by Tariq Ali
‘Is this relevant?’
‘Everything I ask is relevant.’
‘Well, if you must know, David fell in love with someone else. A social-democratic doctor!’
‘I know.’
Gertrude started laughing, but Ludwik’s face remained stern.
‘Sorry. It was the way you said “I know”. His new woman is called Gerda. He always wanted to be a doctor. The Bavarian revolution stopped him. Gerda was his route back to medicine. They’re in Heidelberg now and she is paying for his studies. True love. I’m told he’s no longer politically active.’
‘You’ve been misinformed,’ said Ludwik coldly.
That’s how it all began, on the seventh day of November in 1923. If anyone had told her then where it would lead and how Ludwik would meet his end, she would have laughed in his face and thought him insane.
And yet there were people, even then, like that embittered old Karl Kautsky, who warned over and over again that the Bolshevik experiment, isolated from world realities, could only lead to disaster. Lenin and Trotsky, master polemicists that they were, had penned their replies to him. Party members all over Germany had roared their approbation and taunted Social Democrats by thrusting The Renegade Kautsky and the Proletarian Revolution and Terrorism and Communism in their faces. Yes, literally. And yes, it had felt good.
And Ludwik? As Gertie came to know him – his jokes, his sudden changes of mood, his luminous intelligence, his psychological insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Communist leaders in Moscow and Berlin – she began to appreciate how and why he had risen so rapidly. He was something very special. Half poet, half commissar, tender-hearted and ruthless.
I remember a beautiful summer day in Pushkino. We were staying with friends, Aunt Yelena and her husband, Uncle Mitya. Their son, Sasha, was my age and we went to the same school in Moscow. Uncle Mitya was a physicist working on splitting the atom and so he had this special dacha, where he could work in peace.
Sasha and I were carving our names on the birch tree when we heard Gertrude’s joy-filled voice as she ran towards us followed by Sasha’s parents, who were dancing with delight.
‘The Red Army is on its way to Berlin! Do you know what it means, Vlady? We’ve won the war!’
Sasha and I stared at the three adults.
‘Is it really true, Mutti?’
‘It’s true, my boy.’ Uncle Mitya spoke in a gruff voice as he stroked his beard in a self-satisfied fashion. ‘The Germans are finished. The hammer and sickle will fly over Berlin.’
‘But we’re Germans,’ I remember myself saying, and I got angry when they all started laughing, just like you used to get angry when your mother and I laughed at some question you had asked. Sasha got worried by what I’d said.
‘Will our generals kill all the Germans?’
‘Of course not, you idiot,’ his mother reprimanded him, ‘only the Nazis.’
We got tired of listening to the grown-ups and ran to our favourite hide-out in the river-fields. Here we used to lie down on our bellies, our faces resting in our hands and stare for hours at the river flowing by, engrossed in our fantasies. The only noises were those of chirping birds and the humming of a small stream as it flowed out of ancient Jurassic clay and rocks, making its way to the river below.
We used to climb on the slippery rocks, covered with dark green lichen which changed to a reddish brown when the sun shone on them, and jump into the stream, even though this was forbidden because the stream was very shallow. It was idyllic. Here one forgot that the Soviet Union was at war, that millions lay dead, hundreds of cities and towns were empty shells, and even as we stood on those rocks, the Red Army was on its way to Berlin. I never forgot that afternoon in Pushkino. Never. And years later I would still remember that bewitched landscape. How tranquil everything seemed. Gertrude told me many years later that she felt the same. All her bad memories were temporarily frozen. She was overcome by lofty thoughts, utopian desires, dreams of my future as she floated with the river. She always went on her own.
Gertrude knew what Stalingrad and Leningrad looked like. She had interviewed General von Paulus and his defeated Sixth Army soldiers for Moscow Radio. She began to wonder what Germany would be like when she returned. Memories of Schwaben flooded back and she wept as she thought of Heiny and her parents. I rushed to hug her. We were always very close, much closer than you are to your parents. I often wonder why this is the case. What did we do wrong, Karl? After all neither of us were apologists for the old regime. Both of us were fighting for change, but not the shock therapy, the forced decollectivization they have inflicted on us, disregarding our status as human beings. Even you and your friends at the Ebert Stiftung must see that it could have been done differently.
I remember Gertrude sending me back to the dacha to get some cold lemonade, but nothing else. That was a day of good memories for me, but Gertrude told me later of how the day had ended. I rushed back without the lemonade shouting at her.
‘Mutti! Mutti!’ I ran towards her and as I drew closer she saw my tear-stained face and hugged me tight.
‘Three men to see you,’ I told her, trying to regain my breath. ‘Army men. They want to see you.’
‘Calm down, calm down. I’m coming. Why are you so upset, my Vladimiro?’
‘One of them, he has black hair and a moustache like comrade Stalin. He grabbed me tight, so I couldn’t escape. Then he threw me in the air and they all laughed. They spoke to each other in some other language. Then he told me, ‘You go and get your mother. Tell her if she doesn’t get here soon, we’ll chop her German head off.’
Gertie’s face had paled; she knew. Holding me tightly by the hand to stop her own from trembling, she walked back to the dacha. She knew who it was and why he had held Vlady in his animal-like grip. She felt sick.
I did not go inside the house with Mother. From the outside I observed their silhouetted gestures, caught echoes of their raised voices and was pleased that Gertrude, too, seemed not to like the man with the moustache. The man caught sight of us spying, and he raised his fist to threaten. Sasha and I ran into the woods and hid. We only came out when we heard the noise of a command car driving away.
‘Who was that man, Mutti? Why was he here?’
‘Quiet, Vlady! Quiet. I worked with him many years ago.’
‘He’s cruel,’ I replied. ‘He’s a cruel man.’
Gertie flinched, startled by the accuracy of a child’s instinct. ‘I hope you will never meet him again.’
Eight
MOSCOW IN JANUARY 1924 was experiencing its coldest recorded winter. It was forty degrees below zero on the day Lenin died. Everything was frozen. Bonfires were lit in squares. People gathered as the news began to spread. Comrade Lenin is dead. Comrade Lenin is dead. From every part of the city and its suburbs, slow crowds, clothed in black and red, were moving towards the Hall of Pillars where the dead leader was lying.
The smoke from the bonfires was tar-laden and had reduced visibility to such an extent that even the trams, their bells ringing, were proceeding at a snail’s pace. Covered in ice, carriages appeared stationary because the people on foot were moving at a quicker pace.
From Lubianka Square, Ludwik could hear the music. It was the Funeral March, punctuated by explosions of dynamite. Even in death, Lenin was not allowed any peace. They were breaking up the earth to dig his grave. It was dark now. Moscow and its citizens were engulfed by the polar night.
They moved towards his body in total silence. On the raised bier, surrounded by flowers and red flags, Lenin’s tired face was hidden. Tears slid down Ludwik’s face. Lisa gripped him by the arm tightly as they walked past the dead man with the bulging forehead and tiny hands. They had heard him speak many times. Ludwik had observed him from close quarters at meetings of the Comintern, spoken to him on a number of occasions. Lisa stroked her distended stomach and spoke to her unborn child.
‘This is the centre of history. Do you understand?’
As they were walking
out, Ludwik saw Gertie, dressed in black, her head covered by a red scarf, her tear-stained face distorted by grief. He took her by the arm and they walked away from Red Square. What other generation had experienced what they had been through – war, revolution and civil war? In their tiny room lit by candles, they drank vodka and talked about Lenin.
Ludwik told Gertie and Lisa that there were ugly rumours. Stalin had insulted Lenin’s long-time companion, Krupskaya. Lenin had broken off all relations with Stalin. Lenin had appealed to Trotsky for a common bloc against Stalin. Lenin had left behind a last testament asking the Party to remove Stalin from his post as General Secretary. Stalin had poisoned Lenin.
‘Is it true?’ Gertie had asked, breathless with emotion.
Ludwik shrugged his shoulders.
The next day, at the funeral, Trotsky was absent, lying indisposed with a high temperature far away from Moscow. The Politburo had advised him to get better before travelling back to the capital.
‘We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin …’ began Stalin’s funeral oration. This language was alien to Ludwik and most party members. Ludwik was repelled by the strong undertones of religion and superstition. But why Stalin? He accepted that Trotsky was absent, Trotsky whose oratory had held Petrograd spellbound in 1917 and who, as the Commissar for War and leader of the Red Army could, through persuasion and example, convince soldiers to fight better than anyone else, but anyone else would have done better. Bukharin. Zinoviev. Kamenev. All present and able. Why Stalin? Even ordinary people were perplexed.
‘A new war has begun,’ Ludwik told Lisa that night, ‘a war for the succession, and I fear our friend is already out of the running. He should have got up from his sick bed and boarded a train. I have seen him lead men into battle with a high temperature.’ Ludwik had never spoken to the Commissar for War, but he had fought under him during the civil war and fallen under his spell.
‘Do you think more blood will be spilled?’ asked Lisa. ‘Will we too devour our own, like the French?’
Ludwik’s eyes betrayed his anxiety. He had been unhappy when the Party, egged on by Lenin and Trotsky, had decided to cross the frozen waters and take Kronstadt by force, disband the sailors’ committees, denounce the rebels as ‘objective agents of the counter-revolution’, meaning that no matter what their motives, the state was entitled to treat them as it would treat conscious and deliberate enemies.
It was Thermidor, Lenin had explained. Remember the fate of Robespierre and Saint-Just. This is our tragedy, Ludwik had thought, every new revolution haunted by the fate of its predecessor. Lenin was obsessed with Thermidor. Power must be held at any price. The Mensheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries had been banned, together with their newspapers. Factions within the Bolshevik Party had been disbanded. All in the name of the cursed Thermidor.
He remembered Radek’s account of his conversation with Rosa Luxemburg three days before her murder. ‘Their terror,’ Rosa told Radek in Berlin, ‘never succeeded in crushing us. How can we rely on terror?’ Radek had puffed on his pipe in silence, waiting for Ludwik or the others to ask for his reply, but no one had spoken.
Radek, irritated and impatient, had told them anyway. ‘I told her bluntly. “Rosa; I said, “the world revolution is at stake here. We have to gain a few years. Terror is powerless in the hands of a doomed class against the rising tide of a new class, but it becomes powerful when applied by our side against a class which has been sentenced to death by history.”’
Five voices in unison, unimpressed by the sophistry, had confronted Radek: ‘What did she reply?’
Radek had glared at them. He knew all of them, knew they were veterans of the Polish underground. They had served spells in prison. They loved Rosa. Radek did not reply, but stood up quietly and left the cafe.
Lisa’s face was shining in the soft light of the lamp. Looking up, Ludwik read worry in her eyes. They hugged each other, an embrace that owed more to despair than passion. Ludwik cupped her cheeks in his hands and kissed her lips, then her eyes. Their child was due this month. Would it find any warmth in Moscow?
He was worried about the future, yes, even at that early stage of the Revolution. They had been banking so hard on a victory in Germany, but it remained elusive. Ludwik was now almost convinced that a German revolution was impossible. The socialists were far too strongly entrenched in the factories. The countryside was hostile. The universities were dominated by German nationalism. The intelligentsia was divided and the middle classes had been scared off by the Russian Revolution. These thoughts, in the year 1924, bordered on heresy.
But what of Gertie? On the train from Berlin to Moscow, Gertie decided that she wanted Ludwik, not just for the journey, but forever. They had just seen in the New Year on the train with other passengers. Now they had retired to their compartment. Their passports showed them to be man and wife. She proposed that they become lovers.
Gently, very gently, he declined her offer, pleading emotional commitments – his wife was pregnant with their child in Moscow – and professional rules. It was bad practice, and dangerous in the extreme, for people in their field of work to get attached to each other. Lives could be put in jeopardy. Comradeship was all he could offer. Gertie tried to hide how upset she was by becoming flippant.
‘You mean you aren’t even a “glass-of-water” man?’
Ludwik smiled. Lenin had told Clara Zetkin – or was it Kollontai? – that sex was like drinking a glass of water. Nothing more. Nothing less. Overnight this throwaway remark had become a convenient orthodoxy for many Communists all over Europe. In consequence much water was consumed throughout the world.
‘No,’ Ludwik replied with a smile. ‘In any case Vladimir Ilyich was only referring to his relations with Krupskaya. It was never a glass of water with Inessa, or some others I could tell you about.’
Gertie was hurt by the rebuff and angry with herself for being hurt. Once they arrived in Moscow, she became immersed in an intensive training programme. Slowly, her passion for Ludwik receded. They remained friends and after Gertie had met Ludwik’s lover, Lisa, it became clear to her that any serious affair with him was permanently excluded.
Gertie had become a Comintern loyalist, a follower of Grigori Zinoviev, and would brook no challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy. She quarrelled fiercely with Ludwik in private and at party meetings to discuss the ‘situation in Germany’. She would pounce like a tigress on the mildest display of what she denounced as ‘petty-bourgeois pessimism’.
‘Do you think the proletariat are always optimistic?’ teased Ludwik, but Gertie was intoxicated, drunk on hopes and possibilities, driven by an energy that she never knew she had possessed. She was living in the capital of world revolution, meeting comrades from all corners of the world, revelling in the fear the revolution had struck in the hearts of the bourgeois and imperialist leaders in the West. She had little time for more ordinary pursuits.
One day an English journalist from a radical newspaper had come to interview Zinoviev about a letter he was supposed to have written to trade unionists in Britain. The document, known as the ‘Zinoviev letter’, had been crudely forged by British intelligence to embarrass the minority Labour Government. It had succeeded. Zinoviev had not been angry, but amused and, if the truth be told, flattered by the incident.
The journalist, a tall wiry man called Christopher Brown, had been impressed by Gertrude’s skills as an interpreter. He invited her to dinner. She talked and talked. He listened. Her enthusiasm began to infect him. She introduced him to her friends. She took him to hear Mayakovsky, the poet who loved to step on the throat of his own poems. He was in great form that night: ‘In the Soviet melting pot lies / A thin layer of mould / And from behind the back of the USSR / Peeps out the bourgeois’ snout.’
Once Brown had been sufficiently softened, it was Ludwik’s turn. He spent a long time with him, questioning him in detail about the situation in Britain and in India. Brown, who had planned to spend a fortnight in Moscow, ended up staying
for three months. His reports to his newspaper at home became more and more fevered.
Then two things happened. Gertrude took him as a lover and Ludwik recruited him as an undercover agent.
‘We are not the foot soldiers of the world revolution,’ Ludwik told him, ‘but its eyes and ears. When you go back you must break publicly with us, say you were repelled by some aspects of what you saw. This means you won’t have to lie. We can help with some material. I want you to leave the Manchester Guardian and get a job on The Times.’
Brown was stunned. He was not a good actor and was nervous about how he would handle his friends. He had not been prepared for duplicity on such a scale. Gertie convinced him that it was necessary. He had fallen in love with her, proposed marriage and suggested that she return with him to London. Ludwik had considered the idea seriously, but rejected it. He needed Gertrude in Germany.
Gertie and the Englishman made love every day, but when he declared his love for her, she could contain herself no longer. Her own romantic meandering with David Stein long forgotten, she now affected to loathe all sentimentality and romance in personal relations.
‘Love!’ she said to Brown as they were getting into bed one night. ‘Love! What does it mean? It’s a disease that lays siege to the mind. It makes you irrational. I despise the very word. What a joke. Love for people like you means a nice house, children and a healthy bank balance. Love is a bourgeois concept. You’ve read too much romantic poetry. It’s an old German disease. That is why I understand you. It’s an affliction, Christopher. Get it out of your system, for heaven’s sake. Poets and novelists who write just about love and tender feelings, do so because they shut their eyes to the baseness of this world. Now turn over so I can fuck you.’
Brown was shocked by her outburst. Even though he was filled with the ardour of a new convert, he knew she was wrong and he wondered what really lay beneath the eruption. But her casualness had excited him and so he did as she asked. The following week he returned to London.