Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Talat Pasha was reported to have told an official at the German embassy in 1915 that the Ottoman government was “taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal enemies, the indigenous Christians … without being disturbed by foreign intervention.” Between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians, out of a population of just under 2.5 million, perished in this period, whether this was an officially ordered genocide or a disorderly series of massacres.

  Meanwhile in the Middle East, Jemal, facing an Arab revolt under British patronage, was launching a reign of terror in Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem against Arab nationalists. The Ottomans achieved some surprising successes, destroying a British army at Kut in Iraq and routing the British forces in the Dardanelles. Nonetheless, Jemal failed to take Egypt and the British offensive was soon advancing on Jerusalem as the Russians pushed across the Caucasus.

  Talat then focused more of his attention on the deteriorating military position, and in 1917 was appointed grand vizier of the Sublime Porte (Ottoman prime minister). But he failed to stem the tide of military defeats, and resigned in October 1918, fleeing Turkey aboard a German submarine. The other two of the Three Pashas fled. In 1919, the world’s first war crimes trials were held under Allied auspices. The CUP leadership was found guilty and Talat, as the mastermind of the massacres, was sentenced to death. The Turks appealed to Germany for his extradition, but before this could happen Talat was murdered in Berlin in March 1921. His assassin was a survivor of the massacres who had seen his sisters raped and murdered by Turkish troops. Jemal was assassinated too, while Enver died in battle charging the Bolsheviks in central Asia.

  The persecution of the Armenians that Talat initiated provided the inspiration that others would draw on later in the century. Thus, as he contemplated his slaughter of the Jews, Hitler remarked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Even to this day, to mention the Armenian massacres in Turkey is interpreted as the crime of “insulting Turkishness,” and is punishable by imprisonment.

  ATATÜRK

  1881–1938

  We shall attempt to raise our national culture above the level of contemporary civilization. Therefore, we think and shall continue to think not according to the lethargic mentality of past centuries, but according to the concepts of speed and action of our century.

  Atatürk, speaking at the 10th anniversary of the Turkish Republic (October 29, 1933)

  Atatürk—the name adopted in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal—means Father of the Turks. He was a leader of immense vision, who created a new Islamic secularism, led Turkey out of the ruins of the moribund Ottoman empire and transformed it into a modern, Westernized republic. He became a military hero in the First World War and subsequently led the Turks to victory over an invading Greek army, sometimes with ruthlessness. He went on to become Turkey’s first president, leading the country until his death in 1938. He was by far the greatest of the strongmen of the inter-war period. In our own time of challenge from Islamist fanaticism, Atatürk’s vision has never been more important or relevant, yet his methods were harsh and the massacre of Smyrna was at least partly his responsibility.

  Atatürk was born in what is now the Greek city of Thessaloniki. He was an academically gifted child and attended military schools from the age of twelve. Once he had been commissioned as an army officer, he joined the group known as the Young Turks, who were critical of the Ottoman regime and eager for reform and progress. Atatürk was one of those leaders who was as gifted a politician as he was a military commander. During the First World War, he was the victor of Gallipoli, defeating the Allied attack there. He also served in the Caucasus, Sinai and Palestine. He demonstrated a talent for winning the ultimate loyalty of his troops. “I don’t order you to attack,” he told them, “I order you to die.”

  At the end of the war Atatürk found himself on the losing side. As many of the Arab lands once ruled by the Ottomans were distributed among the victorious Allies, he became involved with a national movement to create a modern nation out of the Turkish heartland of the defunct empire. British prime minister David Lloyd George and the Allies believed in a classically inspired Greek empire, assigned much of Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) to the Greeks, and encouraged its premier, Eleftherios Venizelos, to invade, thus launching a recklessly unnecessary war. Atatürk resisted ruthlessly and brilliantly, culminating in victory at the Battle of Dumlupinar in 1922—and the appalling atrocity of the Great Fire of Smyrna, in which Turkish troops were responsible for conflagration, rapine and murder, destroying one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities and killing 100,000 people. Commander-in-Chief Atatürk must bear some responsibility. Turkish independence was assured, however—confirmed in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne.

  With the military struggle over, another challenge arose: to secure the modernization of a new secular Turkish state. In October 1923 the Republic of Turkey was declared, and Atatürk became president. As a nationalist, one of his first aims was to purge the country of foreign influence. As a progressive, his next priority was to separate the Islamic religion from the state.

  The last Ottoman sultan had been deposed in 1922, and in 1924 Atatürk abolished the caliphate—the institution by which successive sultans had claimed rule over all Muslims. In place of an autocratic theocracy, Atatürk embraced, at least in theory, the principles of democracy and a legal code based on European models. Although Turkey remained a single-party state virtually without respite throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Atatürk tried to operate as an “enlightened authoritarian”—ruling without opposition but with a progressive and reforming agenda.

  Economically, Turkey lagged behind much of the Western world in the 1920s. Atatürk set up state-owned factories and industries, built an extensive and efficient rail service, and established national banks to fund development. Despite the ravages of the Great Depression after 1929, Turkey resisted the moves toward fascist or communist totalitarianism that took hold elsewhere.

  Atatürk declared that Turkey “deserves to become and will become civilized and progressive.” A major part of that drive was in the cultural and social field. The restrictions of Islamic custom and law were lifted. Women were emancipated—Mustafa Kemal’s adopted daughter became the world’s first female combat pilot—and Western dress was strongly encouraged, at times by official rules. Panamas and European hats replaced the traditional fez, which was banned by law. Education was transformed in towns and rural areas alike, and a new Turkish alphabet (a variant on the Roman alphabet) was introduced. Literacy levels rose from 20 percent to 90 percent.

  Atatürk encouraged the study of earlier civilizations connected with the heritage of the Turkish nation. Art, sculpture, music, modern architecture, opera and ballet all flourished. In every area of Turkish life, Atatürk pressed forward his modernizing, nationalistic mission, and a new culture began to emerge. In the process he rode roughshod over non-Turkish minority groups, suppressing the Kurds, among others.

  Dramatically good-looking, Atatürk was an eccentric leader, a vigorous womanizer and a heavy drinker. His Herculean workload combined with these prodigious appetites to bring about a collapse in his health, and in 1938 he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was only fifty-seven. He was loved by his people for his charisma, his energy and his personable style, and his funeral brought forth a massive wave of grief across the country. His memory is still revered; today in Turkey there are portraits and sculptures of him everywhere, and it remains a crime to insult the visionary father of the nation, yet during the early 21st century, his fiercely secular order is increasingly challenged by the mildly Islamic rule of Prime Minister Erdogan.

  PICASSO

  1881–1973

  Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon

  Pablo Picasso, in a letter (1945)

  Art today would not be the same without the genius of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. In a career spanning nearly eighty years, Picasso—ever
vigorous, ever full of joie de vivre—showed himself to be the most versatile and inventive artist not just of the 20th century but perhaps of all time, a master of painting and drawing as well as other media, such as collage, set design, pottery and sculpture. But his talent was not simply aesthetic. His most famous painting, Guernica, captured the total horror of war, while in his simple etching of the dove of peace he pointed the way for a happier future.

  Picasso was born in Malaga to an artistic but conventional family. Inspired by his father, he showed exceptional talent for painting from a very young age. By the age of fourteen he had his own studio and was already exhibiting in public and receiving praise from the critics. Before he was out of his teens, he was in Paris, mixing with the European avant-garde.

  In 1901 Picasso embarked on a phase known as his Blue Period, in which his paintings—still relatively naturalistic—were dominated by shades of blue. The paintings from this time are mainly melancholy, lonely portraits, often depicting extreme poverty. Much of Picasso’s dark mood was influenced by the suicide of a close friend, Casagemas. In a brilliant but gloomy self-portrait from this period, Picasso looks haggard and intense, far older than his twenty years. Soon, though, the mood lifted and Picasso moved into his Rose Period, in which his subjects—often circus people or acrobats—were depicted mainly in shades of pink.

  In 1907 Picasso struck out in a bold new direction, influenced by Cézanne and African masks, and produced one of the first masterpieces of modernism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is a striking and wildly angular and distorted depiction of five aggressively sexual women in a brothel. Thus, along with George Braque, who was producing strikingly original compositions of his own, Picasso gave birth to cubism, a completely new mode of capturing the essence of the subject on the canvas. Traditional perspective is abandoned in favor of multiple perspectives, as if the subject is seen from a number of different angles simultaneously. It was a revolutionary way of seeing. “I paint objects as I think them,” Picasso said, “not as I see them.”

  After his cubist phase, Picasso moved on to a neo-classical period, in which he painted monumental human figures in Mediterranean settings, influenced in part by Ingres and Renoir, and then, in the 1920s and 1930s, he became loosely associated with the surrealist movement, experimenting further with distortions of the human face and figure, exploring the depiction of sexuality, and letting his imagination conjure up strange monsters.

  Despite his excursions into surrealist painting, Picasso remained very engaged with the world around him He supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, his painting Guernica expressing his outrage at the violence of fascism. Guernica is Picasso’s best-known work, created in the aftermath of the horrific bombing of the Spanish town of the same name in 1937 by forces acting on behalf of Franco’s Nationalist forces. The vast canvas presents a twisted mass of dark colors, contorted bodies, screaming heads and terrified animals—a vision of wartime apocalypse. The masterpiece is both a memorial to the helpless people killed in this action during the brutal Spanish Civil War (1936–9) and a warning of the wider horrors that war brings, then and now.

  Picasso remained so enraged with Franco’s regime that he refused to allow the painting to be taken to Spain while the dictator was still alive. It finally reached Madrid in 1981, where it remains, too fragile to be removed to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, despite Basque requests.

  In 1944 he joined the French Communist Party. Around this time he wrote: “What do you think an artist is? An imbecile that only has eyes, if he is a painter; ears, if he is a musician; or a lyre in the deepest strata of his heart, if he is a poet? Quite the opposite, he is at the same time a political being.” In 1949 he somewhat absurdly contributed his famous design of the dove of peace to the communist-sponsored World Peace Congress held in Stalinist Poland. Picasso always had sympathy with the sufferings of the oppressed, even if his flirtations with Stalinist tyranny were misguided.

  In the decades that followed, Picasso continued to produce large quantities of work in a great variety of media, often exploring and reinventing great works of art from the past, such as Velasquez’s Las Meninas or Delacroix’s Women of Algiers. By now he was the most famous living artist in the world, his pictures purchased for large sums by galleries and rich private collectors. Sometimes Picasso would pay for an expensive meal in a restaurant by drawing a few lines on a napkin.

  Throughout his long career Picasso had a ravenous appetite for life and all its pleasures. Over the years he had a succession of wives and mistresses, sometimes overlapping each other, and in his later works he often depicts himself as some kind of satyr, or Olympian god, enjoying wine, women and la vie en rose beside his beloved Mediterranean. It seemed he would live forever but death finally caught him when he was ninety-one.

  ROOSEVELT

  1882–1945

  His life must … be regarded as one of the commanding events in human destiny.

  Winston Churchill, following the death of Roosevelt

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his unparalleled four terms as US president, pulled the country out of the depths of the Depression, commanded the American military effort in the Second World War and helped create the “American century,” with his colossal, rich nation as the arsenal of freedom. A charming, shrewd and enigmatic man of tolerant liberal convictions, immense personal courage and ruthless political cunning, Roosevelt’s determination to secure democracy at home and abroad makes him one of the greatest leaders in history.

  Roosevelt was first elected president in 1932 by a country in the grip of a terrible economic slump, with 30 million out of work. As soon as he took office, he set about implementing the New Deal he had promised the American people, setting them back on the path to economic prosperity. Unprecedented levels of government intervention in agriculture, trade and industry allowed capitalism to recover from the blows dealt it by the Wall Street Crash.

  Roosevelt’s administrations took on unheard of levels of responsibility for the people’s welfare. In the face of bitter opposition from free marketeers, he introduced social security, protected workers’ rights to organize trade unions, and regulated working hours and wages. At the same time, through the 1930s, he oversaw the restoration of America’s economic strength, so re-establishing the faith of Americans in their political system and their way of life—and giving the country the muscle to face the trials of global war that were to come.

  Roosevelt wanted his country to be “the good neighbor” to the world and sought for the United States a new role as a guarantor of freedom around the world. He recognized early the barbaric evil of Nazi Germany and knew that neutrality in the Second World War would, in the long term, damage US interests, but such was the strength of isolationist feeling that he was obliged to fight the 1940 presidential election on the promise of keeping America out of the war.

  At the same time, Roosevelt did everything he could to support the Allies, instituting the Lend-Lease program of economic and military support that helped Britain to fight on alone against the Nazis after the fall of France. In January 1941 he enunciated the Four Freedoms for which he stated America would be willing to fight: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. In August 1941 he met Churchill and the two issued the Atlantic Charter, which asserted the universal right to national self-determination and security and laid down the principles of what was to become the United Nations.

  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 ended US isolation. For Roosevelt, it was not enough to defeat Germany and Japan: “It is useless to win battles if the cause for which we fight the battles is lost,” he declared. “It is useless to win a war unless it stays won.” His duplicity and shrewdness in statecraft whether in war or peace was best summed up in his own words, “You know I am a juggler and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely incon
sistent, and furthermore I’m perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help the war.”

  During the conflict, Roosevelt not only laid the foundations of the United Nations, but also, with Churchill and Soviet dictator Stalin, became an architect of the postwar world. He prided himself on charming Stalin and building a personal relationship with the Soviet leader, often by baiting his close ally Churchill.

  He has been criticized for yielding too much of eastern Europe to Stalin during these discussions, but since Soviet forces were in occupation there already, it is probable that only another war would have liberated them.

  Roosevelt’s belief that the weak should be defended against the predations of the rich and powerful had been drummed into him since childhood. Although he had had a privileged upbringing in the patrician society of the East Coast, an inspirational headmaster had instilled in him a deep sense of social responsibility. This was later enhanced by his marriage to his distant cousin Eleanor. A bluestocking of progressive social ideals, she was an indefatigable campaigner on behalf of the disadvantaged right up until her death in 1962.