MOSCOW: Vladimir speaks to a conference of working women. War commissar Trotsky has already lectured the group on the situation at the front, now only a few hundred miles from the Bolshevik capital. Others have been drafted in to talk about the food crisis. Lenin allows himself to talk about higher matters.
The regime has made great advances since the revolution, he begins, abolishing the old laws on divorce or on children born out of wedlock. But yes, he recognises, this is not enough. Equality before the law? Well, even bourgeois states can do that. But, as every good Bolshevik knows, law is one thing and power another. Women ‘still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them’, Lenin sighs. In the new communist society which, one day, will be built, women will be emancipated from such ‘petty, stultifying, unproductive work’. Canteens will be established and nurseries for children set up. Yes, women will be involved in politics, just like any other worker. That is the goal, Lenin says, but it will take many years to achieve.
He has frequently discussed these ideas with Inessa Armand, his former lover. The two once fell out over Vladimir’s pedantic, prudish, entirely theoretical response to free love–bourgeois, he calls the idea (a little steep given his own status as an adulterer). But that was long ago. Inessa is a frequent visitor to see him and Nadya in the Kremlin these days. Together, they talk about everything: the past and future. Sometimes Inessa brings her young daughter Varya with her, nearly killed in an anarchist bomb attack on the headquarters of the Moscow Communist Party that September. Vladimir enjoys having such a young and receptive audience around to listen to his stories about his exile past and his musings about the future.
Other times this autumn, when he is not out lecturing, or else dictating telegrams in his Kremlin office, Vladimir sits in his kitchen with the Ulyanovs’ housekeeper–a former factory worker from the Urals. He daydreams about the imminent victory of world revolution, even as Denikin’s armies approach Moscow from the south.
ISTANBUL: ‘MUSTAPHA KEMAL’S INFLUENCE CONTINUING TO SPREAD’, warns a secret British telegram on the first day of October. The general’s pronouncements from Ankara are still barely consistent with a constitutional Sultanate. A long-distance power struggle is under way. New parliamentary elections have been called. Kemal considers moving west.
FIUME–FLORENCE: Better late than never. Benito Mussolini flies to Fiume to congratulate Gabriele D’Annunzio on his taking of Fiume, with the hope of recouping some of the glory for himself.
Two days afterwards, and out of his flying gear for once this autumn, Benito is in Florence for an election rally of his Fasci di Combattimento. The Fascists, he proclaims elliptically, are ‘not republican, not socialist, not democratic, not conservative, not nationalist’. They are all of these and none, he says, taking a leaf out of Dada. They are a party and anti-party, ‘the sum of all negations and affirmations’ representing ‘all those who feel uncomfortable with the old categories and the old way of thinking’.
VIENNA: Having lost contact for the duration of the war, Freud meets again one of his English colleagues, who has travelled through war-torn Europe to Vienna and is staying at the Hotel Regina. Like long-lost friends, they talk of everything: how each has aged in the war, how bad things are in Austria these days, and of course they talk of psychoanalysis.
Gingerly, they broach the situation of their two countries, and of the world. Freud admits that he has become half a Bolshevist during the last few weeks. In a recent discussion with an ardent Bolshevik, he was told that the revolution will bring a few years of misery and chaos and then eternal peace and prosperity. ‘I told him I believed the first half’, Freud says.
When it comes to President Wilson, Freud is more serious. ‘He should not have made all those promises’, he insists. An awkward silence hangs between the two men.
AMERICA: For the next few weeks the White House will be wherever Woodrow is. He departs on a tour of America to sell the League of Nations to the country.
As befits a modern, American-style agitprop train, twenty journalists are invited along for the ride and, as the newspapers put it, ‘five moving picture men’. (Colonel House, the President’s adviser from Paris, with whom relations are now strained, is not invited.) If the Senate does not have the sense to ratify the treaty as he signed it, Woodrow believes, he must go directly to the people–as he did in Europe–so that they can put pressure on their representatives to do the right thing. Woodrow has faith in the people. All he asks is that they, and God, have faith in him.
Arriving in Ohio for his first big speech, Woodrow is already exhausted, his head aching, the blood pumping around his nerve-racked frame. ‘The terms of the treaty are severe’, he admits, ‘but they are just.’ No humiliation or retribution is sought. ‘This treaty is an attempt to right the history of Europe’, he declares: ‘in my humble judgement, it is a measurable success.’ It will not please everyone, of course. Some Italians think the Adriatic coast essential to their security. But why should Italians need to rule over Slavs for their security when the League will assure the security of all? ‘If they were going to claim every place where there was a large Italian population’, he jokes, ‘we would have to cede New York.’
He talks about Silesia, and the role of referendums in making sure people get the government they want. He talks about a new deal for workers within the treaty’s provisions: a ‘Magna Carta of labor’. All this is necessary to make the world a safer place. ‘Revolutions don’t spring up overnight’, he tells the businessmen of Ohio, but are born from the failure of governments to understand their people. The best antidote to Bolshevism is freedom, democracy and sound social protection. ‘I used to be told that this was an age in which mind was monarch’, Woodrow says in the most philosophical passage of his speech. Now we know better. The mind ‘reigns, but does not govern’. Passion is what drives us. And this treaty represents the triumph of humanity’s higher passions–for justice and civilisation–over its baser ones. It promises the elevation of the whole world to the higher plane that America already inhabits.
How, then, can America, a country of strong passions for what is right and just, reject it? ‘The only country in the world that is trusted at the moment is the United States’, Woodrow declares: it must not fail. In Kansas City, he appeals to the crowd’s patriotism, urging the ratification of the treaty as the completion of what the soldiers fought and died for in France. ‘The men who make this impossible or difficult’, he snarls, ‘will have a lifelong reckoning with the men who won the war’.
As Woodrow travels further west in his jolting, swelteringly hot train, an Old Testament tone enters his perorations. ‘Do you not know that the whole world is all now one single whispering gallery?’ he asks the crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, with all the evangelical fury of a preacher’s son. ‘All the impulses of mankind are thrown out upon the air and reach to the ends of the earth’, the President warns. ‘With the tongue of the wireless and the tongue of the telephone, the suggestions of disorder are spread through the world’. The treaty and the League will lead the world to its holy destiny: ‘those distant heights upon which will shine at last the serene light of justice, suffusing a whole world with blissful peace’. The President’s doctor watches anxiously from the sidelines. He urges more breaks, fewer speaking engagements, shorter speeches. He insists that the President not shake so many hands.
The tour is relentless, yet the President seems to relish it. As the train crosses the prairies from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Woodrow and Edith sit out on the rear platform of the presidential train carriage and wave to the small farmers and ranchers who have come out to greet them. The speeches continue, day after day. At every station, the President’s remarks are printed and distributed to the local newspapers, thus magnifying his audience a thousandfold and allowing him to hog the national limelight for weeks. (Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer, peace advocate and former Democratic Senatorial candidate, provides the funding for this particular propaganda effort.) In the north-western states, old frontiersmen turn out to greet the President alongside Native American chiefs, forty years after the annexation of their lands to the United States. (Men younger than Woodrow died at Custer’s Last Stand.) The President thinks he can feel the country turning his way.
Yet there is an unease in America which no amount of presidential glad-handing can overcome. This has been a year of riots and bombings. Warnings against Bolshevism run through the President’s speeches. ‘There are disciples of Lenin in our own midst’, he tells one assembly, who long for nothing more than ‘night, chaos and disorder’. Woodrow is in Montana when news arrives that police have gone on strike in Boston after the refusal of their request to affiliate with America’s largest trades union. The city immediately descends into looting. ‘Lenin and Trotsky are on their way’, the Wall Street Journal shudders. Boston’s entire police force is eventually fired, and Governor Coolidge becomes a national hero for putting the National Guard on the streets instead.
The news from Washington is no prettier. Giving evidence to a Senate inquiry, a disgruntled former diplomat causes a media storm by revealing the Secretary of State’s private view of the treaty. ‘If the American people could really understand’, he is reported to have said in Paris, ‘it would unquestionably be defeated.’ A Senate committee recommends a long list of reservations and amendments. Both sides bait each other in speeches across the floor of the Capitol. Several Senators fan out across the country on their own anti-treaty tour, often speaking in the same cities that Woodrow has just visited and to crowds almost as large. The President’s inflexibility on the treaty–demanding that it be ratified without anything more than interpretative reservations–makes negotiation impossible.
Passing west through the Rockies, Woodrow has difficulty breathing. (He has to sleep sitting up to prevent congestion, with pillows plumped up in a chair.) A long loop through the forests of Oregon and California provides an opportunity for rest. In San Diego, he makes one of his best speeches, standing in a glass box equipped with electric amplifiers to project his voice across a crowd of over thirty thousand. In Los Angeles, Edith and Woodrow even sleep in a hotel for once. But as they make their way back east into the mountains the President’s headaches return, sometimes so powerful he can hardly see. In Salt Lake City, Wilson speaks to fifteen thousand in an unventilated hall (Edith Wilson dabs a handkerchief in lavender and has it taken to her husband to help him through the ordeal). His temper frays. In Wyoming a local paper reports a look of ‘inexpressible weariness–the weariness of a nation’ on his face.
Twenty miles outside Pueblo, Arizona, the President’s doctor stops the train and Woodrow and Edith are sent on an evening stroll to get some fresh air (a farmer recognises the President and presents him with cabbages and apples for his supper). That evening, Wilson seems full of optimism. ‘Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away’, he tells his audience for that night, ‘I believe that men will see the truth, eye to eye, and face to face.’ America will rise to the challenge of peace as it rose to the challenge of war: ‘We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us, the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.’
Late that night, Woodrow knocks timidly on Edith’s door. He cannot sleep. His head is splitting. The doctor is called. The President’s face twitches uncontrollably. He feels he is about to be sick. It is hours before he drifts off to sleep. The next morning, he dresses and shaves as usual. But something inside of him has gone, as if he were suddenly no longer himself, but another, lesser man; a mere mortal, rather than President of the United States. ‘I just feel like I am going to pieces’, he admits weakly. A talk in Wichita, Kansas, is cancelled. The railway lines to Washington DC are cleared.
A telegram is sent to both his daughters: ‘Returning to Washington. Nothing to be alarmed about. Love from all of us. Woodrow Wilson’.
OMAHA, NEBRASKA–PHILLIPS COUNTY, ARKANSAS: A riot breaks out in Omaha the same day Woodrow returns to Washington. A black man accused of raping a white woman is pulled from jail by a mob of several thousand, shot, set on fire, and then dragged through the streets of the city. Soldiers have to restore order.
A few days later in Arkansas there are rumours of a radical-inspired revolt by black sharecroppers against white plantation owners. (In fact, the sharecroppers are simply trying to organise a union to get a better price for their cotton.) Whites are trucked in from Mississippi and Tennessee to teach the uppity workers a lesson. No one knows how many blacks are killed. Their bodies are dumped in the river.
Afterwards it is only blacks who are indicted, on charges of killing a white man. The trial is a farce. Black witnesses called for the prosecution are forced to provide false testimony. The defence offers no case: the lawyer does not meet his clients before the trial and calls no witnesses. Even the testimony of the defendants is not sought. Though a white mob surrounds the courthouse, threatening to lynch the black defendants unless they swing, no legal attempt is made to move the trial to safer and more neutral ground. A white jury decides the case in minutes. The blacks are sentenced to death.
NEW YORK: ‘Once more the white man has outraged American civilization’, Garvey writes. Lynching proves that America is no place for blacks. A fine and great democracy, but one built and run for whites. A race war is on its way–and blacks must organise, Garvey writes. America does not deserve their effort. It is Africa that must be redeemed, a splendid continent ‘kept by God almighty for the Negro’.
In the meantime, Garvey tells his readers: ‘let me remind all of you, fellow men, to do your duty to the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation’. The shares now cost five dollars each, he reports: ‘and I now ask you to buy as many shares as you can and make money while the opportunity presents itself’. A ship has now been found and part purchased. A black captain has been hired (and receives a kickback from the vendors of the rusty hulk for his help in negotiating the inflated price of the vessel). The sum of fifty thousand dollars has been raised.
Not everyone is convinced by Marcus Garvey. In Chicago, a local community leader accuses him of being just the latest in a long line of foreign con men–Nigerians are said to be particularly blameworthy–who take the hard-earned money of black Americans and provide nothing in return. Du Bois warns his uncle not to invest. In New York, Garvey survives an assassination attempt by a disgruntled investor in an earlier UNIA enterprise.
MOSCOW–LONDON–PETROGRAD: A last line of defence is designated by the Bolsheviks and a huge area of European Russia placed under martial law. Though outnumbered two to one, the Whites soon breach the Red perimeter. Denikin’s army races forwards. In London, Winston plays with the idea of going out to Moscow to help the Whites write a new Russian constitution. He feels an awesome sense of having been proven right.
In the Kremlin plans are made to move the seat of Bolshevik government from Moscow to the Urals. Cheka officials sift through their current hostage list–ten thousand names–and mark out who should be killed first. Trotsky and Stalin argue about the right military strategy to deflect the danger from Denikin’s troops. Lenin receives anonymous letters threatening him with all kinds of horrible retribution when he falls.
Vladimir has no intention of letting that happen. He barely leaves his office during the day. When he cannot sleep in the middle of the night the impatient revolutionary phones his subordinates, to check that his orders in some vital matter have been obeyed. When things are really bad, he even stops going on his walks with Nadya. And he worries: what if the Finns were to decide to join the White offensive? What if the Poles throw their armies into the fray?
In the middle of October, while matters are reaching a climax outside Moscow, Yudenich’s northern army launches towards Petrograd. The White general declares he stands for the eight-hour day and against the restoration of the Tsars. Within days his forces have reached Tsarskoye Selo. The British provide naval and air support. The prospect of an attack by British-made tanks terrifies Petrograd’s Red defenders. Evacuation plans are prepared. The top Bolshevik in the city has a nervous breakdown. He retires to the sofa, as Trotsky crushingly puts it.
Lenin is ready to abandon Petrograd to its fate and focus instead on crushing Denikin. Trotsky gets him to change his mind. ‘Very well, let us try’, Vladimir says, at last. The war commissar is sent north. There, he finds chaos, panic, dissolution. Trotsky may not be much of a general, but this is a situation which requires bravura–and he has plenty of that. Tanks, Leon tells a troop of Red soldiers, are nothing but ‘metal wagons of a special construction’. He laughs in the face of danger and encourages others to do the same.
To achieve his goal of destroying Yudenich’s army Trotsky is prepared to consider every eventuality. He toys with the idea of letting the White army into Petrograd, and then turning the ‘stone labyrinth’ of streets into their mausoleum by flattening the whole city with powerful artillery. He accepts that such an approach would ‘destroy a certain number of inhabitants, women and children’. But it would be effective. It is only on reflection that the war commissar is persuaded the cost in ‘accidental victims and the destruction of cultural treasures’ would be too high. He opts for a more classical course of action. Mounted on horseback, like Napoleon crossing the Alps, the Jewish farmer’s son from Ukraine rallies the fleeing Red Army at the very gates of the city, persuading the troops to turn back against the enemy. The counter-attack succeeds. The Whites fall back in disarray.
By this time Denikin’s advance on Moscow has ground to a halt. There is no popular upsurge to carry him on to victory as he had hoped. And the Bolshevik regime has not collapsed as expected. The White army of 1919 is well equipped and well led–but it is not the popular force the anti-Bolshevik rebel armies of 1918 seemed set to become and is far outnumbered by the Red Army. A long, slow retreat begins.
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND: A letter from Vienna arrives at 61 Bloom Street. Sam Freud, a local businessman, tears open the battered envelope. As expected, it is from Uncle Sigmund, the family success. ‘Life is hard with us’, Freud writes. ‘I don’t know what the English papers tell you–maybe they don’t exaggerate.’
Much of what Sigmund writes, Sam already knows: that the Austrian crown is worthless these days and the city unable to feed itself. The railways that once connected Vienna to the rest of the world are now like the pathetic stumps of an amputee, cut clumsily by the bloody surgeons of Paris. A once-peaceful Continent seems perpetually torn between revolution and reaction. ‘Which rabble is the worst?’ Freud asks another correspondent. ‘Surely the one just on top.’
But it is the news of family which affects Sam most. ‘We are living on a small diet’, he reads, ‘the first herring some days ago was a treat to me. No meat.’ Whoever can leave Austria has already left. ‘My own family is dissolving rapidly’, Freud writes. ‘Ernst has got a job in Berlin in the Palestine settling business, Oli looks forward to an engagement in the Dutch colonial government, ready to go to the East Indies… Anna will be the only child left to us.’ Sam fingers a photograph sent with the letter. His uncle Sigmund looks sterner than he used to, he thinks.
‘You know I have a big name and plenty of work’, Freud writes, but never enough to make ends meet. (He does not mention Edward Bernays, his American nephew, who at that very moment is finishing off the translation of some of Freud’s lectures for publication in America, in spite of a cable from Vienna countermanding the project.) Sigmund writes out a list of necessities which, if sent post-haste from Manchester, might make it through to Vienna unharmed: fat, corned beef, cocoa, tea and English teacakes…
PRANGINS, LAKE GENEVA: Charles and Zita Habsburg take a different tack. In October, a pair of emerald bracelets and a ruby brooch are put up for sale. Later in the autumn, a set of emerald pieces earns the family a little over one million Swiss francs, enough to keep them in imperial style for a few more months at least.
WASHINGTON DC: For weeks, no one outside Woodrow’s immediate family, his valet Brooks and the White House servants see the President. Edith allows no outside visitors. (An exception is made for the King of the Belgians, Woodrow’s host from the battlefield tour in June.) The President’s chief of staff is kept out. Even Colonel House is left to wonder what is going on. The first outsider to see Woodrow properly, a month after his return to the White House, is Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, currently leading a crackdown against a coal miners’ strike he has declared to be as deadly as an invading army and probably Bolshevik-inspired.
Edith decides what correspondence reaches the President, and what is ignored. She is his gatekeeper, his avatar. Much of the daily work of presidential government–such as the appointment of ambassadors–simply grinds to a halt. The rest is left to cabinet secretaries to sort out as best they can. Some measures taken sail close to constitutional impropriety. In consultation with Woodrow’s advisers, Edith goes so far as to deploy the presidential veto against a wide-ranging law on the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, defining what ‘intoxicating liquor’ is to mean in practice and how prohibition is to be applied. Rabbis and priests, for example, are allowed to make sacramental wine, but not allowed to sell it to anyone other than other rabbis and priests; doctors may prescribe liquor, but must keep a list of the patients who have received it, for examination at any time. Edith’s veto is overridden by Congress the same day. The clock to nationwide prohibition ticks down to 1920.
Woodrow’s doctor is evasive about the President’s condition. He laughs off suggestions of a cerebral lesion. ‘Nervous exhaustion’ is the preferred terminology. But the signs are there of a more serious illness. A draft of the President’s annual Thanksgiving proclamation is returned without a single word altered–very unlike the President–and with a signature, scrawled in pencil, that is virtually illegible. Edith Wilson, people joke, has become America’s first woman President.
The truth is that there is a power vacuum. Nature abhors such things. Ambitious politicians rather like them.
MUNICH: ‘Are we citizens or are we dogs?’ the mangy field-runner asks his audience. While keeping his day job as a member of the army’s propaganda team, Adolf is making a name for himself as a rising star on Munich’s far-right political scene and the newest member of the German Workers’ Party.
His speeches rage at those in power. They tell a story of hopes dashed and dreams betrayed. Germany has been cheated, Adolf declares. Never in the whole history of the earth has such a shameful peace been signed. ‘Instead of the understanding we hoped for, we have deceit’, he says: ‘instead of reconciliation, we have violence’. He shakes his fists and slices the air with his hand, copying the gestures he has picked up from other political orators. One student compares his technique to that of the playwright revolutionary Ernst Toller.
Adolf is connecting with his public and becoming the chief recruiting officer for the German Workers’ Party. At the end of one of his speeches, the chairman of the meeting–the slick-haired Thule Society member Karl Harrer–urges the audience of students, soldiers and shopkeepers to bring three friends each to the next event. At another party meeting, the police note a new energy, with three hundred in the audience now. To keep up the momentum, a further Christmas meeting is planned, despite the ban on heating public rooms so as to conserve coal and wood through the winter.
The mangy field-runner finds that his talent as a speaker opens doors to people he would never have dreamed of talking to before. He latches on to the German translator of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, another Thule Society member, as someone who understands Hitler as he sees himself: as an artist.
LONDON: The teams that travelled to observe the eclipse in Brazil and Principe earlier in the year finally present their findings to the public. The Royal Astronomical Society is packed. A portrait of Isaac Newton hangs on one wall.
Rumours of the results have been circulating in the physics community for a few weeks now–Einstein and his colleagues have already exchanged celebratory poems. But it falls to Britain’s Astronomer Royal, the successor to Newton–and a mild sceptic of relativity as a theory–to announce the results to the wider world. ‘A very definite result has been obtained’, he tells the gathering. The deflection of light shown by the Sobral and Principe expeditions corresponds–within reasonable bounds of error–to the values predicted by Einstein. The Astronomer Royal calls the result ‘part of a whole continent of scientific ideas affecting the most fundamental principles of physics’. A sceptic present points to Newton’s portrait and warns against accepting all of Einstein’s ideas on the basis of a few photographs. His voice is soon drowned out.
For outside the room, a popular craze erupts. The rule of the absolutes has fallen, in science as in politics. ‘Revolution in Science’, runs the headline in The Times: ‘New Theory of the Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.’ Suddenly, everyone is grappling to understand Einstein’s ideas–and their implications for everything else. For if time and space are not as straightforward as they seem, what else might prove to be just an illusion, a trick of the mind? People who have never given a thought to why up is up, and down is down, now find themselves perturbed–or invigorated. Occultists wonder if talk of an Einsteinian ‘Fourth Dimension’ holds, at last, the secret to telepathy or communication between the dead and the living. Painters and poets see relativity as the portal to a new world view where–of course–they can act as the true interpreters of a shattered reality. The bewildered public find relativity blaring at them alongside news of war and revolution across the world. The New York Times runs a gargantuan headline: ‘Lights All Askew in the Heavens. Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry’. What does it all mean?
In Berlin, Albert is besieged by well-wishers, many of them foreign. A scientist from Yorkshire writes asking for a signed photograph to add to his collection of Austrian, Hungarian and German scientists. Albert fields invitations to speak from around the world and the Prussian government jacks up his salary by fifty per cent to make sure he returns to Germany. He is asked to write popular articles about relativity for the masses. In The Times he illustrates relativity by joking that now that he is considered a success Germans claim him as a German and the British call him a Swiss Jew–but if he were ever to fall out of favour Germans would certainly refer to him as a Swiss Jew and the British as a German. Einstein complains to his friends that he can’t get any work done these days, that his life is now just ‘telegrams, ringing telephones, stacks of letters’. ‘I can hardly breathe anymore’, he complains to one correspondent.
Fame has arrived. And with it controversy. Some are uneasy at yet another success of German science so soon after the war. There are scientists who dislike the over-hasty elevation of a fellow scientist into a demigod. They demand more proof (and rather better photographs) before succumbing to the craze. Some wonder if relativity–and the rush with which it has been embraced–connects to some deeper strain of sickness in the world. ‘For some years past,’ an American professor writes, ‘the entire world has been in a state of unrest, mental as well as physical’. Is it so far-fetched to imagine that all the symptoms of this unrest–war, Bolshevism, relativity, even jazz–are linked somehow? Perhaps they have a common psychological root, as if the whole world were suffering from the same neurosis.
For those who liked the world as it was–or as they imagined it was–Einstein is not a scientist so much as a sorcerer, a necromancer, a hypnotist of the masses. His theory must be squashed.
ACROSS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Mitchell Palmer sees his chance to act. Two years to the day since Lenin’s coup in Petrograd, the Bureau of Investigation lashes out at Bolshevism–real or imagined–in the United States. The borders are sealed. The raids begin around nine in the evening.
In Detroit, agents surround a major theatre showing a Russian play. A Russian-speaker is sent in to announce to the audience that some of them will not be going home that evening. A pool hall popular with Russians is raided near Pittsburgh. Boarding houses are stormed in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The main hit is at the Russian People’s House in New York where over two hundred are rounded up as members of the Union of Russian Workers, an organisation suspected of anti-American treachery (its constitution contains a line about socialistic revolution, making all foreign members liable for deportation). American citizens, who it would be illegal to hold without charge, are quickly released, as are those who do not appear in Hoover’s card index. But by the following morning nearly forty others have been identified as worthy of deportation. They are marched to Battery Park and put on boats to Ellis Island. ‘We’re going back to Russia–that’s a free country’, one shouts. Some have black eyes. It is the history of the United States in reverse.
The press has a field day. The New York Tribune describes how a communist meeting in Yonkers was broken up by a priest leading his parishioners in singing the national anthem. ‘Russian Plot Nipped in the Bud’, shouts the Wausau Daily Record in Wisconsin. Days later, on Armistice Day, an American Legion march in the mining town of Centralia, Washington, is fired upon from a building belonging to the local chapter of a radical trades union. Four are killed. Rage against the Reds notches up another level.
America is fighting back, and it is Palmer, not Wilson, who is leading the crusade. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle runs a cartoon of Uncle Sam striding across the land, picking up tiny gesturing figures marked ‘Reds’–one looks like Lenin, a worker’s cap atop his head and a single hand raised in exhortation. The ‘Reds’ are placed in a sack marked ‘Deportation’. But there is a particular detail to the cartoon. A few of the prisoners manage to escape the sack through a hole at its bottom marked ‘Legal Technicalities’.
IRELAND: The Dáil is suppressed, and operates in the shadows. In the nationalist south and west, brigandage is rife. Military zones are declared. In County Clare, there are attacks on police posts, and ambushes on their patrols. Rifles and ammunition are stolen. In County Cork, attacks on post offices aim to disrupt police operations and steal their correspondence (armoured cars are used from now on).
The Royal Irish Constabulary, barely ten thousand strong, finds it hard to keep up its strength. Irish constables tread carefully or retire from fear, warned by their neighbours that they are now in danger of their lives should they be too zealous in their duties. In some rural parts, IRA volunteers patrol the lanes with impunity.
Once a week, Michael Collins visits Sinéad de Valera to hand over her husband’s salary.
MILAN: Benito wins just five thousand votes in elections in Milan (out of some quarter of a million cast). Neither a victory, nor a defeat, he claims in public. In private, he is bitterly disappointed. The Socialists, the most popular party across the country, organise a mock funeral march for Benito, passing by the front door of his apartment building and terrifying his wife Rachele trapped inside.
Mussolini takes stock. He needs more money, he concludes. He needs to distinguish himself as a man who understands the politics of compromise, rather than just being perceived as a subspecies of the crazy liberators of Fiume or a has-been like Marinetti (or an ex-socialist, which is what he really is).
His profile is lifted when he is arrested for illegally hoarding weapons. But the government opts not to prosecute. It may need Mussolini in the future, and Italy already has enough martyrs.
LONDON–SIBERIA–MOSCOW: By December, even Winston is ready to accept the bitter truth. ‘The last chances of saving the situation are passing away’, he writes. ‘Very soon there will be nothing left but Lenin and Trotsky, our vanished 100 millions, and mutual reproaches.’
Denikin’s troops are in full flight from Moscow towards the south. In the east, along a single railway line, Admiral Kolchak, his army, and supporters and their families struggle to make good their own escape. Rebellions against his rule flare up along the way. White refugees freeze to death in railway carriages; others try to trudge through the Siberian winter on horse or foot. In Moscow, war commissar Trotsky is the hero of the hour.
At a ceremony in the Bolshoi he is awarded the Order of the Red Banner. To smooth things over between the two rivals, the Georgian bank-robber is given the same award. ‘Can’t you understand?’ one old Bolshevik mutters to another. ‘This is Lenin’s idea–Stalin can’t live unless he has what someone else has.’
WASHINGTON DC: The Senate is deadlocked on the treaty. Yet Woodrow does not answer his opponents’ letters and will hear of no compromise. He will not see his treaty, his League, mutilated. He comes up with fantastic schemes to try and save it: challenging fifty-six Senators to stand for immediate re-election, as a kind of referendum on the treaty. When visitors come to see him he hides his paralysed left arm under the covers and arranges state papers by his bed in an attempt to show that his bedroom is a hive of government activity–before relapsing exhausted when they have gone.
AMERONGEN: Wilhelm reaches the twelve thousand mark in November. By early December his total stands at thirteen thousand logs. Some days the ex-Kaiser only breaks his labours for an occasional glass of port, or a rambling discussion with his adjutant about the state of Europe while sheltering from the rain in the children’s playhouse. ‘Aged and Melancholy, the War Lord in Exile’, runs the headline in the Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford’s newspaper, above a picture of Wilhelm in civilian clothes, snapped illicitly by a Dutch photographer. There are rumours that Wilhelm offered to buy the plates in order to have them smashed.
Wood-chopping seems the only thing to stop the ex-Kaiser from chain-smoking and fantasising about bloody revenge in his room. His wife, physically fragile, worries about the ‘dark musings’ her husband has become prone to. There are particular reasons for Wilhelm’s mood. The newspapers have got hold of some of his marginalia on diplomatic reports going back to 1914 which make it look as if the Kaiser actively wanted war. Wilhelm’s entourage worry about the effect on public opinion. The Dutch might hand him to the French and British after all.
Wilhelm’s mind wanders freely over past, present and future. He talks extemporaneously to anyone within earshot about his pet subjects: the war, Germany’s need for a strong Führer, the situation in Russia, or his grandmother, Queen Victoria. He tells Count Bentinck’s daughter that the Queen died in his arms, and that it was a Union Jack from his yacht which lay on her coffin at her funeral, because her English family–how typical!–had forgotten to arrange it themselves.
Earlier that autumn the Kaiser explains to a bewildered guest how he has been fighting a shadow war with the Catholics and Jews all along, who have been conspiring to replace the Hohenzollerns with the Habsburgs. He goes on to explain that the parlous economic situation in Britain and France means Germany has won the war not lost it, and that all that is needed now is an alliance with Russia to finish the job. In the board-game of world politics, Wilhelm seems to have things sewn up in a trice. ‘Japan I will attach to Russia in the east’, he explains, ‘and then we’ll march together with Russia against England!’ The French will eventually feel obliged to attack England too, the Kaiser insists. Such imperial fantasies leave his young guest quite shaken. Has Wilhelm always been this way?
Occasionally one of his sons drops by. Wilhelm takes little interest in them. He expresses positive disgust for August Wilhelm, whose wife has run off with one of the servants. He blames the moody temperament of Prince Joachim on Jewish influence. Indeed, he blames the Jews for his wife’s illness too. In December, he writes to one of his most trusted generals to explain that it is the Jews who carry the responsibility for pretty much everything which has befallen him and his country. ‘Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil!’ Wilhelm writes. He calls the Jews a ‘poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree’. He thirsts for revenge.
As the wet winter weather causes the Rhine to flood the meadows on his estate, Count Bentinck wonders whether the imperial couple might move temporarily to another house. Impossible, as the only option available would require the Kaiser and his wife to share a dressing room, which apparently they cannot do. In The Hague, some wish the waters of the Rhine would force Wilhelm out of Holland altogether. ‘If, indeed, by some act of Providence, this self-invited and embarrassing guest could be sunk without a trace,’ a diplomat reports, ‘such a solution would be hailed with unmitigated relief.’
SAGUA LA GRANDE, CUBA–NEW YORK: After a journey which the ship’s captain describes euphemistically as ‘adventurous’–including running aground on a sandbank–the first Black Star Line vessel arrives in Cuba from New York. The captain blames saboteurs amongst the (mostly British) crew for problems along the way. ‘The passengers’, he writes, ‘are behaving splendidly.’
‘The Eternal has happened’, Garvey tells his faithful readership. This is a moment to savour, a moment of regained self-confidence, the firing of the starter’s gun in a struggle between the races. ‘We black folks believe so much in the omnipotence of the white man that we actually gave in all hope and resigned ourselves to the positions of slaves and serfs for nearly five hundred years’, he writes. ‘But, thank God, a new day has dawned’. He beseeches his readers to ‘steel their souls’ for the revolution to come and buy as many shares in the Black Star Line as they can.
MODLIN, POLAND: Captain de Gaulle has one more course to teach. One hundred officers of the Polish army attend his lectures on how morale makes the difference between victory and defeat, and why France must stand by Poland to the end.
He prepares to leave before the spring. ‘The Polish army will have been what I intended it to be for me: a military restoration’, he tells his mother. He has been awarded the Légion d’honneur for his bravery prior to his capture in 1916. The shame of being a prisoner of war has been erased.
MOSCOW: ‘Our banking on the world revolution, if you can call it that, has on the whole been fully justified’, the impatient revolutionary declares in his end-of-year report to an All-Russia Congress of Soviets. Nonetheless, ‘from the point of view of the speed of its development we have endured an exceptionally difficult period’, he admits. Developments have been, for want of a better word, full of ‘zigzags’.
‘I think we may say without exaggeration that our main difficulties are already behind us’, Vladimir reassures the Soviet representatives. The Whites have been chased away like children. The foreigners have pulled out. Kiev is Red Kiev once again, and the Ukrainian nationalist leader has gone into exile. The imperialists have been caught out by their hypocrisy. They call themselves democrats but lock up opponents. They say they stand for the rights and freedoms of small nations, but try to bribe them to fight their wars. The workers are waking up to such tricks; they will not be duped by propaganda: ‘the lie being spread about us is fizzling out’. In the frightened Western capitals they call the Bolsheviks terrorists, Vladimir snorts indignantly: ‘We say terror was thrust upon us.’ He quotes a Swedish newspaper suggesting Churchill had expected to be in Moscow by now: ‘just try it, gentlemen!’
Life in Russia is hard. The population of the cities has collapsed. Those that remain eat in collective canteens to avoid starvation. Wooden fences are burned so the people can keep warm. But it won’t be long now, the impatient revolutionary declares, before the Bolsheviks will be able to turn from fighting wars to building socialism. ‘Comrades, the task which now confronts us is to transfer our war-time experience to the sphere of peaceful construction.’
It is already happening. Look around you, Vladimir exhorts: the workers’ state is coming into existence, the old bureaucrats are being pushed out. Efforts are already being redirected to the struggle against cold and hunger, how to provide the people with grain and fuel. To allow peasants to sell their produce in the market, like before the war, is no solution: ‘if you want free sale of grain in a ruined country, go back, try out Kolchak and Denikin!’ No, the challenges now are organisation and distribution, keeping up socialist self-sacrifice, continuing the fight against plotters and saboteurs.
And then there is the battle against disease. The scourge of typhus must be subdued. ‘Either the lice will defeat socialism’, Vladimir thunders, ‘or socialism will defeat the lice!’
KIRŞEHİR, OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Struggling west through mud and snow to reach Ankara, the hilltop city he has chosen as his new base of operations, Mustafa Kemal stops one night in the small town of Kırşehir.
He has carried all before him in the elections. The nationalists are triumphant. A new Ottoman parliament is to assemble in Istanbul, where patriotic demonstrations against foreign occupation are now gathering pace. After dinner, Kemal gives a campaign speech to the notables of Kırşehir. He quotes a few lines of poetry: ‘The enemy has pressed his dagger to the breast of the motherland / Will no one arise to save his mother from her black fate?’
Kemal answers his question with a smile. Surely they can see that he is the saviour they have been waiting for.
MUNICH: Wearing black trousers, white shirt, black tie and an old jacket he bought years ago in Vienna, Adolf Hitler opens a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in December.
Adolf is still fed and housed at the expense of the army, unable to stand on his own two feet. But now that he has found his calling as a speaker he is growing more confident in his own ideas. Anti-capitalism, German nationalism, a hatred of the Versailles Treaty, and a firm belief in German unity rather than Bavarian particularism still form the bedrock of his speeches, alongside popular anti-Semitism. Occasionally he allows himself to range more widely. In December, he talks expansively about how Britain’s colonisation of India and the opium war with China expose the hypocrisy of the Great Powers and demonstrate the fundamental truth that legitimacy is ultimately derived from power, not the other way around. ‘Is right possible without might?’ Adolf asks. America does not wish to join the League of Nations because it believes itself too strong to need it. The strong do not want constraints on their action.
Hitler divides the world into two. There are temporary enemies with whom Germany may be drawn into occasional conflict but with whom a future alliance cannot be ruled out. Russia falls into this category. And then there are Germany’s permanent and perpetual enemies, of which the most prominent are the British and Americans, who think only of money ‘even if it is soaked in blood’. Adolf Hitler does not mention Bolshevism once. International capitalism rather than international socialism is the chief focus of his anger.
VIENNA: As the year shivers towards its end Sigmund Freud is busy corresponding with his British and American nephews.
Sam has dutifully dispatched a food parcel from Manchester to Austria as requested. But nothing has yet arrived in Vienna. Perhaps the goods are lost in a railway siding somewhere, or making a feast for a hungry postmaster and his wife, or waiting unclaimed in an Austrian customs office. ‘You seem not to be aware of the whole amount of governmental stupidity’, Sam reads in the latest missive from his uncle. Permits are required for everything these days, Sigmund explains. Hopes for the parcel being recovered grow slighter with each passing day.
Around the same time, Sigmund finally hears back from his American nephew Edward, the publicity man. Edward blames strike conditions for his silence over the last few months. But he has good news: despite Sigmund’s second thoughts about the whole business, the American translation of one of his books is now nearly ready. A first instalment of one hundred dollars is on its way. Edward suggests that a well-paid lecture tour could be arranged, as well: ‘America would listen eagerly to what you would say.’ Flattery, and money, he hopes, will soothe his uncle’s nerves.
Edward even suggests that Freud write a public appeal for the American people to come to the aid of the suffering population of Austria, which would make his name better known in the United States. Freud politely declines the offer. ‘I do not consider myself a person of public notoriety such as may be entitled to appeal to the American people on behalf of the Austrian people’, he writes, ‘and in my own country at least I am in the dark.’
Where is Freud’s country now anyhow? Fear of revolution and civil war stalks the streets. The Habsburgs are banished. Prague and Budapest are now foreign capitals, where German is the dirty language of a defeated, humiliated power. Freud’s homeland is no more. Even his thoughts about psychoanalysis tend to darkness. ‘I have finished sowing’, he writes gravely to a colleague. ‘I shall not see the harvest.’
NEW YORK–RUSSIA: One cold morning in December the USAT Burford, an old naval ship from the Spanish–American War, slips past the Statue of Liberty into open water, carrying the first wave of foreign radicals deported from the United States away from American shores.
‘This is the beginning of the end for the United States’, shouts the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, as the ship pulls away. Another deportee’s words are more menacing: ‘we’re coming back–and we’ll get you.’ On board, the passengers share out clothing with those who did not have time to pack before they were forced to leave. Someone strikes up a Russian folk song.
John Reed is already in Russia waiting for them, having worked his way across the Atlantic to Norway as a stoker under false papers and then making the last leg of his journey by sleigh and on foot.
In the Kremlin, the latest recipient of a personal copy of Ten Days that Shook the World is writing a note on the Russian language. It is being spoiled by too many foreign words, Lenin tells his colleagues. His attention has been drawn to the increasingly common use of defekty–meaning defect, fault, imperfection, shortcoming. He points out that Russian already has three perfectly good words for that.