Daily Archives: April 6, 2022

LeBron James has split the past dozen years of his career into three four-season segments, each in a different city. The results in his latest stint, in Los Angeles, are by far the worst.

In four seasons as a member of the Heat, LeBron reached four Finals, winning two. In four seasons in his return to the Cavaliers, LeBron reached four more Finals, winning one. And in four seasons thus far as a Laker, LeBrons won one championship, lost once in the first round of the playoffs, and failed to reach the postseason twice.

A title is a title, and the Lakers 2020 banner will fly forever. But despite tremendous expectations coming into the 2021-22 season, the Lakers have been officially eliminated even from play-in contention, with seven consecutive losses dropping them to 11th place in the West. The final blow came Tuesday night, courtesy of a Suns team that Anthony Davis claimed got away with one in their series last postseason because he was injured.

Extremely disappointed, Lakers coach Frank Vogel told reporters after the blowout loss. Disappointed for our fan base. Disappointed for the Buss family, who gave us all this opportunity, and we want to play our part in bringing success to Laker basketball and we fell short.

Now, Vogel is expected to be fired two years after winning a championship, and the Lakers will head to the draft lottery, where they will promptly hand over their pick to either the Pelicans (if it lands in the top 10) or the Grizzlies (if it falls outside).

This season is the greatest disappointment in LeBrons career, even if he qualifies for and then outscores Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo for the scoring title. But are the 2021-22 Lakers, overall, the greatest disappointment in NBA history?

It may be hard to recall, but with James, Davis, and newly acquired Russell Westbrook, Los Angeles was the no. 2 preseason betting favorite to win the championship, behind only the Nets. Never mind that the roster looked incredibly old or that Westbrook didnt seem like a great fit on this roster or that the Lakers had just lost in the first round of the playoffs to a better Suns team. (Davis was indeed injured in that series, but so was Chris Paul.) The Lakers had star power and a championship pedigree and the sheen of a top contender.

But the Lakers fell, and they fell hard. They didnt just fail to compete for a title they didnt even make the expanded play-in field. With a 31-48 record and three games remainingincluding contests at Golden State and Denverthey might lose 50 games.

Its difficult to gauge each teams preseason outlook in the earliest NBA decades, but we can at least start in 1984-85, which is the first season for which Basketball-Reference lists preseason title odds. Among the betting favorites over that span, the Lakers immediately shoot to the bottom; this graph shows the ultimate result for every other top-two favorite entering the season:

Only two other favorites missed the playoffs, both from the same season. In 2004-05, three teams were tied for the second-favorite slot after the Spurswho eventually won the titleand two of the three faltered: Minnesota, which went 44-38 after reaching the Western Conference finals the previous summer, and the Lakers, who went 34-48 after trading Shaquille ONeal to Miami.

So assuming that Brooklyn makes it out of the play-in, only three of the 83 top-two favorites on record will have missed the playoffs. The 2021-22 Lakers are oneand, unless they win their last three games, they will also collect the worst record of the bunch.

But wait, the historical comparisons get even worse. B-Ref also lists over/under win totals dating back to the 1999-00 season. The Lakers, with a mark of 52.5 this preseason, are one of 149 teams this century projected to win at least 50 games (or the equivalent of 50 out of 82 games in a shorter season). And out of that 149-team group, the Lakers will almost certainly fall short of their over/under total by the widest margin.

One other Lakers outfit makes the list: the Now This Is Going to Be Fun 2012-13 Lakers, who entered the season with enormous expectations after adding Steve Nash and Dwight Howard. They fell 13.5 wins short of their over/under but at least won 45 games and reached the playoffs. The 2021-22 version cant say that much.

To be fair, these Lakers arent the greatest underachiever among all teams this century. That dishonor belongs to the 2007-08 Heat, who traded Shaq midseason, lost Dwyane Wade to injuries, and tanked for better draft lottery odds down the stretch as they won just 15 games versus a projected 46.5. But that Heat teams over/under ranked 12th in the league; they werent expected to be a top contender like the 2021-22 Lakers, and the disappointment is so much more visceral when a prospective favorite falls flat.

Injuries hampered the Lakers efforts to meet expectations, of course, as they did for many teams on that chart. The previous greatest underachiever was the 2005-06 Rockets, who lost both Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming for large swaths of the schedule.

The Lakerslike most teams this seasonlost numerous players to injury, too, most notably James and Davis for a combined 60 games. Davis alone missed roughly half the season with multiple injuries and has recently blamed injuries for the teams downfall.

Our goal was to win a championship, Davis said Tuesday. Feel like we had the pieces, but injuries got in the way of that. And that was the difference in the season.

Yet while injuries certainly didnt help, the Lakers were outscored even when James and Davis played together, as well as by themselves.

Judging the Lakers so harshly is not merely a product of selective memory. They didnt win a title, didnt reach the Finals, didnt even qualify for the play-in game as the 10th-best team out of 15 in a shallow Western Conference. Statistically, among teams projected to contend for a title, the 2021-22 Lakers are the largest underachiever for as far back as we have data. At least this team made some sort of history.

Read more from the original source:

Are the Lakers the Biggest Disappointment in NBA History? - The Ringer

On the evening of February 21, 2022, three days before Russian forces began the largest land invasion on the European continent since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an angry televised speech. In it, he expressed familiar grievances about the eastward expansion of NATO, alleged Ukrainian aggression, and the presence of Western missiles on Russias border. But most of his tirade was devoted to something else: Ukrainian history. Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us, Putin said. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. Ukraines borders, he asserted, have no meaning other than to mark a former administrative division of the Soviet Union: Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia.

To many Western ears, Putins historical claims sounded bizarre. But they were of more than casual importance. Far from an innovation of the current crisis, Putins argument that Ukraine has always been one and the same with Russia, and that it has been forcibly colonized by Western forces, has long been a defining part of his worldview. Already during the Maidan popular uprising in Kyiv in 201314, Putin claimed that the people leading the huge protests were Western-backed fashisti (fascists) trying to tear Ukraine from its historical roots. (In fact, the protests caught the West by surprise, and although they included a far-right fringe, they were no fascist takeover.) And in July 2021, well before the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin published a 7,000-word essay under Putins byline with the title On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Both Russia and Ukraine, it asserted, have not only common roots in language and faith but also a shared historic destiny. Since its publication, the essay has become part of the required curriculum for all service members in the Russian armed forces, including those fighting in the current war. According to Putins logic, all divisions between Russia and Ukraine are the work of Western powers. From Poland in the sixteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and the Nazis in World War II, they have periodically coerced Ukraine or led it astray. In this reading, Kyivs pro-Western outlook over the past decade is only the latest form of external interferencethis time by the European Union and the United Statesaimed at dividing Russia against itself. Ukraines forced change of identity, Putin wrote, is comparable...to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. In Putins meaning, us included Ukrainians. Ukrainians and Ukraine, in other words, arent just naturally part of Russia; they dont even really exist.

A variation on the Ukraine doesnt really exist theme is the Kremlins assertion that Ukraine is a foregone failure. According to this viewlong echoed in a more sophisticated form by Western commentatorsthanks to its geography and political history, Ukraine is forever destined to be riven by internal division or torn apart by more powerful neighbors. This was the core narrative of Putins propaganda the last time he invaded Ukraine, when he grabbed Crimea and the Donbas following the Maidan protests in Kyiv. Then, Russian state media reported that Ukraine was a failed state taken over by a neo-Nazi junta and that Russian forces were riding to the rescue. The close Putin adviser who directed all this propaganda, the bodyguard turned strategist Vladislav Surkov, reprised the theme in an interview with the Financial Times last year. Ukraine, he said, using an odd analogy, was like the soft tissue between two bones, which, until it was severed, would rub painfully together. (With Russian journalists, he was more straightforward: the only method that has historically proved effective in Ukraine, he said, is coercion into fraternal relations.)

As the extraordinary resilience and unity of the Ukrainian population in the current war have demonstrated, these Russian claims are nonsense. Saying that Ukraine doesnt really exist is as absurd as saying that Ireland doesnt exist because it was long under British rule, or that Norwegians are really Swedes. Although they won statehood only 31 years ago, the Ukrainians have a rich national history going back centuries. The idea that Ukrainians are too weak and divided to stand up for themselves is one they are magnificently disproving on the battlefield. As for the neo-Nazi insult, this is belied by the fact that Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and that in the most recent parliamentary elections, in 2019, Ukraines far-right party, Svoboda, won less than three percent of the vote. As Putins imagined Ukraine has increasingly diverged from Ukrainian reality, the myth has become harder to sustain, the contradictions too acute. But rather than adjusting his historical fantasy to bring it closer to the truth, Putin has doubled down, resorting to military force and totalitarian censorship in a vain attempt to make reality closer to the myth. He may now be learning that reality is hard to defy: the wages of bad history are disaster in the present.

Putins obsession with Ukraines past can be traced to the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Until 1991, most of todays Ukraine had been ruled by Russia for 300 yearsslightly longer, in other words, than Scotland has been ruled by England. And with a population that is today nearly as large as Spains, Ukraine was by far the most significant Soviet republic besides Russia itself. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser, famously wrote, Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire. This isnt literally true. Russia today is still a vast multiethnic empire, taking in a 3,000-mile-wide slice of northern Asia and including more than a dozen Asian nationalities, from the 5.3 million Tatars on the Volga River to a few thousand Chukchis on the Bering Strait. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Moscow lost its West.

For Putin, Russias European empire was all-important. Although there has long been an exoticizing streak to Russias self-imageYes, we are Scythians! the hitherto gentle poet Aleksandr Blok declared after the 1917 revolutionthe country has always seen itself as a European, rather than an Asian, power. Its great composers, novelists, and artists have been European in orientation; its historic military triumphsagainst Napoleon and Hitlermade it a senior player in Europes concert of nations. By pushing Russia back into her gloomy pine forests, away from such ringing old place names as Odessa and Sevastopol, the loss of Ukraine, in particular, injured the Russian sense of self.

At the heart of Russias Ukraine problem, then, has been a war over history. The first battle is over where the story begins. Conventionally, the story starts with a legend-wrapped leader from the Middle Ages, Volodymyr (or Vladimir in Russian) the Great. A descendent of Norse raiders and traders from Scandinavia, Volodymyr founded the first proto-state in Kyiv toward the end of the tenth century. A loose but very large fiefdom known as Rus, it was centered on Kyiv and covered todays Belarus, northwestern Russia, and most of Ukraine. Volodymyr also gave Rus its spiritual foundations, converting his realm to Orthodox Christianity.

Although Russians and Ukrainians concur on Volodymyrs importance, they disagree over what happened after his kingdom broke up. Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it disintegrated into warring princedoms, and in the thirteenth, it was overrun by the Mongols, under Batu Khan. In Russian accounts, the populationand, with it, true Rus culturefled the violence, heading northeast, to Moscow and Novgorod. Ukrainians, however, argue that Rus culture remained squarely centered on Ukraine and that what emerged in Moscow was a separate and distinct tradition. To Western readers, the argument seems trivial: it is as though the French and the Germans were locked in battle over whether Charlemagne, the ninth-century founder of the Carolingian Empire, belongs to modern France or modern Germany. Ukrainians, however, understand the significance of the Russian claims. One of Kyivs landmarks is a large nineteenth-century statue of Volodymyr the Great, holding a cross and gazing out over the Dnieper River. When Putin put up his own, even bigger Vladimir the Great outside the Kremlin gates in 2016, Ukrainians rightly saw it not as a homage to a tenth-century king but as a blatant history grab.

In fact, for most of the next seven centuries after Volodymyrs reign, Ukraine was outside Muscovite control. As Mongol rule crumbled through the 1300s, the territory of present-day Ukraine was absorbed by the emergent Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in turn combined by dynastic marriage with Poland, so that for the next two and a half centuries, Ukraine was ruled from Krakow. Eventually, even Ukraines faith acquired a Western veneer: in 1596, the Union of Brest-Litovsk created the Greek Catholic, or Uniat, Churcha compromise between Catholic Poles and Orthodox Ukrainians that acknowledged the pope but was Orthodox in ritual and allowed priests to marry. A politically canny halfway house between the two religions, the union helped Polonize the Ukrainian nobility, part of what Putin sees as a long pattern of the West pulling Ukraine away from its rightful Orthodox home.

It was not until the late seventeenth century that Moscow forcefully entered the picture. A series of uprisings by Ukrainian Cossacksmilitarized frontier groups, centered on the lower Dnieperhad weakened the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Then, following a long war with Poland over Ukraine, expanding Muscovy was finally able to annex Kyiv in 1686. For Ukrainians, it was an out of the frying pan into the fire moment: Polish rule was simply swapped for its harsher Muscovite counterpart. But in Putins telling, it was the beginning of the gathering of the Russian world, using an archaic phrase that he has resuscitated to justify his war against Ukraine today. Another century later, Poland itself was partitioned among Austria, Prussia, and Russia, with Russia ending up with what is today Belarus and central Ukraine, including Kyiv, and Austria with todays western Ukraine, then known as eastern Galicia, which included Lviv.

Ukraines modern national movement began in the 1840s, led by the first great Ukrainian-language writer, Taras Shevchenko. Born into an enserfed peasant family in a village near Kyiv, he exhorted Ukrainians to throw off the Russian yoke and excoriated the many who Russified themselves in order to climb the socioeconomic ladder. (These views earned him ten years in Siberia.) As the century progressed, and especially after Tsar Alexander IIs assassination by anarchists in 1881, tsarist rule became more repressive. Hundreds of Ukrainian socialists followed Shevchenko into exile, and Ukrainian-language books and education were banned. At this point, Ukraines east-west divide turned into an advantageat least for those living in the western partbecause in Austrian-ruled Galicia, Ukrainians were able to adopt the freer civic culture then taking root in Europe. In Lviv, they published their own newspapers and organized reading rooms, cooperatives, credit unions, choirs, and sports clubsall innovations borrowed from the similarly Austrian-ruled Czechs. Although disadvantaged by a voting system that favored Polish landowners, they were able to form their own political party and sent representatives to Lvivs provincial assembly, to which the typical Ukrainian deputy was not a fiery revolutionary but a pince-nez-wearing, mildly socialist academic or lawyer.

Ukraines reputation as a land cursed by political geographypart of the bloodlands in the title of the historian Timothy Snyders best-selling bookwas earned during the first half of the twentieth century. When the tsarist regime suddenly crumbled in 1917, a Ukrainian parliamentary, or Rada, government declared itself in Kyiv, but it was swept away only a few months later, first by Bolshevik militias and then by the German army, which occupied Ukraine under the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. After the armistice that November ending World War I, Germany withdrew again, leaving the Red Army, the reactionary Russian White Army, the Polish army, a Ukrainian army under the socialist Rada minister Symon Petlyura, and an assortment of independent warlords to fill the power vacuum. In the chaotic civil war that ensued, the group worst hit was Ukraines Jews. Scapegoated by all sides, more than 100,000 were killed in 1919, in a series of massacres unmatched since the 1600s. Beaten by the Reds, Petlyura formed a last-ditch alliance with Poland, before fleeing to Paris when Poland and the Soviet Union made a peace that divided Ukraine again, the Russians taking the east and the center, the Poles the west. Two small borderland regionstodays Bukovina and Transcarpathiawent to newly independent Romania and Czechoslovakia, respectively.

Not surprisingly, Petlyura is a hotly contested figure. For Russians, he was just another pogromist warlord. (That viewpoint saturates the Kyiv-bred but ethnic Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakovs novel The White Guard, for whose characters Petlyuras army is a frightening mob.) For Ukrainians, conversely, he led their countrys first stab at independent statehood, which might have succeeded had the Allies only given him the same diplomatic and military support that they did the Balts and (less successfully) the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis, and the Georgians. To accusations of ethnonationalism, they rejoin that the Rada government printed its banknotes in four languagesUkrainian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddishand that the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was a distinguished Jewish lawyer, Arnold Margolin. Petlyuras army rampaged, they concede, but he could not control it, and so did all the others. The controversy played out in 1926 in a Paris courtroom, after Petlyura was assassinated by a Jewish anarchist who claimed to be avenging family members killed by Ukrainian soldiers. The three-week trial was an international sensation, with the defense presenting a devastating dossier of evidence about the pogroms, while the prosecution sought to paint the assassin as a Soviet agent. After only half an hours deliberation, the jury declared him innocent, and debate over the affair still rages.

In fact, the violence and chaos of the Petlyura era were merely a prelude to much greater Ukrainian tragedies in the years that followed. Beginning in 1929, Joseph Stalin launched the Holodomorliterally, killing by hungera program of forced deportations and food and land requisitioning aimed at the permanent emasculation of Ukraines rural population as a whole. Rolled out in parallel with a purge of Ukraines urban intelligentsia, it resulted in the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Covered up for decades, there is no doubt that this extraordinary mass killing was deliberate: the Soviet authorities knew that villagers were dying in great numbers, yet they persisted in food requisitioning and forbade them from leaving the famine areas for the towns. Why Stalin perpetrated the famine is less clear. An estimated three million Kazakhs and Russians also starved to death during these same years, but he chose to hit Ukraine hardest, probably because it embodied his twin demons in one: the conservative peasantry and a large, assertive non-Russian nationality. Even today, however, there is an ongoing effort by Russia to block international recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide. In his Historical Unity essay, Putin refers to the famine only once, in passing, as a common tragedy. Stalins name is not mentioned at all.

Less than a decade later, a new round of horror was visited on Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruled western part of the countrythe first time Russia had ever controlled this territory. Two years later, however, the Wehrmacht marched in anyway, and two years after that, the Red Army returned. Both armies deported or arrested the Lviv intelligentsiaa rich mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jewsas they arrived and killed political prisoners as they departed. For a few months in 1943, a large ethnonationalist Ukrainian partisan army controlled most of northeastern Ukraine, establishing a primitive administration and its own training camps and military hospitals. Remarkably, small units of this army carried on an assassination and sabotage campaign for years after the war ended, with the last insurgent commander killed in a shootout near Lviv in 1950.

Overall, 5.3 million Ukrainians died during the war years, an astonishing one-sixth of the population. Again, many died of hunger, after Germany began confiscating grain. And again, it was Jews who suffered most. Before the war, they made up a full five percent of Ukraines population, or some 2.7 million people; after it, only a handful remained. The rest had fled east or lay in unmarked mass graves in the woods or on the edge of cemeteries. (In the fall of 2021, as part of an effort to commemorate these events, Zelensky presided at the opening of a new complex at Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, the park next to a metro station where nearly 34,000 Kyivan Jews were massacred in September 1941. On the sixth day of Putins invasion this year, three Russian missiles landed in the park, causing damage to the Jewish cemetery there.)

For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most important fact about the Ukrainians during the war was not their victimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis. The most controversial Ukrainian figure of the period is Stepan Bandera, the leader of a terrorist organization in Polish-ruled interwar western Ukraine. Having already been sour when the area was under Austrian rule, Polish-Ukrainian relations dramatically worsened with the new governments Polonization drive, in the course of which Ukrainian-language schools were closed, Ukrainian newspapers strictly censored, Ukrainians banned from even the lowliest government jobs, and Ukrainian candidates and voters arbitrarily struck from electoral rolls. The repression radicalized rather than Polonized, so that the largest Ukrainian parliamentary party, the compromise-seeking Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, was increasingly squeezed out by Banderas underground nationalists. When the Wehrmacht entered western Ukraine in June 1941, Bandera joined forces with the Germans, organizing two battalions, Nachtigall and Roland, although he was almost immediately arrested by the Nazis, who found him too hard to control.

Ever since, Russia has used Bandera as a stick with which to beat the Ukrainian national movement. No matter that far more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in the Wehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, too. As in Soviet days, a standard epithet for Ukrainians in Russian state media today is BanderivtsiBanderitesand Putin revisited the trope in an even odder than usual speech on February 25, the day after the Russian invasion began, in which he called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow the drug addicts and neo-Nazis in power in Kyiv.

After the end of World War II, and especially after Stalins death in 1953, Ukraine enjoyed several decades of relative stability. Compared with the other non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians were simultaneously extra repressed and extra privileged, making up the largest single group of political prisoners but also acting as Russias junior partner in the union. The Politburo was packed with Russians and Ukrainians, and in the non-Slavic republics, the usual pattern was for an ethnic national to be appointed first party secretary, while a Russian or a Ukrainian wielded real power as number two. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Ukraine floated to independence without bloodshed, after its own Communist Party leadership decided to cut the tow rope to the sinking mother ship. It is this late-Soviet little brother relationship that Putin grew up withand which he may believe (or have believed) Ukrainians would be ready to return to were it not for the Wests interference.

Ukraines political path in the three decades since independence has accentuated all of Russias fears. At first, it seemed as if Russia and Ukraine would move on parallel tracks in the postCold War era. Both countries were riding the rapids of economic collapse combined with new political freedoms; neither seemed interested in the past. In Ukraine, nobody bothered to take down Kyivs Lenin statue or rename its streets. Russias new ruling class, for its part, seemed more interested in making money than in rebuilding an empire. It was easy to imagine the two countries developing along separate but friendly paths: like Canada and the United States or Austria and Germany.

That happy illusion lasted only a few years. The two hinge moments of Ukraines postCold War history were two highly effective and genuinely inspirational displays of people power, both provoked by the Kremlin. In 2004, Putin tried to insert a burly ex-convict and regional political boss from Donetsk, Viktor Yanukovych, into the Ukrainian presidency, an effort that seems to have included having his pro-European electoral rival, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. After Yushchenko survived the attack (with his face badly scarred), the vote was blatantly falsified instead. Sporting orange hats and ribbons, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets in protest and stayed there until the electoral commission conceded a rerun, which Yushchenko won. For Putin, the protests, known as the Orange Revolution, were a plot orchestrated by the West.

Pro-European protesters during the Maidan uprising, Kyiv, December 2013

In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency, after the pro-European bloc rancorously split. For the next four years, he devoted himself to looting the Ukrainian treasury. But in November 2013, he went a step too far: just as Ukraine was about to ink a long-planned and widely popular trade deal with the European Union, he abruptly canceled it and, under pressure from Putin, announced a partnership with Russia instead. For Ukrainians, as for Putin, this was not just about how best to boost the economy but also about Ukraines very identity. Instead of heading westwardperhaps even one day joining the European Unionthe country was being coerced back into the Russian orbit. Initially, only a few students came out in protest, but public anger grew quickly after they were beaten up by the police, whose upper echelons Yanukovych had packed with Russians. A protest camp on Kyivs central square, known as the Maidan, turned into a permanent, festival-like city within a city, swelling to a million people on weekends. In January 2014, the police began a violent crackdown, which climaxed with the killing of 94 protesters and 17 police officers. When the crowds still refused to disperse, Yanukovych fled to Moscow, and the contents of his luxurious private compoundHerms dinner services, chandeliers the size of small cars, a stuffed lionwent on display in Ukraines National Art Museum. In the power vacuum that followed Yanukovychs flight, Putin invaded first Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, the eastern border cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The land grab pleased the Russian public, but if Putin intended to pull Ukraine back toward Russia, his actions had the opposite effect. New presidential elections brought in another pro-European, Petro Poroshenko, a Ukrainian oligarch who had made his money in confectionary rather than corruption-ridden mining or metals. Then, in the years that followed, a mass civilian effort supported Ukrainian forces in a low-level but grinding conflict with Russia in and around Donetsk and Luhansk. (Until the Ministry of Defense was reformed, the previously neglected Ukrainian army was literally crowdfunded by direct donations from the public.) Ukrainian support for NATO membership rose sharply, and in June 2014, Ukraine signed a wide-ranging association agreement with the European Union. Most symbolic and popularor, in Putins eyes, most cunningwas the EUs 2017 granting to Ukrainians of bezviz, visa-free 90-day travel to the whole of the Schengen area. Russians still need visas, which are extortionately expensive and burdensome. The contrast grates: little brother has not only abandoned big brother; he is better traveled now, too.

Ukraines progress before the invasion should not be overstated. Shady oligarchs pulled strings behind the scenes, and the country was hobbled by pervasive corruption. (Transparency Internationals 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index puts Ukraine alongside Mexico and Zambia but ranks it as slightly less corrupt than Russia.) But for all of the countrys problems, its history since independence has been one of real changes of power, brought about by real elections, between real candidates, reported by real free media. For Putin, the Ukrainian example had become a direct political threat. What if Russias own populationand not just the urban intelligentsiastarted demanding the same freedoms? In his Historical Unity essay, Putin explained away the fact that Ukrainian presidents change as being the result of a system set up by the Western authors of the anti-Russian project. Ukraines pro-Russian citizens, he wrote, are not vocal because they have been driven underground, persecuted for their convictions, or even killed. Whether he actually believes this is unclear, but it might explain the slightly ad hoc tactics used by the Russian army in the first week of his war on Ukraine. Putin may really have expected his tank battalions to be greeted as liberators.

As during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 201314 Maidan protests, which came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraines fierce self-defense today is a defense of values, not of ethnic identity or of some imagined glorious past. Putins obsession with history, in contrast, is a weakness. Although earlier in his presidency, banging the gathering of the Russian world drum boosted his approval ratings, it has now led him down what may turn out to be a fatal dead end. In terms of square mileage alone, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe, after Russia itself. If you placed it over the eastern United States, as The Washington Post recently observed, it would stretch from Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean, and from Ohio to Georgia. Occupying it permanently would be enormously costly in troops and treasure. Moreover, Putins war has unified Ukrainians as never before. And whether they are speaking Russian or Ukrainian, their sentiment is the same. Already, video clips have gone viral of babushkas telling Russian soldiers that they will leave their bones in Ukrainian soil and of Ukrainian soldiers swearing joyously as they fire bazookas at Russian tanks, all in the purest Russian. The war is likely to go on for a long time, and its final outcome is unknown. History, Putin may be learning, is only a guide when its the real sort.

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Putins War on History: The Thousand-Year Struggle Over Ukraine - Foreign Affairs Magazine

There are four majors on the PGA Tour, but the Masters well may be the most prestigious of all.

The Masters, which began in 1934, has been held at Augusta National Golf Club every year since 1946. The tradition-rich event has one of the most iconic prizes in the sport the green jacket and also happens to be one of its most exclusive.

The winners of the Masters include the greatest golfers to ever play. From Jack Nicklaus to Arnold Palmer to Ben Hogan and Tiger Woods, the tournament has helped shape some of the most prolific golf careers of all time.

Which players have won the Masters? Here's a look at the golfers who are members of the elite green-jacket club as well as why that award is one of the most important ones in all of sports.

MORE: How many times has Tiger Woods won the Masters?

The list of Masters winners over the years is riddled with the names of the greatest golfers to ever play. That said, no golfer has had more Masters success than Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear won the tournament six times during his legendary career, with the first coming in 1963 and the last in 1986.

Tiger Woods is just behind Nicklaus with five total wins, the first of which came in 1997 while his most recent came in 2019. Arnold Palmer is the only other golfer with four or more green jackets.

Dustin Johnson holds the scoring record for the Masters. He shot 20-under par during the 2020 tournament and won by five strokes over the rest of the field. Previously, Woods and Jordan Spieth's mark of 18-under from 1997 and 2015, respectively, had been the best in tournament history.

Below is a full look at the history of the Masters, from the most recent winner, Hideki Matsuyama, to the first champion,Horton Smith in 1934.

*Note: The Masters was canceled from 1943-1945 as a result of World War II.

MORE: Golf world remembers Lee Elder, the first Black player to win the Masters

The Masters prize pool has stayed the same since 2019. There is an$11.5 millionpurse for the event and the winner will make$2.07 million. That represents 18 percent of the total purse.

In the first year of the Masters, Horton Smith's payout was just $1,500. The tournament first awarded a $1 million prize to the first-place finisher when Tiger Woods won in 2001.

Below is a breakdown of how much the Masters winner has made by year, per Golf.com.

*Expected winner's share for 2022.

MORE: Why Phil Mickelson is missing the Masters for the first time in 28 years

Augusta National describes the green jacket as "the ultimate symbol of success at the Masters Tournament." The unique award has been gifted to winners since 1949, when Sam Snead won it for the first time.

Green jackets first became a part of Augusta's legacy in 1937. Members of the club began wearing them so they could answer questions from patrons that were less familiar with the course.

The original jackets were made of a heavy woolen material, but they were quickly replaced by a lighter-weight version.

Per tradition, the winner of the previous year's tournament, Hideki Matsuyama, will present the green jacket to the winner in 2022. In rare circumstances during which a golfer wins the event in back-to-back years, the chairman of Augusta National will award the jacket. The only time this didn't happen was when Jack Nicklaus won the event in 1966 and was instructed to put the jacket on himself, as he was the previous year's winner.

Only Augusta National members and tournament winners are allowed to wear green jackets at the club. And the jacket must stay at Augusta National unless it belongs to the tournament's reigning champion. In the year after winning, the champion is permitted to take the jacket home from the club but must return it the following year.

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Masters winners by year: List of past champions, payouts, green jacket history - Sporting News

When the world saw the horrors in Bucha and the towns around Kyiv, it was like a tide had gone out, leaving behind the grisly driftwood of dead bodies. By now, youve seen the photos and read the stories: the women raped in front of their children, the men executed with their hands behind their backs, the people who fell off their bicycles and lay for weeks under the open sky until the photographers arrived.

When I saw photos of the heads and hands and feet of town elder Olha Sukhenko and her family protruding from the sandy grave in which they were hastily buried, when I saw journalists crowded around her shoddy burial among the pines outside of Motyzhyn, I thought immediately of the Ukrainian forests where dozens of my relatives were shot and dumped in mass graves in 1941: in Zhytomyr, in Medzhybizh, in Salnitsa, Ostropol, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. I thought, this is what it must have looked like then, when, returning in 1944, their relatives found a million Ukrainian Jews, buried in the loam. It was these massacres that began to break the Nazi soldiers carrying them out, forcing the invention of a more efficient and less intimate way of eradicating a people: the death camps, like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek.

Citing the famous quote attributed to the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, my friend Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist and author, wrote, If one cant write poetry after Auschwitz, then what can one say after Bucha?

In both cases, it turns out, one can say a lot while saying not much at all. In the four days since the massacres became public knowledge in the West, much was said, including by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who, on Sunday night, asked Russian mothers, in Russian, If you raised your sons to be marauders, how did they become butchers, too? And yet, atrocities like those at Bucha, Irpin, and Trostyanets show us exactly where human institutions fail. They push language to its limits, leaving us speechless, grasping for words that are pale approximations of what they are describing. (I am thinking as I write this of Anna Akhmatovas famous poem about the Great Terror, Requiem, which begins with a woman who is waiting in line with Akhmatova outisde the jail and asks the poet, Can you describe this?)

They also show us, undeniably, the failure of the very systems the West has constructed to prevent such things. After Auschwitz, Europe said never again. Then the victors put on a trial of two dozen Nazis, but most of the other perpetrators died peacefully in their beds. After World War II, the victors created a global body, the United Nations, meant to prevent another catastrophe like this one and an International Court of Justice, headquartered at the Hague, to punish those that dared to try.

And yet, never again has become, in practice, over and over and over again. The global institutions that the West put in place failed to stop the bloody proxy wars of the Cold Warin Vietnam, Angola, El Salvadorin part because the two main adversaries in those wars, the United States and the Soviet Union, both sat on the U.N. Security Council, where they wielded veto power. The Russian Federation, the successor state to the U.S.S.R., still holds that power today. Thanks to the Russian veto and a lack of political will in the West, the U.N. failed to stop the slaughter in Syria, aided and abetted by Russia, nor did Russia suffer any consequences for what its army did in Chechnya, which became a blueprint for Bucha. George W. Bush also showed the world how easy it is to skirt the U.N. altogether when he made up his mind to invade Iraq. And even when it came to clear examples of genocide, the U.N. failed to stop those in Bosnia, Xinjiang, and Myanmar; when it sent in its peacekeepers to places like Rwanda, it failed to stop that genocide, too.

If the world, as embodied by the United Nations, couldnt stop the vast slaughter of Syria, Rwanda, and Myanmar, what hope did the villagers of Bucha have? Its why Zelensky, in his scorching speech to the Security Council on Tuesday, wondered why we have a United Nations at all. Ladies and gentlemen! he said. I would like to remind you of the first article of the first chapter of the U.N. Charter. What is the purpose of our organization? To maintain peace. And to force peace. Now the U.N. Charter is being violated literally from the first article. And if so, what is the point of all other articles?

What is the point, he argued, of an organization that can not carry out one of its most basic functions? Why have an institution whose design negates its purpose? What is the point of a U.N. where members of the Security Council are allowed to wage war and commit war crimes? If this continues, the finale will be that each state will rely only on the power of arms to ensure its security, not on international law, not on international institutions, Zelensky said. Then, the U.N. can simply be dissolved.

In pointing out the hollowness of the U.N., Zelensky danced dangerously close to agreeing with his enemy, Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has spent his 22-year tenure consciously and openly undermining the postwar order and its institutions, at least the shape they took after 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Though Putin loves the United NationsRussia can use it for a patina of legitimacy while bogging the place down in bureaucratic procedure or ending things with a vetohe loathes institutions where the U.S. holds sway but Russia doesnt. This is why, for example, in the run up to Russias invasion of Ukraine, we heard so much from Moscow about NATO and indivisible securitythe idea, essentially, that Russia should get veto power over European security, too. Those are the institutions Putin wants to destroy.

But Putin also understands the power of cynicism and sophistry to erode institutional moral authority and shatter international consensus. This is why, for instance, he is always trying to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal world orderto force the West to admit that might has always made right, but he was the only one honest enough to say so. (Or as Andranik Migranyan, a friend of the Russian foreign minister, told me when we spoke recently, Big countries have big demands and solve them in big ways.)

It is why Ukraines efforts to document, with the help of international investigators, the war crimes that Russia seems to have committed in Ukraine will be largely a formality. Ukraine, along with the Netherlands and Australia, are bringing legal action against Russia for its role in shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. A Russian BUK missile exploded by the nose of the civilian airliner, and the bodies of 298 passengers and crew rained down on the sunflower fields of the Donbas. The Netherlands, which lost 193 citizens in that disaster, launched a formal investigation, and later held a news conference to make a convincing case that they had figured out who had launched the missile and how. The Russian government, meanwhile, conducted its own investigation, which spun elaborate theories that kicked the blame away from the Kremlins doorstep. Meanwhile, the state propaganda machine provided ever more bizarre explanations for the crash, including the invention of a Spanish flight dispatcher named Carlos and a plane pre-packed with corpses that America deliberately crashed in Ukraine to make Russia look bad. And it worked. Most Russians bought their governments version of events and, despite legal action brought by the Netherlands and other governments, the people who shot the plane out of the sky are walking free.

The same is already happening after Bucha. The Kremlin and Russian Foreign Ministry immediately did what they always do, predictably and cynically waving away the massacres as fake. Then, Russian state media, as usual, took the baton and started doing the real work, developing and disseminating alternative explanations of what happened, and thereby muddying the waters. Kremlin media is already telling its viewers that the corpses are actually those of Russians who had been shot by Ukrainians, or were not corpses at all: they have been showing footage that they say depicts the bodies in Buchas streets moving their hands (theyre not) or sitting down (they dont).

Now that Russia is in a near total information vacuum, most Russians will inevitably believe their government and not understand why the world is so intent on hating them. Meanwhile, the Russian government is calling for an independent international investigationthat is, one dominated by Russiathat would prove the Kremlins lazy and ludicrous explanation (its favorite) that it was all a provokatsiya, a false flag operation.

Bucha is just the beginning. In Mariupol, the Ukrainian government suspects, the situation will look far worse. Meanwhile, the Kremlin seems to be laying the philosophical and moral groundwork to encourage or excuse any crimes Russian soldiers might commit in Ukraine. RIA Novosti, a Russian state media site which has in the past telegraphed the Kremlins thinking, published a manifesto on Sunday declaring that Russia no longer has to distinguish between the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people. Both are Nazis and therefore subject to legitimate liquidation. Not only does Ukraine have to be dismantled as a state, the piece argues, but the Ukrainian population must live through the hardship of war and absorb this lived experience as a historical lesson and an expiation of its guilt.

The chances that the Russian soldiers who carried out the killings in Buchaor Irpin or Mariupolwill see justice are slim at best. The only chance of them or their commanders ever facing justice is if Putins regime completely disintegrates. The question is what falls faster: Putin, or the world order that America and the West have become accustomed to, the one to which Putin is taking a sledgehammer in Ukraine.

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Never Again Again: The History of Putin's Terror - Puck

By Bartee Haile

The surprising thing about the April 7, 1902 death of Barney Riggs was not the violent nature of his demise but that the West Texas gunfighter managed to live so long.

There is no telling how many notches Riggs had on his six-gun before moving to Arizona in the early 1880s. Not that he was a professional killer, just an amateur with a fast draw and a bad temper.

The fact that Riggs always seemed to have reasonable doubt on his side kept him out of jail until Sept. 29, 1886. That was the day he shot a friend in the head for fooling around with his unfaithful wife.

This time there was no doubt as to Riggs guilt, and the judge saw no grounds for leniency. He started serving a life sentence for murder on New Years Eve 1886 in the infamous Territorial Prison at Yuma.

Ten months later, Riggs was stretching his legs in the prison yard when five inmates, all Mexican, made a live-or-die bid for freedom. A convict named Puebla buried a blade in the shoulder of Superintendent Thomas Gate while two accomplices were busy being shot down, one by a guard and the other by the secretary of the prison board.

Attracted by the screams and the familiar sound of gunfire, Riggs jumped in the middle of the mad melee. He grabbed a pistol from a mortally wounded Mexican, rammed the barrel into the chest of the superintendents assailant and pulled the trigger. The convict staggered back, and the fearless rescuer finished him with a second shot.

Stepping over the dead bodies of the five would-be escapees, the convicted killer from Texas helped his chief keeper to the prison infirmary.

Riggs was the talk of the territory. A Tucson newspaper praised his heroism in a glowing report that took pains to point out that no one was more brave and took more desperate chances than Barney Riggs to prevent the escape and further loss of life.

In record time, Riggs was rewarded with a full pardon. For the rest of his days, his favorite wisecrack was, I had to kill a man to get into Yuma and killed another to get out.

Riggs returned to West Texas with his young son but not his adulterous wife. She left town the minute she heard her foul-tempered husband was a free man.

After four lean years in the private sector, Riggs landed a job on the public payroll. Andy Royal, the corrupt and hated sheriff of Pecos County, always had a badge for anybody who was handy with a gun.

The ex-convict had been a deputy for a year or so, when his boss was voted out of office in November 1894. While working at his desk late one night a couple of weeks after the election, the lame-duck sheriff was given a shotgun send-off by an unknown assassin.

The word on the dirt streets of Fort Stockton was that Deputy Riggs was next, but he succeeded in dodging that particular bullet. However, try as he may, he could not avoid getting caught up in a classic West Texas feud.

Reeves County Sheriff G.A. Bud Frazer and Deacon Jim Miller, the Old Wests original killer-for-hire, already had two shootouts under their gun belts by the time Riggs relocated to Pecos. Neutrality made the most sense, but their marriages to each others sisters compelled Riggs to side with the lawman in the private war.

Riggs brother-in-law was no match, of course, for a killing machine like Miller. Frazer was playing cards in a Toyah saloon in September 1896, when Deacon Jim ended the feud with a fatal one-two punch from a double-barreled shotgun.

Once again Riggs was on a hit list with a single name his. He knew it was only a matter of time until Miller or his surrogates came gunning for him.

Riggs did not have long to wait. Three weeks after Bud Frazers murder, John Denson and Bill Earhart showed up in Pecos. The pair spent the day hunting their prey and the courage to take him on but found neither.

The next morning, Denson and Earhart burst into the watering hole where Riggs was tending bar for a buddy. Earhart got off the first round but merely grazed Riggs, who returned fire in a heartbeat hitting him right between the eyes.

With the odds suddenly even, Denson turned and ran. Riggs missed him on this way out the door, followed him into the street, calmly drew a bead on the shrinking target and put a bullet in the back of his head.

Following his acquittal in the double homicide, Riggs stayed out of serious trouble for several years. Then in 1901 his wife divorced him and was awarded a cash settlement of $2,000 payable to her son-in-law Buck Chadborn.

On Apr. 7, 1902, Barney Riggs temper got the best of him one last time. He confronted Chadborn and, according to three different witnesses, either (a) threatened to strike him with a walking cane, (b) reached in his back pocket for a handkerchief or something or (c) cursed the youth less than half his age.

No one claimed the over-the-hill gunfighter was armed. But Chadborn shot him dead anyway, and a jury agreed it was an open-and-shut case of self-defense.

Unforgettable Texans brings to life the once famous people no one remembers today. Order your copy for $24.00 (tax and shipping included) by mailing a check to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.

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This Week in Texas History: Hot-tempered gunman pushed his luck - Hays Free Press

And just like that, the Miami Marlins are about to take the field for Opening Day No. 30.

It usually hasnt gone well for the Fish. They are 12-17 all time on the seasons first day, and have just one Opening Day win since 2014. Even without a victory this Friday, this is already a somewhat unique opener for the organization, as it will be only theninth time Miami has started a season on the road. I guess some teams just havent been in a rush to get back north.

However, this article is about one of times it did go well. In fact, with all due respect to the 1993 squad that won game No. 1, Im prepared to say that this is going to be about the greatest Opening Day in Miami Marlins franchise history.

For your consideration, I give you the gem provided by the 2004 contest between the Marlins and the Montreal Expos.

For starters, Miami won, besting their division rival 4-3. Miami hadnt started 1-0 since 2000, so it made for a nice change. More importantly though, the year was 2004, meaning these were the defending world champions we were talking about. Whats more, a defending world champion that was actually expected to have a chance to defend. This was Miamissecond title defense, after all, but that 1998 team had been gutted heading into the season, with even more gutting still to come. When the 1998 team won its opener, it was a cute, almost annoying novelty. By contrast, the 2004 team winning its opener was an exciting tone-setter.

Especially since it wasnt like the 2004 team didnt have some notable player absences themselves. The bulk of the team was retained, but you can make a pretty good case two of their three best hitters were the ones who werent retained. The Marlins couldnt afford to keep a pair of Gold Glovers in Ivan Rodriguez and Derrek Lee, making do instead with Hee-Seop Choi at first and a tandem of Ramon Castro and Mike Redmond at catcher.

As mentioned, Miami won 4-3.All four runs were knocked in by either Choi or Redmond.

So for a day, and indeed much of April in the case of Choi, the irreplaceable actually looked kinda replaceable. There have been plenty of openers where Miami Marlins fans have come into a season questioning the front office and having even more questions at the end of Game 1 of 162. Youd be hard pressed to name a Marlins opener where more was done to silence some of the doubters than this one.

Lastly, and most importantly though, was the pitching matchup. Reigning World Series MVP Josh Beckett against 1997 World Series MVP Livan Hernandez.

Honestly, it was an occurrence rare and awesome enough that the box score could almost have been thrown out. Except that both pitchers were actually kind of awesome that game. Both turned in quality starts. Beckett struck out nine, while Hernandez struck out eight. They were dominant. The pair only allowed three runs between them, with the bulk of the scoring coming in dramatic fashion late against the bullpens.

The two newest members of Miamis revamped bullpen stepped in to secure the victory just one more example of the new-look roster making the front office look good and making fans feel excited about what would be possible in 2004.

For at least this Miami Marlins fan, I cant recall an Opening Day I was riding higher.

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The greatest Opening Day in Miami Marlins history - Call To The Pen

Wreck takes a newish literary subgenre, in which a memoir or personal essay is pegged to an intense and often rather febrile investigation into one or more works of artthe best known is probably still Edmund de Waals The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)to a new level of brow-knitting conceptual complexity. The book is itself presented as a kind of artwork, one strand in a tangle of projects done in several different media, often collaboratively; a document of a process, and a pretty messy one at that, rather than a thing in itself.

At its heart is Tom de Frestons obsessive relationship with Thodore Gricaults The Raft of the Medusa, a pioneering masterpiece of French Romanticism, exhibited at the 1819 Paris Salon asShipwreck Scene to coyly disguise its origins in a contemporary scandal. De Freston is struggling to process the feelings of grief, rage and hurt that the recent death of his abusive father has stirred in him. The paintings allusions to Michelangelos Sistine Chapel frescoes set him thinking about judgement and damnation, the drowned and the saved. The precarious progress of the raft, lashed together from the timbers of the Medusa after it ran aground off the west African coast in 1816, then cast adrift for nearly a fortnightduring which time nine-tenths of the 150 or so people aboard drowned, starved, died of thirst or ate one anotherseems to mirror his own floundering attempts to keep his life in one piece as he steers a course away from his traumatic past. It also makes him reflect, naturally enough, on the hopes and fears of todays migrants, whether the rafts they make for themselves are real or metaphorical; one of these, the Syrian journalist and academic Ali Souleman, becomes de Frestons collaborator and friend.

Tom de Freston's Wreck: Gricaults Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea

Wreck is not advertised as a scholarly work, so its perhaps beside the point that some of its historical and biographical elements are less than entirely reliable. Fact and speculation combine without any warning in scenes from Gricaults life: the paintings darker elementsits tarry palette, its Michelangelesqueterribilit, its sheer morbidity (Gricault carted body parts from the nearby Hpital Beaujon back to his studio to study the effects of putrefaction on skin tones)are allowed to eclipse a more nuanced reality, whereby the possibility of rescue, two hours away as depicted in the painting, is as important as the hellish tormentsat hand.

In fact, the picture is generally rather subtler than de Freston makes it seem. Gricault also has an eye on the European idealist tradition: the antique, Raphael, the butch, moonlit dead Christs of the Emilian Baroque, the homoerotic nocturnes of Anne-Louis Girodet. The Raft is no ordinary history painting, but rather the exaltation of a recent news story into an epic of betrayal, heroism and martyrdom that converses with some of the most interesting art of the era, from Henry Fuselis Ugolino (1806) to Baron Gross Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1804).

De Freston is surely quite right to stress Gricaults engagement with the politics and representation of race in the aftermath of Frances slave trade. Being on the right side of history on one issue isnt quite the same as being ahead of your time; yet Gricault was both. Its somehow telling that in the unrelenting fusillade of cultural references that pepper the text, from King Lear to Maggie Nelson by way of Jackson Pollock, the names of Baudelaire and Manet seem not to figure.

Wreck is a powerful testament to one persons subjective truthsa good working definition of Romanticism, maybe. I hope this project brought de Freston a measure of peace. But a calmer book might have been more nourishing.

Tom de Freston, Wreck: Gricaults Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea, Granta Books, 352pp, 13 in-text b/w illustrations, 16.99 (hb), published 3 March

Keith Miller is an editor at the Telegraph and a regular contributor to the Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement

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New memoir relays a traumatic family history through an intense obsession with a Gricault masterpiece - Art Newspaper

Douglas Neckers| Community Columnist

All weapons of war are awful guns, bombs, bayonets, even arrows from bows whenever one of these is fired, no good can come to the person on the other end.

But war is war. The mortal hate that marks it means opposing armies will use everything at their disposal in quests of victory over the enemy. So that Putin might use chemical weapons in the Ukraine was taken seriously by the Allies. The compounds sarin and tabun probably have never been used in battle, but are so toxic that micro quantities kill humans.

The Germans made tons of both at three different sites in the 1940s, and considered using them. But Hitler wouldnt give his approval.Society is terribly ignorant, it seems, and if the kinds of drugs that were peddled to everyone including the former president of the United States to treat COVID-19 are any indications, the general awareness of the people toward chemical things hasnt improved. Hitler wasnt chemically more aware, but he surmised that if he had supplies of nerve agents, his enemies would have larger stashes.

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In war making with chemicals, most everyone knows the Germans introduced waves of chlorine gas over the battle fields at Ypres in Belgium in April 1915 and that most combatants used mustard gas and phosgene during World War I. Less known perhaps was a much more toxic mustard gas analog, Lewisite, so-called "dew of death" that was never used.

Lewisite had an impressive academic profile the reaction to make it was discovered by Father Julius Nieuwland later at Notre Dame, where he probably gained more fame as Knute Rocknes chemistry instructor than from the reaction of arsenic trichloride with acetylene. The toxic substance in that mix was identified by Northwestern University professor Winfred Lewis and manufactured by the U.S. chemical corps at the former Ben Hur automobile site near Willoughby, Ohio, under the direction of James Bryant Conant, later the president of Harvard. As 1918 was winding down, tons of Lewisite were shipped east by rail through Corry, Pennsylvania, where I was born and up over the mountains to Baltimore where it was loaded on vessels headed for France. The War ended so the Lewisite was dumped in the ocean.

The late Professor Paul Fried of Hopes history department knew I was a chemistry major when I took his European history course as a senior, and he urged me to study chemical weapons by the medium of a former day the ubiquitous semester ending "term paper." Fried assigned term paper topics in his classes and because he knew I was to become a chemist, he assigned me to write a paper on the chemical organization, I.G. Farben.

Farben was a cartel of 11 companies formed after WWI to do what cartels do control markets, prices, patent positions and distributions. Farben was a WWI reaction by German industry to rebuild after the Versailles treaty had taken the best efforts of its industries in reparations for their causing WWI. Farben aspired to take over the world of chemical manufacturing much as the Nazis saw the Third Reich as lasting 1,000 years. I found one book on Farben in all of Holland, at the Herrick Library (it no longer has it I checked), so I read what I could I understand of the history of I.G. Farben, and most particularly of its involvement in making weapons of mass destruction in German chemical companies. Farben was the topic of Nuremberg trial No. 6, the case of the U.S. v. Karl Krauch et al. and its overriding impact on the chemical industry world wide continued until it was broken up following WWII. From that simple assignment came a lifelong interest in the involvement of chemists in War.

Nerve agents were made in huge quantities by other combatants after they were discovered, and their structures revealed. The U.S. stash of sarin, soman and other agents took German scientists to help us make, and later, to destroy. They have been used occasionally. Once by a Japanese terrorist in the GUM attack on a Tokyo subway; also by Russian operatives on agents in Britain, and last year on Alexei Navalny when Putin agents put a novichok, Russian for "new agent," in his underwear in Siberia.

Chemical weapons treaties were signed by many nations including Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian scientists who developed the novichok agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to 10 times more potent thansoman. Chemical stocks were to be destroyed and no new compounds found or made. From reports published by a Russian scientist in the 1990s, we found that the chemical structures were only slightly different than other known compounds. And though this has not been officially released, a specific novichok, (Russian for "new agent") of known chemical composition that was not new was used in the poisoning of Alexei Navalny the Putin critic since jailed in Russia for his anti-government politics. Fortunately Navalny was treated in Siberia saving his life; and at the Charite Hospital in Berlin, where he was brought back to normal and released only to be jailed again when he returned to Russia.

Do we expect the Russians will use chemical weapons? No army has been as horrific as the Russian army in Ukraine; and no leadership as brutal. Its impossible to know for sure, but when cornered, Id guess the Russians would. When Fritz Hater, the German scientist that advocated the use of chlorine in Belgium in 1915 was about to depart to the east with armies that would use gas there, his wife chemist Clara Immerwahr tried hard to talk him out of doing so. And when he wouldnt, she took his pistol and shot herself. The conscience of a single spouse, also a chemist, says volumes to the rest of us. Lets hope she really could effect a never, but never, again.

Douglas Neckers, in addition to being a proud Hope alum, is an organic chemist, the McMaster distinguished professor emeritus and the founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University. He is also a former board chair of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y.

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Douglas Neckers: The disturbing history of chemical weapons - HollandSentinel.com

The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) is one of the oldest railways in the United States. It began life as the Brooklyn and Jamaica Rail Road (B&J), which was incorporated in 1832 to serve a 10-mile stretch between the City of Brooklyn and the village of Jamaica. However, while the B&J was still just in the planning stages, the railroads developers had ambitious plans for a train that ran the entire length of Long Island and connected New York to Boston via a ferry from Greenport. It was thought that this route would out-compete the other obvious route through southern Connecticut because that path would have to cross too many wide streams. By contrast, the LIRR does not have to cross any major streams on its way to Greenport.

With the plans in place for an island-spanning railroad, the Long Island Rail Road was chartered in 1834, and the first section between the Brooklyn waterfront and Jamaica opened in 1836. From there, the train tracks expanded eastward, reaching Hicksville in 1837, Deer Park in 1842, and finally Greenport in 1844. Operation between Brooklyn and Greenport began on July 29th, 1844, and reduced the travel time between New York and Boston from nearly fifteen hours down to eleven.

Long Islands relatively easy terrain and close connection to New York City meant that construction was fast and easy. Upon completion, the LIRR was one of the first major railroads in the United States. It started service only a few years after the countrys first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, commenced, and the system was virtually complete decades before the great railroad tycoons would amass their fortunes in the West. In fact, the name Long Island Rail Road is the oldest continually-used railway company name in the United States.

During the 1850s and 60s, the LIRR competed with other Long Island railways, such as the New York and Flushing (NY&F) and the Central Railroad of Long Island (CRRLI). The NY&F was the LIRRs first competitor, beginning operation in 1854 with a route between Flushing and a ferry terminal in Long Island City. The two companies competed for 13 years until NY&F was bought by the LIRR in 1867, eventually becoming the modern-day Port Washington branch. The Central Railroad of Long Island served many of the local villages in Nassau County that the LIRR bypassed on its way to Greenport, but by 1876 the LIRR had bought this railroad as well.

As the 1870s came to a close, the Long Island Rail Road had eliminated all of its major competitors and formed monopoly control over rail service throughout the peninsula. However, the economic recession of 1893-1897 caused ridership to plummet, and by the end of the 19th century, the LIRR itself was bought by the giant Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). The PRR owned thousands of miles of track from Chicago to New York and for a brief period even operated a special express service from Penn Station to Montauk, fully equipped with dining and lounge cars, for wealthy vacationers traveling to the Hamptons.

In 1905, the Pennsylvania Railroad used some of its mammoth fortune to modernize large portions of the Long Island Rail Road through electrification and grade-crossing elimination projects. The following three decades would be the LIRRs high point both in terms of service quality and the extent of track miles. Not only did the Pennsylvania Railroad electrify large sections of the LIRR, withthe New York City-area electrification project being completed in 1913, but PRR also completed major grade-crossing eliminations. For example, the Atlantic Branch of the LIRR, which runs between Downtown Brooklyn and Jamaica, had 50 grade crossings in 1897. By 1907 a combination of elevated viaducts and tunnels were built and the line became fully grade-separated.

A surprising relic from this era of railroad expansion was the LIRRs introduction of through-running service into Manhattan via the subway system. Between 1909 and 1917, Long Island Rail Road trains served the Financial District of Manhattan by traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge and into the J/Z subway tunnel to Broad Street. This highly modern level of railway integration exists today only in Tokyo, and it is one of the crowning achievements of their transit system, but an early version of it actually existed in New York almost 100 years earlier.

Unfortunately, beginning in the 1940s, the Long Island Rail Road began to face increasing competition from highways and the automobile, which created a downward spiral of declining ridership, decreasing revenue, and deteriorating service. During the postwar years, at least 22 different branches, spurs, and cutoffs of the LIRR were abandoned, sold off, or even burned down. Some of these branches, like parts of the Rockaway Beach Branch and the Manhattan Beach Branch, were incorporated into the New York City subway system as the A and B/Q trains respectively. However, other major rail corridors were abandoned altogether, like Whitestone Branch that served the Queens neighborhoods of College Point and Whitestone with passenger rail until 1938.

The rapid ascendency of the car after World War II caused cascading bankruptcies for rail companies across the United States. The New York region was not immune from this destruction, and in 1949, the Long Island Rail Road went bankrupt. Although it was still owned by the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, after the LIRRs bankruptcy the PRR stopped subsidizing the LIRR. This led to a series of deadly crashes, branch closures, and service reductions throughout the 1950s and 60s. Even the LIRRs majestic terminal station in Manhattan, the original Pennsylvania Station, was demolished to build Madison Square Garden. By 1970,the Penn Central Transportation Company, formerly thePennsylvania Railroad, filed for bankruptcy. Prior to this, the LIRR wasacquired by the MTA from the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1965 and incorporated into New Yorks regional transportation network

In the decades following the LIRRs incorporation into the MTA, the railroad has seen a gradual but steady resurgence. By and large, service stopped being cut by the 1970s and in some places even expanded. New electrification projects began in 1968, and by 1987 the Main Line had been electrified from Mineola to Ronkonkoma and the Port Jefferson Branch had been electrified from Hicksville to Huntington. Service slowly increased on the non-electric sections of rail too. For example, in 1963 there was one train running between Riverhead and Greenport per day; in 2018, there were four per day. Today the LIRR is the busiest commuter railroad in the country, serving almost 350,000 daily riders over 11 branches. And throughout its 188-year long history of mergers, expansions, and bankruptcies it has kept its original 1835 name: the Long Island Rail Road.

Curious about the history of the LIRR? Join us for the virtual talk, When New York Was Long Island: The Past and Present of the Long Island Railroad led by Gotham Center Writing Fellow and journalist Elizabeth Moore. The talk is free for Untapped New York Insiders (get your first month free with code JOINUS).

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The History of the Long Island Rail Road - Untapped New York