PETROGRAD: The treasures of the Hermitage are packed up and sent out on barges. There are rumours that the government plan to quit the capital. One day news reaches town that German soldiers have landed on the islands off Estonia’s coast. The Petrograd Soviet sets up a Military Revolutionary Committee to organise the popular defence of the city. Packed with Bolsheviks, many suspect it is planning a coup.
Everyone is talking about it. ‘The moment has finally arrived when the revolutionary slogan All power to the Soviets! must finally be realised’, one newspaper writes that October. ‘The Bolsheviks are getting ready for action–that is a fact’, says another two days later. The Smolny Institute is full of cigarette smoke and muttering. ‘It is the inevitable lutte finale’, Leon Trotsky explains languidly to John Reed.
The principled non-tipper is the public face of Bolshevism in these weeks. He is rarely at home, sleeping on a sofa at the Smolny and spending his days racing around Petrograd talking to the garrisons and to mass meetings at the Cirque Moderne. Trotsky explains the benefits of a Soviet regime in plain and simple terms. ‘The Soviet government will give everything the country contains to the poor and to the men in the trenches’, he promises. All goods will be redistributed: ‘You, bourgeois, you have got two fur caps!–give one of them to the soldier who’s freezing in the trenches. Have you got warm boots? Stay at home. The worker needs your boots.’
Internal Bolshevik arguments about whether they should issue the call for insurrection spill into the open. A senior Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev, writes an article warning that an uprising in the next days would be ‘a fatal step’. Leon is forced into a denial, claiming: ‘we have still not set a date for the attack’. Lenin responds to those who publicly discuss the imminence of insurrection with the worst insult he can muster: ‘strike-breaker’.
Stalin attacks the ‘general croaking’ amongst intellectuals who used to speak about revolution so warmly over the table but now are suddenly afraid. Soon, he says, such ‘celebrities’ will be consigned to the ‘museum of antiquities’.
ROSENBERG FORTRESS: De Gaulle attempts escape from Rosenberg for the second time in two weeks. This time he is only out of German captivity for a few hours. The local police pick him up when he tries to board the 5 a.m. train from Lichtenfels to Aachen, on the German–Dutch border, planning to make good his escape via the Netherlands. De Gaulle tells the police exactly what he thinks of them when they arrest him–a lapse in manners which will come back to haunt him later.
KARFREIT, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE–MILAN: At the northern end of the Western Front, the British, Canadians and Australians launch attacks against the Germans. Advances are measured by who controls which farm outhouse, who dominates which hill, who holds such-and-such a ridge. The Canadians eventually capture Passchendaele, at the loss of several thousand casualties. There is no knockout blow.
The real action, it turns out, is far to the south-east, around the village of Karfreit–the Italians call it Caporetto–on the Isonzo river, where the Austrians launch a major attack backed by battle-hardened German divisions. From the beginning, almost everything goes their way. Fog and rain hide their artillery from the Italians. Forward units storm through the valleys of Plezzo and Tolmino, west of the Isonzo, bypassing Italian defensive positions on the hills above.
Within a few days, German and Austrian troops are advancing towards Venice. Italian generals blame dissent behind the lines for the military collapse. Nearly three hundred thousand soldiers are taken prisoner and the same number of civilians flee their homes. British and French forces are rushed to the Italian front line, their planes restoring control of the skies. Austrian and German forces continue to advance until their supply lines are too extended for them to carry on. The Italians secure a new defensive line on the Piave, dangerously close to Venice.
Caporetto becomes a symbol of everything that is wrong with Italy: the weakness of the state, the haughty attitude of the generals, the lack of national cohesion. Nationalists like Mussolini or D’Annunzio blame the corrupting influence of internationalism. They rage against the peaceniks who want to sell Italy short just at the moment when the country is on the point of becoming southern Europe’s great power. The disaster of Caporetto does not kill Italian nationalism–it provides it with martyrs to honour, and new domestic enemies to defeat.
Benito Mussolini is in no doubt what is needed: Italy must dedicate itself once more to war. Cafés, concert halls and theatres should be shut. Order must be re-established. The Socialists, Mussolini’s old comrades until they took the path of pacifism, must be locked up. Radical social change should be introduced to give soldiers something to fight for: land reform for the peasants and better conditions for the workers. But this is socialism for the nation, to strengthen its living force, not socialism against it. After Caporetto, it is clearer than ever to Mussolini that Italy must defeat two enemies to win this war: the Austrians at the front, and the pacifist-internationalist tendency behind it. War abroad and war at home are two sides of the same nationalist revolutionary coin. ‘It is blood which moves the wheels of history’, Benito once told a crowd in 1914. The war must be won for Italy to remake itself.
Perhaps the soldiers should take over, Mussolini writes, those who have felt the heat of war and know the price. True warriors understand commands, leadership, the cruel equality of death. Is it not just that those who sacrifice most for the nation’s future should determine its path? Trenchocracy–trincerocrazia–will replace democracy. The new division in society, Benito decides, is between ‘those who have fought and those who haven’t; those who have worked and the parasites’. So then, a soldiers’ council–in essence, a nationally minded Soviet–should run Italy.
But better still, how about a single leader, a nationalist socialist vanguard in the living flesh of one man? It would cut out the bickering. Allow things to move faster. The Russian experiment is hardly a model to take in a time of war. Occasionally glancing at his own rather striking visage in the mirror, Mussolini lovingly describes the kind of leader he has in mind: ‘A man who has both the delicate touch of an artist and the heavy fist of a warrior. A man who is sensitive and yet strong-willed. A man who knows and loves the people, and who can direct and bend them with violence if required.’ A modern leader, Benito explains on the pages of Il Popolo, should be an artist, a conjuror, a mind-reader, a man of magnetic appeal, a man who instinctively understands the impulses of human nature explored by Freud and who is able to respond and shape them through his own leadership, turning the docile and idiotic masses into an army of renewal.
Such a leader must be a visionary. He must be virile, yet sensitive. He must be sensual in his exercise of power, yet have no fear of embracing brutality when required. Mussolini looks at himself in the mirror again and runs his eyes over his own strong features: the jutting chin, the Roman nose, the bullet-smooth dome of the forehead, the fierce black eyes and the luscious lips which seem to form themselves naturally into a pout, ready to deride, or order, or even to kiss. They will make marble busts of this head one day, he thinks.
BERLIN: ‘In all my life, Davis’, Wilhelm tells his American dentist, ‘I have never suffered so much pain.’ The first panicked telephone call to Davis comes in at three-thirty in the morning. A limousine is sent to pick him up, complete with an outrider carrying a bugle. By the time they get back to the Neues Palais in Potsdam the palace is gearing up for the day ahead. Davis cannot believe his luck: real coffee, real white bread, butter, marmalade and cold meats await him in the antechamber to Wilhelm’s apartments. The dentist leaves a single slice of bread by way of politeness. The Kaiser’s manservant tells him not to be so foolish. ‘Even here’, he says, ‘we don’t get too much of that.’
The Kaiser is placed in a chair looking out over the palace grounds while the dentist gets to work. Wilhelm’s rowing machine, with a special attachment for the Kaiser’s unusable left hand, stands to one side. ‘Look here’, he tells Davis, ‘I can’t fight the whole world,
you know, and have a toothache!’ It is not long before the American is able to solve the problem. And not long before the Kaiser’s braggadocio has returned to its usual gale-force levels. He boasts about Caporetto: ‘Italy will never get over this defeat’, he brags. ‘Now, we’ve got the Allies’.
A week or so later Wilhelm visits the Italian front with Charles. The emperors hand out medals. There is a spat between them about the apparent Habsburg lack of generosity towards German soldiers. Wilhelm catches a chill and has to return home early.
PETROGRAD: ‘I don’t understand them’, Lenin cries on receiving another note from the Smolny. ‘What are they afraid of?’ He throws it on the floor. A hundred loyal soldiers, he says, is all he would need to finish off the provisional government. And the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee, with Trotsky at the helm, already have the support of the city’s garrison.
Still cooped up in an apartment, unable to leave for fear of being arrested on the street, Vladimir waits. He issues impatient notes to his fellow Bolsheviks, urging them to action, action, action where once he recommended caution, caution, caution. Have they lost their nerve? ‘We must not wait!’ he writes in one missive. ‘We may lose everything!’ Then he decides he must go to the Smolny himself, where the All-Russian Congress of Soviets is due to open in a day or so. He must herd the Bolsheviks towards insurrection. The congress will be presented with a fait accompli. Vladimir throws caution to the wind. He leaves a note for his hostess: ‘I have gone where you did not want me to go. Ilyich.’ He wears a wig, of course. And a bandage wrapped around his head.
At the Smolny, to his surprise and relief, Lenin finds the uprising already under way. Kerensky has finally been provoked into an ineffective crack-down: the printing presses of two papers, including one edited by Stalin, are smashed up. This gives the Bolsheviks their excuse to act–defensively, of course–to take over key points in the city. In no time, they have seized the railway stations, telephone exchange, an electricity generation plant and the post and telegraph offices. Kerensky’s regime is melting away. Lenin insists the Bolsheviks push harder. They must plan their moves for when the congress opens, and proclaim their own government. (It is Trotsky who comes up with the vigorous title of ‘People’s Commissar’ to replace that old-fashioned ‘minister’: ‘smells terribly of revolution’, Lenin says enthusiastically.) Everyone is tramping through the Smolny to get a taste of what is going on. The building is lit up day and night. John Reed gives up his ballet tickets to hang out there.
The vice is closing on the provisional government. Kerensky escapes in a car belonging to the American embassy. A Bolshevik proclamation is issued claiming, a little prematurely, that the government itself has been overthrown. ‘We must now set about building a proletarian socialist state in Russia’, Lenin thunders. ‘Long live the world socialist revolution!’ The Petrograd Soviet passes a resolution stating its conviction that ‘the proletariat of the West European countries will help us to achieve a complete and lasting victory for the cause of socialism’. Can it really be this easy? Vladimir admits he finds it all quite dizzying: ‘es schwindelt’, he says in German, circling his hand around his head. Exhausted by all his agitation over the last few weeks, Leon suffers a blackout from lack of food.
That evening, the Smolny is full of tobacco smoke and bayonets of the Red Guards. But not everyone is happy at their putsch. The Bolsheviks must explain themselves. Why did they not wait? Why did they not work with others? Trotsky is uncompromising: the Bolsheviks represent historical destiny. ‘A rising of the masses of the people’, he says, ‘needs no justification.’ What happened is not a conspiracy, it is a popular insurrection. ‘And now we are told: renounce your victory’, Trotsky snorts. Those who do not like it can leave. Some factions in the Soviet walk out. This merely increases the Bolshevik majority.
But their power is not completely cemented yet. There is a final act still to play out. The ministers of the government remain holed up in the Winter Palace, anxiously waiting to be arrested or killed. There are few soldiers left willing to defend them: one hundred and forty members of a women’s battalion, the boys from the military academy, and a special bicycle unit amongst them. An attack is bound to come. At the British embassy candles and torches are distributed. In the palace, the electricity is cut off. Then the phone lines. Calls for reinforcements are tapped out by a sole loyal telegrapher at the war office. The palace is taken that very night. A deafening blank fired from a frigate signals the start of the assault. A clatter of soldiers across cobblestones. The whistle of gunshots. Later, there are reports of some of the women soldiers being thrown out of windows–or worse. They do not stand a chance.
In the depths of that freezing night, to waves of applause, a new government of commissars is proclaimed at the Smolny, with Lenin at its head and Trotsky made responsible for foreign affairs (after being denied the job of commissar for the press, and refusing responsibility for interior affairs on the basis that anti-Semitic Russians would not like a Jew in that position). Stalin is made responsible for nationality issues. There is cheering: they have done it. A decree on peace is passed demanding an immediate armistice on all fronts, between all belligerents, and announcing the abolition of secret diplomacy. ‘We shall send out our appeal everywhere, it will be made known to everybody’, Lenin announces, ‘it will be impossible to hush up our workers’ and peasants’ revolution, which has overthrown the government of bankers and landowners’. He calls the war a ‘bloody shambles’, a ‘nightmare of slaughter’. Private land ownership is to be abolished. Theory is to be put into practice.
Ludendorff sends a telegram to his generals on the Eastern Front. ‘ACCORDING TO INTERCEPTED RADIO TRANSMISSIONS’, he reports, ‘A REVOLUTION HAS BROKEN OUT IN PETROGRAD IN WHICH THE WORKERS’ AND SOLDIERS’ COUNCIL IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN VICTORIOUS.’ This is ‘DESIRABLE FROM OUR POINT OF VIEW’. Ludendorff asks that the events in Petrograd be used for propaganda purposes.
Curious visitors inspect the Winter Palace the next day. The British Ambassador observes that while there are thousands of bullet holes in one side of the building, there are only three larger marks where artillery shrapnel has struck. The damage from looting is much worse inside–a French diplomat heads to the Petrograd flea market in the hope that he may be able to pick up some imperial antiques. Michael Romanov, the ex-Tsar’s brother, sees the damage for himself when he is escorted back to Petrograd after a failed escape to Finland. He spends a couple of days visiting his old haunts before returning to Gatchina, where he is held under house arrest and spends his time playing the guitar.
In Moscow the fighting around the Kremlin lasts for a week. There are wild rumours of Kerensky gathering a Cossack army to take back Petrograd. Even without such a push from the outside, how long will it be before the Bolshevik insurrection collapses? Informed observers give it a week or two at most.
VIENNA: Freud smokes his last cigar, and immediately suffers the ill effects of its absence. ‘Since then I have been grumpy and tired, got heart palpitations and an increase in the painful swelling of my gums (carcinoma? etc.)’, he writes to a colleague. But Freud is lucky. Help is at hand: ‘Then a patient brought me fifty cigars, I lit one, became cheerful, and the gum irritation rapidly abated’.
In between puffs Freud works on a new idea, to prove the role of the unconscious in shaping the process of evolution, giving a psychological basis to evolutionary biology, and making thought the ultimate master of genetics. ‘The idea’, Freud writes a few days later, ‘is to put Lamarck entirely on our ground and to show that his “need”, which creates and transforms organs, is nothing but the power of unconscious ideas over one’s own body, of which we see remnants in hysteria, in short the “omnipotence of thoughts”’.
Freud’s patients talk of nothing but guilt. Sigmund himself begins to wonder out loud whether he will last the war, and worries for his son Martin, involved in the fighting in Italy. In correspondence with Karl Abraham, who still believe
s in German victory and the triumph of psychoanalysis with it, Freud is pessimistic. ‘I do not believe that the events in Russia and Italy will bring us peace’, he writes; ‘one should admit the U-boat war has not achieved its object. Our future is pretty dim.’ Both sides stink.
Freud’s latest paper is finally released, about mourning and melancholia. Other unfinished papers lie on his desk, the building blocks of what he has called metapsychology. Somehow, they trouble him. These papers must be ‘silenced’, Freud writes to a friend. Eventually he decides to burn them, watching the words turn to cold ash.
SIBERIA: The Bolshevik revolution is not instantaneous across the entire country. It spreads by railway and by telegraph wire. It reaches some places in a few hours. In other parts of Russia, the news takes days or even weeks to get through. ‘Can it be that Kerensky cannot stop this wilfulness?’ Nicholas Romanov asks when the tidings from his old capital finally penetrate the Siberian isolation of Tobolsk.
It is several days before news gets another thousand miles east to Tomsk, where the Hungarian socialist Béla Kun is busy in the local library learning Russian and writing pieces for the local newspaper, the Siberian Worker. The next revolution, he declares, will take place in Germany.
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