Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  LONDON: An English version of the Protocols is printed in London, causing quite a stir. The Times does not pronounce on the authenticity of the document. Instead it asks a leading question which resounds amongst its readership. If not true, ‘whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in parts fulfilled, in parts far gone by way of fulfilment?’ The forgery continues its world tour.

  BERLIN: Will Einstein stay in Germany, or will he leave? In Germany’s fevered atmosphere, where morality and sound money seem both to have gone up the spout, the question takes on political proportions. Departure might be seen as a betrayal of Germany at its moment of weakness. It might reflect badly on Germany’s Jews.

  Yet with a dirty campaign against him, must Einstein just put up with it? He could make more money and have more peace elsewhere: in Britain perhaps, maybe even in America or (worst of all) in France. As much as he loves the beautiful world of German science–and supports it as much as he can by acting as its unofficial representative–there is his own well-being to think about, and that of his family. ‘My situation is like that of a man who is lying in a beautiful bed, tortured by bed bugs’, Albert explains one day. ‘Nevertheless, let us wait and see how things develop.’

  In early summer, he departs with Elsa on a Nordic tour, to lecture in Oslo and in Copenhagen.

  DEARBORN: Henry Ford is not an educated man, but he is a highly successful businessman. He believes in what he calls ‘facts’.

  A fact, Ford writes, is like granite: ‘winter will not freeze it, summer will not melt it, rains will not wash it away’. The key is finding one’s own facts and then sticking to them. Ford is fascinated by theories about what happened in the past, but we are missing the right facts to prove. He is quite taken with the idea that Abraham Lincoln’s assassin did not die in a shoot-out as everyone thinks, but escaped to become a saloon keeper in Texas and then a house painter in Oklahoma. Ford is a superficially inquisitive man, but not discriminating in what he draws on to back up his feelings about things. He believes what he wants to, and takes attempts to persuade him otherwise as propaganda. He is a contrarian who believes in his own truths. He trusts his instincts rather than the views of others. He is primed for conspiracy theories.

  Henry Ford’s magazine, the Dearborn Independent, is not making as much money as he would like. It is distributed through his Ford dealerships, and they are everywhere across America, but he is persuaded that an attention-grabbing campaign of some sort might help him to reach a wider readership. In the summer of 1920, Ford’s prejudices and credulity combine with the sharp pen of a journalist and the influence of Ford’s German secretary, well acquainted with the Russian who hawked the Protocols around America two years ago. Henry Ford launches an anti-Semitic campaign on the pages of the Dearborn Independent.

  The campaign presents itself as an inquiry into why Jews are persecuted. In pretending to simply ask why this might be, the magazine explores and repeats any anti-Semitic slander it can find. ‘Persecution is not a new experience to the Jew’, says the Independent, ‘but intensive scrutiny of his nature and super-nationality is’. The magazine claims that it is revealing a necessary truth which others want to hide: ‘efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for general discussion’. Anyone disclaiming the conspiracy must clearly be part of it.

  Ford’s own brand of anti-Semitism springs from personal experience. He believes that financiers on Wall Street are making things difficult for his business. And everyone knows that Wall Street is run by Jews. He blames the embarrassment of his peace attempts during the war on a Jewish associate. He concludes that the Jews must have wanted the war to continue so as to line their pockets with the profits to be made. And then, of course, there is the popular association of the Jews with Bolshevism. In Ford’s mind, this all seems to fit together.

  A hired journalist writes up Ford’s prejudices into long, superficially researched articles, finding new angles when the old ones get tired, playing on concerns about immigration, jobs and terrorism. After a few weeks, the Independent’s campaign is being picked up by other newspapers and magazines, just as planned. The spark has been provided. Now the fire is catching. Disinformation thrives on repetition. In July, the case of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is raised.

  Some Jews wonder if Ford himself can be personally involved in spreading such stuff, imagining that someone behind the scenes must be taking advantage of him. A few send in protest telegrams, hoping Ford will realise what is being perpetrated in his name. ‘These articles shall continue’, replies the Independent to one complainant. ‘When you have attained a more tolerable state of mind we shall be happy to discuss them with you.’ The magazine blames Jews for ‘supersensitivity’. The campaign seems to have hit a nerve; the truth must be close at hand.

  Ford seems genuinely surprised when, in June, a local rabbi returns a special Model T the car manufacturer gave him recently, with a letter hoping the mogul will realise the ‘enormity of the injury’ he is causing. Ford telephones the rabbi and asks him what is wrong. ‘Has something come between us?’ He seems to think it is a personal matter.

  Meanwhile, the campaign continues. Sales of the Independent begin to rise. It all seems to be a great success.

  PETROGRAD: Dressed in their oldest clothes–so as not to embarrass their Russian hosts–the British Labour Delegation arrives in Russia. A special train is laid on for them, decorated with red bunting, Communist slogans and pine sprigs. As it crosses the border, the most ardent members of the delegation break out into the Internationale. They have reached the promised land. They have heard so much about the great experiment. At last they can see it for themselves. One of the travellers, the suffragette Ethel Snowden, describes the sensation of peering behind an iron curtain.

  ÅBO: John Reed is finally released from his Finnish jail after payment of a fine for smuggling (and a campaign by Louise). Unable to travel to America–the State Department will not issue him a passport–he returns to Petrograd and is put up in the Hotel International to recover from his ordeal. He is not a well man, after being fed on a diet of dried fish. He is much thinner than he used to be. His eyes are sunken.

  Further east, in Siberia, after several Cheka interrogations, Maria Bochkareva is executed.

  PARIS: Three friends are walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg. They run into a girl one of them knows. She is introduced to the others. ‘I’m not a Dadaist, you know’, Simone Kahn tells André Breton. ‘Neither am I’, André replies, with a smile which suggests that he may or may not be telling the truth.

  SUMMER

  KIEV: The Poles are thrown back. Barely a month after they conquered Kiev, the city has changed hands again. Locals have lost count of how many times their city has been trampled through by competing armies these last three years. The Bolsheviks present themselves as Russian patriots fighting against the historic foe. The Tsar’s former commander-in-chief appeals for all patriotic officers to join the Red Army.

  Now, with Piłsudski’s armies in retreat, the question is no longer how to save Bolshevism, but how far to extend it. Europe’s populations have not risen up in revolution as Vladimir had hoped. Might Red Army bayonets in Warsaw help to concentrate their minds?

  Stalin argues that Wrangel should be knocked off first. Trotsky, for once, urges caution. But Lenin is impatient. A young aristocrat who is appointed as the commander of the Red Army in the west shares his ambitions. He is the same age as Napoleon when he conquered Italy–just twenty-seven.

  WASHINGTON DC: In January, Mitchell Palmer was untouchable, a crusader for American values against the Bolsheviks. By summer, he is under fire for abuse of power, accused of terrorising thousands with an illegal witch-hunt and then trying to ruin those who stand in his way. ‘I declare these charges are outrageous and unconscionable falsehoods’, he tells a Congressional committee looking into the matter. He is just doing his job. For two days straight he rebuts his critics. His political career is on the line. The Democratic convention
is just weeks away.

  ‘The world is on fire’, Palmer warns, and the arsonists in Moscow are doing all they can to spread the conflagration. The flames of revolution are leaping across western Asia from the Caspian Sea to the Suez Canal. They have reached ‘the huts of Afghanistan’. Americans must understand what it is that they are up against. Those who oppose his methods are playing the Bolshevik game. They are either knaves or fools. Honest American workers are being manipulated. Palmer furiously attacks ‘our so-called “liberal press”’ and the ‘parlor Bolsheviki’ who cannot see what is happening outside their book-lined studies.

  He invites members of the committee to come down to the offices of the Justice Department to look at the photographs of the foreign Bolshevik agitators that have been compiled. ‘Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime’, he says. ‘From their lopsided faces, sloping brows and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakeable criminal type.’

  PARIS–BERLIN: Paris Dada takes off on summer holiday. Tzara heads to the Balkans; André recovers from his Dadaist activities in Brittany, writing letters to Simone almost every day.

  Fun and games may suit the Paris lot. Berlin has no time for dilettantes and dandies. The mood is different there. Berlin Dada is serious, anti-war, political. It celebrates the arrival of summer with an art fair, closer in spirit to Moscow than to the Latin Quarter. ‘Dada is Fighting on the Side of the Revolutionary Proletariat’, reads one slogan. ‘DADA is the Voluntary Destruction of the Bourgeois World of Ideas’, shouts another. ‘Dadaist Man is the Radical Opponent of Exploitation’, declares a third.

  A life-size model of a German soldier with a pig’s head hangs from the ceiling. (It is called Prussian Archangel.) A painting shows three war-wounded soldiers playing cards, one with his mouth crudely stitched up and a black hole for an eye, another with a prosthetic nose, a third with a metal plate holding his skull together.

  PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: Wherever they go, they are treated like royalty.

  In the old imperial capital, the British Labour Delegation tour the great revolutionary sites of 1917 and are treated to several outings to the ballet and opera. In Moscow, they are given an hour and a half with Lenin in person (who as usual pretends to be quite frank, while saying very little). At the Bolshoi Theatre, they sit in the imperial box. Hearts pound a little faster when war commissar Trotsky joins them for the opera one evening dressed in a tight-fitting Red Army uniform and bearing news of Russian success in pushing back the Poles from Red Ukraine. During the second half, when a lovemaking scene takes place on stage, Leon turns to the suffragette sitting by his side, gestures towards the actors and murmurs in broken English: ‘There is the great international language.’ Some delegates go to see a Futurist performance as well. Their minders never leave their side. A sleek Comintern representative is assigned to answer questions. She is horrified when Ethel Snowden seems concerned about the whereabouts of the former owners of the palace in which they are staying.

  The consequences of three years of war and revolution are everywhere to see on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. The suffragette asks why so many women on the streets have short hair. Typhus makes the hair fall out, she is told. When Ethel gives a woollen jacket to the maid who has been looking after her, the girl falls to her knees and kisses the generous British lady’s hand. The Bolsheviks have destroyed the old economy–but its replacement has not yet arrived. In parts of the Russian countryside, peasants reportedly eat moss. Even Trotsky admits that rations are now weighed on ‘the chemist’s scales’. In the cities, illegal markets sell shoddy goods at inflated prices. A rouble note with lots of zeroes is referred to on the streets as a limon, a sour reflection of all it can buy. Factory workers are paid in goods they do not want and then resort to barter, with matches exchanged for glasses of milk, and overcoats bought with firewood. Commissars get their lemons hand-delivered from abroad.

  Perhaps money could be abolished entirely? For what are banknotes but coloured paper, the symbol of capitalist oppression? Lenin gives Marx’s dictum that each should be provided for according to their need a little twist: for each according to their work. An economist proposes a system based on units of work-energy with a giant centralised ledger keeping everything in balance. Realism intervenes. The tools are not yet ready and the economy is not prepared for such a shock. Some have more blasphemous thoughts. Trotsky, while demanding the extension of military discipline to the industrial workforce, simultaneously suggests that the wartime policy of simply requisitioning grain from the peasantry should now be softened to encourage them to grow more. Vladimir shoots him down. Heresy!

  While debates rage in the Kremlin, Russia shivers and the peasants do not plant for the year ahead. A summer tour of villages near Moscow inspires John Reed to start work on a new play with the working title Hunger. In Petrograd, Ethel meets one of Russia’s most famous singers and spots his bare toes poking through his worn-out shoes. Another delegate asks about the fashion for women wearing socks rather than stockings. ‘Socks use up less wool than stockings’, comes back the answer. ‘Most have neither’. But, ultimately, who is to blame for these material conditions: the Bolsheviks or the enemies they have been forced to fight for the last three years? Meeting Vladimir in the Kremlin, one of the British delegates compares Soviet Russia to a patient recovering from a serious illness: sick, but on the mend. Yes, Lenin pounces, that’s it. And the revolution is like a severe but vitally necessary operation.

  The delegates arrive in Russia wanting to believe in the great experiment, or at least wanting to approach it with an open mind. They leave it disappointed. The commissars are worse than the old Etonians they have to deal with back home. The intellectual inflexibility of the Bolsheviks grates. Is poetry, art, love, all just a subset of Marxist theory? On a long cruise down the Volga, even the philosopher attached to the British delegation grows a little tired of interminable discussion of the materialistic conception of history. Many of his fellow delegates fall sick at some point during their time in Russia, mostly with digestive trouble. One very nearly dies from pneumonia. Colleagues nurse him back to life, no thanks to Bolshevik doctors who give him two days to live. The delegates dine a little too much on fish heads–and never fish. (That part goes to the commissar, they joke.) Abject poverty is less romantic when looked at up close.

  The delegates leave Russia with the belief that it should be given a chance to work out its difficulties without outside intervention. London and Paris should keep their hands off. But they do not think the great experiment would work at home.

  TEREZÍN FORTRESS, CZECHOSLOVAKIA–SARAJEVO, YUGOSLAVIA: The coffins of the Sarajevo martyrs are laid out on a long black dais. There are flowers everywhere. A crucifixion scene is placed in the middle. For the Serbians in attendance these bodies are holy relics. Their nerves tremble with patriotic energy. Gavrilo Princip’s body is reburied in Sarajevo’s Koševo cemetery a few days later. A new cult of Serbian heroism is born to justify their domination of the new kingdom of Yugoslavia.

  MOSCOW: The impatient revolutionary involves himself in all details of Soviet Russia’s ongoing crisis.

  The authorities must act firmly to confiscate the surplus produced by people growing food on allotments outside Moscow and Petrograd, he writes. Muscovites must be mobilised to forage for firewood–‘by hand’–in the forests within a twenty-mile radius of the city and dump it at railway stations. Each man should be required to haul one cubic metre of wood every three months (‘the experts can figure it out more exactly’, Vladimir writes, ‘I mention a figure as an example’). Failure will result in arrest and execution: ‘inactivity and negligence cannot be tolerated’. At the same time, he orders that the estate manager at his Gorki country house–he prefers to use the more proletarian-sounding term sanatorium in public–should be imprisoned for a month for cutting down a fir tree. The charge is ‘causing damage to Soviet property’.

  No matter is too small to dema
nd Vladimir’s personal attention. Everything is important. Everything is urgent. One day he finds himself leafing through a pamphlet produced in the dark days of 1918 called Cooking Food Without Fire. He asks the relevant official to update him as to whether anything ever came of a competition for a new kind of thermos vessel mentioned therein. In late June, he orders the state publishing house to ‘publish quickly’ the book of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. When he discovers that the Commissariat of Enlightenment has no film with which to record the trial of Kolchak’s ministers, Vladimir personally orders the foreign ministry to buy some abroad immediately.

  While trying to keep the revolution on the road at home, Vladimir’s attention is increasingly drawn to the situation with the Poles. He pesters his subordinates daily for more news from the front. A Red cavalry division is harassing the Poles towards the line they held before they launched their offensive. But no final decision has been taken as to what to do when the task of clearing the area has been completed.

  The twenty-seven-year-old commander of the Red Army in the west, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, is keen to push on. At the beginning of July, he issues an order of the day to all his units.

  The time of reckoning has come.

  In the blood of the defeated Polish army we will drown the criminal government of Piłsudski.

  Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to World Conflagration.

  On our bayonets we will bring peace and happiness to the toiling masses of mankind.

  On to Wilno, Minsk, Warsaw–Forward!

  The road west is open. All that is needed is the order from the top to fire the starter’s pistol.

  Vladimir is surrounded by voices urging caution. Despite all the stirring speeches in Moscow about a proletarian war against the Polish landlord class, in private many Bolshevik leaders fear that the workers of Warsaw may not welcome the Red Army as liberators. The British offer to mediate a ceasefire in order to save the Poles and hold back the Reds in Russia. Trotsky urges Lenin to take the offer up.