BREST, FRANCE: After a tense voyage across the Atlantic spent worrying about a U-boat attack–even smoking a cigarette on deck at night is forbidden in case the ship is spotted by a German submarine–on New Year’s Day, a contingent of black American soldiers lands in the port of Brest. The regimental band led by Jim Europe strikes up the Marseillaise for the crowd assembled to meet them. At first, the audience do not recognise their own national anthem played New York-style. Then they do, and break into cheering.
STOCKHOLM: Albert Einstein is nominated again for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Six nominations this year. No award yet.
In Berlin, the physicist is bedridden with the effects of a stomach ulcer. His cousin Elsa nurses him back to health on a diet of rice cooked in milk and sugar. Albert wishes he could be married to her, rather than to his wife Mileva in Zurich. He sends Mileva his latest divorce proposal, promising her the proceeds of a Nobel Prize, if he ever wins one. ‘Why do you torment me so endlessly?’ she writes back. ‘I would never have thought it possible that anyone, to whom a woman who had devoted her love and her youth, and to whom she had given the gift of children, could do such painful things as you have done to me.’
KANSAS CITY: A new year, a new plan for getting into the war–or several. Ernest tells his parents of his latest plan to join the Marines, ‘unless I can get into aviation when I am 19 and get a commission’. He toys with going to France with the army medical corps. His father Clarence should join up too, he insists in letters home to his parents. ‘He could get a captain’s commission… all you have to do is apply for one’, he writes encouragingly. ‘There are a bunch that are married and fat and a lot older than Pop too’.
In letters to his mother, Ernest reassures her he is still a Christian, despite the temptations of the city. His letters to his sister cover more terrestrial matters: a crush on film star Mae Marsh, trips to the theatre and a new-found ability to distinguish between different kinds of wine ‘sans the use of the eyes’. It is his last hurrah before coming face to face with death, Ernest reasons: one way or another he will be in Europe before the year is out.
WASHINGTON DC: At 10.30 on a Saturday morning in January Woodrow and his friend House sit down to remake the world. They pore over maps of Europe. They start to draft the practical essentials of what America expects from the war, and what America wants from the peace. By the end of the day, the two men have them down: fourteen points, bashed out on the President’s typewriter.
Sunday is spent tinkering. On Tuesday, after a morning round of golf, the President goes to the Capitol–at short notice, again–and stands before Congress to deliver a speech. ‘The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come’, he tells them, more like a prophet than ever before.
Belgium is to be restored. France will have Alsace and Lorraine. Insofar as clear lines of nationality can be drawn, Italy’s borders will be readjusted in her favour. The peoples of Austria–Hungary and the Ottoman Empire will have opportunities for ‘autonomous development’, which sounds a lot like independence. Poland will be free–and have access to the sea. An association of independent nations is to be set up to guarantee it all.
The fourteen points ricochet around the world. Woodrow’s intention is now plain. Inspired by God–and by the principles of America–he intends to remake the world.
BREST-LITOVSK: In the first days of 1918 it is not obvious the Russians will return to Brest-Litovsk at all. They ask for the conference to be moved to Stockholm where it will be easier to turn proceedings into a megaphone for world revolution. The request is refused.
When the parties do return to the fortress of Brest-Litovsk the mood is different from before. The preliminaries are over. The notion that the conference’s remit might be expanded to encompass peace in both east and west has been crushed. A suicide has taken place amongst the delegates. It is bitterly cold. The Austrian Foreign Minister returns in the middle of a blizzard in a train in which the heating system is frozen solid. The top German military representative, General Hoffmann, arrives from difficult consultations in Berlin where tempers flare between the Kaiser and Ludendorff over how Europe’s borderlands should be rearranged. (Wilhelm presents a map showing modest direct annexations of territory to Germany so as to minimise the number of Poles added to Germany’s population; not enough territory for Ludendorff.) A new delegation has arrived from the Ukrainian Rada–the national parliament–anxious to use the imprimatur of the conference to confirm their independence from Petrograd. The exact status of their delegation is fudged.
But the greatest change is the arrival of the new head of the Russian delegation, Leon Trotsky, persuaded by Lenin that he is the man to hold up negotiations while revolution is given time to break out across Europe. While passing through the front lines on the way to Brest, the principled non-tipper strikes a defiant pose. ‘The Russian revolution will not bow its head before German imperialism’, he tells the soldiers. ‘It was not for this that Russian peasants, soldiers and workers deposed the Tsar.’ He assures them he will sign only an honourable peace. In truth he intends to turn the negotiations into a drawn-out revolutionary tribunal on the imperialists, with a revolutionary war at the end if all else fails.
Trotsky bristles with self-righteousness in Brest-Litovsk. He condemns a proposed preamble to the peace treaty declaring Russia’s intention to live in peace and friendship with the German and Austro-Hungarian empires as unnecessarily decorative. It will be revolution which draws the Continent together, he notes, not empty promises of good neighbourliness. He bans the habit of the delegations dining together which developed the previous year. The Soviet delegation to be an example of revolutionary self-reliance.
The principled non-tipper is repulsed by attempts to soften him up with bourgeois charm. On the day he arrives, the German Foreign Minister, Richard von Kühlmann, greets him while he is hanging up his coat and tells him how glad he is to be finally dealing with the master rather than his emissary. Trotsky answers this unfortunate turn of phrase with a show of revolutionary froideur, stepping away without a word. When his Austrian counterpart offers to look into the return of the personal library Trotsky left behind in Vienna when he was forced to leave in haste in 1914, Leon is about to express gratitude–until the Austrian links it to the question of some prisoners in Russia (officers, of course) who are said to have been badly treated. Leon tells the Austrian flatly he would be happy to have the books back and he personally abhors ill-treatment of prisoners, but that the two issues are quite unconnected. He will not be bribed.
The new Russian chief negotiator makes hay from the German and Austrian rejection of the Russian proposal to move the conference to more neutral ground. To be incarcerated, in effect, at ‘the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, at the Headquarters of the enemy armies, under the control of the German authorities, creates all the disadvantages of an artificial isolation which is in no way compensated for by the enjoyment of a direct telegraph wire’. Nonetheless, Trotsky declares, Russia accepts the ‘ultimatum’ because it wishes to provide no technical excuse to the other side to restart the war. Between negotiating sessions, Trotsky dictates a history of the Russian revolution that is barely three months old.
Alone amongst the delegates on the other side of the table, Leon does eventually develop a grudging intellectual respect for German Foreign Minister von Kühlmann. Here at least is a man with whom he can have a proper argument about matters of principle, wasting a little more time in the process. The two spend days in non-stop debate about the precise meaning of self-determination and the extent of its application to parts of the former Russian Empire now under German occupation which the Bolsheviks would like them to vacate. The German minister notes that the Bolsheviks have declared themselves in favour of self-determination, ‘even going so far as complete separation’ for territories of the former Russian Empire. They have formally allowed the independence of Finland. The situation in Ukraine is more complex but, in principle, independence has been promised there as well should a legitimate authority demand it. (In practice, the Bolsheviks intend that this could only happen under a Soviet regime–not a Ukrainian nationalist one–which would in any case be joined to Bolshevik Russia at the hip.)
Kühlmann argues that the areas of the Baltic now under German occupation are no different. Through various locally based institutions, they have declared their desire for separation. They have already self-determined. Germany is no longer a conqueror in these lands, but a protector. German soldiers cannot be asked to leave. Trotsky questions the validity of the bodies which voted for separation. They are the product of feudalism, he declares; only true workers’ Soviets can express real self-determination. At times the debates become quite philosophical. This suits Trotsky fine. ‘I am taking part with much interest in the debates on these questions, which, thanks to the kindly forethought of the President of the German Delegation, are reaching such ever-increasing proportions’, he says at one point.
As time goes on, the onlookers to this game of diplomatic cat and mouse become more frustrated. General Hoffmann is infuriated when the Bolshevik delegation, active proponents of revolution throughout Europe, have the gall to insist that the Germans and Austrians must agree to refrain from any interference in the former territories of the Russian Empire and forgo any annexations whatsoever. Only once German and Austrian occupation forces have left can the future status of these lands be determined, they contend. ‘I must first protest against the tone of these proposals’, Hoffmann says. He reminds the Soviets that ‘the victorious German army stands in your territory’.
The Austrian Foreign Minister winces at such Prussian aggressiveness. Vienna urgently needs grain from Ukraine. If these roundabout negotiations go on much longer, Vienna will be forced to consider the possibility of a separate peace with the Rada Ukrainians–though any recognition of Ukrainian independence implied by such an agreement is bound to raise problems with the empire’s existing Polish and Ukrainian populations, which have their own aspirations and claims to territory.
After blustering and blathering for days on end, Trotsky manages to secure a ten-day break for consultations with Petrograd.
VIENNA: Cold is everywhere in the Habsburg capital these days. The walls seem to exhale it. Women stamp their shoes to try to keep warm while queueing up in the hope of getting their hands on the latest supply of vegetables. The flour ration falls early in the year, prompting furious strikes (and an expectant headline in Pravda: ‘On the Eve of the Austrian Revolution’). There is no meat. Thought becomes slow, movement painful. Freud’s hand shakes over a letter to a friend. ‘Cold shivers’, he heads the letter, by way of explanation for his writing. An old superstition haunts him: that he will die in his sixty-first year, or in February 1918.
BERLIN: The Kaiser is in one of his exultant moods. The turnaround in the south and in the east, he writes in the margins of an article he is reading, is just a taste of things to come. ‘The same must now be done in the west!’ scribbles the imperial hand. ‘First victory in the west with the collapse of the Entente, then we will impose our terms which they will simply have to accept!’
Outside the imperial cocoon, a dog goes missing in Berlin. The next day the owner finds the dog’s skin, quite cleaned of any flesh, with a crude sign attached: ‘Died for the Fatherland’.
PETROGRAD: What good is Russia to the European proletariat if the revolution does not survive where it has started?
The Bolsheviks face challenges from all sides. There is more violence on the streets this winter and less food. Factories are closed. Street lamps are barely lit. Lenin is angry at striking workers. How self-indulgent of them, he thinks, wondering how they can be forced back to work. One evening, Vladimir makes a rousing speech to Red Guards about to head off to fight a Cossack rebellion which has flared up in the south, led by General Kornilov. He calls them the ‘first heroic volunteers of the socialist army’ and promises, on somewhat slim evidence, that ‘our army’s ranks will soon be swelled by the proletarian forces of other countries and we shall no longer be alone’. On the way back to the Smolny, his limousine comes under fire. Lenin is unharmed. A Swiss socialist travelling with him is injured. The impatient revolutionary’s old rivals the Socialist Revolutionaries are blamed for the attack.
Another challenge to Lenin’s power is posed by the imminent meeting of the elected Constituent Assembly. Its creation had been one of the key demands of Russia’s revolutionaries in 1917. But that was before the coup. Now that Lenin has power, the assembly–in which Bolsheviks will be a minority–represents a threatening alternative source of legitimacy. The impatient revolutionary is concerned that the meeting of the assembly might be used to launch a counter-coup, which is, after all, what he would have done if the situation were reversed. Loyal security forces are brought in to prevent this. Red Guards are stationed at important junctions. Barricades are put up. It is made clear that disturbances will be dealt with harshly. Martial law is proclaimed. Lenin worries about the loyalty of the city garrison. The day before the assembly is due to meet, an American journalist notes in his diary: ‘Eve of a battle or collapse of a bluff, which?’
In early January, the great day arrives. Tens of thousands of pro-assembly demonstrators gather in central Petrograd singing the Marseillaise. Red Guards fire a few volleys in the air to disperse the crowds. The message from Bolshevism’s shock troops is clear: they will not shrink from the use of extreme violence, as the Tsar’s forces did until it was too late. ‘Ex-poachers make the best gamekeepers’, a French observer comments in his diary; if there had been a Tsarist Lenin or Trotsky the Romanovs would still be in power. No one is hurt in these first encounters. Later, several marchers who persist in demonstrating in favour of the assembly and against the Bolshevik regime wind up dead. Red blood colours the snow.
At the Tauride Palace, where the Constituent Assembly is due to meet, Red Guards with machine guns and fur hats pace up and down behind a huge wooden barricade. Occasionally they remove a piece and burn it to keep warm, the fire lighting up their faces. In the early afternoon, a side door to the palace opens for the members of the assembly to file in, passing a security cordon to check their credentials. The Socialist Revolutionary delegation, despite being the largest, are given a small room at the back in which to meet before the opening. Here they nervously fine-tune their plans to establish their legitimacy as the true voice of the Russian people through a wave of proposed legislation.
The Bolsheviks, despite being the smaller group in the assembly, are given a grand room at the front of the palace in which to meet. Their deliberations mostly boil down to tactics: how long should this masquerade be allowed to go on? Socialist Revolutionary delegates carry candles in case the Bolsheviks turn out the lights. In accordance with revolutionary tradition, the tea rooms at the Tauride are out of food. Wisely, most delegates come armed with sandwiches. It is dark outside by the time the members of the assembly are fully gathered inside. Lenin looks at them and sees a company of corpses, the walking dead. The red-and-gold chamber is decorated in funereal black.
Foreign observers take up position in the gallery. ‘It’s going to be a real Wild West show’, the Mayor of Stockholm whispers in John Reed’s ear. ‘Everyone seems to be carrying a gun.’ A moment of excitement comes early when a group of Bolsheviks storms the stage and gets everyone to sing the Internationale. Lenin turns white in anger at this overly precipitate action. Certain formalities must be followed. Appearances are important. He does not want this to just look like another coup.
In a recess while votes are being counted for the election of the chairman of the assembly, Reed is over the moon to be introduced to his idol, who dispenses advice on learning Russian. ‘You must go at it systematically’, the impatient revolutionary says, ‘you must break the backbone of the language at the outset.’ One must learn all the nouns, then the verbs, then the adverbs and adjectives, leaving grammar and syntax till last, he explains. Then practise, practise, practise. Vladimir jabs a finger towards the ceiling to emphasise this last point.
As expected, Viktor Chernov, a leading Socialist Revolutionary, is elected chairman of the assembly. Several speeches are made which are critical of the Bolshevik regime. ‘You promised bread for all the people but can you now say hand on heart that Petrograd is guaranteed against starvation even for the next few weeks?’ one speaker asks. On matters of war and peace he wonders: ‘Do you really believe the Germans will take account of you in the way they would inevitably have to respect a universally representative and recognised supreme authority, not dependent on an extended civil war for its survival?’ Louise Bryant is impressed by the speaker. ‘He has that majestic air’, she says. John Reed is not pleased at his wife’s softness for an anti-Bolshevik. ‘And you’ll be given the air if you keep that up’, he rejoinders.
Enough talk! The Bolsheviks bring matters to a head by demanding a vote on a motion calling for the assembly to rubber-stamp the rule of the Soviets from now on, making itself essentially irrelevant. The motion is voted down. The Bolsheviks storm out of the room, declaring proceedings counter-revolutionary. Meeting his caucus behind closed doors, Lenin is adamant that the assembly cannot be allowed to continue sitting indefinitely. But his strategy is to let it fade out rather than benefit from the martyrdom of any great clash with Bolshevik forces. Now that the delegates have rejected the supremacy of the Soviets they have signed the assembly’s death warrant anyway. ‘Let them just go home’, he says. After some discussion, the party agrees his approach. The Bolsheviks formally withdraw and Lenin goes back to the Smolny.
For the moment, the assembly continues its discussions. Long-winded speeches are made to a half-empty chamber. Two o’clock in the morning passes. Then three. Then four. Eventually the captain of the loyal Bolshevik troops on duty, a reliable Kronstadt man, decides to call time. ‘The guards are tired’, he announces. ‘I suggest you vacate the premises.’ The chairman frantically puts everything he has proposed to the vote–land reform, statements on peace, the federalisation of Russia. All these measures are adopted overwhelmingly. At five in the morning the remaining delegates go home. ‘Perhaps this is not the end’, one delegate says to another hopefully.
The next morning the delegates of the Constituent Assembly are refused access to the Tauride Palace. Russia’s democratic experiment is over.
THE WESTERN FRONT: Ludendorff visits the troops, checking on morale, ensuring fresh supplies of munitions are going where they are needed, speaking to the officers in the field. (One day, he attends a field exercise involving the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment; he takes no note of a mangy Austrian field-runner called Adolf Hitler.)
Back at headquarters, Ludendorff puts the finishing touches to plans for the final assault against the British and French. With troops now freed up from operations against Russia, the Germans have a numerical advantage on the Western Front for the first time in years. Ludendorff runs the battle plans through his mind again. Preparations are meticulous.
The tactical scheme is bold. Battle-hardened soldiers, trained in the latest storm-trooper tactics, will smash the enemy’s death grip in a series of concentrated hammer blows (particularly against the British, in the hope of breaking their army and putting intolerable strain on relations with the French). Rather than setting final objectives for each assault, a degree of flexibility will be maintained. German troops will be sent wherever they can best exploit a weakening of enemy resolve. In this way, a new war of movement will be unleashed, confusing an enemy grown used to static warfare.
A German Prince asks Ludendorff what will happen if things go wrong. ‘Then Germany will have to go under’, he responds gruffly.
PETROGRAD: Fighting a revolutionary war of defence against the Germans may sound good–it ‘might perhaps answer the human yearning for the beautiful, dramatic and striking’, Lenin writes. But in reality, it makes no sense. The army is not ready. The peasants would not support it. ‘It would totally disregard the objective balance of class forces and material factors at the present stage of the socialist revolution now under way’, he concludes. If the German proletariat start a revolution in the next few months the point can be revisited. In the meantime, concluding peace with Germany and Austria–on their terms–is essential.
At a meeting of the Bolshevik inner cabal, Vladimir tries to persuade Leon and the others of the new position he has come to. They are shocked. How can they give in to imperialist blackmail? It would turn the Bolsheviks into German tools–just as some have always said they are. The whole thing is a ‘dirty stable’, Vladimir admits. But what is the choice?
Leon comes up with his latest wheeze: to neither wage war, nor sign a peace treaty. Neither war, nor peace. If that does not confuse the monocles at Brest-Litovsk, what will? Vladimir is sceptical. An ‘international political demonstration’, he calls it mockingly–and a pointless one. The terms the Germans will exact will only get harder over time, he says. The Bolsheviks should sign now for fear of being forced to accept worse later. Vladimir is out-voted. Leon Trotsky’s suggestion of neither peace nor war wins the day, as a final measure should there be an ultimatum from the Germans and no other way out. It is agreed he will try and delay getting to that point for as long as possible.
On the home front, Lenin is constantly in and out of meetings to try and keep his shaky regime on track. ‘We can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism’, the impatient revolutionary yells at leaders of Russia’s food supply organisation. There can be no mercy. Revolutionary justice means that ‘speculators must be shot on the spot’. Compulsory searches should be carried out. The wealthy should have food taken from them.
PARIS–LONDON: Guillaume Apollinaire, still recovering at the Villa Molière, writes a letter to his young admirer André Breton, in anticipation of the latter’s imminent visit (a previous visit having been cancelled on account of the Italian War Minister dropping by Apollinaire’s hospital room). ‘Would you mind bringing me that book of the theories of Freud?’ Apollinaire asks.
The same day, in London, a telephone rings in a small flat above an office in Knightsbridge. Jessie Kenney answers. News just in. Royal assent has been granted to the Representation of the People Act. The final stage of Britain’s constitutional process has been completed. All men now have the vote in Britain, and eight million women.
TOBOLSK: Nicholas saws up wood, reads philosophy and starts a new thriller: The Garden of Allah. Some days, the Tsar sits on the greenhouse roof to warm himself. Inside the house the temperature in the bedrooms is often barely above freezing. Alexandra spends a lot of time thinking about God, suffering and her children’s health. She writes postcards to friends signed with an eastern religious symbol she is fond of: a left-facing swastika.
News of the latest Soviet reform reaches the Romanovs one day. The old calendar, used in Orthodox Russia for centuries, and strongly associated with the Church, is to be replaced with that in use in Western Europe. ‘In other words’, Nicholas writes in his diary on the first day of pre-revolutionary February, ‘today already turns out to be 14 February’. Whatever will they think of next? ‘There will be no end of misunderstandings and mix-ups’, he notes.
BREST-LITOVSK: A patriotic Ukrainian from the Rada delegation engages in a long harangue against Petrograd trying to prevent Ukraine from slipping out of Russian control. ‘The noisy declarations of the Bolsheviks regarding the complete freedoms of the peoples of Russia are simply a mean demagogic trick’, the young man rages. ‘The government of the Bolsheviks, a government whose power rests on the bayonets of hired Red Guards, will never elect to apply in Russia the very just principle of self-determination.’ Just look at their methods, he goes on: ‘They disperse assemblies, they arrest and shoot politically active personalities’. They have introduced not self-determination but ‘anarchy and devastation’.
Sweat trickles down Trotsky’s forehead at these accusations of Bolshevik hypocrisy. The Austrian Foreign Minister even feels a twang of sympathy for the principled non-tipper at his obvious discomfort at being upbraided in such terms. But by the end of the Ukrainian’s speech Trotsky has sufficiently recovered his composure to try to verbally reoccupy the moral high ground. ‘I can only thank the President’, he says, ‘that he, in harmony with the dignity of this assembly, has not opposed in any way the free-speaking of the preceding orator.’ The Austrians and the Germans now declare that they recognise the full independence of Ukraine. The old Russian Empire is drifting from Bolshevik control.
Trotsky’s attempts to delay and confuse proceedings grow more desperate. He requests a visa for Vienna so as to speak with the Austrian working classes directly. The suggestion is refused. On the question of admitting Polish representatives to the conference, he opens up a new Pandora’s box by asking whether the proto-kingdom which Berlin and Vienna have established to try and keep the Poles on their side–without definite borders and without a sovereign–can be considered a state at all. ‘The negotiating powers have not come here to engage in intellectual combat’, Kühlmann notes curtly. Trotsky’s tricks are wearing thin.
In Berlin, the Austrian and German Foreign Ministers are confronted by Ludendorff over the delays in signing a final peace treaty with Russia. He is incensed that it is taking so long to reach a deal which will allow him to transfer troops west, and even crosser at apparent Habsburg willingness to countenance a peace unlikely to give Germany every little scrap of territory she wants. ‘If Germany makes peace without profit, then Germany has lost the war’, he rants. Back in Brest-Litovsk, and above Trotsky’s protest that it is an interference in internal Russian affairs, the Austrians agree peace with the Rada Ukrainians and get the promise of the grain they need. Whether any of this will work remains to be seen. ‘I wonder if the Rada is really sitting at Kiev’, the Austrian Foreign Minister writes in his diary the day the peace is signed. Their claim to rule is fragile.
Trotsky is down to his final card. He plays it with aplomb. ‘The war ceased long ago to be a defensive war’, he tells the conference at Brest-Litovsk. ‘When Great Britain takes African colonies, Baghdad and Jerusalem, then that is certainly not a defensive war. When Germany occupies Serbia, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania and Romania, that is a struggle for the partition of the globe.’ Russia wants no further part in this war, he says. Russia’s aim is to build socialism. ‘Our peasant soldiers must return to their land to cultivate in peace the field which the revolution has taken from the landlords and given to the peasants.’ In anticipation of worldwide revolution, Bolshevik Russia is leaving the war, its forces are returning home but–it is not going to sign a peace. No war, no peace. Trotsky allows no further discussion on the matter. His team get up to leave. ‘Unerhört, unerhört!’ General Hoffmann exclaims: ‘Unheard-of, unheard-of!’ The German minister asks how the Russian delegation can be contacted in future. There is always the wireless radio, Trotsky suggests.
‘So, what is going to happen now?’ a German major asks his Russian counterpart. ‘Do we have to go back to war with you?’ The Russian shrugs his shoulders. On the train home, the Bolsheviks are jubilant. Trotsky seems confident the Germans will not start a war again. Lenin is not so sure.
PETROGRAD: Anarchy reigns in the Bolshevik capital. The Italian Ambassador is robbed blind in the middle of the street (they even take his snow boots). A former colonel in the army begs the head waiter at the Hôtel d’Europe to give him a bowl of soup. He used to be a regular customer, he explains. The Patriarch of the Orthodox Church declares all Bolsheviks to be anathematised. ‘Hell’s fire awaits you in the next life beyond the grave’, he warns those who do not repent.
John Reed decides to head back to America. He spends several weeks at a loose end in Norway while American officials debate whether to grant him a passport or not. He begins to write a book about the Russian revolution of October 1917.
HASKELL COUNTY, KANSAS: A windswept, poor, empty kind of place. Far from the war, far from anything. But beautiful in its way, with all that sky to look at. There are few roads in this part of the country. People get around on horseback, mostly. The railway is a recent arrival. It gets cold in the wintertime.
The local doctor is a large, well-educated man who passes his evenings reading the classics in ancient Greek. He also tries to keep up with the scientific literature. His wife, from a wealthy Kansas landowning family, is head of the Red Cross Women’s Work Committee. And the doctor is busy this February. Everyone seems to be sick. It almost seems as if God–whom Dr Loring Miner is not particularly fond of anyway–has sent a plague upon the people of Haskell County.
Not just the old, but the young as well, are falling ill. This is influenza, but more virulent than anything he has seen before. It spreads quickly. It kills. ‘Most everybody over the county is having la grippe or pneumonia’, a local paper reports. At Camp Funston, over near Kansas City, where soldiers are trained up for France, a thousand young men fall sick over the next few weeks.
BREST-LITOVSK: If the Russians want to denounce war and peace, fine, the Germans decide. But then the armistice must be considered to be over as well.
‘Tomorrow we are going to start hostilities again against the Bolsheviks’, General Hoffmann writes in his diary. ‘No other way out is possible, otherwise these brutes will wipe out the Ukrainians, the Finns and the Balts, and then quietly get together a new revolutionary army and turn the whole of Europe into a pigsty.’ He does not expect much resistance: ‘the whole of Russia is no more than a vast heap of maggots–a squalid, swarming mess.’
When Lenin hears of the German plans, he proposes to his comrades that the enemy be given whatever he wants–immediately. Trotsky is against it. Again, Lenin is outnumbered. Only when the Germans actually begin their advance–virtually unopposed–does the penny drop. Stalin is blunt: ‘The Germans are attacking, we have no forces, the time has come to say that negotiations must be resumed.’
This time it is the Germans who want to delay proceedings. When a message comes in from Petrograd requesting another armistice, Hoffmann asks for it in writing. He wants German troops in Estonia at least before calling a stop to the advance. ‘It is the most comical war I have ever known’, he writes in his diary. ‘We put a handful of infantrymen with machine guns and one gun on a train and push them off to the next station; they take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops and go on.’ Petrograd is wide open. Some in the capital are delighted at the prospect of a return to order (even if it wears a German jackboot). ‘Everyone is radiant with joy’, a Frenchman writes in his diary.
Panicking that his revolution is about to be swept away, Vladimir writes a spiky article in Pravda castigating those who would hide behind slogans rather than look reality in the face. ‘The slogans are superb, alluring, intoxicating’, he writes, ‘but there are no grounds for them.’ The expectation that the German proletariat will prevent an attack by the enemy has been disproved. He dismisses the argument that, just as in the revolution in October 1917, the struggle itself will produce the means to victory as ‘so childishly ridiculous that I should never have believed it possible if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears’. He threatens to resign.
VIENNA–BAY OF KOTOR: February is over, and Sigmund Freud is still alive. He sighs. His long-held superstition that he would die in February 1918, in his sixty-first year, can now be buried. Or can it? Perhaps it was only the month that was incorrect. It is another nine weeks before he will escape the age of sixty-one entirely. Freud remains in a state of nervous apprehension waiting for his birthday.
In February, a mutiny breaks out in the Austro-Hungarian navy. For two long days, the red flag flutters over the mutineers’ vessels in the Bay of Kotor. The rebels demand not only more cigarettes–such requests Charles Habsburg can understand–but an immediate end to the war and self-determination for all the empire’s nationalities (several ringleaders are Czech). Loyal units crush the uprising. A Hungarian naval captain named Horthy is promoted. A news blackout means that the public know nothing of what has happened.
The promise of grain from Ukraine brings some prospect of alleviation in the food situation, but the political price–a peace deal with the Ukrainians–infuriates the empire’s Poles who hoped to win territory now accepted by Vienna as Ukrainian. The contradictions of the Habsburg realm are becoming harder and harder to contain.
PETROGRAD: Lenin wins. An extraordinary congress of the party–renamed the Communist Party (Bolsheviks)–ratifies the punishing German peace terms. The Russia of the Bolsheviks is a shadow of its former imperial extent. Trotsky refuses to go to Brest-Litovsk and sign the peace himself, but he accepts that the revolution has no choice.
Another decision is taken which will change the character of the revolution: to move the capital to Moscow. The regime calls it a temporary measure. The vague possibility is raised that perhaps Petrograd will be redesignated a free city, an economic boomtown open to the world; one newspaper suggests it will become a ‘second New York’. In the meantime, government offices are stripped. Anything that can be moved is taken away: books, curtains, ashtrays, stoves, mirrors, blankets, furniture.
Foreign embassies are not long behind in planning their departure, burning diplomatic papers and settling accounts. Old retainers are laid off. Foreign diplomatic staff leaving the country altogether in expectation of Bolshevik collapse face tense passport checks at the border. When a French diplomat gets through to Finland he is thrilled at the order and cleanliness which appears to prevail there–despite a bloody civil war between Finnish Reds and Whites–and enjoys the refreshing taste of a glass of fresh milk. One of the last acts of the regime in Petrograd is to send the Tsar’s brother Michael into exile to Siberia. He is sent to Perm in a first-class carriage with all the windows missing. A journey that once took two days now takes eight.
When the time comes for the Bolsheviks to leave the cradle of the revolution, they do so in the dead of night and in total secrecy. Crates marked with the Sovnarkom stamp are conspicuously loaded onto a train at the city’s main railway station. Meanwhile, the rail convoy that will actually carry the Bolshevik leadership to Moscow is prepared far from public view, in a disused siding south of the city. Vladimir, Nadya and his sister Maria travel in the first train to set out that night, with the electric lights switched off to avoid any unwanted attention. Other trains follow at regular intervals behind. The head of the Cheka travels with a single briefcase. The case files follow separately, leaving some prisoners locked up in Petrograd with no paperwork to indicate what they have been incarcerated for.
In Moscow, there is a scrum for office and living space when the Bolshevik leadership and their officials arrive. Some move into the city’s hotels. The National Hotel is renamed the House of the Soviets No. 1. The Cheka find lodgings on the Lubyanka (and later acquire an imposing building around the corner which used to be an insurance company headquarters). Lenin and Trotsky move into the Kremlin, where the clock tower still rings ‘God Save the Tsar’ and dinner is served on plates adorned with the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs. The only food available is tinned meat and caviar that is no longer exported. On the wall of Trotsky’s office hangs an allegorical painting of classical love between Cupid and Psyche.
The Georgian bank-robber is less fortunate in the lodgings he is assigned. Joseph Stalin arrives in Moscow with his new wife Nadya, an innocent girl twenty-two years his junior whom he has known since childhood–Joseph is rumoured to have had an affair with her mother–and who still addresses her husband with the formal vy rather than the informal ty. The newly-weds are given a noisy apartment in a Kremlin outbuilding to live in while Stalin has to make do with some offices the Cheka did not want to continue his work on the nationalities question.
Lenin promises that things will get better for the Bolsheviks now. Moscow is less vulnerable than Petrograd. But the regime must be adaptable. ‘History is moving in zig-zags and by roundabout ways’, he writes. The revolution must learn from its enemies. He expresses admiration for the ‘scientific American efficiency’ of the Taylorist system, and the German genius for ‘modern machine industry, and strict accounting and control’.
In spreading revolution, the Bolsheviks must work with what they have to hand. How many million prisoners of war are there still in Russia who can be turned against their homelands? ‘Béla Kun’, Lenin observes, naming one Hungarian who has recently come to his attention, ‘should be a dark spy.’ At home, the Bolsheviks must show no mercy. A rumour starts in Moscow that the government has decided to kill anyone younger than seven years old so that no child of these painful years will grow up in ineradicable resentment of the harshness of the regime of the time (whereas adults are expected to understand its necessity). A Muscovite writer asks his doorman whether such a thing could really happen. ‘Anything can happen’, the man replies. ‘Anything is possible.’
German armies continue their advance through Ukraine. First Kiev, then Odessa are occupied. But this is a military sideshow now. With Russia defeated, German troops are now available for transfer to the west.
NANTES, FRANCE: There is a new musical sound in France in the winter of 1918, first heard on the quayside at Brest back in January and now travelling across the country.
It hits Nantes, where Jim Europe’s band plays outside the opera house, working its way from French military marches to Southern ‘plantation’ melodies and finally to the uninhibited syncopation and instrumental experimentation that some call jazz. Elsewhere in France, the band plays railway stations and town squares as it tours the country before winding up in an American army rest-and-recuperation centre in the Alpine spa town of Aix-les-Bains, where French civilians come along to listen. When the band finally receives orders to move out to rejoin their regiment–now renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment, US Army, and allocated to serve behind the front line within a French division–their departure is met with fond farewells from the local population and parting gifts of champagne. Europe reaches Connantre, just behind the front line with Germany, on 20 March 1918.
Around the same time, in Washington, Woodrow Wilson receives a delegation of black leaders with a petition carrying twelve thousand signatures and requesting that the soldiers sentenced for their part in the Houston affair receive a presidential pardon. Under the circumstances, Woodrow seems amenable to such an act of grace.