The city is saved from the Whites, just. In later years it will be called Stalingrad.
VIENNA: ‘The bankruptcy of the old state is now a fact’, Victor Adler tells parliament.
Emperor Charles tries to win American favour and buy some time by promising wide constitutional reform within the empire. It looks like desperation. The nationalities of the Habsburg realm are already taking matters into their own hands. The empire’s Poles look forward to an independent Polish state. In Prague, the double-headed eagle starts disappearing from the streets, and the police do not know which way to jump. Slovenes, Croats and Serbs–collectively known as the southern or yugo-Slavs–have already set up their own national council in Zagreb. Autonomy is no longer enough, Woodrow Wilson responds. Benito Mussolini calls Woodrow the ‘magnificent Duce of the peoples’ for his stance.
In Budapest, the capital of the other half of his failing empire, Charles’s reform proposals are taken to represent the liquidation of the constitutional bargain he swore to uphold in 1917. There are calls for Hungarian troops to come home now rather than keep fighting for Austria. At the opening of a new university, the imperial anthem is hissed. No one will take the Emperor’s instructions any more. ‘It’s always difficult to find a crew for a sinking ship’, he comments to Zita on a trip to sell his reforms in Budapest. When the imperial couple return to Vienna they leave the children behind in the Hungarian capital to demonstrate that their departure is only temporary.
BERLIN: Woodrow’s latest diplomatic note blows away any last illusions of an armistice of equals. It proposes what amounts to capitulation. The Allies’ present military superiority will be guaranteed. The submarines will have to return to port. Arbitrary power–the Kaiser, that is–will have to be curbed. In other words, the Americans are demanding regime change as the price of peace.
In meetings with top civilian and military officials in the German capital, Ludendorff is evasive as to the consequences of rejecting Wilson’s demands. When asked whether another six months of fighting, with twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand casualties a month, would earn Germany a better peace he answers breezily: ‘Maybe it would, maybe it would not.’ (He orders that his stepson’s body, buried in the grounds at Spa, be dug up and sent home just the same.) The general asks a Social Democrat politician if he can somehow boost the people’s morale again. ‘It’s a question of potatoes’, the politician responds. With the army unwilling to provide assurances, the civilians take charge. The desire to perish in honour may be suitable for an individual, the new German Chancellor writes, ‘but the responsible statesman must recognise that a people in its entirety has the right to demand with all due sobriety that they live, rather than die in beauty’.
VENICE, ITALY: Gabriele D’Annunzio confesses to a friend: ‘I love the war’. To another, he writes that ‘for you and me, and for those like us, peace is a disaster’.
MOSCOW: Lenin gives his first public speech since the attempt on his life in August.
‘Comrades, this is the fifth year of the war and the universal collapse of imperialism is as plain as can be’, the impatient revolutionary tells a meeting in Moscow. ‘Everyone can now see revolution must come in every country in the war’. Bolshevism is on the march across Western Europe, in Italy, France, Britain and Spain. The workers are giving up on spineless social democratic types and veering left. ‘Bolshevism has become the worldwide theory and tactics of the international proletariat!’ Lenin thunders. For or against the Bolsheviks: that is the only dividing line which matters now in socialist parties around the world.
‘Three months ago, people used to laugh when we said there might be a revolution in Germany’, the impatient revolutionary says. ‘They said that only half-crazy Bolsheviks could believe in a German revolution.’ Times have changed: ‘In these few months Germany, from a mighty empire, has become a rotten hulk.’ And the same forces operating in Germany are at work elsewhere, in America, Britain and France. ‘This force will loom larger and larger and become even more formidable than the Spanish flu’, Lenin declares.
And yet it is precisely at this moment that Bolshevism is most in danger. The enemy is waking up. ‘The more the revolution develops, the more the bourgeoisie rally together’, Lenin warns. The capitalist powers have already intervened in Russia, directly and indirectly. But the Czechs, Cossacks and Whites are only pawns in a wider struggle. Once world capitalism fathoms the seriousness of its predicament German capitalists may strike some kind of bargain with the British, French and the Americans–and then all turn east.
‘The workers are mature enough to be told the truth’, the impatient revolutionary avers. The revolution is going to have to fight for its life, on many fronts, maybe for years. The army must be everyone’s top priority. Sacrifice and discipline are needed for the struggle ahead.
Lenin is still working on his pamphlet day and night.
VIENNA: The Habsburg Empire still exists on paper. Each day brings evidence that it will not last long.
In most places, the transition is peaceful. In the Adriatic port of Fiume, Croats disarm Hungarians without a fight, and the navy is transferred into the hands of the locals. In Prague, the Czechs pretend that a declaration of independence on 28 October is simply a loyal echo of Charles’s reform promises–and, to avoid any unpleasantness, the Habsburg authorities pretend to believe them. The troops are kept in their barracks.
In Vienna, the empire’s German-speaking parliamentarians, including those from the Czech kingdom of Bohemia, set themselves up as the self-declared provisional German-Austrian National Assembly. The groundwork is laid for a new country called German-Austria. In Budapest, a local army commander orders soldiers to fire on a student demonstration. A former premier is murdered in his home by those who blame him for the war. A playboy liberal is appointed Hungarian Minister-President by a popular Habsburg Archduke.
Charles is a spectator to this historical unfurling of his inheritance. He tries to prevent further bloodshed at the front by asking the Pope to intervene with the Italians to stop them from launching a last offensive. To no avail. Italian artillery begins firing one year to the day since the beginning of Austria’s Caporetto offensive. Rome wants a stunning victory now to erase the memory of that defeat.
On the seven hundredth day of his troubled reign Charles breaks definitively with Kaiser Wilhelm by making clear that his government will now negotiate a separate peace. Wilhelm is scathing of the betrayal: ‘We have had to endure this war in order not to leave Austria in the lurch, and now she does so to us’. Germany now stands alone against the world.
Sigmund Freud, who had greeted the outbreak of war with enthusiasm, is now caught up in the excitement of its end. It is ‘terribly thrilling’, he writes to a friend, to live through days where ‘the old has died, but the new has not yet replaced it’. He will shed no tears for ‘this Austria or this Germany’. To Ferenczi in Budapest he advises the most dramatic course of action: ‘Withdraw your libido from your fatherland in a timely fashion and shelter it in psychoanalysis.’ Apparently it is the only safe place for it.
PASEWALK, THE GERMAN REICH: Amongst the new arrivals at a Prussian military hospital by the Baltic Sea is one of the dispatch runners from Flanders, temporarily blinded by British poison gas, in abject pain, his eyelids swollen, hysterical from shock. He lies powerless in hospital, separated from his regiment, from the few he might call friend. He hears whispers of retreat, collapse, betrayal. Adolf Hitler burns with indignation.
MUDROS, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Aboard a British warship named after an ancient Greek hero, the Ottomans sign an armistice. Talaat, Djemal and Enver Pasha escape Istanbul aboard a German ship.
BERLIN–SPA: Ludendorff issues an order to the army stating that the peace terms on offer from Woodrow Wilson cannot be squared with military honour.
At a royal palace in Berlin, the man who told Wilhelm to start peace negotiations now tells him he should break them off. He loses his temper with the monarch. ‘You seem t
o forget that you are talking to a King’, the Kaiser reminds him. Ludendorff’s offer to resign is accepted. (Hindenburg keeps his mouth shut and remains in his post.) ‘The Kaiser thinks he can build an empire with the Social Democrats’, he bellows at his adjutant. ‘Mark my words: there will be no Kaiser within two weeks.’ Members of his staff are already weighing up emigration options, with Chile and Argentina most popular.
Wilhelm decides to return to headquarters in Spa.
WASHINGTON DC: Discussions begin about the possible location of the future peace conference. The French push for Paris. Though it is still under German occupation, the Belgians suggest Brussels as a symbolic choice. Woodrow writes to Colonel Edward House: ‘Much as I should enjoy Paris I think a neutral place of meeting much wiser, care being taken not to choose a place where either German or English influence would be too strong.’ His preference is for Lausanne, Switzerland.
SPA: The Prussian Interior Minister is sent to military headquarters to persuade the Kaiser to abdicate. Wilhelm is having none of it: ‘It would be incompatible with my duties as successor to Frederick the Great, towards God, the people and my conscience.’ He seems convinced that if he were to go then the army would disintegrate. He will not give up his throne, he writes to a friend, ‘on account of a few hundred Jews or a thousand workers’. He will answer troublemakers with machine guns.
THE AUSTRO-ITALIAN FRONT LINE: Carrying a flag of surrender and heralded by a trumpet signal, an Austrian captain tries bravely to make his way across enemy lines to hand a formal peace overture to the Italians. The messenger is shelled. Austrian commanders try an open radio transmission to get their message across. The Italians question the credentials of a proposed peace commission. They are in no hurry to halt their advance.
The town of Vittorio Veneto is reconquered by Italian troops. Austro-Hungarian forces collapse. On the last day of October an Austrian general is finally allowed through the lines to sue for peace. He is sent to the villa of an Italian Senator near Padua and told to wait.
MOSCOW: News from Austria is garbled. The impatient revolutionary speculates on the course of events. ‘Friedrich Adler is very likely on his way to Vienna after his release from prison’, Lenin tells a rally. ‘The first day of the Austrian workers’ revolution is probably being celebrated on the squares of Vienna.’ In fact, Adler is still in jail and Charles is still at Schönbrunn. But details hardly matter at times like these. What must happen will happen.
‘Hard as it was for us to cope with famine and our enemies,’ Lenin says, ‘we now see that we have millions of allies’.
THE AUSTRO-ITALIAN FRONT LINE– VIENNA: The peak of the highest mountain in Habsburg territory is abandoned by its Austrian guardians, who leave the imperial flag flying at half-mast. The Italians surge forward over the Isonzo river, occupying all the land they failed to gain in the previous three years of war. Several hundred thousand Austro-Hungarian troops are taken prisoner. Amongst them is Sigmund Freud’s son Martin.
Monday 4 November 1918, 3 p.m. The armistice comes into force. Gabriele D’Annunzio writes a macabre Lord’s Prayer: ‘O dead who are in earth, as in heaven, hallowed be your names’. He swears to keep alive their ‘sacred hatred’ and continue their fight. He warns against political compromises which might, in his words, mutilate the soldiers’ victory. The territory promised to Italy must be handed over in full.
In Vienna, ministers gather in St Stephen’s cathedral to celebrate the Emperor’s name day. Across the empire, the troops head home. Barracks are plundered for food. A trainload of Austrian soldiers arrives at one station stark naked. Their clothes were stolen by Hungarians along the way.
LONDON: ‘A drizzle of empires falling through the air’, Winston tells his assistant. He decides to visit the front one last time.
KIEL, GERMANY: Mutiny breaks out in the imperial fleet. The sailors call each other comrade. A wave of revolutionary fervour spreads from ship to ship. ‘There is no turning back any more’, a proclamation reads. A Social Democrat sent up from Berlin to calm the situation is elected chairman of the sailors’ council. The sound of gunshot echoes around the city. No one knows whether the shots are intended to celebrate the people’s victory, or whether they are the sound of loyal imperial forces trying to put the mutiny down. The hussars are said to be on their way from Hamburg.
SPA: Officers at headquarters look at the map to find a good spot where the Kaiser could lead some soldiers into a final battle and thereby earn himself a hero’s death. ‘Whoever wants to can sign up’, one writes in his diary. The Kaiser is not informed of the plan.
THE GHENT ROAD, BELGIUM: The front line has become supple again. Allied troops are advancing at pace. Winston’s car takes a wrong turning into the battle zone. ‘I was puzzled’, he writes after the event, ‘to see a peasant suddenly throw himself down behind the wall of a house; something seemed to be very odd about his gesture’. The sound of a shell burst a moment later explains his behaviour. Winston still makes it to Bruges in time for lunch. ‘All’s well that ends well’, he writes cheerfully.
BERLIN: Mutiny leaps from Kiel to other cities along Germany’s northern coast. Red sailors stream into Berlin by train. Workers and soldiers’ councils spring up across the country. The Russian embassy, whose staff are suspected of coordinating events, is raided by government forces. The German revolution has begun.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: Great armies have been destroyed on Europe’s battlefields. Europe’s old kingdoms are being swept away. Even at this very moment, magnificent empires are crumbling under the pressure of the war. And yet that motley crew of wide-eyed revolutionaries, once mocked and told they could never mount a successful workers’ revolt in backwards Russia, are still standing. In spite of invasion, civil war, disease, hunger and assassination their regime, the Bolshevik regime, has survived its first year in power. Surely that is something to celebrate.
A small fortune is set aside to prepare Petrograd and Moscow for the festivities. Millions of roubles are available. Seventy-one sites around the old capital are chosen to be specially decorated. Bands play from balconies. Children are taught revolutionary songs. Mobile cinemas show stirring movies. The people of Petrograd are told that the events of October 1917 were their revolution: a popular uprising, not a party coup. They must be made to understand the scale of what has happened, the permanence of the change. Terror shows them there is no going back; mass propaganda is intended to push them forward.
The Bolshevik Party takes pride of place, of course. Non-Bolsheviks involved in the revolution last year are excluded from the commemoration: they do not fit with the story the choreographers of the new regime want to tell. The fact that some prominent Bolsheviks vigorously (and publicly) opposed Lenin’s coup last year is conveniently forgotten.
This is a time for new stories to be told–stories that make the regime’s triumph appear inevitable and its leadership look united. It is a time for warring revolutionaries to make peace with each other, at least on the surface. The Georgian bank-robber writes an article for Pravda praising the role of a man he despises. ‘All the work regarding the practical side of organising the uprising was carried out under the direct management of the Chair of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky’, Comrade Stalin writes (imagine the pain of putting that down on paper). ‘It can be said, without doubt, that the defection of the garrison to the Soviet and the organisation of the Military Revolutionary Committee depended above all on Comrade Trotsky’s contribution.’
One year later, and Petrograd has become holy ground. The revolution has been sacralised. As the anniversary date approaches, Petrograd’s bridges and public spaces are renamed, with such catchy new nomenclature as Dictatorship of the Proletariat Square. Tsarist symbols are removed or covered up. Carpenters and construction workers on other projects are simply commandeered to work on the celebrations. Potential troublemakers are put in jail.
A special news sheet is produced. ‘Shortly the revolution will pass from Austria to Italy�
��, it crows. The red flag will fly over Berlin and Paris soon. London might hold out a couple of years ‘but from the moment when socialism in Russia, Austria, Germany, France and Italy becomes a fact, English capitalism will have reached its end’. The world is following where Petrograd has led. The mood of the true believers is triumphant, euphoric. For nearly three days there are marches, fireworks and speeches. ‘We are strong and can do anything we wish’, says one speaker.
In Moscow, the Bolsheviks’ new capital, food rations are increased for the day. The buildings are lit up with red-tinted electric lights. Even the grass is painted red. Portraits of the great Communist leaders of past and present are hung in the streets: Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. (The war commissar’s sister is one of the organisers of the Moscow events.) Fireworks scream into the air. ‘It seemed as if the edifice of capitalism itself were being blown up’, Pravda reports, ‘with the exploiters and the abusers buried under its rubble.’ A scarecrow representing a kulak is doused in paraffin and set alight. The city is covered in slogans: ‘Peace to the Peasantry; War on the Palaces’, ‘The Proletariat has Nothing to Lose but Its Chains; It Has a Whole World to Win’. ‘Revolution is the locomotive of history’ is the slogan assigned to the city’s railway workers.
The seal of the new Russian Soviet Republic–the hammer and the sickle–is printed on everything. At last, Lenin gets busts of Marx and Engels on the streets of Moscow. The sculpture designs are mostly conservative. One with Marx atop four elephants is dismissed as a little whimsical. Other artwork on display follows a more radical, modern aesthetic, not the kind of thing Vladimir likes at all–all cubes, planes and geometric shapes. The designs of the Futurists are too close to Dada for some people’s taste–and if the workers do not like it, how can it be considered proper proletarian art?
Crucible Page 20