Bevin, Ernest

Born March 9, 1881 in Winsford (Somerset). He remained an orphan when he was not even seven years old. He left school at 11, worked on a farm. In 1894 he moved to Bristol , where he worked as a truck driver. He later became a Baptist preacher.

By 1914 he became one of the three leading organizers of the nationwide trade union movement. In 1918, he ran for parliament from the Labor Party . In 1921, he initiated the union of transport workers' unions and the creation of a national union of transport and unskilled workers (in 1922-1940 its general secretary). As secretary general of the union, Bevin did not object to the defeat of the general strike of 1926 , although he considered it poorly prepared. In 1930, Bevin became a member of the Macmillan Commission on the National Financial and Banking System and in 1938 took an active part in consultations with the government on rearmament issues.

For several years on the eve of World War II, he opposed pacifists in the ranks of the Labor Party and in 1935 secured the resignation of their leader in parliament, J. Lansbury. Bevin was an opponent of the Munich Agreement and a supporter of the armament of Great Britain. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he was elected to parliament and took the post of Minister of Labor in the coalition government of W. Churchill .

After the war, resigned to take part in the 1945 election. C. Attlee became Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Labor Government and participated with him in the Potsdam Conference of the Three Powers.

In 1946, the eminent Russian emigrant orientalist V.F. Minorsky made a political statement condemning Ernest Bevin for his solidarity with Turkish Prime Minister Sarajoglu that, allegedly, “there are no Armenians in the regions of Kars and Ardagan ”. Minorsky recalled Hitler’s famous words: “Who today remembers the massacre of Armenians ?!” and indicated that the memory of mankind is not so short and that it remembers what the Young Turks did with the Armenians.

Bevin was a supporter of maintaining the rapidly decaying British Empire and a tough foreign policy. In an effort to prevent Soviet expansion into Europe during the development of the Cold War, he worked closely with the United States and supported Marshall 's plan to restore the economies of Europe destroyed by the war.

He took an active part in the creation of the Western European Union (Brussels Pact 1948) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ) in 1949. His proposal to create a federal state of Jews and Arabs in Palestine was rejected by both Jews and Arabs.

He died in London on April 14, 1951.

• Chanter, Alan; Peter Chen WW2DB: Ernest Bevin (Neopr.) (2007). Date of treatment July 20, 2011. Archived on May 14, 2012.