I won’t be really wrong if I say that it takes a lot to make a history class a truly remembered one. In most cases, it depends on a subject, professor and his teaching style. In my case, I had one very good professor at NYU who taught “Contemporary World” class. The professor never had a lecture where he would sit behind a desk while reading a history book to his students. On the contrarily, our discussions were active and sometimes provocative. The way the professor was explaining things was like a documentary movie: full of facts, numbers and yet colorful and memorable.
Two semesters later, I find a similar style while reading newspaper articles in connection with various historical subjects. A good newspaper article allows a reader to feel urgency and momentum and that is what attracts attention of reader. Thus, here are some excerpts from an article that appeared in “The Atlanta Constitution” on August 19, 1919. The title is “Minsk Discards Bolshevik Yoke” and it gives you a glimpse of an ordinary life in Minsk back in 1919.

Minsk. White Russia. August 17 (Delayed.)—After many months of terrorization under Bolshevist rule Minsk is beginning to resume normal life again. Groups are conversing on street corners and in doorways of houses breathing the atmosphere of relief and in every section of the population whether Jewish or Polish shopkeeper or Russian peasants and workmen one finds the same deep inexpressible thankfulness at deliverance from a government which, while pretending to give freedom and equal rights to all, actually exercised a tyranny far greater than anything known under the czars.

Personal liberties were destroyed
It must be admitted that in outward appearances the town and its population do not make a bad impression. Food certainly exists, though the operation of the Bolshevist system or rather its breakdown has resulted in perfectly impossible prices. But these facts admitted, there is nothing else to be said in favor of a regime that destroyed all personal liberty and made the humblest person feel that neither life nor property were either safe.
“To the dogs, death.” These words spoken by a woman as she kicked the dead body of a secretary of the soviet, as it still lay in the streets where he had been shot by Polish soldiers, express the bitter hatred of the people for Bolshevism. The Jewess who was president of the local “extraordinary tribunal for combating the counter revolution” and who signed the death warrants of the miserable persons who were executed almost daily was literally torn to pieces by the mob as she was being taken through the streets. A single word of criticism of the government was sufficient cause for arrest as a counterrevolutionary. When once the victim was arrested, his fate was unknown. Number of such persons is being released from Minsk prison. Over three hundred were deported to Bobrisk and Smolensk: certainly hundreds perished….

Peasants are rich

…Manufacturing and Industry have broken down, mainly, I believe, from a lack of transport: coal and other raw materials are unobtainable. There is plenty of forest land round Minsk, yet the price of wood was twelve thousand rubles. Other current prices are pound bread, 38 rubles; meat, 75 rubles; butter, 200 rubles.
…There has been one issue of bread on bread cards to the citizens since last Easter. On that occasion they received half a pound per head. Citizens of the third and fourth categories received none.
…Yet people have been coming here from Petrograd and Moscow in the hope of finding food for Minsk, which is regarded as the land of plenty.
…People were also drawn to Minsk by the hopes of its delivery by the Poles.

Propaganda
…Propaganda was the strong point with the Bolshevists. The town was placarded with posters, representing the destruction of capital by labor. Bolshevists soldiers shown threatening with a bayonet a fat gentleman in a waistcoat cowering behind cases of war munitions; in another the Russian people are shown floating to safety through a raging sea on a book labeled Karl Marx. Lectures were given daily in the square on the iniquities of capitalism; a special information bureau provided a prolific supply of news about revolutionary strikes in England, the downfall of Kolchak’s army and pogroms by the poles in Vilna.

In preparing for evacuation the soviet published a proclamation declaring that they would meet the white terror- that is, the advance of the Polish army, the red terror. In fulfillment of the threat the mass executions referred to above took place, and on leaving they carried off a large number of hostages, many of whom were women whose husbands and sons are fighting in the Polish army…

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