VIENNA: A woman opens the door of her apartment. A strange man stands in the doorway. There is no initial flicker of recognition. She has not seen him since she was a child. She did not know whether he was dead or alive. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, he has turned up. To Paula Hitler’s delight, Adolf takes his sister out shopping.
He leaves again. They promise to stay in touch.
BAD NAUHEIM, GERMANY: The cream of Germany’s scientists gather in a spa resort to discuss the matter troubling the peace of German science: Einstein’s relativity.
Everything has been done to prevent a riot. Armed police guard the building where the discussion is to take place. Only registered participants–some five hundred of them–are allowed inside Bathhouse Number 8. A mathematician and a physicist jointly check people’s credentials. There is to be no trolling by unscientific outsiders. Politics is banned. Most of the discussion of relativity is taken up with presentations–four hours in total–full of mathematical formulae, counted on to suppress (or exhaust) the kind of emotions that were on display in the Berlin outrage, and to put things on a purely scientific plane.
Philipp Lenard, the victim of Einstein’s acid pen, and nearly a generation older than him, is quite courteous when his turn to speak eventually comes around. His objections to relativity, he says, are those of a simple scientist appealing to common sense. But he is not given much time to make his case. Einstein, equally polite, is brief and to the point. The chairman of the meeting calls an end to the debate after just fifteen minutes: ‘Since the relativity theory unfortunately has not yet made it possible to extend the absolute time interval that is available for the meeting, our session must be adjourned.’ Lenard believes he has been cut short, dismayed that the anti-relativists have been smothered by procedure. Though he has undoubtedly won the encounter, Einstein feels uncomfortable at the course of events. At dinner that evening, after a calming walk in the park, Einstein and his party avoid the other physicists. His wife Elsa is confined to bed with nervous exhaustion.
Albert spends the next two weeks relaxing in the hills around Stuttgart with his boys, Hans-Albert and Eduard. ‘Best greetings from the most romantic point of our expedition’, he writes on a postcard to an old friend. ‘Here even consciousness hasn’t made an appearance yet–so it seems.’ When Einstein is not talking with his sons, or dozing, or calculating how many rapidly depreciating German marks he must earn to send to Mileva in Switzerland, his mind wanders towards a new idea quite unconnected with physics. The experiences of war and economic crisis, he writes to a colleague, ‘have made minds so malleable that a real statesman could achieve grand things: I am thinking of a union of European states’.
NALCHIK, RUSSIA–MOSCOW: Two romantics of the revolution, Inessa Armand and John Reed, die within days of each other in the autumn of 1920, one from cholera and the other from typhus. Or is it from disappointment? The disappointment that their beloved revolution, now that it has been realised, is not quite everything they imagined. The reality is never as bright as the dream.
Inessa is evacuated from her Caucasian sanatorium, and contracts cholera somewhere in southern Russia as she tries to escape the disease-ravaged, bandit-ridden regions of the borderlands of the Soviet Republic, sleeping in her railway car and being shunted this way and that as the security situation demands. Her body is taken back to Moscow in a zinc-lined coffin. Vladimir and Nadya greet it at the station. Lenin walks bare-headed behind the funeral cortège. He is distraught.
Jack makes it back from Baku to Moscow where his wife Louise is waiting for him. They go to the ballet. He introduces her to Lenin and Trotsky. But he is not himself. The doctors cannot figure it out. Eventually they diagnose typhus. (Some blame a watermelon picked up en route from Baku in a market in Dagestan, not far from where Inessa died.) In the end, Jack is delirious. He is caught in a trap, he says. The Harvard revolutionary dies in a Moscow hospital.
Reed’s coffin stands on display for several days surrounded by flowers and palm fronds and the slogans of the revolution he loved. ‘The leaders die, but the cause goes on’, reads one in gold lettering. Under a thin and freezing rain, his body is buried in the Kremlin wall. There are speeches in several languages. Louise collapses. ‘John was a real American’, she tells a reporter later. He would have wanted to be buried at home.
VIENNA: The luxuries of Holland seem a world away. A new parcel from Manchester arrives. Chocolate. Freud greedily unwraps it. He places a tiny piece inside his mouth to let it melt slowly. Quite suddenly a taste of mouldy cheese overwhelms the sweetness. Freud writes a stern letter to Sam advising sackcloth to wrap things up next time. And to send meat extract, coffee and cinnamon.
Sam sends a comic poem about Freud and Jung that he found in an old copy of Punch magazine lying around in his dentist’s waiting room. Sigmund is not amused. He is quite indifferent to ‘popularity in itself’. But he pronounces the poem ‘silly’. Freud is angry the editors of Punch do not properly understand who he is. He reminds Sam that his name can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in ‘the supplement to it of the year 1913’.
The dutiful nephew scans the British newspapers for more positive mentions of his uncle.
MOSCOW: History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The day after John Reed’s untimely death, a new Western visitor is ushered into the presence of Bolshevik greatness. The visitor is Clare Sheridan, an adventurous Englishwoman in her thirties with two children, whose husband was killed in the war. Winston Churchill is her cousin, a fact she does not need to be prompted to reveal. Clare has taken up sculpture since her husband’s death and discovered a talent for it. (She has already done Winston; the person she would really like to do is D’Annunzio.)
It is sculpture which has brought Clare to Moscow. Sculpture and adventure. ‘Artists are the most privileged class’ in Soviet Russia, she was told in London. Lenin and Trotsky will sit for her, she is promised. The offer of such a commission is not easily refused. So Clare braves a ferry across the Baltic to the new independent republic of Estonia, and then a train east. She crosses the front line where White troops fought their last engagement with the Reds after failing to take Petrograd last year. The war has moved on now, and so has the world. London is abuzz with talk of trade deals with the Bolsheviks, in spite of the war with Poland. Of the White armies which once threatened Lenin’s regime, only Wrangel’s forces are left, holding out in southern Russia.
Clare finds that promises made in London by a Soviet representative intent on seducing her do not match reality in Moscow. The schedule of the impatient revolutionary this autumn does not easily accommodate a few hours of sitting for a sculpture. The Warsaw catastrophe hangs over a disputatious Communist Party conference in Moscow. Only a redacted version of Vladimir’s speech can be published in Pravda. ‘I absolutely in no way in the slightest pretend to knowing military science’, he admits. The invasion of Poland was an error, some say. Lenin holds up his hands: what would you have done? Private tensions spill out into the open. Trotsky blames Stalin for holding back troops at the crucial moment; the question of who actually supported the timing of the revolution in 1917 is dragged up again. There is criticism that the party apparatus is getting too strong, too centralised. A week later Vladimir gives a rambling speech to a Communist youth congress. ‘The generation of people who are now at the age of fifty cannot expect to see a communist society’, he admits, ‘but the generation of those who are now fifteen will see a communist society, and will itself build this society.’ The period of construction will be long.
While Clare waits for the call from the Kremlin, she is put up in a guesthouse for foreign dignitaries alongside an American capitalist seeking concessions from the Bolshevik regime and the popular British writer H. G. Wells, who has already been honoured with an interview with Lenin during which the Bolshevik leader talks mostly about his latest scheme for Russia’s electrification. (Wells is given a film of the Baku conference to take back home with him.) Clare finds herself an observer rather than a participant. There are awkward encounters. At the ballet, a minor official asks how she can wear a red star on her lapel and bourgeois white gloves. Clare responds winsomely that what truly matters is what is in one’s heart. The apparatchik is unmoved. The days go by. Clare sees Trotsky from a distance. She meets John Reed before he falls ill. Once, she is mistaken for Sylvia Pankhurst. But there is no hot water to take a bath and no newspapers from home. She starts to become a little lonely.
Finally, things start to move. A studio in the Kremlin is assigned to her. A sack of clay is delivered (later a carpet from Turkestan and a gaudy sofa) so she can prepare herself to sculpt the Bolshevik leader. The good and the great start dropping by. Word gets around the Bolshevik village. Soon everyone wants to be sculpted by the English lady: the Comintern chief, the Cheka boss, Béla Kun (whom Clare finds repulsive). Finally, she is taken to see the impatient revolutionary. Vladimir is hard to sculpt, as he cannot keep still. He harangues Clare over her cousin Winston, whom he accuses of being the acme of Western capitalism. But she is delighted when he hands her some British newspapers–several weeks old–which have been piling up on his desk. She is particularly interested in news from Ireland, where her father has a large estate.
It is war commissar Trotsky who sweeps Clare Sheridan off her feet. For starters, he speaks French. While setting up and trying to figure out how best to rearrange the furniture in his office for the sitting, she finds herself looking at him for a little too long.
‘I hope you don’t mind being looked at’, Clare says.
‘I don’t mind’, Trotsky replies. ‘I have my revanche in looking at you, and it is I who gain’. He seems much less busy now the war with Poland is over and the Red Army is closing in on Wrangel’s Crimean lair. He is quite prepared to flirt. ‘Tout ce que vous voudrez’, he says, when Clare asks if he would mind if she measured his face. ‘You are caressing me with tools made of steel’, he tells her when she takes out her callipers. Trotsky innocently points out to Clare that his face is somewhat asymmetric, snapping his jaw shut to prove a point. There is still dash about the man. He is only forty, after all.
Clare feels that she is making a connection at last. They talk about poetry. Trotsky claims Shakespeare’s existence justifies the existence of England–even if the country is now Soviet Russia’s greatest geopolitical enemy. They read the newspapers together. Clare works deep into the night, adjusting and readjusting the bust she is making, while Leon dictates letters to his secretary or else just stands staring at her. He tells her that even when she is toiling with her clay, ‘vous êtes encore femme’. One night, at Clare’s request, he unbuttons his shirt to reveal his neck and chest–so that she can better convey his energy and vitality, she says.
Leon warns her against writing bad things about the Soviet experiment when she returns to England. If she betrays him, he warns, he will come to London in person to punish her. ‘Now I know how to get you to England’, Clare replies.
NEW YORK: It all seems to have gone to his head.
Marcus Garvey returns from a speaking and fundraising tour of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and Ohio, bathing in the acclamation he has received. ‘The masses of the race’, he writes, ‘absorb the doctrines of the UNIA with the same eagerness with which the masses in the days of the supremacy of imperial Rome accepted Christianity.’
William Du Bois continues his enquiries. He writes to the shipping registers to ask if they can provide detail on the legal ownership of ships claimed publicly by the UNIA as belonging to the Black Star Line. He asks for any information on their movements.
Patiently and methodically he builds his case.
RIGA, LATVIA–SEBASTOPOL–MOSCOW: A preliminary peace is agreed between the Bolsheviks and the Poles.
In Crimea, General Wrangel issues an order to his army. ‘We are now alone in the struggle which will decide the fate not only of our country but of the whole of humanity’, he writes. ‘Let us strive to free our native land from the yoke of these Red scum who recognise neither God nor country, who bring confusion and shame in their wake.’ Wrangel’s forces take refuge behind a defensive line of trenches, barbed wire and artillery pieces dug into the ground. The temperature is falling now. Freezing fog engulfs the troops.
In Moscow, war commissar Trotsky issues an order to annihilate them: ‘We need peace and manpower! Soldiers of the Red Army! Destroy Wrangel! Wipe his gangs from the face of the earth!’ Leon and Vladimir send a joint telegram to the front telling the Red commanders that letting Wrangel escape would be ‘the greatest crime’. The war commissar’s train is prepared. He heads to the front again.
VIENNA: Freud is called to give evidence to an inquiry set up to investigate the brutal methods of various doctors during the war, particularly the use of electric shocks. ‘I would have done it differently’, Sigmund tells them, accidentally reminding the panel that, despite his reputation, he himself did not treat a single case of shell shock throughout the war. He describes the wartime role of psychiatrists, often called upon to catch malingerers and frighten men into returning to duty as soon as possible, as being like a ‘machine gun behind the front line’.
The whole affair of the inquiry–the feeling of being put on the stand, as it were, if only as a witness rather than as one of the accused–leaves a bad taste in his mouth. ‘I could once more see the mendacious spitefulness of the psychiatrists here’, Freud writes to one of his German colleagues. ‘But naturally they dared to come out only after I had left. In my presence they were scheissfreundlich [shit-friendly] as one says in the language of the erogenous zone.’
WASHINGTON DC: There’s a new word in America this autumn. In the towns and villages outside the big cities with their psychoanalysts and their vegetarians and their League-fanatics, the word has a homespun, no-nonsense quality to it which people seem to like: normalcy.
Americans are fed up with grand visions of the wide blue yonder. They are tired of the riots and the raids and endless high drama in the nation’s capital. They crave something more straightforward, more American, more calm, perhaps even more boring. Normalcy it is. So, the country turns from Woodrow Wilson to someone very few had heard of before the autumn: Warren Harding, the Republican candidate for President, and Mr Normalcy himself. His running mate is Calvin Coolidge, the man who beat the Boston police strike last year.
Their promise is simple: to put America first. The economy is not doing well. The country needs leaders who understand American business and promote it unashamedly, not distant professors who seem more concerned with the situation in Silesia and Siberia than in Sioux Falls and Saratoga. Normalcy stands for law enforcement, for sound but not overweening government, for more businesslike management of the country’s railroads, for balancing the books. While promoting world peace and supporting the independence of small states, America should not seek to meddle in global affairs too much. Nor should it drift too far from its roots.
Wilson’s name is not on the ballot paper in this election. (The idea of a third term dies in the Democratic convention in San Francisco, where James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt edge out Mitchell Palmer.) But Wilson is not absent entirely. He is a brooding offstage presence: the Republicans’ political piñata doll. Woodrow makes no campaign appearances, and when he eventually issues his message to the nation, a few days before the actual vote, he fails to mention the Democratic candidates by name. Instead, he talks about the League. ‘The whole world will wait for your verdict in November,’ his message reads, ‘as it would wait for an intimation of what its future is to be.’
Mr Normalcy wins almost every state. The anti-war Socialist Eugene Debs, still in prison, garners nearly a million votes. (The veteran-turned-writer Hemingway casts his vote that way.) The prospect of his departure from the White House depresses Woodrow. He worries he will be forgotten. Why is it, he mutters to an aide, that the streets of Washington are numbered or lettered, or named after states? Should they not instead be named after the country’s leaders?
His supporters write in to comfort him. ‘The people have just stopped to get their breath’, one suggests.
‘Your crown will be one of glory’, writes another, likening Woodrow to a wise prophet: ‘The heathen who have imagined vain things, will someday creep penitently to touch the hem of your garments’.
‘I know that this is not a repudiation of the League’, Woodrow’s daughter Eleanor writes. ‘Nothing can destroy what you have done–nothing in the whole wide world.’
The letters and visitors soothe the pain. Woodrow announces to his brother-in-law that he has not lost faith in the American people because they have elected Harding: ‘They will realise their error in a little while.’
The next day the President makes his first public appearance in a year, in a wheelchair on the White House lawn. A band plays a song about Virginia, the President’s home state, to which it is assumed he may now return as a plain citizen. (Edith has other places in mind, which she ranks according to ‘Climate’, ‘Friends’, ‘Opportunities’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Amusements’.) Woodrow grimaces. Three weeks later he is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
SEBASTOPOL–ISTANBUL: In the cold Crimean autumn of 1920, a salt marsh which normally never freezes begins to harden and ice over. Wrangel’s defensive line is suddenly extended. There are not enough troops to man it. As the Red Army marches across the ice, the Whites fall back into Crimea. After that, there is nowhere left to go but the open sea. The Bolshevik military commander offers generous terms to those who surrender–but who can believe a Bolshevik promise? Wrangel gives the order to evacuate. The objective now becomes to get out as many soldiers and sailors as possible. But where can they go?
Istanbul is the obvious choice. The city is just across the Black Sea and under international control. A British admiral questions whether this is such a good idea. ‘If these ships filled with refugees arrive in this port what provision is to be made for them?’ he asks. ‘They cannot be landed here as the town is already overcrowded with refugees from Asia Minor, Thrace, and with returned Turkish prisoners of War.’ In other words, Istanbul is full. But where else can the refugees be taken? Conditions in Bulgaria or Serbia are only slightly better. The situation in Greece is just as bad.
THE FORMER BATTLEFIELDS OF NORTHERN FRANCE: In each of the nine French military districts along the old Western Front, soldiers are sent out into the mud and cold and rain on a grim mission.
Each district has been ordered to produce from the earth of the battlefields the body of a French soldier–clearly identifiable as to his nationality, but otherwise unknown and unknowable. Not a simple matter. Some are too decomposed. Others too fresh, or too easily identified. In one district, it is impossible to produce a single body definitely French (some of the unearthed corpses might be British or Canadian) yet otherwise anonymous. In another, the officer in charge orders his men to dig up one corpse after another until one that meets all the criteria can be found. (Two are discarded because they belong to troops from French North Africa.) The chosen body is placed in a wooden coffin and transported to the underground citadel of Verdun, the supreme symbol of French wartime resistance, to join other, identical coffins from the other military districts.
Lying side by side in a low-ceilinged room, the coffins are covered in flags and flowers. The walls are covered in the colours of the French flag. Soldiers stand guard over the bodies. At dawn on 10 November 1920, the schoolchildren of Verdun process past. The local clergy kneel to pray before the coffins. That afternoon, a French minister, André Maginot, arrives for the ceremony to designate one of the eight as the symbol of France’s war dead: the country’s Unknown Soldier. Auguste Thin, a young soldier, is asked to make the final choice, placing a bouquet of flowers from the battlefield on one of the coffins. That night, the Unknown Soldier is loaded on a train and taken to Paris.
The following morning, on Armistice Day, in the fiftieth year of the French Third Republic, the nation unites in mourning. From an overnight resting place in the south of Paris, the Unknown Soldier is carried first to the Panthéon, a symbol of republican tradition. Then, along the boulevards of Paris, lined with veterans, the procession winds its way to the symbol of the French nation’s military might: the Arc de Triomphe. Along the way, the Unknown Soldier is blessed by the Archbishop of Paris. The crowds, dressed in black, gather around.
One young Frenchman, a soldier himself, and a good Catholic, chooses Armistice Day to become engaged to a young woman from the provinces. On leave from Poland, Charles de Gaulle has been courting Yvonne Vendroux for the last month under the watchful eyes of her family. (One date involves a group trip to a Paris art exhibition on the pretext of seeing a new painting by Kees van Dongen, a friend of Picasso.) The two make plans for a spring wedding.
SEBASTOPOL–ISTANBUL: Papers and maps are packed away or burned. Commercial vessels are commandeered: barges, tugs, anything that floats. There is panic amongst the civilian population of Crimea: what will their fate be if they are abandoned to the Bolsheviks? Long queues form outside Sebastopol’s banks. The quayside is cluttered with people and their possessions. Shots are fired in the air to prevent disorder. Wrangel tries to exude calm as he makes the final arrangements for departure. One of his generals dies of a heart attack. The French offer their protection to the White flotilla. In return, the Russian ships of the line are offered as security to defray France’s costs in helping with the evacuation.
On the day the flotilla sets sail from Sebastopol, the cold weather breaks and the sun comes out. A motorboat takes Wrangel out to the cruiser General Kornilov, named after a previous leader of the White cause. Wrangel tries to look as dignified as possible as he clambers aboard. He makes a short speech. A band plays some music.
There are last-minute delays. The officer on the Kornilov responsible for the sailors’ health is missing; a search party is sent ashore to find him. The senior French civilian representative in Sebastopol requests that the White authorities produce a formal letter with details of the Russians about to be shipped to Istanbul. There is panic amongst Wrangel’s officials as they consider how they can best meet the French demand, and in particular how they should number any letter responding to it, having destroyed or stowed away most of their other administrative correspondence and files. Marking a letter ‘No. 1’ would look amateurish, it is decided, giving the unforgivable impression that the White administration has no numbering system at all. A general solves the problem by asking for the brand of one of his junior officers’ eau de cologne. The letter is duly sent marked ‘No. 4711’.
An eerie calm descends over Sebastopol when the last of Wrangel’s boats pulls away from the quay–those strange hours between one army leaving and the next army arriving to take its place. With the Crimean coast still in sight, the radio cabin on board the General Kornilov intercepts a wireless message from the Reds crowing about their victory. It is easy for the Whites to imagine the doors being kicked in: the shouts, the orders, the screams. (Béla Kun is put in charge of the reprisals and clean-up operation.) Then the last of Russia disappears over the horizon. The Whites have left. The Reds have won.
Conditions at sea are awful. There is not enough food or water. On one torpedo boat, a thousand men, women and children are crammed all along the deck, and in every nook and cranny below. On another ship, several women give birth during the journey. Their babies are stillborn. In order to conserve fuel, the ships travel slowly. Some take several days to cover the few hundred miles across the Black Sea. Some hundred thousand Russian soldiers and sailors and another fifty thousand civilians make it across. Nearing Istanbul, French flags are raised on the Russian warships and the remnants of the imperial fleet are redesignated as a mere squadron. Wrangel’s sick and defeated armies are placed in quarantine. They are sent to build their own camps at Gallipoli and on the island of Lemnos. For the first few nights they sleep on the ground.
In the heady days of 1914, patriotic Russians imagined arriving in Constantinople as conquerors. Now they have come as refugees.
DUBLIN: A Sunday morning in November. Small teams of IRA men appear at addresses across the city.
A dozen British officers–all suspected members of the intelligence services–are shot dead where they sleep. Two are killed in their rooms at the Gresham, Dublin’s finest hotel. The manager finds a copy of Irish Field next to one of the dead men’s beds. He always thought the late-sleeping officer was nothing more than a bored army veterinary surgeon with a fondness for horse-racing. He suspects a bad mistake has been made by Collins and his gang. Others die alone in their lodgings across southern Dublin, or in front of silent, tearful wives or screaming, terrified girlfriends. Remembering that he has missed Mass that day, one of the killers slips off to church to pray for the departed when the deed is done. Michael Collins, the man who has sent the killers to their prey, waits for news, beside himself with worry at his assassins’ fates. ‘Any casualties?’ he shouts at one of the scouts sent out to gather up information about the morning’s cull. None, so far.
Blood revenge comes that afternoon at a Gaelic football match between a Dublin team and one from Tipperary. The stadium is surrounded by the army and the Black and Tans. Shooting breaks out inside. It is claimed that the IRA fired first. The dead tell a different story: all civilians, all killed by British bullets. Three minutes of firing, one hundred and eighty seconds, and a round for each one of those seconds. An Amritsar-style massacre, albeit with much smaller casualties, on Irish soil. The vicious circle continues a week later, when British forces on patrol in an open lorry are ambushed on a rainswept road in County Cork. A few weeks after that, half the high street in Cork is burned down.
‘A Devil’s competition’ is what the Bishop of Cork calls it, criticising both sides for their violence. He condemns the killing of men of the Royal Irish Constabulary as plain ‘murder’, contrary to God’s teaching, and declaring the destruction of property, by whichever side, to be pure vandalism. He further infuriates nationalists by issuing a pastoral letter to his flock noting that Ireland is not yet an independent sovereign state–whatever the Dáil may have said in 1919–and that consequently acts of violence in the republic’s name enjoy no special legitimacy or religious sanction. It is not just the control of Ireland’s streets that is at issue in this struggle. It is the moral authority of those who seek to rule them, killing both British and Irish in Ireland’s holy name.
‘People speak quite calmly of a large part of Europe sinking back into barbarism & compare it to the break-up of civilization at the fall of the Roman Empire’, William Butler Yeats notes to a friend. Martial law is declared in the autumn in the most rebellious southern provinces of Ireland (though not yet in Dublin). Michael Collins is the most wanted man in the country. Yet he slips through British fingers like a phantom.
NEW YORK–VIENNA: As royalties begin to flow more regularly from America to Vienna, the stiff relationship between Sigmund and his nephew Edward loosens up a little. Freud suggests at last that he may indeed be willing to write a few popular articles for the American public. The doctor from Vienna proposes a title for his first: ‘Don’t Use Psychoanalysis in Polemics’. The New York publicity man suggests they try something a little catchier: ‘The Wife’s Place in the Home’, for instance.
REVAL, ESTONIA–MOSCOW: Exhilarated, transformed and convinced that Bolshevism is a wonderful experiment in new living–whatever nasty things Cousin Winston might have to say about it–Clare Sheridan prepares to leave Russia. She hands out her spare stockings, soap, shoes, gloves and hat to her new friends. To one she donates a particularly valuable item: her hot-water bottle. Boarding her ship home on the Baltic coast, Clare begs the captain to be particularly careful with the oversized packing cases she has brought from Moscow. ‘They contain the heads of Lenin and Trotsky’, she explains. The captain looks impressed. ‘Plaster heads and breakable’, she adds.
Back in the Kremlin, Vladimir receives an old friend from Germany, a woman he has not seen since the revolution: Clara Zetkin. They are joined by Nadya–and a cat, which reminds them of the times Rosa Luxemburg’s cat used to purr contentedly in the impatient revolutionary’s lap. The old comrades drink black tea together. Someone goes off in search of jam as a special treat. They talk about life and art. Vladimir admits to feeling somewhat out of touch when it comes to artistic matters. ‘We don’t understand the new art any more, we just limp behind it’, he says. He admits to even being something of a ‘barbarian’ in such matters.
The tendency towards artistic experimentation leaves him cold: ‘I cannot value the works of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other isms as the highest expressions of artistic genius. I don’t understand them. They give me no pleasure.’ Art for art’s sake? A bourgeois idea. Over the autumn, Vladimir orders that the organisation responsible for all this cultural experimentation be reined in, with the party placed firmly in charge and class war made the cultural lodestar for the future.
In the end, what really matters, of course, is not whether people go to the theatre or the opera–landlord culture, Vladimir calls it, though he used to hum arias after going to the opera as a young man in Kazan–but whether the great broad masses of the people can read. ‘Don’t complain so bitterly of the illiteracy’, Comrade Clara objects. The illiteracy of the masses helped the revolution: ‘It prevented the mind of the workers and peasants from being stopped up and corrupted with bourgeois ideas and conceptions’. Vladimir nods. Yes, he says, but what about bureaucracy? If the people can read, they can do more things for themselves and require less supervision. The path to communist utopia lies through literacy. Nonetheless, there remains an important question of what people read–which is why it is essential to ensure that libraries stock the right books. People must not be led astray.
Another time, Clara comes to Vladimir’s office in the Kremlin to talk business: whether Germany is ripe for another revolutionary attempt, how women’s organisations should relate to the Communist Party and so forth. They end up talking about sex. Vladimir upbraids her. He has been told that in Communist Party circles in Germany, women spend most of their time debating marriage and sex. ‘What a waste!’ he exclaims. Everything that needed to be said on that score was said years ago. He is particularly cross about the Viennese, with their pseudoscientific pamphlets and dissertations on the matter. ‘Freudian theory is the modern fashion’, Vladimir complains. Personally, he dislikes all this ‘poking about in sexual matters’. It is a hobby of the intellectuals. It distracts people from the proletarian revolution–and that is all that matters in the end. Class war is more urgent than ‘marriage forms of Maoris or incest in olden times’.
Worse, all this Vienna stuff is getting at the young, Vladimir says. It is positively unhealthy. He worries about the ‘over-excitement and exaggeration in the sexual life of some of them’. All these ideas that sex should be as simple as drinking a glass of water. Nonsense! A thought straight from the bourgeois gutter! All this so-called ‘living to the full’ is rubbish. Vladimir tells the story of one young comrade he knows who seems to stagger from one love affair to the next. And how is that going to help the revolution? ‘The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces,’ he tells Clara; ‘it cannot tolerate orgiastic conditions, such as are normal for the decadent heroes and heroines of D’Annunzio.’ What young people need is sport, fresh air and a good dose of Karl Marx. Healthy bodies, healthy minds!
There is hardly time to discuss the other matter Clara came to talk about: bringing more women over to the revolutionary cause. If only Comrade Inessa were here! Vladimir gives Clara a lecture on the subject. Working women should understand that the root of their problems is capitalism. Their freedom can only be achieved under communism. He is all in favour of more agitation amongst women–‘working groups, commissions, committees, bureaus or whatever you like’. But that is not feminism. It is simply ‘practical, revolutionary expediency’. There can be no special organisations outside the party. Vladimir warms to his theme; Clara cannot get a word in edgeways. Male workers must be taught to help with the housework, rather than act as if they were a factory boss at home. The problem is bourgeois mentality. Proper communism will change that, he explains.
There is a knock at the door. The impatient revolutionary’s next meeting. Ten minutes later there is another knock. Lenin is late. He tells Clara he will blame it on women who talk too much. He helps her with her coat: ‘You must dress more warmly. Moscow is not Stuttgart. Don’t catch cold. Auf wiedersehen!’
VIENNA–NEW YORK: The truce between the old-world Viennese and the New Yorker trying to help him to his share of American-style fame and fortune does not last so far as the end of the year. Edward conjures up the possibility of a well-paid lecture tour, detailing it in a long cable. Freud’s initial reply is brusque: ‘NOT CONVENIENT’, an Austrian telegraphist taps out. It is some weeks before Freud gets around to composing a letter on the subject to send to his nephew.
A lecture tour would make the American analysts jealous, Freud explains. And the money on offer–a guarantee of at least ten thousand dollars–is not enough. There is a psychological element to this for Sigmund. ‘The outcome of this undertaking would be that the New York people had got the better of me’, he complains. ‘They could get my treatment cheaply while I would get nothing out of them.’ His fee should be five or ten times higher. After all, ‘it is not much in America’.
DEARBORN: The Independent has become a machine, a production line spewing out anti-Semitism every week. The hack who has to write all this stuff–a sometime preacher who believes Anglo-Saxons are the Bible’s ‘chosen people’ and that Britain and North America are the true Holy Land–starts taking to the bottle. The articles published between May and October are collected in a book entitled The International Jew that is sent out to influential community leaders, for free. Hundreds of thousands of copies are produced.
ISTANBUL–BIZERTE, TUNISIA: The first of the Russian ships offered to France as security set sail again for Bizerte naval base in the French protectorate of Tunisia.
There, the Russian sailors are treated with suspicion, as if infected with the virus of Bolshevism. (It does not help that they are penniless too, relying on a French wage of ten francs a day.) The authorities in Tunisia suggest that the Russians be sent on immediately to the neighbouring French colony of Algeria.
Wrangel’s refugee army has become a problem no one wants.
MUNICH: Adolf declares that he is against Germany joining the League of Nations. Would it be right for young Germans to be sent to defend someone else’s land? Has the League ever done anything to help the Irish in their national struggle, he asks, or the Indians in their fight against the British? Even in America, the country of the League’s originator, it is viewed as a ‘crazy utopia, yet amongst our own enslaved people you still find people willing to defend it’. The only strength any country can rely on is the strength of their own people, the solidarity of the Volk. This is the national in national socialism.
‘We want to build’, the mangy field-runner declares on another occasion, ‘not just smash everything up like the Bolsheviks in Russia.’ Germany’s productive forces–from the business managers to the workers–must function as one national unit. The needs and interests of the community must predominate over the individual. Every German citizen–every person, that is, whom the NSDAP determines is worthy of membership in the German Volk–must have equal rights and bear equal responsibilities in the collective. Work must be upheld as a cardinal virtue. The young must be educated and protected. This is the socialism in national socialism.
Hitler’s events are sold out. But is progress quick enough for the party to break free from its beer-hall origins and become a serious political player? The number of fee-paying party members, though double what it was in the summer, is still less than a single Hofbräuhaus audience. In order to give an impression of greater scale, numbered membership cards start at 500.
In December, a unique opportunity arises. The Thule Society’s Völkischer Beobachter comes up for sale. In the past, though not controlled by the Nazi Party, the newspaper has been favourable to it. If ownership were to fall into the wrong hands now, the party might lose that thin oxygen of publicity on which it survives. The Beobachter has only a few thousand readers, nothing like Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. But as Ford himself has shown, readership can expand with the right editorial line. Adolf persuades Dietrich Eckart to mortgage his home to find the money to buy the paper. A Freikorps general agrees to get hard cash from an army slush fund. Within twenty-four hours the newspaper is secured.
The first edition of the Völkischer Beobachter after the change of ownership is much the same as before. In between advertisements for hot chocolate and requests for subscribers to send in their fees early for the year 1921 it includes a helpful primer on the swastika and the announcement of the publication of an address book for non-Jewish businesses, allowing völkisch consumers to exercise the power of their wallet.
By the end of the year the newspaper has become a purely party paper, advertising Nazi meetings and finding an anti-Semitic slant to every story. Adolf Hitler can add articles to speeches in his propaganda armoury, reaching out to a far larger potential audience than can be accommodated in a beer hall.
PARIS: Breton takes odd editing and consultancy jobs to keep off the breadline. Despite the support of Marcel Proust, he loses out on a major literary prize. Yet not everything is gloomy. Simone Kahn has agreed to marry him. André feels like a changed man.
Tzara and Breton avoid each other. Paris Dada descends further into spectacle: high jinks, jazz, and a lot of self-indulgent laughter. Over the course of the year, Tzara produces no fewer than four Dadaist manifestos. His tricks are starting to wear thin.
‘Hold on to your overcoat’, André writes in the December edition of Littérature, ‘Dada is not dead’. But who is in charge?
LUDWIGSHÖHE, BAVARIA: Travelling through Germany from the Netherlands on the occasion of his honeymoon, Kaiser Wilhelm’s equerry pays a visit to a large villa on the outskirts of Munich. The villa’s owner is a rather portly man, given to conspiracy theories. He hopes a new volume of his wartime documents, some hundreds of pages long, will ‘fill the German people with renewed national will and open their eyes to the truth’. They will prove his own blamelessness for Germany’s wartime defeat once and for all. As Wilhelm’s equerry is ushered in, General Ludendorff shows off a statuette of the Kaiser sitting on his desk, and a portrait of Wilhelm on the wall. No hard feelings, it would appear.
Conversation quickly turns to the chances of Wilhelm’s restoration. Ludendorff proclaims himself in favour of the Hohenzollerns but, he warns, perhaps the Kaiser’s sons might be better placed to take over the reins. Other German dynasties–he mentions the royal houses of Baden and Hanover–might stand in the way of the Hohenzollerns by asserting their rights as co-creators of the empire if Wilhelm were to propose simply returning to the post of Kaiser himself.
On his return to Huis Doorn, the equerry finds a dark mood. The Kaiserin is sick. It is uncertain whether she will recover. As usual, Wilhelm takes refuge outside. ‘The park looks ever barer’, an aide writes. ‘One tree falls after another’. Occasionally the Kaiser shares his latest insight on the world situation, predicting war between America and Japan, or war between Russia and China against Japan, or war by Russia, China and Japan against all of Europe. Such a race war cannot be far off. Europe must prepare for it.
NEW YORK: William Du Bois launches his broadside in the direction of uptown Harlem.
Marcus Garvey’s first commercial scheme, Du Bois writes, was for a farm school in Jamaica which ran into financial difficulties and failed, causing Garvey to come to America. His political projects in the United States were similarly unsuccessful until a sufficient number of his Jamaican compatriots had moved to New York to provide him with a solid base in the city. Du Bois provides a short history of the Black Star Line. The convention of August 1920 is covered in a few lines.
Then come the questions on matters of honesty, businesslike attitude and practical chances of success. On the first of these, Du Bois is generous to Garvey, a man he has never met. His tone is patronising–that of an upper-crust patrician looking down on a West Indian peon–but not unkind. ‘He has been charged with dishonesty and graft,’ Du Bois writes, ‘but he seems to me essentially an honest and sincere man with a tremendous vision, great dynamic force and an unselfish desire to serve.’
There, the compliments end. The list of defects William Du Bois finds in his rival is long. He is ‘dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious’, Du Bois writes. He mentions the breakdown of his marriage, as well as various lawsuits in which Garvey has had to make an account of himself. Worse, ‘he has absolutely no business sense, no flair for real organization’. Du Bois is highly doubtful of the back-to-Africa movement.
A tone of mockery enters into the article when the editor of The Crisis describes the personality cult which Garvey seems to have encouraged within the UNIA: all the grandiose titles and gowns and pretensions to nobility. ‘He has become to thousands of people a sort of religion.’
A second instalment of the article is promised for January.
FIUME: D’Annunzio is now officially Regent of his mini-state, Canaro. A constitution is promulgated. Postage stamps emblazoned with his profile appear. Men shave their heads in emulation of Gabriele’s baldness. Some go so far as to imagine that Fiume will now annex Italy, rather than the other way around.
On the surface, the Fiume experiment seems as lively as ever. The legionnaires take to wearing an extraordinary range of self-designed military uniforms, complete with feathers and Roman daggers. When the Italian conductor Toscanini (once an election candidate for the Fascists) comes to Fiume with his orchestra, a mock battle with live weapons is staged for the orchestra’s entertainment, leading to several injuries amongst the musicians (a few of whom get so excited they decide to take part themselves). Several musical instruments are shattered by shrapnel.
But, in truth, D’Annunzio’s adventure is reaching a dead end. When Gabriele learns of a treaty about to be signed by the Italian and the Yugoslav governments which will make Fiume a self-governing Free State, never to be incorporated into either Italy or Yugoslavia, he flies into a rage. This is not the ending he wanted. The fact that Mussolini and others view the treaty as a great success makes it worse. Public attention shifts elsewhere. In November, three hundred Fascists interrupt the swearing-in of the new Socialist administration in Bologna. Several are killed in the ensuing fracas. This is the front line now.
D’Annunzio withdraws into seclusion. The Italian government issues an ultimatum for him to leave. Some of his closest followers urge him to clear out now and accept the laurels that must come his way for saving Fiume from the Yugoslavs. Gabriele’s response is blistering: ‘I have to consider you as deserters to the Cause in the face of the enemy.’
He waits for the ultimatum to pass. Surely the Italian army will not attack its own.
CHICAGO: Ernest Hemingway’s latest from the seamy underside of prohibition-land. American gunmen from the big cities are being shipped across to Ireland–the ‘Red Island’–to carry out contract killings. The going rate, Ernest reports, is four hundred dollars: enough to then go to France and have a good time blowing it all on the horses. ‘They say that if you throw a stone into a crowd at the famous Longchamps racecourse outside of Paris, you would hit an American gunman, pickpocket or strong-arm artist’, he reports. So much for American hoodlums. On the other hand, bootlegging business is bad. Too much booze is just being made right here under the noses of the police.
ANKARA: Mustafa Kemal’s twenty-three-year-old female admirer Fikriye plays the piano at his hillside villa. He knocks back rakı late into the night with his army buddies. The Armenians have been defeated in the east–crushed between the Bolsheviks and the Turks. The Greek nationalist government in Athens has fallen.
Kemal dashes off two diplomatic telegrams to new friends. ‘We know how vital it is that the European proletariat and the enslaved and colonised peoples fight against the common enemy’, he writes to the Bolshevik nationalities’ commissar, Comrade Stalin. He thanks him for his work bringing Bolsheviks and Muslims closer together. He notes the importance of smashing imperialism to achieve the ‘demolition of capitalism’.
Then one to Lenin greeting the Bolsheviks’ recognition of the independence of Dagestan in the north Caucasus, referring to Moscow’s new tendency to establish autonomous republics in its unruly extremities. ‘Autonomy does not mean independence’, Stalin is at pains to point out when he travels there himself. The language has changed but the territorial ambitions remain. The Russian Empire is being recreated under another name.
MOSCOW: ‘We are now passing through a crucial period of transition,’ Lenin announces, ‘something of a zigzag transition from war to economic development’. Transition! Zigzag! Those words again.
Each year, things are supposed to get better. But somehow events conspire to make them worse. Peace and plenty are always just around the corner. Now, peace has arrived, but plenty is still very far away. The economy is in a dreadful state. Industry has virtually closed down: Russia produces one fifth of the goods manufactured before the war. The cities survive on hunger rations. The countryside is starving. Factories feel like prison camps. Now the Bolsheviks do not even have a foreign enemy to pin their misery on. Out of desperation, the call to strike is going up again. Peasant rebellions are swelling across the land. Trotsky is making trouble in the party. Something in the mechanism of government is faulty, Lenin admits. Decrees are signed ‘and then we ourselves forget about them and fail to carry them out’. Communism isn’t working.
Vladimir struggles for answers to the crisis. He is caught between purity and practicality, between the ideals he came to power with, and the need to cling on now. He tries to find a middle course, to split the difference, and dress it up as revolutionary statesmanship. The revolution–his revolution, that is–will only be truly safe once it is strong economically, he concludes. To achieve that, it must trade with the outside world. Foreign businesses–German ones, in particular–should be encouraged to invest. The impatient revolutionary becomes an advocate of extensive concessions to foreign capitalists–land for tractors, oil for investment. Many Bolsheviks are appalled. Was this what the revolution was for? Only weeks before, on the third anniversary of the revolution, the largest agitational spectacle yet was put on in Petrograd, with banker capitalists in top hats carrying huge sacks marked with dollar signs and a cast of eight thousand storming the Winter Palace–a far greater number than were involved in the real thing in 1917. ‘Lenin! Lenin!’ they cry at one point. The whole thing has been made into a film.
‘There is no question of selling out Russia to the capitalists’, the impatient revolutionary reassures them. He tries to turn the horror of most Bolsheviks at his proposals into an argument in their favour: it proves that Russia is already ideologically inoculated against capitalism and can therefore survive the presence of a few foreign capitalists in their midst without fear of contamination. Anyway, the ends justify the means. The situation is desperate. Adjustments are necessary.
But how far will the impatient revolutionary go? He promises he has no intention of letting the poison of the market back into Russia in a broader sense: no private trading, no capitalist mentality. As a testament to this, Vladimir points to the recent suppression of the Sukharevka, a large Moscow street market where speculators thrive (but also where people go to try and buy the food they cannot get from the rations or the canteens). But we must go further, the impatient revolutionary demands. After all, the true danger is not on the street. It is ‘the Sukharevka that resides in the heart and behaviour of every petty proprietor’. ‘This is the Sukharevka that must be closed down.’
In any case, the present adjustments are temporary. The key to the future is scale: big factories, big farms, nationwide electricity. Vladimir has a new slogan for it: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.’ A plan is being drawn up to achieve it over the next decade. But the people are hungry now. And they are getting hungrier.
FIUME: When the assault to recover Fiume comes, fifteen months after D’Annunzio marched in and took over the city, the whole of Italy is preparing itself for the festivities of Christmas. People have more important things to worry about than politics.
Though defensive preparations have been made, with fishing nets slung across the streets and barricades built up, Lieutenant Colonel D’Annunzio (Retd) can hardly believe it when the attack begins. Soldiers shout over their lines to the defending legionnaires, warning them to get out now. No one wants to shoot. Can this really be happening?
After three days of intermittent fighting, Italian against Italian, a shell fired from a battleship whistles through an open window of D’Annunzio’s headquarters. If he does not surrender now, the poet is warned, more will follow. Italy’s famous Great War hero ponders for a while, and then makes his decision. Negotiations begin for the safe passage of him and his men. The adventure is over.
DUBLIN: A stormy crossing of the Irish Sea from Liverpool. Éamon de Valera acts the drunk when challenged by the ferry’s captain as to his identity. By Christmas Eve he is in a Dublin safe house owned by a gynaecologist. Sinéad visits him but does not stay.
The new returnee blasts Michael Collins’s guerrilla tactics in the war fought during his prolonged American absence. Too much violence, too little distinction between Irish and British. ‘This odd shooting of a policeman here and there is having a very bad effect, from the propaganda point of view, on us in America’, Éamon de Valera sermonises to his Irish courtiers. ‘What we want is, one good battle about once a month with about 500 men on each side.’ Collins is incensed. Open battle means certain, bloody, glorious defeat. Another waste of heroes’ blood. More martyrs for the cause. Which will it be: glorious defeat or bloody victory?
Everyone knows the war must be ended, somehow. But when, and on whose terms? Who will tire first? Each act of violence ratchets up the pressure on the other side. Openings for negotiation are narrow, fleeting. Possible intermediaries come and go: an Australian archbishop, an Irish businessman. The day de Valera returns from America, a British law officially splits Ireland into two, with a self-rule parliament to be established in each part, north and south, in Belfast and Dublin, and elections held next year. Vague hopes for peace are shrouded in mutual mistrust and blackened by daily, tangible acts of murder and retribution. The time is never right.
One night at the end of the year, like on so many nights before in other Irish towns and villages, a Black and Tan patrol in Midleton, County Cork, comes under fire. IRA men appear from nowhere, emerging from the laneways. For twenty minutes, the main street becomes a shooting gallery. Taken by surprise, several Black and Tans are badly wounded and later die in hospital. An IRA man takes a bullet in the wrist, but nothing serious. He and his comrades escape into the mountains with a haul of weapons, and later occupy an abandoned farmhouse outside the village of Clonmult.
Three days later reprisal comes to Midleton: not in the heat of battle, as before, but now as a matter of official policy, an instrument of British martial law. Half a dozen houses near the ambush site are selected, somewhat randomly. The inhabitants are given an hour to clear out. They are allowed to take their valuables with them but not their furniture. Then the houses are burned to the ground.
It is the first day of 1921.