THE WESTERN FRONT: The middle of the night. German soldiers are in high spirits. This is the moment they have been waiting for. The bombardment begins at 4.20 a.m. It is 21 March 1918.
Over the course of the next five hours, a million shells rain down on British positions. There are rumours among German troops that a new type of grenade is being used today, containing a powerful substance previously forbidden by the Kaiser on humanitarian grounds. The soldiers smell bitter almonds, the smell of gas–or is it their minds playing a trick on them? They wait in the trenches for the signal to attack. A soldier whose account of his storm-trooper days will catapult him to fame after the war takes a final swig from a friend’s field flask. The alcohol tastes like water. He is so taut from the waiting that it takes him three matches to light a single cigarette. Then, over the top. The officers behind the line watch the action through telescopes. ‘It looks like a film’, one of them writes in a letter home.
Winston Churchill, ever the man in the right place at the wrong time, over from London on another fact-finding mission, hears the German artillery cannonade for himself. The fire of the guns lights up his sleeping quarters like a magic lantern. He cannot make out the sound of the replying British guns, so overwhelming is the Teutonic fury. In Kansas City, Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper office goes mad with phones ringing and fresh bulletins every hour. ‘The German push looks awful’, he writes back to his family in Oak Park; ‘we just got a bulletin that they were shelling Paris’. In Vienna, Freud cannot summon up such a young man’s interest. ‘Beginning of the German offensive in the West’, he notes flatly in his diary, blaming Austria’s food supply problems for his sullen mood. ‘Perhaps, as I have always been a carnivore’, he writes to a friend, ‘the unaccustomed diet contributes to my listlessness.’
The Kaiser races up and down the front. A disappointing first day. A better second day. On the third day, a breakthrough. Wilhelm is jubilant. ‘The battle is won, the English have been utterly defeated’, he shouts to a bewildered guard on the station platform when the imperial train pulls into Avesnes that evening. Champagne is served at dinner. There are loyal toasts and patriotic speeches. (In London, there is discussion of evacuating British forces through the Channel ports, raising the conscription age to fifty-five and sending King George V to the front to raise morale.) The German military issue an official communiqué proclaiming a great victory of German arms, achieved under the Kaiser’s personal leadership. Wilhelm is suitably flattered, until he begins to wonder whether it was right to specify his leadership role in this particular battle, as if all the others had nothing to do with him.
While the corks fly around the Kaiser’s dinner table, Ludendorff feels the pressure mounting. His youngest stepson, an airman, has gone missing, shot down over Flanders. The attack on the ground is losing momentum. The general decides to double up, taking on the British and French at the same time. It is a mistake which weakens the impulse of attack by spreading it across two foes. Belatedly, Ludendorff decides to refocus his forces and aim straight for Amiens, a crucial railhead for Allied supply. The enemy falls back, but cannot be dislodged.
German soldiers have advanced, but the territory they have conquered is a wasteland: no target of significant strategic value has been captured. The British replenish their ranks with fresh soldiers from England. The French do not abandon their allies, as Ludendorff had hoped. The Americans make their presence felt, taking up the slack in quieter sections of the front, and releasing more experienced troops for service elsewhere. In April, Jim Europe’s regiment is given responsibility for defending a section several miles long in the Argonne forest. Within a few weeks Jim is crawling through no man’s land with French soldiers–fortified by a bottle of wine–to raid outlying German positions.
Increasingly it is the German army that is breaking apart. Attack after attack has left the men exhausted. There are not enough troops to replace those that have fallen. The bountifulness of the food and drink found in captured British and French supply depots not only holds up the advance as German soldiers gorge themselves on American bacon and French wine–but also gives the lie to German propaganda that the Allies’ supply lines are at breaking point.
Winston attends a meeting in Beauvais town hall where the French commander of Allied forces in the west, Marshal Foch, gives a presentation on the weakening German advance. He marks out enemy gains on a large map with coloured pencil. At first, he draws an expansive bulge. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! How big!’ he exclaims sarcastically. Now there are only some pathetic protuberances, not worth anything strategically. The consequence is clear. ‘Stabilisation’, Foch tells his audience, ‘sure, certain, soon.’
And then? ‘Ah, afterwards!’ the field marshal sighs. ‘That is my affair.’
ZURICH AND BERLIN: Albert and Mileva exchange letters about their divorce: what the financial terms should be, shares or cash; whether it is best for the process to be completed in Switzerland or in Germany. Albert favours Germany. It is quicker, he explains. And, in any case, were he to admit to adultery with cousin Elsa in Switzerland he would be banned from remarrying for two years, which would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Eventually, the two agree on how to settle things.
VIENNA: The imperial government is in a state of panic. The French have hinted they are in possession of a secret Austrian letter entrusted by Charles to his brother-in-law Sixtus last year, in the hope of using him as an intermediary to start peace negotiations with France. The letter is political dynamite, suggesting Vienna’s willingness to help Paris recover Alsace-Lorraine from Germany as part of a general peace. What would the Germans say if they knew? A frantic search is made of Empress Zita’s bedroom desk to try and find a draft of the letter that was sent to check the actual wording. It turns out no copy was taken of the original. Do the French actually have the letter or are they bluffing?
Vienna denies its existence, and then is embarrassed when the letter is published. Charles suffers a minor heart attack. Some suggest that the Emperor should stand aside. His Foreign Minister threatens suicide, and then is persuaded to take the fall. The result of the dynastic peace attempt and botched cover-up is to further reduce Vienna’s freedom of action. The future of the Habsburg Empire will be decided in Paris, London and Washington or, most frighteningly of all, in Berlin.
A few weeks later Charles travels to German military headquarters–now moved from Kreuznach to Spa, in Belgium–to pay his respects to the Kaiser and sign an agreement on military coordination. In the wake of the embarrassment of the Sixtus affair, the Germans present a draft outlining complete economic and effective political unity between the two empires, to remain in force until 1940. When the Austrians say they need time to think, Wilhelm is incredulous. ‘What’s wrong about it?’ he cries. ‘Bavaria has already signed the same convention with us, and is quite happy with it’, seemingly forgetting that Bavaria is already part of the German Reich. The direction is clear: Anschluss by another name.
MAYNOOTH, CO. KILDARE, IRELAND: There is one great reserve of manpower in the British Isles not yet fully tapped for war. As ministers in London wonder how to replace British losses in France and fight back against the German surge, they look hungrily across the Irish Sea. Why should Ireland shirk the responsibilities that England, Wales and Scotland bear so manfully?
‘I have not met one soldier in France who does not think we shall get good fighting material from Ireland’, Winston tells his cabinet colleagues in April. Fifty thousand men under the age of twenty-five might be raised in Ireland–maybe more. But there is Irish opposition to the idea. Across the board. And it is fierce. Much of the island is already seething. The carrying of arms has already been outlawed. ‘The fit resting place for an Irish bullet is in an English heart’, an Irish priest from County Clare declares that spring.
Ireland’s bishops are less colourful, but no less firm. Meeting in the gabled glory of the seminary at Maynooth–the former schoolmaster Éamon de Valera feels right at home when he pays a visit to make his case directly to the men in purple–the bishops release a statement entitling Catholics to resist conscription into the British army by all means ‘consonant with the laws of God’. An anti-conscription Mass is organised. London’s mistake makes Ireland’s unity.
A few weeks later, de Valera is arrested while on his way home, one of many Sinn Féin leaders picked up that evening. (Typically, Michael Collins evades the net.) They are accused of plotting with Germany–a well-watered Irishman has recently been picked up in a pub after arriving home on a German submarine. Back to England. Back to jail.
RUSSIA: ‘We have taken Kharkov’, Hoffmann writes in early April; ‘I could never have dreamt a while ago that German troops would enter that little hole.’ In the south, German forces penetrate deeper into Ukraine. In the north, they are fighting with White Finns against Red Finns in a vicious civil war. The British and French worry that their former ally Russia is about to become a German satellite, with their access to the central Eurasian landmass blocked by German soldiers on its northern and southern fringes and their ability to both influence Russian affairs and enjoy its natural resources correspondingly diminished. They consider sending a military force into the White Sea port of Archangel to try to keep the country open, and leave themselves the option of fuller military intervention in the Russian heartland later if required.
Over the spring, senior Allied diplomats either leave Russia entirely or move to the medieval city of Vologda, which the American Ambassador anoints ‘the diplomatic capital of Russia’ to the delight of the local mayor. A French diplomat describes the place more truthfully as a big village–‘a little monotonous but full of charm’–and spends evenings at the theatre marvelling at local attempts to put on classical opera to impress the visitors. There is not much work to do but try and make sense of garbled reports of the situation from across the country, probably long out of date by the time they arrive. Fed up, the Belgians decide to leave. Given the situation in European Russia they opt to exit Eurasia via the Pacific port of Vladivostok, where Allied Japanese troops have just landed.
In Moscow, the Bolsheviks are clinging on to power by their bare teeth, fighting a triple war: for grain to feed the cities, against Socialist Revolutionaries disgusted by the peace of Brest-Litovsk; and against the military threat of counter-revolutionary White armies gathering in the Cossack heartlands of southern Russia under General Kornilov, the would-be strongman of 1917. Leon Trotsky, the former war correspondent, is made war commissar. He takes to the job of turning the Red Guards into a proper army with a dictatorial zeal for order and authority which many old Bolsheviks find distasteful.
Transforming himself from red-hot revolutionary intellectual into military supremo, Trotsky gives an interview to Pravda declaring that ‘discipline must be discipline, soldiers must be soldiers, sailors sailors and orders orders’. Soldiers’ committees are formally abolished. The cosmopolitan war commissar is even prepared to accept the services of former Tsarist officers–‘military experts’ is the euphemism used–to boost the army’s fighting capacity. Stalin is disgusted by such Napoleonic attitudes. Army officers are class enemies. He suspects Trotsky is not building a revolutionary army, but a personal one.
A culture of diplomatic intrigue pervades Moscow, where the Allied military missions left behind by their ambassadors engage in an exhilarating game of plot and counter-plot to try and prevent further German encroachment. Spies are everywhere. Information is sold and loyalties purchased on the intelligence black market. Danger is ever-present. At a meeting where Trotsky is due to talk about the new Red Army, a British operative briefly considers liquidating Bolshevism the old-fashioned way by shooting the new war commissar. The Bolsheviks are knee deep in intrigue themselves, trying to play the Allies and the Germans off each other in a desperate effort to keep them both at a safe distance. In early March, when the German military threat is at its height, Trotsky even considers allowing a small British force of marines to land at Murmansk.
‘We can say with confidence that in the main the civil war is at an end’, Lenin tells a political gathering towards the end of April, after hearing that General Kornilov has been killed trying to take the city of Ekaterinodar. (He claims Kornilov was murdered by his own soldiers, when in fact he was killed by artillery fire.) ‘There will be some skirmishes, of course, and in some towns street fighting will flare up here or there’, he says, ‘but there is no doubt that on the internal front reaction has been irretrievably smashed by the efforts of the insurgent people.’ Nonetheless, Lenin admits that the revolution is not strong enough to wage war against foreign imperialists, ‘armed to the teeth and possessing a wealth of technical equipment’. Anyone who suggests otherwise is an ‘agent provocateur’. The revolution will only be truly safe when the workers have risen up elsewhere. In the meantime, the regime must turn its energies against enemies who are even more dangerous than Kornilov: the merchants and the peasants who prefer to stock what little food they have rather than sell it to the towns. ‘Furious struggle’ against them lies ahead.
Towards the end of April, while German and Austrian armies are completing their occupation of Crimea, a new German Ambassador arrives in Moscow, setting up a full embassy in the mansion of a former sugar merchant (outshining the lower-level Allied missions). Count Mirbach insists on presenting his credentials formally to the Bolshevik regime, and has to be dissuaded from doing so in uniform, or at least in evening dress. He leaves the Bolsheviks in no doubt as to who he thinks is in charge under the circumstances. The German Count goes to see the Commissar of Foreign Affairs at least once a day, generally throwing his stick and hat onto a chair in the waiting room and simply barging into his office without knocking. After Brest-Litovsk, he sees his role as an enforcer of the German will, not as a friend to the Russian people.
The Kaiser is delighted at the firm approach his new man in Moscow is taking towards Lenin’s regime–‘a thieving rabble of proles’, Wilhelm writes in the margins of one of Mirbach’s reports. The Count describes a sad city. Even the relatively prosperous wear drab clothes to avoid standing out. The factories have stopped working–‘signature of the socialist future!’ Wilhelm scrawls–and the shops have nothing to sell. What the country is going through is not just a change of leadership but a total collapse. The former ruling classes feel powerless. According to the Count, they look to Germany as a potential saviour. ‘We’ll see’, writes Wilhelm, in English, after this report.
Faced with growing German influence in Russia, the question of a counterbalancing Allied military intervention becomes more pressing. Woodrow has never liked the idea, worried that American troops entering Russia uninvited would make America look like just another grasping imperialist power. In January, an American diplomat in Archangel suggests other means. ‘The tremendous advertising power of a few shiploads of food is well worth weighing and can hardly be exaggerated’, he writes. In late April, he proposes another scheme: a new railway from Siberia to Archangel to act as a giant ‘suction pump’ drawing the wealth of Siberia away from the existing railway routes heading west towards Germany and, instead, directing it towards the Allies. Such a plan, he writes triumphantly, ‘would be more important in the world’s economic history than the Baghdad railroad’, the iron link intended to weld together Berlin and the Middle East.
Such grand schemes ignore the immediate necessity for action. ‘I think time is fast approaching for Allied intervention, and Allies should be prepared to act promptly’, the American Ambassador writes from Vologda to Washington. But with what forces?
THERESIENSTADT FORTRESS, THE KINGDOM OF BOHEMIA, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: Weakened by tuberculosis, malnutrition and blood loss from an amputated arm, a Bosnian Serb boy of twenty-four–the young idealist Gavrilo Princip whose bullets killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914–dies in an Austro-Hungarian prison cell.
TOBOLSK: For months, false stories have been circulating of the escape of Nicholas Romanov or members of his family from Siberia. There are rumours the Tsar’s daughter has left for America, where she is said to give public lectures on Russian subjects. Questions are being asked about the adequacy of the guard assigned to the Romanovs. There is rivalry between different Soviets in Siberia about who can best ensure they stay under lock and key. Moscow’s intentions are viewed with mistrust. Some fear a dirty diplomatic deal to release them.
The tensions swirling around the Romanovs’ situation do not go unnoticed in the imperial household. They are instructed to economise. Nicholas asks the children’s French tutor to help with the accounts and forms a committee to look into possible spending cuts. Since everyone else appears to be creating Soviets, the Tsar jokes, we might as well form our own. As many as ten loyal servants may have to be let go, it is concluded. Butter and coffee drop off the menu at the imperial dining table. ‘Our last chance of escape has been snatched from us’, the children’s French tutor writes in his diary shortly after an unruly contingent of two hundred Red Guards arrive from Omsk, quickly staking their Soviet’s claim to determine the Romanovs’ future. Nicholas notes in amazement how they sing songs and play the balalaika for seven hours straight one day. They must be very bored, he decides.
One day, a new man arrives from Moscow, tasked with clearing up the semi-anarchy which has been allowed to develop in Tobolsk. He bears instructions that the Romanovs are to be removed without delay to the city of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, a place renowned for its strongly anti-monarchist politics. The Tsarevich is too sick to travel. At first, the Tsar protests that therefore he cannot go either. But the man from Moscow leaves him no choice. (In messages to Moscow the Tsar is referred to as ‘the baggage’.) Alexandra is forced to choose between travelling with her husband or staying with her son. Distraught, she chooses Nicholas. Perhaps the Bolsheviks want him to endorse the peace they made at Brest-Litovsk, Nicholas speculates. ‘I’d rather cut off my own hand.’
The imperial party led by the man from Moscow leaves in the middle of the night. Conditions along the way are dreadful as the ice and snow begin to melt and the roads turn to freezing mud. Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra have been told their destination.
MOSCOW: A decree is issued. Russia is to be cleansed. Statues of the Tsars and their cronies–barring those considered to have particular artistic merit–are to be removed from public places. A competition of revolutionary artists will be held to determine what to replace them with. Coats of arms and other emblems of the old regime are to be removed. Street names are to be changed. The new Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment will be in charge. Money will be provided. No expense must be spared.
SPA, GERMAN-OCCUPIED BELGIUM: Ludendorff’s nerves are shot. The death of his stepson affects him deeply. ‘It has taken away my will to live’, the general writes. When the young man’s body is recovered, the general commands that he be buried in the grounds of the high command’s headquarters, so he can visit his grave whenever he wants. He makes excuses to his wife Margarethe for not sending the body back to Berlin to be buried next to another of Ludendorff’s stepsons, who was killed last September. ‘I would gladly give up my so-called fame if I could get the two boys back in return’, he writes to the grieving mother in Berlin.
In early May, a lieutenant visits Ludendorff to provide the latest report from the front. The general taps his pen incessantly, impatient at the bad news he is receiving. Finally, he explodes. ‘What do you want from me?’ he shouts. ‘Should I make peace at any price?’ The lieutenant tries to calm the general down. He is only doing his job, he says, telling Ludendorff that the troops cannot be pushed further. ‘If the soldiers’ morale is getting worse, if discipline is breaking down, that is your fault, and that of all the other officers at the front’, Ludendorff screams. The blame game has started.
AMERICAN FRONT LINE, NEAR MALMY, FRANCE–NEW YORK: Two soldiers of Jim Europe’s 369th Regiment hear the sound of barbed wire being cut. Then a squad of Germans rushes towards them from the darkness. One of the American privates, Needham Roberts, is wounded badly by a German grenade. The other, Private Harry Johnson, now fights for both their lives. He knocks one German to the ground with his rifle butt. As another tries to drag away the wounded Roberts to enemy lines, Johnson plants his knife in the German’s head. He then rips open the stomach of the soldier he has knocked to the ground. The remaining attackers flee. Johnson flings some grenades after them. By the time the relief party arrives he has fainted.
The French, under whose command the 369th Regiment is serving, immediately cite Johnson and Roberts for outstanding bravery: they will be awarded the French Croix de Guerre. The US army is more miserly at first, but once the story is reported in the American press they recognise both the American soldiers’ valour, and their propaganda potential.
After months of training, and waiting, the first American soldiers have started fighting and dying in this war. Stories of real-life heroism are important. The army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, runs a long story on the two men. The bravery of black American soldiers in the Civil War and the Spanish–American War is well known, goes the piece. ‘Now the slaves of a century ago are defending their American citizenship on a larger battlefield’, it continues. ‘Now is their first chance to show themselves before the whole world as good and brave soldiers, all.’ Johnson becomes the first black American hero of the war.
In America, William Du Bois writes an article in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ‘For all the long years to come’, he predicts, ‘men will point to the year 1918 as the great Day of Decision, the day when the world decided whether it would submit to military despotism or whether they would put down the menace of German militarism and inaugurate the United States of the World’.
CHELYABINSK, RUSSIA: An orphan Czechoslovak army, raised to fight on the Russian side in the war, and now stranded by revolution and Brest-Litovsk, travels slowly by train across Russia towards the Pacific port of Vladivostok.
Hundreds of freight cars, spread out over hundreds of miles of the trans-Siberian line, are pulled east by the locomotives. Each car is equipped with bunk beds and a central stove, which has to be constantly fed with scavenged wood. The interiors are decorated with paintings of the Charles Bridge in Prague. The soldiers make weather vanes in the shape of the Kaiser. The wagons smell of smoke, human waste, sweat, half-washed clothes. Forty thousand members of the Czechoslovak Corps are travelling this way, the best-trained force in Russia, viewed with envy and suspicion by supporters of the revolution. They are on their way home–and then to the front in France to continue the fight against Germany and Austria and ensure that when peace comes a new Czecho-Slovak state will arise from the destruction of the old empires.
In Chelyabinsk, a train carrying Czech soldiers meets a train going the other way bearing Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. One of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers throws an iron bar, wounding a Czech. An Austro-Hungarian soldier is lynched in revenge. The Soviet authorities detain the Czechs responsible for the killing and take them into town. Hours pass. Officers are sent to check what is going on. They are put in jail as well. The Czechs are furious. Eventually, they take matters into their own hands. They occupy the main points in Chelyabinsk, taking the city over with ease and helping themselves to local weapons stocks.
Ekaterinburg, where Nicholas and Alexandra are now being held, is only a few hundred miles up the line.
NEW YORK: Down Fifth Avenue from the Upper East Side to Downtown, well-wishers crowd the sidewalk, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the largest parade ever organised through the city: seventy thousand women and men of the American Red Cross and similar organisations engaged in the national war effort.
A cacophony of music and cheers, and the steady tramp, tramp, tramp of new leather boots–and then, between 67th and 68th Streets, a surprise. The parade is halted. For a moment, a ripple of concern runs through the crowd. A black car appears from nowhere, surrounded by a motorcade. From it emerges a tall man in tails and top hat, blinking into the sun. As the marchers start up again, Boy Scouts are sent ahead to spread the news. For forty blocks, Woodrow Wilson, a picture of healthful manhood, leads the Red Cross volunteers through New York, raising his top hat in polite greeting to the cheering crowds, bowing this way and that, and waving occasionally as if he has spotted some long-lost friend in the throng.
Towards the back of the parade marches a young man from Oak Park, Illinois, freshly commissioned as a second lieutenant, with a thousand-dollar life insurance policy in his pocket and the view of the Atlantic from the top of the Woolworth Building still fresh in his mind’s eye. A few days later Ernest Hemingway is aboard the Chicago, a French Line steamer bound for Bordeaux. It is a ‘rotten old tub’, he writes, ‘but we travel 1st class’.
There is a collective sigh of relief back at home that Ernest did not get married in New York, as he jokily threatened to do. But then, a wave of fresh anxiety overcomes his parents: an Atlantic crossing in the midst of a U-boat war (though Hemingway himself is over the moon at the possibility of spotting a German submarine), then France, then front-line duty in Italy–Grace and Clarence worry about their boisterous, brave, foolish son. Will he be sensible over there, will he look after himself, or will he do something stupid and get himself killed?
CHELYABINSK: The leaders of the Czechoslovak Corps meet at the railway station to discuss their position. Most want to press on to Vladivostok.
A telegram from Moscow to the Soviets along the trans-Siberian railway, intercepted at Chelyabinsk, gives orders that the Czechoslovak Corps should be taken off their trains, and drafted into labour units or the Red Army. A misunderstanding, the Russians now say. Czechoslovak representatives in Moscow try to calm things down, ordering the troops to give up their weapons and rely on the Soviets for security. The soldiers refuse, swearing that they will not surrender their arms till they reach Vladivostok. ‘The assurances of safe transportation cannot satisfy us’, they telegraph Moscow.
Then an order from war commissar Trotsky: ‘Every armed Czechoslovak found on the railway is to be shot on the spot; every troop train in which even one armed man is found shall be unloaded, and its soldiers shall be interned in a war prisoners’ camp.’ Delay in carrying out these orders will be counted as treason. Any Russian assisting the Czechoslovaks, even under threat of violence, is to face severe punishment. When local authorities question Moscow’s orders, Trotsky thunders that they are to do what they are told.
More fighting breaks out along the line between members of the Czechoslovak Corps and German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Arms dumps and railway stations are seized.
THE WESTERN FRONT: The Germans launch an unexpected attack across the Chemin des Dames ridge, the same ground Nivelle sent the French army over last year. As with the March offensive, the initial phases go well. Several bridges are captured without the Allies having had time to blow them up. Communication lines are severed. Confusion reigns. A captured British general is taken to meet the Kaiser.
‘Does England wish for peace?’ Wilhelm enquires, breaking off from his lunch.
‘Everyone wishes for peace’, the general replies. The Kaiser nods and makes his exit.
The Allied line is close to buckling over the next few days. American soldiers are thrown into battle. The French still fear an attack elsewhere. The Germans surge forward to the river Marne, and are less than fifty miles away from Paris. They hope to either punch through to the French capital here or draw so many French troops south that they can launch a final attack against the British through Flanders.
Amongst the Allies, the military crisis begins to metastasise into a political one. The British cabinet discuss evacuating the army. French charities issue urgent requests for help to deal with the latest wave of refugees fleeing from the German onslaught. Those who can afford to leave the capital now do so. ‘Paris is a city of the dead’, writes the British Ambassador. But then, slowly, very slowly, the German advance of 1918 grinds to a halt a second time.
PETROGRAD: Lenin writes a letter to the workers of what is now Russia’s second city. He blames the bourgeoisie for the lack of bread in Petrograd. Wealthy peasants are hoarding grain to force up prices, he explains, and profit from the hunger of others.
He proposes a new maxim for Soviet Russia: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ A food dictatorship must be enforced. Peasants will be compelled to deliver grain at a fixed price. The state will control who is given what to eat. There will be no private buying and selling. The proletariat must not be tempted to return to the market; instead it must lead a crusade against bribe-takers and profiteers. ‘Every particle of surplus grain must be brought into the state stores’, Lenin writes. ‘The whole country must be swept clean’.
Occasionally over the spring, his driver takes him out hunting for wood grouse in the countryside.
EKATERINBURG: The Romanov family are reunited again. They let go the French tutor and their old retainers. Now it is just them and their guards.