BRESLAU, SILESIA, GERMANY: Rosa writes her usual letters to her friends. She tells them about a fuchsia plant which blossomed for a second time in October. She fulminates against the spineless German Social Democrats. How pathetic they have been to not take advantage of the sailors’ mutiny in Wilhelmshaven over the summer! How weak in their response to the government crackdown which followed! Is the Russian proletariat to be left to ‘bleed to death’, she asks?
But she believes in the inevitability of history. ‘Lenin and his people will not of course be able to win out against the insuperable tangle of chaos’, she writes, ‘but their attempt, by itself, stands as a deed of world-historical significance.’ What Lenin has started on the fringes of the capitalist system–in backward Russia–will inevitably spread to Britain, France and Germany, the only places where the struggle for world revolution can finally be won. ‘In a few years, everything, all around, will have to change’, she explains; ‘the more the general bankruptcy takes on gigantic dimensions and steadily persists, the more it will become obvious in an elementary way that appropriate measures must be taken against it.’
History is taking its course, she tells herself. It must be observed, with ‘the calmness of a research scientist’.
BERLIN: Albert Einstein writes to a friend. ‘Would it not be good for the world if degenerate Europe were to wreck itself totally?’ he asks. ‘All of our exalted technological progress, civilisation for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.’ The Chinese, he says, would do a better job.
He survives on food parcels sent from Switzerland (to which he is entitled as a Swiss citizen). On Thursdays, he lectures on statistical mechanics and the latest theories from the world of physics. Amongst the tiny group of European intellectuals familiar with reports of his work, Einstein is either the budding prophet of a new philosophical order or a dangerous charlatan, another harbinger of the universal derangement of society. To most of the world, he is an unknown quantity. His name means nothing.
PETROGRAD: Lenin and his closest allies work day and night at the Smolny to secure control of what remains of the Russian state. It is an uphill struggle. They have never really run anything before. Most are writers and professional revolutionaries, with backgrounds in Marxist theory and Siberian exile. The ministries are resistant to such freelancing outsiders.
One day, the old state will be smashed, of course. But first, it must be mastered. The secretive habits of revolutionaries in exile are not designed for smooth and efficient government. They have no cash. Lenin wires to Stockholm: ‘Urgently find and send here three highly skilled accountants to work on reform of the banks. Knowledge of Russian is not essential. Fix their remuneration yourself in accordance with local conditions.’
The Smolny is a tip. Trotsky’s wife notes Lenin’s dirty collar and reminds his sister to get him a new one. Everyone eats and sleeps irregularly. A cleaner catches a furtive figure helping himself to bread and herring in the Smolny canteen late one night. ‘I felt very hungry, you know’, Vladimir says sheepishly when challenged. The impatient revolutionary’s first official automobile is stolen from outside the Smolny’s front gate by members of the fire brigade hoping to sell it across the border in Finland. Are the Bolsheviks in power or are they merely squatting?
In such a hothouse atmosphere, relationships are forged and broken in an instant. One day, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin arrive at the same time to a meeting of Lenin’s cabinet–the Sovnarkom–to hear the sound of a lusty twenty-nine-year-old sailor seducing the beautiful forty-six-year-old Alexandra Kollontai (an old associate of Lenin, and leading expert on the relationship of sex and love to socialism). Hearing the muffled sounds of amorous embrace, Joseph nudges Leon: ‘That’s Kollontai! That’s Kollontai!’ Trotsky is not amused by such backwater crudeness. ‘That’s their affair’, he snaps back unsmilingly. Mutual prejudices are re-enforced. Trotsky is a cosmopolitan intellectual, who speaks several languages effortlessly and is conversant in all the latest literary debates. Stalin speaks even Russian with a Georgian accent. His mother, embarrassingly enough, does not speak the language at all. The Georgian bank-robber overcompensates with a dose of Russian chauvinism as a result.
A flurry of proclamations declare an eight-hour work day, the right of workers to oversee the management of their workshops and factories, the nationalisation of the banks, the removal of religious privilege, the equalisation of pay for intellectual workers and labourers. Whether any of these will become reality is quite unclear. Petrograd is a revolutionary island; Russia is another country. Workers are one thing; peasants quite different. Vladimir and Leon work as one, with offices at either end of a long corridor in the Smolny. A young sailor runs with messages between them. Sometimes they use the telephone. They correct each other’s texts. Several times a day Leon strides up the corridor to see Vladimir personally. Lenin jokingly suggests he get a bicycle for the journey.
Leon does not take his work as commissar for foreign affairs entirely seriously. ‘What diplomatic work are we apt to have?’ he asks one comrade. ‘I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world, and then shut up shop.’ Worldwide revolution will do the job for him. John Reed joins the Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda to help the process. A more junior official is sent to the German-held citadel of Brest-Litovsk to negotiate an armistice with the representatives of Germany and her allies. Leon prefers to stay in Petrograd, where he can exercise a more freewheeling influence on events. He sends out radio messages exhorting the world to revolution, to counter the critical ones that are being broadcast from the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
There is a distinct turn to dictatorial methods even in these first weeks. The ends justify the means. ‘As soon as the new order becomes consolidated, all administrative pressure on the press will be terminated’, it is promised. In the meantime, opposition newspapers are deemed counter-revolutionary. The expansive theory of all power to the Soviets is honoured in principle. But the practical reality is that decision-making authority lies increasingly in small committees–or, to be precise, in an exclusively Bolshevik cabal at the very top. The line between state and party is blurred. Theory and practice collide.
Lenin answers his critics with platitudes. ‘Socialism cannot be decreed from above’, he says comfortingly; ‘living, creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.’ And yet formalities cannot be observed right now: any delay would be a disaster. He wonders whether calling the Constituent Assembly–long promised by everyone including the Bolsheviks as the sovereign body to choose a government for the Russian people–is such a good idea at this particular juncture. Alarmingly, elections show the Socialist Revolutionaries are far more popular across the country than the Bolsheviks.
Vladimir appoints a thin and gloomy Pole with shifty grey eyes and an intellectual’s beard to run a new security outfit to fight against the spies and saboteurs he imagines everywhere. He calls it the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption–or Cheka, for short. ‘The bourgeoisie are prepared to commit the most heinous crimes; they are bribing the outcast and degraded elements of society and plying them with drink to use them in riots’. Such things must be stopped.
The impatient revolutionary applies his personal experience in other matters of essential importance. Library policy, for example. ‘The following changes, based on principles long practised in the free countries of the West, especially Switzerland and the United States, must be made immediately and unconditionally’, Lenin writes: networks to exchange books must be introduced (particularly with Finland and Sweden); forwarding books between libraries must be made free; libraries should be open from eight in the morning to eleven at night. In other words, like Zurich–but better.
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI: Riding around in squad cars, chasing ambulances, getting ‘the latest dope’, describing almost anything as ‘jazzy’, chatting man-to-man with hard-bit
ten police officers who have seen it all–this is the life!
Within a few weeks of starting as a cub reporter with the Kansas City Star–a job acquired with Uncle Tyler’s help, the Chicago Tribune firmly forgotten–Ernest, barely eighteen years of age, has reported on a conference of black religious leaders, talked his way into the trust of an American army captain to enquire about confidential troop movements, made friends with a guy called Ted fresh back from France, and become the mascot of the local police. ‘All cops love me like a brotherhood’, Ernest writes excitedly to his sister Marcelline.
And he has other news a few days later. ‘I intend to enlist in the Canadian Army soon’, Ernest scribbles to his sister in early November, in strictest confidence: ‘Honest kid I cant stay out much longer’. It takes just three months, he explains, from signing up to arriving in France. He has already discussed the whole thing with his friends at the Canadian recruitment office. They are, Ernest writes, ‘the best fighters in the world, and our troops are not to be spoken of in the same breath’. He feels his place is with them. ‘I may wait until the summer is over’, he explains, ‘but believe me I will go not because of any love of gold braid glory etc. but because I couldn’t face anybody after the war and not have been in it.’
A week later Ernest Hemingway signs up with the Missouri National Guard and uses a large portion of his reporter’s salary to buy himself a second-hand khaki uniform and an overcoat for training in the woods outside the city (‘we marched and skirmished and had bayonet charges and sent out spies and all’). ‘We will get our winter uniforms soon’, Ernest reassures his parents, ‘and then I will get snapped and send to you’.
One night in December, Ernest spots an unusual sight at Kansas City railway station: three train-cars full of black American soldiers sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in the Houston riots that summer.
JERUSALEM, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: After several weeks of fighting nearby, in mid-December the British receive the surrender of the Holy City, ending centuries of Ottoman rule. Where the Kaiser rode in on horseback on a state visit nearly twenty years before, the British General Allenby now enters Jerusalem on foot. The event is filmed. Allenby makes a short proclamation. It is then read out to the population of the city in the languages spoken there: Arabic, Hebrew, French, Italian, Greek and Russian.
‘A Christmas present to the British people’, they call it in London, particularly welcome after the bloody grind of news from Flanders and the narrowly averted disaster at Caporetto. ‘Jews Here Jubilant’, runs the headline in the New York Times. It is only a few weeks since the British declared their support, in principle, for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Now they run the place.
On a cold Sunday in Vienna, Freud is in a rotten mood–angry at Germany for the war (he warns he may never go there again), angry at himself for a bad bout of writer’s block, frustrated that the latest edition of his psychoanalytic journal cannot be circulated for lack of wrapping paper, and pessimistic about the future. ‘The only thing that gives me any pleasure’, he writes, ‘is the capture of Jerusalem, and the British experiment with the chosen people.’
In Istanbul, there is horror. Mecca, Medina and Baghdad have already fallen. Now Jerusalem. How long can the Ottoman Empire and its Sultan–who doubles as Islam’s Caliph–survive this shame? The triumvirate of pashas who run the empire–Grand Vizier Talaat, Navy Minister Djemal and War Minister Enver–are downcast. They entered this war on the German side–even to the point of accepting German army commanders–in order to reunite the Turkic peoples of the world (Enver’s particular dream), and to save the empire. They might end up ruining it. Djemal is reported to be in tears.
A fourth man, a general named Mustafa Kemal–the man who defeated Winston’s grand plans at Gallipoli and is now a Turkish national hero–is plunged into despair. He paces up and down in his suite at the Pera Palace hotel in Istanbul, where he is taking a period of leave after a bruising run-in with his German superior officer (personally he has always preferred the French). There are reports that Kemal went to see Enver after the Jerusalem debacle to remonstrate against the management of the war and that things got so heated that both men drew their guns.
To calm him down, War Minister Enver offers Kemal a place on a diplomatic trip to Europe, accompanying the Sultan’s younger brother and heir apparent, Crown Prince Vahdettin, on a trip to visit the German Kaiser. Kemal’s initial impression of the fifty-six-year-old Ottoman Prince is unpromising: he seems a nice enough man, but a little unsure what day it is and perhaps in some kind of trance. The first stage of the trip to Europe continues in that vein. A communications cock-up in Istanbul means that when the imperial delegation arrive in Vienna there is no one there to greet them, and the party are forced to sleep on board their stationary train.
Things get better in Bad Kreuznach, where Wilhelm welcomes Mustafa Kemal as the hero of Gallipoli and his visit is reported in the German papers. He goes to see Strassburg, where he is embarrassed to be asked whether the gruesome stories of the mass deportation and starvation of the empire’s Armenian population–allegedly ordered from the top–are true. He breaks away from the imperial party to explore a little bit of the front line by himself, climbing a tree to get a better view. He concludes the Germans cannot be relied upon to win the war.
BREST-LITOVSK: The Germans and Austrians anticipate peace negotiations with the Russians along traditional lines, cementing their military triumph in the east on terms of their choosing. The Bolsheviks see the negotiations rather differently: as an opportunity to propagandise for wider revolution around the world, as a short and painless interlude before their own ultimate victory. Berlin and Vienna must be made to understand: the future is theirs.
An awkward dinner party is held in December, hosted by Prince Leopold of Bavaria. ‘I hope we may be able to raise revolution in your country as well’, a Russian delegate looking for an ice-breaker tells the Austrian Foreign Minister. A Russian peasant picked up off the streets of Petrograd at the last minute to ensure the peace delegation represents the full spectrum of Russian society enquires of the wine, ‘Which is the stronger? Red or white?–it makes no difference to me which I drink, I’m only interested in the strength’.
Over lunch one day a German general casually informs the Russians that German acceptance of the peace-without-annexations formula does not imply German withdrawal to the borders of 1914 given the vast areas in the east which have already declared independence from Russian control. Whatever visions of worldwide revolution may dance before the eyes of the Bolsheviks, the Germans expect to impose their conception of peace in the east in the meantime. And quickly.
INGOLSTADT, BAVARIA: As the end of the year approaches, a French prisoner in German captivity laments his powerlessness. Escape is impossible. The snow is too deep. ‘My heartache will only end with my life’, Charles de Gaulle writes in a letter home to his mother. ‘It is the cruellest fate one could imagine’, he tells her, ‘to be so totally and irredeemably useless in such times as these.’
BRESLAU: A few hundred miles away, another prisoner, Rosa Luxemburg, lies awake one night. She listens out for the rumbling of a train passing somewhere in the night, the distant whispering of the prison guards, and the crunch of their boots on the gravel as they walk under her window.
She recalls the recent arrival of a wagonload of bloodstained German army coats and shirts at the jail, sent there to be patched up and returned to the army for further use. Such wagons are not pulled by horses any more. They are too valuable at the front. Instead, water buffalo from Romania are used. Rosa observes these beautiful, strong, bewildered creatures being beaten into service. Their thick skin is broken by the soldiers’ cudgels. Their hair becomes matted with blood. Rosa fancies she sees a tear roll down one animal’s cheek. Don’t the troops have any pity for these poor animals? one of the prison guards asks. ‘No one has pity for us humans’, the soldier replies.
She waits for the revolution to spread.
&
nbsp; WASHINGTON DC: On New Year’s Eve, the President is at work. He writes letters. He annotates a statement about America’s progress in the war. A million problems bear down upon him: the oil situation in California, the railways, Russia, an amendment to prohibit the sale of alcohol. A journalist writes him a memorandum warning that the war is turning into a ‘class war’, even in America, setting town against country. Woodrow seems distracted, as if his mind were far away, in the mud and snows of Europe. One evening, he reads aloud a poem by Wordsworth, describing Britain under threat of invasion from Napoleon:
Another year! Another deadly blow.
Another mighty Empire overthrown.
And we are left, or shall be left, alone,
The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.
How swiftly the world changes sometimes. A week, a month, a year. For a moment, Woodrow Wilson feels quite alone, an enormous weight of responsibility resting on his soul. More than any other political leader, the outcome of this war now depends on the inner workings of Woodrow’s spirit and Woodrow’s mind. He must ensure the peace is worthy of the sacrifice.
1918
Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation = negation
Dada Manifesto
Revolutions do not stand still. The law of all living things drives them to advance and to outgrow themselves.
Rosa Luxemburg
WINTER
BREST, FRANCE: After a tense voyage across the Atlantic spent worrying about a U-boat attack–even smoking a cigarette on deck at night is forbidden in case the ship is spotted by a German submarine–on New Year’s Day, a contingent of black American soldiers lands in the port of Brest. The regimental band led by Jim Europe strikes up the Marseillaise for the crowd assembled to meet them. At first, the audience do not recognise their own national anthem played New York-style. Then they do, and break into cheering.
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