MOSCOW: An illustrated supplement of Pravda appears: Comrade Lenin on Vacation. There are several photographs of the dictator. In one he has picked up a cat and is cradling it in his arms. In another he is walking down a lane in the garden at Gorki. There are pictures of Vladimir with his wife Nadya. And a picture of him with Stalin, with the hale and hearty Georgian smartly attired in his bright white jacket while the clearly frail Lenin wears rumpled green-grey. This is an image which matters: the loyal Georgian by the master’s side. (Trotsky has meanwhile just been reprimanded by the party for a breach of Communist discipline in refusing the job he was offered.)
Comrade Stalin writes an article to accompany the photographs. ‘I have to do it, since the editors insist’, he claims modestly. He describes two visits to Gorki, the first in July, the second in August. On the first, Lenin looked like an ‘old fighter’, his face creased with fatigue, but inquisitive as always. On the second, Stalin writes, he was a changed man: ‘Calmness and confidence have fully come back to him.’ The Georgian describes the range of weighty topics that Lenin wished to discuss with him–currency matters, foreign affairs, the harvest, America’s position–which reflects well on both Lenin’s acuity and Stalin’s importance.
They even discussed rumours of Lenin’s death. Lenin’s response, the Georgian writes, was spiteful towards those who wish him ill: ‘Let them lie and that way console themselves; there is no need to take away from the dying their last consolation.’
SMYRNA: Outside the city, skirmishes continue between conquering Turkish troops and Greek stragglers trying to escape to the sea. The largely foreign-owned villas of Bournabat are ransacked. Churches are violated. The new Turkish governor–a general appointed by Mustafa Kemal, with a fearsome reputation for his activities against the Christian population in the Black Sea region–calls the Greek bishop of Smyrna to his headquarters, denounces him as a traitor and then sets him free on the streets of the city, where he is immediately lynched.
These are strange days in Smyrna. No one is sure who is in charge. No one is prepared to take responsibility for dealing with the nightly outbreaks of violence: not the foreign forces at anchor outside Smyrna, who are wary of being seen to intervene, nor the Turkish authorities who seem unable or unwilling to rein in their men. Accurate and impartial information is impossible to come by. Stories of resistance against the Turks circulate alongside rumours of imminent catastrophe for anyone seen as a threat to their grip on the city. A hysterical Armenian priest begs an American naval officer to save the lives of thousands of his co-religionists, said to be sheltering from Turkish sniper fire and bombings, fearful they will all soon be killed.
Christian refugees from the hinterland fill the waterfront and the city’s parks. They will not be able to return home, insists the Turkish governor. Their houses and villages have been destroyed by Greek soldiers in their retreat. ‘Bring ships and take them out of the country,’ he tells a foreign delegation, ‘it is the only solution’. He breaks off the conversation to greet the arrival of another unit of Turkish cavalry. ‘Look at them,’ he says proudly: ‘five hundred kilometres in twelve days.’ Greek prisoners of war are paraded through town. The city’s bars are still open.
Visiting Smyrna for the first time since its reconquest, Mustafa Kemal meets a young Turkish lady, Lâtife, from a good family, just returned from legal studies in France, and promptly falls in love. Lâtife seems purer and more suitable as a mate than Fikriye, a cousin by marriage. Kemal is delighted to discover she wears a locket around her neck containing his picture. One afternoon, as the ransacking in the Armenian quarter of the city continues and as the foreign powers scramble to organise the departure of their own citizens, Kemal turns up at the Grand Hotel Kraemer Palace and orders a glass of rakı. He asks idly whether King Constantine ever did the same. On discovering the answer is negative, Kemal replies suavely: ‘in that case, why did he bother to take İzmir?’
As the days wear on, Turkish military discipline breaks down. The city is engulfed in violence. Americans report casual murder in the street, daylight looting, back-alley executions. British sailors watch atrocities being committed on shore through their field glasses. Corpses float out to sea. A British reporter tracks down Kemal. The war with the Greeks is over, he tells the journalist, in French: ‘There is nothing to fight about any more.’ His aim now is to take back Istanbul. The foreign armies occupying the Ottoman capital must agree to leave. If not, he will be forced to march there too. His patience is not infinite, he warns.
On the day that the major powers start the full-scale evacuation of their citizens, Smyrna starts to burn. Turks are seen dousing the Armenian quarter in petrol to help the fire along. Black smoke billows into the air. Strong winds whip up the blaze. The city’s firemen, paid for by foreign insurance companies, are powerless. Throughout the afternoon, American citizens gathered in the Smyrna Theatre are led to the quayside in small groups, where boats wait to take them to the battleships further off. Each group is protected by a double file of marines to prevent other refugees from insinuating themselves amongst the lucky few. As they shuffle towards the embarkation point, they hear the anxious pleas of those about to be left behind. Some claim their papers have been burned. A few manage to talk their way through to safety this way. Others drown in the sea trying to swim out to the ships. ‘Without exaggeration, tonight’s holocaust is one of the biggest fires in the world’s history’, a British journalist writes.
The fire leaps and licks its way down to the waterfront. Hundreds of thousands of Christian refugees are gathered on the quayside now, trapped between the hot fire behind them, the sea in front and Turkish troops in the side streets. A low wail of anguish rises. Men and women cling to each other in fear. Well past midnight, the British finally decide to intervene, sending all available boats in to pick up as many of the refugees as they can. Thousands of Armenians and Greeks are ferried to the American, British, French and Italian battleships that night, and over the next few days. But the relief effort is a reprieve, not a solution to the underlying problem. The old Smyrna is dead. The city’s Christian population have been turned into refugees. Word spreads that the Turks intend to resettle any homeless Christians who remain to central Anatolia, within a month. Many fear another destination: a shallow grave or a funeral pyre somewhere. ‘The final solution of the refugee problem’, writes an American sailor helping with the relief operation, ‘is wholesale evacuation.’
It takes several days for the fire to burn itself out. The world’s attention shifts between awful stories coming out of Smyrna and concerns about Istanbul. Will a new war break out over the Ottoman capital? Kemal has made it clear that for him Turkey encompasses all of Anatolia, including Istanbul and eastern Thrace, the last remaining European portion of the Ottoman Empire. Will the Americans and Europeans really go to war to keep the Turkish national leader out of a city the Turks have called their capital for half a millennium? Will the alliances of the Great War hold firm to enforce a peace settlement agreed two years ago, in which no one believes any more?
‘We are celebrating Smyrna, you must drink with us’, Kemal tells the Turkish novelist Halidé Edib at a party on the day the fire finally goes out. He raises a glass of rakı. She prefers champagne, she says. Lâtife gazes at her hero, dressed in a crisp white suit, holding court. He engages in his favourite pastime: retelling old war stories for an appreciative audience. His advisers wonder whether Lâtife might make a good wife for their bachelor leader, by now the most powerful man in Turkey.
Mustafa Kemal is no longer a man in search of a role. His destiny has arrived.
NEW YORK: ‘Mustapha Kemal has become the man of the hour, even as the Kaiser was in 1914’, declares Garvey.
Just as Wilhelm laid the foundations for a changed Europe, so Kemal is now laying the foundations for a changed world. In the next war, he says, blacks will not fight for their colonial masters as they did in the past. They will fight for themselves. Garvey sees the uncertain situation in Turkey and the Middle East as the promise of something greater: ‘We do not say a holy war; we said a race war, but a holy war may be the sign by which we shall see liberty through the race war that will follow.’
Garvey pummels the white governments of Europe and America: ‘They tell us that Kemal is a barbarian and the Turks are barbarians and cannot be allowed even to live in Europe because they burned Smyrna.’ But who are the real barbarians? In their colonial conflicts, the British bomb people from the air who have nothing but ‘sticks and stones to fight with’. Who is more civilised: the man ordering the strikes in London from the comfort of an office with thick carpets and a telephone, or the men and women under attack, screaming for their lives?
SMYRNA: Towards the end of September, intrepid Clare Sheridan, fresh off the Orient Express to Constantinople, armed with her newspaper credentials and an old petrol can filled with clay, tracks Mustafa Kemal down to his new seaside headquarters for an interview.
He says a few words about his desire for peace (if it can be achieved). To satisfy Clare’s curiosity, he affirms he is not a Bolshevik (and notes that Bolshevism will never take root in Turkey, a country in which the peasants own the land they work). He evades questions about the Armenians, simply expressing Turkish tolerance for all non-Muslims. He gets cross when Clare suggests that there are no sculptors in Turkey as in Europe (representation of the human form is banned by Islamic teaching). Rather piqued at the implication of Turkish backwardness, Kemal points out that more than a decade of continuous war may be to blame for the current state of art and culture in the country.
Sheridan produces her trump card: photographs of various busts she has done of Lenin, Trotsky and Churchill. She proposes Mustafa Kemal be her next subject. Trapped, he accepts, before adding that he can only sit for her once he is in charge in Istanbul. But that might not be for ages, Clare protests. Kemal assures her that it will come sooner than she thinks. Turkish cavalry cross over into the neutral zone around Gallipoli a few days later.
The evacuations from Smyrna continue. By October, two hundred thousand people have left. Kemal heads back to Ankara. His new love Lâtife is told to stay where she is. ‘Don’t go anywhere. Wait for me. This is an order’, Mustafa tells her. Fikriye–Kemal’s unsuitable female admirer in Ankara–is meanwhile sent to a sanatorium in Germany, so as to recover from the ravages of tuberculosis (and get her out of the way). ‘You will be well, and you will come back, my dear’, a female friend tells her. ‘Inshallah’, she responds.
BERLIN–MILAN: Kemal’s success echoes through Europe. German nationalists treat his story as a parable for their own country. ‘The man Mustafa Kemal rises and turns a seemingly helpless and unstable, disoriented and faltering mass into a unified nation’, one propagandist writes excitedly: ‘A Führer rises and shows the way’. Some admire the approach of the Turkish authorities–long before Kemal came to power–in ridding Anatolia of its potential enemies.
In Milan, Benito Mussolini declares that Turkey has now returned to Europe: ‘all attempts to contain it in Asia have failed’. British prestige in the Islamic world has been crushed. The Versailles order hangs by a thread now that Sèvres has been disembowelled. ‘All the other treaties, connected so intimately to one another, are now in peril’, he writes. The Turkish war may have been ‘peripheral’. But what if there is now a cascade of collapsing treaties? What if a revived Germany, backed by Bolshevik Russia, embarks on a similar revision of the European peace settlement through force?
Benito blames a ‘Wilsonian mentality’ for the current European mess: a frame of mind which tries to rationalise the world, to compartmentalise it into neat categories which do not exist, refusing to get to grips with the undercurrents of human emotion which govern the reality of power. ‘A peace of the sword’, he writes, would have been better than the dog’s breakfast cooked up at Versailles.
But new war now would spell ‘catastrophe for European civilisation’, declares Mussolini. ‘This is the challenge from Anatolia, illuminated by the glow of Smyrna’s conflagration’.
PARIS: As late summer runs into early autumn, strange gatherings begin to take place at André Breton’s studio on the Rue Fontaine. With the lights off, curtains drawn, eyes closed and hands outstretched around a table, Breton and his closest associates attempt to put themselves into a hypnotic trance, and from this trance to summon their inner voices to speak aloud.
Some find this easier than others. Two of Breton’s rather more competitive friends seem to be particularly adept at falling into this dreamlike state, and then murmuring suspiciously well-crafted stories from the spirit-deep, or else answering questions, in writing, put to them by the other members of the group. Sometimes things get quite noisy. One of Breton’s friends has a tendency to bang his head against the table and throw chairs around the room when under hypnosis. Simone is sent downstairs to calm the neighbours and promise not to summon any more evil spirits into the apartment block.
Breton writes up the seances in Littérature as long series of questions (from whoever happens to be leading the group that evening) and answers (from whoever happens to be in a trance):
Q: Where are you going?
A: Where they take me. (Then) Where men fall dead, fall dead like snow.
Q: Where is this country?
A: There. (Finger pointing)
Q: Is it in Europe? In Asia?
A: No.
Q: Another planet?
A: Yes.
Q: Jupiter?
A: No. The furthest one from the earth.
Q: What do you see?
A: A big blue blade… a big blue blade… rolling, rolling… (From now on Péret’s face takes on a look of ecstasy which doesn’t leave him until he wakes up. He seems astonished, he laughs uncontrollably.)
Q: What is it used for?
A: Nothing.
Q: Are there animals?
A: An egg… an egg… an egg…
Breton is excited. He is back on his own turf, adventuring into the world of the subconscious–other people’s, this time–just as he did with Soupault three summers ago.
André searches for the right phrase to describe these adventures into the lost worlds of the human mind. Like Freud, Breton considers himself an explorer after the model of Columbus rather than purely a scientist, let alone an artist. He settles on surrealism, the word Apollinaire coined back in 1917, when André was still a medical auxiliary treating shell-shocked patients with poetic imaginations more vivid than his own.
Apollinaire liked the fluidity of surrealism–a term waiting to be properly defined. André has no hesitation now in appropriating it and giving it his own definition. ‘By this word we mean a certain psychological automatism,’ Breton writes, ‘essentially the state of dreaming’–a condition it is harder than ever to distinguish from reality these days. Dada begins to seem a diversion. Tzara dismisses the whole exercise as nonsense.
In London, an American bank clerk publishes a rather depressing poem entitled The Waste Land.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: Over the first weeks of autumn, two of Vladimir Lenin’s fondest wishes are realised.
First, two steamers leave Russian waters, carrying philosophers, academics, scientists, economists–the intelligentsia Vladimir does not like–into exile in Europe. In 1920, it was Wrangel’s Whites from Crimea, sent packing, never to return. Now it is a group of people expelled not for the military risk they pose but for their dangerous ideas. Trotsky gives the expulsion a humanitarian glow. If these people had stayed in Russia, he notes, they probably would have wound up getting themselves shot as counter-revolutionaries.
But more significant is the realisation of Lenin’s other wish: to return to work. In Moscow, his apartment still smells of paint from the additional renovations carried out while he was away. The Politburo meets the day after he gets back.
The dictator seeks to pick up where he left off before his incapacity. He soon finds himself squabbling with Stalin about the future form of the Soviet state. Lenin accuses the Georgian of being a Russian nationalist, seeking to sweep all the nationalities of the former empire into the Russian Soviet republic–rather than creating a federation of Soviet republics, across Europe and Asia, as Lenin himself would prefer. Stalin is forced to concede the point. But Lenin is perplexed. The loyal Georgian seems to have grown ideas of his own in his absence. He is not so pliable as before.
Vladimir tries to get back on top of the matters which Stalin and the others have grown accustomed to managing without him. His doctors are there at every turn. Within days of his return to work, inflammation of the gums keeps Vladimir awake for three nights in a row. He is ordered to cut down his working hours to 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m, with regular days of rest. He tries to evade the rules, of course, coming to the office earlier than strictly allowed and, when his secretaries knock on the door, declaring innocently that he is ‘not working, just reading’.
Lenin’s world-famous scheming is reduced to trying to fool his doctors. He starts meetings fifteen minutes early to gain a bit more time from their regime. He brings forward Politburo meetings in the evening by half an hour to shorten his afternoon break. He always comes back from lunch with a list of comments on papers he has taken away with him, against instructions. His secretaries try to reduce stress by collecting the answers which arrive to his constant queries so he can look at them together in one go rather than in dribs and drabs. ‘Are you plotting against me?’ the impatient revolutionary asks: ‘Where are the answers to my notes?’
The question is not so innocent. Political intrigue in Moscow is reaching fever pitch. One day someone suggests to Vladimir that maybe it is time to get rid of Trotsky once and for all. Lenin suspects they have been put up to it. But on whose behalf? Stalin perhaps, or one of the other Politburo members: Zinoviev, Kamenev? Vladimir calls the idea of dropping Trotsky ‘the height of stupidity’.
But the dictator begins to sense a conspiracy forming against him. Increasingly, he feels himself out of the loop, slowly falling into the void, his authority slipping away. Who can he really trust?
MUNICH–MILAN: Adolf makes the acquaintance of a new disciple, perhaps even a new friend: a serial swindler from a good German family named Kurt Lüdecke.
Though in some ways the two men could not be more different–Lüdecke is a self-confident German who has experienced the world while Adolf is a provincial Austrian who just talks about it–they hit it off immediately. Perhaps it is the reflection of themselves they see in the other: both Kurt and Adolf lost their fathers when they were young, both have an uneasy relationship with the truth. Perhaps it is the overlap in their interests: Adolf is hungry for power, Kurt likes the thrill of risk. Perhaps it is just that each knows the other has something they lack: Adolf has a cause, Kurt has style.
Lüdecke regales Hitler with tales from his exotic past. How he gave up the cotton trade in Manchester to live as a professional gambler in France, falling in love with another man’s wife along the way. How he reached his understanding of racial theories while working in a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg during the war (thus avoiding the front, of course). How, after the great betrayal of 1918, he came up with a legally dubious scheme to sell impounded ships and surplus army aircraft in Latin America–and then treadless tyres in the Baltic. To Adolf, all this must sound like the work of a world-class operator.
Having heard the mangy field-runner give a rousing speech in Munich and deciding he is the man to save Germany, the serial swindler offers Adolf his services and his soul. As a first step, he suggests he go to Italy to make contact with the Fascists there. German radical nationalism seems to be going nowhere. It needs allies. Perhaps the dynamic Italian Benito Mussolini might be sympathetic. The Nazis have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
The serial swindler is sent off to Italy to try and meet Benito in person. (An introduction from Ludendorff is secured to help the process.) It is surprisingly easy to gain an interview. Lüdecke notes the Italian’s bitten-down nails. Mussolini seems under pressure, though he waves away the idea that he is anything other than fully in control of the situation. The German and the Italian talk about the Jews. While Benito seems just as keen a critic of the pernicious role of international finance as the German National Socialists, he is unimpressed by Lüdecke’s anti-Semitism. They talk about the status of the south Tyrol, won from Habsburg Austria–Hungary in the dying days of the war. Mussolini tells the German that the region is Italian, and must remain so despite the predominance of German-speakers. Lüdecke mentions the name Hitler. It barely registers with Benito.
The serial swindler asks the Fascist leader whether it is true that he is plotting a coup and, if so, whether the Italian King will be allowed to remain in office. Mussolini answers in French with a statement of typical forcefulness and ambiguity. ‘Nous serons l’état’, he says, ‘parce que nous le voulons!’ ‘We will be the state, because we wish it so.’
Lüdecke comes back from Italy empty-handed. But the serial swindler’s account of Mussolini’s aggressive squadristi techniques catches Hitler’s attention. There is something to this, Adolf decides: out of the beer hall and into the streets.
DEARBORN: Henry Ford’s autobiography is now published as a book and immediately enters America’s bestseller lists. Some people find it inspirational and visionary. Others find it confused. The Wall Street Journal reaffirms its support for a possible presidential bid.
ISTANBUL: ‘There is a tight-drawn, electric tension in Constantinople’, young Hemingway writes on his latest trip. He compares the mood in Istanbul to the expectation of the first ball game of the world’s series, multiplied by the tension of a horse race–the ‘Woodbine thrill’, he calls it, after Toronto’s most famous racetrack–with the addition of knowing a loved one is under the scalpel in a hospital somewhere, and you can do nothing to help. These are things the readers of the Daily Star will understand.
Ernest paints a picture of a city filled with ‘cut-throats, robbers, bandits, thugs and Levantine pirates’–all ready to begin looting just as soon as Mustafa Kemal’s armies march in. The Greeks and Armenians are busy arming themselves. The Greek owner of Hemingway’s hotel tells him, ‘I am not going to leave my life’s work here just because the French force the allies to give Constantinople to that bandit’. The European quarters of the city are engaged in ‘a sort of dance of death’–a last bacchanal in which the reputable nightclubs open at two in the morning and the disreputable ones at four. Russian refugees, worried that they will be left high and dry if the foreign powers leave, are preparing for yet another hasty exit. ‘I would hate to be Kemal,’ Hemingway writes, ‘with all the dangerous prestige of a great victory behind me and these problems ahead.’
By day, Ernest attends press briefings by the senior American representative in Istanbul, a fan of Mustafa Kemal. He hears horrible stories of what happened in Smyrna, picking up his impressions from sailors and other journalists. By night he contends with bedbugs and comes down with malarial fever.
One day, Ernest scores an interview with Kemal’s man in Istanbul, who tells him that Western fears of a massacre of Christians in the city are misplaced. He suggests reporters pay attention instead to stories of horrible violence being perpetrated against Turks by Greek troops still in Thrace, the Ottoman Empire’s European toehold. ‘That’s why we must occupy Thrace now,’ he says, ‘to protect our people.’ An armistice is agreed the next day between Kemal’s representatives and the Great Powers. In Britain, David Lloyd George, Prime Minister since 1916, is chucked out of office by his Conservative coalition partners, his war-like stance against the Turks finishing him off. Another peace conference will be held in Switzerland in a few weeks’ time. There is no doubt Kemal will get most of what he wants.
Despite not having met him, Hemingway writes a profile of Kemal, describing how he has been transformed in just a few months from a contemporary Saladin, prepared to lead the Muslim world in arms against the West, into ‘Kemal the businessman’, a deal-maker for peace. Ernest compares him to the late Michael Collins. ‘As yet his de Valera has not appeared’, he notes.
ACROSS IRELAND: The war takes a dark turn. A spirit of revenge inhabits it.
Sidelined by others who were always more soldierly than him, the man some still call ‘the President’ grows a beard. He is just a simple volunteer with no special influence, he tells Michael Collins’s successor as commander-in-chief of the national army when they meet early that autumn, just a few weeks after his rival’s death. He has not the power to make peace over the heads of the men of faith now fighting for the republic, he says. It might just be the truth.
The republican campaign returns to the old ways: assassinations and bombings. A pane of glass in the poet W. B. Yeats’s new home in Dublin is cracked by a blast targeting a nearby Free State interrogation house. But the republicans are picked off one by one. The national army grows by the thousand. The Catholic Church stands behind the provisional government, declaring it alone has God’s sanction. ‘Vanity, perhaps self-conceit, may have blinded some who think that they, and not the nation, must dictate the national policy’, reads the bishops’ statement.
De Valera is furious. The Church has got it wrong. He will not attend Mass until such time as the clergy correct themselves.
BERLIN: Albert Einstein responds to a series of written questions from Henry Brailsford, editor of the British Labour Party’s weekly magazine, about the current situation in Germany. With the decline in value of the German mark, he notes, salaries of academics are now worth one fifth of what they once were. Musicians are in dire straits. Artists are starving. Anyone with any money tries to get it out of the country. Even the spate of political murders can, in part, be blamed on personal destitution brought about by the country’s uncertain economic conditions.
And then there is the psychological factor. ‘People’s energy is sapped by the consciousness that under present conditions it is impossible to provide for the future’, Einstein writes. Without confidence in the future, people are adrift. They seek guidance from even the most extraordinary sources.
COBURG, GERMANY: A touch of squadristi flair in the Bavarian hinterland. Invited to attend a patriotic festival in Coburg, a pretty little town a couple of hundred miles to the north of Munich, Adolf decides to go all out to show that the Nazis mean business.
The name Hitler does not feature in the festival’s official programme. The list of talks on offer includes such topics as ‘New Work Methods for the Nationalist Campaign’ and ‘The Homeland Schooling Movement’. A gala planned for the end of the festival promises a short play by a well-known nationalist playwright called The Consecration of the Sword. The mangy field-runner intends to hijack this cosy get-together assembled under the patronage of a local aristocrat and turn it into a display of Nazi power.
A special train is commissioned to carry the Führer to Coburg from Munich–accompanied by his inner circle of advisers, and several hundred members of the SA with swastika armbands. Like a Soviet agitprop train, Hitler’s locomotive blazes through the Bavarian countryside covered in Nazi flags, in open defiance of the law against such provocation. There is a marching band aboard. A thirty-minute halt in Nuremberg station provides the opportunity for a nationalist sing-along.
Word of the Nazis’ impending arrival has been signalled ahead. A welcoming party awaits at the station, issuing the warning that, while SA members are free to join the festival celebrations, they are not to march through town in formation. The SA disobey and start out of the railway station through an underpass. There is a short but violent clash with workers who have gathered to show their opposition to the Nazis. The main Coburg newspaper gives the confrontation a few lines, describing it as a pitiful attempt by local socialists to disrupt the festival. Adolf and his supporters celebrate the punch-up as a great battle victory against the forces of internationalism and glory in the black eyes and sore heads suffered by the enemy. ‘After the ruthless punishment they just received,’ reports the Beobachter, ‘they’ll remember this little moment for a month.’
In his speech at the festival that evening, Hitler rails against the ‘democratic poison’ that is killing Germany. He talks about the importance of a political avant-garde, claiming that all real change throughout history comes from some kind of elite guiding the masses, rather than from the masses themselves. He calls for national rather than class consciousness to be the governing principle of society. He is dismissive of capitalists who fail to realise how crooked and corrupt capitalism has become. He pleads for the concept of the Volk–the ethno-national people of Germany–to be at the heart of building a new economy.
The local reception is positive. Hitler’s speech is amongst the best received of the festival. He uses his moment in the limelight to make his pitch for ownership of the radical nationalist movement as a whole. ‘Our symbol’, he says, pointing to the swastika, ‘is not the symbol of an association; it is a victory banner’.
The German mark crashes further. Last Christmas, one dollar bought two hundred marks. Now it buys several thousand.
PARIS: The occupation of the Ruhr is no longer an abstract matter. Military plans are well developed. Politicians compete with each other to attach their names to the scheme. The more military action is talked about, the more impossible it becomes for Paris back down from their threats to make the Germans pay by force.
‘We are living through an armistice–an unstable armistice–not a peace’, says France’s leading nationalist newspaper. Making more worthy speeches is a waste of time. The League of Nations is a ‘deformed child’: equipped with a huge tongue for the purposes of speaking, but with no arms for getting things done. If the British are too spineless to force the Germans to pay what they owe then France will have to act alone.
MOSCOW: A ripple of applause echoes through a grand state room in the Kremlin, still decorated with the gold double-headed eagle of the empire, ten gaudy chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, an empty throne at one end. The name Lenin is whispered amongst members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee–what passes for a parliament in the brave new one-party state. A small, parched figure appears through a side door. He is called up on stage. Yes, it’s him. The assembly rises to its feet.
Lenin apologises that the doctors have allowed him to speak for only twenty minutes (and no time for questions). He starts by congratulating the Red Army on entering the port of Vladivostok in Russia’s far east after the Japanese withdrawal, the last mopping-up operation of the civil war. Then he turns to domestic matters: the need to prevent abuse of the new economic policy he has instituted, the need for greater efforts in the sphere of industrialisation, his dissatisfaction with the inefficiency of the machinery of state and the ‘deluge of paper’ which he himself has done so much to create. It will take years before such things are fully worked out, Lenin admits. In the meantime, the central role of the Communist Party is essential. It is because the revolution’s promise has not yet been fully realised that its self-appointed vanguard must remain in control indefinitely.
Back at his office, Vladimir frenetically fires notes in all directions. He throws his weight behind the construction of a paper factory in Karelia: ‘If there are no special obstacles, please speed up the matter.’ He enquires about the purchase of peat-digging machines to boost Russia’s peat production and about the distribution of money for tractors and work animals in Armenia: ‘The matter should be speeded up and checked.’ He issues an order banning private conversations during Sovnarkom meetings (he needs complete calm to function). He requests an update on a new Soviet world atlas designed to show how much of the earth is controlled by the imperialists: ‘we will translate it into all languages, make it into a textbook; add supplements every two years’.
Nadya persuades him to go to the theatre to try and relax. They see a play by Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth. Vladimir leaves after the first act. Such sentimentality!
NAPLES, ITALY: Late October. A Fascist rally in the metropolis of the Italian south. The ras are growing impatient again.
Mussolini has been in negotiations with Italy’s main political leaders for months now. He has perfected the art of the bully-boy, warning the politicians of his violent henchmen, while assuring them that he personally would much rather reach a peaceful deal with them. He has tried out the same manoeuvre on the King, assuring him of his royalist (or at least not anti-royalist) inclinations while letting it be known he would be foolish to stand in the way of a Fascist role in government (and that other royals could easily replace him if he did). Appealing to people’s desire for respect and recognition, while at the same time threatening the security of their position, is a winning combination for political success. Benito knows his Machiavelli.
But the Fascist rank and file want more than just the share of power that seems to be on offer. Increasingly they want it all. They want conquest. They want Rome. Real power is there for the taking. Why not take it? To a sea of blackshirts in Naples Mussolini now proclaims himself ready. They may not have long: D’Annunzio is due to make a speech in Rome on the fourth anniversary of the armistice with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Perhaps he is about to throw his weight behind some kind of national reconciliation. That is the last thing the Fascists need.
The idea of a theatrical march on Rome has been circulating for months. Now, finally, it is put into action. Thousands of black shirts are ironed in preparation. Back in Milan, Benito strenuously attempts to give the impression that nothing dramatic lies ahead (perhaps also because he is not entirely sure it will succeed). He unplugs the phone. He goes to the theatre. He takes long drives into the countryside. He acts relaxed. (At the same time, D’Annunzio is promised a deal with his Federation of the Workers of the Sea to keep him sweet and dissuade him from taking any peremptory action which might spoil the Fascists’ plans.)
Over the next few days, post and telegraph offices are taken over in the north of Italy. Outside Rome, thousands of Fascist blackshirts assemble (though neither as many as had been hoped nor as many as are claimed). Slowly, they walk towards the city. Their leaders know the truth: they are badly armed, badly fed and cold and wet from the stormy autumn weather. A few army battalions could stop them if they wanted to. Mussolini is nowhere to be seen.
At first, the country’s political leaders cannot decide what to do. Their internal rivalries hold them back. The loyalty of the army is uncertain. Don’t test us, the generals warn. The Vatican is silent. Then, around breakfast time on the morning of 28 October 1922, the Italian premier finally grows a spine. It is agreed that the King will announce a state of emergency. In Rome, the roads are blocked with barricades and barbed wire. Telegrams are sent to government officials across the country to prepare them for the crackdown. It looks as if the Fascist bluff will be called. There is even talk of killing Mussolini. But then the King decides not to sign the order. The political collapse is total.
The following day, Benito receives the royal summons to Rome. He takes a while to reply. He wants to give the press time to organise themselves. ‘Wearing my black shirt, as a Fascist’, and claiming that there are three hundred thousand fascisti ready to follow his orders (at least ten times greater than the actual number camped outside Rome), Mussolini gets on the 8.30 p.m. sleeper from Milan, insisting that it stop wherever there is demand for a speech. As the train makes its leisurely progress through the Italian countryside, Benito gives interviews deep into the night. The blackshirts are selfless, patriotic people, he says. They seek only to give Italy a new government and then return to their families and get back to work. Mussolini promises he will restore Italy’s standing in the world. He will give the country some style.
He arrives in Rome the next morning, in bowler hat and spats, just before eleven. By the end of the day–after yet another change of clothing–he is Italy’s new constitutionally appointed leader. Planes drop Fascist manifestos from the air. There is a crush of Mussolini’s supporters around the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A flurry of Fascist-led violence breaks out in the streets. Old scores are settled. Communist Party offices are ransacked.
For many without much interest in the minutiae of politics, the mood is one of relief. The city’s florists run out of flowers to strew upon the black-shirted victors. The King, it is reported, warmly embraces Benito after he has sworn him in as premier. How different from their first encounter back in the cold spring of 1917, when Mussolini lay in a hospital bed, and the King enquired after the wounded soldier’s health.
Benito exchanges messages with Gabriele in the Vittoriale, keeping him up to date and, with an eye to history, inviting him to deliver a public statement of support of his subaltern-turned-superior. Instead, D’Annunzio makes obtuse replies and sends a copy of his wartime speeches to help Mussolini with his new duties. ‘Victory has the clear eyes of Pallas,’ Gabriele writes mysteriously; ‘do not blindfold her’. Benito responds in similar style: ‘the vigorous fascist youth which is restoring the nation’s soul will not put a blindfold on victory.’ As always, the two men dance around each other.
NEW YORK–LONDON–PARIS–DOORN–VIENNA–MOSCOW–ROSENHEIM: Around the world, people take stock of the news from Rome. It is like Fiume all over again.
The tone is mostly positive. ‘Every window was filled with cheering, some showering flowers upon the passing blackshirts,’ the New York Times reports from Italy, ‘while those in the streets saluted straight-armed from the shoulder, with hands extended towards the west.’ (The reporter notes a Fascist from Ancona who marches with a baseball bat.) Mussolini tells foreign journalists that he is their friend. He believes in the value of hard work so Italy can renew itself. ‘The country had got tired’, he explains, ‘it had been running in a groove too long.’ He seems to bring a new energy to the office of the premier. ‘Mussolini’s chin may become famous throughout the world for its squareness and force’, Americans read over their breakfast.
Benito is an instant celebrity. On the right, he is applauded. On the moderate left, he is seen by many as a force of renewal. He does not seem to quite fit in the normal spectrum of politics. In London, conservative newspapers compare him to Garibaldi, the nineteenth-century unifier of Italy. Meanwhile, the liberal Manchester Guardian calls him a ‘revolutionary’ and an ‘apostle of national regeneration’, immediately bracketing him with de Valera and Mustafa Kemal. A Swiss newspaper applauds his ‘extraordinary temperament, exceptional organisational strength and marvellous ability to dominate’.
In Paris, despite public concern about just how far Mussolini’s revanchist attitudes will take him–does he really want to take back Nice?–Action française welcomes Benito’s power grab as a sign of Europe’s nationalist turn. Nationalism, writes the editor, is an ‘irresistible reality’, even if the Continent’s liberal elites don’t like it and the mainstream media don’t understand it: ‘The anti-democratic and anti-parliamentary success of Italian fascism won’t surprise any reader of Action française, but they will horrify the readers of the so-called “big” newspapers.’ The revolt against liberal orthodoxy has finally arrived. Only in Moscow is the tone more critical. The newspapers note Mussolini’s past as a socialist, suggesting that social democrats and Fascists are cut from the same cloth.
In Vienna, Sigmund Freud is both fascinated and horrified by the super-energetic Italian. In Doorn, Wilhelm compares the nervous Germans with the ballsy Italians. ‘What on earth are all those field marshals, generals, staff officers doing?’ the Kaiser asks. ‘What is keeping them?’ Over the Alps in Bavaria, Hitler is cautious. The Italian model should be handled with care, the Völkischer Beobachter eventually declares. The ideology of Italian fascism is a muddle. Moreover, ‘it is not the shadow of the Italian Blackshirts coming down off the Brenner Pass’, but rather ‘the words of Hitler that are inspiring German hearts’. Nonetheless, the comparison is irresistible. ‘We have a Mussolini in Bavaria’, announces a party hack at an event a few days later: ‘his name is Adolf Hitler.’
ADRIANOPLE–ISTANBUL: The exodus continues. ‘In a never-ending, staggering march the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia’, Ernest writes, on his way back to Paris from the east.
Shortly afterwards, another refugee leaves his homeland quite unobserved. Sultan Vahdettin, formally shorn of his political role by Ankara, decides Istanbul is no longer safe. The palace has emptied. He tries to pretend everything is normal when the British Ambassador comes to visit, making excuses for the absence of staff. He makes his own exit under a rainy sky a few days later. Two ambulances take the Sultan the short distance to the Bosphorus (one gets a puncture on the way). A British boat takes him into exile. It sets sail for Malta a little before nine in the morning.
The Sultan is gone. His heir, a keen nationalist and quite capable painter, is made Caliph, leader of the world’s Muslims, a purely religious post. The Ottoman Empire has ceased to exist.
WASHINGTON DC: The anti-lynching bill dies on the Senate floor, killed by a filibuster of Southern Democrats. Activists blame Republicans for not pushing the matter hard enough. Republicans declare the numbers were not there and the bill’s constitutionality was in doubt.
Garvey blames the NAACP. The organisation is, he says, ‘nothing else but the trick of the white man to control the rising ambition of the Negro’. Hopes of democratic liberation can never be achieved in white America.
DOORN: A letter arrives from England from a Mrs Frances Pelly, who claims skill as a fortune-teller. She has looked into Wilhelm’s future, she writes. She sees flowers and warns him to look after the seeds.
The Kaiser’s entourage are not clear whether the message is intended as a good or bad omen. Are the flowers celebratory or funerary? Wilhelm has no doubts. He interprets the letter as meaning that his second marriage–symbolised by flowers, don’t you see?–brings with it the prospect of additional positive developments–seeds, obviously!–which can only mean his return to power in Germany. Italy has led the way. ‘Fascism will take over in Germany as well’, Wilhelm insists confidently; ‘that’s how we’ll get the monarchy back.’
The next day, a private wedding ceremony takes place at Huis Doorn. The world’s paparazzi are kept at a safe distance. Some formal press photographs are released instead. Hermine wears a knowing expression and a mauve dress of her husband’s design. She leans towards the Kaiser proprietorially. Wilhelm, his face all steely self-righteousness, chooses to be photographed in the uniform he wore crossing into Holland in 1918. This is to show that he is still at war, Wilhelm says by way of explanation. It is not long before Hermine starts taking long trips back to Germany, leaving her husband to himself.
MOSCOW: Vladimir speaks to a Comintern gathering, in German. One of his comrades from the train in 1917 prompts him with the right German word when he cannot find it.
He blames the famine on the civil war. The Soviet state has been guilty of mistakes, but he blames them on sabotage, poor education and the machinery of state inherited from the Tsars. Anyhow, ‘I don’t think it will be an exaggeration to repeat that the foolish things we have done are nothing compared with those done in concert by the capitalist countries’, the Versailles Treaty in particular. He laughs off the notion that there is anything to worry about with all the money circulating in Russia now: ‘The noughts can always be crossed out.’ Lenin even recasts Benito’s coup as good news: ‘this will be very useful’, he believes, a wake-up call to the Italian proletariat. He declares the prospects for world revolution as ‘not only good, but excellent’. A bravura performance. Lenin’s shirt is drenched in sweat. He cannot remember a word he has said.
Vladimir tries to convince his colleagues, Russia and the world that all is well. He is getting better, he is in charge. He gives interviews to foreign journalists, with the questions submitted in advance. Those who have not met him before think he is fine; others see a changed man. Lenin’s once-overflowing natural dynamism–the revolutionary in hobnail boots stomping around Zurich as if racing to some goal no one else can quite see–now seems forced: it is an act. His mind is more brittle than it used to be. It requires long prompting to get to where it needs to go. Lenin is quickly irritated by criticism that his policies to allow private trade to return have allowed a new class of small-time merchants to emerge in Russia, the so-called NEP-men, ‘New Economic Policy-men’. Only when talk turns to the subject of Mussolini does a flash of the old dog’s wit return. ‘A merry story’, Vladimir chuckles.
A week later, he addresses a meeting at the Bolshoi. True socialism, he declares, ‘is no longer a matter of the distant future, or an abstract picture, or an icon’ but something which is now appearing in everyday life. But his words are hollow. His delivery is hesitant.
Lenin’s doctors are never far away. The headaches are coming back. In Politburo meetings, Lenin loses his train of thought and repeats himself. Amongst the inner circle, Vladimir is fooling no one but himself. Around the Politburo table, his comrades look at him and see a man who is no longer the Lenin they used to know. Properly speaking, he is not Lenin at all.
He is becoming plain old Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov again, a man like any other. A man who loses his temper too much. A man a little prone to ranting when things are not going his way. A man who, one day, will do what all men do eventually.
His colleagues look at him with a mixture of pity, respect, fear, trepidation–and anticipation.
BARCELONA, SPAIN–PARIS, FRANCE: In town for the opening of an exhibition by his friend Francis Picabia–Tristan Tzara’s host in 1920–André Breton gives a talk to a local group of Dadaists. They are eager to hear from one of the movement’s figureheads. They are disappointed. With great solemnity, André tells them that, after a short illness, Dada is now dead. They look at each other in horror, not sure what to make of it. Is he out-Dadaing Dada? Or is he serious?
The next day there is a real death in the family. Two doctors are called to the Paris sickbed of author and one-time Breton supporter Marcel Proust. One of them is the neurologist Babinski, Breton’s former teacher, Freud’s colleague and Proust’s doctor on matters neurological. Obsessed with the vagaries of memory and mind, Marcel has been consulting him on and off since 1918. Proust’s sister asks for the doctor’s reassurance. Is everything being done to cure Marcel’s bronchitis? Babinski’s answer is blunt: ‘You must be brave’, he says. ‘It is all over.’
The American Dadaist photographer Man Ray–another soul who has found that Paris is the place to be for art and life–takes a picture of Proust on his deathbed. Vladimir Mayakovsky, who is in Paris visiting the impresario Diaghilev, Picasso and a few others, attends his funeral. So does James Joyce.
MARSEILLES, FRANCE: For six weeks, the sea will be Albert and Elsa Einstein’s daily view. And not the cold Baltic, but the warm Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. In the autumn, Albert takes a leave of absence from his post in Germany, and heads east at the invitation of a publishing house in Japan. They consider him one of the two most significant people alive, the other being Lenin, who is unavailable.
Given the situation in Germany, the trip could not have come at a better time. Albert will be gone for months. As the Japanese ship heads southward towards Suez and a warmer sun begins to beat down on him, Albert can feel, as he puts it, his ego and his id becoming reacquainted with one another. On board, he reads philosophy. One morning, he sketches the Italian volcano of Stromboli in his travel diary. He muses on the relationship between the climate in which a people live and their intellectual life. He spots sharks off the coast of Africa.
Though travelling on a Swiss passport, Einstein is everywhere counted a German. (‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’ is played whenever the Kitano Maru comes into port; German associations open their doors to him to show off their famous countryman.) But Chaim Weizmann ensures that Albert’s trip is useful to the Zionist cause as well. In Singapore, a banquet is given by the city’s business community, with a Malaysian band playing Viennese waltzes and American jazz in, as Albert notes, ‘the European schmaltzy coffee-house style’. At the end of the evening, an appeal is made for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Hong Kong, where Einstein notes the segregation of Europeans and Chinese in the funicular railway journey to The Peak, he visits the Jewish clubhouse, where he feels suddenly connected to a Middle Eastern tradition hardly present in Europe. ‘A sense of belonging together is strong’, he writes.
In November, they reach Japan. Einstein visits the temples and the Kabuki theatres, and lectures about relativity. He is the centre of attention at the Tokyo chrysanthemum festival, where he is accosted by a Japanese admiral in full uniform. ‘I admire you’, the admiral tells the most famous man on the planet before respectfully withdrawing. In Osaka, Albert speaks in front of over two thousand. He takes the train to Hiroshima–a name he will recall in horror in 1945–and hikes on nearby Miyajima island. Albert immerses himself in Japanese culture. He visits poets and artists. He is particularly fascinated by Japanese music–so different from that of Europe–and by its stylised interpretations of birdsong or the beating of the waves. The German embassy follows the visit closely, hoping it will foster more positive political and economic relations. If Germany is to be frozen out by its neighbours in Western Europe, it must search for friendship elsewhere. In Japan, an apparent victor in the Great War, there is some sympathy with the German predicament. Japan, a major power, but a late arrival on the international scene, is also facing a sort of union of Western powers seemingly arrayed against it.
While in Japan, in December, Einstein receives confirmation from Stockholm: at long last, he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Better late than never. He is part of the establishment now. The Swedish Academy awards the prize retrospectively for the year 1921, to be handed out in 1922 alongside another award for the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. (Even then, the Academy tries to avoid the wrath of anti-relativists by awarding Albert his prize not for his theory of relativity but for a quite different contribution: the law of photoelectric effect.) There is a brief diplomatic tussle in Stockholm when the Swiss and German Ambassadors, both claiming Einstein as their own, demand the honour of representing him at the prize-giving ceremony.
The whole Nobel saga leaves a bitter taste for Albert. But the money will be welcome. With the German exchange rate as it is, the prize is worth fifty times all Einstein’s German salaries combined. As per his divorce agreement with Mileva, the money will go to the children.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND: Ernest Hemingway is off again. Switzerland, this time, to cover the latest international diplomacy: negotiations on a final deal with the Turks, now Kemal is in charge.
There is plenty of bluster and grandstanding on display. The world has grown familiar with it all. İsmet Pasha, the Turkish representative at the conference, takes a leaf out of Trotsky’s playbook, pretending to be deaf when a subject comes up which he does not want to engage with and playing for time. The British, having dumped the Greeks, petulantly threaten to storm out of proceedings unless they get what they want, which is access to the Turkish Straits and control of the oil town of Mosul. The French talk about the historic role of France in the Near East–no change there. A delegation from Moscow turns up late and, ever conscious of the free publicity available whenever a few hundred journalists are gathered in one place and bored out of their minds, kicks up a fuss about not being invited for the entire conference. The Italians speechify at length about their historic rights to the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean, making clear their intention to hang on to them whatever anyone else might think.
Hemingway, by now the seasoned foreign correspondent, tries to gather what he can. (Later he writes a scathing poem: ‘They All Made Peace–What is Peace?’) One evening he runs into İsmet Pasha in a jazz bar in Montreux, busily scoffing cakes, drinking tea and joking in bad French with the waitress. Another day he is summoned, along with the rest of the hungry press pack, to an audience with Italy’s new leader. Mussolini takes a theatrically long time to look up from the book he is reading before acknowledging the existence of anyone else in the room. Such is the choreography of power. Hemingway later identifies Benito’s book as a French–English dictionary held upside down–and begins to wonder whether the half-crazy Gabriele D’Annunzio might be the better option for Italy. He is annoyed to discover that his rival Clare Sheridan secures a private interview with Benito and accepts an invitation to follow him to Rome.
Ernest is getting bored. When can he get back to being a writer? Or at least have some decent fun? ‘HUSTLE DOWN HERE SOON’, he telegraphs to Hadley, left back in Paris. She does. Before travelling down to Switzerland Hadley packs up a suitcase with everything she will need–riding breeches for the skiing they will do, and so forth. At the last minute, she decides to pack a smaller valise with her husband’s manuscripts–his unfinished novel, his short stories and his poems–so that he can work on them in the mountains. She so wants to be the good, supportive wife, even if Ernest is a bit of a beast sometimes. Then, on the platform at the Gare de Lyon, the suitcase is gone.
LONDON–DUNDEE–CANNES, FRANCE: It is that season of British politics when MPs return to their constituencies to seek the renewal of their mandate, and at last the people’s voice is heard above the braying of the parliamentarians. Having got rid of that old Welshman Lloyd George, the Conservatives are now in power and expect the voters to confirm it. The venerable Liberal Party, of which Winston is one of the leading figures, is divided. The Labour Party, barely twenty years old, is growing stronger and stronger, drawing off Liberal support in industrial constituencies across the country.
Winston is sick in bed in his London home following an operation for appendicitis. Clementine is up in Dundee campaigning on his behalf, with their seven-week-old baby in tow. It is several days before he is well enough to join her. He is not his normal, ebullient self. Some see Winston as yesterday’s man, from yesterday’s party–and a warmonger to boot. On election day he comes in fourth behind a Scottish Prohibitionist, the Labour candidate and a fellow Liberal. Nationally, the Conservatives are triumphant. Labour win four million votes and one hundred seats in parliament. They have become the main opposition party. Winston is bereft.
‘What bloody shits the Dundeans must be’, fumes T. E. Lawrence in a private letter to a friend, angry at the summary ejection of that great titan Churchill. Winston tries to be more forgiving. ‘If you saw the kind of lives the Dundee folk have to live, you would admit they have many excuses’, he writes. No one quite knows what the former Colonial Secretary will do next. One society lady tells everyone she knows that he is going to spend four months recuperating in Rome, where the British embassy is said to have rather good tennis courts. An immediate return to politics is not on the cards. ‘Mr Churchill has had as many lives as the proverbial cat’, notes the Daily Mail, ‘but the indictment against him is a long one.’
In the end, Winston decides to go to France, where he has always felt himself at home. Clementine and Winston rent the villa Le Rêve d’Or, near Cannes, for six months. Before they go, Winston pays a visit to Buckingham Palace to see the King. ‘His Majesty was very sorry about the Dundee election’, the King’s secretary writes to Winston afterwards. ‘The Scotch electorate is rather an incomprehensible body!’
Winston Churchill is out. Gone, but not forgotten.
DUBLIN: The republican campaign, de Valera knows, is already lost. Militarily, the IRA are weak and isolated, constantly on the run. Politically, they are bereft. Assassinations are a dead end. ‘The policy of an eye for an eye is not going to win the people to us’, he writes in a letter to the IRA’s military leadership, ‘and without the people we can never win.’
The Free State comes into official existence in December. (Yeats is made a Senator.) Its leaders are determined to end Ireland’s civil war by whatever means. The time for half-measures, pity or hope is gone. Four Irishmen–the leaders of the Four Courts’ occupation–are shot by firing squad in an Irish prison, on the orders of an Irish cabinet.
One of the men shot was best man at the wedding of one of those who gives the order. Such wounds cut deep.
MOSCOW–GORKI: One day in late November: Lenin spends five minutes in his office and dictates three letters down the telephone line. Then he collapses in the corridor. His doctors tell him he must rest for a week at least. He comes back to the office the same evening.
The next day he is depressed. His legs feel weak. He receives medication from abroad. The doses are increased. A week or so later he goes to Gorki, taking his papers with him. He is there for five days. He sits on the terrace in a fur coat, sad and silent. He is having paralytic attacks every day. His limbs feel heavy. Over the telephone from Gorki, Vladimir issues new rules for the Politburo, to try to ensure that they do not meet without him, and that decisions are not taken late at night, when his health will not permit him to attend. He tries to follow up on a row he has been having with Stalin about rival Communist factions in Georgia.
Back in Moscow in the middle of December, Vladimir Lenin dictates a message over the telephone: ‘Owing to a recurrence of my illness I must wind up all political work and take a holiday again’. His writing becomes illegible. A few days later, he has another stroke. Lenin is ordered by his colleagues in the Politburo–the dictator is ordered–to take a complete rest this time. Comrade Stalin is put in charge of his medical regime. Its primary rule is isolation.
MUNICH: A mania has taken hold of him. One night in November Adolf gives speeches in five different beer halls. In December, he appears in ten different venues over a period of four hours talking on the same theme: Jews, Marxists and other gravediggers of the Reich. Adolf is a creature of the night.
His hyperactivity pays off. His name starts to crop up in Italian diplomatic correspondence. Hitler’s growing celebrity draws the Duke of Anhalt, a young and rather impressionable aristocrat, to see him in action. (The Duke, unused to being jostled by the sweaty crowds of a beer hall, soon makes a getaway in his white Mercedes.) In Berlin, rumours swirl that Henry Ford is now funding the Nazis. (The New York Times reports that there is a portrait of Ford in Hitler’s study.) It is surely a backhanded compliment that the party has now been banned in large parts of Germany. Adolf claims there is a price on his head.
An American military attaché is sent to Munich to check up on the situation. He finds himself having an afternoon tête-à-tête with Adolf, eager for the chance to get his message out. Suiting his argument to his audience, Hitler presents the Nazi movement as fully dedicated to the payment of reasonable reparations–once a national dictatorship has been brought to power in Germany to defend the country against Bolshevism, hopefully with American financial help. Not entirely convinced, the attaché asks an old German friend to check up on Hitler at one of his events–to see whether the afternoon and evening versions match.
The tall German who now turns up at the attaché’s request to see Hitler speak is certainly a cut above Lüdecke. At Harvard, he entertained rich Americans on the pianoforte, and crossed paths with both the red-hot revolutionary John Reed and the author of The Waste Land. During the war he ran a fashionable art shop in New York. He is on nodding terms with Franklin Roosevelt from his luncheons at the Harvard Club and claims both Charlie Chaplin and Henry Ford as former clients. He finds his old German homeland rather depressing these days. But in Adolf Hitler, he likes what he sees: a common man able to give the masses something to believe in. He does not seem to mind Hitler’s rancid anti-Semitism. These are just words, after all.
The tall German introduces himself to the former field-runner after the talk. His friends call him Putzi. His real name is Ernst Hanfstaengl.
ROME: Around eight in the evening, a messenger arrives at Clare Sheridan’s room in the Grand Hotel. Benito Mussolini will see her for a private interview.
There are the remains of a light meal on the table. He does not eat much, Benito explains, pushing the plate away. His expression is one of cold disdain, as if the world bores him. Clare notes that his room is filled with photographs, of himself. Benito talks grandiosely about his origins, his disillusionment with socialism during the war, and his devil-may-care attitude towards death. He offers to give Clare a Fascist uniform for her seven-year-old son. The black shirt and the death’s head emblem, he explains, will teach him to despise death. His own heart is like a desert, he says. It is the only way for a leader to live, he rhapsodises: lonely, pure and strong. The only thing that means anything to him now is ‘le pouvoir’–‘power’. As he says this, he clenches his jaw and looks Clare long and hard in the eyes. The next night, he dares to kiss her hand. He seems determined to seduce her.
Clare suspects she is under Italian police surveillance during her time in Rome. The British Secret Intelligence Service considers her a person of interest too. Not much spying is required for the Rome station to make its report to London. At a party thrown for Clare by an Italian noblewoman, she publicly declaims the advantages of Bolshevism and free love in particular. Another night, in a restaurant where the British Ambassador is also dining she talks loudly–wishing to be overheard, clearly–about how Benito Mussolini has converted her from Bolshevism to fascism. She is already hard at work making a bust of the Fascist leader–for posterity, she claims.
The commission does not work out. Mussolini decides he has told Clare too much. She rejects his violent advances. He tells her not to write anything about him. He writes her a note in French asking her to return any preliminary work she has done on his bust. ‘J’aime pas les monuments faits aux vivants’, he writes, ‘leur résultat est de veillir’–‘I do not like monuments of the living; it makes them look old.’ Clare decides she does not like Italy, after all.
VIENNA: The work of Sigmund Freud is stopped by news from Egypt: the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. ‘Such important things and so tangible’, he writes to a friend in mid-December.
At home, things are rather less exciting. ‘Our money is stable and worth nothing’, Freud writes to his nephew Sam. ‘Vienna is left quiet and lonely. All eyes are turned to Germany and the impending collapse there’. To Manchester Freud sends a photograph of himself with his latest grandson. From London he orders the latest volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which psychoanalysis is fully detailed for the first time.
MOSCOW: Vladimir dictates a note to his wife Nadya, to be sent to Comrade Trotsky, thanking him for his recent support in the Politburo (against a position taken by Stalin). He begs Leon to continue such work. Finally, Lenin and Trotsky seem to be moving closer together again.
Stalin gets wind of Vladimir’s actions. Furious, he rings up Nadya. He accuses her of going against the express wishes of the party that Lenin be isolated from politics from now on. She is sticking her nose in where it is not wanted. She is risking her own husband’s health. Nadya is deeply upset at such treatment. She does not dare tell her husband what Stalin has said.
The impatient revolutionary is truly impatient again–desperate to get his thoughts on paper before it is too late, before the Politburo cabal takes over everything. It feels like that hurried departure from Zurich five years ago. So much to do. So little time. So many mistakes of others to be corrected. That sense of being the only man with the right answers–and yet far away from getting them through to where they matter.
He can only work in short bursts. He starts dictating a series of new notes to his secretary. He orders that they be kept strictly confidential. They are not. Stalin commands that the notes be burned. A new directive is issued limiting Lenin to five to ten minutes of dictation each day.
LAUSANNE: There is still no agreed draft treaty on the horizon. The victors of the Great War grow impatient. İsmet Pasha holds firm. He quotes Voltaire. The West has interfered with Turkey’s national development for centuries, he says. That must now stop. Only full sovereignty will do. No special rights for foreigners on Turkish soil. No foreign oversight of national finances, railways or waterways.
Behind each abstract term raised for discussion–nation, state, citizen, rights–lie the hopes and interests of hundreds of thousands of huddled Greeks and Turks on either side of the Aegean Sea, fearful for their future as a minority in someone else’s country. How can the problem be solved? An extraordinary solution is discussed: a compulsory trans-Aegean population exchange. Anatolia’s remaining Greeks will be swapped for northern Greece’s Muslims, ethnic cleansing sanctified by treaty and codified in law. The British Foreign Secretary calls it ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution’. But who wants to guarantee the rights of a Greek minority in Turkey, or a Muslim minority in Greece? And why should either state accept the possibility of an enemy people residing in its midst?
As the year winds down, conversation moves from the conference table to the dining room. The head of the Russian delegation in Lausanne sweet-talks the Scandinavians and the Americans over caviar and vodka, discussing painting, literature and other countries’ politics. ‘Mussolini’, Chicherin says, ‘has a passion, not a program’. The Italians throw a dinner party at which İsmet Pasha indulges in his taste for champagne. But the Turks remain as obstinate as ever. ‘You remind me of nothing so much as a music box’, the British Foreign Secretary tells İsmet Pasha one day: ‘you play the same old tune day after day until we are heartily sick of it–sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.’
The holiday break is cancelled. The diplomats and politicians struggle on.
MOJI, JAPAN–BERLIN: The Nobel laureate Albert Einstein has another photograph taken of him. It must be the ten thousandth picture, he calculates. In Moji, he plays the violin at a children’s Christmas party.
WASHINGTON DC: Woodrow instructs Dr Grayson in the pronunciation of the latest Italian word he has learned. The middle syllable, he insists, should be pronounced like ‘cheese’. ‘Fas-chees-ti’, he repeats, for his doctor’s edification. Has Grayson had time to study the photographs of Mussolini’s face, he asks? Woodrow has already drawn his own conclusions. ‘Shifty’, he decides.
MOSCOW: On the last day of the year, a new state officially comes into being: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As a consequence of war, disease and famine there are ten million fewer people in the Soviet Union than there were on the same territory in 1917.