They say that a hundred years is a long time, although apparently there is an English proverb that in a hundred years everything will be the same. Philosophically, 100 years is a fog in the long cycle of humanity’s existence. However, physically, it may be instructive to weigh the events of a century ago to understand the distance traveled – or not – and assess the progress made. At first glance, much has changed since 1922: industry, telephony, media, medicine, trade, communication, science, entertainment, travel and even climate. Yet, as shown by some of the other big events of that year, the more things change, the more likely they are to stay the same. It may be tempting to invest the dates with a little flexibility and compare two public health crises: the Spanish flu pandemic that broke out in 1918 at the end of World War I and the Covid outbreak that engulfed the world in 2020 and still is. continues. Progress has been mixed: While the world was able to launch a vaccine for Covid in record time, reducing its worldwide death toll, another oddly named crisis—monkeypox—has sprung on its heels. .
But, if we are to be rigid about the dates, two important developments of 1922 will emerge, which should give us some pause for thought. This is the year when signs of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 began to fall into place, with the Red Army finally occupying Vladivostok on the eastern coast of Russia’s vast landmass. More significantly, it was a year when the revolution’s architect Vladimir Lenin fell ill and his partner Joseph Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. This was significant because in 1922 Stalin deviated from Lenin’s grand plan for a federal union of states, which envisaged a transfer of power to satellite states, and of Soviet socialist republics with all power concentrated in the Moscow Politburo. A centralized federation was formed. After the late 1990s, when these states gained independence, Russian jugglers are on the move again, trying to re-establish central control over them, first in Crimea and now in Ukraine. The second major development in 1922 was the hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany, whose currency rose from 320 points to a dollar in the first half of 1922 to 7,400 points by the end of the year, resulting in widespread unemployment and general poverty. It was then that Adolf Hitler became the undisputed leader of the Nazi Party and, taking advantage of the economic crisis and the conflicts of the World Wars at Versailles, began to gather popular support for the gradual putsch. In India, the gruesome Chauri Chaura incident of 1922 strengthened Mahatma Gandhi’s resolve in favor of a non-violent movement to achieve independence.
But, as always, the healing touch came from art and a change in cultural understanding. The year saw two landmark publications: James Joyce publishing his stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses and TS Eliot’s 434-line poem Wasteland, which firmly established modernist theory in Western literature. It was also the year that Gandhi pleaded guilty to a charge of sedition for his writing, Section 124A, “perhaps designed to suppress the liberties of the citizen among the political classes of the Indian Penal Code.” His works certainly live up to the hope that art and culture will continue to provide us with a therapeutic touch in these appalling times of war, inflation and health insecurity.
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