DUBLIN: Back safely on Irish soil, Éamon de Valera ventures a suggestion: perhaps Michael Collins, his hotheaded rival, would like to go to America on a fundraising tour.
The pill is sugared as much as possible. The break would do him good. Collins is tired out. He looks ten years older than the man of thirty he is. It would be a chance to travel, and to use his reputation in the Irish cause without worrying for his safety every minute of the day. And it would infuriate the British.
‘The Long Whoor won’t get rid of me as easily as that’ is the furious reply. Michael Collins is staying put.
CHICAGO: After a few false starts (including lying on an application form to work in advertising), Ernest is made the assistant editor of a magazine for the American cooperative movement. It’s not for ever, Hemingway tells himself, and it’s a job.
But that’s not all that is new in his life. The young hero has met a woman he likes, a far more serious proposition than the Petoskey girls he has been hanging out with: a tall, limber, well-educated girl called Hadley, eight years his senior, with no parents to call her own, but with a trust fund to her name instead. Ernest and Hadley–or Hash, as he likes to call her–write slightly tortured letters to each other and worry about who loves whom more. He gives her a book by D’Annunzio to show his worldliness, just as he did to Dorothy Connable last year.
On cold dark evenings in Chicago, Ernest flicks through the poems of Siegfried Sassoon, which leave him feeling bitter about the war. A journalist fresh back from Moscow–the man who ghost-wrote Maria Bochkareva’s autobiography in 1918–comes over for supper. Isaac Don Levine brings with him ‘the cold dope on Rooshia’, as Ernest types it up for his mother. Poor Hemingway feels a little sorry for himself that he is not closer to the action in Europe. For a while in January, he entertains the notion of jacking it all in and going to Italy for a few months with a friend. Then he has another idea: perhaps he should get married.
LONDON: The President of the British Phrenological Society, whose members believe measurements of the skull can give insights into the character of their owners, visits the studio of sculptor Clare Sheridan.
He has brought his tools to measure the sculptures Clare did in the Kremlin as one would measure an actual human head. Lenin, he says, is clearly a thinker and a planner. He has great ideals which he wishes to put into effect on a grand scale. He is secretive and ambitious. He is gracious towards women, but fails to understand the views of others. Turning to the bust of Trotsky he states that the measurements of his head suggest greater intuition, though with a tendency towards brusqueness. He has a strong self-preserving instinct and high self-esteem. The shape of his cranium shows that his amorousness is greater than his powers of concentration.
GORKI: Vladimir spends nearly three weeks at his country house. He finds it hard to relax.
The country is in permanent economic crisis. And it is spreading to the political. He is worried about the party. Too much debate. Too many arguments. Too many factions, says the arch-factionalist of yesteryear. ‘The party is sick,’ Vladimir writes, ‘the party is down with the fever.’ Some are saying the party has got too far away from the workers–there are not many in its leadership. They want the trades unions to control the economy and the party hacks reined in. ‘Syndicalist deviation,’ Lenin calls it, ‘which will kill the Party unless it is entirely cured of it.’
Trotsky has stirred things up the other way, saying the unions should be nationalised: who needs to represent the workers against the state when you have a workers’ state already? And all this being discussed in public! Lenin is appalled. Why does Comrade Trotsky not know when to stop? So reckless. So irresponsible. So individualistic. Lenin’s own line is that the whole Soviet system should be viewed as an arrangement of cogwheels, with the unions as ‘transmission belts’ running between the party and the workers. Unfortunately, the machine has stopped working.
In the cities, bread rations are cut again this January. Factories shut down for lack of fuel. In the countryside, the Cheka estimates one hundred and eighteen peasant uprisings. Vladimir receives maps showing the vast areas of the country in rebellion. He personally speaks to peasants from the affected areas. They cannot all be class enemies. They cannot all be put down either. Something will have to give. A new zigzag starts forming in Lenin’s mind.
FIUME: In January, D’Annunzio leaves the city-state he once ran with such extravagance. He will face no trial or punishment for insubordination. Those who died in Fiume’s defence will be his personal martyrs. His conquest of Fiume, however badly it ended, makes him an icon for the nationalist right. Many consider him a demigod. The poet now travels to a new house by Lake Garda, reclaimed from a German art historian (Wagner’s wife once played on its piano). He is delighted to have a new project of Italianification on his hands.
His legionnaires split up. Some retire from their nationalist pursuits. Others drift to Milan, where Mussolini is making his name. Some lend their services to the Fascist gangs roaming central and northern Italy, seeing a reflection of Fiume in their habits of strange, exotic violence: using dried cod heads as weapons and force-feeding castor oil to their foes.
PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA: A man with something of the look of a travelling violin player arrives at the railway station, his hair swept back dramatically, an impish grin on his face. Though he has been here before, he acts like a tourist, asking to be taken by his guide to different cafés to get a good look at the population of Prague these days–Czech nationalists in one, German nationalists in another, Jews, Communists and actors in a third. For lunch, Einstein eats calf’s liver cooked over a Bunsen burner in the apartment of a scientist friend.
As is common wherever Einstein comes to speak these days, the lecture hall at the Urania Association is crammed. After the lecture, he avoids in-depth questioning by offering to play a Mozart violin sonata instead. As he is leaving Czechoslovakia on his way to Vienna, he is accosted by a young man talking gibberish about how the energy contained within an atom could some day be used to create the most extraordinary explosion. Einstein tells him to abandon such foolishness.
His mood seems quite playful this wintertime. Perhaps it is his hope that this year–surely–will be the year he finally gets his Nobel Prize. Perhaps it is just the effects of being amongst friends–and Prague seems a rather happier place than Berlin right now. Perhaps it is the prospect of a trip to America. Einstein has demanded fifteen thousand dollars from Princeton and Wisconsin universities for a short lecture tour–one way to solve the problem of how to make his alimony payments–and now awaits their response. Or perhaps it is just the acclaim which seems to greet him wherever he goes these days. The anti-relativists have been silenced. The fan-mail keeps on piling up. His theory–however misunderstood–seems to reign supreme.
Yet, in some quarters, a different and darker mood is building. The day Albert arrives in Prague, Adolf gives a speech in a Munich beer hall entitled ‘Stupidity or Crime’, claiming that a Jewish conspiracy is at work in the world of science, aiming at the ‘deliberate poisoning of our national soul, and thereby bringing about the inner collapse of our people’. Such manipulators, Hitler says, are prepared to work for years and decades before they achieve their final objective: ‘psychological illness of the masses’.
The day Albert leaves Prague an extremist hack suggests that Einstein should be murdered. He is fined a small sum by a Berlin court for incitement to violence.
DEARBORN: On week thirty-five of Ford’s campaign it is the world of American entertainment which the Independent has in its sights. The theatre has been taken over by Jews, and turned from a place of refinement where Americans can be instructed in sound virtues into a money machine. It is now ‘show business’. Commercialism trumps everything else and vulgarity reigns supreme. The Independent provides a list of actors operating under innocent-sounding ‘cover names’. Such as Charlie Chaplin.
In January, over one hundred Christians–including Woodrow Wilson, his predecessor, several bishops and William Du Bois–sign a letter attacking Ford’s campaign of ‘prejudice and hatred’. They call it un-American. America’s moral majority is at last finding its voice. It is all far too late. Henry Ford’s Independent has given worldwide credibility to anti-Semitic slander; The International Jew has been translated. Henry Ford is now an idol to anti-Semites around the world. And still the articles are churned out like automobiles.
INÖNÜ, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Greek troops advance into Anatolia, probing deeper and deeper into the interior. A reconnaissance mission, they claim. The Turks suspect the incursion is the prelude to a general assault, with the objective of smashing Turkish resistance, safeguarding Smyrna from attack and enforcing whatever they can of the Sèvres peace–signed but unratified, and already falling apart. Nearly a hundred Turks are killed in battle and Turkish troops repair to a new line. But the Greeks turn back as well. Who has won, who has lost?
MUNICH: ‘Before the war’, the Völkischer Beobachter recalls, ‘Turkey was called the “sick man”.’ That has changed since Kemal. His war of resistance against the Sèvres peace terms has given his country back its sense of pride. National solidarity has been revived. The ‘sick man’ has returned to vigorous health. Could not Germany manage something similar if it opposed Versailles? Could Bavaria be a second Anatolia? ‘One day’, the paper says, ‘Germany may have to resort to Turkish methods.’
MOSCOW: It is bitterly cold.
Nadya and Vladimir pay a visit to young Varya Armand, staying in a commune for art-school students. They sleep on bare wooden boards; they have neither bread nor salt. But they do have cereals. The students make the impatient revolutionary and his wife a bowl of porridge. They show them their drawings. Vladimir looks confused. One has a locomotive in it.
‘Dynamic!’ Lenin calls it. He asks them whether they read Pushkin.
‘Oh no,’ the students reply, ‘we read Mayakovsky.’
Bloody Mayakovsky! Nadya remembers one time at a Red Army concert when Vladimir was confronted with an actress declaiming a Mayakovsky poem almost in front of his nose–‘Speed is our body and the drum our heart!’ Her husband breathed a deep sigh of relief when another actor came on and started reading a short story by Chekhov. Vladimir pauses before responding to young Varya. ‘I think Pushkin is better’, he says eventually.
Back at the office, he takes comfort in a new project, more attuned to his own literary tastes: to build up a library collection of the works of Marx and Engels. Perhaps, Vladimir wonders, they could go one better. ‘Could we buy the letters of Marx and Engels, or photographs of them?’ Vladimir asks. They must be in Germany: ‘You know, this dirty lot will sell anything.’
CLONMULT, CO. CORK: Twenty IRA men, some involved in the Midleton ambush of last year, are surprised by the army while hiding out in a farmhouse just beyond the isolated village of Clonmult. Twelve of them are killed in the ensuing battle.
Whole provinces of southern Ireland have become battlefields in a bitter guerrilla war. ‘The area of active lawlessness is extending to counties which have hitherto been comparatively free from the more violent kinds of crime’, reads the weekly report to the British cabinet. There are thirty-two British casualties in Ireland for that week alone. Attacks are reported against the distribution of the mail. London is informed of the case of a thirteen-year-old girl found in possession of a machine gun and three revolvers, sentenced to detention in a Catholic reformatory.
The war divides, building walls of mistrust between communities and individuals. The longer the violence continues, the more impossible it is to stand above the fray. Ireland’s people find themselves in one camp or the other. Friend or enemy. Patriot or traitor. These are the only categories left. There is no middle ground–or at least none that is safe.
Over the winter weeks, an Irish woman in County Cork–a Presbyterian landowner–is kidnapped by the IRA. Her offence is to have passed on information about a planned IRA ambush when advised by a local grocer not to take a particular road one day. She pleads for her life and is shot as a spy. In Cork itself, the houses of Protestant businessmen suspected of loyalty to the old regime are burned down. British reprisals are now met with IRA counter-reprisals. Six civilians are caught in the crossfire when a train carrying British soldiers is shot up. The house in which Michael Collins was born–now occupied by his brother Johnny–is destroyed. Eight children of the Collins family are left without a home.
In those areas under martial law, life is lived with the constant threat of disruption and arrest, and of intimidation by friends and foes alike. New weapons are devised to try and shift the odds of victory. Empty shell cases fired by the British into the sea to test their artillery are recovered by fishermen and filled with a home-made explosive known as ‘Irish cheddar’ and turned into road mines. Normal daily life has been sabotaged by war. Nothing escapes it.
MUNICH: The NSDAP is still in start-up mode. It is growing fast–and yet never quite fast enough. It must compete for attention and support with plenty of other more established organisations. The Freikorps and nationalist and patriotic associations of Bavaria have fifty or a hundred times as many members as Hitler and Drexler’s party. They look askance at the upstart on the fringes of Munich’s patriotic scene, with no substantial links to the Bavarian establishment but plenty of Protestants and non-Bavarians. At a nationalist anti-Versailles congress where all these groups are represented and which Adolf hopes to hijack, his attempt at a speech is drowned out by a brass band.
There are those who think that, if it wants to grow, the NSDAP needs to merge with other like-minded groups. Adolf is against it. Some even propose trying to get close to the Communists as a means of siphoning off their support amongst the workers. The party’s financial situation is disastrous. The Beobachter makes no money. The NSDAP survives from speech to speech. The bigger the audience at Hitler’s events, the greater the fees. In February, Adolf speaks to a crowd of six thousand at the Zirkus Krone at an entry price of one mark per person: war wounded go free, Jews not allowed.
Adolf himself relies on the kindness of strangers to provide him with enough money and food to get by, never much worrying where it comes from. He has a sweet tooth, it turns out. Cakes home-baked by the party faithful are a favourite. He wears the same blue suit and trench coat almost every day. In between his speaking engagements, and meetings with the inner circle of the party, he hangs around in cafés. In these months, he often only gets out of bed at midday. One might almost mistake him for a Bohemian.
PARIS: A new play is about to begin at the Théâtre Deux Masques. The curtain rises on the office of Madame de Challens, aristocratic headmistress of a private girl’s school in Versailles called Les Fauvettes. Preparations are under way for prize-giving, an event marked the previous year by the unexplained death of one of the school’s pupils.
The plot of Les Détraquées, or ‘The Crazed Women’, is clunky. Its themes are both racy and gruesome: sex, murder and the power of mind over matter (and occasionally mind over mind). The school, it turns out, is little more than a playground for the predatory lesbianism of Madame de Challens and her lover Solange, a Parisian dance teacher with a taste for heroin. Both are drawn to Lucienne, the prettiest girl in the school, who obeys de Challens as if controlled by telepathy. ‘I’ve never met anyone with such a passive nature’, Madame de Challens tells Solange excitedly. ‘She obeys my thoughts.’ An unequal ménage à trois is formed.
In the play’s second half, Lucienne has disappeared. The local police are stumped. Ultimately it is a doctor with experience of psychiatric patients who unravels the mystery. Solange is a ‘femme fatale’, he declares–something that the unimaginative police believe to be nothing more than a cinematic invention. The doctor insists that such characters really exist and they are more common after the war than ever before: women whose psychiatric sickness drives them to seek ever greater nervous stimulation. When opium and cocaine are not enough, he explains, they seek still more risky highs. Why not sex and murder? ‘Everyone poisons themselves their own way, no?’ the doctor asks, before offering a cigarette to a policeman. At the end of the play, Lucienne’s body is found in a cupboard, evidently tortured to death in a sexual game by the two older women.
For André Breton, the whole affair is captivating. His enjoyment is no doubt enhanced by knowing the true identity of one of the play’s authors. Referred to in the programme simply as Olaf, he is none other than André’s former teacher and Freud’s former colleague the great neurologist Babinski. For André, Les Détraquées is not a spectacle, but an act of literary bravery: a serious attempt to embrace the latest theories of the mind–even where these are shocking. The psychological mechanisms to which the play alludes–telepathy, mind control, addiction, unseen drives–all echo Breton’s own obsessions, adventures and experiences. The play speaks to a world coming to terms with its own neuroses, confronting it with the realities it would prefer to cover up.
Why can’t Dada be more like this?
MOSCOW: The latest zigzag takes definite form in the impatient revolutionary’s mind. Some people will not like it. But then again, the ends–if anyone can remember what they were–will surely justify the means.
Vladimir is still pushing for concessions for foreign businesses, a little too eagerly for several of his party colleagues. His latest concern is that the oilfields of Baku will collapse without the involvement of foreign enterprise. ‘Disaster is imminent’, Vladimir writes: ‘The working out of the terms must be speeded up.’ Now he is thinking of something even more radical: allowing peasants to sell whatever surplus they produce individually, upending several years when the policy has been for the state to requisition it and private commerce was declared anathema. The change is a matter of political and economic common sense, Vladimir has come to believe. The peasants must be brought onside. More grain must be produced. A regime that cannot feed its people is not long for this world, as Lenin knows, and no one denies that profit can be an incentive. Lenin can already hear the clamour of opposition from the old Bolshevik believers. Unthinkable! Preposterous! Letting the very seed of capitalism back into the bosom of the Soviet Republic. Giving in to the backward peasants. Giving up on state monopoly. Turning back the clock. Vladimir Lenin turned into a shopkeeper.
Well, yes. But maybe it is the only way to save the regime–and nothing is more important than that. To give up power would be to give up on the revolution. And that is something that Vladimir will not do. Party, regime and revolution are all one in the end. What helps one, helps the other. ‘The proletarian class = the Communist Party = Soviet Power’, he wrote last year. When it comes to weighing up means and ends, Vladimir (and Leon too) have always thought that the latter justifies the former. There is a certain devious charm to using the market to save its supposed antithesis. That appeals to Lenin’s mind, a sort of intellectual one-upmanship over the capitalists. If it works, that is. The emergency is acute. Last year was dry, this year has been little better, and if the weather does not change and the peasants do not plant, Russia will face famine. There are peasant risings in the Volga region, protest marches in Moscow. Now the rot has even spread to Petrograd, birthplace of the revolution.
How bad will it get? Some sense a dangerous mood in Russia’s second city resembling that of 1917. The authorities take away soldiers’ shoes to prevent them from joining demonstrations. Strikers are locked up. There are rumours that the Kronstadt sailors are ready to revolt, not to defend the Bolsheviks but to destroy them, saying they do not represent the will of the people. Already in February, newspapers in Paris and New York report that the Kronstadt batteries are trained on Petrograd. At the end of the month, a proclamation spread around the streets of Petrograd calls for freedom of assembly for workers, new elections to the Soviets, the release of political prisoners–another revolution, in other words. Isn’t this what the Bolsheviks once stood for themselves? That was then. Now it sounds like dangerous talk.
Party, country, all at sea. ‘My nerves are kaput’, Vladimir writes to Comrade Clara. He starts putting his zigzag down on paper.
BERLIN: In February, Einstein gets his answer from the Americans. He asked for too much money. But then, almost immediately, another opportunity arises: to go to the United States at the invitation of the Zionist organisation to raise money for a new university planned for Jerusalem. This appeals to Albert. How could it not? A charitable mission with a political purpose. Plans are made. The Rotterdam will sail from Plymouth in the spring. Chaim Weizmann, the British chemist and leader of the Zionist movement, will host Albert and Elsa aboard.
Albert’s German friends cannot believe the news. For any German to travel to America while a state of war still exists between the two countries, and just as a schedule for the payment of German reparations is being prepared–well, the optics, as they say, are bad. ‘The whole world looks on you as the most important German Jew’, Albert’s friend Fritz Haber tells him. ‘If, at this moment, you ostentatiously cosy up to the British and their friends, people in this country will see that as evidence of Jewish faithlessness.’
Einstein responds the same day. He has made up his mind. No argument will deflect him. ‘I am not needed for my abilities, of course, but only for my name’, he admits. ‘Its promotional value is anticipated to reap considerable success amongst our rich tribespeople in Dollaria.’ In the name of internationalism, he is bound to do his duty: to spread the word of science and to link arms with like-minded people across the ocean.
In any case, Einstein writes, ‘I must go… the steamship seats have already been booked’.
CHICAGO–CINCINNATI–NEW YORK: ‘There is nothing in the wide world–in the great universe–to intimidate Marcus Garvey’, Garvey says in a pit stop in Chicago. He tells police spies in the audience not to worry: he doesn’t mind them taking notes of what he says, as long as they understand he is not a Bolshevik.
Look how few statues there are to black men and women in the United States, he tells an audience in Cincinnati. ‘All that we have done was to carry mortar for the other fellow when he was building up his property’, he says. ‘The time has come for us to build up in Africa’. (Garvey is at this time trying to develop a business relationship with Liberia through the good offices of the mayor of its capital, Monrovia.)
Back in New York, he prepares his departure for a tour of the Caribbean. He obtains a new British passport and secures an apology from The Crisis for a misstatement of fact in one of their articles on Garvey, the UNIA and the Black Star Line. The correction reads: ‘Our statement that the Yarmouth is a wooden vessel is incorrect, as it is in fact steel.’
Before he leaves, the Provisional President of Africa gives a speech to the faithful at Liberty Hall. He takes aim at those who call Africa the ‘dark continent’, noting rather the diamond-and-gold brilliancy of its future, its mineral wealth waiting to be tapped by its rightful owners. And he launches a verbal assault on the new British Secretary of the Colonies, just moved sideways from his post at the War Office. ‘This temperamental, unscrupulous, and audacious and irresponsible person’, Garvey contends, ‘has done more than any ten men in the British Empire to bring disrepute and bad credit morally and financially upon the British government.’ He is referring, of course, to Winston Churchill.
VIENNA: Freud writes to a Russian psychoanalyst who has recently fled the Bolsheviks. He promises to help him settle in Prague, fast becoming one of the centres of Russian émigrés in Europe. ‘Your wishes that your great fatherland may soon awaken again, and come out of its crisis’, Freud writes, ‘find in us the strongest sympathetic response.’
There seems little chance of Freud visiting Russia. ‘How much would I have liked–protected by powerful connections–to see your magnificent Moscow’, he confides. It is not to be: ‘All gone! There will be no change in my lifetime.’
KRONSTADT FORTRESS–MOSCOW: Across the ice from Petrograd, the island fortress of Kronstadt, home of the Baltic Fleet and symbol of the revolution of 1917, is in open mutiny against Bolshevik rule. The local Soviet is deposed and Bolshevik leaders thrown in jail. New elections will be organised. In Paris, Prague and Istanbul there is rejoicing–Russia’s exiled leaders offer what assistance they can.
The Communist Party has alienated itself from the workers, the mutineers declare. All they want is what the revolution promised them: freedom. Lenin calls the rebellion a White plot cooked up in Paris. The White generals, says Pravda, have ‘bared their fangs’. Family members of sailors are taken hostage in Petrograd. Trotsky, the man who made Kronstadt his second home in 1917, is sent to smash the uprising. Mercy will only be shown to those who give up unconditionally. ‘Your clemency, Mr Trotsky, will not be needed’, the mutineers respond. A pamphlet dropped from the air tells the sailors to surrender, or they will be ‘shot like partridges’. De Gaulle’s acquaintance Misha is sent to command the assault.
One ultimatum is ignored. A second passes also without surrender. At the beginning of March, the Red Army launches a first attack across the ice. The Kronstadt newspaper issues its own retort. The Communists have replaced the ‘hammer and the sickle’ with the ‘bayonet and the barred window’. They have stifled the creative spirit of revolution with bureaucracy, turned work into slavery. Now that they have won power, there is nothing they will not stoop to in order to keep it: slander, violence, deceit. But a third revolution is on its way: ‘At last, the policeman’s club of Communist autocracy has been broken’. On the ground, a Red Army attack is repelled.
Even as the guns are firing outside Petrograd, in Moscow Vladimir commends his latest policy zigzag to a meeting of the Communist Party: letting the peasants sell their grain, accelerating concessions to foreign capitalists. He rips into his opponents from all sides. The splits and squabbles must stop. To some arguments–Kronstadt arguments, he calls them–there is only one response: ‘a gun’. He jibes Trotsky, accusing him of grandstanding on the trades union business, of going too far in his call to simply make them servants of the state, the shock troops of a militarised labour force. But nor is Lenin going to tolerate the opposing tendency advocating putting independent unions in charge of the economy, which Vladimir considers a dangerous deviation towards syndicalism. Where would the revolution be then? It needs a party vanguard. To simply hand things over to the workers–many of whom are not even Bolsheviks–would be an abdication of responsibility.
One must not make a ‘fetish of democratic principles’, as Trotsky puts it with characteristic hauteur, after his own position has been rejected. No one should forget the ‘historical birth-right of the party’, the war commissar says, ‘obliged to maintain its dictatorship regardless of temporary wavering in the spontaneous moods of the masses, regardless of the temporary vacillations even in the working class’. Trotsky has a way with words. But he uses them too much.
In Moscow, Vladimir alternates defence and attack. He acknowledges that the state has ‘bureaucratic distortions’–but these can be corrected. He accepts that ‘we may have made mistakes’ in the past–but there was ‘no alternative’. Perhaps we nationalised too much, too quickly. Perhaps we abolished the market too readily. He is quite plain in admitting what he now proposes: letting peasants sell their produce means ‘turning back towards capitalism’. But it is expedient. He is vague about how it will work: ‘I only wish to prove to you that theoretically it is conceivable.’ There is no alternative. Taxing something is better than trying to requisition nothing. Vladimir wants to reassure his followers he has not gone soft on the peasants: ‘The peasant must do a bit of starving so as to relieve the factories and towns from complete starvation.’ Proletarian dictatorship will not be weakened. Compulsion will be used where necessary. Meanwhile, Kronstadt is bombed from the air.
Reconstruction will take perhaps a decade, perhaps more, Lenin says. The country has been beaten to within an ‘inch of its life’ for seven straight years: ‘It’s a mercy she can hobble about on crutches.’ Foreign concessions are such a crutch. He recalls being told by Clare Sheridan in the Kremlin last year that when the Bolsheviks came to power, British politicians called them crocodiles. Vladimir smarts: ‘Crocodiles are despicable’. Now Britain wants to trade. See how far the Soviet Republic has come! (A trade agreement is signed the following day, including a promise to stop hostile propaganda against each other–a promise Moscow has no intention of abiding by.)
In the final minutes of the congress, when everyone is exhausted or beaten into submission, Lenin pulls off his masterstroke. A motion on party unity. Who can be against that? The odd voice raised in comradely enquiry as to the correctness of the party line–totally ineffectual, anyhow–will be permitted. But organised dissent against the party line will be met with expulsion. Factions are banned. Some sense that a Rubicon is being crossed, even if they cannot quite perceive the full significance of Lenin’s move for themselves. (Trotsky has no conception it could be ever used against him.) The Soviets have already been hollowed out, and made the creatures of the Bolsheviks. Now party democracy is set aside. For all practical purposes, the leadership will rule over the party as it wishes, and the party will rule over everything. The structure is completing itself. All it needs is a mechanic to sit at the controls and make it work better. If only there was someone loyal and reliable who could do the job. Certainly not Trotsky. ‘A temperamental man’, Vladimir decides. ‘As for politics, he hasn’t got a clue.’
On Kronstadt island, the rebel sailors produce their last newspaper. ‘Socialism in Quotation Marks’ is the title of its main article. That evening, Misha prepares his final assault. The Kronstadt garrison have little ammunition left. Medical supplies have run out. The sailors survive on canned horsemeat. At three in the morning, Misha’s troops start across the ice through freezing fog. No talking, no smoking. By five they are nearing the first of Kronstadt’s defensive forts, approaching it on their bellies. Then an electric lamp is switched on. Blinding light. The firing begins. For nearly two days the battle for Kronstadt rages: house to house, street to street. The Bolsheviks consider using poison gas. Some sailors attempt to flee across the ice to Finland. In the days to come, the government in Helsinki asks Moscow to clear the corpses: it is feared they will cause a public health risk in the thaw. Captured rebel leaders are either shot or sent to a prison camp above the Arctic Circle.
The ideals of 1917 are very far away. All power to the Soviets! Who remembers that now? The day that Kronstadt is conquered is the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, notes one revolutionary exile in Petrograd, expelled from the United States last December. She came to Russia in hope, singing revolutionary songs. Now Emma Goldman is appalled. The revolution has murdered its children. Trotsky’s hands are covered with their blood. Lenin’s rule has become a dictatorship. Opposition to the Bolsheviks is repressed by the Cheka. John Reed is dead. World revolution is delayed. Dreams of new ways of living, new forms of organisation, new ideas of art and society, have been disappointed. Electrification is held up as the new ideal where freedom once stood.
NEW YORK: Clare Sheridan embarks on a lecture tour of the United States.
She talks passionately about Russia, and about Trotsky in particular. (One evening, playing charades, she has to act out his name, first imitating a horse trotting along, and then someone skiing down a mountain.) Clare excites audiences large and small with her devil-may-care attitude, feminine vivacity and vague radicalism. ‘I worship force as an element, force and energy in humans, force and power in machinery’, she tells one hall. She compares Pittsburgh steel mills to Bolshevism: ‘something so tremendous that my mind cannot grasp it’. While in America, Clare exchanges a few letters with Winston Churchill, in which he says he is almost prepared to forgive her for consorting with the Bolsheviks–‘fiends in human form’, as he calls them–while she suggests to him that, given the excellent high-level contacts she has established, she should now be made British Ambassador in Moscow.
In New York, there is an exhibition of Clare’s work–mostly bronze busts of the leading figures of the Russian revolution. Some visitors come to ogle their political heroes, blinking reverently at the mute figures of Lenin and Trotsky. Others tell Clare to her face how much they hate them. ‘I am always amused by people who want to kill off all Bolsheviks, all Sinn Féiners and all Jews’, she writes in her diary. ‘It would make for a wonderfully emptier world: anyway, it is very emblematic of the Christian spirit of today!’
The city fairly bubbles with concern for the situation in Ireland. Clare has been warned of an anti-British mood. One day she attends a public lecture by a loyalist British Catholic on the situation in Ireland which is interrupted by a group of hecklers waving Irish flags. On St Patrick’s Day, her taxi ride across town is held up by a large Sinn Féin procession through the city. Her Russian cab driver is unsympathetic to all this protesting. It is action the Irish need, he tells Clare, not placards. The Russians rose up and killed the Tsar, he points out: why don’t the Irish rise up and kill King George?
MOSCOW: The Bolshevik regime works overtime to downplay the significance of Kronstadt, and spreads rumours that it was nothing more than a final episode in Russia’s long civil war. Red against White–and the Reds have prevailed.
‘The Kronstadt affair is itself a very petty incident’, Lenin tells a journalist from New York. ‘It does not threaten to break up the Soviet state any more than the Irish disorders threaten to break up the British Empire.’ People in America are foolish to imagine that if only the Bolsheviks were overthrown then some kind of admirably middle-of-the-road government would take over. Wrong! The only alternatives are ‘butcher generals and helpless bureaucrats’. He is hoping for more trade with America: fur for tractors, timber for shoes.
Comrade Stalin is admitted for an operation to remove his appendix. Vladimir sends the Georgian four bottles of the best port wine to be found. He is ordered to go to a spa to recover. Stalin chooses Nalchik, the town in the Caucasus where Inessa died.
BERLIN–MUNICH–BERLIN: Germany lurches towards a new crisis.
In order to force the Germans to pay reparations as required, the French and their allies move in to take control of the German cities of Düsseldorf, Duisburg and Ruhrort. Over the next few weeks, trains carrying foreign soldiers arrive at the cities’ main stations every day.
While the government in Berlin is reeling from that first blow to its authority, a wave of Communist-inspired strikes breaks out in the central German province of Saxony. Policemen are attacked, courthouses bombed and banks robbed–part of an ‘offensive theory’ backed by Béla Kun. He is keen to have a second go at revolution; local Communists are not sure the conditions are right. Three thousand striking workers occupy Germany’s biggest chemical works. The Saxon crisis gives the police an excuse to crush the Communists. Kun returns to Moscow with his tail between his legs. Hitler starts a Bavarian tour under the question ‘Statesmen or National Traitors?’, blaming the politicians for the country’s dire straits.
In amongst all the violence, a murder in Berlin goes almost unnoticed. Talaat Pasha, one of the triumvirate who ran the Ottoman Empire during the war, is shot dead one day while out walking with his wife. His assailant, a twenty-five-year-old Armenian student who survived the massacres, is hauled before a German court and acquitted on the grounds of mental trauma. Witnesses attest to the horrors perpetrated against Armenians during the war. Talaat’s killing is deemed an understandable response.
PARIS: The latest edition of Littérature appears. Inside, a chart. And on the chart, a statistical ranking of the men and women of the age according to the opinions of the magazine’s leading lights: André Breton, Tristan Tzara and the rest. The range is somewhat arbitrary, from–25 (representing total aversion) to +20 (representing something akin to hero-worship). A score of zero is taken to mean indifference. The purpose of the rankings, so Littérature claims, is not ‘to grade, but to degrade’.
No surprises at the bottom end of the scale: Anatole France, John Stuart Mill, Émile Zola and Rodin all come off badly on the judges’ score sheet. The Unknown Soldier, buried physically only a few months previously, is now buried figuratively on the pages of Littérature: both Breton and Tzara give him–25. (Pretty much the only positive score Tzara gives is to Breton, and even then, only a measly 12 out of a possible 20.)
Further up the rankings things are more ambivalent: a mild distaste for the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ (an average across the board of–1.72 and–1.54 respectively), and a slightly more negative view of Lenin and Trotsky (–3.72 and–3.63). Kaiser Wilhelm comes in at–2.09, well above D’Annunzio (–7.36), and at the midpoint between Henri Matisse (–3.27) and Oscar Wilde (–1.45).
Jostling for position in the upper tier of the rankings are, amongst others, Einstein (+9.54), Freud (+8.63) and Shakespeare (+9.18, despite another–25 from the Romanian). At the very top of the chart–surprise, surprise–feature the contributors and editors of Littérature themselves: Breton in the lead (+16.85), Soupault just behind (+16.30) and Aragon (+14.10) snapping at their heels. Tzara is a little behind on +13.30. (Suppressing his doubts, André publicly awards Tzara 18 points, but, privately, there is an awkwardness about their relationship now, like two lovers who have learned too soon the other’s imperfections.)
The surprise of the rankings, however, is amongst the runners-up. With a positive score across the board from every judge, in third place: the actor Charlie Chaplin.
ISTANBUL: The British Ambassador has an audience with the Sultan. Vahdettin is angry and depressed. The French and Italian Ambassadors are made to wait outside for over two hours.
The list of the Sultan’s complaints is long. Ankara, he says, is a ‘mad-house’. He is furious at the equal billing given to Kemal’s representatives at a recent conference in London reopening the Sèvres terms. He distrusts the French, who are now thought to only have eyes for Syria and commercial opportunities in the wider Middle East. The Italians are said to be providing arms to Ankara on the side. Vahdettin dislikes even his own ministers. He pointedly threatens the British Ambassador with abdication. That way the British would have no one in Istanbul to negotiate with at all. He wonders aloud as to the true nationality of the cashiered general who once accompanied him to Berlin. ‘A Macedonian revolutionary of unknown origin’, the Sultan calls Mustafa Kemal spitefully. The Sultan decides he must be Serbian.
His fevered speculations are whirlpools in an Ottoman teacup now. Vahdettin is isolated. The Sultan-Caliph still has the trappings of imperial authority. He still appears to the faithful in the selamlik procession each Friday. But politically, he is a busted flush. Nationalists view him as a British puppet. Militarily, he has no power.
All the advantage now lies with Ankara. Anatolia has been largely pacified by Mustafa Kemal’s forces. His position gets stronger by the day. Kemal’s associates have finally signed a real treaty with Moscow. A trickle of Russian weapons becomes a flood. After the Turkish military successes of last autumn and the treaty with Moscow, Turkey’s borders in the Caucasus are decided between Moscow and Ankara alone. Istanbul is cut out entirely. (The Armenians and Georgians–outnumbered, outgunned, and now theoretically part of their own Soviet Socialist Republic–have no choice but to accept Moscow’s decision.)
There are now only the Greeks left to deal with. In late March, they attack again.
MUNICH: Adolf appears to be making headway with Munich’s power-brokers. At the end of winter, one of the party’s new acolytes introduces him to Erich Ludendorff, now engaged in defending his image, explaining the causes of Germany’s defeat and plotting his return. Ludendorff looks at Hitler and sees the kind of effective propagandist he could have done with during the war; Hitler looks at Ludendorff and sees the political capital of his name (and the fundraising possibilities).
MILAN: The flying lessons continue. In March, Benito is involved in that most Futurist of events: a crash. He emerges unscathed. Another story to add to his legend. Another story to raise his profile. Someone writes a song about it. ‘The airplane and the bomb wanted to oust you’, it goes. ‘You answered to Lady Death: come back another time.’
Across Italy, the tempo of political violence has not slackened even as the threat of a socialist takeover has diminished. The squadristi have become more brazen than ever. Socialist offices are ransacked with joyful abandon. Left-wing newspapers have their printing presses smashed. Socialist politicians live in fear of the sound of a truck pulling up outside their door. Local magistrates are too afraid to act. Many condone the Fascist violence. In Mantua, Fascists charged with six separate counts of murder all get off while sixteen socialists are awarded a collective century in jail for the murder of two squadristi. So successful have the gangs become that it now looks as if they and their leaders, the ras, are the true leaders of Italian fascism (particularly given D’Annunzio’s retreat into writing books). Mussolini is worried. If he does not watch out, perhaps the ras will come to dominate the movement he helped to found.
In a speech in Trieste, he is forced to defend himself for not having come to the rescue of D’Annunzio in Fiume. What was he supposed to do? ‘Revolutions are not jack-in-the-boxes which can be set off at will’, he says. ‘Revolutions are made with armies, not against them; with arms, not against them; with disciplined movements, not with amorphous masses called to attend a gathering in the town square’. Fiume tried to mix ‘the devil and Holy Water’, anarchists and nationalists. The army and navy did not switch sides. Fascism must be smarter in the future. It must think big, it must choose its time, and use tactics which will bring success rather than just adulation. ‘I reject all forms of Bolshevism’, Benito tells his audience, ‘but if I was forced to choose one it would be that of Moscow and Lenin, if only because its proportions are gigantic, barbaric, universal.’
He looks to Rome and to the elections. The prestige of national office would surely help him against the pretenders for the Fascist throne. He makes friends with the political class and insinuates himself into an electoral alliance. On the principle of holding one’s rivals close, and basking in reflected glory, Mussolini even pays a visit to that old roué D’Annunzio and asks him whether he would like to stand alongside him in the elections. The poet declines.
PARIS: A few days before Easter Sunday 1921 a Spanish diplomat wearing a pair of dark glasses arrives in the French capital on the night express from Strasbourg. There he picks up the Vienna train. Finally, after spending the night at a friend’s apartment in the Austrian capital, the same man is driven westwards towards Hungary. But at the border, the Spanish diplomat has changed. A remarkable metamorphosis. Now he wears motoring goggles rather than dark glasses to hide his face. And he is no longer a diplomat but, according to his passport, a British representative of the Red Cross. The motor car is nodded through. Charles Habsburg keeps the goggles on.
The drive through the Hungarian–Austrian borderlands is picturesque. It is almost like old times: girls dressed in dirndls, and schnitzel and cucumber salad for lunch (paid for with French money). Afterwards, still in disguise, Charles and his party run into an Easter procession, at which sight the successor of the Holy Roman Emperors is moved to kneel down in the street to pray. It all seems to be going so well–until the car breaks down. The last few miles to Szombathely are completed in a horse and cart. There, Charles spends the night in the house of the local bishop, while the Minister-President, who happens to be on a shooting holiday nearby, is called over to give his advice on the situation with Horthy in Budapest.
The capital can only be reached the following day. Expecting Horthy to turn over power without a fight–after all, Horthy is only a regent, supposedly standing in for the Habsburgs during their absence–Charles dispenses with the idea of taking any soldiers with him to his capital. When Charles arrives at his old palace, there is no one there to greet him. There is no fanfare, no red carpet. When he meets the once-loyal admiral, Horthy is rather rude. He tells Charles to go back to Switzerland at once. The timing is wrong.
Charles has miscalculated. The French seemed willing to support a Habsburg back in Budapest–maybe even in Vienna. But not a Habsburg so witless as to conduct his own restoration without even a revolver. Conservative Hungarians might have sympathy–but are they willing to risk a civil war to have Charles back? Meanwhile, in Prague, Bucharest and Belgrade, there is outright fury. The governments there threaten military intervention.
Charles beats a hasty retreat from Budapest and holes up in Hungary’s royalist west for a week or so, while recovering from the flu. He ponders his options. The international chorus telling him that a Habsburg restoration will not be accepted grows louder. Charles gathers around his closest followers and suggests a new tack: perhaps one of their number could return to Switzerland disguised as him, while he remains in Hungary. An embarrassed silence. No one volunteers. It is time to go into exile, again.
DOORN: Wilhelm has little time for Schadenfreude at the embarrassment of that ridiculous man Charles. At home at Huis Doorn, the atmosphere is heavy. The Kaiser is preoccupied with the state of his wife’s health. And, increasingly, another subject which he has been reading up on: the Jews.
One evening, he breaks into an anti-Semitic diatribe over dinner. There will be a reckoning, he warns. All these people will have to give up their art collections and their houses. They will be banned from public office.