STOCKHOLM: Albert Einstein is nominated again for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Six nominations this year. No award yet.
In Berlin, the physicist is bedridden with the effects of a stomach ulcer. His cousin Elsa nurses him back to health on a diet of rice cooked in milk and sugar. Albert wishes he could be married to her, rather than to his wife Mileva in Zurich. He sends Mileva his latest divorce proposal, promising her the proceeds of a Nobel Prize, if he ever wins one. ‘Why do you torment me so endlessly?’ she writes back. ‘I would never have thought it possible that anyone, to whom a woman who had devoted her love and her youth, and to whom she had given the gift of children, could do such painful things as you have done to me.’
KANSAS CITY: A new year, a new plan for getting into the war–or several. Ernest tells his parents of his latest plan to join the Marines, ‘unless I can get into aviation when I am 19 and get a commission’. He toys with going to France with the army medical corps. His father Clarence should join up too, he insists in letters home to his parents. ‘He could get a captain’s commission… all you have to do is apply for one’, he writes encouragingly. ‘There are a bunch that are married and fat and a lot older than Pop too’.
In letters to his mother, Ernest reassures her he is still a Christian, despite the temptations of the city. His letters to his sister cover more terrestrial matters: a crush on film star Mae Marsh, trips to the theatre and a new-found ability to distinguish between different kinds of wine ‘sans the use of the eyes’. It is his last hurrah before coming face to face with death, Ernest reasons: one way or another he will be in Europe before the year is out.
WASHINGTON DC: At 10.30 on a Saturday morning in January Woodrow and his friend House sit down to remake the world. They pore over maps of Europe. They start to draft the practical essentials of what America expects from the war, and what America wants from the peace. By the end of the day, the two men have them down: fourteen points, bashed out on the President’s typewriter.
Sunday is spent tinkering. On Tuesday, after a morning round of golf, the President goes to the Capitol–at short notice, again–and stands before Congress to deliver a speech. ‘The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come’, he tells them, more like a prophet than ever before.
Belgium is to be restored. France will have Alsace and Lorraine. Insofar as clear lines of nationality can be drawn, Italy’s borders will be readjusted in her favour. The peoples of Austria–Hungary and the Ottoman Empire will have opportunities for ‘autonomous development’, which sounds a lot like independence. Poland will be free–and have access to the sea. An association of independent nations is to be set up to guarantee it all.
The fourteen points ricochet around the world. Woodrow’s intention is now plain. Inspired by God–and by the principles of America–he intends to remake the world.
BREST-LITOVSK: In the first days of 1918 it is not obvious the Russians will return to Brest-Litovsk at all. They ask for the conference to be moved to Stockholm where it will be easier to turn proceedings into a megaphone for world revolution. The request is refused.
When the parties do return to the fortress of Brest-Litovsk the mood is different from before. The preliminaries are over. The notion that the conference’s remit might be expanded to encompass peace in both east and west has been crushed. A suicide has taken place amongst the delegates. It is bitterly cold. The Austrian Foreign Minister returns in the middle of a blizzard in a train in which the heating system is frozen solid. The top German military representative, General Hoffmann, arrives from difficult consultations in Berlin where tempers flare between the Kaiser and Ludendorff over how Europe’s borderlands should be rearranged. (Wilhelm presents a map showing modest direct annexations of territory to Germany so as to minimise the number of Poles added to Germany’s population; not enough territory for Ludendorff.) A new delegation has arrived from the Ukrainian Rada–the national parliament–anxious to use the imprimatur of the conference to confirm their independence from Petrograd. The exact status of their delegation is fudged.
But the greatest change is the arrival of the new head of the Russian delegation, Leon Trotsky, persuaded by Lenin that he is the man to hold up negotiations while revolution is given time to break out across Europe. While passing through the front lines on the way to Brest, the principled non-tipper strikes a defiant pose. ‘The Russian revolution will not bow its head before German imperialism’, he tells the soldiers. ‘It was not for this that Russian peasants, soldiers and workers deposed the Tsar.’ He assures them he will sign only an honourable peace. In truth he intends to turn the negotiations into a drawn-out revolutionary tribunal on the imperialists, with a revolutionary war at the end if all else fails.
Trotsky bristles with self-righteousness in Brest-Litovsk. He condemns a proposed preamble to the peace treaty declaring Russia’s intention to live in peace and friendship with the German and Austro-Hungarian empires as unnecessarily decorative. It will be revolution which draws the Continent together, he notes, not empty promises of good neighbourliness. He bans the habit of the delegations dining together which developed the previous year. The Soviet delegation to be an example of revolutionary self-reliance.
The principled non-tipper is repulsed by attempts to soften him up with bourgeois charm. On the day he arrives, the German Foreign Minister, Richard von Kühlmann, greets him while he is hanging up his coat and tells him how glad he is to be finally dealing with the master rather than his emissary. Trotsky answers this unfortunate turn of phrase with a show of revolutionary froideur, stepping away without a word. When his Austrian counterpart offers to look into the return of the personal library Trotsky left behind in Vienna when he was forced to leave in haste in 1914, Leon is about to express gratitude–until the Austrian links it to the question of some prisoners in Russia (officers, of course) who are said to have been badly treated. Leon tells the Austrian flatly he would be happy to have the books back and he personally abhors ill-treatment of prisoners, but that the two issues are quite unconnected. He will not be bribed.
The new Russian chief negotiator makes hay from the German and Austrian rejection of the Russian proposal to move the conference to more neutral ground. To be incarcerated, in effect, at ‘the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, at the Headquarters of the enemy armies, under the control of the German authorities, creates all the disadvantages of an artificial isolation which is in no way compensated for by the enjoyment of a direct telegraph wire’. Nonetheless, Trotsky declares, Russia accepts the ‘ultimatum’ because it wishes to provide no technical excuse to the other side to restart the war. Between negotiating sessions, Trotsky dictates a history of the Russian revolution that is barely three months old.
Alone amongst the delegates on the other side of the table, Leon does eventually develop a grudging intellectual respect for German Foreign Minister von Kühlmann. Here at least is a man with whom he can have a proper argument about matters of principle, wasting a little more time in the process. The two spend days in non-stop debate about the precise meaning of self-determination and the extent of its application to parts of the former Russian Empire now under German occupation which the Bolsheviks would like them to vacate. The German minister notes that the Bolsheviks have declared themselves in favour of self-determination, ‘even going so far as complete separation’ for territories of the former Russian Empire. They have formally allowed the independence of Finland. The situation in Ukraine is more complex but, in principle, independence has been promised there as well should a legitimate authority demand it. (In practice, the Bolsheviks intend that this could only happen under a Soviet regime–not a Ukrainian nationalist one–which would in any case be joined to Bolshevik Russia at the hip.)
Kühlmann argues that the areas of the Baltic now under German occupation are no different. Through various locally based institutions, they have declared their desire for separation. They have already self-determined. Germany is no longer a conqueror in these land
s, but a protector. German soldiers cannot be asked to leave. Trotsky questions the validity of the bodies which voted for separation. They are the product of feudalism, he declares; only true workers’ Soviets can express real self-determination. At times the debates become quite philosophical. This suits Trotsky fine. ‘I am taking part with much interest in the debates on these questions, which, thanks to the kindly forethought of the President of the German Delegation, are reaching such ever-increasing proportions’, he says at one point.
As time goes on, the onlookers to this game of diplomatic cat and mouse become more frustrated. General Hoffmann is infuriated when the Bolshevik delegation, active proponents of revolution throughout Europe, have the gall to insist that the Germans and Austrians must agree to refrain from any interference in the former territories of the Russian Empire and forgo any annexations whatsoever. Only once German and Austrian occupation forces have left can the future status of these lands be determined, they contend. ‘I must first protest against the tone of these proposals’, Hoffmann says. He reminds the Soviets that ‘the victorious German army stands in your territory’.
The Austrian Foreign Minister winces at such Prussian aggressiveness. Vienna urgently needs grain from Ukraine. If these roundabout negotiations go on much longer, Vienna will be forced to consider the possibility of a separate peace with the Rada Ukrainians–though any recognition of Ukrainian independence implied by such an agreement is bound to raise problems with the empire’s existing Polish and Ukrainian populations, which have their own aspirations and claims to territory.
After blustering and blathering for days on end, Trotsky manages to secure a ten-day break for consultations with Petrograd.
VIENNA: Cold is everywhere in the Habsburg capital these days. The walls seem to exhale it. Women stamp their shoes to try to keep warm while queueing up in the hope of getting their hands on the latest supply of vegetables. The flour ration falls early in the year, prompting furious strikes (and an expectant headline in Pravda: ‘On the Eve of the Austrian Revolution’). There is no meat. Thought becomes slow, movement painful. Freud’s hand shakes over a letter to a friend. ‘Cold shivers’, he heads the letter, by way of explanation for his writing. An old superstition haunts him: that he will die in his sixty-first year, or in February 1918.
BERLIN: The Kaiser is in one of his exultant moods. The turnaround in the south and in the east, he writes in the margins of an article he is reading, is just a taste of things to come. ‘The same must now be done in the west!’ scribbles the imperial hand. ‘First victory in the west with the collapse of the Entente, then we will impose our terms which they will simply have to accept!’
Outside the imperial cocoon, a dog goes missing in Berlin. The next day the owner finds the dog’s skin, quite cleaned of any flesh, with a crude sign attached: ‘Died for the Fatherland’.
PETROGRAD: What good is Russia to the European proletariat if the revolution does not survive where it has started?
The Bolsheviks face challenges from all sides. There is more violence on the streets this winter and less food. Factories are closed. Street lamps are barely lit. Lenin is angry at striking workers. How self-indulgent of them, he thinks, wondering how they can be forced back to work. One evening, Vladimir makes a rousing speech to Red Guards about to head off to fight a Cossack rebellion which has flared up in the south, led by General Kornilov. He calls them the ‘first heroic volunteers of the socialist army’ and promises, on somewhat slim evidence, that ‘our army’s ranks will soon be swelled by the proletarian forces of other countries and we shall no longer be alone’. On the way back to the Smolny, his limousine comes under fire. Lenin is unharmed. A Swiss socialist travelling with him is injured. The impatient revolutionary’s old rivals the Socialist Revolutionaries are blamed for the attack.
Another challenge to Lenin’s power is posed by the imminent meeting of the elected Constituent Assembly. Its creation had been one of the key demands of Russia’s revolutionaries in 1917. But that was before the coup. Now that Lenin has power, the assembly–in which Bolsheviks will be a minority–represents a threatening alternative source of legitimacy. The impatient revolutionary is concerned that the meeting of the assembly might be used to launch a counter-coup, which is, after all, what he would have done if the situation were reversed. Loyal security forces are brought in to prevent this. Red Guards are stationed at important junctions. Barricades are put up. It is made clear that disturbances will be dealt with harshly. Martial law is proclaimed. Lenin worries about the loyalty of the city garrison. The day before the assembly is due to meet, an American journalist notes in his diary: ‘Eve of a battle or collapse of a bluff, which?’
In early January, the great day arrives. Tens of thousands of pro-assembly demonstrators gather in central Petrograd singing the Marseillaise. Red Guards fire a few volleys in the air to disperse the crowds. The message from Bolshevism’s shock troops is clear: they will not shrink from the use of extreme violence, as the Tsar’s forces did until it was too late. ‘Ex-poachers make the best gamekeepers’, a French observer comments in his diary; if there had been a Tsarist Lenin or Trotsky the Romanovs would still be in power. No one is hurt in these first encounters. Later, several marchers who persist in demonstrating in favour of the assembly and against the Bolshevik regime wind up dead. Red blood colours the snow.
At the Tauride Palace, where the Constituent Assembly is due to meet, Red Guards with machine guns and fur hats pace up and down behind a huge wooden barricade. Occasionally they remove a piece and burn it to keep warm, the fire lighting up their faces. In the early afternoon, a side door to the palace opens for the members of the assembly to file in, passing a security cordon to check their credentials. The Socialist Revolutionary delegation, despite being the largest, are given a small room at the back in which to meet before the opening. Here they nervously fine-tune their plans to establish their legitimacy as the true voice of the Russian people through a wave of proposed legislation.
The Bolsheviks, despite being the smaller group in the assembly, are given a grand room at the front of the palace in which to meet. Their deliberations mostly boil down to tactics: how long should this masquerade be allowed to go on? Socialist Revolutionary delegates carry candles in case the Bolsheviks turn out the lights. In accordance with revolutionary tradition, the tea rooms at the Tauride are out of food. Wisely, most delegates come armed with sandwiches. It is dark outside by the time the members of the assembly are fully gathered inside. Lenin looks at them and sees a company of corpses, the walking dead. The red-and-gold chamber is decorated in funereal black.
Foreign observers take up position in the gallery. ‘It’s going to be a real Wild West show’, the Mayor of Stockholm whispers in John Reed’s ear. ‘Everyone seems to be carrying a gun.’ A moment of excitement comes early when a group of Bolsheviks storms the stage and gets everyone to sing the Internationale. Lenin turns white in anger at this overly precipitate action. Certain formalities must be followed. Appearances are important. He does not want this to just look like another coup.
In a recess while votes are being counted for the election of the chairman of the assembly, Reed is over the moon to be introduced to his idol, who dispenses advice on learning Russian. ‘You must go at it systematically’, the impatient revolutionary says, ‘you must break the backbone of the language at the outset.’ One must learn all the nouns, then the verbs, then the adverbs and adjectives, leaving grammar and syntax till last, he explains. Then practise, practise, practise. Vladimir jabs a finger towards the ceiling to emphasise this last point.
As expected, Viktor Chernov, a leading Socialist Revolutionary, is elected chairman of the assembly. Several speeches are made which are critical of the Bolshevik regime. ‘You promised bread for all the people but can you now say hand on heart that Petrograd is guaranteed against starvation even for the next few weeks?’ one speaker asks. On matters of war and peace he wonders: ‘Do you really believe the Germans will take account of
you in the way they would inevitably have to respect a universally representative and recognised supreme authority, not dependent on an extended civil war for its survival?’ Louise Bryant is impressed by the speaker. ‘He has that majestic air’, she says. John Reed is not pleased at his wife’s softness for an anti-Bolshevik. ‘And you’ll be given the air if you keep that up’, he rejoinders.
Enough talk! The Bolsheviks bring matters to a head by demanding a vote on a motion calling for the assembly to rubber-stamp the rule of the Soviets from now on, making itself essentially irrelevant. The motion is voted down. The Bolsheviks storm out of the room, declaring proceedings counter-revolutionary. Meeting his caucus behind closed doors, Lenin is adamant that the assembly cannot be allowed to continue sitting indefinitely. But his strategy is to let it fade out rather than benefit from the martyrdom of any great clash with Bolshevik forces. Now that the delegates have rejected the supremacy of the Soviets they have signed the assembly’s death warrant anyway. ‘Let them just go home’, he says. After some discussion, the party agrees his approach. The Bolsheviks formally withdraw and Lenin goes back to the Smolny.
For the moment, the assembly continues its discussions. Long-winded speeches are made to a half-empty chamber. Two o’clock in the morning passes. Then three. Then four. Eventually the captain of the loyal Bolshevik troops on duty, a reliable Kronstadt man, decides to call time. ‘The guards are tired’, he announces. ‘I suggest you vacate the premises.’ The chairman frantically puts everything he has proposed to the vote–land reform, statements on peace, the federalisation of Russia. All these measures are adopted overwhelmingly. At five in the morning the remaining delegates go home. ‘Perhaps this is not the end’, one delegate says to another hopefully.
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