imaginary, much more tangible external enemies began to arise. The Japanese had defeated and humiliated Russia in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905; in 1932, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria without authorization by the Japanese government, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo. Japanese troops now stood along a long border with the Soviet Union. The USSR heavily reinforced the border region.
In January 1933, German elections swept the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler to victory. Hitler, and in his reflection the Nazi Party, was rabidly anti-Bolshevik, anti-Jew, and anti-Slav. Oddly, Hitler had no great ideological objection to Communism, and there were ex-Communists in the ranks of the Nazis who Hitler thought highly of because they possessed the inclination to violence and ruthlessness that he found so admirable. His problem with Communism was that he believed it was a Jewish conspiracy. By a further irony, the emerging Stalinist regime was antisemitic as well, though it was by no means as rabid about it as its German counterpart.
Furthermore, anyone who cared to read through the turgid prose of Hitler's autobiography, MEIN KAMPF, would see it flatly stated that Hitler believed that the German people should obtain "lebensraum (living space)" in the East, displacing the inferior Slavic peoples, who he called "a mass of born slaves", fit only to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water." Hitler made little secret of this ambition in his public speeches. The Soviets were perfectly aware of it, occasionally denouncing Hitler's expansionist goals in propaganda broadcasts.
A clash between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was inevitable. However, Stalin quickly granted recognition to the new Nazi government. Three months after Hitler's election, Stalin ratified the extension of the 1926 Berlin Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality. Incomprehensibly, the Soviets continued to provide military assistance and training to German military, which would soon rise as a deadly threat to the USSR.
* Although Stalin was at the helm of the Party, he was still not as sure as he wanted to be of his absolute control, although at the Party Congress of 1934 he was showered with praise, particularly from Party risers like the Georgian Gregoriy Ordzhonikidze and Stalin's old pal Voroshilov. The "Congress of Victors", as the event was called, was a forum for rising, future, and fading stars of the Party. Lavrenti Beria, who would become most useful, was filmed at Stalin's side, while the movie camera caught a young Nikita Khrushchev in the rows, who would denounce Stalin's cruelties a quarter of a century later.
The real focus of the camera was on current Party heroes; Stalin saw many of them as rivals and so a threat. The most prominent of these heroes was the charismatic Sergei Kirov, who though capable of being ruthless was bright, energetic, ambitious, and what a later generation would call "telegenic". He was consensus-oriented, not inclined to iron-fisted leadership like Stalin's, and that made him attractive as a potential General Secretary for the Party.
Although the applause for Stalin at the Party Congress was loud and continuous, there was a core group of regional Party secretaries who knew about his brutal policies in detail and did not like them. Many public votes were taken during the congress, but on the last day a secret vote was conducted to select members of the important Central Committee of the Communist Party and confirm Stalin as General Secretary of the Party. This was something of a formality, but it would have real effects. Only three votes were cast against Kirov for his position on the Central Committee, but 300 were cast against Stalin. The votes were immediately destroyed and false results were announced, electing Stalin nearly unanimously. Of 1,966 delegates, more than half would be executed sooner or later; historians have suggested that in hindsight the "Congress of Victims" might have been a more appropriate name than the "Congress of Victors". Of the 139-member Central Committee, 98 would be executed.
Kirov would get special treatment. Stalin took his cue from Adolf Hitler. Hitler had been helped to power by Ernst Roehm and his Brownshirt SA thugs, but once power had been achieved, Roehm's enemies gradually turned Hitler against him. Hitler moved against the SA in a swift stroke known as the "Night Of The Long Knives", and personally executed Roehm in a Munich cell. The neat operation was directed by Reinhard Heydrich, a rising star in Hitler's personal force, known as the "Schutzstaffel" or "SS", crystallizing around Heinrich Himmler.
Stalin found the Night of Long Knives inspirational, reputedly commenting: "Hitler, what a lad! Knows how to deal with political opponents!" However, Stalin's approach was a little more devious. Six months after the Night Of The Long Knives, on 1 December 1934, Kirov was assassinated by an OGPU agent named Leonid Nikolaev. Some sources suggest that Nikolaev had actually acted on his own and not on Stalin's orders, but if the murder was a spontaneous act, it was extremely convenient for Stalin. When Bukharin was called on the phone and told of Kirov's murder, he put down the phone and said: "Now Koba will shoot us all."
Kirov's death was played up as a tragedy in the state propaganda apparatus and Stalin shed crocodile tears at his funeral, kissing the corpse on its cheeks. Arrests and executions began. Kirov's bodyguard hardly lived a day longer than his boss, being bludgeoned to death with iron bars in the back of a paddy wagon. Nikolaev was shot before the end of December, along with his wife, ex-wife, sister-in-law, one brother, and a number of acquaintances, collectively described as the "Leningrad terrorist cell". Stalin was now showing his full true colors. The Party was to be cleansed of anyone that Stalin did not trust, and he was a very untrusting person.
Bukharin was perfectly correct as to his own fate. He himself was put through humiliating sham trials to be abused and browbeaten by the prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, and executed in 1938.
The arrests, confessions under torture, trials, and executions had a strong impact on the public. Men who had been praised as Communist heroes were now revealed to be traitors, though the trials were an obvious farce to anyone who wasn't a complete drone. Jews were even accused of being Nazi agents. In all, before the purges were done, 1 in 20 Soviet subjects would be arrested. The result was predictably widespread confusion and fear. People began to spy on their neighbors and denounce them to the authorities, who gave little thought to the truth of such accusations. Anyone who had a petty grudge against a neighbor or co-worker now had an opportunity for the ultimate revenge, and many became enthusiastic in performing such denunciations. What little person would not have been thrilled to have the power of life and death over enemies? There were some people who denounced hundreds of others, persisting in their denunciations so fanatically that even the authorities stopped listening to them.
Nobody dared speak freely. Sometimes things were so absurd that people could hardly keep from laughing, even though laughing was dangerous. In 1937, Stalin had proposed a new Soviet constitution, and put it before the people for a referendum. One Soviet citizen did his duty and went to vote, as he had to if he valued his head, and went into the voting booth to find the vote card had a single entry. It was already marked. He found it almost literally hysterical. A joke went around: "Barber, why must you talk politics?" "Because your hair is easier to cut when it stands on end."
Surprisingly, many Soviet citizens did not realize who was responsible for the madness, thinking it was due to some breakdown in the system or officials who had gone off the deep end. People would say: "If only Stalin knew!" Sometimes concerned citizens would even try to write Stalin with complaints, an action that was likely to prove a grave mistake. Stalin often scribbled comments on documents and letters that went across his desk; when he received pleas from citizens in desperate distress, he would scrawl mocking or contemptuous remarks on them -- and often order the arrest of the authors.
Leftist visitors from the West still believed that the Soviet Union represented progressive revolutionary ideals and the way of the future, and Stalin proved shrewd at manipulating them so that they went home completely ignorant of the true nature of Stalin's regime. Communist movements in other countries remained dupes. When a decree was passed that extended the death penalty down to 12-year-olds, French Communists argued that under Communism people matured so much faster that a 12-year-old was effectively an adult.
The privileged elite in the showpiece state apartments on the Moscow river were witnesses to the terror, as well as other acts of tyranny. The apartments faced the grand Church of Christ the Savior, one of Moscow's great landmarks, but in 1935 workmen began to put up fences and remove the church's artworks. Shocked rumors ran around that the church was to be demolished. The Chairman of the Economic Council, Valerian Kubishev, wrote a letter to Stalin pleading that the church be spared. Kubishev received the letter back, with Stalin's words scribbled across it: "Comrade Kubishev: You do not understand the full scale of the political meaning of this action. I insist on the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. J. Stalin."
And so the domes of the cathedral fell. It would be rebuilt decades later, but its destruction remained a crime. Kubishev was a brave man. He died not long afterward, apparently of natural causes, but there remains room for doubt.
* Stalin's brutality undermined the unity and morale of the Soviet people. In Germany, Hitler was proving similarly brutal, but somewhat shrewder. Hitler made the Jews a scapegoat for the country's problems, a measure that was both convenient and sincere, since his hatred of the Jews was pathological. Persecution of the Jews began to increase dramatically. At the same time, Hitler inflamed German patriotism and resentment against the defeat in World War I to rearm his country and steel the Germans for war. Germany would be turned into a powerful machine that would reach out and take the lebensraum in the East that was one of Hitler's most prized goals.
The German military, the Wehrmacht, had never paid any more concern to the limitations in the Treaty of Versailles than they had to, but now Hitler openly defied the treaty, beginning mass production of tanks for his army, the Heer; modernizing and building up his air force, the Luftwaffe; and implementing plans to build submarines and surface warships for his navy, the Kriegsmarine. In 1935, conscription began to build an army of 36 divisions, and the country was put on a war footing.
While the Nazi threat grew, Stalin worried about internal enemies. He was suspicious of the military and wanted it in his grasp. One of the most prominent of the military elite was Mikhail Tukachevsky, a handsome ex-Czarist officer of noble blood and excellent military credentials, who was Marshal of the Red Army. To Stalin, he stood too much for the loathesome old society. Tukachevsky, a big and strong man, had also apparently once grabbed the short-statured Stalin by the shoulders and lifted him up to face height. Stalin had a very long memory for personal grudges.
Tukachevsky had been an obedient tool of the Soviet state, and had suppressed uprisings and enforced Stalin's will. He also had proven an excellent and forward-looking officer, who introduced parachute assaults and conducted military experiments in armored warfare, adopting a strategic doctrine of mobility with large armored formations, deep penetration, and successive battles as a means of winning wars. Under Tukachevsky's guidance, the Red Army was at the leading edge of military thinking in the era before the war.
That meant very little to Stalin; indeed, by demonstrating military competence superior to that of Stalin, Tukachevsky was automatically an enemy who needed to be dealt with. Tukachevsky and a number of senior Army officers were arrested on 27 May 1937 and put through trials that were a sham even by Stalinist standards. The generals were executed on the evening of 12 June 1937; Tukachevsky's military writings were suppressed. The loss of Tukachevsky was a particular blow to the Red Army, the service's strategic thinking then falling into disarray, with Tukachevsky's writings suppressed.
That was only the beginning. The purge cut through the military senior command hierarchy like a scythe, and it didn't stop there, working its way down the ranks to clean out thousands, tens of thousands, of junior officers as well. Stalin's old crony Voroshilov boasted to the Great Leader: "The Red Army has been cleansed of more than 40,000 officers!"
The majority of the purged officers were simply dismissed, but enough were arrested and shot to ensure that none of the survivors dared to do anything unless Stalin wanted it done. Any spark of initiative had been completely stamped out in the name of establishing direct control from the top. All responsibility was thrown onto the shoulders of junior officers; trapped in the contradictions between the ideals of their indoctrination and ugly realities, overburdened by duties beyond their capacity to meet, the number of suicides among their ranks would climb to shocking levels.
By this time, the German military had been honed to become a sharp and powerful offensive weapon. To Adolf Hitler, the Soviet giant to the East seemed to be in convulsions that reduced it to a state of feebleness and vulnerability. Nazi officials and German officers marveled at the self-destructive lunacy of the purges. The mindless savagery had gone beyond the point where it was possible to convincingly assign even the most cynical and brutal rationales to it. The Red Army had been almost decapitated by its own leader, reducing a powerful force that had been at the leading edge of new concepts and tactics to almost complete paralysis.
Soviet society had been thoroughly destabilized, with so many people arrested that it was hard to keep the trains running. Soviet agriculture had been all but wrecked. A census had been conducted in 1937 that showed that the Soviet population had declined considerably since the previous census. All on the census board were arrested, to disappear from the face of the Earth. The next census board would be more careful in its findings.
Stalin would succeed in building a mighty industrial machine, but almost unarguably much more in spite of the brutality than because of it. In addition, many of the grand show projects of the Soviet State were frauds, a misallocation of resources at the very best, at worst imposing but worthless. Tens of thousands died to dig the White Sea-Baltic canal, which proved too shallow to be useful.
When people were arrested in the middle of the night, they almost always asked: "Zachto?!" -- Why?! What for?! Hardened criminals who were arrested became something of an "upper class" in the Gulag, serving as guards who could be trusted to be brutal to the other prisoners, the innocents who had simply been swept up in the purges. The Soviet state proved most effective at punishing those who had done nothing wrong. Stalin was creating his own idea of a New Soviet Man, a cowed creature who seemed hardly likely to stand up to the tough legions of Germany's Nazi F�hrer.
* Hitler had been testing the waters for war for several years. In 1936, he sent his still-weak army into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized by the Versailles Treaty. The French and the British did nothing of consequence, and Hitler was emboldened for further moves. Stalin did not fail to notice the feeble response to the aggression. He also did not fail to notice the creation of a pact between Germany, a clear future enemy, and Japan, a past enemy that had humiliated Tsarist Russia. The pact, which would later include Italy, was clearly aimed at the USSR.
At home, Stalin's power was absolute, but that did not mean he felt confident. Stalin's distrust was pathological and the people had to be kept under the whip. In particular, they would not be allowed to be infected with ideas from the outside world. When US Navy battle cruiser AUGUSTA and four destroyers paid a courtesy call for four days to the Siberian port of Vladivostok, the American sailors had the run of the streets of the city and chatted with Soviet citizens, often trading souvenirs. The American warships were similarly open to the Soviet public, and many paid a cordial visit to their decks. There was nothing unusual about such a courtesy call, it was a naval tradition. Russian sailors had paid a similar courtesy call to the US during the American Civil War and had been treated like visiting royalty. The visit of the AUGUSTA had been approved by the Soviet leadership.
When the warships left, mass arrests began. Sailors were accused of having been recruited as spies for the Americans, and were intimidated or tortured into signing bogus confessions. There was the same dismal round of executions and transportations to the Gulag. The approval for the visit may have been a bureaucratic mixup, but it is frighteningly possible that Stalin himself gave the go-ahead for it. The Americans would leave with the impression of a friendly, open society, and the mess they left behind could be cleaned up out of their sight.
Stalin cast his net wider for other groups to intimidate. He learned of the teachings of the quack geneticist Lysenko, who repudiated mainstream evolutionary ideas for a half-baked form of "directed evolution" that appealed to Stalin's Marxist ideology. Lysenko had a knack for appearing a homespun genius while pouring out a line of preposterous pseudoscientific doubletalk designed to trim to the political winds, and Stalin bought into him completely.
Why not? Despite the claim of Communism to be scientific, Stalin did not understand the sciences and did not want to understand them. To him, there were no scientific truths, based on concrete and supportable evidence, which remained the same no matter what anyone thought of them. To Stalin, the truth was whatever he wanted it to be. He was all-wise; all-knowing; nobody could contradict him; and the thought that he could be wrong apparently never crossed his mind.
Furthermore, Lysenko had the classic mentality of a crank, believing that his brilliant ideas were being suppressed by a scientific establishment committed to the fraudulent conventional wisdom. Having been granted Stalin's ear Lysenko, unlike most cranks, could actually do something about the "conspiracy" against him. Geneticists who had criticized Lysenko were thrown into the security machine. Many did not return. Lysenko's influence would linger for a quarter of a century, doing much to grossly set back Soviet genetics.
That machine ground on relentlessly. In 1938, Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's old crony and currently the state's premier, had suggested a list of new ministers of the Supreme Soviet. Within two years, they had all been murdered or imprisoned. The pressure on the peasants did not let up even as the upper levels of Soviet society were cleansed. Propaganda films showed smiling peasants dancing at harvest celebrations and praising the regime. The films did little to inspire the peasants, because they were all under iron control, subject to widespread terror, and knew from painful experience the films were lies. Nikita Khrushchev did the will of Stalin in the Ukraine, writing to the Great Leader in a cable: I HAVE SENT YOU 18,000 ENEMIES OF THE STATE. Anyone even suspected of disloyalty was swept up, and practical resistance was almost out of the question.BACK_TO_TOP