PARIS: In the midst of this strange war, an echo of 1913. The Ballets Russes put on a performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet. They call it Parade.
Russian dancers leap to French music. The stage designer is a Spaniard from Barcelona named Pablo. The story is eclectic, featuring a Chinese magician and an American child star. The orchestra includes a typewriter. All the ingredients, then, for a succès de scandale to match the premiere of Rite of Spring four years before, when Nijinsky pulsated his way across the stage and the audience hissed its disapproval. It is almost like old times (minus the Germans).
The wounded literary critic Guillaume Apollinaire coins a new word to describe the ballet, calling it ‘a sort of Sur-realisme’. He enjoys the plasticity of the term. ‘Surrealism does not yet exist in the dictionaries’, he writes to a poet friend, ‘it will be easier to manipulate than Supernaturalism, which is already in use by the philosophers.’
VIENNA: The following morning, at 9 a.m. precisely, a spectacle of quite a different kind gets under way in Vienna’s central criminal court: a sensational murder trial involving the assassination of the Austrian Premier in one of the city’s finest restaurants last year by Friedrich Adler, the son of the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Victor Adler.
All Vienna’s attention is riveted on proceedings. Albert Einstein writes a personal letter to Emperor Charles pleading for the actions of his friend Friedrich–who is a physicist as well as a revolutionary–to be treated as a tragic accident rather than a crime. Freud writes to a friend: ‘our inner conflict here is perhaps nowhere so plainly revealed as it is by the extremely notable trial of Fr. Adler’. Victor Adler defends his son by describing the stifling atmosphere in Vienna since 1914 with political debate curtailed by war conditions and state censorship. ‘The very air in Austria had become suffocating’, he declares dramatically to the court, casting his son’s act as the desperate last resort of a man of intense convictions pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown (and beyond). Before the trial he goes so far as to try and have his son declared insane.
Friedrich Adler shows no remorse. He bought the murder weapon, it turns out, as long ago as 1915, in Zurich, thus leaving no doubt that the crime was premeditated: ‘I know only that I did what I had to do’, he tells the court. He despises the hypocrisy of those who order men to certain deaths at the front every day but invoke the Ten Commandments when one of their own is killed. ‘We live in a time when battlefields are covered with hundreds of thousands of the dead, and tens of thousands more fill the seas’, he cries, ‘and we are told: this is war, this is necessity.’ Revolution also has its necessity. After Petrograd, will Vienna be next? A wave of strikes hits Vienna in the early summer.
At seven in the evening the judgement of the court is read out. Friedrich Adler is found guilty as charged. As he is taken down, there are cheers in the courtroom to Adler and the Socialist International. Adler himself is able to shout: ‘Long live revolutionary international social democracy!’ before he is bundled off by the police. Eight demonstrators are arrested inside the court, and another six on the street outside.
TSARSKOYE SELO: ‘It’s exactly three months since I came from Mogilyov and since we have been sitting here like prisoners’, Nicholas writes in his diary. Occasionally War Minister Kerensky visits. The hardest thing to get used to is the lack of news from his mother.
One night there is a commotion when a shot is fired in the palace garden. A guard sees what appears to be a light being switched on and off repeatedly in the room of one of the Romanov children, as if sending a coded signal for help. Further investigation reveals the cause: Anastasia has been doing needlework late into the night, her head occasionally moving between the electric lamp and the window.
LEEDS, ENGLAND: The spirit of Petrograd reaches the north of England in June. A convention is called bringing together socialist, women’s and trades union organisations in the Gothic splendour of the Leeds Coliseum. The organisers call it a Convention. It looks not unlike a Soviet. ‘Let us lay down our terms, make our own proclamations, establish our own diplomacy’, says pacifist Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald. The workers are now rediscovering their voice after three years when patriotism kept them silent.
A resolution in support of the Russian revolution passes easily. A second resolution calling for an immediate peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’–the formula of the Petrograd Soviet–passes less easily. One delegate asks who will pay the pensions of merchant seamen killed by German submarines if not the German government. ‘The shipowners’, a few shout. An Irishman decries the double standards of those who celebrate the revolution in Russia, but ignore the failed independence rising in Dublin last year, ‘where the leaders were taken out and shot like dogs’. The third motion is the most radical. It calls for the immediate establishment of workers’ and soldiers’ councils across the country. The speaker introducing the motion is quite clear that this means revolution. Another declares his support for Lenin’s phrase: the dictatorship of the proletariat. The suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst calls the motion a ‘straight cut for the Socialist Commonwealth we all want to see’.
The Leeds resolutions are published in Pravda. The King of England is informed.
LEWES, SUSSEX, ENGLAND: A few days later, word gets through the Lewes jail that an Irish maths professor lucky to have escaped the hangman for his role in the Easter Rising is to be released along with other Irish political prisoners held in British prisons. They say it is a gesture towards American opinion.
Before 1916, Éamon de Valera was not a figure of particular importance. His role in the rising and his time in prison have given him a new stature, as the most hard-line leader in the movement for Irish independence still around. The other Irish prisoners look up to him. He calmly ignores the third-class ticket in his hand when he boards the boat home at Holyhead and marches his men up the first-class gangplank.
In Dublin he is greeted as a hero and made the Sinn Féin candidate for the parliamentary seat of East Clare, vacated because of the death of its previous holder, an Irish patriot who decided to demonstrate his patriotism in a very different way: by fighting in the King’s army in France. In the weather-beaten villages of western Ireland de Valera campaigns in the uniform of an Irish Volunteer, the force that launched last year’s rising. He makes halting speeches to forgiving crowds. He curries favour with local priests by saying he is opposed to any further uprisings for the moment. He talks of his dream that Ireland will one day be not just a dominion of the British Crown but, perhaps, a republic.
THE WESTERN FRONT: ‘The spring has been stretched too long’, reports a French army officer, ‘now it has broken.’
A wave of mutinies spreads through the French army. ‘Even within the most reliable units, even amongst the best elements, there is moral as well as physical exhaustion’, the officer writes: ‘I repeat, the spring is broken, it has been kept taut for too long.’ On one occasion four hundred soldiers abandon their posts and start marching towards Paris before being surrounded by cavalry units and persuaded to return. Another day, two thousand soldiers gather in Ville-en-Tardenois carrying a red flag and singing the Internationale.
Leave is improved. Pay is increased. Military repression is accelerated–but its severity is limited. The French army strains but does not shatter.
VIENNA: Freud flees the city for the summer. In the capital, black marketeers hoard food and government posters urge people to collect bones, lest they go to waste. The Hungarian countryside seems a different world. ‘Friendship and loyalty are taking the form of generosity’, Freud writes to a friend, ‘with the result that we are able to wallow in the abundance of bread, butter, sausages, eggs and cigars, rather like the chief of a primitive tribe’. The Hungarians are ‘unmannerly and noisy’. But amidst such plenty, he hardly cares. He knows it cannot last.
EAST ST. LOUIS, ILLINOIS: The town of East St. Louis on the Mississippi has a reputation for easy alcohol, easy women and politicians on the take. State after state has gone dry in recent years but East St. Louis is an oasis of vice. The licensing of saloons provides an income for local officials. ‘Irrigation juries’ from local bars ensure no one is ever acquitted except as required by the Mayor. Dance halls provide cheap thrills. Aunt Kate’s Honkytonk advertises the Chemise-She-Wobble, where girls perform an Americanised version of the belly dance.
The city has a new reputation by 1917: for racial tensions between whites and blacks. White workers in the city’s booming war industries protest that new black immigrants fleeing poverty and violence in the rural South are holding down wages and introducing crime into the city. In May, a white man is shot by a black man during a hold-up, prompting a downtown riot. Soon after, black labourers at a meat-packing plant are beaten up as they leave work. Whites move out of the neighbourhoods where black families move in. The city is ghettoised.
One Sunday in July, the tensions explode. In the course of a sweltering day, a string of assaults take place. White youths in a Ford motor car cruise along Market Avenue, unloading a gun at random into black houses and shops as they drive by. That night, a police automobile, perhaps mistaken for the same Ford, comes under fire from black residents. Two white officers, Samuel Coppedge and Frank Wadley, are killed. The shops and saloons of East St. Louis are closed the next day. Whites descend on the city’s black neighbourhoods to terrorise the new arrivals and force them to leave.
Black men are pulled off streetcars and beaten to a pulp. Black homes are set alight. Josephine, an eleven-year-old black girl who likes to dress up and dance, runs through the flames to safety on the other side of the Mississippi, where she huddles with her friends and stares back in terror at her home town glowing with the fire of racial hatred. A fourteen-year-old white boy is killed when two black men, trapped in a burning barber’s shop, try to disperse the angry crowd outside with bullets. A black man is lynched on Broadway. ‘Get hold, and pull for East St. Louis!’ bellows a man in a straw hat. The police are powerless to stop the violence. Some join in. The city descends into bloody lawlessness. ‘Look at that’, a rioter says that evening, flashing a torch in the face of a barely breathing black man: ‘not dead yet’. A gunshot echoes around the shuttered streets. Grim order is eventually restored by the National Guard. Forty-eight men, women and children have been killed. Press photographs of the carnage are not allowed. ‘East St. Louis doesn’t want that kind of advertising’, reporters are told.
Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican race activist living in Harlem, pours forth his anger in New York. He thunders against American hypocrisy: ‘America that has been ringing the bells of the world, proclaiming to the nations and the peoples thereof that she has democracy to give to all and sundry, America that has denounced Germany for the deportations of the Belgians into Germany, America that has arraigned Turkey at the bar of public opinion and public justice against the massacres of the Armenians, has herself no satisfaction to give twelve million of her own citizens.’ His solution is revolutionary: the world’s blacks must unite around the world as the workers have, to throw off their enemies.
The Federal government declines to get involved in investigating the East St. Louis riot, just as it declines to intervene against lynching across the American South, where white mobs string up blacks in the name of rough justice for crimes real and imagined. The government seems prepared to let such violence occur, and leave it to the states to sort out. A few weeks after the riots, a silent parade in New York claims the nation’s attention. Several thousand blacks march down Fifth Avenue, the women and children all dressed in white, protesting for justice. It is the first parade of its kind. A banner asks: ‘Mr. President, why do you not make America safe for democracy?’
The East St. Louis riots put America on edge. Later that summer, in Houston, Texas, a mutiny breaks out amongst black soldiers when they hear false rumours that a rampaging white mob is on its way to their army camp. Twenty are killed in the ensuing violence, mostly whites. A court martial leads to the execution at dawn of thirteen black soldiers and forty-one sentences of life imprisonment. A second court martial results in sixteen more death sentences. A petition for clemency is prepared.
PETROGRAD: The leader of the Czech independence movement, Tomáš Masaryk long in exile from Habsburg Prague, meets two guests from Britain off their train. The famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her assistant Jessie Kenney are on a mission to make sure Russia does not drop out of the war. The Czech gentleman has a droshky waiting.
After a quick tour of the sights, the gallant Czech drops the ladies at their hotel and offers two pieces of advice for how to get on in revolutionary Russia: avoid big crowds and get your own cook. If they do not do the former, he says, they may get stuck between two rival mobs–one for and one against the war, for example. If they not do the latter, Masaryk explains cheerily, their choice in Russia will be between starvation or food poisoning. Emmeline refuses the offer of a Czech bodyguard to protect them.
Mrs Pankhurst is granted an audience with the Russian premier within days of her arrival and filmed for the newsreels. One evening, Emmeline and Jessie dine with Rasputin’s aristocratic murderer (and are shown exactly where the grisly deed was done). They are in Petrograd when, on 19 June, the British House of Commons endorses the right to vote of several million more men–and, for the first time, eight million British women. The achievement of Emmeline’s life’s work is crowded out by the situation in Russia.
By day, she gives rousing speeches, in English, to women workers in Petrograd’s munitions factories, urging them not to be misled by siren calls for an immediate and separate peace. She visits hospitals run by foreign aid workers. She attends fundraisers for Maria Bochkareva’s women’s ‘battalion of death’, admiring their strength and dedication to their cause. (‘It is the men, principally, who are leading on to anarchy’, Jessie notes in her diary.) Emmeline falls sick from overwork, with a recurring stomach complaint dating from her various hunger strikes as a suffragette. She rejects an offer to visit the ex-Tsar and his family. It would compromise her mission, she explains.
Petrograd is full of words, words, words. Liberals book up theatres and music halls to give patriotic lectures to their supporters. The city Soviet is packed with workers’ representatives declaring their positions on everything from land reform to Ukraine’s latest bid for autonomy from Russia. War Minister Kerensky, the provisional government’s most dynamic and recognisable leader, never stops talking. But the most stunning newcomer on the speaking circuit is the principled non-tipper Leon Trotsky, with his wild gesticulations, mordant wit, quivering pince-nez and rousing speeches against the war. He revels in the ‘human electricity’ at his speeches at the Cirque Moderne. He has not quite thrown in his lot with Lenin, but is moving his way.
The impatient revolutionary himself is more comfortable with a pen. He castigates the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries for consenting to serve the provisional government and blames capitalist ‘predators’ for the ongoing food and industrial crisis. His position on the war remains: no separate peace with Germany, but no alliances with anyone else. In the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin declares that the Bolsheviks, though only a small minority of the delegates present, are ready to take power by themselves ‘at any moment’: a boast greeted with fear and laughter in equal measure. Kerensky is highly irritated when he sees the Bolshevik leader, whom he has just met for the first time, grabbing his briefcase and slipping out before the end of his own peroration.
The city is bursting with nervous energy. Every rally seems to have the potential to turn into a riot; and every riot has the potential to become an uprising. The workers are losing faith in the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks are suspected of using political agitation as cover for a coup. Their opponents consider banning them. ‘What they are engaged in now is not propaganda’, warns an anti-Bolshevik member of the Petrograd Soviet, ‘it is a plot’. Lenin calls this an ‘insinuation’. In truth he is trying to keep his own followers motivated, while at the same time ensuring they do not strike too early, giving their political enemies an excuse to suppress them. On the one hand he says that ‘peaceful processions are a thing of the past’. On the other, ‘we must give them no pretext for attack’.
A French diplomat hears about a revolutionary meeting at the Cirque Moderne where some joker shouted: ‘here come the Cossacks’, just to see what would happen. ‘In a second’, he writes, ‘both speakers and audience vanished into thin air.’
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: Three years to the day since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, priests dedicate a huge iron and bronze cross to the site of their murder in the centre of Sarajevo.
Charles and Zita are on an official visit to Munich and unable to attend.
THE RUSSIAN FRONT: War Minister Kerensky ignores the generals who warn him that the army will not fight. He issues an order to attack. ‘Let not the enemy celebrate prematurely his victory over us!’ it reads. ‘Let all nations know that when we talk of peace, it is not because we are weak! Forward!’
Success comes easily at first. Thousands of enemy soldiers are taken prisoner in the advance. At Tsarskoye Selo, a service of thanks is conducted before breakfast. The Tsar spends the rest of the day chopping down trees and working in the vegetable garden until interrupted by rain. News remains good for several days. A French diplomat wonders if somehow the Russian army, thought to be riddled with Bolshevik defeatism, is undergoing a glorious resurrection out there at the front. ‘Anything is possible in this country’, he notes. Nicholas and his son joyously saw up fir trees. He finishes Le Comte de Monte Cristo and hungrily starts a new detective novel: Arsène Lupin contre Sherlock Holmes.
The truth at the front is less rosy. Early victories are bought at a heavy price in desertions, dead and wounded. A British military observer reports that many of those missing are simply hiding in the woods and that a large proportion of wounds appear to be self-inflicted. Some of the best fighting is done by units that are not Russian at all, such as the Czechs inspired to fight on the Russian side against the Habsburgs in the hope of securing independence after the war. (The Czech presence on both sides can have ugly consequences: in one case a father shoots his own son in battle.)
Kerensky’s offensive begins to peter out. On the Russian side, desperate appeals for reinforcements to be sent to the front to replace those who have fallen or run away produce no result. Soldiers in Petrograd are said to be selling cigarettes in the street or offering their services as railway porters rather than heeding the call to arms. The German army pulls soldiers from the Western Front to launch a counter-attack. The only bright spot for the Russians is the headlong advance of their troops into Austrian Galicia under a general named Kornilov. (A Siberian Cossack with authoritarian tendencies, the general has a mounted phalanx of Turkmen bodyguards to protect him and writes poetry in Tajik for relaxation.)
When Maria Bochkareva’s women’s battalion arrives at the front, she finds an army on the brink of collapse. ‘What devil brought you here?’ the soldiers jeer. ‘We want peace!’ That evening a band of deserters stone the women’s barracks and thrust their hands through its broken windows to grab their hair. Maria has a vision of three hundred women marching into no man’s land, and a million Russian men rising up behind them, shamed into becoming proper soldiers again by the women’s example. They attack the next day. Several enemy machine guns are seized. Thirty-six of the battalion are wounded; Maria herself suffers concussion. (In the midst of battle she finds two soldiers having sex behind a tree: she promptly bayonets the girl, and sends the man running away in terror.)
The battle–and Kerensky’s offensive–end in heroic failure.
TSARSKOYE SELO: ‘There has been bad news from the south-western front in recent days’, Nicholas Romanov notes in his diary: ‘many units, infected throughout with base, defeatist teachings, not only refused to go forward but in some places retreated even without any pressure from the enemy’. Now, Kornilov’s advance has been halted too. The Germans and Austrians are breaking back through the Russian lines: ‘What disgrace and despair!’
That day the Tsar cuts down three trees, and saws up two more. Then he tidies his room.
ACROSS EUROPE: There is much talk of peace over the summer months: peace formulas, peace declarations, peace resolutions, peace terms. All over Europe, there are meetings, conventions and conferences to discuss it. Charles Habsburg prays for it. Workers strike for it. Diplomats send letters and messages around the Continent trying to figure out what will make the other side stop. At Fátima in Portugal, where young children have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary, they ask her when the soldiers will come home.
At times, peace seems close, like a white dove appearing suddenly through the fog of war. For a moment over the summer, hope settles on the prospect of an international conference in Stockholm where socialists will hammer things out in a spirit of common humanity. But then the little bird disappears again as if it was just a trick of the light. The time is never right for everyone. What’s more, peace has many meanings. Yes, peace–but which peace? Whose peace? Security for Germany or freedom for Belgium? Respect for borders or a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine? Arguments flare between those who think it worth talking to the enemy, and those who think it is betrayal while their countries are still occupied.
And all the while, the war goes on. In the west, the French army is in no position to launch a fresh offensive. A series of limited British assaults are launched to take out German naval bases on the Belgian coast, reducing the risk to cross-Channel troop transports and the danger of German submarines sailing from Ostend. Thousands killed and wounded as a result. An open letter by a soldier in the Royal Welch Fusiliers is read out in the British House of Commons. ‘I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have power to end it’, runs one line. The soldier is sent for psychiatric treatment by a follower of Freud in a hospital outside Edinburgh. In the meantime, the daily horrors of war increase. A new weapon is deployed which the German army calls Gelbkreuz: a poison gas which sinks into the trenches, getting inside even the most well-secured gas mask, burning any skin exposed to it, and lingering in the soldiers’ clothes, and in the soil, for days. Even battle-hardened German soldiers find the conditions of 1917 more awful than the year before. Constant bombardment makes sleep impossible. The soldiers’ nerves are shattered. Rates of desertion are on the rise.
In Germany, a mood of mutiny swells backwards and forwards between the soldiers at the front and the civilians left behind in the fatherland. Tentative dreams of peace clash with the army high command’s demand for the full mobilisation of society. The people are exhausted. In July, when Kerensky’s offensive is looking threatening, the situation takes a dramatic turn when a leading Catholic politician warns his fellow Reichstag members that they must now end their submission to the Kaiser and the generals. They must express their desire for a European peace of reconciliation negotiated by civilians, rather than pursue the fantasies of a military clique. The submarine war has failed. The Reichstag has been deceived. Peace cannot wait. If it does not come soon there will be a winter of unequalled suffering. Nineteen-eighteen will be even worse. Germany cannot win. Will peace now spring from the German Reichstag?
The relatively moderate German Chancellor demands that immediate electoral reform be introduced and that Reichstag representatives–many of whom are Social Democrats–are brought into government. For conservatives and nationalists, this confirms their belief that democracy and defeatism go hand in hand. Ludendorff and Hindenburg force out the Chancellor, threatening the Kaiser with their resignation if he objects. ‘I might as well abdicate straight away’, Wilhelm declares petulantly, before giving in to his generals’ demands. A new Chancellor is soon appointed: quite out of his depth in matters of foreign and military policy. (Up until now, he kept himself abreast of world events ‘by reading the newspapers’, he explains.) Everyone knows he is little more than Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s puppet.
A peace resolution still passes the Reichstag. But the tone is ambiguous. It calls for a ‘peace of understanding’ without territorial acquisition ‘by force’–a major caveat–while affirming that the German people will fight on to the death until their rights to national ‘life and development’ are guaranteed. Perhaps it is a matter of timing. The resolution passes the Reichstag on the same day Kerensky’s offensive collapses and Petrograd seems on the brink of yet another revolution. Peace negotiations suddenly do not seem quite so urgent in Berlin. The new Chancellor says he accepts the resolution ‘as I interpret it’–weasel words which ensure the motion will have no practical effect on government policy.
Despite its apparent desire for peace, the Reichstag nonetheless votes more money for the war. The Stockholm peace conference never takes place.
PETROGRAD: Nadya never sees her husband any more. They take no walks. Vladimir is too busy. She throws herself into the Bolshevik cause in her own way, getting elected to the Vyborg district council and conducting educational work. She notices how useful sellers of sunflower seeds are for conducting agitation amongst the troops. This is how the party grows: garrison by garrison, factory by factory, Soviet by Soviet. As living conditions worsen, the factories grow more militant. As inflation rises, so do the Bolsheviks.
Nadya organises a youth league that, amongst other things, proposes everyone should learn to sew. At first, the young male recruits laugh it off, noting that surely sewing is a woman’s job. They are quickly corrected. ‘Do you want to uphold the old slavery of women? The wife is her husband’s comrade, not his servant!’ Things are changing.
EAST CLARE, IRELAND: The public call the Sinn Féin candidate ‘The Spaniard’ or their ‘Man with the Strange Name’: Éamon de Valera. The Irish Volunteers hold marches in his support. On election day, ‘The Spaniard’ crushes his opponent, a more traditional Irish patriot and a lawyer who is said to have ‘defended one half of the murderers in Clare, and is related to the other half’.
It is clear that de Valera’s strain of nationalism is on the up: the militant, rebellious kind, the kind which refuses British rule entirely and honours the dead of the Easter Rising rather than the Irish dead in France.
NEIVOLA, FINLAND–PETROGRAD: A train chugs its way from Petrograd along the coast of the Gulf of Finland. A pale middle-aged man sits next to his sister, who talks at him non-stop as the carriage rocks from side to side. Occasionally the man holds his head in his hands, as if trying to rid himself of a headache. He looks tired.
For several days at a friend’s dacha in the Finnish village of Neivola, not two hours from Petrograd, Vladimir walks, eats and swims. He spends long hours sitting on the veranda staring at the blue sky. He feels himself regaining his strength after all the scheming and scribbling of the last months. Then, early one morning, a messenger arrives with urgent news. In Lenin’s absence, an insurrection has broken out amongst industrial workers in Vyborg and soldiers about to be sent to the front. It is unclear who, if anyone, is behind it.
Jessie Kenney hears armoured vehicles screaming through the streets of Petrograd. The Belgian Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce is stolen by the mob, and then adorned with a machine gun and a red flag to flutter beside the Belgian tricolour. War Minister Kerensky is visiting the front, though said to be rushing back. The front page of Pravda is blank. A debate in the Petrograd Soviet about whether to support, reject or suppress the revolt does not begin until one in the morning. Lenin rushes to the capital by the first train. He is back at Bolshevik headquarters by midday. Those hothead fools! Too soon, too soon! ‘You ought to be given a good hiding for this’, he tells his over-eager comrades in private, furious that they have let an insurrection take place. Such undisciplined action is fraught with danger.
Twenty thousand armed sailors arrive from the Kronstadt garrison that morning, with their cap ribbons turned inside out so that no one can identify them by the name of their ship. Their purpose in the city is uncertain. The insurrection lacks leadership. Addressing a crowd from the balcony of Bolshevik headquarters, Lenin pointedly refuses to provide it. He even gets a stand-in to finish his speech. The uprising was rotten from the beginning, Lenin decides: this is going nowhere. Riderless horses are seen cantering through the streets. Sheets of paper from a ransacked office float downstream along the Neva. A Frenchman notes spilled face powder and ribbons from a looted shop.
The fair-weather revolutionaries amongst the Kronstadt sailors are cleared off the street by a torrential downpour in the afternoon. A hard core marches to the Tauride Palace. ‘Take power you son of a bitch when it’s handed to you’, a worker shouts at a leading Socialist Revolutionary member of the Soviet who is also a minister. Leon Trotsky stands up on a car bonnet and requests that the man be released. The crowd are confused. Trotsky comes to Kronstadt regularly urging the need for the revolution to continue. Now he seems to be rejecting it. Has he lost his nerve? ‘You’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power’, Leon says. Their devotion to the revolution is not in doubt, he tells the rebels, but ‘individuals are not worthy of your attention’. Trotsky stretches out his hand to one of the sailors: ‘Give me your hand, Comrade! Your hand, brother!’ The minister is released. There will be no revolution today. Pictures of War Minister Kerensky reappear on the walls of the city’s apartments and cafés the next morning.
Despite their protestations of innocence, the Bolsheviks are blamed for the insurrection. The offices of Pravda are raided and Bolshevik headquarters turned inside out in the search for proof of the impatient revolutionary’s German contacts and general Bolshevik perfidy. A warrant is issued for Lenin’s arrest. The fugitive moves from apartment to apartment, from safe house to safe house. ‘Now they are going to shoot us’, he confides knowingly to Trotsky. ‘We may not see each other again’, he tells Nadya when she comes to visit him in one of his hideouts. He raises the possibility of giving himself up–there may be some propaganda benefit to a public trial. The Georgian bank-robber Stalin argues against it. Vladimir’s mind turns to his intellectual legacy, and all the writing he was doing in Zurich before the revolution interrupted him. ‘Entre nous’, he writes to a trusted comrade, ‘if they do me in, I ask you to publish my notebook Marxism and the State (it got left behind in Stockholm)’.
The manhunt for the Bolshevik leader continues. Nadya is closely interrogated when the house in which she is staying is ransacked by a military search party. ‘Look in the oven, someone may be sitting there’, the servant girl tells the soldiers conducting the raid a little tartly. As the net closes in, Vladimir decides he must get out of the city. He has Stalin shave off his moustache and beard before catching a local train filled with summer holidaymakers heading up the Gulf of Finland, getting off not far outside the city and trudging to a property owned by an old Bolshevik party member.
The principled non-tipper Leon Trotsky is arrested and incarcerated in the Kresty jail, where he writes furious articles for Pravda expressing solidarity with Lenin. The Petrograd Soviet is moved to the Smolny Institute, formerly a private girls’ school, full of long corridors and bare classrooms–a significant demotion from the grandeur of the Tauride. Kerensky takes over the formal leadership of the provisional government and moves into the Winter Palace.
UPSTATE MICHIGAN: An American summer at Walloon, the Hemingway family cottage near the Canadian border, five days of dusty driving from Chicago, not so different from Lenin’s hideaway in Finland. Young Ernest the high-school graduate, no longer a boy exactly but not quite a man either, spends the summer fixing things up, helping out his father, going fishing, and pondering the greatness of his future, somehow about to begin.
Time passes slowly. The world is far away. Even the rest of America–where German-Americans are being hounded, suspect newspapers closed and socialists locked up–seems far away. Ernest’s grandfather sends over the Chicago papers for his grandson to read, several days late, but always hungrily consumed. Ernest replies with the latest from Walloon, which isn’t much: a visit by Uncle Tyler and his wife, worries about the potato crop this year, the condition of Clarence Hemingway’s automobile (‘Dad’s Ford is running fine now that the cylinders are clean’.) The most exciting news concerns fishing, and Ernest’s claim to have made ‘the largest catch of trout that has ever been made’ in Horton’s Bay.
As the summer wears on, and the trout tally mounts at Walloon, Ernest begins to wonder whether his future will begin at all. He might stay up at the cottage until October, he writes. Or he might visit one of his uncles, or he might try and get a job at the Chicago Tribune, his newspaper of choice…
THE VATICAN: The Pope tries another peace initiative, issuing an invitation to the warring parties to discuss a peace without annexations or indemnities, but with Belgium’s independence guaranteed.
In Milan, the war-wounded newspaper editor Benito Mussolini calls the Pope a traitor to his country, and advocates total war against the Austrians. (At that very moment, the Italian army is preparing for yet another assault, hoping to crack open the Austrian defences in the mountains north-east of Venice.) To make peace now would be to give up on the nationalist dream of turning the Adriatic Sea into an Italian lake and building an extended empire in Africa. The British demand German withdrawal from Belgium before negotiations can begin. Woodrow Wilson writes that a return to the status quo before the war is impossible now that the Germans have covered Europe in a ‘tide of blood’.
WILHELMSHAVEN, GERMANY: Wilhelm decides to conduct what he considers to be a morale-boosting visit to his fleet. The weather is balmy–‘Hohenzollern weather’, they call it–and so is the political temperature aboard.
The mood amongst the sailors is poor. Germany’s giant surface fleet has not ventured out onto the high seas in force since 1916. They hear that the submarine war has stalled, and that Germany is now losing U-boats faster than they can be replaced. They read in the newspapers from Berlin about the political crisis there, the calls for peace, and the instability in Russia. ‘The entire world is a madhouse’, one sailor writes in his diary that summer, ‘the oldest dynasties have fallen or now hide fearfully from an increasingly restless and fuming volcano…’ The sailors organise themselves into committees to present their complaints. Some are arrested for passing around socialist tracts or for refusing to attend drill practice. News that Russian sailors have taken matters into their own hands at Kronstadt over the summer is greeted warmly in Wilhelmshaven: ‘we Germans ought to imitate them’.
A report on socialist agitation is delivered to Wilhelm in person. He listens approvingly as he is told of the death sentences expected to be handed down to the ringleaders. That evening before supper, Wilhelm addresses the naval chiefs with his own personal perspective on matters. Keen to emphasise his credentials as a far-sighted moderniser, the Kaiser suggests that the German navy should adopt an American-style naval jacket in the future. The senior officers demur: they prefer the old-fashioned cut.
WASHINGTON DC: America gears up for war. Like Tsar Nicholas at Tsarskoye Selo, Edith Wilson plants a vegetable garden at the White House. Across the country, the mines produce more coal. Steelworks produce more steel. Shipyards clank out new vessels.
American businesses, more profitable than ever, promise great feats of additional productivity to meet the fresh demands of war. (The Detroit automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, having apparently given up on his earlier peace efforts, promises to produce one thousand midget submarines and three thousand aeroplane engines every day.) American savers are encouraged to lend money to the government through new Liberty Bonds. The financial wealth of the country is pressed into national service. The first American soldiers reach Europe–though not yet the front–over the summer.
After the Houston mutiny, the army temporarily halts the draft for black Americans. Most existing black recruits are assigned to labour battalions or guard duty. (One activist notes that all the guards at the White House are black.) It is decided that only a handful of all-black combat units will be formed and sent to France.
TSARSKOYE SELO: On a warm and beautiful Friday morning towards the end of summer, just after breakfast, Nicholas Romanov is informed that he and his family are to be moved. Not to Crimea as they had hoped–‘and we were still counting on a long stay in Livadia!’ he notes sadly in his diary–but somewhere out east. They are not told their exact destination. Nicholas engages in a final bout of chopping and sawing in the forest: eleven fir trees are felled in three days. On Sunday, the family celebrates the Tsarevich’s thirteenth birthday.
Nicholas’s brother Michael is brought to Tsarskoye Selo by Kerensky late one night. ‘It was very pleasant to meet’, Citizen Romanov writes in his diary: ‘but to talk in front of strangers was awkward.’ The next morning, the imperial party boards a train marked as belonging to the Red Cross and flying the Japanese flag. A few days after that, they are already in the middle of Siberia, where they pass the native village of their old holy man, Rasputin. They gather on the viewing platform to look at his house standing out amongst the meagre log cabins around it. Rasputin told them that they would come here one day.
Their final destination is Tobolsk. They are put up in the former governor’s mansion. There is a fence to keep them in, and armed guards on the door.
MOSCOW, RUSSIA–RAZLIV, NEAR PETROGRAD: The villages outside Russia’s second city are rather like the English county of Surrey, Jessie Kenney decides. In Moscow, Jessie and Emmeline enjoy a vegetarian dinner with two charming English bachelors who have taken up residence in the city. They talk about the Cossack shawls Emmeline so admires. They buy records of Russian folk songs to take home. The mood is lighter here than in Petrograd.
They are disappointed not to be able to get into the Bolshoi Theatre to see the main show playing in town: a political gathering called by Kerensky to assert his personal authority as leader of the provisional government and present himself as the only man capable of welding together Russia’s fractured polity. Two thousand representatives from across the spectrum of Russian society and politics meet in Moscow–right and left, town and country. But without the Bolsheviks, of course, who declare Kerensky’s national gathering to be counter-revolution dressed up as democracy and call for protest resolutions (but not street demonstrations) against it. Eventually Jessie and Emmeline are able to secure two tickets to view proceedings from the British box. They are delighted to recognise the odd Russian word they have learned: ‘democratzie, revolutzie, organizatie’.
The attempt to demonstrate Kerensky’s power and indispensability to Russia’s political renewal meets with only partial success in Moscow. The precautions necessary to protect the Bolshoi, with a triple cordon of police and militia, tell their own story. Kerensky seems fractious and exhausted: yesterday’s favourite. He is upstaged at the gathering by General Kornilov, the new commander-in-chief of the army, who is greeted by one half of the meeting as a saviour and by the other as a Napoleon-in-waiting.
The army is falling apart, Kornilov explains: ‘men have become like animals’. While he claims not to be against soldiers’ committees in the army per se, he insists they should focus on issues of welfare and supply, on combating the spread of disease and hunger. They must not be allowed to elect officers or dictate tactics. Kornilov is blunt about the military situation: ‘The enemy is knocking at the gates of Riga.’ If the city falls, the road to Petrograd will be open. The next speaker, another army general, goes much further, calling for the Soviets to be abolished. He is applauded on the right. On the left, there is a feeling of unease. Are the generals preparing to take power and roll back the changes of the last six months?
While all this is happening in Moscow, the impatient revolutionary is still in hiding outside Petrograd, in a wooden hut with a thatched roof which leaks when it rains. The mosquitos are terrible. ‘Power has passed into the hands of counter-revolution’, he warns in a riposte to some Bolsheviks who clearly have not grasped the full magnitude of events, the full scale of betrayal which has occurred. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries are ‘butcher’s aides’. Armed insurrection will now be needed against them. All power to the Soviets is no longer a suitable slogan now that the Soviets have proven themselves mere ‘puppets’ of the provisional government under Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary influence. The slogan of the February revolution should be scrapped, Lenin demands.
He decides the time has come to move to a new, and safer, hideout. But to move anywhere at all these days, he needs a disguise. A Bolshevik comrade acquires a wig on the pretext that a troupe of amateur dramatics is being organised. A photographer comes out from Petrograd to take Lenin’s picture for false identity papers. Because there is no tripod available, Vladimir is forced to kneel in the mud while the photo is taken. On the day of departure, the impatient revolutionary and his group get lost in the forest on the way to the railway station and are forced to run across a still-burning peat-bog. They then find they have come to the wrong station anyway. Two trains, a carriage, a change of clothes and an adhesive face mask later, Lenin arrives in the Finnish city of Helsinki, where he is put up in the safest place imaginable: the home of the elected local police chief.
RIGA, RUSSIA–PETROGRAD: A week after Kornilov’s warning, Riga falls to the Germans in a lightning strike combining new tactics on the ground with poison gas and aeroplanes. ‘Today’s news is hateful’, a French diplomat writes in his diary. For Russia, it spells disaster. Petrograd will soon be in range of German bombing raids. Only winter can save the city from German occupation now.
French citizens in the capital turn up at their embassy to ask whether they should leave for home. Petrograd’s railway stations are crowded with those who need no such advice. Women sit on suitcases with their children, surrounded by bags. Trunks are tied up with rope. There are samovars, rolled-up mattresses, gramophone horns. The only winners from the latest crisis are the Bolsheviks.
Jessie Kenney is one of those who goes to the railway station that day, to see her friend Maria Bochkareva off to the front again. At the station, there is a ruckus as some try to prevent the women from boarding their train. Jessie finds herself caught between two opposing mobs–one for and one against the war–just as the gallant Czech gentleman had warned. Her ribs are crushed. She can hardly breathe. Her scarf gets caught, pulling tighter around her neck. Jessie raises one hand into the air, still bearing some flowers given to her by members of Maria’s battalion, in the hope of attracting attention. A soldier on horseback makes his way into the crowd and rescues her.
Jessie has to hold back her tears when she returns to the hotel. She does not want Emmeline to see her this way. To cry in public is against suffragette etiquette. Suffragettes must smile while they bleed.