PETROGRAD, RUSSIA: It is a lurid affair. The press, though heavily censored, have a field day. A popular hate figure–a holy man accused of hijacking the imperial family, cuckolding the Tsar and leading Russia to ruin–has been murdered by one of Russia’s most prominent aristocrats. Rasputin’s mutilated body is laid to rest in the foundations of a new church at Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar’s estate just outside Petrograd. Nicholas Romanov is there, his German-born wife Alexandra, and their four daughters (their son Alexei is too ill to attend). Boards are placed on the ground to protect their clothes from the frozen mud. Alexandra is in tears.
Russia is in crisis. The price of bread–and apples and cabbage and underwear and everything else–keeps going up. The soldiers’ boots are worn out. There are rumours of a possible palace coup. The French Ambassador is told of plans to assassinate the Tsarina.
Nicholas is tired. He prays fervently for salvation.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND: A man with narrow eyes, hobnail hiking boots, and clothes that smell faintly of sausage–he lives with his wife above a butcher’s shop–fills in a questionnaire from the city authorities. Name and profession: ‘Ulyanov, lawyer and writer’. Wealth: none. Ulyanov confirms that he is not a deserter from one of Europe’s armies, nor a draft-dodger. Not entirely untruthfully he reports his income as coming from ‘literary and journalistic work for a Petrograd publisher’. The authorities grant the Ulyanovs leave to remain until the end of 1918.
Vladimir Ulyanov–whose wife Nadya, former lover Inessa and political intimates call him by his patronymic Ilyich–is a familiar face in the narrow streets of Zurich. A little eccentric, perhaps, but no more than any of the other foreigners in the city. The Ulyanovs’ neighbours include a former German soldier and an Austrian actor with a marmalade cat. All seem to be escaping something. Zurich is full of writers and performers and cranks and crackpots looking for a safe haven in the middle of a war.
The Russian couple live a spartan existence. They eat horsemeat to save money. To judge by Vladimir’s daily routine alone–to the library at nine in the morning, home for a quick lunch between midday and one, and then back to the library again till six–one might at first mistake him for being an academic (albeit on forced sabbatical, apparently). Pretty much the only time Ulyanov is not in the library is Thursday afternoon, when it closes early. On those days, the Russian couple are to be seen walking up the Zürichberg, the low, wooded mountain outside town. Vladimir purchases hazelnut chocolate bars wrapped in blue paper to share with Nadya. On the way down, in season, the two carry mushrooms and berries foraged from the mountainside.
But is he really so harmless? Look closer. The hobnail boots suggest a rougher past than a university lecture hall or the well-appointed offices of a publishing house. There is something quite worldly about him, quite physical, perhaps even a little coarse. His clothes are made of thick material, as if they might be his only set. And then there are those occasional flashes of intensity–those eyes, again–when Vladimir exudes a sense of inner purpose, unfathomable to the outsider, quite magnetic. He is always in a great hurry to get wherever he is going, even when just walking through town. His wife calls him her ‘Arctic wolf’, prowling within the bounds of polite society but always striving for the wilderness. He rarely seems fully relaxed, even when tucked up at home. The slightest sound can set him off. He can be tyrannically impatient with the world at times. When he goes to the theatre, which is not often, he and Nadya tend to leave after the first act.
As a younger man, Vladimir Ulyanov was quite a sportsman: a walker, a swimmer, a hardy (if not particularly skilled) fisherman prepared to wade perilously deep into Siberian rivers to try and catch a few small fish, a mountain hiker and keen hunter, a skater and skier. He is still a man who finds a winter without snow and ice not a real winter at all. And winter is his favourite season. He likes the Swiss mountains because the cold frosty air reminds him of Russia. He believes in mens sana in corpore sano–a healthy mind in a healthy body. He once thought that ten minutes’ gymnastics every morning was the key. More recently he has turned to cycling to keep fit and burn off his excess energy. But his body is less cooperative than it used to be. He has headaches now; he sleeps badly. He is often short-tempered. ‘It’s the brain’, a doctor tells him, when asked where the trouble lies. Vladimir is forty-seven. His father Ilya–hence Ilyich–was dead at fifty-four. What restless, anxious thoughts fill that bare skull of his?
The more one looks at this Vladimir Ulyanov, the more one digs into his past and certainly the more one listens to what he has to say, the less innocent he becomes. On the city’s registration questionnaire, he writes that he is a ‘political émigré’. Well, Russia produces plenty of those. But what kind of émigré? In revolutionary circles, he is known by the pseudonym Lenin, a name he picked up after returning from a stint in internal Russian exile in Siberia. Is he a paper tiger, or could Vladimir Ulyanov, aka Lenin, be dangerous? There is perhaps something a little sinister about him when he pulls his face into that leering half-smile of his, full of subtly demonic charm. Then there is the chilling way he narrows his gaze into a squint when he looks at people sometimes, as if he were actively sizing them up for the revolutionary judgement day. Then again, it could just be short-sightedness.
At the Zurich public library, Vladimir terrorises the staff with prodigious requests for works of German philosophy, revolutionary socialist theory and economic history. He admires the organisational efficiency of the Swiss in meeting his demands through their extraordinary system of inter-library loans. This would never work in Russia, Lenin sighs. There, one could not get hold of such books at all. He piles them on his desk like a barricade, warily eyeing anyone who might take them away from him. He fills notebook after notebook with agitated observations on what he has read. Occasionally, the scribbling stops and the squinty Russian mutters something inaudible under his breath.
The muttering generally happens when Vladimir thinks he has caught out some fellow Marxist in a misinterpretation of the theories of Karl Marx. For the man his political followers call Lenin, this is a frequent enough occurrence and an infuriating one. He feels himself to be in constant battle with those who do not understand Marxist theory the way he does. Lenin’s own theoretical-historical-economic postulates, which his library studies serve to buttress and to elaborate, boil down to three. First, capitalism must eventually collapse in social revolution and reform attempts are, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a betrayal of the workers. Second, the majority are stupid and need a correctly indoctrinated minority to lead them: not a stance calculated to win many friends perhaps, but certainly consistent with Vladimir’s own ability to be outnumbered even in avowedly socialist gatherings–Lenin has always been a splitter amongst splittists. Third, the world war–understood as an expression of the inherent tendencies of capitalist business interests–has created a revolutionary situation ripe for exploitation: so long as middle-class pacifists don’t screw it up by settling for a bourgeois peace, and as long as the proletariat stop listening to patriotic socialists and start turning their weapons against their masters, rather than against each other. In the glowing embers of the imperialist-capitalist conflict, Lenin spies the spark needed for a European civil war, a class war, and with it: revolution!
The first step to victory is defeat all round–defeat for the French with their colonial empire across North Africa, defeat for the British with their imperialist designs across the globe, defeat for the autocratic regime of the Russian Tsar, defeat for the German Kaiser, defeat for the American business interests inexorably pushing their country further into the cauldron. Can a lose–lose scenario be arranged from which social revolution might spring? Vladimir’s ears prick up at any sign that his message is getting through. Every encounter is an opportunity to make his case for the revolutionary necessity of defeat all round. Over the summer he is, in his wife Nadya’s memorable phrase, like a ‘cat after lard’ when he identifies a soldier recovering from tuberculosis staying in the same small guesthouse, halfway up a mountain near St Gallen. He tries repeatedly to engage the patient in political chit-chat, asking him leading questions such as whether he agrees about the predatory character of the war. In Zurich, Vladimir is delighted when his wife relates to him the comment of one of the other women huddled around a gas stove that maybe soldiers should start attacking their own governments.
A flow of insistent questions and hectoring demands issue constantly from Vladimir’s pen to his followers (not many, these days). His letters to fellow Bolsheviks–the name Lenin gives to his faction of the Russian left–are generally brief and unembellished, written in the shorthand of someone who expects his correspondent to immediately grasp their correctness, importance and urgency. They overflow with snap judgements on the shortcomings of others. To Lenin, the world is full of hypocrites. He is particularly disdainful of a group of former political associates known as the Mensheviks and a man called Kautsky, Marx’s literary executor, who Lenin thinks has gone soft. For Lenin, calling someone a ‘Kautsky-ite’ is the highest term of abuse. He has no time for what he calls, with visceral hatred, opportunists. He considers the mainstream socialist movement to be full of them.
His correspondence is full of frustration about the state of things: there is not enough money, not enough translators, not enough of anything to do a proper job of revolution. In January, Vladimir suggests his former lover Inessa Armand have a dress made with a special pouch in which the last remaining Bolshevik party funds in Switzerland can be hidden and transported abroad if need be. Conspiracy is a way of life. He is hungry for information–from Russia, from Germany, from anywhere. In Zurich, he has made himself an authority on the factional struggles within the Swiss socialist movement. When a Russian prisoner of war escapes from Germany by swimming across Lake Constance, Lenin is keen to pump him for his impressions. Impatient, insistent exclamation marks pepper his letters like gunshot pellets.
Occasionally, summoning all his prestige as Lenin, the veteran of the Russian revolution of 1905, Vladimir gathers together Zurich’s anti-war socialists in one of the city’s bars. Naturally, he tends to dominate such events, speaking for an hour or so himself and then announcing that there is no time left for questions. Moderates accuse Vladimir of running head first into a brick wall with his revolution-at-any-cost approach. His embrace of violence as a political necessity strikes some as overdone. Who does Ulyanov speak for anyway? His Russian networks are largely blown (a couple of senior Bolsheviks turn out to be informants for the Tsar). Lenin is hardly a household name amongst the Petrograd proletariat. Who is he to lecture the socialists of Western Europe? After some initial success–as many as forty men and women crammed into the bar–Nadya notes a thinning-out in subsequent meetings, until there are just a couple of Poles and Russians left staring morosely into their beers.
In January, Vladimir gives a talk to a group of young Swiss socialists at the Zurich Volkshaus, twelve years to the day since the outbreak of revolution in 1905. He tries to arouse their enthusiasm, and instruct them in the lessons to be drawn from his experience. Yet there is an ambivalence here. ‘The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war’, he says, ‘engender a revolutionary mood.’ But when will that erupt into revolution? In six months? A year? Ten years? ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution’, Vladimir admits, ‘but I can, I believe, express the confident hope that the youth which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement of Switzerland, and of the whole world, will be fortunate enough not only to fight, but also to win.’ Will revolution happen within his lifetime? The impatient revolutionary sounds uncertain.
THE FRONT LINE: It used to be simple to draw. A line on the map from the North Sea to the Alps in the west, slicing through Europe in the east, and dividing Italy and Serbia from Austria in the south. Things get more complicated in Africa, and in the Middle East, of course, where the Ottoman Empire fights as ally to the Germans and the Austrians.
But where is the front line now? In this war, it is everywhere. It runs through towns and cities, across rivers, and through mountains. The front line is on the factory floor and in the fields. It is in the chemistry laboratories where scientists develop new ways of making stretched resources go a little further and invent new products to kill the enemy or prevent disease. The front line is in Europe’s tax offices, in war bonds departments, and in the marketplaces of global finance, where money is borrowed to fund the war (increasingly, in America). It is in recruiting centres from Bombay to Brisbane, where Europe’s empires try to persuade their subject peoples to join their struggle, shipping thousands off from Asia and Africa to fight the enemy. The front line is in the human mind, where the horror of war is in continual combat with the dream of victory. This war is constant. It never stops. Everyone is involved. Armies and navies are just the leading edge of whole societies in conflict.
There is little fighting of the old-fashioned variety this winter. Long periods in the trenches with nothing to do are punctuated by sudden, shocking violence. An Italian soldier sitting on the front line with Austria–Hungary just north of Trieste writes in his diary: ‘snow, cold, infinite boredom’. Rations have been cut again. Stewed salt cod and potatoes for supper on Christmas Day; and a miserly half a dozen panettone to share amongst over two hundred soldiers. Cholera is spreading. The soldiers have fleas. Men returning from leave mutter about chaos back home. ‘A government of national impotence’.
BUDAPEST, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: In the first days of 1917 the city of Budapest nurses an imperial hangover. It is a week since the newly elevated head of the Habsburg line, Emperor Charles I of Austria, was rushed from Vienna to be crowned a second time, as King Charles IV of Hungary, adding another royal title to the gazette of lesser honorifics inherited from his dead great-uncle, the bristly Franz Joseph.
Amidst the toasts to tradition and the oaths of blood fealty from Charles’s varied subjects–Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, Austrians, Romanians, Croatians–journalists huddle around field telephones to call in their latest coronation story. Film cameras whirr and click, recording the scene for the empire’s newsreels, while a Hungarian Jew who will later make his name in Hollywood directs the film crews this way and that to catch the essence of the moment. One camera’s gaze settles for an instant on the lolloping figure of a plump bishop, mounted uneasily on horseback, clinging on to his crozier for dear life while a soldier draws his horse past the cheering crowds. Another captures an undulating sea of hats–top hats, bowler hats, felt hats, fur hats, Tyrolean hats, fedoras, military caps and unseasonal straw boaters–as varied as the peoples of the empire. The war wounded are nowhere to be seen. For half an instant, it feels like 1914 all over again. Charles trots on horseback through the streets of Budapest, his moustache clipped in the modern fashion, smiling and nodding brightly in all directions, followed by a posse of slouching nobles with short legs and thick fur mantles, looking for all the world as if they have just stepped out of a Holbein group portrait. He swears to uphold the constitutional bargains at the heart of the old empire, whereby the Hungarians manage one half of his estate and Vienna manages the other half, and the Emperor sits on top trying to hold the whole thing together.
Budapest’s streets are quieter now. The clip of cavalry hooves on cobblestone has been replaced by the more familiar sounds of daily life. The decorations which festooned the procession route, prepared in great haste by the scenery department of the Budapest opera, have been taken down. Police reports on the public response have come back: ‘too much pomp’, the citizens of Vienna grumble. Plans for a huge statue of Franz Joseph to be cast from captured Russian cannons proceed slowly for lack of funds. The dignitaries who travelled to Budapest to see the Austrian Emperor’s second coronation as King of Hungary have now returned home. They are bombarded with questions about the new King-Emperor. One question above all: will he bring peace?
Charles is twenty-nine years old: a handsome man, but with a weak face, more like a character from Proust than a leader of an empire at war. (His wife Zita is not quite twenty-five.) It is three years since the assassination of his cousin Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo unloosed this war. It was never meant to last this long. Charles now proclaims his desire for peace with honour to save his creaking empire, the product of several hundred years of dynastic accumulation, an unwieldy structure in which a kaleidoscope of nationalities live in moderate happiness under the Habsburg Crown, and which people have been trying to reform for years, but cannot quite work out how.
But peace cannot just be wished. Success depends on the willingness of others to play along–both one’s enemies and one’s allies. Yet Charles’s most powerful ally, the German Kaiser Wilhelm, feels no deference to his junior partner-in-war. With each passing month, Austria’s fate is bound tighter and tighter to that of Germany. Without a negotiated peace, what started as Austria–Hungary’s war is likely to end up either as Germany’s victory–with Austria reduced to vassal status–or with the collapse of both. Charles fears the possibility of imperial break-up or revolution amongst his peoples. Demands for independence have been growing for years. The war has made them louder.
There is a second current of revolution running through Charles’s empire in the first days of 1917: an intellectual revolution, a revolution of the mind. For now, that revolution is self-proclaimed. It exists on paper, amongst the initiated. The inner cabal–somewhere between a study group and a secret society (their leader thinks of them as his ‘adopted children’)–denote their cause symbolically: with the Greek letter Ψ, or psi. More widely–which is not widely at all outside the hospital ward and the university–this revolution is known as ‘psychoanalysis’. The revolution’s father figure, based in Vienna, refers to the cause as a Geistesrichtung, a spiritual movement.
His disciples exchange a constant stream of letters, gossiping about patients and swapping insights. Topics of enquiry are varied. Karl Abraham, a German army doctor serving at a Prussian military hospital, takes time between tending to the war wounded to finish his paper on premature ejaculation and its relationship to early childhood. In Budapest, Sándor Ferenczi struggles with a study of the symbology of castration. Last winter a series of public lectures were organised in Vienna on the subject of psychoanalysis. It is said one of Emperor Charles’s cousins popped in to hear a few.
In January, the revolution’s latest front is opened in an article in Budapest’s leading literary periodical entitled ‘An Obstacle in the Path of Psychoanalysis’. It makes for uncomfortable reading for the city’s literati. Their pupils dilate. Their synapses flash. Ink smudges onto sweaty fingertips. The chief impediment to the spread of psychoanalysis, the article proclaims accusingly, is ourselves. It has always been thus. It is our self-love, our narcissism, which makes us refuse the genius of the greatest of our scientists. First it was Copernicus, who had the temerity to tell humans that the sun and stars did not turn around us, but us around them. Then it was Darwin, who upturned the aggrandising idea that God made humans in His image to rule the earth, but showed rather that we are mere animals, super-brained monkeys in three-piece suits, evolved but not separated from our genetic forebears.
Now is the hour of the third revolution against which human narcissism rages, blindly and in vain. And this revolution is the most disturbing blow of all to human self-regard, for it shows that we are not masters even of ourselves. A deep breath, a sip of water. Budapest’s trams scrape and rumble by outside, unheard. The readers’ pulses race. The mind, they learn, is a ‘labyrinth of impulses, corresponding with the multiplicity of instincts, antagonistic to one another and incompatible’. There is no coronation ceremony in the world which can change the facts: control is an illusion, order is fleeting. ‘Thoughts emerge suddenly without one’s knowing where they came from’ and, once brought to mind, these ‘alien guests’ cannot be so easily removed. Such is the terrifying image conjured into life by the article’s author, the man most closely associated with the psychoanalytic creed: the conscious and unconscious are held in constant tension, our minds are forever simmering with psychical revolt. This is a conflict that no earthly peace deal can resolve.
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN: The Nobel Prize Committee receives a letter from an Austrian physicist recommending a former patent clerk in Switzerland, now working at one of the German Kaiser’s most prestigious scientific institutes in Berlin, for the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Over the next few days, several more letters pile up suggesting the young Albert Einstein, still only in his mid-thirties, for the award.
PLESS CASTLE, SILESIA, THE GERMAN REICH: The German Kaiser is in no mood for compromise. ‘The war’, he explains, ‘is a struggle between two Weltanschauungen, the Teutonic-German for decency, justice, loyalty and faith, genuine humanity, truth and real freedom; against the worship of mammon, the power of money, pleasure, land-hunger, lies, betrayal, deceit.’ He blames his enemies for the war’s continuation. They have rejected his latest (thoroughly disingenuous) peace initiative. He writes to nervous Emperor Charles: ‘before God and before humankind the enemy governments will carry alone the awful responsibility for whatever further terrible sacrifices may now come to pass’. The matter is out of his hands.
In a conference room deep in a medieval castle the Kaiser and a few military men take a fateful step. Germany is suffering a slow suffocation at the hands of a British naval blockade. Its children are starving. Yet Britain is free to receive imports of food and weapons from around the world, both from the empire but also from supposedly neutral countries such as the United States. As the generals see it, Germany could disrupt this flow and force the war to an end in months by using submarines.
There is a catch. For maximum effectiveness of the campaign, submarine captains must be empowered to strike without warning and without mercy when they spot a target on the high seas. Fire first, ask questions later. They cannot wait to check the ship’s nationality or the content of its hold. Law and morality must be set aside. To engage in such a war will spark condemnation. It will upset American public opinion. But it is a calculated risk. ‘Things cannot be worse than they are now’, the group is told by Field Marshal Hindenburg, who, with General Ludendorff, runs Germany’s war.
Wilhelm has hesitated for months. He plays at being the decisive war leader. The truth is that he is never sure what he should do until he has done it. The generals try to sideline him as much as possible, leaving him to flitter-flutter around in his bubble of hunting excursions, meetings with foreign leaders and road trips along the Rhine. But on this issue, the Kaiser cannot be ignored. The generals resort to another technique: seducing him with the promise of a great victory achieved by the Kaiser’s very own navy, and simultaneously dropping broad hints that they will resign if he does not do what they ask. It works.
There is one final obstacle: the Kaiser’s appointee as the nation’s civilian leadership, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. But once the Kaiser has been persuaded, the Chancellor is presented with a fait accompli. This is Germany’s ‘last card’, he warns the generals. What if it goes wrong? The military men push back: ‘energetic’ and ‘ruthless’ methods are now needed to bring about victory before the Austrians start to fall apart. ‘We must spare the troops a second battle of the Somme’, Ludendorff tells the Chancellor. And if America joins the war? Hindenburg is confident: ‘we can take care of that’. The war will be over before any Americans arrive.
The Kaiser signs the order that evening. He affects a strange insouciance as to its likely consequence: America’s entry into the war. The order will come into effect on the first day of February. It will not be made public until the day before, the last day of January. Even the Austrians are not told of the final decision until it is too late to rescind.
VIENNA, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: Outside a few learned societies and the local Jewish welfare organisation, the name Sigmund Freud signifies little in the Austrian capital in 1917. Though a true son of the Habsburg Empire–a Moravian-born Jew who has made it in the capital–Freud’s fame, as he himself puts it laconically, begins at the border. The first time he feels he might really one day be famous is in 1909, when he catches a cabin steward reading one of his books on an ocean liner crossing from Europe to America.
Freud’s outward style of life is that of an ever-so-slightly eccentric gentilhomme of his generation (university class of 1881) and milieu (a medical professional). His daily schedule is regular: writing, hourly slots with patients, a light lunch, a brisk walk, and letter-writing before bed. Like Lenin, he lives above a butcher’s shop, though his spacious family apartment at Berggasse 19 compares quite favourably with Vladimir and Nadya’s spartan digs in Zurich. Freud has achieved sufficient prosperity to be able to spend reasonably freely on a few particular private passions: books, his family, holidays in Italy or in the Alps, cigars, ancient artefacts. But, generally, he is careful with money. He invests his savings in Austro-Hungarian state bonds and life insurance. He rarely drinks. He never goes to the opera, preferring silent contemplation in his study to the noise of music. (There is no piano in the Freud apartment and the doctor’s study is situated as far as possible from the rooms of his musically inclined sister-in-law, ‘Tante’ Minna.) Though an avid card-player, Freud sticks to what he knows: the classic establishment game of tarock. The value he most admires, and demands, is loyalty.
Freud is far from being a political firebrand. He takes pleasure from the coincidence that Victor Adler, the leader of the Austrian socialists and one-time correspondent of Lenin, used to live at the same address as the Freuds. The fact that Victor’s son Friedrich is currently in police custody, charged with assassinating the Austrian Minister-President at a popular Viennese restaurant the previous autumn, adds a certain frisson to the connection. But Freud’s own radical heroes are of the past. His son Oli is named after Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Parliamentary forces in England’s Civil War. Wide-eyed modern revolutionaries–too certain of their right to remake the world in the reflection of their ideals, too unforgiving of human nature–are foreign to Freud’s sensibilities. The concept of the revolutionary masses scares him. He calls the French ‘the people of psychical epidemics, of historical mass convulsions, unchanged since Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame’. Freud prefers the English.
Not that he is immune to the gusts of the popular mood. In the emotional atmosphere of the summer of 1914, as his daughter Anna rushed back from an unfortunately timed trip to England, Freud briefly metamorphosed from a Viennese man of the world into an Austro-Hungarian patriot. As Austrian soldiers tramped off to face the Russians and the Serbs, Freud declared himself willing to donate his libido to their fight. (For a Freudian, there is no greater gift.) That was three years ago. These days Freud ruminates daily on the savage impulses war has unloosed. He takes no pleasure in having been proved correct: the war has set the stage for humankind’s psychic dramas to play out en masse. Individuals have been transformed into stampeding hordes, the surface of civilisation has been peeled back. The sickness is deeper than even he had feared.
In photographs, Freud often appears rather severe. Perhaps it is the war which has made him that way: the lack of food, the cold. Or perhaps it is just age. His face is so much gaunter than it used to be, the skin drawn tightly over his bony features, the all-seeing eyes peering out with such intensity. (Some think Freud looks like Moses, a conceit in which he secretly delights, and occasionally plays up to.) Even in these difficult times, however, a smile can often be seen playing on Freud’s lips, in the expectation of the punchline of some new joke or other. (Like most Viennese he considers humour an essential attitude to take towards a world at once tragic, comic and absurd.) Conscientious on matters of physical appearance, Freud dresses neatly in sober fashions that would once have marked him out as a man of style, but which now reveal him only as a man of substance. When seeing patients, he appears, rather stiffly, in a frock coat. It is on holidays in the mountains that Freud truly lets himself go, donning shorts, braces and a Tyrolean feathered hat.
Freud’s eccentricities are a combination of the daft, the amusing and the superstitious: he hates umbrellas, is fascinated with porcupines, finds railway timetables impossible to understand and wonders if there is something in numerology (as a result of which he fears he will die at the age of sixty-one, or else in the month of February 1918). He is at his happiest when mushroom-picking; he is reputed to be able to pick out particularly promising patches of forest from a fast-moving train. When asked to recommend a good read Freud plumps for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. When Freud decides to initiate a select few of his closest associates as guardians of the sacred flame of psychoanalysis–the ‘inner circle’, some call it–he uses the gift of ancient seal rings to consummate the arrangement. Here is a man who does not shy away from the symbolic gesture.
Somewhere in the artefacts of the ancient world he senses the outlines of the basic drives and fears and beliefs which inhabit us all, which modern civilisation has tried so hard to suppress. He is an inveterate hoarder. Every surface of his study is covered with Roman busts, clay pots, ancient Chinese figurines or statuettes of winged Greek deities, primed for flight. His study is his private imaginarium, a place to commune with the past. It is also, of course, the room where Freud’s patients are psychoanalysed, the doctor making infrequent notes and odd remarks and asking occasional questions while his patients lie on a rather elegant chaise longue and empty their minds at a hefty rate of Austrian crowns an hour. High on one wall, and almost always in Freud’s line of sight, hangs a lithograph of the great French neurologist Charcot, under whom Freud studied in the 1880s, demonstrating hypnosis to a class at La Salpêtrière. There is a brass spittoon on the floor. On Freud’s desk sits a curious porcupine paperweight he was given in America.
America. Now there’s a conundrum to break one’s head against, as much of a conundrum for Freud as for the Kaiser and his men. In many ways Freud would be most happy if America could be somehow made to disappear, sinking like the Titanic into the icy Atlantic, never to be heard from again. If physical removal is impossible, Freud would like it very much if he himself could just forget the existence of that brash, rich, uncivilised country (and the place where he had the worst attack of indigestion he has ever experienced in his life). And yet, like a disturbing thought one cannot quite shake off, America is always there lurking at the back of Freud’s mind, and occasionally brought to the fore by news from family members across the Atlantic. Like many complex relationships in life, this one began with childhood infatuation: a visit to the American pavilion at the Vienna World Fair in 1873 and an intense curiosity in the facsimiles of the letters of President Lincoln on display. The young Freud, it is said, learned the Gettysburg Address by heart. As a newly minted graduate, he briefly considered moving there. It was only much later, well into middle age, that Freud finally consummated things by visiting the country. In 1909 he spent an entire week-long Atlantic crossing to America joyfully psychoanalysing his fellow passenger and erstwhile friend, Carl Jung.
Both relationships have since soured. Jung is an apostate, a Judas, these days. As for America, Freud has taken a violent dislike to it. He views Americans’ love of money as a misdirection of natural human sexual urges. He worries that if psychoanalysis ends up being viewed as a sham medicine, it will be because of the New York hucksters simply calling themselves psychoanalysts–and then trying to make a quick buck from fleecing gullible Americans with the kind of voodoo remedies that would make a witch doctor blush. In America, Freud finds, his work is either crudely and inaccurately popularised in breathless articles in Good Housekeeping and Everybody’s Magazine or else puritanically condemned, even by well-known physicians and psychologists, as ‘filth’ liable to corrupt public morality.
The whole business of ‘filth’ pains him. For, whatever his theories as to the origins of neurosis in childhood sexuality or the primordial role of what he terms the Lustprinzip, the pleasure principle, in driving human behaviour, Freud is far from being a bohemian or a sex addict. Rather he is a devoted middle-class family man, a good son to his ageing mother and a self-conscious patriarch to his children. Though the physical passions of youth have long subsided, Freud is rarely separated for long from his wife Martha, except in the holidays. (When a student in Paris, Freud found himself constantly turning around on street corners at the imagined sound of his beloved Martha calling out his name, so ever-present was she in his thoughts.) Some say Sigmund has eyes for her sister Minna, but the tittle-tattle doesn’t seem to bother him. Freud is forever publicly anxious and privately solicitous of his children’s health and safety. His letters to them often consist of little more than brief expressions of affection, followed by hungry demands for information.
In early 1917 it is the twenty-one-year-old Anna Freud, sick with the flu, who most exercises the doctor’s paternal instincts. Freud organises her dispatch to a clinic in the nearby Wiener Wald, cross at himself for not being able to secure a room in a more salubrious sanatorium in the mountains. Freud’s other daughters–Mathilde and Sophie–give no cause for concern. A greater worry are the three boys of the Freud family, all engaged in the Austro-Hungarian war effort in one way or another. ‘It is better not to think in advance about the painful experiences that this spring will bring for the world’, Freud writes to his friend Karl Abraham, imagining the next offensive which must surely come. But, for the moment, Freud’s sons all seem to be out of harm’s way: Martin in Vienna, Ernst recovering from tonsillitis in the Tyrol and Oli, a tunnel engineer, still in training in Cracow. (Earlier in the war, a dream of his son Martin’s death at the front troubled Freud deeply, sparking bouts of furious self-analysis as the theorist of wish fulfilment tried to uncover what hidden desires his dream revealed.) Freud keeps photos of all his children in his study. A group portrait of the proud father with his soldier-sons hangs on one wall. Nothing could be more bürgerlich.
Freud’s critics accuse him of manipulation of his patients, or even dabbling in the dark arts of the occult. It is true that Freud has tried out hypnosis (as taught by his teachers in Paris). The technique of free association, essentially persuading patients to blurt out the first thing that comes into their head when Freud gravely utters some such word as Schnurrbart (moustache) or Eisenbahntunnel (railway tunnel), strikes many as too suggestive. But how else to discover the secrets the conscious mind seeks to keep under lock and key? As for Freud’s curiosity in the paranormal, his interest is not so uncommon, even for men of science. When quizzed on such matters as telepathy, he is fond of misquoting Hamlet: ‘There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy’.
Freud’s lifetime has shown how previously fantastical ideas can turn into great discoveries or technological innovations: the transmission of radio signals through the empty air, the harnessing of invisible rays to peer inside the human body. In 1913, Freud’s natural inquisitiveness into the possibilities of unseen communication led him to host a seance in his own home, led by a man claiming power as a medium, Professor Roth. The medium proved a dud. Fear of embarrassment prevented Freud from asking for the return of his brown envelope stuffed with Austrian crowns. But open-mindedness should be no crime, Freud pleads. For the scientist, it should be a duty, however apparently odd the theory proposed.
In a time of peace and plenty, the theories of such an unlikely revolutionary might get no further than the private consulting rooms of Mitteleuropa’s larger cities and a handful of American universities. But war has changed all that. What was once outlandish now appears prophetic. The world is out of joint: the unconscious is the accepted culprit. Jabbering, spasmodic soldiers tumble into military hospitals across the Continent by the truckload every day, with disorders of the mind and body immune to rest or surgery–or even to electric shocks. As Freud himself might have remarked, people are more receptive to new gods when their old gods have proved false. And so it is that at the very moment when Freud himself feels most isolated, when his psychoanalytic associates are cut off from him by war and when his list of patients in Vienna has dwindled, Freud’s ideas begin to take on a life of their own, spreading from the consulting couch to the hospital bed and into the cultural ether of the age.
THE BRONX, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A Jewish dairy restaurant on Wilkens Avenue in the East Bronx. A regular customer–late thirties, medium height, black hair, glasses, moustache, slightly wild look about the eyes, dreadful English–shuffles in off the street. That man again! He comes in almost every day. He never tips. (The waiters occasionally spill hot soup on him by way of suggesting he should.) It is against his political beliefs, he says.
As a revolutionary agitator in wartime Europe the principled non-tipper attended the same political gatherings as his rival Vladimir and called, like him, for unflinching class struggle. But Lenin has never really trusted him, with regular spectacular fallings-out on ideological matters; he is too obstinate, too capricious, too individual. Vladimir once wrote to Inessa describing him as ‘always the same, evasive cheating, posing as a leftist but helping the right while he can’. As a journalist–his off-again on-again profession–the principled non-tipper once interviewed the shadowy figure behind the Sarajevo murders. ‘My young friend never thought his heroic bullet would provoke the current world war’, Gavrilo Princip’s mentor explained, ‘and believe me, when I read the war reports, a horrible thought goes through my mind: did we indeed incite all this?’
The principled non-tipper’s entry papers into the United States–off a ship from Barcelona called the Montserrat, on which he travels first class–list his profession as ‘author’. The customs officials who let him into the country without a second look that rainy day note down his name, incorrectly, as Zratzky. Others pay closer attention. A local Yiddish-language newspaper prints a photograph of the new arrival on its front page by way of welcome. The principled non-tipper wears a three-piece suit for the shoot.
The new arrival soon finds a reasonably priced apartment for which his wife Natalya pays the rent three months in advance and where his children are fascinated by the telephone. Natalya has lost count of the number of homes they have had since they married, shortly after her husband’s escape from exile in Siberia. Since then they have lived in Petrograd (where her husband made his name in the 1905 revolution), Vienna, Paris. Her husband was even briefly in Cádiz in Spain after the French tired of his presence and decided to unceremoniously deport him.
In America, Leon Trotsky is given a job writing for a Russian-language newspaper, Novy Mir. Typically, his first article is headlined ‘Long Live Struggle!’ When not writing, he tours around making fiery speeches about revolution and getting into arguments with local socialists about the direction their own movement should take. Particularly if war should come.
THE VATICAN: The Pope writes an early birthday card to Kaiser Wilhelm offering his warmest wishes and the rough outlines of a peace proposal he has been working on. ‘First, we have to win’, Wilhelm scribbles on the Vatican letter. How ‘unworldly and utopian’ of the Pope to think of future arms control at a time like this. Peace will only come, the Kaiser writes in the margins, ‘through a German victory brought about with the help of God’.
WASHINGTON DC, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: There is something of the romantic crusader spirit about this upright man–suspicious of emotion, yet highly emotional himself–who carries a poem by Rudyard Kipling in his breast pocket and who now sits behind his desk in the Oval Office, working on a speech.
He wants so badly to be a peacemaker, this man, who remembers the fires of America’s Civil War from his childhood in Confederate Virginia. He wants so much to be the world’s friend (except to Republicans, whom he despises). He wants to show the world the shining path to righteousness which he fervently believes it is America’s destiny to light up. (‘America First’ is one of his political slogans.) Perhaps he, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian pastor, can personify that moral righteousness. Perhaps history will offer him, in his sixty-first year on earth, the opportunity to bring to worldwide fruition the political principles he has spoken about all his life. Perhaps his own blessings–and those of America–can be made universal. Would it not be a wonderful thing if the world could be made more American? Would not humanity benefit from a healthy dose of American-style self-government or from America’s spirit of commercial enterprise?
Woodrow knows his Bible: ‘blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God’. America must keep out of the war. It would be a ‘crime against civilization’, he tells his friend and adviser Colonel Edward House, for the last of the ‘great White nations’ to ruin itself in a contest between German and British ambitions. His concern with race is unexceptional. Many Americans view the European fighting as a white civil war, selfishly endangering the future security of the race itself. Last year, Madison Grant, chairman of the New York Zoological Society, described the war as race ‘suicide on a gigantic scale’. Woodrow worries about a future war of the white nations against the Japanese.
America must keep itself chaste. It must prepare for the time when Europe’s ‘mechanical slaughter’ has ceased and a new crusade for peace can begin under American tutelage. Woodrow understands his own particular authority in this regard. An American President, directly elected leader of the world’s most populous white republic, burnished by the prestige of its wealth and power and not engaged in the war’s present butchery, can speak directly to the peoples of Europe, over the heads of their leaders, man to man, as it were. An American President can speak to the world. He can speak for the world. There is a moral force in the affairs of humankind, that only the truly far-sighted can perceive. He must be that force.
Thinking through America’s duty to itself and to the world, a noble idea takes root in Woodrow’s mind: a plan not just to end this bloody war, but to end all wars. He writes and rewrites his text. He tosses around different versions of it with his confidants. And finally, when he is ready, he summons the elected representatives of America’s forty-eight states to the Capitol to hear his shining vision for the future: a cooperative league of nations for world peace, with America its chief backer. No more the temporary truces and unstable alliances of the past, but a perpetual peace built on common democratic principles, enforced by common action. ‘These are American principles, American policies’, he tells the law-makers of the republic, ‘they are the principles of mankind and must prevail’. One Democrat Senator declares it ‘the greatest message of the century’. Another commends ‘a fine literary effort’. Most Republicans find the peroration woolly, arrogant, even dangerous. ‘The President thinks he is president of the world’, notes a Senator from Wyoming. ‘Ill-timed and utterly impossible of accomplishment’, remarks his colleague from New Hampshire.
The speech is circulated to Europe’s capitals. There is one phrase in particular which angers many: ‘peace without victory’. A lasting peace, Woodrow lectures, as if back at Princeton, cannot be built on an equilibrium of terror but only on the equality of nations. An end to the present war which leaves one European power crowing triumphantly over the carcass of another would be a temporary expedient. ‘Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser’, the President explains, ‘accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand’. True peace will only come when both sides exchange the mirage of victory for something greater.
Easy for an American to ‘sell so cheaply the interests and sacrifices of others’, says a French newspaper. What insufferable arrogance.
LA SALPÊTRIÈRE HOSPITAL, PARIS, THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: A man stands naked in a room, one leg contorted and at rest, the other jacking up and down spasmodically against the parquet floor. His eyes are as vacant as the dead.
In front of him, a table, and on the table an array of objects: a cushion stuffed with pins, a reflex hammer, two batteries and a tuning fork. Not instruments of torture, but tools of diagnosis. On the other side of the table stands Dr Babinski, one of France’s most famous neurologists (Marcel Proust’s mother was once a patient) and a former student of Charcot (he is one of the students depicted in the engraving on Freud’s wall in Vienna). The doctor raises his eyes to assess the patient, a soldier recently returned from the front. The doctor’s notes fall from the table and land flat against the floor. A report echoes through the room.
Suddenly, the soldier’s eyes come alive. He speaks, he raves, he rants. It is gibberish: associations, memories, stories that stop and start, a terrifying cannon burst of words. For Babinski’s new assistant, a handsome plump-lipped boy newly arrived from Verdun, it is poetry. He watches enraptured as if the wounded man’s speech were a transmission from another world. He searches for meaning in the torrent of words. Is the soldier describing what happened to him at the front, or a dream of what will happen if he is sent back? In his head perhaps he is there already, hot steel hurtling towards him from every side. And who, in this moment, can say which is more real: the hospital or the front, the memory or the fear, the inner or the outer experience?
Though only twenty, and uncertain yet whether he will be a doctor or a writer, Babinski’s assistant is by now a seasoned observer of the ravages of war. He has seen the shell-shocked, those with lost limbs, the half mad and, most fascinating of all, those who deny there is a war at all and claim the whole thing is make-believe. His life has become a litany of whirlwind encounters with the wounded, assimilating their experiences into his own, drawing him deeper and deeper into a fascination with the unruly mind. Last spring it was Jacques Vaché, a wounded soldier at a military hospital in Nantes, whose mocking views on art and life had an almost magnetic attraction for the young André Breton. For a couple of months, the two young dandies rattled around Nantes in a fury of fun-making, jeering at the rules of bourgeois society and running from one cinema to the next to avoid seeing anything as boring as an entire film.
Last summer it was Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire, the literary standard-bearer of the French avant-garde–and correspondent of Breton’s since the age of nineteen–wounded in the head by a piece of shrapnel which cut right through his helmet. Breton pronounced the great man’s character irretrievably ‘changed’. Last July he transferred to a neuropsychiatric hospital where he interviewed victims of shell shock about their dreams and tried to free himself from his obsession with poetry. (The head doctor at the hospital introduced young Breton to untranslated German texts and suggested he write a doctoral thesis on Freud.) Now André is in Paris, working where Charcot once hypnotised his patients as Freud stood back to admire.
The soldier’s speech becomes steadier as the minutes pass. Babinski continues the investigation of his patient, tapping a reflex hammer here, then moving on almost without stopping to another body part, as if chasing the soldier’s malady across the landscape of his body. Breton is fascinated at Babinski’s technique, the diagnostic trance which seems to take hold of him. He stands back to admire the two of them–patient and doctor–the one uttering strings of words as if at random, the other diagnosing him, as if at random, both driven by unseen forces operating in the background of their minds.
Is this soldier mad, or is he the sanest of us all? Breton muses. How much more truthful–yes, how much freer–are this shell-shocked soldier’s words, these ecstasies of the unconscious mind, than anything that passes for poetry or writing. And how impossible to fake.
UNDER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN–GERMANY–WASHINGTON: Silent and unseen, German submarines slip past the British Isles and into the open waters beyond. The ambassador in Washington begs Berlin to delay launching them against the world’s shipping, fearing the consequences on relations with America. ‘Regret suggestions impracticable’, comes back the answer. The boats are beyond recall. They are out of radio contact.
The mood in Germany is jubilant when news breaks of the imminent resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. A few more months of war, people think, then there will be peace. Not many parents have a son in the U-boat fleet. Millions have a son serving at the front. A shortened war might just save their lives. The Kaiser spends the evening at a banquet with Emperor Charles’s brother, as if unaware of all the excitement that news of the decision has created. (Perhaps he is fearful of its consequences.) Later he gathers together his staff and reads aloud a paper he has come across by a German university professor on the vital subject of the eagle as a heraldic beast. ‘A gruesome evening!’ notes the Kaiser’s naval attaché in his diary.
In Washington, the White House telephone rings incessantly. Woodrow feels betrayed. But he does not now want emotion to push him to take any rash decisions. ‘Not sure of that’, he says to the suggestion of an immediate diplomatic break with Germany. His friend Edward House finds him depressed. His vision of America as the neutral peacemaker above the fray is now in tatters. Germany is a ‘madman that should be curbed’, the President says. But his mind struggles with how to respond. Woodrow paces his study, nervously rearranging his books. He worries about the consequences of war on the ‘white race’, and wonders if the Japanese might take advantage. His wife Edith suggests a round of golf. House warns against ‘anything so trivial at such a time’. The two men shoot a game of pool instead.
Relations with Germany are broken off, but war is not declared. Maybe the Germans will not follow through. Then an unarmed British vessel is sunk off Ireland, with several Americans on board. Perhaps American ships can be armed to defend themselves, satisfying considerations of immediate security, but stopping short of outright war. Then a top-secret German telegram is leaked, showing that Berlin has offered to give Mexico chunks of American territory in return for an alliance in the event of conflict. The country is enraged.
VIENNA: Doctor Freud writes a letter to a psychoanalytic colleague in Budapest. His mood is grave: ‘I would have written you long ago, if there had been something positive to report. But everything is negative, everything is inhibition, limitation, renunciation, at most, stifled expectations’. The cold and dark make serious work impossible. The price of cigars is up. Across the Habsburg Empire, flour is mixed with ground chestnuts and coffee with ground acorns to make limited supplies go further. Freud finds himself preoccupied with submarines: ‘so, everything is waiting until the U-boats have restored order in the world–if they succeed’.
MOGILYOV, RUSSIA: At Russia’s military headquarters, the Stavka, five hundred miles south of Petrograd, Tsar Nicholas writes a letter home to his German-born wife, in English. Alexandra is his lovebird; the Tsar is her huzy. He so misses their time together, working away diligently on a jigsaw before bed. He finds barracks life unproductive. It is much less fun to play games by oneself. ‘I think I will turn to dominoes again’, he writes: ‘of course there is no work for me’.
Elsewhere in Russia, the national crisis deepens. Cold shuts down the capital’s transport system. The bakeries are out of bread. There are rumours that huge food supplies elsewhere are being wasted for lack of organisation. Caspian fishermen, it is said, have taken to burying their catch rather than letting it rot in the open air while waiting for a train to take it to the cities. A bishop blames the proliferation of cinemas and the army morphine for the chaos. The Interior Minister holds seances with Rasputin’s ghost.
THE ITALIAN–AUSTRIAN FRONT LINE: An Italian soldier commits the events of the day to his diary. ‘This morning, at dawn, I sent the Germans my best wishes for the day’, he writes: a grenade launched against the enemy. ‘The little red point of a lighted cigarette disappeared,’ he notes, ‘and probably also the smoker.’ The next day it is the Italian’s turn to suffer. A grenade is accidentally set off in the Italian trenches, ripping him through with shrapnel.
The wounded soldier’s name is Benito, a journalist and former revolutionary agitator in the mould of Lenin who once founded a newspaper called La Lotta di Classe, or Class War. (At an event where the two men crossed paths in Switzerland before the war, Benito even gave a little speech ending with ‘Long live the Italian proletariat! Long live socialism!’) More recently he has acquired a passionate belief in the importance of the war splitting Italian socialism between spineless pacifists and noble, nationally minded warriors like himself. He also has a fondness for duelling. At the field hospital where he is now treated after his mishap with a grenade, the doctors notice something else about Benito’s health–syphilis, perhaps?
In March, the King of Italy himself is amongst the visitors to the hospital. He stops by the corporal’s bedside.
‘How are you, Mussolini?’ he asks.
‘Not so well, master’, the soldier answers valiantly.
PETROGRAD: The revolution begins on a radiant morning, warmer than it has been for weeks. A festive atmosphere for International Women’s Day. Students and nurses link arms with the enlightened women of the bourgeoisie, marching down Nevsky–Petrograd’s central thoroughfare–with banners above their heads demanding equal rights and bread.
In the city’s industrial Vyborg district, on the other side of the wide Neva river, the mood is more militant. Women textile workers, tired of the queues for food and their treatment by the bosses, decide to come out on strike. They shout to their brothers and husbands to join them. At the munitions works, managers tell them not to play the Germans’ game by striking in the middle of a war. ‘The Empress herself is a German spy’, comes the reply. The mutinous mood spreads. By afternoon, the workers have invaded Petrograd’s commercial centre in force, evading squadrons of Cossacks on horseback. A few trams are rocked onto their side. The Siberian Trade Bank is robbed.
But no one is killed. As the sun goes down the city centre is quiet again. A searchlight scans the empty Nevsky with its electric beam. The French Ambassador holds a dinner party with the city’s beau monde where there is a fierce debate about which of Petrograd’s famous ballerinas deserves to win this year’s award for best dancer. Alexandra writes a letter to Nicholas passing on news of the measles situation in the imperial family and of revolutionary informality entering the Romanov household: the Tsarevich’s English tutor, it is reported, read to him ‘in a dressing gown’.
Over the next few days, the crisis does not dissipate; it deepens. Strike action spreads. As the weekend approaches, the number of demonstrators increases. The workers’ demands become more political: justice and an end to police intimidation. While Petrograd’s revolutionaries still hesitate to call for an armed insurrection, the demonstrations are turning into a trial of strength. One day, a woman watching a demonstration is shot dead. The police deny they have started using guns. The next day, the chief of police is himself shot. Alexandra blames hooligans for the trouble. ‘If it were very cold they would probably stay indoors’, she writes.
The foundations of autocracy are creaking. Yet the military authorities in Petrograd convince themselves, and the absent Tsar, that the situation can be saved with a little traditional firmness. Even when the soldiers begin to refuse orders–and the mutineers are then caught in a gun battle with loyal police–the military authorities in Petrograd assure the Tsar that order will soon be restored in the city. The country’s leading politician sends him a more alarmist message, talking of ‘elemental and uncontrollable anarchy’. The disbelieving Nicholas sighs to an aide: ‘I will not even reply’. Parliament, the Duma, is dissolved. Nicholas plays dominoes.
The next day, all hell breaks loose in Petrograd. A regiment previously ordered to fire on protesting civilians now shoots its commanding officer instead. Whole regiments go over to the rebellion. The Petrograd arsenal is attacked, and forty thousand rifles are captured. Police snipers on rooftops pick off targets in the streets until they are hunted down and thrown to their deaths. Commandeered automobiles career around the city’s streets, bristling with bayonets like hedgehogs. The regime disintegrates. The Tsar’s brother Michael, the one man in Petrograd who might be able to rally troops to the Romanov cause, orders soldiers out of the Winter Palace when he finds them gathering to defend it–he is worried they might break things. Facing an inevitable assault of the rebels, the Tsar’s ministers resign in a panic. Two hide in a photographic darkroom to try to avoid arrest. Others simply flee into the night.
The contest for power now switches to the Tauride Palace. Though the Duma has been formally dissolved by the Tsar, this is where members of Russia’s parliament now meet to work out what to do. (The meetings are characterised as private in order to keep the semblance of constitutionality.) They must move quickly. The Tauride Palace swarms with soldiers. There are piles of looted goods everywhere. A dead pig adorns one patch of floor. And, in one of the palace wings, a council of workers’ delegates has been established, calling themselves a Soviet. It is impossible to verify who voted for them; at first, most members are intellectuals, later most are soldiers.
The Soviet leaders debate whether, following Marxist dogma that bourgeois democracy precedes socialism, they should now take power themselves. To forestall that eventuality, a provisional committee of the Duma declares itself in charge of restoring order. Sheer anarchy reigns outside. Plain-clothes policemen are hunted down and lynched. In one instance a humble chimney sweep on a rooftop is mistaken for an escaping police sniper and shot by a trigger-happy rebel in the streets below. Isolated pockets of regime resistance are crushed. When the Astoria Hotel–a favourite with Russia’s officer class–is raided, its cellars are flooded with broken bottles of cognac. Butter is handed out on the end of a sabre. Shooting between different factions of the same regiment–some for the Tsar and others against–is briefly stopped to allow the British Ambassador to get through to the still half-operational Russian Foreign Office to discuss the war with Germany. The French Ambassador, following his usual route to the same destination, runs into one of the Tsar’s old Ethiopian guards, now dressed as a civilian, his eyes full of tears. In Tsarskoye Selo, Alexandra notes her children’s temperatures. The palace lift is out of service.
Down at Stavka the imperial train is readied to bring the Tsar back to his capital. Lusty hymn-singing accompanies his departure. He never makes it to Petrograd. Instead, his train is directed and redirected around western Russia in the search for a safe route back to the capital. Much of his time is spent sleeping, or looking out of the window at the static landscape, or waiting for others. Finally, after a day and night of such pointless activity, the Tsar arrives in Pskov, still more than a hundred miles from Petrograd. Again, he is left waiting. Now, the message from his army commanders is blunt: if he is to have any chance of saving the Russian Empire, he must abdicate in favour of his son with his brother Michael as regent. Nicholas lights up one cigarette after another. ‘What else can I do when all have betrayed me?’ he says to an aide.
Two politicians from Petrograd arrive with a draft abdication proclamation. As they are ushered into the Tsar’s immaculate presence one of them is acutely aware that his own shirt is creased and he has not had time to shave. Nicholas wears a grey chokha, the Cossack national dress. He tells the delegation that he accepts the necessity of his own abdication, but that he intends to abdicate not only on his behalf but also on behalf of his son. Nicholas treats the throne as a gift he is free to assign. His brother Grand Duke Michael, who has not been asked his own view on the matter, is to become Tsar directly. The politicians question the constitutionality of it all. But what time is there for that when the country is in chaos?
In Petrograd, while the Duma and the Soviet negotiate the form of the next government, one figure emerges astride both: Alexander Kerensky, a Socialist Revolutionary who shares the same home town on the Volga as Vladimir Lenin. His days are spent in a delirious whirl of activity, surviving on coffee and brandy, using charisma and oratory to get what he wants.
‘Comrades! Do you trust me?’ he asks the soldiers of the Soviet, to gain their approval to become a minister. They roar approval. It is Kerensky who now phones up Grand Duke Michael to inform him of his brother Nicholas’s decision, after leafing through the Petrograd telephone directory to find the right number. But Michael abdicates in turn. He will not accept such a poisoned chalice. Russia is now a republic. ‘Slept long and soundly’, Nicholas Romanov writes in his diary. He reads a lot about Julius Caesar, the Roman leader betrayed by his closest associates.
Across Russia there is hope: of freedom, land, bread. Censorship is removed. Statues of the Tsars are pulled down. Wherever the revolution arrives, officials of the old regime are arrested, local Soviets are formed and political prisoners set free. (A Georgian bank-robber and conspirator bearing the revolutionary pseudonym Stalin–man of steel–is released from exile in Siberia and travels back to Petrograd with a typewriter on his knee.) ‘Festivals of Freedom’ re-enact the events of the last week like latter-day mystery plays. The French Ambassador, touring Petrograd’s churches the first Sunday after the revolution, notes that even in these citadels of Orthodoxy, which used to venerate the Tsar as God’s anointed, everyone seems to sport a red cockade or armband. Though the new government reaffirms its commitment to uphold Russia’s wartime alliances, there is also hope for peace.
One of the first orders of the new regime is to find the secret burial place of the murdered monk Rasputin–a symbol of Holy Russia or of Tsarism’s ultimate decadence depending on your point of view–and destroy his bodily remains for ever. The furnaces of a local engineering school do the job. The ashes are then scattered and a false story told to prevent anyone building a shrine.
BERLIN, GERMANY: The Kaiser’s naval attaché urges Wilhelm to consider cutting down on palace expenses, noting that some of the language used against the Romanovs might equally apply to the Hohenzollerns. ‘Degenerate and basically egotistical dynasty’ are the specific words he has in mind.