Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) made the link between the experience of the war and the birth of modernist literature in what he called the ‘dynamics of hope abridged’. Other historians, less focused on the direct links between the war’s specific impact on cultural history, have written about the raucous, riotous onset of modernity with similar verve. Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century (1998) is an endlessly fascinating vision of the cultural history of the bloodiest century of human existence. Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius: 1922, Modernism and All That Jazz (2012) provides a diaristic account of the cultural happenings of that seminal year, which offered a partial inspiration for the approach taken in Crucible. Philipp Blom charts the social and cultural history of the interwar period in the twenty-one kaleidoscopic chapters of Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918–1938 (2015).
At the centre of Crucible is the story of the collapse of four European or Eurasian empires: German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian (though the Soviet Union ended up resurrecting the last under the guise of world communism). While hinted at here, another book would be needed to describe the erosion of assumptions of European superiority which followed the Great War, and the global conflicts and anti-colonial movements which emerged from its ashes. David Fromkin, Sean McMeekin, Eugene Rogan and James Barr have all written on the consequences of the war for the shape of the Middle East–consequences which resonate down to today. But the change went far wider than that, to India and China and beyond. As the Chinese intellectual Yan Fu wrote after the war, ‘the European race’s last three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption’.
Margaret MacMillan’s brilliant Peacemakers (2001) inspired in me a fascination with the world in which the peace was made after 1918, and the constraints under which the peacemakers were operating–they acted like gods, but were they really in control? Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (2015) broadens and reshapes that story of how the world was remade, as does Robert Boyce’s The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (2009). William Mulligan’s The Great War for Peace (2014) takes a refreshingly different view of the role of the war in early twentieth-century history. David Reynolds’ book The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (2013) widens the frame to the whole of the century. There is an increasing interest, sparked by Ernst Nolte and others, in the notion of a ‘European civil war’, running from 1917 (or earlier) to 1945. In reality, of course, no periodisation really fits. All history is the story of lives and ideas which meet for an instant, connect, transform each other and eventually dissipate back into the flow of time. There are no breaks; just influences, consequences and memories.
Almost every character in this book has multiple biographies written about them, most of which I have dug into at some point during the research for this book. Among the most enjoyable are Robert Service’s trilogy on Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s wonderful The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (2013), John Röhl’s epic biography of Kaiser Wilhelm, Colin Grant’s Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa (2008) and Andrew Mango’s Atatürk (1999). Tim Snyder’s The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Europe (2009) is a gem, as is Tim Butcher’s unusual The Trigger: The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin who Brought the World to War (2014). Tim Pat Coogan’s twin biographies of de Valera and Michael Collins are to early twentieth-century Irish history what Robert Service’s books are to early Soviet history, giving a human shape to the politics.
And behind all the biographers are those who have collated, edited and translated the sources on which the labours of the later historian depend: the editors of Lenin’s Collected Works (whose memorialisation of the dictator began before he was even dead and buried), the historians who have collected the papers of the UNIA so that its story can be told, or those engaged in the ongoing and colossal project of collecting and translating the papers of Albert Einstein. Writing a book feels like a solitary task sometimes. In fact, writing a history book is a collective one, where you are constantly thankful for the work that others have done, sometimes years or decades before, in a dusty archive somewhere, without which you would have nothing to say at all.
NOTES ON NAMES, LANGUAGE AND DATES
My guiding principle in decisions on names and language has been immediacy of description and readability for a current audience, while trying to avoid anachronisms and achieve consistency across what was a tumultuous period of historical change, during which names and language were often contested, as they are today.
In descriptions of ethnicity and race I have eschewed terminology which might be used nowadays, such as African American, but which would be anachronistic for the period. I have preferred the phraseology in common parlance at the time. The use of collective nouns for groups of people in the text–such as ‘the Jews’–reflects the tendency of the times to identify whole communities by the (real or perceived) actions and beliefs of a few individuals (or simply by generalised prejudice against those communities). In this book, it is normally a paraphrase of the character speaking in the text. Judgements on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity or religion were commonplace in this period, based on lazy, age-old cultural assumptions and the more recent popularisation of false scientific theories. But this was also a time when the challenge to those assumptions and theories began to take flight.
The question of place names was of huge relevance in this period. Borders and populations shifted. Empires ruled by one (or in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, two) population group collapsed; new states arose. In this book I have placed intelligibility and consistency above other considerations. Where they exist, I have used common English names (Salonika rather than Thessaloniki, Warsaw rather than Warszawa). For well-known places I have generally used the most easily intelligible place name for a modern English-speaking audience (Kiev rather than Kyiv and, with a couple of exceptions, Istanbul rather than Constantinople). If the place named is generally less well known, I have had to make a choice about using the administrative name or the name used locally. I have opted for Smyrna rather than Izmir, which is the name which would have been used by the majority of the city’s population up to the early 1920s. For Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg/Lwów I have chosen Lviv as the modern and most recognisable name of the city, even though it was controlled by the German-speaking Habsburgs at the beginning of the period (Lemberg), was essentially ruled from Moscow at the end (Lvov), had a Polish majority at one time (Lwów) and now a Ukrainian one (Lviv).
For proper names I have generally used spellings from the original language (Dáil rather than Dail, Friedrich rather than Frederick) except where a name may be mispronounced (Djemal rather than Cemal). With Russian names and with transliteration from Russian in general I have used whatever is most intelligible to a modern English-speaking audience even if that means some inconsistencies (Nicholas rather than Nikolai, Tsarskoye Selo rather than Tsarskoe Selo, Mogilyov rather than Mogilëv).
Except where otherwise indicated, translations are my own. I was helped in Russian translation by Sofia Gurevich and Inga Meladze, Polish translation by Tomasz Gromelski and Turkish translation by Zehra Haliloğlu. I have abbreviated original quotations for readability on a handful of occasions.
In February 1918, the Bolsheviks changed the calendar in use in Russia from the Julian to the Western Gregorian, which is thirteen days ahead in this period. This explains why the 1917 Bolshevik revolution generally described as the ‘October Revolution’ took place in November according to the Western calendar and why I count Rasputin’s burial as taking place at the start of 1917 though according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia it was still 1916. In the endnotes, I have used Old Style dates when citing documents from Russians up to February 1918 and Western ca
lendar dates for documents from non-Russians (in other words, using the dates the writers themselves would have employed).
SOURCES
Libraries and Online Resources
This book has mostly been written at the British Library in London. Parts of the book have also been written and researched at the New York Public Library, the library of the London School of Economics, and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and Deutsches Historisches Institut in Paris. In addition to the material in these libraries and the archives listed below (many of which are themselves partly or wholly digitised), a huge amount of primary material is now available online:
www.archive.org for memoirs from the period
www.britishpathe.com is a great source for newsreels of the times
http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie–for the Bureau of Military History covering material of Irish history from 1913 to 1921
https://gallica.bnf.fr/html/und/presse-et-revues/les-principaux-quotidiens for French newspapers
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org–for a selection of German primary sources
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu–for the collected papers of Albert Einstein
www.marxists.org for the works of Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg
https://monoskop.org–for materials relating to Dada
www.newspapers.com for American and British newspapers
https://www.oireachtas.ie–for the proceedings of the Dáil
www.onb.ac.at–for Austrian newspapers
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/index.html–for the International Dada Archive at the libraries of the University of Iowa
https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/search–Warwick University digital collection on the Russian revolution and Britain
zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de for German newspapers
Archival Sources
AWD: Allen W. Dulles Papers, Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton
BL: British Library, London
BMH: Bureau of Military History, Ireland
EHC: Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
FHA: Fritz Haber Archives, Max-Planck Gesellschaft, Berlin
HFA: Henry Ford Archives, Benson Ford Research Centre, Dearborn
HIA: Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford
Frederiksen Letters
Lockhart Papers
Luxemburg Jacob Papers
M. J. Larsons Papers
Paul Levi Papers
Register of the Russia. Posol’stvo (U.S.) Records
Vrangel Collection
Vrangel Family Papers
JKP: Jessie Kenney Papers, Women’s Library, London School of Economics
JRL: Freud Collection, John Rylands Library, Manchester
JRP: John Reed Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard
LOC: Library of Congress, Washington DC
National Endowment for the Advancement of Colored People
Sigmund Freud Collection
NA: National Archives, Kew, London
RL: Royal Library, Windsor
WEB: W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
USNA: U.S. National Archives, College Park, Maryland
Published Documents
In the endnotes published documents are cited by abbreviation or by title followed by the volume in Roman numerals, and then the page references for the cited document followed by the page number for the individual citation if the document is of considerable length.
CI: The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents, 3 volumes, 1956–1965 (ed. Jane Degras)
DBFP: Documents on British Foreign Policy
DIFP: Documents on Irish Foreign Policy
DÖZ: Dokumentation zur österreichischen Zeitgeschichte 1918–1928, 1984 (eds. Christine Klusacek and Kurt Stimmer)
FRUS: Papers Relating to the Foreign Affairs of the United States
GFA: L’Allemagne et les problèmes de la paix pendant la première guerre mondiale: Documents extrait des archives de l’Office allemand des affaires étrangères, 4 volumes, 1962–1976 (eds. André Scherer and Jacques Grunewald)
IDDI: I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani
MG: Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 10 volumes, 1983–2006 (ed. Robert A. Hill)
PBL: Proceedings of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference: The Peace Negotiations between Russia and the Central Powers, 21 November 1917–3 March 1918, 1918
ROM: The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution, 1995 (eds. Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv)
RPG: The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents, 3 volumes, 1961 (eds. Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky)
RSS: The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State, 1917–1921, 1975 (ed. Martin McCauley)
–Address of the President of the United States at the Semicentennial of the Founding of the City of Birmingham, Alabama, 1921
–Albert Leo Schlageter: Seine Verurteilung und Erschießung durch die Franzosen in Düsseldorf am 26. Mai 1923, 1938
–Arbeiterklasse siegt über Kapp und Lüttwitz, 2 volumes, 1971 (eds. Erwin Könneman, Brigitte Berthold and Gerhard Schulze)
–Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice by Louis F. Post and Others, Hearings before the Committee on Rules, House of Representatives, Sixty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, 1920
–Aus Kaiser Karls Nachlass, 1925 (ed. Karl Werkmann)
–Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Congress, 1919
–Congress of the Peoples of the East: Stenographic Report, 1977 (trans. Brian Pearce)
–Der Hitler-Putsch: Bayerische Dokumente zum 8./9. November 1923, 1962 (ed. Ernst Deuerlein)
–Der Waffenstillstand, 1918–1919: Das Dokumenten-Material der Waffenstillstands-Verhandlungen von Compiègne, Spa, Trier und Brüssel, 3 volumes, 1928 (eds. Edmund Marhefka, Hans von Hammerstein and Otto von Stein)
–Deutsche Parteiprogramme 1861–1954: Quellensammlung zur Kulturgeschichte, Vol. 3, 1954 (ed. Wolfgang Treue)
–Die Entwicklung der deutschen Revolution und das Kriegsende in der Zeit vom 1. Oktober bis 30. November 1918, 1918 (ed. Kurt Ahnert)
–Documents and Statements Relating to Peace Proposals and War Aims, December 1916–November 1918, 1919 (ed. G. Lowe Dickinson)
–Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte, 3 volumes, 1961–1966 (ed. Ernst Rudolf Huber)
–The Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1918, 2 volumes, 1932 (ed. Ralph Haswell Lutz)
–Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–1918: Documents from the Archive of the German Foreign Ministry, 1958 (ed. Z. A. B. Zeman)
–Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia, April–December 1918: Documents and Materials, 1936 (ed. James Bunyan)
–Official German Documents Relating to the World War, 2 volumes, 1923 (ed. James Brown Scott)
–Politische Reden, 4 volumes, 1994 (eds. Peter Wende and Marie Luise Recker)
–Riot at East St. Louis, Illinois: Hearings before the Committee on Rules, House of Representatives, Sixty-Fifth Congress, First Session, on H.J. Res. 118, August 3, 1917, 1917
–Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, 1980 (ed. Alan Adler; trans. Alix Holt and Barbara Holland)
–To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921, 2015 (trans. John Riddell)
–Urkunden der Obersten Heeresleitung über ihre Tätigkeit 1916/8, 1920 (ed. Erich Ludendorff)
–What Happened at Leeds, 1919 (Council of Workers and Soldiers Delegates)
Collected Papers, Speeches and Published Writings
These documents are cited either by the abbreviations below or by the surname of the author. In cases where there are several works by the same author, or there are several authors of primary or secon
dary sources with the same surname, I have used the author’s surname and an abbreviation of the title of the work.
CDG: Charles de Gaulle: Lettres, notes et carnets, 3 volumes, 2010 (ed. Philippe de Gaulle)
CPAE: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, 14 volumes, 1987–2015
CW: Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works, 47 volumes, 1960–1980
LS: Leninskii Sbornik, 40 volumes, 1924–1985
OO: Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, 44 volumes, 1951–1980 (eds. Diulio and Edoardo Susmel)
PSS: Polnoe Sobranie Sochenii, 55 volumes, 1961–1965
SA: Adolf Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905–1924, 1980 (eds. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn)
SE: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, 1953–1974 (ed. James Strachey)
TMW: How the Revolution Armed: The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, 5 volumes, 1979–1981 (ed. Brian Pearce)
TP: The Trotsky Papers, 2 volumes, 1964–1971 (ed. Jan M. Meijer)
WSC: The Churchill Documents, 17 volumes, 2006–2014 (ed. Martin Gilbert)
WW: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 volumes, 1966–1994 (ed. Arthur S. Link)
ADLER, Friedrich, Friedrich Adler vor dem Ausnahmegericht. Die Verhandlungen vor dem §-14-Gericht am 18. und 19. Mai 1917 nach dem stenographischen Protokoll, 1919
D’ANNUNZIO, Gabriele, Fante del Veliki è del Faiti, 1932 (ed. Saverio Laredo de Mendoza)
Prose di Ricerca, 3 volumes, 1962–1968 (ed. Egidio Bianchetti)
La Scrittura nel Vento: Gabriele d’Annunzio e il volo su Vienna. Immagini e documenti, 1999 (ed. Giorgio Evangelisti)
BRETON, André, Manifestes du surréalisme, 1972 (ed. Jean-Jacques Pauvert)
CHURCHILL, Winston, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, Vol. 3, 1914–1922, 1974 (ed. Robert Rhodes James)
Winston Churchill’s Speeches: Never Give In!, 2003 (ed. Winston S. Churchill)
DE GAULLE, Charles, ‘La bataille de la Vistule’, Revue de Paris, No. 6, 1920, 35–53
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