Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: The 369th Regiment has been disbanded. Its men are free to do as they please. Jim Europe heads out on tour, to bring to America the musical style it has already brought to France.

  The band’s playlist ranges widely. There are military marches to get the audience warmed up and then medleys of popular Broadway tunes to give audiences that comforting sense of being up to date with the leading edge of the nation’s musical tastes. Some of the music played is daringly original, including a syncopated arrangement of the Russian composer Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor. And then, at the most liberated and most inventive end of the spectrum, there is the jazz. A snare drum duet, for example. Or a rendition of ‘On Patrol in No Man’s Land’, with Jim Europe singing along with his army buddy Noble Sissle, accompanied by effects to replicate the rat-a-tat-tat of the machine guns in France.

  In Boston, not exactly a city where one would expect the metronome to bend, the band plays at the opera house. Then it’s Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and a couple of days in St. Louis, where Josephine, now nearly thirteen, works as a waitress in a musicians’ hang-out called the Old Chauffeur’s Club. In Terre Haute, Indiana, a picket line enforces a black boycott of the opera house when the manager announces the concert will be held with the same segregated seating rules as usual. Jim Europe’s band ends up playing to an audience of two hundred whites and two blacks.

  VIENNA: Sigmund writes to a friend. Word has come in of just how far Austria will be reduced. It will even lose some of the territory where the locals speak German. ‘Today we learn that we are not permitted to join Germany but must yield up south Tyrol’, he complains: ‘To be sure I’m not a patriot, but it is painful to think that pretty much the whole world will be foreign territory.’

  MOSCOW: Long Live Ilyich! The representatives of the vastly expanded Communist Party–who wouldn’t want to join a ruling party that offers a shortcut to the top?–meet in the Red capital. A huge coloured map reminds delegates of the difficult military situation at the front (and why, therefore, they must back their leaders). After a bitter and public spat about how the army is run–Stalin’s behaviour in Tsaritsyn is brought up again–a compromise is secured, with Lenin’s support, backing the use of military experts. The idea that the foundations of a new society can be built without the help of bourgeois experts is, Vladimir says, simply ‘childish’. Trotsky’s unpopular policy is upheld.

  The party rank and file are forced to hold their noses at the decision. Many are nonetheless out of joint over Trotsky’s conduct of the war. They dislike the way his sense of iron military discipline seems unable to discriminate between party members–good Communists whose minor infractions should be overlooked–and non-party members, who should be punished more vigorously. Trotsky is gaining a reputation as a super-propagandist, yes–but also as an arrogant disciplinarian, a Napoleon-in-waiting, a military strongman with designs on power. The war commissar is not there in Moscow to make his case in person. That tends to increase the animus against him: distant, haughty, petulant, not really a party man at all.

  Lenin rams through a few more small details, correcting the errors of others as he goes. (Proofreading a draft of the party programme the impatient revolutionary notes the persistent misspelling of the word ‘exploitation’ and takes it upon himself to personally explain the word’s origins to the poor typesetter who keeps messing it up.) The centralisation of Bolshevik power is confirmed by the formal creation of a small Politburo as the party’s top decision-making body (and therefore, over time, the centre of effective state power as well). In theory, the five-member Politburo–including both Stalin and Trotsky–works collectively. But given Trotsky’s frequent absences from Moscow and Lenin’s personal prestige he is unquestionably the man in charge.

  At the same time, a new inspectorate is set up to oversee the burgeoning structures of state administration and root out corruption and bureaucracy. Now here’s a job for Comrade Stalin: reliable, salt of the earth, understands the party. The Georgian bank-robber may not have the war commissar’s flair. But he knows how to make the machinery work. Perhaps more than that, he knows how to make the machinery work for him.

  PARIS: Woodrow returns to Paris and to disappointment. House has not kept his promises. The German peace terms have not been finalised. The reparations question is unresolved. The French have become bolder in demands for German territory to ensure their security. To make matters worse–hard not to sense a snub here–the Wilsons have been moved into smaller lodgings, much less comfortable that those they had before. Edith makes the best of the change, noting a nice garden, an enormous bath and gold taps.

  Despite all the rage and fury from Republicans in America, Woodrow thought at least he left the League covenant in good shape in Paris. Yet it turns out that there remain two major obstacles to its completion, both rather trickier than he had anticipated. The Japanese demand that a clause on racial equality be inserted into the text (something the white powers are unwilling to concede). Meanwhile, Woodrow is enraged to find opposition to his polite request that the covenant should explicitly recognise America’s Monroe Doctrine. The French see the American desire to exclude Europeans from Latin America as something of a one-way street given America’s intention to dictate what happens in France’s back yard in Europe.

  Russian affairs remain a quagmire. The young man sent to Moscow on a fact-finding mission just before Woodrow left for America has now returned with what he believes is the outline of a grand deal with the Bolsheviks. But in Paris, he is greeted with a wall of scepticism. Most experienced hands think the young diplomat has fallen prey to Bolshevik game-playing: Brest-Litovsk tactics. Woodrow is too busy to sit down with his diplomatic envoy. But he is leery of alternative means of grappling with the Bolshevik challenge. To try and stop a revolutionary movement with a line of armies, Woodrow lectures his fellow leaders, is like trying to use ‘a broom to stop a great flood’.

  ‘The only way to act against Bolshevism is to make its causes disappear’, he says: ‘this is, however, a formidable enterprise; we do not even know exactly what its causes are’.

  MILAN: Lies, lies and more lies. In Italy, demobilised soldiers returning home find one broken promise after another. Jobs are scarce. Land reform is stalled. The old men are still in charge.

  Nationalists are furious that the territorial gains they were promised by the British and the French to join the war are about to be sold out from under them by the politicians and the diplomats in Paris. The country is rocked by strikes and up to its eyeballs in debt. The Socialists are turning further to the revolutionary left, scaring the wits out of Italy’s business owners, farmers and the Church.

  Some begin to look beyond the old formulas of Italian politics to combat this new threat. Perhaps a more muscular figure is needed, with the smartly dressed Arditi at his back. Maybe it takes a street-fighter to re-establish order in the streets. There seem several candidates for the job, ready to reform the country, give the soldiers their due and save Italy from Bolshevism. D’Annunzio is the obvious choice, of course. But then again, he is a propagandist rather than a pugilist. His instincts are libertarian–does he have the cynicism to be a politician? He could be a figurehead of some new movement, but could he really organise one? How about that newspaper editor, Benito Mussolini? His background as one of Italy’s most prominent Socialist Party activists gives him a certain credibility as a man of substance. He certainly seems keen to get stuck in, however dirty things may get. The battle against chaos is urgent, Mussolini writes in Il Popolo. ‘As for the means,’ he warns, ‘we have no preconceptions, we accept what will be necessary: both legal and so-called illegal means.’ Such moral flexibility may be just what is required. Mussolini is a man who makes a virtue out of it.

  Benito assembles his fellow discontents in the elegant offices of the local employers’ federation in Milan. There are conservatives who have lost faith in the methods of the old right, dislike the arrogance of the ruli
ng classes and want strict measures to ensure order is returned. There are socialists who have lost faith in the Socialist Party the moment it opposed Italy’s entry into the war. Marinetti is there as the representative of the newly founded Futurist Party (daily gymnastics features amongst its manifesto commitments). There is a sprinkling of men who refer to themselves as anarchists, syndicalists or anarcho-syndicalists and who expect everyone to know the difference. Then there are the veterans, of course, with their particular claim to moral leadership of Italy, based on the lost futures of the country’s war dead and an energetic sense of camaraderie forged in the trenches.

  Under Mussolini’s watchful eye, this rather eclectic group establish a new organisation, the Fasci di Combattimento. A manifesto is agreed. Its defining characteristic–besides nationalism–is opportunism. Women are to be given the vote. The voting age for men is to be dropped to eighteen in a nod to young soldiers returning home and hungry for something better. Workers are to be given an eight-hour day, the totemic socialist demand. In a gesture to the traditions of Italian anti-clericalism, the Church is to be expropriated. The manifesto is ideologically anti-ideological. It is Dadaism as politics. Reality comes from struggle, not from books. The energy of war is to be channelled into social revolution.

  If this group were to have a spiritual leader, his name would surely be Gabriele D’Annunzio. But D’Annunzio is a busy man. He has better things to do than to attend what is, at first glance, an administrative gathering of his tribe. He doesn’t make time to meet Benito until June, when the two finally get together over drinks at the Grand Hotel in Rome.

  BUDAPEST: A diplomatic note is delivered to Hungary’s Minister-President by France’s military representative in Budapest. Hungarian soldiers, already far inside the old borders that Charles Habsburg swore to defend, are now required to vacate an additional swathe of Transylvania, to become a neutral zone opposite occupying Romanian forces. Why not occupy the whole country right now, the Minister-President asks: ‘make it a French colony, or a Romanian colony, or a Czechoslovak colony’? The Frenchman shrugs.

  The government collapses. The country is close to being dismembered. America has proved unfriendly. The British and the French seem no better. As the Red Army carries all before it in neighbouring Ukraine after the fall of Kiev, some begin to wonder if Hungary’s national salvation may lie through an alliance with Soviet Russia. After a half-hearted attempt to suppress them over the last few weeks, Hungary’s Communists now march out of jail and straight into a leading role in a new Revolutionary Governing Council alongside more mainstream Social Democrats. Béla Kun is made Foreign Minister. The Hungarian Soviet Republic is proclaimed.

  At first, Moscow is not entirely sure whether to support this new enterprise. Who is really in charge? Two attempts at communication between Lenin and Kun prove abortive: once when Kun is in a meeting and cannot come to the receiving post, and another time when Lenin is uncertain that the person on the other end is who he claims to be. It is several days before Kun is able to convince Moscow that he is the real boss. ‘My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council’, he writes reassuringly, ‘is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established.’

  Lenin is delighted–it will be far easier to promote world revolution with an avant-garde in Budapest. The Comintern issues a statement declaring events in Hungary ‘the first flash of lightning splitting the threatening clouds’. Long live the international Communist republic!

  ECKARTSAU: Even in times of revolutionary upheaval, news about the Habsburgs travels fast around Austria. Supposedly secret news spreads even faster.

  By 9 a.m. on 23 March 1919 (the same day Mussolini’s Fascists are meeting in Milan) the spectators have already begun to gather at Eckartsau to observe the latest chapter in the seven-hundred-year saga of the Habsburgs: their journey into exile. The imperial train stands ready at the small station of Kopfstetten, a few miles away.

  In Vienna, the republican government looks the other way. The Chancellor knows full well that Charles’s departure is imminent, having been warned of the fact. But what can he do? An attempt to stage-manage matters to the new republic’s advantage–by forcing the Emperor to abdicate before he goes–is prevented by a little subterfuge from Colonel Lisle Strutt, who ostentatiously waves before the terrified Chancellor’s nose a fake telegram suggesting Austria will be subject to an immediate British blockade if the Emperor’s departure is interfered with in any way. The Chancellor appears to buy this outrageous bluff. But Lisle Strutt is apprehensive. One half of the former Habsburg Empire has just gone Red. If Austria follows, a new Chancellor may come to power who is not so easily fobbed off.

  The chapel at Eckartsau is packed to the rafters that Sunday. The organist plays passages from Wagner to keep the punters happy. Afterwards, the imperial cook distributes any remaining food amongst spectators who have come from Vienna. British trucks arrive that afternoon to ferry the Habsburgs’ luggage to their train. At nightfall, Lisle Strutt marches out to cut down a nearby intersection of telegraph wires to stop any orders being sent from Vienna for the Emperor to be arrested at the border–or worse.

  A little after 6.30 p.m., Charles and Zita (who is pregnant with the couple’s sixth child) appear at the top of the stairs at the Eckartsau hunting lodge. Behind them follows the Emperor’s mother, Maria-Josefa, dripping in jewels and holding two collie dogs on their lead. Lisle Strutt, revolver in hand, accompanies the family in a motorcade to Kopfstetten and the waiting train. A few thousand well-wishers are there to see them off, and to hear the Emperor’s faint ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. ‘After seven hundred years’, Charles sighs to his family as the train pulls away into the gathering darkness.

  In the middle of the night, at a place called Amstetten, Colonel Lisle Strutt takes the precaution of redirecting the train onto a subsidiary line, and telling local officials he is accompanying members of a British food commission back from Budapest. The following morning, when the Habsburgs wake, they find themselves in the Alps, a changing picture-postcard view through every window: the frozen lake at Zell am See, the old-world charm of Kitzbühel. Occasionally, they pass a curious villager or two. Once, they see Italian cavalrymen on horseback, tramping heavily through the snow. Some British soldiers salute as the train crawls through a mountain pass.

  How different Charles’s arrival in Switzerland to that of Wilhelm’s in Holland the previous November! In Buchs, Charles is greeted as the representative of an ancient and noble dynasty, rather than as an unwanted guest. A Swiss diplomat is already there to officially pass on the best wishes of the government. Some Swiss soldiers stand to attention. Charles, in civilian clothes now, is allowed to continue with his family to a house belonging to Zita’s family, on the southern shores of Lake Constance.

  Lisle Strutt can make out the shapes of the houses on the opposite shoreline, in Germany. (Lenin once met an escaped Russian prisoner of war who swam across this lake.) There is rioting on the other side, the colonel is told. Bolsheviks. They are everywhere, it seems.

  MOSCOW: In a high-pitched, somewhat hectoring voice, Lenin makes a series of recordings of his speeches for wide distribution.

  The records are short; so are his speeches. Some are lectures delivered in short phrases and slogans; others are straightforward appeals for popular support. In one, he commemorates a leading Bolshevik comrade who has just died from influenza. (The comrade is granted a lavish state funeral; when his personal safe is opened a decade later it is found to contain a small fortune in Tsarist-era gold coins and jewels, as well as no fewer than nine passports.) In another, Lenin explains why it was essential to form the Comintern after the mainstream socialist betrayal of 1914. ‘They helped to prolong the slaughter, they became enemies of socialism, they went over to the side of the capitalists’, he instructs the recording horn.

  One record takes on the question of anti-Semitism. This has become an acute issue in Ukraine in particular, where the bitter struggle between
the Red Army and Ukrainian nationalists has been accompanied by a renewed surge in pogrom violence against the Jews. ‘Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews’, Lenin tells listeners. Under the Tsars, he explains, false rumours were spread and pogroms incited in order to distract the workers from the truth of their own exploitation. But most Jews are workers. And as for those Jews who are exploiters and capitalists, they are no different from rich Russians, or the rich anywhere else in the world who are ‘in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers’. What matters is class, not religion.

  Down at his Gorki retreat, meanwhile, Lenin tries to get the estate manager to understand his ideas for how state farms should be run now, as models of collectivisation for the peasants, and as propaganda to show them how much better things can be under Communism. The feeling in the Russian countryside is not warm towards the Bolsheviks. Yet it must be won over. Lenin asks the manager what he is doing to help the local peasantry.

  ‘We sell seedlings’, the manager replies.

  ‘He doesn’t understand the very question’, Vladimir says dispiritedly to Nadya.

  Around the same time, Nadya experiments with a kitchen garden where peasants work without hired labour to grow cabbages. The cabbages are misappropriated. Vladimir gets the Cheka to investigate. Things are not working out as hoped at all.

  AMRITSAR, PUNJAB, BRITISH INDIA: Against a background of economic dislocation, Muslim fury at Britain’s supposed enmity to Islam and the Caliphate, and a passive resistance campaign led by the Hindu leader Mohandas Gandhi, a wave of pent-up Indian anger at the iniquities of British rule explodes into life. The Raj is beset by riots. Europeans fear for their lives. Some consider a full-blown insurrection to be imminent.