Fracture

by Philipp Blom

  During the trial Yagoda had apparently believed that Stalin himself would pardon him, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn would later recall. Even though Stalin was nowhere to be seen in the courtroom, Yagoda addressed his former ally and patron directly, shouting: “‘I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!’ And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.”17 Stalin’s jurists did their work thoroughly. Yagoda and some three thousand NKVD men seen as loyal to him were found guilty and sent to their deaths in the cellars of Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison. Before Yagoda was shot, Yezhov ordered him to be stripped naked and severely beaten by the guards.

  Yezhov’s efficiency earned him a place in the Russian language, as the term yezhovchina was coined for the paranoid and bloody climax of the purges, during which secret police units are believed to have executed some one thousand men and women every day, the overwhelming majority an hour after their farcical secret trial on trumped-up charges. Other victims were sent to a slower but almost certain death of overwork, malnourishment, and cold in a gulag, a Soviet labor camp.

  While most trials were held in secret, Stalin loved to turn the destruction of his most prominent victims into vast and carefully orchestrated public spectacles during which the accused had to repeat prepared confessions of often absurd and outlandish crimes before being sentenced. There were no acquittals. Even though they had been guaranteed prison sentences instead of death, Zinoviev and Kamenev (who had confessed only after having been threatened with the arrest and execution of his son) were condemned to death and executed in 1936.

  The greatest of the show trials opened on January 23, 1937, in the House of the Unions, a graceful classicist building close to Red Square. Within a week, the sixteen high-profile accused had been sentenced in a trial carefully crafted as a media event to send a message to communists at home and abroad. After the trials, the prosecutors and judges were also arrested and executed. Nikolay Yezhov, the gifted torturer at the head of the NKVD, was to suffer the same fate two years later.

  Having asserted his annihilating power over the Party and the secret police, Stalin turned his attention to the army, the other great source of danger to his absolute authority, in a campaign that would send ripples as far as the Spanish Civil War. His last remaining potential challenger was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who commanded almost universal respect for his courage and competence, and who had overseen a comprehensive reform of the army in a bid to turn it into a thoroughly modern and efficient fighting machine able to survive the threatening confrontation with fascism.

  Tukhachevsky was arrested on May 27, 1937, and once again it was Yezhov who oversaw his interrogation and eventual confession, spurred on by Stalin’s personal encouragement to see to it that the prisoner would be “forced to tell everything.” The written confession signed by the army’s former leading mind is sprayed with brownish dots of blood. When confronted with the indictment, Tukhachevsky was overheard to say, “I think I must be dreaming.”18 On June 11 he and other high-ranking officials were sentenced. They were shot shortly before midnight.

  The elimination of powerful and prominent members of the hierarchy had effects reaching far beyond their immediate trial. Everyone associated with them in any way—family, friends, colleagues, chance acquaintances—became tarnished and was in danger of suffering the same fate. This is what befell the composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who had enjoyed a measure of protection through the patronage extended to him by the cultured Tukhachevsky. While this meant that Shostakovich had been able to work relatively undisturbed as long as Tukhachevsky was in power, the situation was reversed dramatically after his fall.

  Even before Tukhachevsky’s arrest, Stalin had withdrawn his favor from the composer, partly in an effort to undermine his rival. Shostakovich was attacked in the press for producing bourgeois music, and in particular, his opera Lady Macbeth of Mzhensk was singled out for damning criticism. Increasingly isolated, deprived of commissions, and at times suicidal with fear for himself and for his family, Shostakovich saw himself forced to abandon large-scale works. He turned to writing “useful” film music and, in a bid to satisfy his own artistic thirst for expression, to chamber music, which could be performed in private by friends or vanish in the drawers of his desk for years or decades. He was wise to be cautious, as several people belonging to his immediate circle fell victim to the terror. Vsevolod Frederiks, his brother-in-law, was arrested, his friends Nikolai Zhilyayev, Boris Kornilov, and Adrian Piotrovsky executed, and his mother-in-law, Sofiya Varzar, and others close to him swallowed by the gulag system.

  Tukhachevsky’s demise also had an immediate consequence for the Russian involvement in Spain. Here, too, the terror was spreading fear and paranoia among the cadres involved in the war, and one of the consequences of this climate of dread was that nobody dared to be seen to implement the tactics devised by the brilliant marshal, who had written books about the theory of warfare and had especially revolutionized the use of tanks in battle. As his ideas were suddenly associated with treason and any approval could be turned into a deadly threat, the Soviet tanks in Spain were used in a desultory and improvised fashion, giving the fascist forces a considerable advantage.

  Stalin’s man in Spain, the murderous Alexander Orlov, knew how to read the signs that he had so often used himself. When he was ordered in 1938 to meet a Soviet ship in Antwerp, he took his wife and daughter to Canada. Before leaving he made certain that the Soviet hierarchy knew that he had made arrangements to reveal the entire Soviet spy network if anything happened to him or to his family.

  The terror received its fitting emblem during the Universal Exhibition held in Paris in June 1937. While the Soviet pavilion featured colossal statues of the muscled heroes of the revolution such as Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhos Woman and showed how the state had advanced the interests of workers and peasants, the Spanish exhibit, organized by the Republican government, was centered on an equally monumental work of art, created by an exiled artist. Pablo Picasso’s huge painting Guernica was an homage to the victims of the German bombing of the Basque market town, and a tribute to the victims of war and persecution everywhere.

  ·1938·

  Epilogue: Abide by Me

  ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 16, 1938, SOME TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE congregated to celebrate a bourgeois ritual. The temple to which they strode, puffing into the air clouds of white breath and dressed under their thick coats as elegantly as circumstances allowed, was not a church but the Vienna Musikverein, the city’s most famous concert hall. Here they would hear the Vienna Philharmonic under its director, Bruno Walter, in the way the parents and grandparents of many audience members had for generations. To attend concerts at the Musikverein or, better still, to be a subscriber to their Sunday concert series was a precious moment of unbroken tradition among the nightmarish upheaval of recent years.

  In the hall with its gilt female figures adorning the columns and exposing their incongruously geometric neoclassical breasts, amid the riot of ornaments dominated by the great organ and contained by a lavish gold ceiling with painted medallion insets, the crowd settled into their seats. Many simply kept on their coats. Even an institution such as this one had little money for heating on a cool winter’s day. The musicians behind the stage were ready to come on and trying to keep their fingers warm. Strung across the stage were looming black microphones. The central work on the program was Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which had never yet been recorded. Sound engineers from EMI in London had come over for the occasion to document this performance for posterity.

  Among the listeners was Hans Fantel, a young boy from a bourgeois Jewish family, who came here in the company of his father to be initiated into the mysteries of Mahler, a composer whose works were hardly ever performed. “Mahler performances were rare in Vienna in those days,” Fantel remembered. “Mahle
r’s city had already been contaminated by the acolytes of Adolf Hitler. By their reckoning, Mahler’s music was loathsome—a product of ‘Jewish decadence.’ To put Mahler’s music on the program was therefore a political act. It was to protest and deny the hateful faith that blazed across the border from Germany. That much I understood quite clearly, even as a boy.”1

  Led by Bruno Walter, who had been Mahler’s assistant as a young man, the symphony commenced, a strange universe consisting of tentative beginnings, torn intermezzi, intemperate outbursts, savage irony, and sadness. The audience knew of the symbolic power of the moment, and for some among them the Sunday ritual became a kind of communion with something much greater and more important. When at the beginning of the last movement the strings launched with one huge heaving musical sigh into their passionately ruminative chorale theme, some members of the audience recognized the hymn Mahler had used: ”Abide by Me.”

  As the audience dispersed into the city after this concert, some crossed the Ring to go into the center and perhaps have coffee at their favorite coffeehouse, while some went toward the graceful width of the Karlsplatz, overlooked by a large baroque church, the Karlskirche, an impressive symbol of tolerance and the Enlightenment with its towers resembling minarets, its cupola formed like that of a temple, its façade Greek, and its claim to stand for the one great Truth of mankind.

  The members of the audience went their separate ways knowing that they had partaken in something extraordinary. They could not possibly know that with this concert they had been present at the end of an era, that the people composing the audience would never again come together quite like this, that many of them would soon be dispersed around the world, or dead. “We could not know on that winter Sunday that this would turn out to be the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler crushed his homeland to make it part of the German Reich,” remembered Fantel.

  Bruno Walter had indeed scheduled the concert of his teacher’s music, which he would continue to champion, in open defiance of the new cultural climate, which was poisoning all culture and every moment of every day. Five years earlier, after the Nazi rise to power in January 1933, Walter had been forced to withdraw from a concert in Leipzig when the new masters made it clear that there would be violence in the hall if he, a Jewish conductor, dared to raise his baton in a German hall. To Walter’s disgust, Richard Strauss had agreed to conduct in his stead.

  In March 1938 Walter’s busy concert schedule took him to Amsterdam, where he was to conduct the Concertgebouw orchestra. It was here, huddled before a radio in their hotel room, that he and his wife followed the demise of their country: “The end had come. From early afternoon until late into the night we sat at the radio, listening from afar to Austria’s agony . . . to the following confusion of the pathetic Austrian announcements, and to the Nazis’ triumphant proclamations. And all this took place to the accompaniment of music, as if no historical tragedy were being enacted, the suffering and death of human beings were not involved, nor the victory of evil, but as if we were witnessing the insipid melodrama of a theatrical pen-pusher itching for a sensation.”2

  A musician first and foremost, Walter particularly noticed the change in the style of the pieces played between the announcements. “After Schuschnigg’s farewell words ‘God protect Austria!’ the country we had loved had passed away to the solemn strains of Haydn’s national anthem played by a string quartet,” he wrote, adding that “every pause was filled by Viennese waltzes, only to be interrupted again by announcements of new disasters. Suddenly that mad mixture of death groans and dance music stopped. A new sound came to our ears. The announcements over the Vienna radio were made by a harsh Prussian voice. The listeners were told in terse brief sentences of the progress of Austria’s conquest. Blaring Prussian military marches took the place of the waltzes, a musical symbol of what had happened.”

  Things went from bad to worse for the conductor when his manager informed him during the intermission of one of his Amsterdam concerts that his daughter had been arrested in Vienna. Walter still had some influence, and after a few days of hectic telephone calls and impassioned pleas he managed to secure her release. During the following months he even managed to find safe havens for other members of his family.

  Walter himself moved to the United States and would not return to Vienna until after the Second World War, which was now beginning to seem not so much a distant threat as a concrete and imminent catastrophe. Among the other refugees who had been present at the historic Musikverein concert was Hans Fantel, who had been able to secure a visa for the United States, ironically through his love of classical music, which was shared by an American diplomat. He would later become a columnist on stereo equipment and musical recordings for the New York Times.

  Fantel’s father, who had awakened this passion for music and who had been a producer of sound equipment himself, did not make the journey with him and was murdered by the Nazis. As the son would later write, it was this that made Walter’s 1938 recording precious to him: “This disk held fast an event I had shared with my father: 71 minutes out of the 16 years we had together.”

  One moment of recorded time among so much that slipped away; two stories—one famous and one not—taken out of the millions the following years would have.

  Throughout this book, I have tried to excavate aspects of how people experienced the aftermath of the war and the years that followed, and how the unfolding story of modernity played out in their lives. The great forces of modernity that had begun to dominate the lives of urbanites in Europe and the United States around 1900 were intensified and accelerated by the war and continued to assert themselves in the years after 1918. In the first chapter, a victim of shell shock stood for a traumatized European continent and the experience of a modern war. The effects of this experience became legible in the succeeding chapters: the conservative revolutionaries exposed the anatomy of discontent; the story of Prohibition illuminated the culture wars within the United States; the Kronstadt rebellion showed the final perversion of the idea of the Russian Revolution; the Harlem Renaissance showcased the energies for innovation and social change that were so prominent and which veered between the hopes invested in the Soviet Union and the search for different ways.

  Among other things, these first five chapters investigated ideologies and visions of culture. In 1923, other, polarizing changes occurred. Scientific theories made the physical world as unpredictable and alien as society appeared to many people at the time. The surrealists heightened this tension in 1924 with their onslaught against yesterday’s discredited morality, and the traditional world confronted the modern intellectual vision in the Scopes trial. The 1926 film Metropolis offered more visions of the cultural contradictions between man and machine, the fear of robots, and the idea that somehow technology had begun to threaten humanity. In 1927, the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice served as a concrete example of social, cultural, and political tensions—in this case between the right and the left. The answer many younger people sought to this, the following chapter suggests, was escapism amid signs of slow economic recovery.

  That was the point when this rudderless period began to tilt from optimism to pessimism, and from a postwar time into a prewar time. The chapter on 1929 began in Magnitogorsk, but the specter of the Wall Street crash, the very antipode and seemingly also the confirmation of all Soviet hopes, was never far away. The economic and cultural dissolution in the wake of this disaster revealed itself in Berlin and its anything-goes nightlife. The only antidote to this kind of moral dissolution was faith, and this faith suffused Fascist Italy, ready to cross the Alps. At the same time the last remnants of faith in the Russian experiment were shaken by the secret genocide of the Ukrainian artificial famine and the hesitant response of Western intellectuals. The book burnings in Germany were a defiant gesture against the intellect and in favor of blind belief.

  As all signs began to point in the direction of another war, the book moved to Britain,
taking a look at the often desperate lives of ordinary people during the crisis. This survey continued with a look at Dust Bowl refugees within the United States and at refugees from Germany, whose plight was becoming increasingly dire. The 1936 Berlin Olympics brought an apparent answer to the cultural and economic forces tearing at the fabric of society in the shape of the beautiful athletes’ bodies, carefully celebrated by Leni Riefenstahl, and the dream of the beautiful, strong Nietzschean Übermensch capable of transcending his own time and of providing an answer to the shattered, compromised bodies that were a traumatic cultural presence after the war. In 1937, finally, the dreams and nightmares of these years become solidified in a single, dirty war, a ready projection screen for millions of people around the world. Both sides were played by dictators following their own agenda, in both cases with murderous results.

  At the beginning of the book I argued that not rupture but continuity is the key to an understanding of the interwar years—that the experience of technological modernity was intensified by the war, while the values underpinning Western societies were deeply damaged.

  This book has chronicled different aftereffects of this tremendous shock, from trauma and new beginnings to first confrontations and sheer hedonism, from political faith and its limits to an aesthetic realization in art. It has explored the increasingly cataclysmic manifestations, from street battles to streams of refugees and mass shootings, in a game of ideologies that had already degenerated into the dirtiest of politics. Nineteen eighteen was ushered in by a world at war, and there was a widespread sense at year’s end that the conflict had not been resolved, that the Treaty of Versailles had merely bought time. Not only the German revanchists on the right but also the opinions of such eminent observers as John Maynard Keynes, the French marshal Ferdinand Foch, and French president Paul Deschanel testified to this.