Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Lenin’s plague-on-both-your-houses approach is challenged on the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, airing the leadership’s internal huffing and puffing in front of its supporters. Hitherto, Marx’s two-stage theory of revolution–first bourgeois capitalism, then workers’ regime–has been sacrosanct. Yet one must concede a certain dismal political logic to Lenin’s strategy. The odds are surely against the new government functioning effectively.

  And therein lies the Bolsheviks’ opportunity. For how long will the soldiers continue to fight when they could be at home claiming land? The question of what they are even fighting for has been fudged. Some ministers are still wedded to the aggressive war aims of the Tsar–a far cry from the ‘peace without annexations and indemnities’ demanded by the Petrograd Soviet. The food situation is dire, and a two-headed power structure–the Soviets and the government–is a recipe for instability. Perhaps it is worth giving Lenin’s plan a little time.

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: News of events in Russia reaches the prosperous suburbs of Chicago. On the day Lenin gives the Petrograd Soviet the benefit of his insights, a young American girl, nineteen years of age, is moved to write a poem to celebrate the liberation of the Russian people:

  Out from the ice-bound desolation,

  Siberia’s heart-eating waste,

  Out from the gloom of desperation,

  From dank foul cells they haste,

  Out from the rule of despotism,

  To the freedom of life they spring,

  They have double their might,

  Since their souls can fight,

  For the people of Russia are king!

  Her younger brother Ernest is still a schoolboy at the local high school, keen on boxing, debating, athletics, and writing articles for the school newspaper, in which he positively reviews his own performances. He is in favour of the war, if he can be a part of it. (Not yet, his father tells him.) He scours the papers for news from the front, perhaps he even reads D’Annunzio’s missive from Italy. Despite his brash self-confidence and clumsy youthfulness, the girls like him (and the boys, too). And no one doubts his brains. His English teacher, Miss Dixon–a breathless fan of Woodrow Wilson–considers him her precocious star pupil.

  Whatever he is going to do in life, Ernest Hemingway knows it will be big. He intends to start by leaving Oak Park, Illinois, as soon as the school year is over.

  VIENNA: Sigmund Freud worries about raised expectations of victory. ‘If the overpowering effect of the U-boats hasn’t become evident by September’, he writes to a friend, ‘there will be an awakening from illusion in Germany, with frightful consequences.’ Anyhow, there are other disappointments to contend with. ‘No Nobel prize 1917’, he notes sadly in his diary.

  THE WESTERN FRONT: French attack. German counter-attack. Poison gas. French counter-counter-attack. Stumble. Fall. Many dead. Many more wounded. No breakthrough. Désastre is the word they use in Paris.

  Amongst Russian expeditionary units in France, soldiers’ committees have now been formed. They refuse to swear loyalty to the provisional government in Petrograd. A full-scale Russian mutiny seems to be under way, on French soil. And it is catching. French soldiers refuse orders to make for the front. They start singing the Internationale. Revolutionary tracts circulate through their ranks. In a few cases guns are fired in the air. ‘Shoot me if you like, but I will not go up to the trenches’, one soldier tells his superior, ‘the result is the same.’ The French authorities are alarmed.

  PETROGRAD: Trying to put to bed those stupid rumours about his being a German spy, Vladimir starts writing his autobiography. ‘I was born in Simbirsk on 10 April 1870’, he begins. His brother’s execution for an attempt on the life of Nicholas Romanov’s father merits a single sentence. Within a few lines he is already in 1895, the year of his arrest for spreading revolutionary propaganda in St Petersburg (as Petrograd was then called).

  He stops. What foolishness this is! Why should he justify himself? His enemies in the Petrograd Soviet can make all sorts of wild accusations–but who cares? He knows the truth. And sooner or later, they will be history. Bolshevik party membership has tripled since the revolution. This is the fact that matters. This is the tidal wave coming to sweep away the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and all the other ‘filthy scum on the surface of the world labour movement’. That is to say, the German Social Democrats and their ilk.

  At a Bolshevik conference that spring, Lenin asserts himself as leader of his party, and imposes his views of the future. Conciliation is nonsense. The revolution cannot be allowed to atrophy in coalition with the bourgeoisie. But he admits that the majority of workers are not yet won around to the Bolshevik view. He demands tactical flexibility. ‘To shout about violence now is senseless’, he warns, ‘what we need in the present situation is caution, caution, caution’. The future is coming: a proletarian-peasant republic of Soviets, without a police force or a standing army or even a bureaucracy. Everyone will be paid the same. It sounds wonderful. The state, in some form or other, will be required in a transitional period, of course. But not for long.

  Lenin recalls the speech of a coal miner who explained how he and his comrades just seized control of their mine and then set about ensuring that it worked. ‘Now that is a real programme of the revolution, not derived from books’, says the terror of the Zurich public library.

  HOMBURG PALACE, GERMANY: Wilhelm has received a letter from a German corn merchant who used to live in Argentina. He takes on some of his suggestions for the country’s war aims. An aide worries that these would make negotiated peace impossible. Wilhelm is truculent. ‘Yes’, the Kaiser replies, ‘but those are my peace terms’.

  A long list is sent to the German foreign office. Malta is to be German. Gibraltar will be given to Spain. The Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde and all Britain’s assets in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East are to be turned over to Germany or her allies. The Kaiser imagines a German empire in Africa carved out of French and British possessions. He envisages reparations running into tens of billions of dollars too, and something like a German economic dictatorship over much of the globe. America will send its nickel and copper, Australia its wool, Russia its corn and oil–the list goes on.

  That the war drags on is all the fault of the British, the Kaiser complains. The sooner they accept their defeat the better. ‘Every week will be more expensive for them.’

  THE WESTERN FRONT–SUSSEX, ENGLAND: Winston Churchill is sent to France on a fact-finding mission by the Prime Minister, bumping along rutted roads to the front line. (A few days at the Ritz prepare him for the ordeal.) He meets French generals who keep schtum about the disciplinary trouble they have been having. He meets the top brass of the British army and listens humbly to their views of the military situation before giving his own. He is out of office at the moment and in keen listening mode.

  On return to England, at his new country house in Sussex (three German prisoners of war work on the farm), he can relax a little. He enjoys a new game he has recently devised with the help of his children. It is called the bear game. It involves Winston playing a bear while chasing the children around the garden–or, if it is raining, through the house. The man is indefatigable. The children love it.

  TSARSKOYE SELO, RUSSIA: The horizons of the imperial family steadily narrow. In April, the children’s use of the palace pond is revoked. There are no unauthorised guests. The guards scrawl lewd graffiti on the wall. One casually sticks his bayonet through Nicholas’s bicycle wheel when the ex-Tsar is out getting a little exercise.

  But Citizen Romanov does not complain. ‘Am spending more time with my sweet family than in more normal years’, he writes in his diary. He reads detective stories out loud to his children and diligently makes notes about the weather. As temperatures begin to rise, he decides to plant a little vegetable garden, sowing seeds for a summer harvest. He finds time to teach his children geography. (Alexandra is in charge of religious education.) The ex-Tsar celebrates h
is forty-ninth birthday with a jigsaw.

  PETROGRAD: The provisional government broadens its membership to include more Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks as ministers. The Petrograd Soviet’s objective of ‘peace without annexations or indemnities’ becomes government policy. Kerensky becomes War Minister.

  He tours the front to try and restore morale in Russia’s shattered armies. A women’s only battalion is formed under a Siberian peasant named Maria Bochkareva in an attempt to shame men into doing their duty. Kerensky insists military discipline is restored and gives rousing speeches to the soldiers, promising them that they are now fighting for peace and not empire: ‘Not a single drop of blood will be shed for a wrong cause’. Those who want to give up now are traitors who would dishonour Russia’s name by making it abandon its allies. Revolutionary Russia will only be able to demand peace of others if it proves its own mettle. Peace through strength will be the revolution’s gift to the world. One final assault to make the Germans come to their senses.

  Lenin is cutting: ‘this is the sum and substance of the new government’s “programme”’, he writes in Pravda, ‘an offensive, an offensive, an offensive!’

  SUMMER

  PARIS: In the midst of this strange war, an echo of 1913. The Ballets Russes put on a performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet. They call it Parade.

  Russian dancers leap to French music. The stage designer is a Spaniard from Barcelona named Pablo. The story is eclectic, featuring a Chinese magician and an American child star. The orchestra includes a typewriter. All the ingredients, then, for a succès de scandale to match the premiere of Rite of Spring four years before, when Nijinsky pulsated his way across the stage and the audience hissed its disapproval. It is almost like old times (minus the Germans).

  The wounded literary critic Guillaume Apollinaire coins a new word to describe the ballet, calling it ‘a sort of Sur-realisme’. He enjoys the plasticity of the term. ‘Surrealism does not yet exist in the dictionaries’, he writes to a poet friend, ‘it will be easier to manipulate than Supernaturalism, which is already in use by the philosophers.’

  VIENNA: The following morning, at 9 a.m. precisely, a spectacle of quite a different kind gets under way in Vienna’s central criminal court: a sensational murder trial involving the assassination of the Austrian Premier in one of the city’s finest restaurants last year by Friedrich Adler, the son of the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Victor Adler.

  All Vienna’s attention is riveted on proceedings. Albert Einstein writes a personal letter to Emperor Charles pleading for the actions of his friend Friedrich–who is a physicist as well as a revolutionary–to be treated as a tragic accident rather than a crime. Freud writes to a friend: ‘our inner conflict here is perhaps nowhere so plainly revealed as it is by the extremely notable trial of Fr. Adler’. Victor Adler defends his son by describing the stifling atmosphere in Vienna since 1914 with political debate curtailed by war conditions and state censorship. ‘The very air in Austria had become suffocating’, he declares dramatically to the court, casting his son’s act as the desperate last resort of a man of intense convictions pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown (and beyond). Before the trial he goes so far as to try and have his son declared insane.

  Friedrich Adler shows no remorse. He bought the murder weapon, it turns out, as long ago as 1915, in Zurich, thus leaving no doubt that the crime was premeditated: ‘I know only that I did what I had to do’, he tells the court. He despises the hypocrisy of those who order men to certain deaths at the front every day but invoke the Ten Commandments when one of their own is killed. ‘We live in a time when battlefields are covered with hundreds of thousands of the dead, and tens of thousands more fill the seas’, he cries, ‘and we are told: this is war, this is necessity.’ Revolution also has its necessity. After Petrograd, will Vienna be next? A wave of strikes hits Vienna in the early summer.

  At seven in the evening the judgement of the court is read out. Friedrich Adler is found guilty as charged. As he is taken down, there are cheers in the courtroom to Adler and the Socialist International. Adler himself is able to shout: ‘Long live revolutionary international social democracy!’ before he is bundled off by the police. Eight demonstrators are arrested inside the court, and another six on the street outside.

  TSARSKOYE SELO: ‘It’s exactly three months since I came from Mogilyov and since we have been sitting here like prisoners’, Nicholas writes in his diary. Occasionally War Minister Kerensky visits. The hardest thing to get used to is the lack of news from his mother.

  One night there is a commotion when a shot is fired in the palace garden. A guard sees what appears to be a light being switched on and off repeatedly in the room of one of the Romanov children, as if sending a coded signal for help. Further investigation reveals the cause: Anastasia has been doing needlework late into the night, her head occasionally moving between the electric lamp and the window.

  LEEDS, ENGLAND: The spirit of Petrograd reaches the north of England in June. A convention is called bringing together socialist, women’s and trades union organisations in the Gothic splendour of the Leeds Coliseum. The organisers call it a Convention. It looks not unlike a Soviet. ‘Let us lay down our terms, make our own proclamations, establish our own diplomacy’, says pacifist Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald. The workers are now rediscovering their voice after three years when patriotism kept them silent.

  A resolution in support of the Russian revolution passes easily. A second resolution calling for an immediate peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’–the formula of the Petrograd Soviet–passes less easily. One delegate asks who will pay the pensions of merchant seamen killed by German submarines if not the German government. ‘The shipowners’, a few shout. An Irishman decries the double standards of those who celebrate the revolution in Russia, but ignore the failed independence rising in Dublin last year, ‘where the leaders were taken out and shot like dogs’. The third motion is the most radical. It calls for the immediate establishment of workers’ and soldiers’ councils across the country. The speaker introducing the motion is quite clear that this means revolution. Another declares his support for Lenin’s phrase: the dictatorship of the proletariat. The suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst calls the motion a ‘straight cut for the Socialist Commonwealth we all want to see’.

  The Leeds resolutions are published in Pravda. The King of England is informed.

  LEWES, SUSSEX, ENGLAND: A few days later, word gets through the Lewes jail that an Irish maths professor lucky to have escaped the hangman for his role in the Easter Rising is to be released along with other Irish political prisoners held in British prisons. They say it is a gesture towards American opinion.

  Before 1916, Éamon de Valera was not a figure of particular importance. His role in the rising and his time in prison have given him a new stature, as the most hard-line leader in the movement for Irish independence still around. The other Irish prisoners look up to him. He calmly ignores the third-class ticket in his hand when he boards the boat home at Holyhead and marches his men up the first-class gangplank.

  In Dublin he is greeted as a hero and made the Sinn Féin candidate for the parliamentary seat of East Clare, vacated because of the death of its previous holder, an Irish patriot who decided to demonstrate his patriotism in a very different way: by fighting in the King’s army in France. In the weather-beaten villages of western Ireland de Valera campaigns in the uniform of an Irish Volunteer, the force that launched last year’s rising. He makes halting speeches to forgiving crowds. He curries favour with local priests by saying he is opposed to any further uprisings for the moment. He talks of his dream that Ireland will one day be not just a dominion of the British Crown but, perhaps, a republic.

  THE WESTERN FRONT: ‘The spring has been stretched too long’, reports a French army officer, ‘now it has broken.’

  A wave of mutinies spreads through the French army. ‘Even within the most reliable units, even amongst the best elements, there is
moral as well as physical exhaustion’, the officer writes: ‘I repeat, the spring is broken, it has been kept taut for too long.’ On one occasion four hundred soldiers abandon their posts and start marching towards Paris before being surrounded by cavalry units and persuaded to return. Another day, two thousand soldiers gather in Ville-en-Tardenois carrying a red flag and singing the Internationale.

  Leave is improved. Pay is increased. Military repression is accelerated–but its severity is limited. The French army strains but does not shatter.

  VIENNA: Freud flees the city for the summer. In the capital, black marketeers hoard food and government posters urge people to collect bones, lest they go to waste. The Hungarian countryside seems a different world. ‘Friendship and loyalty are taking the form of generosity’, Freud writes to a friend, ‘with the result that we are able to wallow in the abundance of bread, butter, sausages, eggs and cigars, rather like the chief of a primitive tribe’. The Hungarians are ‘unmannerly and noisy’. But amidst such plenty, he hardly cares. He knows it cannot last.

  EAST ST. LOUIS, ILLINOIS: The town of East St. Louis on the Mississippi has a reputation for easy alcohol, easy women and politicians on the take. State after state has gone dry in recent years but East St. Louis is an oasis of vice. The licensing of saloons provides an income for local officials. ‘Irrigation juries’ from local bars ensure no one is ever acquitted except as required by the Mayor. Dance halls provide cheap thrills. Aunt Kate’s Honkytonk advertises the Chemise-She-Wobble, where girls perform an Americanised version of the belly dance.