Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Each year, things are supposed to get better. But somehow events conspire to make them worse. Peace and plenty are always just around the corner. Now, peace has arrived, but plenty is still very far away. The economy is in a dreadful state. Industry has virtually closed down: Russia produces one fifth of the goods manufactured before the war. The cities survive on hunger rations. The countryside is starving. Factories feel like prison camps. Now the Bolsheviks do not even have a foreign enemy to pin their misery on. Out of desperation, the call to strike is going up again. Peasant rebellions are swelling across the land. Trotsky is making trouble in the party. Something in the mechanism of government is faulty, Lenin admits. Decrees are signed ‘and then we ourselves forget about them and fail to carry them out’. Communism isn’t working.

  Vladimir struggles for answers to the crisis. He is caught between purity and practicality, between the ideals he came to power with, and the need to cling on now. He tries to find a middle course, to split the difference, and dress it up as revolutionary statesmanship. The revolution–his revolution, that is–will only be truly safe once it is strong economically, he concludes. To achieve that, it must trade with the outside world. Foreign businesses–German ones, in particular–should be encouraged to invest. The impatient revolutionary becomes an advocate of extensive concessions to foreign capitalists–land for tractors, oil for investment. Many Bolsheviks are appalled. Was this what the revolution was for? Only weeks before, on the third anniversary of the revolution, the largest agitational spectacle yet was put on in Petrograd, with banker capitalists in top hats carrying huge sacks marked with dollar signs and a cast of eight thousand storming the Winter Palace–a far greater number than were involved in the real thing in 1917. ‘Lenin! Lenin!’ they cry at one point. The whole thing has been made into a film.

  ‘There is no question of selling out Russia to the capitalists’, the impatient revolutionary reassures them. He tries to turn the horror of most Bolsheviks at his proposals into an argument in their favour: it proves that Russia is already ideologically inoculated against capitalism and can therefore survive the presence of a few foreign capitalists in their midst without fear of contamination. Anyway, the ends justify the means. The situation is desperate. Adjustments are necessary.

  But how far will the impatient revolutionary go? He promises he has no intention of letting the poison of the market back into Russia in a broader sense: no private trading, no capitalist mentality. As a testament to this, Vladimir points to the recent suppression of the Sukharevka, a large Moscow street market where speculators thrive (but also where people go to try and buy the food they cannot get from the rations or the canteens). But we must go further, the impatient revolutionary demands. After all, the true danger is not on the street. It is ‘the Sukharevka that resides in the heart and behaviour of every petty proprietor’. ‘This is the Sukharevka that must be closed down.’

  In any case, the present adjustments are temporary. The key to the future is scale: big factories, big farms, nationwide electricity. Vladimir has a new slogan for it: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.’ A plan is being drawn up to achieve it over the next decade. But the people are hungry now. And they are getting hungrier.

  FIUME: When the assault to recover Fiume comes, fifteen months after D’Annunzio marched in and took over the city, the whole of Italy is preparing itself for the festivities of Christmas. People have more important things to worry about than politics.

  Though defensive preparations have been made, with fishing nets slung across the streets and barricades built up, Lieutenant Colonel D’Annunzio (Retd) can hardly believe it when the attack begins. Soldiers shout over their lines to the defending legionnaires, warning them to get out now. No one wants to shoot. Can this really be happening?

  After three days of intermittent fighting, Italian against Italian, a shell fired from a battleship whistles through an open window of D’Annunzio’s headquarters. If he does not surrender now, the poet is warned, more will follow. Italy’s famous Great War hero ponders for a while, and then makes his decision. Negotiations begin for the safe passage of him and his men. The adventure is over.

  DUBLIN: A stormy crossing of the Irish Sea from Liverpool. Éamon de Valera acts the drunk when challenged by the ferry’s captain as to his identity. By Christmas Eve he is in a Dublin safe house owned by a gynaecologist. Sinéad visits him but does not stay.

  The new returnee blasts Michael Collins’s guerrilla tactics in the war fought during his prolonged American absence. Too much violence, too little distinction between Irish and British. ‘This odd shooting of a policeman here and there is having a very bad effect, from the propaganda point of view, on us in America’, Éamon de Valera sermonises to his Irish courtiers. ‘What we want is, one good battle about once a month with about 500 men on each side.’ Collins is incensed. Open battle means certain, bloody, glorious defeat. Another waste of heroes’ blood. More martyrs for the cause. Which will it be: glorious defeat or bloody victory?

  Everyone knows the war must be ended, somehow. But when, and on whose terms? Who will tire first? Each act of violence ratchets up the pressure on the other side. Openings for negotiation are narrow, fleeting. Possible intermediaries come and go: an Australian archbishop, an Irish businessman. The day de Valera returns from America, a British law officially splits Ireland into two, with a self-rule parliament to be established in each part, north and south, in Belfast and Dublin, and elections held next year. Vague hopes for peace are shrouded in mutual mistrust and blackened by daily, tangible acts of murder and retribution. The time is never right.

  One night at the end of the year, like on so many nights before in other Irish towns and villages, a Black and Tan patrol in Midleton, County Cork, comes under fire. IRA men appear from nowhere, emerging from the laneways. For twenty minutes, the main street becomes a shooting gallery. Taken by surprise, several Black and Tans are badly wounded and later die in hospital. An IRA man takes a bullet in the wrist, but nothing serious. He and his comrades escape into the mountains with a haul of weapons, and later occupy an abandoned farmhouse outside the village of Clonmult.

  Three days later reprisal comes to Midleton: not in the heat of battle, as before, but now as a matter of official policy, an instrument of British martial law. Half a dozen houses near the ambush site are selected, somewhat randomly. The inhabitants are given an hour to clear out. They are allowed to take their valuables with them but not their furniture. Then the houses are burned to the ground.

  It is the first day of 1921.

  1921

  The man with a gun who was the terror of the working people in the past is no longer a terror for he is now the representative of the Red Army and is their protector.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Prejudices have become grotesque.

  Albert Einstein

  WINTER

  DUBLIN: Back safely on Irish soil, Éamon de Valera ventures a suggestion: perhaps Michael Collins, his hotheaded rival, would like to go to America on a fundraising tour.

  The pill is sugared as much as possible. The break would do him good. Collins is tired out. He looks ten years older than the man of thirty he is. It would be a chance to travel, and to use his reputation in the Irish cause without worrying for his safety every minute of the day. And it would infuriate the British.

  ‘The Long Whoor won’t get rid of me as easily as that’ is the furious reply. Michael Collins is staying put.

  CHICAGO: After a few false starts (including lying on an application form to work in advertising), Ernest is made the assistant editor of a magazine for the American cooperative movement. It’s not for ever, Hemingway tells himself, and it’s a job.

  But that’s not all that is new in his life. The young hero has met a woman he likes, a far more serious proposition than the Petoskey girls he has been hanging out with: a tall, limber, well-educated girl called Hadley, eight years his senior, with no parents to call her own, but
with a trust fund to her name instead. Ernest and Hadley–or Hash, as he likes to call her–write slightly tortured letters to each other and worry about who loves whom more. He gives her a book by D’Annunzio to show his worldliness, just as he did to Dorothy Connable last year.

  On cold dark evenings in Chicago, Ernest flicks through the poems of Siegfried Sassoon, which leave him feeling bitter about the war. A journalist fresh back from Moscow–the man who ghost-wrote Maria Bochkareva’s autobiography in 1918–comes over for supper. Isaac Don Levine brings with him ‘the cold dope on Rooshia’, as Ernest types it up for his mother. Poor Hemingway feels a little sorry for himself that he is not closer to the action in Europe. For a while in January, he entertains the notion of jacking it all in and going to Italy for a few months with a friend. Then he has another idea: perhaps he should get married.

  LONDON: The President of the British Phrenological Society, whose members believe measurements of the skull can give insights into the character of their owners, visits the studio of sculptor Clare Sheridan.

  He has brought his tools to measure the sculptures Clare did in the Kremlin as one would measure an actual human head. Lenin, he says, is clearly a thinker and a planner. He has great ideals which he wishes to put into effect on a grand scale. He is secretive and ambitious. He is gracious towards women, but fails to understand the views of others. Turning to the bust of Trotsky he states that the measurements of his head suggest greater intuition, though with a tendency towards brusqueness. He has a strong self-preserving instinct and high self-esteem. The shape of his cranium shows that his amorousness is greater than his powers of concentration.

  GORKI: Vladimir spends nearly three weeks at his country house. He finds it hard to relax.

  The country is in permanent economic crisis. And it is spreading to the political. He is worried about the party. Too much debate. Too many arguments. Too many factions, says the arch-factionalist of yesteryear. ‘The party is sick,’ Vladimir writes, ‘the party is down with the fever.’ Some are saying the party has got too far away from the workers–there are not many in its leadership. They want the trades unions to control the economy and the party hacks reined in. ‘Syndicalist deviation,’ Lenin calls it, ‘which will kill the Party unless it is entirely cured of it.’

  Trotsky has stirred things up the other way, saying the unions should be nationalised: who needs to represent the workers against the state when you have a workers’ state already? And all this being discussed in public! Lenin is appalled. Why does Comrade Trotsky not know when to stop? So reckless. So irresponsible. So individualistic. Lenin’s own line is that the whole Soviet system should be viewed as an arrangement of cogwheels, with the unions as ‘transmission belts’ running between the party and the workers. Unfortunately, the machine has stopped working.

  In the cities, bread rations are cut again this January. Factories shut down for lack of fuel. In the countryside, the Cheka estimates one hundred and eighteen peasant uprisings. Vladimir receives maps showing the vast areas of the country in rebellion. He personally speaks to peasants from the affected areas. They cannot all be class enemies. They cannot all be put down either. Something will have to give. A new zigzag starts forming in Lenin’s mind.

  FIUME: In January, D’Annunzio leaves the city-state he once ran with such extravagance. He will face no trial or punishment for insubordination. Those who died in Fiume’s defence will be his personal martyrs. His conquest of Fiume, however badly it ended, makes him an icon for the nationalist right. Many consider him a demigod. The poet now travels to a new house by Lake Garda, reclaimed from a German art historian (Wagner’s wife once played on its piano). He is delighted to have a new project of Italianification on his hands.

  His legionnaires split up. Some retire from their nationalist pursuits. Others drift to Milan, where Mussolini is making his name. Some lend their services to the Fascist gangs roaming central and northern Italy, seeing a reflection of Fiume in their habits of strange, exotic violence: using dried cod heads as weapons and force-feeding castor oil to their foes.

  PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA: A man with something of the look of a travelling violin player arrives at the railway station, his hair swept back dramatically, an impish grin on his face. Though he has been here before, he acts like a tourist, asking to be taken by his guide to different cafés to get a good look at the population of Prague these days–Czech nationalists in one, German nationalists in another, Jews, Communists and actors in a third. For lunch, Einstein eats calf’s liver cooked over a Bunsen burner in the apartment of a scientist friend.

  As is common wherever Einstein comes to speak these days, the lecture hall at the Urania Association is crammed. After the lecture, he avoids in-depth questioning by offering to play a Mozart violin sonata instead. As he is leaving Czechoslovakia on his way to Vienna, he is accosted by a young man talking gibberish about how the energy contained within an atom could some day be used to create the most extraordinary explosion. Einstein tells him to abandon such foolishness.

  His mood seems quite playful this wintertime. Perhaps it is his hope that this year–surely–will be the year he finally gets his Nobel Prize. Perhaps it is just the effects of being amongst friends–and Prague seems a rather happier place than Berlin right now. Perhaps it is the prospect of a trip to America. Einstein has demanded fifteen thousand dollars from Princeton and Wisconsin universities for a short lecture tour–one way to solve the problem of how to make his alimony payments–and now awaits their response. Or perhaps it is just the acclaim which seems to greet him wherever he goes these days. The anti-relativists have been silenced. The fan-mail keeps on piling up. His theory–however misunderstood–seems to reign supreme.

  Yet, in some quarters, a different and darker mood is building. The day Albert arrives in Prague, Adolf gives a speech in a Munich beer hall entitled ‘Stupidity or Crime’, claiming that a Jewish conspiracy is at work in the world of science, aiming at the ‘deliberate poisoning of our national soul, and thereby bringing about the inner collapse of our people’. Such manipulators, Hitler says, are prepared to work for years and decades before they achieve their final objective: ‘psychological illness of the masses’.

  The day Albert leaves Prague an extremist hack suggests that Einstein should be murdered. He is fined a small sum by a Berlin court for incitement to violence.

  DEARBORN: On week thirty-five of Ford’s campaign it is the world of American entertainment which the Independent has in its sights. The theatre has been taken over by Jews, and turned from a place of refinement where Americans can be instructed in sound virtues into a money machine. It is now ‘show business’. Commercialism trumps everything else and vulgarity reigns supreme. The Independent provides a list of actors operating under innocent-sounding ‘cover names’. Such as Charlie Chaplin.

  In January, over one hundred Christians–including Woodrow Wilson, his predecessor, several bishops and William Du Bois–sign a letter attacking Ford’s campaign of ‘prejudice and hatred’. They call it un-American. America’s moral majority is at last finding its voice. It is all far too late. Henry Ford’s Independent has given worldwide credibility to anti-Semitic slander; The International Jew has been translated. Henry Ford is now an idol to anti-Semites around the world. And still the articles are churned out like automobiles.

  INÖNÜ, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Greek troops advance into Anatolia, probing deeper and deeper into the interior. A reconnaissance mission, they claim. The Turks suspect the incursion is the prelude to a general assault, with the objective of smashing Turkish resistance, safeguarding Smyrna from attack and enforcing whatever they can of the Sèvres peace–signed but unratified, and already falling apart. Nearly a hundred Turks are killed in battle and Turkish troops repair to a new line. But the Greeks turn back as well. Who has won, who has lost?

  MUNICH: ‘Before the war’, the Völkischer Beobachter recalls, ‘Turkey was called the “sick man”.’ That has changed since Kemal. His war of resistance against th
e Sèvres peace terms has given his country back its sense of pride. National solidarity has been revived. The ‘sick man’ has returned to vigorous health. Could not Germany manage something similar if it opposed Versailles? Could Bavaria be a second Anatolia? ‘One day’, the paper says, ‘Germany may have to resort to Turkish methods.’

  MOSCOW: It is bitterly cold.

  Nadya and Vladimir pay a visit to young Varya Armand, staying in a commune for art-school students. They sleep on bare wooden boards; they have neither bread nor salt. But they do have cereals. The students make the impatient revolutionary and his wife a bowl of porridge. They show them their drawings. Vladimir looks confused. One has a locomotive in it.

  ‘Dynamic!’ Lenin calls it. He asks them whether they read Pushkin.

  ‘Oh no,’ the students reply, ‘we read Mayakovsky.’

  Bloody Mayakovsky! Nadya remembers one time at a Red Army concert when Vladimir was confronted with an actress declaiming a Mayakovsky poem almost in front of his nose–‘Speed is our body and the drum our heart!’ Her husband breathed a deep sigh of relief when another actor came on and started reading a short story by Chekhov. Vladimir pauses before responding to young Varya. ‘I think Pushkin is better’, he says eventually.

  Back at the office, he takes comfort in a new project, more attuned to his own literary tastes: to build up a library collection of the works of Marx and Engels. Perhaps, Vladimir wonders, they could go one better. ‘Could we buy the letters of Marx and Engels, or photographs of them?’ Vladimir asks. They must be in Germany: ‘You know, this dirty lot will sell anything.’

  CLONMULT, CO. CORK: Twenty IRA men, some involved in the Midleton ambush of last year, are surprised by the army while hiding out in a farmhouse just beyond the isolated village of Clonmult. Twelve of them are killed in the ensuing battle.