by Andrew Marr
The ‘sealed truck’ was in fact an ordinary German train whose carriages were marked on the outside in such a way as to avoid customs and keep up the pretence that the dangerous Russian revolutionary had never set foot on German soil. With the revolutionaries ensconced in their second-class carriages enjoying good German food, and having insisted smoking could only be done in the lavatories, Lenin and his helpers rattled and wrote their way across Germany and through neutral Sweden to Petrograd’s Finland railway station. Zimmermann’s foreign office and Ludendorff’s high command were so keen to get Lenin into Russia that, had Sweden blocked him, they would have sent him through the German front lines.
He did not disappoint them. On the train he had written down his essential arguments. They included no cooperation with the Provisional Government, an immediate demand for peace with Germany on any terms, and power to be taken by the soviets, the committees of workers and soldiers – led, of course, by himself and the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the Germans had helped fund Lenin’s revolutionaries as well as transporting them, something the cheering crowd at the station could not have known. The bacillus had been delivered.
Up to then, the Communist faction in the Russian capital had been seriously divided. Many orthodox Marxists believed, following the philosopher, that proper revolution could only come about after a bourgeois, liberal era – that you could not simply leap from an underdeveloped peasant economy into a socialist one. So their job would be to wait, educate and agitate, while the moderates got on with the job of holding Russia together. They were aghast at Lenin’s uncompromising message, laced as it was with torrents of satire and abuse.
Russia was certainly at boiling point, and Lenin’s readiness to provoke civil war in no way alarmed the desperate workers and soldiers to whom he appealed. As the arguments raged, alongside demonstrations, marches and late-night meetings, the Provisional Government pledged to carry on the war with Germany. Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist leader (whose father had been Lenin’s schoolteacher), emerged as the man who could meld the Petrograd soviet and the government together. He became prime minister, tried to rally the troops, and declared Russia a republic with himself as president. But Kerensky, for all his rhetoric and energy, was no more able to direct the Russian armies to victory than the Czar had been. For the troops had given up. They would fight no longer. The Bolsheviks, now fully under Lenin’s direction, and his spell, chose their moment and struck. The October Revolution, promising bread and peace, was swiftly followed by the peace treaty the Germans had required; and by something close to a group dictatorship directed by Lenin; and then by civil war, famine and catastrophe.
In a fair court of history, Arthur Zimmermann would be acquitted of responsibility for these terrible events. Of direct responsibility, anyway. Though a key player, he was only one of the German clique that sent Lenin to Russia – Kaiser Wilhelm signed off the idea, and the military leader Ludendorff was also involved. Nor can we be sure that Lenin would not have found another way home, though it is hard to see how; or know what would have happened in Petrograd had Lenin never arrived, or had he been delayed during those crucial months of mid-1917. It is possible that others would have orchestrated the overthrow of the Provisional Government, and that Russia would have anyway fallen into dictatorship and civil war. On these grounds, the Scottish legal verdict of ‘not proven’ would surely have been handed down.
And yet . . . Lenin was a very rare, self-certain, charismatic, frightening and narrowly focused leader, much more impressive than his rivals. He scared, out-argued, bullied, out-organized and out-thought lesser revolutionaries, always pushing things towards the extreme, always knocking compromise aside; and never flinching at the terrible cost in blood and suffering that his politics inflicted. He was another Robespierre, a man with ice in his blood; utterly convinced that some kind of human paradise was in the offing, and that any means justified getting there. With his tight little system he called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, his secret police and his purging of those who dared disagree, Lenin started what Stalin finished. Both, of course, employed many hard-working, zealous state bureaucrats with an eye to the next promotion, affable men who liked a drink and just wanted to belong. Arthur Zimmermann, one suspects, would have fitted in rather well.
Part Eight
1918–2012: OUR TIMES
The Best and Worst of Centuries
Two men are sitting in a Russian prison during the Stalin Terror. One has just been tortured. The other is awaiting his turn. They are arguing about history. Aleksey holds out no hope for humanity. He says: ‘Man is simply man, and there’s nothing that can be done with him. There is no evolution. There is one very simple law, the law of the conservation of violence. It’s as simple as the law of the conservation of energy. Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. It does not disappear or diminish; it can only change shape.’
The other man, Ivan, disagrees. For him, ‘human history is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom’. Aleksey, who will soon be dead, mocks Ivan. There is no history. It is just ‘grinding water with a pestle and mortar . . . the humanity in humanity does not increase. What history of humanity can there be if man’s goodness always stands still?’1 The argument takes place towards the end of an angry novel, Everything Flows, by the Russian writer Vasily Grossman. He was writing it in the early 1960s, looking back at life under Stalin, the second most lethal mass killer of modern times. (The first is Mao, the third, Hitler.) His argument, however, was about mankind, not simply Russia. The twentieth century made it the most important argument of all. Do we learn? Do we become better? Does the violence stop or does it get greater, the more of us there are?
It was a century of a great apparent paradox. The killing was greater than ever. In raw numbers it outstripped even the Mongols, all the plague-armed catastrophes of the European invasion of the Americas, and all earlier wars. This killing happened because leaders arose promising to radically improve humankind, or part of humankind, and were able to exercise near-total power. The ‘bloodiest century in history’ has become a cliché of history. Yet it is challenged by, among others, the scientist Steven Pinker, who points out that the terrifyingly large numbers of deaths are partly accounted for by the vastly greater number of people alive: you can’t kill people who are not there. If the blood-count is adjusted for population, then modern times do not look quite as bad. The Mongol Conquests (already described), the very violent revolt in eighth-century China, the conquests of Tamerlane, the fall of ancient Rome and the final fall of the Ming dynasty – all killed proportionally more than did the Second World War.2
Furthermore, our knowledge of recent violence, photographed, totted up, filmed and kept for us in diaries, memoirs and speeches, is more detailed and more vivid than our knowledge of the violence of, say, sixteenth-century Africa or medieval French villages, or the empires of early Korea. This ‘historical myopia’, Pinker argues, encourages us to view the past far too leniently and our recent history too bleakly. For specific historical reasons, unlikely to be repeated, the twentieth century saw a war of annihilation between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia which, having spread to much of the rest of the world, was ended by the use of nuclear weapons.
Of itself that hardly means that people have become more violent or more wicked. In fact, Pinker claims, when one includes small wars, domestic violence, violence against children and the old, cruelty to animals, religious sacrifices, slavery and violent crime, people are actually becoming less violent and ‘better’. This is so even in Africa, which has been particularly plagued by wars in recent times. Societies with a rule of law, in which women have more authority, and which are bound together by international treaties (and kept from huge wars by nuclear weaponry), are producing gentler ways of living. Backing up Pinker, the US researcher Matthew White, who introduced the word ‘atrocitology’ to explain his ranking of lethal events, points out that during the twentieth
century more than 95 per cent of all deaths were from natural causes.
This is a crucial point, which should be underlined from the start. The vast majority of us live most of our lives in what I have called ‘the lulls’, those long periods of quiet social stability. Then we die of diseases of old age. Better medicine and food, cleaner water and more effective policing have brought a huge rise in lifespans, as well as a huge (and unsustainable) rise in human numbers; so the lulls have gone on for longer. To take just one example: without that discovery by Fritz Haber in 1919 of how to fix nitrogen to produce man-made fertilizer, it is said, two billion people now alive would not be alive.3 And in some countries that have suffered hideous famine – China being the clearest example – the twenty-first century has seen an explosion of material wealth and opportunity. Far more people have lived better, more peaceful lives in the past century than ever before. Alongside the slaughter of twentieth-century industrial wars and the threat of nuclear war, we have to remember the good times brought to hundreds of millions of people who have experienced peace and plenty on a scale that has no historical precedent, not even during the ‘Roman Peace’ of the early empire. So, the best of times, too.
The Problem of Politics
A key theme in this history has been the mismatch between mankind’s ability to understand the world and so reshape it, and on the other hand the lack of progress in how we are ruled. Science strides ahead; politics stumbles around like a drunk. We saw it in the age of discovery and the age of empire, but it was particularly glaring in the twentieth century – and, I would add (so far), the twenty-first too.
Our two Russian convict-philosophers were having their argument because of the greatest failure of twentieth-century politics: namely, the belief, tested to destruction, that mankind was on an inevitable journey from hierarchies and classes to a paradise of ungoverned equality. Communists felt that the means – cruelty and tyranny – were justifiable because of the grandeur of their ends. They were not the first to make this mistake. Catholic Inquisitors, for instance, felt the same way. But by the 1930s, with the apparatus of a huge state in their hands, the Soviet Communists had the power to go further, and to try to annihilate whole classes, nationalities and categories of humanity who, they felt, were getting in the way. (Marxists never resolved the conundrum that though their victory was inevitable it had to be struggled for with maximum guile, discipline and ruthlessness. If it was inevitable, why the need for struggle?)
Did Stalin and his coterie really believe it? He lived the high life himself, travelling between luxurious private apartments, a ‘Red Czar’ whose smallest flickers of irritation terrified his minions. Stalin had started as a gangster and behaved like a gangster boss – wily, coldhearted and cynical about human motives. But it would be wrong to conclude that Communism was itself a purely cynical coating for a system essentially not so different from that of Ivan the Terrible. Without vast numbers of true believers, leather-coated killers, simple workers, chairmen and bureaucrats who genuinely thought they were on the side of history and working to make the world anew, Stalinism could never have happened. The problem was not Communism’s cynicism, though it produced cynicism; the problem was its sincerity.
Something similar can be said of Communism’s mutant rival sister, Fascism. Neither Benito Mussolini in Italy, nor Adolf Hitler in Germany, thought of the inevitable march of history in quite the way that Communists did. Nor were they trying to abolish whole classes. But they did have a sincere belief, communicated to millions of sincere believers, that their part of the human race was special, that it had been shaped to dominate others and had a right to glory. Not historical inevitability; but destiny. Letters and diaries from the Nazi commando groups who systematically butchered Jewish women, old men and children show that they believed this was the right thing to do, however unpleasant. The bogus science of race, laced with scientific-sounding language about hygiene, helped them distance themselves from what they were actually doing.
Marxism was a bogusly ‘scientific’ version of history; Nazism was a bogusly ‘racial’ version of evolutionary biology. Just as species were in endless competition, so were the races. For the stronger to fail to struggle against, and destroy, the weak, was a moral failure: it meant humanity would decline, rather than advance. In Hitler’s world, this amounted to an Aryan duty to advance at the expense of Slavs, Jews and other, lower forms of humanity. It would lead not to a Communist Utopia, but to a golden age. Both regimes had to kill their way to paradise – kill rebellious, selfish peasants, kill rival socialists, kill class enemies, kill Jews. Attacking better-off peasants, or ‘kulaks’, or attacking Jews, they used similar language, labelling their enemies bestial and subhuman, vermin or bacilli. Interestingly, neither seemed able to imagine the coming paradise except in the most banal and old-fashioned terms: Communist and Nazi propaganda alike beckoned followers towards a world of apple-cheeked mothers in semi-rural sunlit landscapes, overseen by a mustachioed father figure – a schmaltzy, timid Eden.
If this were the story of modern times it would be bleak. But the twentieth century also brought an expansion of democracy that had seemed impossible during its darkest decades. The ‘American Century’ brought liberty and choice to millions around the world. This was the triumph of the market economy, defended by science, which had produced weapons so destructive that the great powers of the planet no longer dared to go to war against each other. Russians still do not have the freedoms of Americans, Europeans or many others. But they have more freedom than Grossman could have dared hope when he invented the argument in the prison cell.
We could argue, therefore, that this is an overwhelmingly positive story. The follies of politics in the twentieth century were only the logical conclusion of ideas that had developed in Europe much earlier. Racism, Utopianism, a belief in national destiny, anti-Semitism, a weakness for strong leaders . . . these are hardly new. Surely, after the experiences of Marxist dictatorship and of the Nazis, they are lessons learned for all time? Have we not broken through into a politically chastened and better world, with our United Nations, our declarations of human rights, our international criminal courts? There is a lot to that argument. The fact that wars still go on, in Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East, does not disprove the theory of general advance; it just reminds us that progress is bumpy.
Yet there are two bumps so large they cannot be steered smoothly around. The first is that, in fact, democracy has not spread effectively. The highly intelligent political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man that the big arguments about politics were over. They had finished with the triumph of liberal, free-market democracy. Some countries and cultures would take longer than others to get there, but eventually everyone would. In a world where undemocratic but booming China, and oil- and gas-based autocracies (Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia) loom so large, this no longer feels likely. Fukuyama was wrong, because democracy, it turns out, is not a system. It is a culture. It is based on habits, attitudes, long-established divisions of power, ingrained belief in law and absence of systemic corruption and cynicism. You can import a system and set it up, and get it working. You cannot import a culture. This does not mean most of the world is doomed to live under tyrannies or kleptocracies. It just means that it is a little early for democrats to declare the game over.
The second bump concerns the nature of democracy itself. Recently, democracies have mostly based themselves on the ability of competing political parties to offer voters a better material future (more stuff) year by year, and generation by generation. But because science and peace have boosted the planet’s population beyond what its natural resources can bear, this is not a plausible long-term proposition.
To feed, clothe and entertain ourselves, we humans have dug deep into Earth’s reserves of oil and water, and have (probably) irreversibly changed the climate by the quantity of carbon dioxide our activities have released. If all Chinese people, all Indian people, all the peopl
es of South-East Asia and Africa, expect the material goods of today’s Western middle class, they are going to be badly disappointed. In the West, we now have the first generations of adults who expect their children to be worse off, materially, than they are. Democracies have survived trade recessions, and have managed to hold together during dangerous wars; but they have not yet dealt with a long period of lowered expectations and less prosperity. Until we see how they do so, we cannot assume that liberal, market democracy is secure. We have learned some of the lessons from what follows in this part of the book; but not all of them.
The Man in Landsberg
July 1924, and a bizarre scene was being witnessed in spacious, well lit rooms on the first floor of the Landsberg Prison near Munich. The prisoner, convicted of high treason after a cock-eyed attempt to overthrow the German government, was dressed in leather shorts and a short mountain tunic. He had put on weight and his rooms were crammed with gifts from well-wishers – cakes, chocolate, bouquets of flowers. Visitors thronged. According to one friend, ‘The place looked like a delicatessen store. You could have opened up a flower and fruit and wine shop with all the stuff stacked there.’ Hitler looked visibly fatter.4