Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  But there is a catch. Kornilov is informed he has been dismissed, but the order is ignored, and his official replacement refuses to take over his command. The general’s troops are already on their way to Petrograd. Having conjured the fake threat of a military takeover to secure full powers for himself, Kerensky now has a real insurrection on his hands. A radio telegram informs the country that the general has conspired to establish ‘a regime opposed to the conquests of the revolution’, and must be stopped. Kornilov angrily denies this version of events. ‘A great provocation has taken place which jeopardizes the fate of the motherland’, his counterblast declares.

  The troops march on. Reading the messages from Petrograd, the general suspects foul play. Perhaps the Bolsheviks have already captured the government and are now working hand in glove with the Germans. His duty, then, is clear: ‘the heavy sense of the inevitable ruin of the country commands me in these ominous moments to call upon all Russian people to come to the aid of the dying motherland’. If he fails, the Russians will be made German slaves. Kerensky and Kornilov’s budding alliance has turned into a contest. ‘Kornilov has chosen a moment of deathly danger for his homeland to set the fire of a civil war’, reads one paper.

  The Petrograd Soviet, which Kerensky previously sought to sideline, is thrust back to prominence as the command centre of resistance against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks, who have long warned of counter-revolutionary machination, are rehabilitated. They demand Petrograd’s workers be armed. While the Kronstadt sailors sweep into town to defend the revolution, Kornilov’s troops are slowed down by sabotage. Agitators from Petrograd are sent out to win over the rank and file. The soldiers are told the truth: there is no Bolshevik rebellion to repress. If they continue their march into town they will be killing the revolution, not saving it. Kornilov’s revolt–if that is what it ever really was–crumbles in fraternisation and confusion. The general is arrested not long afterwards.

  ‘Is it a farce or a Shakespearean tragedy?’ writes a French diplomat. Lenin is so surprised by the course of events, he proposes something quite unlike him: a compromise with his former enemies whereby the Bolsheviks forgo the possibility of taking power themselves for the time being, as long as all power now resides with the Soviets. Trotsky is released from jail and a little later becomes chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.

  News reaches Nicholas Romanov in Tobolsk. ‘It seems there is a vast muddle in Petrograd’, he writes in his diary. At the front, the Russian army is collapsing faster than ever. ‘She’s a Kornilovka!’ a mob shout at Maria Bochkareva. She is very nearly lynched.

  SPARTANBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA: White locals didn’t want black soldiers from New York training in their town–it’s ‘like waving a red flag in the face of a bull’, Spartanburg’s mayor writes to the War Department–but here they are.

  One Saturday evening, the band of New York’s 15th Infantry Regiment plays a concert in the town square, where a bandstand has been erected for the purpose. Lieutenant Jim Europe leads the band in playing rousing martial music. It’s a huge success. ‘When do they play again?’ asks one of Spartanburg’s white citizens when the band have finished their concert. Perhaps things will work out all right in South Carolina after all.

  The feeling of patriotic unity does not last. In Spartanburg, black soldiers from New York are expected to follow the segregation laws of South Carolina without a word of complaint, are barred from certain shops, and are considered uppity should they so much as decide to walk on the pavement rather than the road. Abuse is common. Tensions soon boil over. One morning soldiers in camp hear that one of their number has been lynched after a fight with the local police. On investigation, it turns out that the story is nothing more than a malicious rumour, and a riot is averted.

  On another occasion, one of Europe’s band colleagues is physically assaulted by the manager of a whites-only hotel when he goes in to buy a copy of a New York newspaper. This time, white soldiers from New York are so enraged by the behaviour against one of their black colleagues that they seem ready to burn the hotel to the ground–until an officer arrives to calm things down.

  The 15th Regiment are in town for just two weeks. Then the orders come: back to the city, then France.

  THE EASTERN FRONT–KREUZNACH: The good news from Russia reaches Kaiser Wilhelm on board a train on his way back from a tour of Bulgaria. Emperor Charles joins his German ally for some of the journey, and bothers him with his latest thoughts on solving the conundrum of Poland’s future status if the war is won. Wilhelm holds forth on Wagner and his operatic genius. ‘The Kaiser’s knowledge on this subject is astounding’, notes an aide in his diary.

  Back in Kreuznach it is a return to the regular drill: the odd drive along the Rhine, meetings on Germany’s latest crisis (which the Kaiser dismisses as just the usual fluff), after-dinner films about the war and lectures about the latest subjects to pique Wilhelm’s fancy. In early October, it is the history and folklore of Transylvania. Later in the year, the Kaiser is off again: this time to Macedonia and Constantinople.

  HELSINKI, FINLAND: Vladimir writes to Nadya asking her to come and visit. His letter is, as usual, written in invisible ink. It is accompanied by a map. Nadya accidentally singes a corner of it while reading the letter by a gas lamp.

  Shortly afterwards, she smuggles herself across the border and walks several miles through a forest to a Finnish railway station. In Helsinki, she struggles to find her husband’s street with only the half-burned map as a guide. It is late by the time she arrives. Two weeks later, she makes the same trip again. The talk on the train to Finland is all political, Nadya reports to Vladimir when she reaches his hiding place. Soldiers openly boast of their willingness to rebel. At first he is delighted–and then alarmed at the news. This is it. The insurrectionary moment has arrived, quite suddenly. There is no more time to lose.

  Only days ago, Vladimir was flirting with ideas of compromise with other socialist parties. Now, he has swung around entirely. The time for such tactical flexibility has passed. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries cannot be trusted to break their links with the bourgeoisie. Kerensky will do anything to cling on to power. In the summer, Lenin considered insurrection premature. Now he thinks it urgent.

  From his Finnish exile, Lenin writes a sharp letter to party leaders in both Petrograd and Moscow (he is not fussy about which group acts first): ‘The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands’, he insists. They are left with no choice as to the means to use: ‘the present task must be an armed uprising’. There is no time to lose. What if there is a separate peace between Britain and Germany? he wonders. (This is a little fanciful.) What if the Kaiser’s troops march into Petrograd? (This is a more likely.) ‘History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now’, Lenin declares. ‘We shall win absolutely and unquestionably.’

  In Petrograd, there is incredulity amongst Bolshevik leaders. Has Lenin lost his mind? Just at that moment, the Bolsheviks are trying out the previously agreed policy of limited compromise, attending a new conference bringing together all parties on the left, from the Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. What if Lenin’s latest missive fell into the wrong hands? The letter is burned.

  TOBOLSK, SIBERIA: Three hundred and thirty-seven soldiers guard Nicholas Romanov and his family. They attract the curiosity of the townsfolk, who occasionally peep through the fence at them up on the balcony of the governor’s house.

  Nicholas does not ask for much: walks out of town (refused), a saw for cutting wood (accepted) and trips to the local church (allowed). He receives English and French newspapers as well as the Russian ones. A steady stream of hate mail is burned. The revolutionary commissar in charge tells the children stories about his travels in the far east of Siberia. He is surprised how little educated they are.

  PETROGRAD: A boisterous, playful Harvard man, full of strong o
pinions about the world and how to make it better, a man who has seen and written about war in Europe and revolution in Mexico, arrives in Petrograd stoked with radical enthusiasm. He carries a notebook carefully inscribed with his name, address and profession in his best newly learned Cyrillic script–.

  John Reed–everyone calls him Jack–soaks up all he can of the revolutionary atmosphere in Petrograd that autumn. He jots down his observations (‘Russians trust any foreigner–could kill Kerensky easily’) and phrases he overhears in the street (‘as long as capitalism in Europe, can have no socialism in Russia’). Conditions of life are poor. ‘The bread is black and soggy’, he writes to a friend back in America. There is no sugar. Milk is watery and arrives every ten days or so. He observes people queueing with fake babies in their arms to secure food.

  But these details matter less than the intensity of life in Petrograd, the sense of possibility and the openness of the future. ‘There is so much dramatic to write that I don’t know where to begin’, he gushes, ‘for color and terror and grandeur this makes Mexico look pale’. Jack and his journalist wife Louise Bryant are having the adventure of their lives.

  The American embassy keep an eye on Reed. A few weeks after his arrival he is reported speaking at a rally at the Cirque Moderne attended by some six thousand in which he denounces the supposedly free republic of the United States for its treatment of radicals at home. A protest resolution is passed, and a greeting sent across the ocean to those fighting for social revolution in North America. Reed is turning from reporter into participant.

  In a private conversation with an embassy agent, Reed gives his assessment of the various factions in Petrograd politics. Apart from the liberals who want parliamentary order to be restored, he says, ‘the Bolsheviks are the only party with a program’.

  ROSENBERG FORTRESS, KRONACH, BAVARIA: In the middle of a storm, on an almost moonless night, five dark figures huddle at the bottom of the inner rampart of Rosenberg Fortress in northern Bavaria, now a prisoner-of-war camp. French soldiers are disguised as German civilians. This is the night of their escape. They check they have everything they need to get across a six-metre rampart, over another, and then down a rocky escarpment and into the forest below: a disassembled ladder made from bits of wood acquired from their jailers on the pretext of building a cupboard, a thirty-metre rope fashioned from strips of bedsheet and some crude skeleton keys.

  One escapee has to be left behind on a ledge halfway down the escarpment when it turns out the rope is not long enough. The four remaining fugitives enter the forest at the edge of the castle grounds and start walking in the direction of Switzerland. Day after day, night after night, they continue along their way. Living off the land, forced to sleep rough during the day and travel by night, and with the weather turning cold, exhaustion is inevitable. On the tenth day after their escape from Rosenberg, the Frenchmen decide to give themselves a treat, and take refuge in a pigeon loft, not far from a German village.

  They are out of luck. Some locals overhear them. They surround the pigeon loft at dusk, along with a nervous German soldier carrying an old rifle. While being led off, two of the four Frenchmen make a dash for it and manage to get away. The other two are returned to Rosenberg. One of them is Charles de Gaulle of the 33rd Infantry Regiment of the French army, taken prisoner during the battle of Verdun in 1916.

  LONDON: Since the summer there has been a new dynamo at the heart of the British government, throwing off electricity and light, and sometimes a little heat as well.

  Winston Churchill, now the Secretary of State for Munitions, is interested in everything this autumn. And war supply, it turns out, really does touch on everything at once. ‘This is a steel war’, he tells businessmen in the metal trade in September. The next day he is looking into the problem of spare parts for motor transport. Later in the month it is poison gas. In early October: ‘I have been giving a good deal of attention to the Tanks lately’–without forgetting the essential importance of ensuring that munitions factories have better air-raid shelters, or the need for more shells from American factories. In the middle of the month Winston is asking about the supply of chemicals and trying to find a way to pay some crucial workers more without setting off a general increase in wages which the country cannot afford. He demands experimental work to neutralise the threat from German Zeppelin bombers which can now fly at six thousand metres above sea level, far above the reach of Britain’s air defences.

  One day Winston receives a letter from a friend in the army in Flanders about the wars of the future. ‘I am sure that bombing from the air–now really only in its infancy–is going to make it impossible for the weaker side in the air to fight’, the correspondent writes. Churchill replies with a missive on ‘bombing machines’ two weeks later (he had hoped to respond in person on a visit to the Continent): ‘I can assure you I shall do everything in my power to emphasize this development’.

  VYBORG, FINLAND: What is taking them so long? Insurrection! Now! Is it so hard to understand? He writes another letter to the Bolshevik leadership. ‘Procrastination is becoming positively criminal’, he tells them. It does not matter where the revolution starts. In Moscow, even: ‘victory is certain, and the chances are ten to one that it will be a bloodless victory’.

  Lenin decides he can wait no longer. He returns to Petrograd in secret dressed as a Finnish priest. He meets the rest of the Bolshevik leadership in a private flat–the owner’s wife has a party connection. For an hour, Vladimir harangues his comrades. He has become convinced that the moment of revolution has arrived. Wait any longer and peace might cut the momentum from the Bolsheviks, and the workers might lose their appetite.

  Eventually, the impatient revolutionary prevails. A vote is taken: 10–2 in favour of insurrection. Technical planning will now begin. The question of precise timing is left open for the moment. The sooner the better, Vladimir asserts. Trotsky has other plans. A national congress of Soviets is planned in two weeks. Perfect cover. Lenin is given the job of preparing the manifesto for the insurrection and what follows from it. He goes back into hiding in Petrograd. The police are still searching for his whereabouts.

  WASHINGTON DC: A New York businesswoman, the well-named Vira Whitehouse, addresses Woodrow: ‘We have come to you as the leader of our country’s struggle for democracy’, she tells him.

  This is America, the shining city up on a hill, a beacon to the world. And yet, outside some of the western states, women do not have the vote. She reminds the President of the role that women play every day in the war effort: selling war bonds door to door, stitching uniforms for the Red Cross and working in factories across the land. They are ready, if called, to bring in next year’s harvest from the fields. Is it not illogical that while a woman sits in the US House of Representatives (a Republican from Montana), most states deny women the right to select who is sent to Washington?

  In the United States, the most recent suffrage battle is under way in the state of New York, America’s most populous, where the vote was denied women in a referendum in 1915, but where a new opportunity to win it now presents itself. ‘We have come to you to ask you’, Vira tells Woodrow, ‘to send to the voters of New York State a message so urgent and so clear that they cannot fail as patriotic men to place the women of their State on an equal footing with the women of the Allied Countries’.

  The President, not always the firmest friend of America’s suffragists, issues a public statement. As two great ideas of political authority–democracy and autocracy–clash across the world at war, America must live up to its founding principles. Two weeks later, New York votes. Women’s suffrage wins. It cannot be long now before the rest of the United States follows.

  DUBLIN, IRELAND: What is an independent Ireland to be? The founder of Sinn Féin favours an Irish monarchy, along Austro-Hungarian lines–one monarch, two kingdoms. Others prefer a total break, a republic. The question threatens to split Irish nationalism.

  At negotiations in a house on the outski
rts of Dublin, the hard men, the men with guns who will settle for nothing less than a full-blown republic in honour of the martyrs of 1916, are ready to walk out and catch the last tram home. Michael Collins is one of these: a blustery Easter veteran who knows the inside of an English jail as well as anyone, is steeped in the secret societies of Irish nationalism, and who believes that only force will secure Ireland’s freedom. De Valera talks them back inside. The nationalist cause has no hope of victory without an army. But an army without a popular movement has no legitimacy. The two must march forward together, arm in arm: Sinn Féin and the Volunteers.

  That evening, de Valera drafts a politician’s compromise. ‘Sinn Féin aims at securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish republic’, it reads, but ‘having achieved that status the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own form of Government’. Republic first–then let’s see. In formulating the compromise to keep Irish nationalism together, Éamon demonstrates his own indispensability: he is the only soldier-politician available who can straddle both the bomb and the ballot box. He is more convinced than ever that leadership is his destiny.

  In late October, in the effete surroundings of Dublin’s Mansion House where Queen Victoria once visited her loyal subjects, the MP for East Clare and former inmate of His Majesty’s Prisons at Dartmoor, Maidstone, Lewes and Pentonville is elected president of Sinn Féin (the party’s founder is persuaded to step down over a coffee in Grafton Street). Two days later, in the rather more basic surroundings of the Gaelic Athletic Association–hay bales and bare wooden planks–the same man is made leader of the Irish Volunteers (with Michael Collins looking on). Thus Éamon unites two thirds of the nationalist Holy Trinity in himself. The last third of course is God. His loyalty is assumed.