ZURICH: Nadya has just finished washing up the dishes after lunch. Vladimir is preparing to return to the library. A young Russian barges in. ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ he asks. He is blabbering something about revolution in Petrograd. Excited but a little sceptical, the Ulyanovs hurry down to the lakeside, where the special editions of the newspapers are pasted up for the public. Lenin scans the reports. ‘It’s staggering’, he exclaims to his wife: ‘it’s so incredibly unexpected’.
Joy soon gives way to scepticism and impatience. Already Vladimir can see that the Petrograd revolutionaries are screwing things up. ‘It’s simply shit’, he shouts when he reads about the proceedings of the Petrograd Soviet, ‘I repeat: shit’. There should be no discussion of supporting a provisional government which includes landlords and capitalists, he splutters. There should be no question of continuing a war of national defence. The workers must be armed. Soviets must be given full power everywhere. The revolution must be carried through to its finish and exported. ‘All our slogans remain the same’, he writes to a comrade in Oslo. But how can he correct the errors of those idiots in Petrograd while stuck in Switzerland? Vladimir telegraphs instructions to any Bolsheviks planning to return to Russia: ‘no trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is especially suspect’. He is desperate to get home himself: but how?
Lenin’s fervid imagination is full of madcap schemes. ‘I can put on a wig’, he writes to a comrade a little desperately. One day he sees himself travelling to Russia via steamer to England. The next he fixes on the fanciful notion that the Kaiser’s government might let a group of Russian revolutionaries travel home through Germany–it might work if the idea were to appear to come from émigré circles in Geneva, or ‘fools’, as Lenin calls them. Perhaps an aeroplane could be chartered to fly across Eastern Europe. Maybe a fake Swedish passport could be obtained and the journey completed overland. One would not need to know much Swedish to trick the authorities. Even better to pretend to be deaf and unable to speak. Nadya points out the plan’s fatal flaw: ‘You will fall asleep and see Mensheviks in your dreams and you will start swearing, and shout, scoundrels, scoundrels! and give the whole conspiracy away’.
Vladimir storms down to the local police station, assuring the Zurich authorities that he is going to leave Switzerland very soon, and demands they return the one-hundred-franc administrative deposit he gave them when he arrived.
HALIFAX, DOMINION OF CANADA, BRITISH EMPIRE: Scurrying back from the United States to Russia to take part in the greatest event in the history of the world, the principled non-tipper runs into a problem: a telegram from British naval intelligence.
‘FOLLOWING ON BOARD KRISTIANIAFJORD AND SHOULD BE TAKEN OFF AND RETAINED PENDING INSTRUCTION’, it reads. The name Trotsky is one of those listed. He is alleged to be carrying ten thousand dollars, provided by ‘socialists and Germans’. The principled non-tipper kicks and screams as some burly mariners carry him off the ship. His son, aged eleven, punches a British naval officer on the arm. Once ashore, Trotsky is strip-searched and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp for processing. Natalya and the children are housed in the Prince George Hotel.
Leon is held in the Amherst camp for several weeks. While there, he agitates for social revolution amongst the other Russian internees (some of whom prove to be excellent craftsmen, whose handiwork Trotsky admires keenly). It is the end of April before he is released. A whole month wasted.
ZURICH: Vladimir has more luck. His idea of a train through Germany turns out not to be so crazy after all.
With the help of mediation from Swiss socialists and the embassy in Bern, the German authorities agree to let a single carriage of revolutionaries transit their territory, travelling secretly from Switzerland to the Baltic. From thence, they will be put on a boat to Sweden. If they make trouble for the new Russian government in Petrograd–still Germany’s enemy–then all the better. Lenin stipulates a range of conditions for his travel, including confirmation that the train carriage will be granted extra-territorial status–so he will be travelling over but not through Germany, technically speaking. News of these bizarre negotiations buzzes around Zurich’s expat community. An Irish short-story writer named James Joyce hears about it in a café.
When news comes through of German acceptance of Lenin’s terms–the last time this will happen for a while–the Ulyanovs rush to pack up their apartment. There is just enough time to return Vladimir’s books to the library. Lenin puts in a final telephone call to the American embassy in Bern, seeking a meeting with a diplomat there in the hope of getting American support for his return so as to make him appear less wholly dependent on the Germans. But it is a Sunday. The young American diplomat who picks up the phone is on his way to a tennis date with the daughter of a prominent Swiss family. He tells Lenin to call back. Tomorrow will be too late, Lenin tells the twenty-four-year-old Allen Dulles.
A strange and mutually antagonistic bunch of revolutionaries board a local service to the Swiss border. One couple have brought their children. The mood is tense. Much of the food the passengers have brought for the trip–sausage, of course–is confiscated by Swiss customs at the border. On the train journey through Germany, Vladimir tries hard to work. But he is disturbed by the constant shouting and debating and joking going on in the next-door compartment. When he can’t take it any more, he goes in to remonstrate, blaming two troublemakers, Ravich and Radek, for the fuss. Another argument breaks out over people smoking cigarettes in the carriage toilet. Lenin proposes a ticketing system, provoking a debate about whether the need to smoke or to empty one’s bladder is the greater human requirement. At the Baltic port of Sassnitz, where a steamer–the Queen Victoria–awaits the revolutionaries, those leaving Germany for Sweden are asked to fill in departure forms. It seems a little pointless. Lenin is suspicious. He suggests that his group agree to fill in the forms, but use false names.
Most are seasick on the way across the Baltic.
WASHINGTON–NEW YORK: Two months after the beginning of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare campaign, America’s peacemaker becomes a war leader.
‘We have no quarrel with the German people’, Woodrow Wilson tells Congress and the world, announcing the declaration of war on Germany. The enemy is the Kaiser and autocracy. ‘The world must be made safe for democracy’, Woodrow says. The address takes exactly thirty-two minutes to deliver. Thousands of supportive telegrams arrive to congratulate him. Woodrow signs orders permitting the government to remove from employment anyone whose loyalty they suspect. Mrs Wilson stands by his side, blotting his papers to dry the ink, and occasionally filling in the date of approval in her own hand.
There is little opposition to the war. In Congress a pacifist and a few Republicans vote against it. Outside it, Harvard-educated radical John Reed tells a so-called People’s Council: ‘this is not my war, and I will not support it’. Generally, the national mood is for unity. One immediate question is whether black soldiers should be deployed. Southern whites worry about upsetting the balance of power in the South if blacks are given military training. Many blacks see the war as an opportunity to prove themselves, in the hope that the government will repay black America’s patriotism at the war’s end.
In New York City, an all-black Harlem-based National Guard regiment–the 15th Infantry Regiment–draws in additional recruits. Its white commander aims to boost its attractiveness by persuading James Reese Europe–famous on the city’s ragtime scene–to become the regiment’s band leader.
MILAN, ITALY: Nowhere is excitement at America’s entry into the war as palpable as in Italy.
Gabriele D’Annunzio, the overactive Italian poet, pilot and propagandist, a man who leads a bombing raid before lunch and takes part in a land battle before supper, sends his own message from Milan, where he is resting after his mother’s death. Words are weapons in this war and D’Annunzio, a rather short, balding and unattractive fifty-four-year-old, with goggle eyes, thick lips and an increasingly hunched back, is not shy of turning his oratorical skills to the advantage of his country–or himself. His language is as flamboyant as the man. ‘Now the group of stars on the banner of the great Republic has become a constellation of the Spring, like the Pleiades’, the poet writes, ‘a propitious sign to sailors, armed and unarmed alike, a spiritual token for all nations fighting a righteous war.’ What are the confused masses of America to make of such wordiness? ‘Propitious Sign to Sailors’, runs the uncertain sub-headline in the Chicago Tribune.
‘Our war is not destructive; it is creative’, the poet writes, his words ascending into flights of passion and conviction. It is a battle for the human spirit against German barbarism. (He does not mention the territory that Italy has been promised as the price of joining the war on the Allied side.) He describes America’s entry into the war as a metamorphosis. ‘You were an enormous and obtuse mass of riches and power’, the Italian writes, ‘now you are transformed into ardent, active spirituality.’ It is meant as a compliment.
BERLIN: In Germany, the Kaiser’s American dentist is caught out by Woodrow’s declaration, finding himself now an enemy alien, required to present himself daily to the police and not leave home between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Amongst Wilhelm’s entourage, Woodrow’s declaration is received calmly. There are other matters to attend to, not least the question of how to reduce any impression of extravagance by the imperial household. Wilhelm protests his own personal consumption is already quite spartan: he eats neither sweets nor potatoes, he points out, and has only a few slices of bread and butter each afternoon with his tea.
To show his understanding of the national mood he decides to offer an ‘Easter egg’ to the nation: a promise to do away with the unequal Prussian voting system after the war. Electoral reform will be the people’s victory prize. ‘Never before have the German people proved so unshakable’, runs the Easter proclamation, asking for patience while the U-boats finish the job.
WRONKE, SILESIA, GERMANY: On the same day the Kaiser gives the people their Easter present, a prisoner locked up in one of his jails receives a bouquet of flowers from Berlin.
Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-Jewish-Marxist intellectual of diminutive stature, with one leg a little shorter than the other and a very slight humpback, is a woman who divides opinion. Some think her brilliant and principled. Others think her a fanatical ideologue. Estranged from the mainstream Social Democratic Party whose leaders she once taught how to think at the party’s training academy, Rosa now leads a revolutionary splinter group known as the Spartacus League, named after the Roman slave rebel. Her police dossier includes a stint in jail before the war, a marriage of convenience in Germany which ended in divorce, and political connections with citizens of foreign states, including through her role as one of the founder members of the Polish Socialist Party.
She and Lenin go way back. There was a time before the war when, in between competitive bouts of Marxist theorising, Vladimir would cradle Rosa’s cat flirtatiously in his lap, claiming suavely not to have seen such a majestic beast anywhere outside Siberia. Over black tea, they would argue the finer points of revolutionary theory: him insisting on the necessity for a strong party to dictate the course of revolutionary events and keep strict order; her countering that centralism could only stifle the essentially organic nature of a true social revolution.
In Wronke, Rosa is ‘on leave from World History’, as she puts it. She observes Russia’s convulsions from afar and waits for the bigger explosion which Marxism dictates must now occur in a more advanced industrial economy–most critically, in Germany. She has few friends in Berlin to argue for her release. In 1914, her relationship with the Social Democrats ended in a fury of recrimination when they meekly supported the war rather than a general strike. Only one Social Democratic deputy, Rosa’s fellow Spartacist Karl Liebknecht, voted against credits for the army. Rosa briefly considered suicide. Then she proposed a new slogan for the Social Democrats: ‘workers of the world unite, in peacetime–in wartime, slit each other’s throat!’ The tongue lashings have not stopped since.
In prison, Rosa is tireless in her analysis of events in Russia and the coming revolution. ‘I regard what has happened there so far as only a small overture’, she writes to her friend Clara Zetkin, ‘things are bound to develop into something colossal… and an echo throughout the world is inevitable’. She writes of the ‘unseen, plutonic forces’ which Nicholas’s overthrow has unleashed. She scans the papers for hints that the German proletariat are waking to their responsibilities. She is delighted by news of strikes in the German munitions industry: some three hundred factories are temporarily shut; several hundred thousand workers walk out. Anxious and excited, Rosa notes down key events in her pocket diary (alongside her falling weight: barely forty-six kilos this spring). How glorious it is to know that world revolution is on its way. How awful it is to have to wait.
She distracts herself with the great works of European literature, which she reads in the original, and cute letters to her friends. ‘Sonyusha, my dear little bird!’ begins one; ‘I send you a kiss and a hearty squeeze of the hand’, ends another. She becomes a keen amateur prison botanist. She looks out of her cell window, willing the trees in the garden to burst into colour and life: ‘two young sycamores, one large silver poplar, one “acacia” (or that’s what people call it, in reality it’s: Robinia), two ornamental cherry trees, several snowberries and in addition a lot of lilacs’. She has nothing but goodwill towards the local fauna. She leaves out what food she can spare for a chaffinch who drops by every morning at seven. She asks her friend not to send more birdseed as the birds are simply too fussy for it. A mouse finds its way into her room, feasts on a dress in her closet–and promptly dies (from some chemical in the dye in the dress, Rosa surmises). ‘I can’t do anything about it’, she writes, ‘but I feel so awful when I find one of these charming little creatures lying there as a corpse.’
Occasionally Rosa smuggles out an article to be passed around by the Spartacus League and printed in its newsletter. ‘For three years’, reads one, ‘Europe has been like a musty room, almost suffocating those living in it; now all at once a window has been flung open, a fresh, invigorating gust of air is blowing in, and everyone in the room is breathing deeply and freely of it.’ She worries that what has started in Petrograd will lose momentum if the German proletariat does not rise at once. She rails against Social Democrats who, having failed to stop the war in the first place, are now calling for peace on bourgeois terms, leaving capitalism intact and returning the world to how it was before the war. This must not happen. No! The choice is clear: ‘Imperialism or Socialism! War or Revolution! There is no third way!’
VIENNA–BERLIN: Emperor Charles receives a gloomy assessment of his empire’s prospects. Though more British ships are being sunk than ever, the Kaiser’s wild promises of a quick victory by submarine warfare are not believed. The Habsburg Empire is at breaking point. After the events in Russia, the monarchic principle that has dominated Europe for a thousand years is at risk: ‘The world is not the same as it was three years ago.’ Without peace there will be revolution. Charles urges Wilhelm to redouble his efforts to find an equitable peace. In fact, Charles has secretly made his own behind-the-scenes endeavours via his wife’s brother, an Italian aristocrat serving in the Belgian army.
Wilhelm takes a month before even bothering to respond. The German position is plain. ‘The outcome of the war is a question of nerves’, comes the message from army headquarters. Peace overtures suggest weakness. Only by showing determination to fight to the last will the enemy become convinced of one’s will to victory. It is a matter of psychology.
Germany’s military leaders draw up their war aims. The richest mining regions of France, along with Luxembourg, are to be simply absorbed into the Reich. Belgium will be made, in effect, a German colony. The Flemish North Sea coast will be leased to Germany for a period of at least ninety-nine years, as the British lease Hong Kong from China. In the Baltic, Latvia and Lithuania will come under permanent German control, and the region’s German minorities will be put in charge. The precise extent of any new independent Polish state to be set up after the war will depend on how far that state can be made practically subservient to Berlin from the outset. The Habsburgs will be granted Serbia, Montenegro and Albania. The oilfields of Romania are to be secured for German use.
Wilhelm decides this list is incomplete. The British must suffer and Germany must be a world power. He draws up his own wish list for the generals.
PETROGRAD: Smelling to high heaven from their days of non-stop travel, Lenin and his associates arrive back in Russia. A telegram sent from Finland to Vladimir’s sisters alerts Pravda to his imminent arrival and produces a crowd of Bolsheviks (and various other well-wishers) to greet him at Petrograd’s Finland station. He is in a foul mood. The latest reports suggest Bolshevik leaders in the capital–Stalin and so on–are willing to tolerate the rule of the new government despite its intention to continue the war (with the endorsement of those numbskulls in the Petrograd Soviet). Has no one read his messages? No trust and no support, etc.
Clambering onto an armoured car in front of the station, the returning exile gives a fiery speech against any hint of accommodation. He is against alliances with anyone at all, it seems. He tells the crowd of Bolsheviks that Russia’s other supposed revolutionaries–the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries–are betraying the workers by kowtowing to the bourgeoisie. In his impatience, Lenin seems ready to break with the traditional Marxist dogma of the two-stage journey to socialism, and telescope it into a single proletarian seizure of power. ‘Long live the world socialist revolution!’ he proclaims. For women and men who treat the words of Marx as the word of God, Lenin’s apparent deviation from the scriptures–at least from their traditional interpretation–is breathtaking. Is the man unhinged?
The next day Vladimir visits the graves of his mother and sister, before dropping in on the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace to give them a piece of his mind. He makes it clear he will never–‘never!’–work with those who have gone soft by cooperating with the new government. He claims he alone understands the logic of the revolution (a bit rich for someone who was in Switzerland when it started). His strategy is to be proved right by events. As the fiercest opponent of conciliation, he will be best positioned to pick up the pieces when conciliation fails, as he believes it must. Can a bourgeois government really make good on the hopes and dreams the revolution has unleashed? Lenin thinks not. A leopard cannot change its spots. The bourgeoisie will always defend capitalism before the interests of the workers.
Lenin’s plague-on-both-your-houses approach is challenged on the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, airing the leadership’s internal huffing and puffing in front of its supporters. Hitherto, Marx’s two-stage theory of revolution–first bourgeois capitalism, then workers’ regime–has been sacrosanct. Yet one must concede a certain dismal political logic to Lenin’s strategy. The odds are surely against the new government functioning effectively.
And therein lies the Bolsheviks’ opportunity. For how long will the soldiers continue to fight when they could be at home claiming land? The question of what they are even fighting for has been fudged. Some ministers are still wedded to the aggressive war aims of the Tsar–a far cry from the ‘peace without annexations and indemnities’ demanded by the Petrograd Soviet. The food situation is dire, and a two-headed power structure–the Soviets and the government–is a recipe for instability. Perhaps it is worth giving Lenin’s plan a little time.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: News of events in Russia reaches the prosperous suburbs of Chicago. On the day Lenin gives the Petrograd Soviet the benefit of his insights, a young American girl, nineteen years of age, is moved to write a poem to celebrate the liberation of the Russian people:
Out from the ice-bound desolation,
Siberia’s heart-eating waste,
Out from the gloom of desperation,
From dank foul cells they haste,
Out from the rule of despotism,
To the freedom of life they spring,
They have double their might,
Since their souls can fight,
For the people of Russia are king!
Her younger brother Ernest is still a schoolboy at the local high school, keen on boxing, debating, athletics, and writing articles for the school newspaper, in which he positively reviews his own performances. He is in favour of the war, if he can be a part of it. (Not yet, his father tells him.) He scours the papers for news from the front, perhaps he even reads D’Annunzio’s missive from Italy. Despite his brash self-confidence and clumsy youthfulness, the girls like him (and the boys, too). And no one doubts his brains. His English teacher, Miss Dixon–a breathless fan of Woodrow Wilson–considers him her precocious star pupil.
Whatever he is going to do in life, Ernest Hemingway knows it will be big. He intends to start by leaving Oak Park, Illinois, as soon as the school year is over.
VIENNA: Sigmund Freud worries about raised expectations of victory. ‘If the overpowering effect of the U-boats hasn’t become evident by September’, he writes to a friend, ‘there will be an awakening from illusion in Germany, with frightful consequences.’ Anyhow, there are other disappointments to contend with. ‘No Nobel prize 1917’, he notes sadly in his diary.
THE WESTERN FRONT: French attack. German counter-attack. Poison gas. French counter-counter-attack. Stumble. Fall. Many dead. Many more wounded. No breakthrough. Désastre is the word they use in Paris.
Amongst Russian expeditionary units in France, soldiers’ committees have now been formed. They refuse to swear loyalty to the provisional government in Petrograd. A full-scale Russian mutiny seems to be under way, on French soil. And it is catching. French soldiers refuse orders to make for the front. They start singing the Internationale. Revolutionary tracts circulate through their ranks. In a few cases guns are fired in the air. ‘Shoot me if you like, but I will not go up to the trenches’, one soldier tells his superior, ‘the result is the same.’ The French authorities are alarmed.
PETROGRAD: Trying to put to bed those stupid rumours about his being a German spy, Vladimir starts writing his autobiography. ‘I was born in Simbirsk on 10 April 1870’, he begins. His brother’s execution for an attempt on the life of Nicholas Romanov’s father merits a single sentence. Within a few lines he is already in 1895, the year of his arrest for spreading revolutionary propaganda in St Petersburg (as Petrograd was then called).
He stops. What foolishness this is! Why should he justify himself? His enemies in the Petrograd Soviet can make all sorts of wild accusations–but who cares? He knows the truth. And sooner or later, they will be history. Bolshevik party membership has tripled since the revolution. This is the fact that matters. This is the tidal wave coming to sweep away the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and all the other ‘filthy scum on the surface of the world labour movement’. That is to say, the German Social Democrats and their ilk.
At a Bolshevik conference that spring, Lenin asserts himself as leader of his party, and imposes his views of the future. Conciliation is nonsense. The revolution cannot be allowed to atrophy in coalition with the bourgeoisie. But he admits that the majority of workers are not yet won around to the Bolshevik view. He demands tactical flexibility. ‘To shout about violence now is senseless’, he warns, ‘what we need in the present situation is caution, caution, caution’. The future is coming: a proletarian-peasant republic of Soviets, without a police force or a standing army or even a bureaucracy. Everyone will be paid the same. It sounds wonderful. The state, in some form or other, will be required in a transitional period, of course. But not for long.
Lenin recalls the speech of a coal miner who explained how he and his comrades just seized control of their mine and then set about ensuring that it worked. ‘Now that is a real programme of the revolution, not derived from books’, says the terror of the Zurich public library.
HOMBURG PALACE, GERMANY: Wilhelm has received a letter from a German corn merchant who used to live in Argentina. He takes on some of his suggestions for the country’s war aims. An aide worries that these would make negotiated peace impossible. Wilhelm is truculent. ‘Yes’, the Kaiser replies, ‘but those are my peace terms’.
A long list is sent to the German foreign office. Malta is to be German. Gibraltar will be given to Spain. The Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde and all Britain’s assets in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East are to be turned over to Germany or her allies. The Kaiser imagines a German empire in Africa carved out of French and British possessions. He envisages reparations running into tens of billions of dollars too, and something like a German economic dictatorship over much of the globe. America will send its nickel and copper, Australia its wool, Russia its corn and oil–the list goes on.
That the war drags on is all the fault of the British, the Kaiser complains. The sooner they accept their defeat the better. ‘Every week will be more expensive for them.’
THE WESTERN FRONT–SUSSEX, ENGLAND: Winston Churchill is sent to France on a fact-finding mission by the Prime Minister, bumping along rutted roads to the front line. (A few days at the Ritz prepare him for the ordeal.) He meets French generals who keep schtum about the disciplinary trouble they have been having. He meets the top brass of the British army and listens humbly to their views of the military situation before giving his own. He is out of office at the moment and in keen listening mode.
On return to England, at his new country house in Sussex (three German prisoners of war work on the farm), he can relax a little. He enjoys a new game he has recently devised with the help of his children. It is called the bear game. It involves Winston playing a bear while chasing the children around the garden–or, if it is raining, through the house. The man is indefatigable. The children love it.
TSARSKOYE SELO, RUSSIA: The horizons of the imperial family steadily narrow. In April, the children’s use of the palace pond is revoked. There are no unauthorised guests. The guards scrawl lewd graffiti on the wall. One casually sticks his bayonet through Nicholas’s bicycle wheel when the ex-Tsar is out getting a little exercise.
But Citizen Romanov does not complain. ‘Am spending more time with my sweet family than in more normal years’, he writes in his diary. He reads detective stories out loud to his children and diligently makes notes about the weather. As temperatures begin to rise, he decides to plant a little vegetable garden, sowing seeds for a summer harvest. He finds time to teach his children geography. (Alexandra is in charge of religious education.) The ex-Tsar celebrates his forty-ninth birthday with a jigsaw.
PETROGRAD: The provisional government broadens its membership to include more Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks as ministers. The Petrograd Soviet’s objective of ‘peace without annexations or indemnities’ becomes government policy. Kerensky becomes War Minister.
He tours the front to try and restore morale in Russia’s shattered armies. A women’s only battalion is formed under a Siberian peasant named Maria Bochkareva in an attempt to shame men into doing their duty. Kerensky insists military discipline is restored and gives rousing speeches to the soldiers, promising them that they are now fighting for peace and not empire: ‘Not a single drop of blood will be shed for a wrong cause’. Those who want to give up now are traitors who would dishonour Russia’s name by making it abandon its allies. Revolutionary Russia will only be able to demand peace of others if it proves its own mettle. Peace through strength will be the revolution’s gift to the world. One final assault to make the Germans come to their senses.
Lenin is cutting: ‘this is the sum and substance of the new government’s “programme”’, he writes in Pravda, ‘an offensive, an offensive, an offensive!’