NEIVOLA, FINLAND–PETROGRAD: A train chugs its way from Petrograd along the coast of the Gulf of Finland. A pale middle-aged man sits next to his sister, who talks at him non-stop as the carriage rocks from side to side. Occasionally the man holds his head in his hands, as if trying to rid himself of a headache. He looks tired.
For several days at a friend’s dacha in the Finnish village of Neivola, not two hours from Petrograd, Vladimir walks, eats and swims. He spends long hours sitting on the veranda staring at the blue sky. He feels himself regaining his strength after all the scheming and scribbling of the last months. Then, early one morning, a messenger arrives with urgent news. In Lenin’s absence, an insurrection has broken out amongst industrial workers in Vyborg and soldiers about to be sent to the front. It is unclear who, if anyone, is behind it.
Jessie Kenney hears armoured vehicles screaming through the streets of Petrograd. The Belgian Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce is stolen by the mob, and then adorned with a machine gun and a red flag to flutter beside the Belgian tricolour. War Minister Kerensky is visiting the front, though said to be rushing back. The front page of Pravda is blank. A debate in the Petrograd Soviet about whether to support, reject or suppress the revolt does not begin until one in the morning. Lenin rushes to the capital by the first train. He is back at Bolshevik headquarters by midday. Those hothead fools! Too soon, too soon! ‘You ought to be given a good hiding for this’, he tells his over-eager comrades in private, furious that they have let an insurrection take place. Such undisciplined action is fraught with danger.
Twenty thousand armed sailors arrive from the Kronstadt garrison that morning, with their cap ribbons turned inside out so that no one can identify them by the name of their ship. Their purpose in the city is uncertain. The insurrection lacks leadership. Addressing a crowd from the balcony of Bolshevik headquarters, Lenin pointedly refuses to provide it. He even gets a stand-in to finish his speech. The uprising was rotten from the beginning, Lenin decides: this is going nowhere. Riderless horses are seen cantering through the streets. Sheets of paper from a ransacked office float downstream along the Neva. A Frenchman notes spilled face powder and ribbons from a looted shop.
The fair-weather revolutionaries amongst the Kronstadt sailors are cleared off the street by a torrential downpour in the afternoon. A hard core marches to the Tauride Palace. ‘Take power you son of a bitch when it’s handed to you’, a worker shouts at a leading Socialist Revolutionary member of the Soviet who is also a minister. Leon Trotsky stands up on a car bonnet and requests that the man be released. The crowd are confused. Trotsky comes to Kronstadt regularly urging the need for the revolution to continue. Now he seems to be rejecting it. Has he lost his nerve? ‘You’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power’, Leon says. Their devotion to the revolution is not in doubt, he tells the rebels, but ‘individuals are not worthy of your attention’. Trotsky stretches out his hand to one of the sailors: ‘Give me your hand, Comrade! Your hand, brother!’ The minister is released. There will be no revolution today. Pictures of War Minister Kerensky reappear on the walls of the city’s apartments and cafés the next morning.
Despite their protestations of innocence, the Bolsheviks are blamed for the insurrection. The offices of Pravda are raided and Bolshevik headquarters turned inside out in the search for proof of the impatient revolutionary’s German contacts and general Bolshevik perfidy. A warrant is issued for Lenin’s arrest. The fugitive moves from apartment to apartment, from safe house to safe house. ‘Now they are going to shoot us’, he confides knowingly to Trotsky. ‘We may not see each other again’, he tells Nadya when she comes to visit him in one of his hideouts. He raises the possibility of giving himself up–there may be some propaganda benefit to a public trial. The Georgian bank-robber Stalin argues against it. Vladimir’s mind turns to his intellectual legacy, and all the writing he was doing in Zurich before the revolution interrupted him. ‘Entre nous’, he writes to a trusted comrade, ‘if they do me in, I ask you to publish my notebook Marxism and the State (it got left behind in Stockholm)’.
The manhunt for the Bolshevik leader continues. Nadya is closely interrogated when the house in which she is staying is ransacked by a military search party. ‘Look in the oven, someone may be sitting there’, the servant girl tells the soldiers conducting the raid a little tartly. As the net closes in, Vladimir decides he must get out of the city. He has Stalin shave off his moustache and beard before catching a local train filled with summer holidaymakers heading up the Gulf of Finland, getting off not far outside the city and trudging to a property owned by an old Bolshevik party member.
The principled non-tipper Leon Trotsky is arrested and incarcerated in the Kresty jail, where he writes furious articles for Pravda expressing solidarity with Lenin. The Petrograd Soviet is moved to the Smolny Institute, formerly a private girls’ school, full of long corridors and bare classrooms–a significant demotion from the grandeur of the Tauride. Kerensky takes over the formal leadership of the provisional government and moves into the Winter Palace.
UPSTATE MICHIGAN: An American summer at Walloon, the Hemingway family cottage near the Canadian border, five days of dusty driving from Chicago, not so different from Lenin’s hideaway in Finland. Young Ernest the high-school graduate, no longer a boy exactly but not quite a man either, spends the summer fixing things up, helping out his father, going fishing, and pondering the greatness of his future, somehow about to begin.
Time passes slowly. The world is far away. Even the rest of America–where German-Americans are being hounded, suspect newspapers closed and socialists locked up–seems far away. Ernest’s grandfather sends over the Chicago papers for his grandson to read, several days late, but always hungrily consumed. Ernest replies with the latest from Walloon, which isn’t much: a visit by Uncle Tyler and his wife, worries about the potato crop this year, the condition of Clarence Hemingway’s automobile (‘Dad’s Ford is running fine now that the cylinders are clean’.) The most exciting news concerns fishing, and Ernest’s claim to have made ‘the largest catch of trout that has ever been made’ in Horton’s Bay.
As the summer wears on, and the trout tally mounts at Walloon, Ernest begins to wonder whether his future will begin at all. He might stay up at the cottage until October, he writes. Or he might visit one of his uncles, or he might try and get a job at the Chicago Tribune, his newspaper of choice…
THE VATICAN: The Pope tries another peace initiative, issuing an invitation to the warring parties to discuss a peace without annexations or indemnities, but with Belgium’s independence guaranteed.
In Milan, the war-wounded newspaper editor Benito Mussolini calls the Pope a traitor to his country, and advocates total war against the Austrians. (At that very moment, the Italian army is preparing for yet another assault, hoping to crack open the Austrian defences in the mountains north-east of Venice.) To make peace now would be to give up on the nationalist dream of turning the Adriatic Sea into an Italian lake and building an extended empire in Africa. The British demand German withdrawal from Belgium before negotiations can begin. Woodrow Wilson writes that a return to the status quo before the war is impossible now that the Germans have covered Europe in a ‘tide of blood’.
WILHELMSHAVEN, GERMANY: Wilhelm decides to conduct what he considers to be a morale-boosting visit to his fleet. The weather is balmy–‘Hohenzollern weather’, they call it–and so is the political temperature aboard.
The mood amongst the sailors is poor. Germany’s giant surface fleet has not ventured out onto the high seas in force since 1916. They hear that the submarine war has stalled, and that Germany is now losing U-boats faster than they can be replaced. They read in the newspapers from Berlin about the political crisis there, the calls for peace, and the instability in Russia. ‘The entire world is a madhouse’, one sailor writes in his diary that summer, ‘the oldest dynasties have fallen or now hide fearfully from an increasingly res
tless and fuming volcano…’ The sailors organise themselves into committees to present their complaints. Some are arrested for passing around socialist tracts or for refusing to attend drill practice. News that Russian sailors have taken matters into their own hands at Kronstadt over the summer is greeted warmly in Wilhelmshaven: ‘we Germans ought to imitate them’.
A report on socialist agitation is delivered to Wilhelm in person. He listens approvingly as he is told of the death sentences expected to be handed down to the ringleaders. That evening before supper, Wilhelm addresses the naval chiefs with his own personal perspective on matters. Keen to emphasise his credentials as a far-sighted moderniser, the Kaiser suggests that the German navy should adopt an American-style naval jacket in the future. The senior officers demur: they prefer the old-fashioned cut.
WASHINGTON DC: America gears up for war. Like Tsar Nicholas at Tsarskoye Selo, Edith Wilson plants a vegetable garden at the White House. Across the country, the mines produce more coal. Steelworks produce more steel. Shipyards clank out new vessels.
American businesses, more profitable than ever, promise great feats of additional productivity to meet the fresh demands of war. (The Detroit automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, having apparently given up on his earlier peace efforts, promises to produce one thousand midget submarines and three thousand aeroplane engines every day.) American savers are encouraged to lend money to the government through new Liberty Bonds. The financial wealth of the country is pressed into national service. The first American soldiers reach Europe–though not yet the front–over the summer.
After the Houston mutiny, the army temporarily halts the draft for black Americans. Most existing black recruits are assigned to labour battalions or guard duty. (One activist notes that all the guards at the White House are black.) It is decided that only a handful of all-black combat units will be formed and sent to France.
TSARSKOYE SELO: On a warm and beautiful Friday morning towards the end of summer, just after breakfast, Nicholas Romanov is informed that he and his family are to be moved. Not to Crimea as they had hoped–‘and we were still counting on a long stay in Livadia!’ he notes sadly in his diary–but somewhere out east. They are not told their exact destination. Nicholas engages in a final bout of chopping and sawing in the forest: eleven fir trees are felled in three days. On Sunday, the family celebrates the Tsarevich’s thirteenth birthday.
Nicholas’s brother Michael is brought to Tsarskoye Selo by Kerensky late one night. ‘It was very pleasant to meet’, Citizen Romanov writes in his diary: ‘but to talk in front of strangers was awkward.’ The next morning, the imperial party boards a train marked as belonging to the Red Cross and flying the Japanese flag. A few days after that, they are already in the middle of Siberia, where they pass the native village of their old holy man, Rasputin. They gather on the viewing platform to look at his house standing out amongst the meagre log cabins around it. Rasputin told them that they would come here one day.
Their final destination is Tobolsk. They are put up in the former governor’s mansion. There is a fence to keep them in, and armed guards on the door.
MOSCOW, RUSSIA–RAZLIV, NEAR PETROGRAD: The villages outside Russia’s second city are rather like the English county of Surrey, Jessie Kenney decides. In Moscow, Jessie and Emmeline enjoy a vegetarian dinner with two charming English bachelors who have taken up residence in the city. They talk about the Cossack shawls Emmeline so admires. They buy records of Russian folk songs to take home. The mood is lighter here than in Petrograd.
They are disappointed not to be able to get into the Bolshoi Theatre to see the main show playing in town: a political gathering called by Kerensky to assert his personal authority as leader of the provisional government and present himself as the only man capable of welding together Russia’s fractured polity. Two thousand representatives from across the spectrum of Russian society and politics meet in Moscow–right and left, town and country. But without the Bolsheviks, of course, who declare Kerensky’s national gathering to be counter-revolution dressed up as democracy and call for protest resolutions (but not street demonstrations) against it. Eventually Jessie and Emmeline are able to secure two tickets to view proceedings from the British box. They are delighted to recognise the odd Russian word they have learned: ‘democratzie, revolutzie, organizatie’.
The attempt to demonstrate Kerensky’s power and indispensability to Russia’s political renewal meets with only partial success in Moscow. The precautions necessary to protect the Bolshoi, with a triple cordon of police and militia, tell their own story. Kerensky seems fractious and exhausted: yesterday’s favourite. He is upstaged at the gathering by General Kornilov, the new commander-in-chief of the army, who is greeted by one half of the meeting as a saviour and by the other as a Napoleon-in-waiting.
The army is falling apart, Kornilov explains: ‘men have become like animals’. While he claims not to be against soldiers’ committees in the army per se, he insists they should focus on issues of welfare and supply, on combating the spread of disease and hunger. They must not be allowed to elect officers or dictate tactics. Kornilov is blunt about the military situation: ‘The enemy is knocking at the gates of Riga.’ If the city falls, the road to Petrograd will be open. The next speaker, another army general, goes much further, calling for the Soviets to be abolished. He is applauded on the right. On the left, there is a feeling of unease. Are the generals preparing to take power and roll back the changes of the last six months?
While all this is happening in Moscow, the impatient revolutionary is still in hiding outside Petrograd, in a wooden hut with a thatched roof which leaks when it rains. The mosquitos are terrible. ‘Power has passed into the hands of counter-revolution’, he warns in a riposte to some Bolsheviks who clearly have not grasped the full magnitude of events, the full scale of betrayal which has occurred. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries are ‘butcher’s aides’. Armed insurrection will now be needed against them. All power to the Soviets is no longer a suitable slogan now that the Soviets have proven themselves mere ‘puppets’ of the provisional government under Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary influence. The slogan of the February revolution should be scrapped, Lenin demands.
He decides the time has come to move to a new, and safer, hideout. But to move anywhere at all these days, he needs a disguise. A Bolshevik comrade acquires a wig on the pretext that a troupe of amateur dramatics is being organised. A photographer comes out from Petrograd to take Lenin’s picture for false identity papers. Because there is no tripod available, Vladimir is forced to kneel in the mud while the photo is taken. On the day of departure, the impatient revolutionary and his group get lost in the forest on the way to the railway station and are forced to run across a still-burning peat-bog. They then find they have come to the wrong station anyway. Two trains, a carriage, a change of clothes and an adhesive face mask later, Lenin arrives in the Finnish city of Helsinki, where he is put up in the safest place imaginable: the home of the elected local police chief.
RIGA, RUSSIA–PETROGRAD: A week after Kornilov’s warning, Riga falls to the Germans in a lightning strike combining new tactics on the ground with poison gas and aeroplanes. ‘Today’s news is hateful’, a French diplomat writes in his diary. For Russia, it spells disaster. Petrograd will soon be in range of German bombing raids. Only winter can save the city from German occupation now.
French citizens in the capital turn up at their embassy to ask whether they should leave for home. Petrograd’s railway stations are crowded with those who need no such advice. Women sit on suitcases with their children, surrounded by bags. Trunks are tied up with rope. There are samovars, rolled-up mattresses, gramophone horns. The only winners from the latest crisis are the Bolsheviks.
Jessie Kenney is one of those who goes to the railway station that day, to see her friend Maria Bochkareva off to the front again. At the station, there is a ruckus as some try to prevent the women from boarding their train. Jessie finds herself caught be
tween two opposing mobs–one for and one against the war–just as the gallant Czech gentleman had warned. Her ribs are crushed. She can hardly breathe. Her scarf gets caught, pulling tighter around her neck. Jessie raises one hand into the air, still bearing some flowers given to her by members of Maria’s battalion, in the hope of attracting attention. A soldier on horseback makes his way into the crowd and rescues her.
Jessie has to hold back her tears when she returns to the hotel. She does not want Emmeline to see her this way. To cry in public is against suffragette etiquette. Suffragettes must smile while they bleed.
AUTUMN
PETROGRAD: Anatoly Lunacharsky, one of Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks, and undoubtedly one of the most cultured, is giving a lecture on Greek art to a group of workers in the Cirque Moderne. Afterwards, a group of his friends chat about aesthetics and culture. It is only towards evening, over tea, that they hear the news. A phone call from the Petrograd Soviet’s new headquarters in the Smolny Institute: Kornilov is marching on Petrograd. The counter-revolution has begun.
The reality is more devious. Kerensky has been in touch with Kornilov for some time, sounding him out about the ideas he expressed in Moscow for giving Russia the strong government it needs. Messages shoot between Petrograd and army headquarters at Mogilyov. Kornilov believes his ideas for restoring order are being supported by Kerensky. Loyal troops are to be moved up to Petrograd in anticipation of a Bolshevik revolt should the scheme be put into action. But Kerensky has begun to have second thoughts. He now senses an opportunity to recast himself as the revolution’s hero by framing the unwitting Kornilov.
Kerensky asks for the general’s preference on a future structure of the government: a dictatorship led by Kerensky with the general as a minister, a collective directoire of some sort on the French revolutionary model, or a dictatorship with Kornilov in charge and Kerensky as his minister. The last, the guileless general answers. One night, over a special telegraph machine which records the conversation, Kerensky encourages the general to repeat his earlier unwisely expressed preference. Armed with this artfully manufactured evidence appearing to show Kornilov’s perfidy against the regime, Kerensky demands his cabinet grant full powers to himself to counter the threat. ‘I will not give them the revolution’, he declares defiantly. The trap is sprung. Kerensky sings operatic arias in his study in celebration of his Machiavellian brilliance.
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