25. Februar

The largest of Verdun’s forts had been stripped of most of its guns and men. A handful of German soldiers climbed in and took it almost without a shot. The French did not get it back until October.

Some 200,000 workers were out, and crowds filled Nevsky Prospekt. At Znamenskaya Square a Cossack cut down a police officer: the troops were no longer reliable.

From Mogilev that evening Nicholas telegraphed General Khabalov, commander of the Petrograd military district, to end the disorders by the next day. Khabalov read it as an order to shoot.

With crowds in the streets and armed workers’ militias on call, President Edvard Beneš accepted a government led by Klement Gottwald’s Communists. Two weeks later the foreign minister Jan Masaryk was found dead beneath his bathroom window. It was the last free country in Eastern Europe to fall.

The first Winter Games in Scandinavia, and the first with a torch relay: the flame was lit in the hearth of the skiing pioneer Sondre Norheim at Morgedal. The speed skater Hjalmar Andersen won three golds on Bislett’s ice.

In a closed session at the end of the Twentieth Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev spent about four hours denouncing Stalin’s crimes and his cult of personality. The text leaked west within weeks and shook communists from Warsaw to Budapest.