KIEV: The Poles are thrown back. Barely a month after they conquered Kiev, the city has changed hands again. Locals have lost count of how many times their city has been trampled through by competing armies these last three years. The Bolsheviks present themselves as Russian patriots fighting against the historic foe. The Tsar’s former commander-in-chief appeals for all patriotic officers to join the Red Army.
Now, with Piłsudski’s armies in retreat, the question is no longer how to save Bolshevism, but how far to extend it. Europe’s populations have not risen up in revolution as Vladimir had hoped. Might Red Army bayonets in Warsaw help to concentrate their minds?
Stalin argues that Wrangel should be knocked off first. Trotsky, for once, urges caution. But Lenin is impatient. A young aristocrat who is appointed as the commander of the Red Army in the west shares his ambitions. He is the same age as Napoleon when he conquered Italy–just twenty-seven.
WASHINGTON DC: In January, Mitchell Palmer was untouchable, a crusader for American values against the Bolsheviks. By summer, he is under fire for abuse of power, accused of terrorising thousands with an illegal witch-hunt and then trying to ruin those who stand in his way. ‘I declare these charges are outrageous and unconscionable falsehoods’, he tells a Congressional committee looking into the matter. He is just doing his job. For two days straight he rebuts his critics. His political career is on the line. The Democratic convention is just weeks away.
‘The world is on fire’, Palmer warns, and the arsonists in Moscow are doing all they can to spread the conflagration. The flames of revolution are leaping across western Asia from the Caspian Sea to the Suez Canal. They have reached ‘the huts of Afghanistan’. Americans must understand what it is that they are up against. Those who oppose his methods are playing the Bolshevik game. They are either knaves or fools. Honest American workers are being manipulated. Palmer furiously attacks ‘our so-called “liberal press”’ and the ‘parlor Bolsheviki’ who cannot see what is happening outside their book-lined studies.
He invites members of the committee to come down to the offices of the Justice Department to look at the photographs of the foreign Bolshevik agitators that have been compiled. ‘Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime’, he says. ‘From their lopsided faces, sloping brows and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakeable criminal type.’
PARIS–BERLIN: Paris Dada takes off on summer holiday. Tzara heads to the Balkans; André recovers from his Dadaist activities in Brittany, writing letters to Simone almost every day.
Fun and games may suit the Paris lot. Berlin has no time for dilettantes and dandies. The mood is different there. Berlin Dada is serious, anti-war, political. It celebrates the arrival of summer with an art fair, closer in spirit to Moscow than to the Latin Quarter. ‘Dada is Fighting on the Side of the Revolutionary Proletariat’, reads one slogan. ‘DADA is the Voluntary Destruction of the Bourgeois World of Ideas’, shouts another. ‘Dadaist Man is the Radical Opponent of Exploitation’, declares a third.
A life-size model of a German soldier with a pig’s head hangs from the ceiling. (It is called Prussian Archangel.) A painting shows three war-wounded soldiers playing cards, one with his mouth crudely stitched up and a black hole for an eye, another with a prosthetic nose, a third with a metal plate holding his skull together.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: Wherever they go, they are treated like royalty.
In the old imperial capital, the British Labour Delegation tour the great revolutionary sites of 1917 and are treated to several outings to the ballet and opera. In Moscow, they are given an hour and a half with Lenin in person (who as usual pretends to be quite frank, while saying very little). At the Bolshoi Theatre, they sit in the imperial box. Hearts pound a little faster when war commissar Trotsky joins them for the opera one evening dressed in a tight-fitting Red Army uniform and bearing news of Russian success in pushing back the Poles from Red Ukraine. During the second half, when a lovemaking scene takes place on stage, Leon turns to the suffragette sitting by his side, gestures towards the actors and murmurs in broken English: ‘There is the great international language.’ Some delegates go to see a Futurist performance as well. Their minders never leave their side. A sleek Comintern representative is assigned to answer questions. She is horrified when Ethel Snowden seems concerned about the whereabouts of the former owners of the palace in which they are staying.
The consequences of three years of war and revolution are everywhere to see on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. The suffragette asks why so many women on the streets have short hair. Typhus makes the hair fall out, she is told. When Ethel gives a woollen jacket to the maid who has been looking after her, the girl falls to her knees and kisses the generous British lady’s hand. The Bolsheviks have destroyed the old economy–but its replacement has not yet arrived. In parts of the Russian countryside, peasants reportedly eat moss. Even Trotsky admits that rations are now weighed on ‘the chemist’s scales’. In the cities, illegal markets sell shoddy goods at inflated prices. A rouble note with lots of zeroes is referred to on the streets as a limon, a sour reflection of all it can buy. Factory workers are paid in goods they do not want and then resort to barter, with matches exchanged for glasses of milk, and overcoats bought with firewood. Commissars get their lemons hand-delivered from abroad.
Perhaps money could be abolished entirely? For what are banknotes but coloured paper, the symbol of capitalist oppression? Lenin gives Marx’s dictum that each should be provided for according to their need a little twist: for each according to their work. An economist proposes a system based on units of work-energy with a giant centralised ledger keeping everything in balance. Realism intervenes. The tools are not yet ready and the economy is not prepared for such a shock. Some have more blasphemous thoughts. Trotsky, while demanding the extension of military discipline to the industrial workforce, simultaneously suggests that the wartime policy of simply requisitioning grain from the peasantry should now be softened to encourage them to grow more. Vladimir shoots him down. Heresy!
While debates rage in the Kremlin, Russia shivers and the peasants do not plant for the year ahead. A summer tour of villages near Moscow inspires John Reed to start work on a new play with the working title Hunger. In Petrograd, Ethel meets one of Russia’s most famous singers and spots his bare toes poking through his worn-out shoes. Another delegate asks about the fashion for women wearing socks rather than stockings. ‘Socks use up less wool than stockings’, comes back the answer. ‘Most have neither’. But, ultimately, who is to blame for these material conditions: the Bolsheviks or the enemies they have been forced to fight for the last three years? Meeting Vladimir in the Kremlin, one of the British delegates compares Soviet Russia to a patient recovering from a serious illness: sick, but on the mend. Yes, Lenin pounces, that’s it. And the revolution is like a severe but vitally necessary operation.
The delegates arrive in Russia wanting to believe in the great experiment, or at least wanting to approach it with an open mind. They leave it disappointed. The commissars are worse than the old Etonians they have to deal with back home. The intellectual inflexibility of the Bolsheviks grates. Is poetry, art, love, all just a subset of Marxist theory? On a long cruise down the Volga, even the philosopher attached to the British delegation grows a little tired of interminable discussion of the materialistic conception of history. Many of his fellow delegates fall sick at some point during their time in Russia, mostly with digestive trouble. One very nearly dies from pneumonia. Colleagues nurse him back to life, no thanks to Bolshevik doctors who give him two days to live. The delegates dine a little too much on fish heads–and never fish. (That part goes to the commissar, they joke.) Abject poverty is less romantic when looked at up close.
The delegates leave Russia with the belief that it should be given a chance to work out its difficulties without outside intervention. London and Paris should keep their hands off. But they do not think the great experiment would work at home.
TEREZÍN FORTRESS, CZECHOSLOVAKIA–SARAJEVO, YUGOSLAVIA: The coffins of the Sarajevo martyrs are laid out on a long black dais. There are flowers everywhere. A crucifixion scene is placed in the middle. For the Serbians in attendance these bodies are holy relics. Their nerves tremble with patriotic energy. Gavrilo Princip’s body is reburied in Sarajevo’s Koševo cemetery a few days later. A new cult of Serbian heroism is born to justify their domination of the new kingdom of Yugoslavia.
MOSCOW: The impatient revolutionary involves himself in all details of Soviet Russia’s ongoing crisis.
The authorities must act firmly to confiscate the surplus produced by people growing food on allotments outside Moscow and Petrograd, he writes. Muscovites must be mobilised to forage for firewood–‘by hand’–in the forests within a twenty-mile radius of the city and dump it at railway stations. Each man should be required to haul one cubic metre of wood every three months (‘the experts can figure it out more exactly’, Vladimir writes, ‘I mention a figure as an example’). Failure will result in arrest and execution: ‘inactivity and negligence cannot be tolerated’. At the same time, he orders that the estate manager at his Gorki country house–he prefers to use the more proletarian-sounding term sanatorium in public–should be imprisoned for a month for cutting down a fir tree. The charge is ‘causing damage to Soviet property’.
No matter is too small to demand Vladimir’s personal attention. Everything is important. Everything is urgent. One day he finds himself leafing through a pamphlet produced in the dark days of 1918 called Cooking Food Without Fire. He asks the relevant official to update him as to whether anything ever came of a competition for a new kind of thermos vessel mentioned therein. In late June, he orders the state publishing house to ‘publish quickly’ the book of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. When he discovers that the Commissariat of Enlightenment has no film with which to record the trial of Kolchak’s ministers, Vladimir personally orders the foreign ministry to buy some abroad immediately.
While trying to keep the revolution on the road at home, Vladimir’s attention is increasingly drawn to the situation with the Poles. He pesters his subordinates daily for more news from the front. A Red cavalry division is harassing the Poles towards the line they held before they launched their offensive. But no final decision has been taken as to what to do when the task of clearing the area has been completed.
The twenty-seven-year-old commander of the Red Army in the west, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, is keen to push on. At the beginning of July, he issues an order of the day to all his units.
The time of reckoning has come.
In the blood of the defeated Polish army we will drown the criminal government of Piłsudski.
Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to World Conflagration.
On our bayonets we will bring peace and happiness to the toiling masses of mankind.
On to Wilno, Minsk, Warsaw–Forward!
The road west is open. All that is needed is the order from the top to fire the starter’s pistol.
Vladimir is surrounded by voices urging caution. Despite all the stirring speeches in Moscow about a proletarian war against the Polish landlord class, in private many Bolshevik leaders fear that the workers of Warsaw may not welcome the Red Army as liberators. The British offer to mediate a ceasefire in order to save the Poles and hold back the Reds in Russia. Trotsky urges Lenin to take the offer up.
But the impatient revolutionary will not be held back. Visions of sweeping conflagration dance before his eyes: the defensive turned into the offensive again. A Red empire stretching from Moscow to Berlin–or further. ‘It is time to encourage revolution in Italy,’ he wires to Stalin. ‘Hungary must be sovietised, and maybe also the Czech lands and Romania.’ (The loyal Georgian replies that it would indeed be ‘sinful’ not to promote revolution in Rome.) The prestige of military victory will surely knock any moderate socialist doubters off their perches, and push the international workers’ movement Moscow’s way.
Confident of success, throwing all caution to the wind, Vladimir demands an acceleration of the military campaign. A timetable is set: six weeks to conquer Poland.
MUNICH–SEBASTOPOL: ‘The fate of Poland today should be a warning sign to the Entente’, Adolf tells an audience in Rosenheim, where a new party chapter has been opened by a local railway administrator and his wife. Germany’s salvation, he says, will not come in the west. It will come in the east. Once Lenin has been overthrown, he sees a match made in heaven of agrarian Russia and industrial Germany. Grain for iron. ‘We must seek an Anschluss with national, anti-Semitic Russia’, Adolf declares, a new geopolitical grouping to take on the world: an unbeatable, Eurasian bloc.
At that very moment, a far-right delegation of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians arrives in Crimea to explore the possibilities of an alliance with like-minded Russians.
BAD GASTEIN: The sacred summer break has arrived. Freud is in the mountains again, this time with his sister-in-law Minna, as far away as possible from Vienna. ‘The peace is delightful,’ Freud writes to Anna, ‘not even an organ grinder.’ There is a waterfall nearby. Every day after lunch, while Minna takes her siesta, Freud settles down to work. And in this high solitude, far from the city, Freud decides to turn his mind to that most salient feature of his age: the crowd.
It is a subject that Freud knows he must address. Everyone is writing about it. Everyone has views on it. Psychoanalysis cannot be left behind. And it is a matter of which Freud has some experience. After all, he has seen the infectious power of crowds. He remembers well the Parisian crowds he wandered through as a student, astounded by the volatility of their moods, so easily manipulated by the martinets and mountebanks of French politics, a type Freud profoundly despises. He has experienced for himself the exhilaration which can go with feeling part of a group united for a single purpose: he remembers 1914.
Freud fears the tendency of his age to discount the individual in favour of the group. He reads about its vicious consequences every day: in wars, pogroms, revolutions and riots from Petrograd to Munich to East St. Louis. He knows the strange influence which the masses exert on the individual–and vice versa. He worries about those rabble-rousers who seem to want to exploit matters further rather than calm them down, who celebrate the collective against the individual, and in so doing make the baying crowd (or the lynch-mob) the only true source of legitimacy. The cult of the masses–whether that of the faceless proletariat or the millions of war dead or the identikit consumer–is all around these days.
What are the masses, psychologically speaking? What is it that makes humans seek sublimation in a group? By what means of hidden communication does a group of individuals cohere into a group, as if possessed of a single will and a single mind? These are not simple problems. Nor are they dry and academic. What makes an army follow its commanders to the death? What makes a revolutionary mob act as one? By what strange power does a leader direct a crowd? And by what craven instinct of submission does a crowd decide to follow? To answer these questions is to unlock the public mind. It is to expose the hidden, subterranean workings of society. And it turns the person who can read them into a god.
What Sigmund seeks to analyse, others are already trying to apply. The notion that the whims and fancies of the masses can be understood in scientific terms fascinates those with the ambition to convert such knowledge into power. Sigmund’s nephew Edward hopes to turn crowd psychology into a marketable business proposition: the management of the public mind for private ends. Benito Mussolini reads the same texts on crowd psychology as Freud in his Austrian hideaway–Gustave le Bon, in particular–looking to improve his political technique. The plasticity of human emotions which so terrifies Sigmund is, for Benito, a thrilling fact, an incredible opportunity. For those who know the workings of the public mind will be those best placed to control it. Politics can become a science and individuals mere cells within the greater body of society, all directed by a fascist super-brain.
Mussolini knows he is not the only one to have picked up on the idea of a leader conjuring the masses to follow his will. There is one other European leader whose methods he admires above all others. ‘Lenin is an artist who has worked with human beings as other artists work with marble or metals’, Benito gushes. It is just a pity that the artwork he has produced has not lived up to his promise.
In Bad Gastein, high up in the mountains, the nightmares of the modern world crowd into Freud’s makeshift study.
WARSAW: Having returned to France to an administrative job which bored him, Charles de Gaulle is back in Poland. He has been here now almost as long as he served on the Western Front in the war.
He left in April, when Poland was thrilled by reports of constant victory. By July, the news is all of defeat. The currency has collapsed; the queues for bread have grown longer. The mood is less one of anger than one of Slavic resignation. ‘The more the danger approaches, the less they react,’ Charles writes in his diary, ‘which explains why, throughout history, a handful of barbarians have been able to dominate such huge territory.’ This is the captain’s own pet theory, of course, that wars are won or lost on the question of popular morale.
Occasionally, he catches sight of a flash of resistance. One Sunday, after a solemn Catholic Mass in what was once a Russian Orthodox cathedral, he attends a parade of volunteers, mostly students. They carry imitation guns. ‘What tragic destiny that the energy and spirit of these people’s elites has never been equal to the virtue and readiness of the masses’, de Gaulle jots down. His own students from last year are now all at the front. Several have been killed. His military acquaintances in Warsaw–Charles has made no real friends here–ask him what the French will do to help. De Gaulle chafes under the restrictions of neutrality. Once again, he is a bystander to great historic events. It is particularly vexing that the young commander of the Red Army, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, is a man de Gaulle remembers from their time in the same German prisoner-of-war camp. (Mikhail was called Misha then and, unlike Charles, he managed to escape.)
But this war is quite unlike the last one. Then, for three years, the Western Front barely moved. Its symbol was Verdun. This war is fought on horseback, like a Napoleonic campaign, with a front line that moves this way and that with the speed of a cracking whip. Cavalry emerge from huge dust clouds, scattering their foes, sabres slashing through the air. The open borderlands are like an ocean: empty and immeasurable, the enemy hidden in its vastness. The Red Army survives off the land and the promise of rapid conquest. Horse-drawn wagons are mounted with machine guns. Where will they come to rest?
The fate of Western civilisation seems to hang by a thread.
NEW YORK: The bare-faced cheek.
Marcus Garvey sends William Du Bois a free pass for the upcoming UNIA convention and asks if he would like to throw his hat into the ring as candidate for ‘accredited spokesman of the American Negro People’, a subsidiary position to that of the worldwide leader.
Du Bois bristles. He takes a week to respond to the Jamaican upstart. He wants his name put forward ‘under no circumstances’. Instead he requests that Garvey answer a series of basic questions about the UNIA so The Crisis can provide a ‘critical estimate’ of the organisation and its leader in an upcoming issue. ‘I expect only such answers as you are willing to divulge and to have the public know’, he writes.
LONDON: ‘It is late in the day to consider all these matters after so many opportunities and resources have been thrown away with both hands through all these disastrous months’, Winston writes. But it is not too late. Churchill demands the suspension of trade talks with Soviet Russia and more aid to Wrangel. British supplies and aircraft should be sent to Warsaw and arms provided to Finland, Romania and Serbia to help them intervene on the Polish side. All the material, in other words, to fight a new world war.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: In an atmosphere of intense excitement, two hundred delegates meet in Petrograd for the opening of the second congress of the Comintern. They arrive on false passports from around the world.
It is a far more impressive gathering than the year before, when delegates were rounded up from whoever happened to be in Moscow and the entire conference barely filled a single room. Last year the congress was over in a few days. This year, it takes three weeks, divided between Petrograd and Moscow. The invitation to attend is answered by delegates from far and wide. A raucous contingent of Italians represent Benito Mussolini’s old Italian Socialist Party. They bring their own Chianti, and share it nightly in one of the Comintern leader’s hotel rooms. Serious-minded delegations arrive from Germany (Rosa Luxemburg’s lawyer amongst them) and France (including a former stretcher-bearer from Verdun with a new book out entitled Revolution or Death). Several Asian delegates arrive in Soviet Russia by various routes in the weeks leading up to the congress. A group of Irish delegates register at the congress under code names, and use their presence to advertise support for the Irish cause as an opportunity for world communism to strike a hammer blow against British imperialism. There is one Pole: he soon leaves for the front.
Amongst the more familiar figures, one can spot John Reed, still recovering from his Finnish ordeal, his skin pale and his cheeks sunken. His romantic ideas about Lenin and his regime are wearing thin. But the Comintern still fires his imagination: as a gathering of like-minded spirits, united by the cause of world revolution, free to debate and argue their way to the victory of the proletariat. One such spirit, Sylvia Pankhurst–Emmeline’s militantly left-wing daughter–decides to make the journey to Russia in spite of an ongoing dispute with Lenin about the correct tactics to use in the struggle in Britain. (Incredibly, Vladimir considers Sylvia’s approach to be too radical and deals with the disagreement in his usual way, writing a pamphlet accusing her and others of being ‘infantile’ and making sure every delegate gets a copy as soon as they arrive.) Amongst the Russian delegates, by far the most numerous, are both Vladimir’s wife Nadya and his former lover Inessa, who is given the job of organising a women’s conference on the margins of the main affair.
No expense is spared to impress the foreign delegates. They feast in the colonnaded grandeur of the Smolny, the epicentre of the revolution in 1917. A six-hour open-air agitprop performance is put on with thousands of conscript soldiers, even grander than the May Day show. A Red Mass commemorates fallen comrades, accompanied by the music of Wagner. Monuments are erected to the Paris Commune of 1871–from which Communism derives its name–and to Rosa Luxemburg. A special commemorative plate is produced. Despite paper and ink shortages, a Comintern bulletin is produced in four languages.
At the congress opening, a huge orchestra plays the Internationale to specially composed new music. All delegates then rise for a funeral march in memory of the martyrs of the revolution. Vladimir gives the opening speech. He declares that Versailles has turned Germany into a colony of the American banks. He quotes approvingly from a new book by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He talks encouragingly about the possibility of communist revolution in otherwise ‘backward’ colonies, forgetting his earlier insistence that socialism could only follow a period of capitalism. But these are heady days. Revolution is on the march again in Europe–and soon in Asia too. A painter is commissioned to capture the moment for posterity.
In Moscow, the congress reassembles a few days later in the coronation hall of the Kremlin. The golden eagles atop the building have been especially regilded for the occasion, for the first time since the revolution. (Some delegates take the opportunity to test the springs of the imperial mattresses in a nearby bedchamber.) A huge map is set up with little red flags to show the daily advance of Red Army troops towards Warsaw. The scent of victory on the battlefield a thousand miles to the west permeates proceedings in the Kremlin. The world is going Moscow’s way.
DUBLIN: A new force appears in Ireland, screeching down country lanes in speeding lorries, stomping through towns and villages. They are not quite soldiers, but not quite policemen either. London’s answer to the IRA. Winston’s answer, too.
Their accents are estuary English, rather than the familiar Irish of the police or the cut-glass accents of the British officer class. They wear a jumble of khaki and green and black leather, topped with a Scottish military beret, rather than the dark bottle green of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the force with which they are supposedly associated. They become known to locals as the Black and Tans after a well-known fox hunt in Limerick. And it is to hunt that they have come to Ireland: to hunt down the IRA, and neutralise them by whatever means most expedient. They arrive in Ireland in dribs and drabs, a few dozen every month at first, then a few hundred.
There is a coarse swagger to these battle-hardened men, men who have come to expect no kindness or sweetness in their lives but what is bought and paid for with blood and money, former British soldiers operating under military law when they feel like it, and outside the law when it suits them. They wear their pistols strapped onto their thighs, or one on each hip, for easy shooting. They are careless about how much ammunition they use, or who they use it on. They have little stake in Ireland’s future and little care for Ireland’s woes. They hunt for King and Empire–and for the sake of a job when no work is on offer back home. They hunt as a pack, travelling around in lorries with machine guns poking out the back. A pound a week and no questions asked. The IRA fights dirty, and so they will fight dirty too, outrunning and outgunning them where they can.
The rhythm of outrage and reprisal continues, of assassination and counter-assassination. In Tuam, County Galway, it is Irish police who lead reprisals against the town for an IRA ambush on the road to Dunmore which leaves two officers dead. In what has become the pattern now, houses and shops are burned to the ground in retaliation. The town hall is torched. A visitor is reminded of the war-scarred villages of Belgium and France.
Sinéad de Valera visits her husband in America that August. (Michael Collins provides her with a false passport for the journey.) Éamon is not best pleased to see her. He is overworked with his fight for control of Irish America, he explains. He cannot spare her much time. There are rumours that he is having an affair with his secretary.
UPSTATE MICHIGAN: The greatest soldier-journalist-fisherman Horton Bay has ever seen (currently unemployed, having left the Star) is at it again: Hemingway is back by the lake.
He seems happy enough to those who meet him, the same chipper character, the same attitude. He has picked up the habit of shadow-boxing when he speaks, as if constantly sparring with an imaginary opponent. On his extended holiday in the country, Ernest fishes and plays tennis nearly every day. (Occasionally he gambles at roulette–and loses.) But something is eating him up inside, the same thing which has been gnawing at him since he got back from the war, just as it gnaws at thousands of other young Americans who have seen a glimpse of the wider world and then had it snatched away. The war has opened up their minds. Peace seems dull. America seems dull. Life seems dull. Ernest Hemingway’s parents seem particularly dull. The war boom has turned into the peace slump. Metaphorically, and in every other way. (Share prices on Wall Street drop almost one third this August; a get-rich-quick scheme dreamed up by a man named Ponzi shuts down around the same time.)
‘I’m for a job in New York’, Ernest writes to Grace Quinlan, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he has befriended in Petoskey, ‘but then I’m also for the open road and long sea swells, and an old tramp steamer hull down on the oily seas.’ Open warfare breaks out with his mother, who warns Ernest to ‘cease your lazy loafing and pleasure seeking’. For a while the prodigal son becomes the black sheep.
The plan to go to Yokohama withers on the vine. Hemingway moves to Chicago instead.
MOSCOW: The Russians dominate. At a football match organised to celebrate the gathering of the Comintern, a team made up of international delegates including John Reed is soundly beaten by a local Moscow squad. The winners are given prizes of outstanding current value: a jar of fruit and a bag of flour each.
In the Comintern meeting the same pattern prevails. There is no doubt the Russians are in charge. Everyone uses the word ‘comrade’; that does not mean that they are always comradely themselves. Procedures are manipulated, debate curtailed, bully tactics employed. At one point, John Reed is called a liar when he points out how his own words are being misrepresented. (His threat to resign from the Comintern is laughed off as petit-bourgeois indulgence.) Sylvia Pankhurst, arriving late, is cut off when she speaks for too long in a direction of which Lenin disapproves. Rosa Luxemburg might have received a better hearing, but she is long gone. Vladimir scuttles in when necessary to make sure the delegates are kept in line. His prestige is critical. A Scottish delegate accepts correction from Lenin ‘as a child accepts the rebuke of a father’.
Dissent turns to deference. The Moscow line is pushed through: the dictatorship of the proletariat conducted by the dictatorship of the party. The organisational principles of Russian Bolshevism become the principles to be adopted by all communist parties the world over: unity, hierarchy, ‘iron proletarian centralism’. Rules are drawn up to ensure that all future decisions of the Comintern will be binding for its member parties. Moscow rule.
The rattle of typewriters fills the air. The bells of the Kremlin clock tower which used to play the anthem of the Tsars play the Internationale three times a day. And still the news from the western front remains good.
NEW YORK: ‘We are here because this is the age when all peoples are striking out for freedom, for liberty and for democracy’, Marcus Garvey thunders. ‘We have entered this age of struggle for liberty at the same time with the people of Ireland, the people of Egypt, of India, and the people of the Eastern states of Europe.’ The UNIA is the only truly black organisation in the United States that that meets ‘not as cringing sycophants, but as men and women standing erect and demanding our rights from all quarters’.
For the whole month of August, the UNIA holds its convention in New York. Jim Europe’s old band plays marching tunes and jazz in UNIA parades. Placards reading ‘Africa for the Africans’ and ‘Negroes Helped Win the War’ are waved aloft in marches through Harlem. Twenty-five thousand are reported to attend a rally in Madison Square Garden, where Garvey trumpets a telegram of support from a leading Californian Zionist: ‘no peace in this world until the Jew and the Negro both control side by side Palestine and Africa’, it proclaims. Garvey reads out another telegram that he intends to send to his hero Éamon de Valera.
Through the stiflingly hot summer, hope, pride and anger intermingle in the airless Liberty Hall. Grievances from around the world are shared. Redress is demanded. A long UNIA Declaration of Rights is agreed, noting the multiple ways blacks are discriminated against and demanding rectification, from a requirement to teach black history in schools to an end to unequal treatment on the world’s railways and steamships. One clause states that blacks must seek the approbation of their leader–that is, whoever Garvey’s organisation chooses–before fighting in any war. Opposition to such a move, on the basis that it suggests the split loyalties of black Americans, is voted down.
‘This movement, let me tell you, has already swept the world’, he tells his audience on the fourth Sunday of the convention, comparing it to the global spread of Bolshevism (a comparison from which he backtracks when he realises the danger in associating himself with the global outlaws Lenin and Trotsky). Garvey preaches the doctrine of African redemption, warning the colonial powers that ‘we are coming, and this we will continue to do for another fifty years if need be’. He is just as fierce in his censure of his critics in America, those black leaders ‘comfortably resting back in cushioned chairs in their editorial rooms’. He plugs the shares of the Black Star Line whenever the opportunity arises.
Outside the hall, Garvey’s radicalism horrifies as much as it inspires. The Bureau of Investigation receives daily updates from its informants, each one more lurid than the last, accusing Garvey of inciting race hatred and playing on the crowd’s emotions and prejudices. Other black community leaders accuse Garvey of being a ‘fool or a rogue’. Du Bois, more quietly, goes about collecting evidence of financial misconduct on the part of the UNIA. In July, he writes in a private letter of his suspicion that ‘Garvey is financially more or less a fraud’. In August, he forms a still more disagreeable opinion. ‘I do not believe that Marcus F. Garvey is sincere’, he tells an interviewer: ‘I think he is a demagogue and that his movement will collapse in a short time’.
At the close of the convention, Garvey appears at the New Star Casino in scarlet robes, wearing a turban with a large gold tassel. He is confirmed as President-General of the UNIA at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year. In a self-conscious nod to de Valera’s aggrandisement, the Negro World terms Garvey the ‘Provisional President of Africa’. He is acclaimed as ‘the ablest statesman of his race, and its acknowledged greatest orator’.
Garvey signs off his latest editorial letter in the usual fashion. ‘Those who have not already bought shares send in to the office of the Black Star Line, 56 West 135th Street, New York, U.S.A., and purchase them now’. The Black Star Line has not yet made one cent in profit.
THE POLISH FRONT: Captain de Gaulle is driven out to the front, crossing lines of trenches from 1915 and 1917. The hastily erected wooden crosses which mark the burial sites of these earlier campaigns have begun to rot. ‘For the sixth year in a row,’ Charles writes in his diary, ‘there will be no harvest from these fields.’ The next day, he rides with the Polish cavalry in headlong retreat.
The Red Army enters Brest-Litovsk, where the Germans forced the young Soviet Republic to accept such bitter terms of peace two years before. Warsaw is just one hundred miles away. A Polish Revolutionary Committee is formed to take control of the city when the Reds get there. (In the meantime, it takes up residence in a grand palace to the east.) In Germany, while some worry that the Red Army’s approach will spark a Communist coup in Berlin, others welcome it as a chance to smash the hated Versailles Treaty. (Lenin himself is not averse to a temporary alliance between German nationalists and the Bolsheviks; it will all be resolved in civil war in the end.) In between sessions of the Comintern, Vladimir commends ‘a beautiful plan’ to hang priests and landowners along the line of the Red Army’s advance and then blame it on a peasant uprising as a way of further stirring up animosity between different groups in Polish society. He suggests a reward of one hundred thousand roubles for every person hanged.
The central spearhead of the Red Army, the western armies commanded by Charles de Gaulle’s erstwhile fellow POW Misha, thrust forward towards Warsaw. The Polish peasants do not rise in revolution. The flanks of the advance are exposed. An order is issued for the armies of the south-western front, to which Stalin is attached, to provide cavalry in support, breaking off from its own assault on Lviv. The Georgian bank-robber bristles at the suggestion. Misha is about to take Warsaw in any case. Why should Comrade Stalin give up his own prize of Lviv to help him?
In Warsaw, Piłsudski shuts himself in a room of the Belvedere Palace to consider what to do. Everything depends on his next move. He pulls back his armies as far as he dares. A few days later he departs for the front.
SÈVRES, FRANCE: In a Parisian suburb famous for its breakable porcelain the Sultan’s envoys sign a devastating peace to end the Ottoman Empire’s six-year war.
The Sultan will retain Istanbul–under temporary foreign occupation–and a small portion of the old empire in Anatolia. Zones of influence are delineated for the European powers. The Armenians, Greeks and Kurds will gain more than they could have dreamed of. Greek troops have already marched two hundred miles from Smyrna to occupy the territory they plan to annex. The Ottoman Grand Vizier resigns in shame and travels to the Czech spa town of Karlsbad to recuperate.
Enver Pasha plays with the idea of a new role for himself at the head of a league of Turkic-speaking peoples from Europe to middle Asia, backed by Moscow. In the baking heart of Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal makes his own gestures to Soviet Russia, congratulating the Bolsheviks on their latest victories and declaring that ‘Bolshevism includes the sublime principles and laws of Islam’. He still ends his speeches with praise for Allah.
DEARBORN: The Independent continues its anti-Semitic campaign. Henry Ford’s own voice remains that of the Olympian observer, dispensing common wisdom from his factory throne. Over the summer, he opines innocently on the nature of the presidency, casually reigniting the thought that he might run for the highest office in the land.
WARSAW: The sound of artillery bombardment can be heard in the Polish capital. The churches are crammed with the faithful at prayer. Grenades are stockpiled to mount a last and surely hopeless stand should the Red Army break through. Inexperienced Polish volunteers are sent forward through the villages and orchards around the capital to face the onrush of the enemy.
When a Catholic chaplain is killed in the first line of defence, he is instantly considered a martyr of the faith, and a symbol of the spirit of national self-sacrifice. ‘This is a battle for life and death, a crusade against modern heathens, a fight against the devil himself’, the priest at his funeral declares. ‘At the gates of Warsaw rages a battle for Poland’s existence, at the gates of Warsaw the fate of all Europe and all humanity is being determined at this very moment.’
But the truly decisive battle is about to be fought elsewhere. While the Red Army, its supply lines stretched to breaking point, advances on Warsaw, Piłsudski manoeuvres a strike force far to the south and east of the spearhead of the Red advance. This now wheels hard against the Red Army’s exposed flank. Surprise is complete. Russian supply and communication lines are cut. The Red Army collapses in retreat.
‘Our Poles have grown wings!’ de Gaulle writes in his diary. Out of the jaws of defeat, the Poles have managed to pluck victory. Lenin’s revolutionary bayonets have missed their target.
MUNICH: Hitler’s anti-Semitic ramblings acquire a mystical tone over the summer. For two hours one evening in the Hofbräuhaus, a regular meeting ground for the Nazi membership now, he declaims on the genesis and future of the Aryan race.
It was born in the far north, he declares, where harsh environmental conditions forced Aryans to be both particularly creative and possessed of great inner strength. The Ice Age pushed them south, the mangy field-runner explains, sweeping his hand to demonstrate the vastness of his conception of things. They were cold, he says, which is why they all worshipped the sun–of which the swastika is one symbol. Then they spread out. ‘We know that Egypt’s cultural flowering was brought about by the arrival of Aryan immigrants’, he continues, ‘and it was the same for the Persians and the Greeks.’ They were all blonde with blue eyes, the dark-haired speaker asserts confidently.
In this racial recasting of world history, Jews are viewed as the eternal opposite of Aryans. ‘I could not survive without work’, Adolf claims. He accuses the Jews of an inborn aversion to proper work, illustrated by their alleged use of Assyrian stonemasons to build their temple in Jerusalem.
Hitler’s anti-Semitic speeches now fuse the kind of traditional prejudices that circulated around the Vienna of his youth with eccentric racial and historical theories picked up from his new acquaintances in Munich and the toxic notion of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy manifested in international finance capitalism and global political chaos. The Spartacists, Hitler says, have been led astray: behind Vladimir Lenin, it is Jewish millionaires who are pulling the strings. True socialism can only be built against the Jews, not with them: ‘if we are socialists, then we must be anti-Semites’. The Zionist project, he says, is nothing less than a plan to establish a training academy for world domination.
The mangy field-runner spices this poisonous brew with his own personal anxieties and hatreds. In amongst his sweeping statements about the history of the Aryan race, he rants furiously against the success of the operettas of the Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Léhar, adducing his commercial success to Jewish preponderance amongst music critics. He claims all pimps are Jewish, ‘always ready to rip up a happy marriage, if there are thirty shillings’ profit to be made’.
The police report lively and enthusiastic crowds.
MILAN: At the airfield of Arcore, not far from Monza, the newspaper editor Benito Mussolini starts taking flying lessons. If D’Annunzio can do it, why not him?
Somewhat awkwardly he turns up for his first lesson wearing a bowler hat and spats. But he takes to the new pursuit with vigour over the following months, inviting his family along to watch. His newspaper starts running a regular page on flying, with the command ‘Volare!’ at its top. Benito takes to donning flying gear to impress his followers. Nothing could be more fascist, he tells them, than the will to conquer the skies. He considers participating in an aeronautical marathon from Rome to Tokyo as a way of burnishing his credentials.
In Rome, the political carousel turns ever faster. One government replaces another. Over the summer, Italy experiences a wave of factory occupations, with hundreds of thousands downing tools and demanding workers’ control. The Italian flag is desecrated and the Red flag raised instead. Catholic priests are beaten up, accused of being the representatives of the old order which must be swept away (on this point, socialists and some Fascists agree). Political violence–both by and against the Socialists–proliferates. Dozens are killed. Physical assault becomes an accepted means of making a political point. The weakness of the central state is self-evident.
Out of this violence, local anti-socialist militias emerge–a sort of Italian Freikorps–sometimes little more than gangs of friends from school or university. They become known as the squadristi. Fired up on whatever local booze they can find–cherry brandy in Ferrara–these gangs see themselves as the only true patriots left in a country on the brink of a foreign-inspired Bolshevik takeover. Their leaders, men who idolise D’Annunzio and his panache, award themselves the extravagant title of ras, in emulation of the tribal leaders of Ethiopia. Landowners and industrialists are only too willing to provide them with trucks and money if they turn their energies to strike-breaking. Thus enriched with potential new supporters–albeit with their own leaders, their own local power bases and a taste for independent action–the Fascist movement which Mussolini purports to lead becomes both more powerful and more unruly.
Benito is skilful in riding this wave of violence and discontent. He flatters whomever he needs to. He cultivates his image as a man who flies planes, but also reads books (some call him Professor Mussolini). He espouses a fascist creed of constant readiness and permanent mobilisation against all threats, from wherever they may come. He talks about violence, without getting caught up in it himself. He expresses an understanding for the plight of the workers. (After all, he is a working man himself, he claims, who sleeps in his underwear rather than in the pyjamas of the bourgeoisie.) But he rails against the socialist doctrines of class war he once espoused.
In print and in speeches, he reminds his readers of the Socialists’ attitude to the war. They are to be blamed for Caporetto. They, and the old-fashioned politicians in Rome, mutilated the soldiers’ eventual victory. Now they are trying to destroy Italy from the inside and impose their internationalist ideology on Italy, Europe and the world.
In contrast, Mussolini presents himself as a practical man, ready to fight against the Socialists as violently as the situation demands but–and this is crucial–also prepared to reach accommodation with whoever he must in order to serve the national interest. This disappoints those who, like Marinetti, like the idea of simply demolishing the old to make way for the new (whatever that may be). But Benito is savvier. He must appeal to more than just the Futurist fringe. There are many more potential Fascists out there who must be won over with an open hand as well as a clenched fist.
As D’Annunzio’s regime in Fiume begins to flounder, Mussolini’s credit rises. For all his skills as a master of public relations, Gabriele’s faults are all too obvious: his personal weaknesses, his disdain for authority, his unpredictability, his love of extravagance. Mussolini seems a man whom one can do business with.
MOSCOW: Warsaw has not been captured. The Red Army is in retreat again. John Reed pesters Vladimir for an urgent meeting to protest his treatment by the Comintern. Lenin is preoccupied with a personal matter: Inessa Armand is ill again.
She wants to travel to the South of France to see the sea. Vladimir worries that she might be arrested. He suggests alternative destinations–Norway, Holland, Germany–where she might be able to go without so much risk, travelling as a Frenchwoman or as a Russian or perhaps even passing herself off as Canadian. Then there is the possibility of a sanatorium much closer to home, in the Caucasus. Vladimir writes to the appropriate authorities insisting they take care of Inessa and her son.
The sanatorium at Kislovodsk is run-down. There is no electric lighting in her room. When the local party officials check up on Inessa, on Lenin’s insistence, her principal request is that they get her a pillow. She is given three. Inessa sunbathes and gets bored. Her son plays croquet.
BERLIN: The anti-relativists strike. Outside the Berliner Philharmonie young men sell swastika lapel pins. Inside, a new organisation called the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science holds a public meeting. The organisation’s founder, an undistinguished engineer called Paul Weyland, stands to address the audience, and starts the attack which has been brewing these past few months.
There is not much science in his speech. Its tone is angry, its contents are personal. Relativity, Weyland tells them, is a hoax, a publicity stunt by a sensation-seeking manipulator. Einstein is accused of ‘scientific Dadaism’, of plagiarism, of taking the German people for a ride. The relativity craze is an offence against common sense, he cries, and a menace to the German spirit. To begin the fightback, he announces a series of anti-relativist lectures to prove the matter scientifically (including one, impressively enough, by the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Philipp Lenard). After Weyland, an actual physicist takes to the stage: Ernst Gehrcke, a long-time critic of Einstein whom Albert has (unwisely perhaps) chosen to ignore. Gehrcke’s pince-nez quivers with indignation as he lists his deeply felt objections to relativity. But just as he gets into the stride of his lecture, another name is heard rising from the audience. Just a murmur at first and then, unmistakeably: ‘Ein-stein, Ein-stein, Ein-stein’.
And there he is. The scientific Dadaist himself. Sitting in a box. Grinning at the hateful idiocy of the proceedings, surrounded by a phalanx of scientific friends (and his stepdaughter, who is now also his secretary). At each statement made against his person and his theory Einstein bursts into prolific laughter, his cackles echoing through the hall. He mock-claps his way through Gehrcke’s speech. At its end, he turns to his friends with a broad smile. ‘Most amusing’, he tells them loudly as they leave.
In truth, he is livid. A few days later, he takes up his pen and writes an article, returning fire with fire. To Weyland and Gehrcke he directs withering sarcasm, referring to his opponents as the Anti-Relativity Company Ltd. Such men are hardly worth responding to, Einstein claims: why waste the ink? Their arguments–if any can be perceived–are nonsense. They themselves are nonentities. Einstein also turns his anger on Lenard–who wasn’t even there–proclaiming him a good experimental physicist but having produced nothing of worth in the theoretical domain. Such men must be driven by hatred, or envy, or some combination of the two. ‘If I were a German nationalist with or without a swastika, instead of a Jew’, Einstein writes, they would have nothing to rail against, these poor fools. Would I be treated so badly in Britain or in Holland, he asks?
A flood of letters urges him not to leave Germany. (His friend and colleague Fritz Haber begs that this swastika-wearing ‘entente of mediocrity cannot appear to counterbalance the shared respect all serious scientists have for you’ and promises to look into Einstein’s salary again–a serious matter for a man who has to pay alimony to an ex-wife with two children in expensive Switzerland.) Friends warn against further intemperate articles, suggesting Einstein leave to others the dirty work of defending relativity against such lowlifes. ‘Don’t let yourself get cross!’ a friend urges him. ‘Stay the holy man in the temple–and stay in Germany.’
‘This world is a curious madhouse’, Albert writes to a friend, where ‘coachmen and waiters debate the correctness of the theory of relativity’, and where their convictions on the subject seem to depend on their politics more than anything else. He challenges his detractors to a proper scientific debate, at a conference of physicists in a few weeks’ time.
WALL STREET, NEW YORK: Men and women are knocked off their feet when the bomb explodes outside the offices of J. P. Morgan, the most famous finance house in America. A sheet of flame stretches from one sidewalk to the other. The sound of broken glass tumbling onto the road below reminds one man of Niagara Falls. A young financier who works on the unregulated, creative fringes of the market–father of a three-year-old boy called John Fitzgerald Kennedy–is knocked to the ground by a wave of hot air.
The streets fill with the smell of blood and burned rubber and acid and dust. Papers flutter in the air. Body parts are everywhere: hands on window ledges, feet still inside warm shoes. War veterans take care of the wounded with makeshift tourniquets. The stock market shuts. A ripple of fear resonates out from Wall Street around the world. ‘Bodies are rent asunder and crushed to pulp’, reports the Philadelphia Enquirer.
And yet, by the next morning, the scene has been cleared. Bloodstains have been removed with bleach. The stock market reopens earlier than expected. There are rumours that Mitchell Palmer is planning a fresh raid against radicals. But the public mood is weary of such panics now. While commiserating with the families of the victims, the Wall Street Journal warns against any political overreaction. ‘The relations between capital and labor will not be changed,’ the paper says in its first comment on the attack: ‘not even for the worse as regards labor.’ Stocks surge when trading begins again. Capitalism is more resilient than expected.
BAKU, AZERBAIJAN: ‘Don’t you know how Baku is pronounced in American?’ John Reed asks. ‘It’s pronounced oil!’
The Comintern launches its latest front in the oil town in the Caucasus where Stalin perfected his bank-robbing techniques in the last days of the empire. The purpose of the gathering is to spread the word of Moscow to the peoples of the east. The British have only just left Baku. Reed travels there across typhus-ravaged southern Russia. He is not given a choice: ‘Comintern has made a decision. Obey.’ He takes it as punishment for the difficulties he caused in Moscow. His wife Louise is expected to arrive from America within weeks. Jack is not well. But he cannot refuse. A special train is laid on. All requirements are taken care of.
The conference takes place mostly at night, when the heat of the day has begun to wear off. Speeches have to be translated and retranslated from English to Russian, Russian to Turkish or Turkish to Persian–and then into Urdu, Pashto, Kalmyk and a dozen other languages. (To speed things up the organisers resort to asking the two thousand delegates to huddle in linguistic groups so interpretation can take place simultaneously.) A band keeps playing the Internationale, sometimes striking up several times in a single speech. The delegates cheer, often at the wrong time, waving their swords and rifles in the air. British and French speakers attack their countries’ imperialism. Don’t expect anything better from American capitalists, Reed warns: ‘No, comrades, Uncle Sam is not one ever to give anybody something for nothing.’
In his latest swerve towards whoever may be able to help him realise his ambitions, a proclamation by Enver Pasha is read out at the conference. (He has too many enemies to be allowed to speak in person.) He apologises for his support of German imperialism during the war, saying he now hates the Germans as much as the British: ‘If we fell into a false situation, that was our bad luck.’ Had Soviet Russia existed in 1914 he would have fought by Lenin’s side, Enver insists. A British spy files a report to London on proceedings.
The Bolsheviks have been defeated at the gates of Warsaw. Moscow now wants to open a new front. The war has expanded Europe’s colonial empires but it has also weakened them. National liberation movements such as Mustafa Kemal’s, or the Muslim Khalifat campaign in India, are growing. Even if these movements are not strictly speaking socialist, let alone proletarian, this must be exploited. Marxist theory must adapt.
In Baku, the words of the Communist Manifesto are updated: ‘workers of all lands and oppressed peoples of the whole world, unite!’ A new holy war is called for: not under the green flag of Islam, but under the Red banner of Communism: ‘Sweep away with fierce will the evil shamelessness of buying and selling!’ There are only two centres of power in the modern world, a Chechen from Grozny explains: ‘the centre of bourgeois domination, Versailles, and the centre of proletarian struggle, Red Moscow.’ ‘Blow up Europe!’ runs one slogan. Effigies of the French, British and American leaders are burned on the streets. The Hungarian Béla Kun conjures up a picture of the delegates meeting next year and swapping stories on how they overthrew the colonisers.
THE HAGUE: An early evening in late summer. A group of revellers walk arm in arm along the beach by the Dutch capital, singing snippets from Carmen.
Next morning, a more serious tone is adopted at the first psychoanalytic congress since the war. Freud, returning to his pet subject, talks about dreams. A German colleague gives a rambling presentation on how various illnesses of the eye–a bleeding retina, myopia and the like–are simply the body’s way of reflecting the mind’s attempt to suppress hidden desires. There are no soldiers attending the congress as there were in Budapest in 1918. Instead, there is a welcome smattering of foreigners: a few Americans, some British, one delegate from Poland. Not quite full peacetime conditions, perhaps, but a sign that psychoanalysis is to be spared the opprobrium of too close an association with defeated Germany and Austria. There was some discussion of holding the congress in Berlin. Too soon, wiser voices counselled.
For the emaciated visitors from German-speaking Europe, Holland is a paradise. Anna Freud spends the pocket money her father has given her on bananas. At lunch one day she worries about the consequences of the rich food on her father’s health.
‘I hope you are eating sparingly,’ Anna writes on a note passed under the table.
‘I am only making an exception for champagne, which is not wine’, Freud replies jauntily.
‘Do you eat pineapple?’ Anna asks in another note.
He does.
It is not possible for the Freuds to make it to England. Sigmund sends the briefest of apologies to Sam. Instead they are conducted on a whistle-stop tour of Holland, including a canoe trip on the waterways of the Zeeland region.
KISLOVODSK, RUSSIA: On the other side of the Caucasus from Baku, Inessa feels herself a ‘living corpse’.
She thinks of dear Vladimir Ilyich. But she is tired, ‘as if having given up all my strength, all my passion to V. I. and the work, all the springs of love have dried up in me, all my sympathy for people’. She catches herself. Of course, ‘personal relationships are nothing compared to the needs of the struggle’.
She plays the piano for guests after dinner one night. The security situation in the Caucasus is getting worse again. They are told they will have to leave.