After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  15

  Communists and Fascism – The Allure of Violence

  Standing on a railway station in Belgium only a few days before he abdicated, Kaiser Wilhelm II was so troubled in mind by a dream which he had the previous night, that he bored the various adjutants and staff officers by telling it. Every royal personage in Europe was angry with him, except Queen Maud of Norway (George V’s sister).

  The Kaiser’s dream touchingly suggests a longing for the European situation to return to the Victorian days when international disputes were seen as royal family squabbles. One minute, he was railing against the British, and saying that he would make peace with France or Russia, but never with Britain – ‘Only amidst the ruins of London will I forgive Georgy.’1 The next, he was saying that it was impossible so much as to speak to republicans in France or America. A peace settlement could only be formulated by kings, since war was ‘a royal sport, to be indulged in by hereditary monarchs and concluded at their will’.2

  In 1933, Lloyd George told the Kaiser’s grandson Prince Louis Ferdinand that they had neither expected nor intended to overthrow the Hohenzollern dynasty. It was a disingenuous claim from a man who had at the time crowed that he was considering hanging or shooting the Kaiser, but in that year of omen, the Welsh radical could see that, had Germany retained its royal family, ‘then we wouldn’t need to give ourselves such headaches now about Herr Hitler’.3

  It is easy to blame the British for their handling of the Amritsar massacre, or the Mandate in Iraq, or the settlement of the Irish question. But as the years unfold, and we see what happens in countries which had overthrown their aristocratic systems of government and their royal figureheads, it might be possible to find some virtue in constitutional monarchies.

  Certainly the Hohenzollerns sank to a very low level. The Kaiser himself was just about all right, living sadly as a country squire in Holland. His sister married a Russian antiques dealer half her age. He spent all her money. They toyed with an offer from Hollywood to take part in a film playing themselves, but they could not decide, and in the course of the row they had about it, they separated. She died of depression in a bedsit in Bonn. He got a job as a waiter in Luxembourg. In vain did Wilhelm II, from his exile, try to persuade the restaurant to remove a poster from the window advertising the fact that diners would be served by the brother-in-law of the Kaiser.4

  Heinrich Mann’s just prewar satirical novel Der Untertan predicted the reversals which were to come upon the human race.

  ‘I suppose you do not know whom history will designate as the representative type of this era?’

  ‘The Emperor’, said Dietrich.

  ‘No’, Buck replied. ‘The actor’.5

  The convulsions by which this transformation took place were not quiet, nor were they peaceful. While Ireland killed its hundreds, Russia killed its hundreds of thousands. Victorians of William Morris’s era, seeing the grossness of inequality between rich and poor, the sheer hopelessness of the plight of the urban poor, the apparently unshakeable unfairness of things, could hardly fail, if they were sensitive human beings, to want some form of communist revolution. ‘Horrible to say,’ Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges, ‘I am a Communist.’ How can it ever be known how many died as a consequence of Lenin’s revolution, and the attempt to spread worldwide communism? A recent study in French called The Black Book of Communism calculates that at least a hundred million human beings have died as a result, first of the revolution itself, and its imitations in other lands, then in the concentration camps, the artificially contrived famines and the mass murders instituted by the communists.6 That is what we see if we look backwards. Yet it isn’t the way that Time works. History is peering the wrong way down a telescope. Our knowledge is greater than the actors’ in the drama, but our understanding is not necessarily superior. The enthusiasm felt at the time for the Russian revolution is a case in point.

  People were drawn to communism because of the obvious failure of the Tsars to bring a just or fair way of life; because of the huge disparity between rich and poor all over the Western world; because they believed that communism was a way of peace. Likewise, people were drawn to fascism because they could see the same injustices which drew people towards communism, but could also see the anarchy which resulted when communists actually took control. Many would have echoed the words of Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, twenty-three years old at the time of the revolution, a beautiful, muscular, pipe-smoking girl who liked wearing sailor-suits. ‘Arthur’ – the English reporter whom she fell in love with and married – ‘did not care in normal times one hoot for politics any more than I did, and it was only upheavals like the Revolution that stirred us up to taking sides. I have never been a communist or even a mild socialist but merely through starting reading the newspapers at the beginning of the war I gradually acquired a respect for socialists and when for a short period between the first or Duma revolution in March 1917 and the Bolsheviks’ takeover in October, Russia enjoyed the real freedom of the press I was convinced the Bolsheviks were the only party which had the chance to extricate Russia from the chaos into which the war, entered so irresponsibly by the Tsarist Government, plunged the country.’7

  The English Arthur with whom she fell in love was Arthur Ransome, one of the few foreign journalists to have close contacts with Trotsky during the Brest-Litovsk talks when revolutionary Russia made peace with Germany. His mentor when he went to Russia as an aspirant journalist had been Harold Williams, a gentle, intelligent man who had entertained high hopes of Kerensky’s liberal revolution. Of Trotsky he believed: ‘He is one of the most evil men I ever met. They want external peace for internal war. Remember my words, the Bolsheviks will fight no one except the Russians.’8 Ransome was unwilling to believe Williams’s pessimism. In common with the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, Philip Price, Ransome wanted to believe that Lenin was bringing justice and prosperity to his people. His description of the Constituent Assembly, addressed by Trotsky, is reminiscent of the rapture felt by young Romantics such as Wordsworth at the time of the French Revolution:

  My position was immediately behind and above the presidium, looking down on Trotsky’s muscular shoulders and great head, and the occasional gestures of his curiously small hands. Beyond him was that sea of men: soldiers in green and grey shirts, workers in collarless ones, or jerseys, others dressed very like British workmen, peasants in belted red shirts and high top-boots: all picked men, not elected for this assembly alone but proved and tested in the local soviets that had chosen them as delegates. And as I watched that amazing crowd, that filled the huge hall and packed the galleries, following point by point Trotsky’s exposition of the international and inter-class situation and the policy of the Revolution I felt I would willingly give the rest of my life if it could be divided into minutes and given to men in England and France so that those of little faith who say the Russian revolution is discredited could share for one minute each that wonderful experience.9

  When Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had been sent by Lloyd George as an unofficial ambassador to the Bolsheviks, met Ransome he thought him ‘a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the under-dog’.10

  Ransome returned to England, with Evgenia, and published an account of the Russian Revolution which was meant as a corrective to the distortions of the right-wing press. His portrait of Lenin, with whom he once played chess, is of a ruthless man, but of a recognizable human being, rather than the villainous hobgoblin portrayed by the Morning Post. ‘He was the most Russian of them. Time and again, after listening to speeches which might have been made in any language in any country by men of any nationality I have been suddenly, as it were, brought back to Russia when this urgent little figure stepped on to the tribune, stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and mingled jest and argument in language that tasted of Russian tobacco and the life of the Russian peasantry.’11 No wo
nder that Lenin wrote to the future author of Swallows and Amazons, offering him every assistance with his Russian history. He even got Ransome an interview with the second-in-command of the new secret police, the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB. Everything he said to justify the killings which had begun could have been said – and was said – by British government officials about the inhabitants of Dublin and Cork: namely, that although some innocents had been shot, for the most part, it had been necessary to kill people in order to maintain civil order.

  At about the time that Arthur Ransome was having this conversation with the Cheka Commissariat, another Englishman, Sydney Gibbes, was in the Siberian town of Ekaterinburg. He had been the tutor to the Tsar’s children, and he had come to the town, ten months after their murder, to see for himself what could be seen. Russia was now engulfed in civil war, and Whites, soldiers fighting the Bolsheviks, had found various items in the woods near a disused mineshaft known as Four Brothers – a pile of eggshells, some false teeth, six corsets. The eggshells had been ordered by the assassins. The Bolshevik guard had told the nuns who fed the royal family to boil fifty eggs, so that they should have something to eat. The false teeth belonged to the devoted family physician, Doctor Botkin, who tended the little haemophiliac prince, Alexis. The corsets had belonged to the empress, two elder grand duchesses and a faithful maid. Mr Gibbes went to the merchant’s house which had been the last residence of the royal family and spent hours in the cellar, gathering up what relics he could find – coins, a blood-soaked handkerchief, scraps of paper. They would in time become sacred relics, just as Mr Gibbes, a bank manager’s son from Yorkshire, would become Father Nicholas of the Holy Orthodox Church. The only member of the royal household to survive was Joy, the King Charles spaniel, belonging to the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexis.12

  Only years later was it established what had happened to the royal family. In the middle of the night of 16–17 July 1918, Yakov Yurovsky, the local Cheka boss, and one of Lenin’s most trusted lieutenants, roused the Tsar, now known as plain Nikolai Romanov, and told him to come to the basement with his family. At 2 am, dressed and ready, they came to the cellar. They were ordered to line up against the wall for a photograph. At their request, two chairs were brought for the empress, and for the haemophiliac Alexis, who had been suffering from one of his bleeding-attacks. Anastasia was holding her spaniel Jimmy. Yurovsky came into the room with five or six Hungarians (or Latvians in some accounts) and five Russians. He read out an order to shoot the Romanovs. Nikolai Romanov was baffled – ‘What? What?’ he asked. But the firing had begun. Yurovsky shot the Tsar at point-blank range. He and the empress died instantly. But the shooting continued for twenty minutes, partly because the bullets ricocheted off the jewels hidden in the corsets of the younger grand duchesses. Alexis, lying in a pool of blood, was still alive when the guard approached the slumped bodies on the cellar floor. Yurovsky shot him twice in the head. Anastasia was stabbed with bayonets to make sure she was dead.13 The dog Joy survived the tragedy, but was blinded, said to have been traumatized.

  There is no doubt that the orders for the murders came directly from Lenin. As Trotsky once said, ‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had the dubious distinction of having founded the Cheka, made an official statement to the press, confirming the death of the Tsar. ‘The Cheka must defend the revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent.’14

  The Bolsheviks had never made any secret of what they wished to do to their enemies. They were bound to have murdered the emperor sooner or later. There is no evidence that they ever contemplated the release of the Russian royal family. Some historians, however, have noted that King George V did not try very hard to rescue his cousins. When the Kerensky government forced the abdication of the Tsar, the foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, was approached by the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, who asked if it might be possible for the imperial family to escape to England. Milyukov, Buchanan reported, ‘was most anxious to get the Emperor out of Russia as soon as possible, the extremists having excited opinion against His Majesty’. This notion was viewed with approval by the British government, and on 22 March 1918, Lloyd George asked Lord Stamfordham, the king’s secretary, to Downing Street to discuss the Tsar’s future. They were joined by Bonar Law and Lord Hardinge, former viceroy of India. It was generally agreed that the Tsar should be offered asylum in Britain, but the King’s Private Secretary immediately began to make difficulties. Where would the Romanovs live? They would have to be given a royal house, and Balmoral ‘would certainly not be a suitable residence at this time of year’. The real reason was that the king feared the possibility of a socialist backlash if he offered his cousin refuge in England. The Tsarist regime had been much hated. Many of the Jews who had suffered persecution – with the full approval of the emperor – by ‘good and simple Russian folk’15 were now living in the East End of London, and many English liberals would have echoed the goodwill messages sent by Lloyd George to Kerensky, in which he had said that ‘The Revolution whereby the Russian people have placed their destinies on the sure foundation of freedom is the greatest service they have yet made for the allied peoples.’

  They were desperate times, and the king funked his duty. Although the politicians were going ahead with the proposal that the Tsar should be got out of Russia, on 30 March, Stamfordham approached Arthur Balfour, Foreign Secretary. ‘The King has been thinking about the Government’s proposal that the Emperor Nicholas and his family should come to England. As you are doubtless aware, the King has a strong personal friendship for the Emperor …’ The friendship was not yet strong enough, however, to allow him to come to England. George V asked if the invitation could be rescinded. The latest, rather desperate excuse offered was that he worried about the ‘dangers of the voyage’. The Foreign Secretary rebuffed the king and said that the invitation could not be withdrawn. But Stamfordham persisted. ‘As you know, from the first the King has thought the presence of the Imperial family (especially of the Empress) [because she was German] in this country would raise all sorts of difficulties, and I feel sure you appreciate how awkward it will be for our Royal Family who are so closely connected with both the Emperor and the Empress.’ This was followed by a letter, written on the same day, in which Stamfordham said the king ‘must beg you to represent to the Prime Minister that from all he hears and reads in the press the residence in this country of the ex-Emperor and Empress would be strongly resented by the public’. The correspondence took place in April 1918. By the end of the month, the Romanovs had been moved to Ekaterinburg.

  The king quickly forgot his own cowardice, and his (partial) responsibility for his cousins’ deaths. ‘May and I attended a service at the Russian Church in Welbeck Street in memory of dear Nicky, who I fear was shot last month by the Bolshevists,’ he noted in his diary on 25 July 1918. In time, the British royal family had rewritten history. Louis Mountbatten, royal propagandist in chief, liked to put it about that George V had striven to rescue his poor cousin from the perils of the Russian Revolution, only to be thwarted by a heartless and opportunist Lloyd George.

  Relations between Lloyd George and his sovereign were coloured by well-placed mistrust. Lloyd George’s attack, made during one of his virulent assaults upon the House of Peers, on the principle of primogeniture (‘You would not choose a spaniel on those principles’),16 could hardly have recommended itself to an hereditary monarch.

  Lloyd George had fought the election in December 1918 on a blatantly populist, ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ ticket. ‘The men responsible for this outrage’ – that is the World War – ‘on the human race must not be let off because their heads were crowned when they perpetrated the deed.’17

  The Kaiser had abdicated as emperor, though not as king of Prussia, and gone to live in exile in Holland. The idea of attempting his extradition was conveniently forgotten by the postwar gover
nment. The old gentleman was doing no harm to anyone. His first request, upon arrival in Holland, had been for a ‘good strong cup of English tea’, and his favourite reading became the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. In appearance and manner he came to resemble an old-fashioned English squire, and his disgruntlements with life were for the most part those of any other conservative-minded personage of comparable age. It worried him, for example, when Baden-Powell admitted ‘Niggerboys’ to join the Boy Scouts. ‘It was the beginning of the treason to their race formerly only executed by the French negroids.’18 Many a retired major in Cheltenham or Bath would have thought the same at that date. Only occasionally would glimpses of the old insane rage burst out to disturb the quiet routines of his secretaries and ADCs: then there would be furious denunciations by their royal master of the disloyalty of the army, the navy, the Prussian nobility, which had allowed him to come to such a pass. Sometimes, his bitterness was directed against the Jews. The Germans had, he ranted to Generalfeld-marschal August von Mackensen, been ‘egged on and misled by the tribe of Judah whom they hate’. No German should be allowed to forget ‘nor rest until these parasites have been wiped out from German soil and been exterminated! This poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree!’19

  George V had viewed with the greatest disquiet the possibility of his cousin Wilhelm being brought to England for trial. He firmly opposed all calls for retribution against the German emperor. He had done his best to wipe out his own German-ness, and that of his relations. He waited, significantly, until 1917 before he changed the name of the royal dynasty from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor, though everyone remains to this day in some doubt about their surname, or even whether they have one. The Kaiser, when he heard of this decision, wondered whether there would now be performances of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Prince Louis of Battenberg was obliged to write to his family that George Rex felt vulnerable ‘being attacked as half-German & surrounding himself by relatives with German names, &c.’ He asked his Holstein, Teck and Battenberg relations to ‘give up using in England our German titles & to assume English titles’. It was at this point in history that the Battenbergs became the Mountbattens.