1921

The year in brief

In 1921 Poland closed the war in the east. On 18 March in Riga it made peace with Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine, and the treaty fixed its eastern border. On the same day the Red Army crushed the rising at Kronstadt, where sailors had demanded free soviets without the Bolsheviks, and in the summer Maxim Gorky appealed to the world to save starving Russia; the famine on the Volga was the result of drought and requisitions. The United States made a separate peace with Germany, Austria and Hungary, taking the victor’s rights from the Paris treaties but without the League of Nations. New movements were growing too. In October the NSDAP’s squad for guarding meetings took the name Sturmabteilung (SA), and in November the National Fascist Party was founded in Rome with Mussolini as its leader.