AUTUMN
PETROGRAD: Anatoly Lunacharsky, one of Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks, and undoubtedly one of the most cultured, is giving a lecture on Greek art to a group of workers in the Cirque Moderne. Afterwards, a group of his friends chat about aesthetics and culture. It is only towards evening, over tea, that they hear the news. A phone call from the Petrograd Soviet’s new headquarters in the Smolny Institute: Kornilov is marching on Petrograd. The counter-revolution has begun.
The reality is more devious. Kerensky has been in touch with Kornilov for some time, sounding him out about the ideas he expressed in Moscow for giving Russia the strong government it needs. Messages shoot between Petrograd and army headquarters at Mogilyov. Kornilov believes his ideas for restoring order are being supported by Kerensky. Loyal troops are to be moved up to Petrograd in anticipation of a Bolshevik revolt should the scheme be put into action. But Kerensky has begun to have second thoughts. He now senses an opportunity to recast himself as the revolution’s hero by framing the unwitting Kornilov.
Kerensky asks for the general’s preference on a future structure of the government: a dictatorship led by Kerensky with the general as a minister, a collective directoire of some sort on the French revolutionary model, or a dictatorship with Kornilov in charge and Kerensky as his minister. The last, the guileless general answers. One night, over a special telegraph machine which records the conversation, Kerensky encourages the general to repeat his earlier unwisely expressed preference. Armed with this artfully manufactured evidence appearing to show Kornilov’s perfidy against the regime, Kerensky demands his cabinet grant full powers to himself to counter the threat. ‘I will not give them the revolution’, he declares defiantly. The trap is sprung. Kerensky sings operatic arias in his study in celebration of his Machiavellian brilliance.
But there is a catch. Kornilov is informed he has been dismissed, but the order is ignored, and his official replacement refuses to take over his command. The general’s troops are already on their way to Petrograd. Having conjured the fake threat of a military takeover to secure full powers for himself, Kerensky now has a real insurrection on his hands. A radio telegram informs the country that the general has conspired to establish ‘a regime opposed to the conquests of the revolution’, and must be stopped. Kornilov angrily denies this version of events. ‘A great provocation has taken place which jeopardizes the fate of the motherland’, his counterblast declares.
The troops march on. Reading the messages from Petrograd, the general suspects foul play. Perhaps the Bolsheviks have already captured the government and are now working hand in glove with the Germans. His duty, then, is clear: ‘the heavy sense of the inevitable ruin of the country commands me in these ominous moments to call upon all Russian people to come to the aid of the dying motherland’. If he fails, the Russians will be made German slaves. Kerensky and Kornilov’s budding alliance has turned into a contest. ‘Kornilov has chosen a moment of deathly danger for his homeland to set the fire of a civil war’, reads one paper.
The Petrograd Soviet, which Kerensky previously sought to sideline, is thrust back to prominence as the command centre of resistance against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks, who have long warned of counter-revolutionary machination, are rehabilitated. They demand Petrograd’s workers be armed. While the Kronstadt sailors sweep into town to defend the revolution, Kornilov’s troops are slowed down by sabotage. Agitators from Petrograd are sent out to win over the rank and file. The soldiers are told the truth: there is no Bolshevik rebellion to repress. If they continue their march into town they will be killing the revolution, not saving it. Kornilov’s revolt–if that is what it ever really was–crumbles in fraternisation and confusion. The general is arrested not long afterwards.
‘Is it a farce or a Shakespearean tragedy?’ writes a French diplomat. Lenin is so surprised by the course of events, he proposes something quite unlike him: a compromise with his former enemies whereby the Bolsheviks forgo the possibility of taking power themselves for the time being, as long as all power now resides with the Soviets. Trotsky is released from jail and a little later becomes chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.
News reaches Nicholas Romanov in Tobolsk. ‘It seems there is a vast muddle in Petrograd’, he writes in his diary. At the front, the Russian army is collapsing faster than ever. ‘She’s a Kornilovka!’ a mob shout at Maria Bochkareva. She is very nearly lynched.
SPARTANBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA: White locals didn’t want black soldiers from New York training in their town–it’s ‘like waving a red flag in the face of a bull’, Spartanburg’s mayor writes to the War Department–but here they are.
One Saturday evening, the band of New York’s 15th Infantry Regiment plays a concert in the town square, where a bandstand has been erected for the purpose. Lieutenant Jim Europe leads the band in playing rousing martial music. It’s a huge success. ‘When do they play again?’ asks one of Spartanburg’s white citizens when the band have finished their concert. Perhaps things will work out all right in South Carolina after all.
The feeling of patriotic unity does not last. In Spartanburg, black soldiers from New York are expected to follow the segregation laws of South Carolina without a word of complaint, are barred from certain shops, and are considered uppity should they so much as decide to walk on the pavement rather than the road. Abuse is common. Tensions soon boil over. One morning soldiers in camp hear that one of their number has been lynched after a fight with the local police. On investigation, it turns out that the story is nothing more than a malicious rumour, and a riot is averted.
On another occasion, one of Europe’s band colleagues is physically assaulted by the manager of a whites-only hotel when he goes in to buy a copy of a New York newspaper. This time, white soldiers from New York are so enraged by the behaviour against one of their black colleagues that they seem ready to burn the hotel to the ground–until an officer arrives to calm things down.
The 15th Regiment are in town for just two weeks. Then the orders come: back to the city, then France.
THE EASTERN FRONT–KREUZNACH: The good news from Russia reaches Kaiser Wilhelm on board a train on his way back from a tour of Bulgaria. Emperor Charles joins his German ally for some of the journey, and bothers him with his latest thoughts on solving the conundrum of Poland’s future status if the war is won. Wilhelm holds forth on Wagner and his operatic genius. ‘The Kaiser’s knowledge on this subject is astounding’, notes an aide in his diary.
Back in Kreuznach it is a return to the regular drill: the odd drive along the Rhine, meetings on Germany’s latest crisis (which the Kaiser dismisses as just the usual fluff), after-dinner films about the war and lectures about the latest subjects to pique Wilhelm’s fancy. In early October, it is the history and folklore of Transylvania. Later in the year, the Kaiser is off again: this time to Macedonia and Constantinople.
HELSINKI, FINLAND: Vladimir writes to Nadya asking her to come and visit. His letter is, as usual, written in invisible ink. It is accompanied by a map. Nadya accidentally singes a corner of it while reading the letter by a gas lamp.
Shortly afterwards, she smuggles herself across the border and walks several miles through a forest to a Finnish railway station. In Helsinki, she struggles to find her husband’s street with only the half-burned map as a guide. It is late by the time she arrives. Two weeks later, she makes the same trip again. The talk on the train to Finland is all political, Nadya reports to Vladimir when she reaches his hiding place. Soldiers openly boast of their willingness to rebel. At first he is delighted–and then alarmed at the news. This is it. The insurrectionary moment has arrived, quite suddenly. There is no more time to lose.
Only days ago, Vladimir was flirting with ideas of compromise with other socialist parties. Now, he has swung around entirely. The time for such tactical flexibility has passed. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries cannot be trusted to break their links with the bourgeoisie. Kerensky will do anything to cling on to power. In the summer, Lenin considered insurrection premature. Now he thinks it urgent.
From his Finnish exile, Lenin writes a sharp letter to party leaders in both Petrograd and Moscow (he is not fussy about which group acts first): ‘The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands’, he insists. They are left with no choice as to the means to use: ‘the present task must be an armed uprising’. There is no time to lose. What if there is a separate peace between Britain and Germany? he wonders. (This is a little fanciful.) What if the Kaiser’s troops march into Petrograd? (This is a more likely.) ‘History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now’, Lenin declares. ‘We shall win absolutely and unquestionably.’
In Petrograd, there is incredulity amongst Bolshevik leaders. Has Lenin lost his mind? Just at that moment, the Bolsheviks are trying out the previously agreed policy of limited compromise, attending a new conference bringing together all parties on the left, from the Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. What if Lenin’s latest missive fell into the wrong hands? The letter is burned.
TOBOLSK, SIBERIA: Three hundred and thirty-seven soldiers guard Nicholas Romanov and his family. They attract the curiosity of the townsfolk, who occasionally peep through the fence at them up on the balcony of the governor’s house.
Nicholas does not ask for much: walks out of town (refused), a saw for cutting wood (accepted) and trips to the local church (allowed). He receives English and French newspapers as well as the Russian ones. A steady stream of hate mail is burned. The revolutionary commissar in charge tells the children stories about his travels in the far east of Siberia. He is surprised how little educated they are.
PETROGRAD: A boisterous, playful Harvard man, full of strong opinions about the world and how to make it better, a man who has seen and written about war in Europe and revolution in Mexico, arrives in Petrograd stoked with radical enthusiasm. He carries a notebook carefully inscribed with his name, address and profession in his best newly learned Cyrillic script–
.
John Reed–everyone calls him Jack–soaks up all he can of the revolutionary atmosphere in Petrograd that autumn. He jots down his observations (‘Russians trust any foreigner–could kill Kerensky easily’) and phrases he overhears in the street (‘as long as capitalism in Europe, can have no socialism in Russia’). Conditions of life are poor. ‘The bread is black and soggy’, he writes to a friend back in America. There is no sugar. Milk is watery and arrives every ten days or so. He observes people queueing with fake babies in their arms to secure food.
But these details matter less than the intensity of life in Petrograd, the sense of possibility and the openness of the future. ‘There is so much dramatic to write that I don’t know where to begin’, he gushes, ‘for color and terror and grandeur this makes Mexico look pale’. Jack and his journalist wife Louise Bryant are having the adventure of their lives.
The American embassy keep an eye on Reed. A few weeks after his arrival he is reported speaking at a rally at the Cirque Moderne attended by some six thousand in which he denounces the supposedly free republic of the United States for its treatment of radicals at home. A protest resolution is passed, and a greeting sent across the ocean to those fighting for social revolution in North America. Reed is turning from reporter into participant.
In a private conversation with an embassy agent, Reed gives his assessment of the various factions in Petrograd politics. Apart from the liberals who want parliamentary order to be restored, he says, ‘the Bolsheviks are the only party with a program’.
ROSENBERG FORTRESS, KRONACH, BAVARIA: In the middle of a storm, on an almost moonless night, five dark figures huddle at the bottom of the inner rampart of Rosenberg Fortress in northern Bavaria, now a prisoner-of-war camp. French soldiers are disguised as German civilians. This is the night of their escape. They check they have everything they need to get across a six-metre rampart, over another, and then down a rocky escarpment and into the forest below: a disassembled ladder made from bits of wood acquired from their jailers on the pretext of building a cupboard, a thirty-metre rope fashioned from strips of bedsheet and some crude skeleton keys.
One escapee has to be left behind on a ledge halfway down the escarpment when it turns out the rope is not long enough. The four remaining fugitives enter the forest at the edge of the castle grounds and start walking in the direction of Switzerland. Day after day, night after night, they continue along their way. Living off the land, forced to sleep rough during the day and travel by night, and with the weather turning cold, exhaustion is inevitable. On the tenth day after their escape from Rosenberg, the Frenchmen decide to give themselves a treat, and take refuge in a pigeon loft, not far from a German village.
They are out of luck. Some locals overhear them. They surround the pigeon loft at dusk, along with a nervous German soldier carrying an old rifle. While being led off, two of the four Frenchmen make a dash for it and manage to get away. The other two are returned to Rosenberg. One of them is Charles de Gaulle of the 33rd Infantry Regiment of the French army, taken prisoner during the battle of Verdun in 1916.
LONDON: Since the summer there has been a new dynamo at the heart of the British government, throwing off electricity and light, and sometimes a little heat as well.
Winston Churchill, now the Secretary of State for Munitions, is interested in everything this autumn. And war supply, it turns out, really does touch on everything at once. ‘This is a steel war’, he tells businessmen in the metal trade in September. The next day he is looking into the problem of spare parts for motor transport. Later in the month it is poison gas. In early October: ‘I have been giving a good deal of attention to the Tanks lately’–without forgetting the essential importance of ensuring that munitions factories have better air-raid shelters, or the need for more shells from American factories. In the middle of the month Winston is asking about the supply of chemicals and trying to find a way to pay some crucial workers more without setting off a general increase in wages which the country cannot afford. He demands experimental work to neutralise the threat from German Zeppelin bombers which can now fly at six thousand metres above sea level, far above the reach of Britain’s air defences.
One day Winston receives a letter from a friend in the army in Flanders about the wars of the future. ‘I am sure that bombing from the air–now really only in its infancy–is going to make it impossible for the weaker side in the air to fight’, the correspondent writes. Churchill replies with a missive on ‘bombing machines’ two weeks later (he had hoped to respond in person on a visit to the Continent): ‘I can assure you I shall do everything in my power to emphasize this development’.
VYBORG, FINLAND: What is taking them so long? Insurrection! Now! Is it so hard to understand? He writes another letter to the Bolshevik leadership. ‘Procrastination is becoming positively criminal’, he tells them. It does not matter where the revolution starts. In Moscow, even: ‘victory is certain, and the chances are ten to one that it will be a bloodless victory’.
Lenin decides he can wait no longer. He returns to Petrograd in secret dressed as a Finnish priest. He meets the rest of the Bolshevik leadership in a private flat–the owner’s wife has a party connection. For an hour, Vladimir harangues his comrades. He has become convinced that the moment of revolution has arrived. Wait any longer and peace might cut the momentum from the Bolsheviks, and the workers might lose their appetite.
Eventually, the impatient revolutionary prevails. A vote is taken: 10–2 in favour of insurrection. Technical planning will now begin. The question of precise timing is left open for the moment. The sooner the better, Vladimir asserts. Trotsky has other plans. A national congress of Soviets is planned in two weeks. Perfect cover. Lenin is given the job of preparing the manifesto for the insurrection and what follows from it. He goes back into hiding in Petrograd. The police are still searching for his whereabouts.
WASHINGTON DC: A New York businesswoman, the well-named Vira Whitehouse, addresses Woodrow: ‘We have come to you as the leader of our country’s struggle for democracy’, she tells him.
This is America, the shining city up on a hill, a beacon to the world. And yet, outside some of the western states, women do not have the vote. She reminds the President of the role that women play every day in the war effort: selling war bonds door to door, stitching uniforms for the Red Cross and working in factories across the land. They are ready, if called, to bring in next year’s harvest from the fields. Is it not illogical that while a woman sits in the US House of Representatives (a Republican from Montana), most states deny women the right to select who is sent to Washington?
In the United States, the most recent suffrage battle is under way in the state of New York, America’s most populous, where the vote was denied women in a referendum in 1915, but where a new opportunity to win it now presents itself. ‘We have come to you to ask you’, Vira tells Woodrow, ‘to send to the voters of New York State a message so urgent and so clear that they cannot fail as patriotic men to place the women of their State on an equal footing with the women of the Allied Countries’.
The President, not always the firmest friend of America’s suffragists, issues a public statement. As two great ideas of political authority–democracy and autocracy–clash across the world at war, America must live up to its founding principles. Two weeks later, New York votes. Women’s suffrage wins. It cannot be long now before the rest of the United States follows.
DUBLIN, IRELAND: What is an independent Ireland to be? The founder of Sinn Féin favours an Irish monarchy, along Austro-Hungarian lines–one monarch, two kingdoms. Others prefer a total break, a republic. The question threatens to split Irish nationalism.
At negotiations in a house on the outskirts of Dublin, the hard men, the men with guns who will settle for nothing less than a full-blown republic in honour of the martyrs of 1916, are ready to walk out and catch the last tram home. Michael Collins is one of these: a blustery Easter veteran who knows the inside of an English jail as well as anyone, is steeped in the secret societies of Irish nationalism, and who believes that only force will secure Ireland’s freedom. De Valera talks them back inside. The nationalist cause has no hope of victory without an army. But an army without a popular movement has no legitimacy. The two must march forward together, arm in arm: Sinn Féin and the Volunteers.
That evening, de Valera drafts a politician’s compromise. ‘Sinn Féin aims at securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish republic’, it reads, but ‘having achieved that status the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own form of Government’. Republic first–then let’s see. In formulating the compromise to keep Irish nationalism together, Éamon demonstrates his own indispensability: he is the only soldier-politician available who can straddle both the bomb and the ballot box. He is more convinced than ever that leadership is his destiny.
In late October, in the effete surroundings of Dublin’s Mansion House where Queen Victoria once visited her loyal subjects, the MP for East Clare and former inmate of His Majesty’s Prisons at Dartmoor, Maidstone, Lewes and Pentonville is elected president of Sinn Féin (the party’s founder is persuaded to step down over a coffee in Grafton Street). Two days later, in the rather more basic surroundings of the Gaelic Athletic Association–hay bales and bare wooden planks–the same man is made leader of the Irish Volunteers (with Michael Collins looking on). Thus Éamon unites two thirds of the nationalist Holy Trinity in himself. The last third of course is God. His loyalty is assumed.
PETROGRAD: The treasures of the Hermitage are packed up and sent out on barges. There are rumours that the government plan to quit the capital. One day news reaches town that German soldiers have landed on the islands off Estonia’s coast. The Petrograd Soviet sets up a Military Revolutionary Committee to organise the popular defence of the city. Packed with Bolsheviks, many suspect it is planning a coup.
Everyone is talking about it. ‘The moment has finally arrived when the revolutionary slogan All power to the Soviets! must finally be realised’, one newspaper writes that October. ‘The Bolsheviks are getting ready for action–that is a fact’, says another two days later. The Smolny Institute is full of cigarette smoke and muttering. ‘It is the inevitable lutte finale’, Leon Trotsky explains languidly to John Reed.
The principled non-tipper is the public face of Bolshevism in these weeks. He is rarely at home, sleeping on a sofa at the Smolny and spending his days racing around Petrograd talking to the garrisons and to mass meetings at the Cirque Moderne. Trotsky explains the benefits of a Soviet regime in plain and simple terms. ‘The Soviet government will give everything the country contains to the poor and to the men in the trenches’, he promises. All goods will be redistributed: ‘You, bourgeois, you have got two fur caps!–give one of them to the soldier who’s freezing in the trenches. Have you got warm boots? Stay at home. The worker needs your boots.’
Internal Bolshevik arguments about whether they should issue the call for insurrection spill into the open. A senior Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev, writes an article warning that an uprising in the next days would be ‘a fatal step’. Leon is forced into a denial, claiming: ‘we have still not set a date for the attack’. Lenin responds to those who publicly discuss the imminence of insurrection with the worst insult he can muster: ‘strike-breaker’.
Stalin attacks the ‘general croaking’ amongst intellectuals who used to speak about revolution so warmly over the table but now are suddenly afraid. Soon, he says, such ‘celebrities’ will be consigned to the ‘museum of antiquities’.
ROSENBERG FORTRESS: De Gaulle attempts escape from Rosenberg for the second time in two weeks. This time he is only out of German captivity for a few hours. The local police pick him up when he tries to board the 5 a.m. train from Lichtenfels to Aachen, on the German–Dutch border, planning to make good his escape via the Netherlands. De Gaulle tells the police exactly what he thinks of them when they arrest him–a lapse in manners which will come back to haunt him later.
KARFREIT, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE–MILAN: At the northern end of the Western Front, the British, Canadians and Australians launch attacks against the Germans. Advances are measured by who controls which farm outhouse, who dominates which hill, who holds such-and-such a ridge. The Canadians eventually capture Passchendaele, at the loss of several thousand casualties. There is no knockout blow.
The real action, it turns out, is far to the south-east, around the village of Karfreit–the Italians call it Caporetto–on the Isonzo river, where the Austrians launch a major attack backed by battle-hardened German divisions. From the beginning, almost everything goes their way. Fog and rain hide their artillery from the Italians. Forward units storm through the valleys of Plezzo and Tolmino, west of the Isonzo, bypassing Italian defensive positions on the hills above.
Within a few days, German and Austrian troops are advancing towards Venice. Italian generals blame dissent behind the lines for the military collapse. Nearly three hundred thousand soldiers are taken prisoner and the same number of civilians flee their homes. British and French forces are rushed to the Italian front line, their planes restoring control of the skies. Austrian and German forces continue to advance until their supply lines are too extended for them to carry on. The Italians secure a new defensive line on the Piave, dangerously close to Venice.
Caporetto becomes a symbol of everything that is wrong with Italy: the weakness of the state, the haughty attitude of the generals, the lack of national cohesion. Nationalists like Mussolini or D’Annunzio blame the corrupting influence of internationalism. They rage against the peaceniks who want to sell Italy short just at the moment when the country is on the point of becoming southern Europe’s great power. The disaster of Caporetto does not kill Italian nationalism–it provides it with martyrs to honour, and new domestic enemies to defeat.
Benito Mussolini is in no doubt what is needed: Italy must dedicate itself once more to war. Cafés, concert halls and theatres should be shut. Order must be re-established. The Socialists, Mussolini’s old comrades until they took the path of pacifism, must be locked up. Radical social change should be introduced to give soldiers something to fight for: land reform for the peasants and better conditions for the workers. But this is socialism for the nation, to strengthen its living force, not socialism against it. After Caporetto, it is clearer than ever to Mussolini that Italy must defeat two enemies to win this war: the Austrians at the front, and the pacifist-internationalist tendency behind it. War abroad and war at home are two sides of the same nationalist revolutionary coin. ‘It is blood which moves the wheels of history’, Benito once told a crowd in 1914. The war must be won for Italy to remake itself.
Perhaps the soldiers should take over, Mussolini writes, those who have felt the heat of war and know the price. True warriors understand commands, leadership, the cruel equality of death. Is it not just that those who sacrifice most for the nation’s future should determine its path? Trenchocracy–trincerocrazia–will replace democracy. The new division in society, Benito decides, is between ‘those who have fought and those who haven’t; those who have worked and the parasites’. So then, a soldiers’ council–in essence, a nationally minded Soviet–should run Italy.
But better still, how about a single leader, a nationalist socialist vanguard in the living flesh of one man? It would cut out the bickering. Allow things to move faster. The Russian experiment is hardly a model to take in a time of war. Occasionally glancing at his own rather striking visage in the mirror, Mussolini lovingly describes the kind of leader he has in mind: ‘A man who has both the delicate touch of an artist and the heavy fist of a warrior. A man who is sensitive and yet strong-willed. A man who knows and loves the people, and who can direct and bend them with violence if required.’ A modern leader, Benito explains on the pages of Il Popolo, should be an artist, a conjuror, a mind-reader, a man of magnetic appeal, a man who instinctively understands the impulses of human nature explored by Freud and who is able to respond and shape them through his own leadership, turning the docile and idiotic masses into an army of renewal.
Such a leader must be a visionary. He must be virile, yet sensitive. He must be sensual in his exercise of power, yet have no fear of embracing brutality when required. Mussolini looks at himself in the mirror again and runs his eyes over his own strong features: the jutting chin, the Roman nose, the bullet-smooth dome of the forehead, the fierce black eyes and the luscious lips which seem to form themselves naturally into a pout, ready to deride, or order, or even to kiss. They will make marble busts of this head one day, he thinks.
BERLIN: ‘In all my life, Davis’, Wilhelm tells his American dentist, ‘I have never suffered so much pain.’ The first panicked telephone call to Davis comes in at three-thirty in the morning. A limousine is sent to pick him up, complete with an outrider carrying a bugle. By the time they get back to the Neues Palais in Potsdam the palace is gearing up for the day ahead. Davis cannot believe his luck: real coffee, real white bread, butter, marmalade and cold meats await him in the antechamber to Wilhelm’s apartments. The dentist leaves a single slice of bread by way of politeness. The Kaiser’s manservant tells him not to be so foolish. ‘Even here’, he says, ‘we don’t get too much of that.’
The Kaiser is placed in a chair looking out over the palace grounds while the dentist gets to work. Wilhelm’s rowing machine, with a special attachment for the Kaiser’s unusable left hand, stands to one side. ‘Look here’, he tells Davis, ‘I can’t fight the whole world, you know, and have a toothache!’ It is not long before the American is able to solve the problem. And not long before the Kaiser’s braggadocio has returned to its usual gale-force levels. He boasts about Caporetto: ‘Italy will never get over this defeat’, he brags. ‘Now, we’ve got the Allies’.
A week or so later Wilhelm visits the Italian front with Charles. The emperors hand out medals. There is a spat between them about the apparent Habsburg lack of generosity towards German soldiers. Wilhelm catches a chill and has to return home early.
PETROGRAD: ‘I don’t understand them’, Lenin cries on receiving another note from the Smolny. ‘What are they afraid of?’ He throws it on the floor. A hundred loyal soldiers, he says, is all he would need to finish off the provisional government. And the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee, with Trotsky at the helm, already have the support of the city’s garrison.
Still cooped up in an apartment, unable to leave for fear of being arrested on the street, Vladimir waits. He issues impatient notes to his fellow Bolsheviks, urging them to action, action, action where once he recommended caution, caution, caution. Have they lost their nerve? ‘We must not wait!’ he writes in one missive. ‘We may lose everything!’ Then he decides he must go to the Smolny himself, where the All-Russian Congress of Soviets is due to open in a day or so. He must herd the Bolsheviks towards insurrection. The congress will be presented with a fait accompli. Vladimir throws caution to the wind. He leaves a note for his hostess: ‘I have gone where you did not want me to go. Ilyich.’ He wears a wig, of course. And a bandage wrapped around his head.
At the Smolny, to his surprise and relief, Lenin finds the uprising already under way. Kerensky has finally been provoked into an ineffective crack-down: the printing presses of two papers, including one edited by Stalin, are smashed up. This gives the Bolsheviks their excuse to act–defensively, of course–to take over key points in the city. In no time, they have seized the railway stations, telephone exchange, an electricity generation plant and the post and telegraph offices. Kerensky’s regime is melting away. Lenin insists the Bolsheviks push harder. They must plan their moves for when the congress opens, and proclaim their own government. (It is Trotsky who comes up with the vigorous title of ‘People’s Commissar’ to replace that old-fashioned ‘minister’: ‘smells terribly of revolution’, Lenin says enthusiastically.) Everyone is tramping through the Smolny to get a taste of what is going on. The building is lit up day and night. John Reed gives up his ballet tickets to hang out there.
The vice is closing on the provisional government. Kerensky escapes in a car belonging to the American embassy. A Bolshevik proclamation is issued claiming, a little prematurely, that the government itself has been overthrown. ‘We must now set about building a proletarian socialist state in Russia’, Lenin thunders. ‘Long live the world socialist revolution!’ The Petrograd Soviet passes a resolution stating its conviction that ‘the proletariat of the West European countries will help us to achieve a complete and lasting victory for the cause of socialism’. Can it really be this easy? Vladimir admits he finds it all quite dizzying: ‘es schwindelt’, he says in German, circling his hand around his head. Exhausted by all his agitation over the last few weeks, Leon suffers a blackout from lack of food.
That evening, the Smolny is full of tobacco smoke and bayonets of the Red Guards. But not everyone is happy at their putsch. The Bolsheviks must explain themselves. Why did they not wait? Why did they not work with others? Trotsky is uncompromising: the Bolsheviks represent historical destiny. ‘A rising of the masses of the people’, he says, ‘needs no justification.’ What happened is not a conspiracy, it is a popular insurrection. ‘And now we are told: renounce your victory’, Trotsky snorts. Those who do not like it can leave. Some factions in the Soviet walk out. This merely increases the Bolshevik majority.
But their power is not completely cemented yet. There is a final act still to play out. The ministers of the government remain holed up in the Winter Palace, anxiously waiting to be arrested or killed. There are few soldiers left willing to defend them: one hundred and forty members of a women’s battalion, the boys from the military academy, and a special bicycle unit amongst them. An attack is bound to come. At the British embassy candles and torches are distributed. In the palace, the electricity is cut off. Then the phone lines. Calls for reinforcements are tapped out by a sole loyal telegrapher at the war office. The palace is taken that very night. A deafening blank fired from a frigate signals the start of the assault. A clatter of soldiers across cobblestones. The whistle of gunshots. Later, there are reports of some of the women soldiers being thrown out of windows–or worse. They do not stand a chance.
In the depths of that freezing night, to waves of applause, a new government of commissars is proclaimed at the Smolny, with Lenin at its head and Trotsky made responsible for foreign affairs (after being denied the job of commissar for the press, and refusing responsibility for interior affairs on the basis that anti-Semitic Russians would not like a Jew in that position). Stalin is made responsible for nationality issues. There is cheering: they have done it. A decree on peace is passed demanding an immediate armistice on all fronts, between all belligerents, and announcing the abolition of secret diplomacy. ‘We shall send out our appeal everywhere, it will be made known to everybody’, Lenin announces, ‘it will be impossible to hush up our workers’ and peasants’ revolution, which has overthrown the government of bankers and landowners’. He calls the war a ‘bloody shambles’, a ‘nightmare of slaughter’. Private land ownership is to be abolished. Theory is to be put into practice.
Ludendorff sends a telegram to his generals on the Eastern Front. ‘ACCORDING TO INTERCEPTED RADIO TRANSMISSIONS’, he reports, ‘A REVOLUTION HAS BROKEN OUT IN PETROGRAD IN WHICH THE WORKERS’ AND SOLDIERS’ COUNCIL IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN VICTORIOUS.’ This is ‘DESIRABLE FROM OUR POINT OF VIEW’. Ludendorff asks that the events in Petrograd be used for propaganda purposes.
Curious visitors inspect the Winter Palace the next day. The British Ambassador observes that while there are thousands of bullet holes in one side of the building, there are only three larger marks where artillery shrapnel has struck. The damage from looting is much worse inside–a French diplomat heads to the Petrograd flea market in the hope that he may be able to pick up some imperial antiques. Michael Romanov, the ex-Tsar’s brother, sees the damage for himself when he is escorted back to Petrograd after a failed escape to Finland. He spends a couple of days visiting his old haunts before returning to Gatchina, where he is held under house arrest and spends his time playing the guitar.
In Moscow the fighting around the Kremlin lasts for a week. There are wild rumours of Kerensky gathering a Cossack army to take back Petrograd. Even without such a push from the outside, how long will it be before the Bolshevik insurrection collapses? Informed observers give it a week or two at most.
VIENNA: Freud smokes his last cigar, and immediately suffers the ill effects of its absence. ‘Since then I have been grumpy and tired, got heart palpitations and an increase in the painful swelling of my gums (carcinoma? etc.)’, he writes to a colleague. But Freud is lucky. Help is at hand: ‘Then a patient brought me fifty cigars, I lit one, became cheerful, and the gum irritation rapidly abated’.
In between puffs Freud works on a new idea, to prove the role of the unconscious in shaping the process of evolution, giving a psychological basis to evolutionary biology, and making thought the ultimate master of genetics. ‘The idea’, Freud writes a few days later, ‘is to put Lamarck entirely on our ground and to show that his “need”, which creates and transforms organs, is nothing but the power of unconscious ideas over one’s own body, of which we see remnants in hysteria, in short the “omnipotence of thoughts”’.
Freud’s patients talk of nothing but guilt. Sigmund himself begins to wonder out loud whether he will last the war, and worries for his son Martin, involved in the fighting in Italy. In correspondence with Karl Abraham, who still believes in German victory and the triumph of psychoanalysis with it, Freud is pessimistic. ‘I do not believe that the events in Russia and Italy will bring us peace’, he writes; ‘one should admit the U-boat war has not achieved its object. Our future is pretty dim.’ Both sides stink.
Freud’s latest paper is finally released, about mourning and melancholia. Other unfinished papers lie on his desk, the building blocks of what he has called metapsychology. Somehow, they trouble him. These papers must be ‘silenced’, Freud writes to a friend. Eventually he decides to burn them, watching the words turn to cold ash.
SIBERIA: The Bolshevik revolution is not instantaneous across the entire country. It spreads by railway and by telegraph wire. It reaches some places in a few hours. In other parts of Russia, the news takes days or even weeks to get through. ‘Can it be that Kerensky cannot stop this wilfulness?’ Nicholas Romanov asks when the tidings from his old capital finally penetrate the Siberian isolation of Tobolsk.
It is several days before news gets another thousand miles east to Tomsk, where the Hungarian socialist Béla Kun is busy in the local library learning Russian and writing pieces for the local newspaper, the Siberian Worker. The next revolution, he declares, will take place in Germany.
BRESLAU, SILESIA, GERMANY: Rosa writes her usual letters to her friends. She tells them about a fuchsia plant which blossomed for a second time in October. She fulminates against the spineless German Social Democrats. How pathetic they have been to not take advantage of the sailors’ mutiny in Wilhelmshaven over the summer! How weak in their response to the government crackdown which followed! Is the Russian proletariat to be left to ‘bleed to death’, she asks?
But she believes in the inevitability of history. ‘Lenin and his people will not of course be able to win out against the insuperable tangle of chaos’, she writes, ‘but their attempt, by itself, stands as a deed of world-historical significance.’ What Lenin has started on the fringes of the capitalist system–in backward Russia–will inevitably spread to Britain, France and Germany, the only places where the struggle for world revolution can finally be won. ‘In a few years, everything, all around, will have to change’, she explains; ‘the more the general bankruptcy takes on gigantic dimensions and steadily persists, the more it will become obvious in an elementary way that appropriate measures must be taken against it.’
History is taking its course, she tells herself. It must be observed, with ‘the calmness of a research scientist’.
BERLIN: Albert Einstein writes to a friend. ‘Would it not be good for the world if degenerate Europe were to wreck itself totally?’ he asks. ‘All of our exalted technological progress, civilisation for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.’ The Chinese, he says, would do a better job.
He survives on food parcels sent from Switzerland (to which he is entitled as a Swiss citizen). On Thursdays, he lectures on statistical mechanics and the latest theories from the world of physics. Amongst the tiny group of European intellectuals familiar with reports of his work, Einstein is either the budding prophet of a new philosophical order or a dangerous charlatan, another harbinger of the universal derangement of society. To most of the world, he is an unknown quantity. His name means nothing.
PETROGRAD: Lenin and his closest allies work day and night at the Smolny to secure control of what remains of the Russian state. It is an uphill struggle. They have never really run anything before. Most are writers and professional revolutionaries, with backgrounds in Marxist theory and Siberian exile. The ministries are resistant to such freelancing outsiders.
One day, the old state will be smashed, of course. But first, it must be mastered. The secretive habits of revolutionaries in exile are not designed for smooth and efficient government. They have no cash. Lenin wires to Stockholm: ‘Urgently find and send here three highly skilled accountants to work on reform of the banks. Knowledge of Russian is not essential. Fix their remuneration yourself in accordance with local conditions.’
The Smolny is a tip. Trotsky’s wife notes Lenin’s dirty collar and reminds his sister to get him a new one. Everyone eats and sleeps irregularly. A cleaner catches a furtive figure helping himself to bread and herring in the Smolny canteen late one night. ‘I felt very hungry, you know’, Vladimir says sheepishly when challenged. The impatient revolutionary’s first official automobile is stolen from outside the Smolny’s front gate by members of the fire brigade hoping to sell it across the border in Finland. Are the Bolsheviks in power or are they merely squatting?
In such a hothouse atmosphere, relationships are forged and broken in an instant. One day, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin arrive at the same time to a meeting of Lenin’s cabinet–the Sovnarkom–to hear the sound of a lusty twenty-nine-year-old sailor seducing the beautiful forty-six-year-old Alexandra Kollontai (an old associate of Lenin, and leading expert on the relationship of sex and love to socialism). Hearing the muffled sounds of amorous embrace, Joseph nudges Leon: ‘That’s Kollontai! That’s Kollontai!’ Trotsky is not amused by such backwater crudeness. ‘That’s their affair’, he snaps back unsmilingly. Mutual prejudices are re-enforced. Trotsky is a cosmopolitan intellectual, who speaks several languages effortlessly and is conversant in all the latest literary debates. Stalin speaks even Russian with a Georgian accent. His mother, embarrassingly enough, does not speak the language at all. The Georgian bank-robber overcompensates with a dose of Russian chauvinism as a result.
A flurry of proclamations declare an eight-hour work day, the right of workers to oversee the management of their workshops and factories, the nationalisation of the banks, the removal of religious privilege, the equalisation of pay for intellectual workers and labourers. Whether any of these will become reality is quite unclear. Petrograd is a revolutionary island; Russia is another country. Workers are one thing; peasants quite different. Vladimir and Leon work as one, with offices at either end of a long corridor in the Smolny. A young sailor runs with messages between them. Sometimes they use the telephone. They correct each other’s texts. Several times a day Leon strides up the corridor to see Vladimir personally. Lenin jokingly suggests he get a bicycle for the journey.
Leon does not take his work as commissar for foreign affairs entirely seriously. ‘What diplomatic work are we apt to have?’ he asks one comrade. ‘I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world, and then shut up shop.’ Worldwide revolution will do the job for him. John Reed joins the Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda to help the process. A more junior official is sent to the German-held citadel of Brest-Litovsk to negotiate an armistice with the representatives of Germany and her allies. Leon prefers to stay in Petrograd, where he can exercise a more freewheeling influence on events. He sends out radio messages exhorting the world to revolution, to counter the critical ones that are being broadcast from the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
There is a distinct turn to dictatorial methods even in these first weeks. The ends justify the means. ‘As soon as the new order becomes consolidated, all administrative pressure on the press will be terminated’, it is promised. In the meantime, opposition newspapers are deemed counter-revolutionary. The expansive theory of all power to the Soviets is honoured in principle. But the practical reality is that decision-making authority lies increasingly in small committees–or, to be precise, in an exclusively Bolshevik cabal at the very top. The line between state and party is blurred. Theory and practice collide.
Lenin answers his critics with platitudes. ‘Socialism cannot be decreed from above’, he says comfortingly; ‘living, creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.’ And yet formalities cannot be observed right now: any delay would be a disaster. He wonders whether calling the Constituent Assembly–long promised by everyone including the Bolsheviks as the sovereign body to choose a government for the Russian people–is such a good idea at this particular juncture. Alarmingly, elections show the Socialist Revolutionaries are far more popular across the country than the Bolsheviks.
Vladimir appoints a thin and gloomy Pole with shifty grey eyes and an intellectual’s beard to run a new security outfit to fight against the spies and saboteurs he imagines everywhere. He calls it the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption–or Cheka, for short. ‘The bourgeoisie are prepared to commit the most heinous crimes; they are bribing the outcast and degraded elements of society and plying them with drink to use them in riots’. Such things must be stopped.
The impatient revolutionary applies his personal experience in other matters of essential importance. Library policy, for example. ‘The following changes, based on principles long practised in the free countries of the West, especially Switzerland and the United States, must be made immediately and unconditionally’, Lenin writes: networks to exchange books must be introduced (particularly with Finland and Sweden); forwarding books between libraries must be made free; libraries should be open from eight in the morning to eleven at night. In other words, like Zurich–but better.
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI: Riding around in squad cars, chasing ambulances, getting ‘the latest dope’, describing almost anything as ‘jazzy’, chatting man-to-man with hard-bitten police officers who have seen it all–this is the life!
Within a few weeks of starting as a cub reporter with the Kansas City Star–a job acquired with Uncle Tyler’s help, the Chicago Tribune firmly forgotten–Ernest, barely eighteen years of age, has reported on a conference of black religious leaders, talked his way into the trust of an American army captain to enquire about confidential troop movements, made friends with a guy called Ted fresh back from France, and become the mascot of the local police. ‘All cops love me like a brotherhood’, Ernest writes excitedly to his sister Marcelline.
And he has other news a few days later. ‘I intend to enlist in the Canadian Army soon’, Ernest scribbles to his sister in early November, in strictest confidence: ‘Honest kid I cant stay out much longer’. It takes just three months, he explains, from signing up to arriving in France. He has already discussed the whole thing with his friends at the Canadian recruitment office. They are, Ernest writes, ‘the best fighters in the world, and our troops are not to be spoken of in the same breath’. He feels his place is with them. ‘I may wait until the summer is over’, he explains, ‘but believe me I will go not because of any love of gold braid glory etc. but because I couldn’t face anybody after the war and not have been in it.’
A week later Ernest Hemingway signs up with the Missouri National Guard and uses a large portion of his reporter’s salary to buy himself a second-hand khaki uniform and an overcoat for training in the woods outside the city (‘we marched and skirmished and had bayonet charges and sent out spies and all’). ‘We will get our winter uniforms soon’, Ernest reassures his parents, ‘and then I will get snapped and send to you’.
One night in December, Ernest spots an unusual sight at Kansas City railway station: three train-cars full of black American soldiers sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in the Houston riots that summer.
JERUSALEM, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: After several weeks of fighting nearby, in mid-December the British receive the surrender of the Holy City, ending centuries of Ottoman rule. Where the Kaiser rode in on horseback on a state visit nearly twenty years before, the British General Allenby now enters Jerusalem on foot. The event is filmed. Allenby makes a short proclamation. It is then read out to the population of the city in the languages spoken there: Arabic, Hebrew, French, Italian, Greek and Russian.
‘A Christmas present to the British people’, they call it in London, particularly welcome after the bloody grind of news from Flanders and the narrowly averted disaster at Caporetto. ‘Jews Here Jubilant’, runs the headline in the New York Times. It is only a few weeks since the British declared their support, in principle, for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Now they run the place.
On a cold Sunday in Vienna, Freud is in a rotten mood–angry at Germany for the war (he warns he may never go there again), angry at himself for a bad bout of writer’s block, frustrated that the latest edition of his psychoanalytic journal cannot be circulated for lack of wrapping paper, and pessimistic about the future. ‘The only thing that gives me any pleasure’, he writes, ‘is the capture of Jerusalem, and the British experiment with the chosen people.’
In Istanbul, there is horror. Mecca, Medina and Baghdad have already fallen. Now Jerusalem. How long can the Ottoman Empire and its Sultan–who doubles as Islam’s Caliph–survive this shame? The triumvirate of pashas who run the empire–Grand Vizier Talaat, Navy Minister Djemal and War Minister Enver–are downcast. They entered this war on the German side–even to the point of accepting German army commanders–in order to reunite the Turkic peoples of the world (Enver’s particular dream), and to save the empire. They might end up ruining it. Djemal is reported to be in tears.
A fourth man, a general named Mustafa Kemal–the man who defeated Winston’s grand plans at Gallipoli and is now a Turkish national hero–is plunged into despair. He paces up and down in his suite at the Pera Palace hotel in Istanbul, where he is taking a period of leave after a bruising run-in with his German superior officer (personally he has always preferred the French). There are reports that Kemal went to see Enver after the Jerusalem debacle to remonstrate against the management of the war and that things got so heated that both men drew their guns.
To calm him down, War Minister Enver offers Kemal a place on a diplomatic trip to Europe, accompanying the Sultan’s younger brother and heir apparent, Crown Prince Vahdettin, on a trip to visit the German Kaiser. Kemal’s initial impression of the fifty-six-year-old Ottoman Prince is unpromising: he seems a nice enough man, but a little unsure what day it is and perhaps in some kind of trance. The first stage of the trip to Europe continues in that vein. A communications cock-up in Istanbul means that when the imperial delegation arrive in Vienna there is no one there to greet them, and the party are forced to sleep on board their stationary train.
Things get better in Bad Kreuznach, where Wilhelm welcomes Mustafa Kemal as the hero of Gallipoli and his visit is reported in the German papers. He goes to see Strassburg, where he is embarrassed to be asked whether the gruesome stories of the mass deportation and starvation of the empire’s Armenian population–allegedly ordered from the top–are true. He breaks away from the imperial party to explore a little bit of the front line by himself, climbing a tree to get a better view. He concludes the Germans cannot be relied upon to win the war.
BREST-LITOVSK: The Germans and Austrians anticipate peace negotiations with the Russians along traditional lines, cementing their military triumph in the east on terms of their choosing. The Bolsheviks see the negotiations rather differently: as an opportunity to propagandise for wider revolution around the world, as a short and painless interlude before their own ultimate victory. Berlin and Vienna must be made to understand: the future is theirs.
An awkward dinner party is held in December, hosted by Prince Leopold of Bavaria. ‘I hope we may be able to raise revolution in your country as well’, a Russian delegate looking for an ice-breaker tells the Austrian Foreign Minister. A Russian peasant picked up off the streets of Petrograd at the last minute to ensure the peace delegation represents the full spectrum of Russian society enquires of the wine, ‘Which is the stronger? Red or white?–it makes no difference to me which I drink, I’m only interested in the strength’.
Over lunch one day a German general casually informs the Russians that German acceptance of the peace-without-annexations formula does not imply German withdrawal to the borders of 1914 given the vast areas in the east which have already declared independence from Russian control. Whatever visions of worldwide revolution may dance before the eyes of the Bolsheviks, the Germans expect to impose their conception of peace in the east in the meantime. And quickly.
INGOLSTADT, BAVARIA: As the end of the year approaches, a French prisoner in German captivity laments his powerlessness. Escape is impossible. The snow is too deep. ‘My heartache will only end with my life’, Charles de Gaulle writes in a letter home to his mother. ‘It is the cruellest fate one could imagine’, he tells her, ‘to be so totally and irredeemably useless in such times as these.’
BRESLAU: A few hundred miles away, another prisoner, Rosa Luxemburg, lies awake one night. She listens out for the rumbling of a train passing somewhere in the night, the distant whispering of the prison guards, and the crunch of their boots on the gravel as they walk under her window.
She recalls the recent arrival of a wagonload of bloodstained German army coats and shirts at the jail, sent there to be patched up and returned to the army for further use. Such wagons are not pulled by horses any more. They are too valuable at the front. Instead, water buffalo from Romania are used. Rosa observes these beautiful, strong, bewildered creatures being beaten into service. Their thick skin is broken by the soldiers’ cudgels. Their hair becomes matted with blood. Rosa fancies she sees a tear roll down one animal’s cheek. Don’t the troops have any pity for these poor animals? one of the prison guards asks. ‘No one has pity for us humans’, the soldier replies.
She waits for the revolution to spread.
WASHINGTON DC: On New Year’s Eve, the President is at work. He writes letters. He annotates a statement about America’s progress in the war. A million problems bear down upon him: the oil situation in California, the railways, Russia, an amendment to prohibit the sale of alcohol. A journalist writes him a memorandum warning that the war is turning into a ‘class war’, even in America, setting town against country. Woodrow seems distracted, as if his mind were far away, in the mud and snows of Europe. One evening, he reads aloud a poem by Wordsworth, describing Britain under threat of invasion from Napoleon:
Another year! Another deadly blow.
Another mighty Empire overthrown.
And we are left, or shall be left, alone,
The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.
How swiftly the world changes sometimes. A week, a month, a year. For a moment, Woodrow Wilson feels quite alone, an enormous weight of responsibility resting on his soul. More than any other political leader, the outcome of this war now depends on the inner workings of Woodrow’s spirit and Woodrow’s mind. He must ensure the peace is worthy of the sacrifice.