Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  The next morning the delegates of the Constituent Assembly are refused access to the Tauride Palace. Russia’s democratic experiment is over.

  THE WESTERN FRONT: Ludendorff visits the troops, checking on morale, ensuring fresh supplies of munitions are going where they are needed, speaking to the officers in the field. (One day, he attends a field exercise involving the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment; he takes no note of a mangy Austrian field-runner called Adolf Hitler.)

  Back at headquarters, Ludendorff puts the finishing touches to plans for the final assault against the British and French. With troops now freed up from operations against Russia, the Germans have a numerical advantage on the Western Front for the first time in years. Ludendorff runs the battle plans through his mind again. Preparations are meticulous.

  The tactical scheme is bold. Battle-hardened soldiers, trained in the latest storm-trooper tactics, will smash the enemy’s death grip in a series of concentrated hammer blows (particularly against the British, in the hope of breaking their army and putting intolerable strain on relations with the French). Rather than setting final objectives for each assault, a degree of flexibility will be maintained. German troops will be sent wherever they can best exploit a weakening of enemy resolve. In this way, a new war of movement will be unleashed, confusing an enemy grown used to static warfare.

  A German Prince asks Ludendorff what will happen if things go wrong. ‘Then Germany will have to go under’, he responds gruffly.

  PETROGRAD: Fighting a revolutionary war of defence against the Germans may sound good–it ‘might perhaps answer the human yearning for the beautiful, dramatic and striking’, Lenin writes. But in reality, it makes no sense. The army is not ready. The peasants would not support it. ‘It would totally disregard the objective balance of class forces and material factors at the present stage of the socialist revolution now under way’, he concludes. If the German proletariat start a revolution in the next few months the point can be revisited. In the meantime, concluding peace with Germany and Austria–on their terms–is essential.

  At a meeting of the Bolshevik inner cabal, Vladimir tries to persuade Leon and the others of the new position he has come to. They are shocked. How can they give in to imperialist blackmail? It would turn the Bolsheviks into German tools–just as some have always said they are. The whole thing is a ‘dirty stable’, Vladimir admits. But what is the choice?

  Leon comes up with his latest wheeze: to neither wage war, nor sign a peace treaty. Neither war, nor peace. If that does not confuse the monocles at Brest-Litovsk, what will? Vladimir is sceptical. An ‘international political demonstration’, he calls it mockingly–and a pointless one. The terms the Germans will exact will only get harder over time, he says. The Bolsheviks should sign now for fear of being forced to accept worse later. Vladimir is out-voted. Leon Trotsky’s suggestion of neither peace nor war wins the day, as a final measure should there be an ultimatum from the Germans and no other way out. It is agreed he will try and delay getting to that point for as long as possible.

  On the home front, Lenin is constantly in and out of meetings to try and keep his shaky regime on track. ‘We can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism’, the impatient revolutionary yells at leaders of Russia’s food supply organisation. There can be no mercy. Revolutionary justice means that ‘speculators must be shot on the spot’. Compulsory searches should be carried out. The wealthy should have food taken from them.

  PARIS–LONDON: Guillaume Apollinaire, still recovering at the Villa Molière, writes a letter to his young admirer André Breton, in anticipation of the latter’s imminent visit (a previous visit having been cancelled on account of the Italian War Minister dropping by Apollinaire’s hospital room). ‘Would you mind bringing me that book of the theories of Freud?’ Apollinaire asks.

  The same day, in London, a telephone rings in a small flat above an office in Knightsbridge. Jessie Kenney answers. News just in. Royal assent has been granted to the Representation of the People Act. The final stage of Britain’s constitutional process has been completed. All men now have the vote in Britain, and eight million women.

  TOBOLSK: Nicholas saws up wood, reads philosophy and starts a new thriller: The Garden of Allah. Some days, the Tsar sits on the greenhouse roof to warm himself. Inside the house the temperature in the bedrooms is often barely above freezing. Alexandra spends a lot of time thinking about God, suffering and her children’s health. She writes postcards to friends signed with an eastern religious symbol she is fond of: a left-facing swastika.

  News of the latest Soviet reform reaches the Romanovs one day. The old calendar, used in Orthodox Russia for centuries, and strongly associated with the Church, is to be replaced with that in use in Western Europe. ‘In other words’, Nicholas writes in his diary on the first day of pre-revolutionary February, ‘today already turns out to be 14 February’. Whatever will they think of next? ‘There will be no end of misunderstandings and mix-ups’, he notes.

  BREST-LITOVSK: A patriotic Ukrainian from the Rada delegation engages in a long harangue against Petrograd trying to prevent Ukraine from slipping out of Russian control. ‘The noisy declarations of the Bolsheviks regarding the complete freedoms of the peoples of Russia are simply a mean demagogic trick’, the young man rages. ‘The government of the Bolsheviks, a government whose power rests on the bayonets of hired Red Guards, will never elect to apply in Russia the very just principle of self-determination.’ Just look at their methods, he goes on: ‘They disperse assemblies, they arrest and shoot politically active personalities’. They have introduced not self-determination but ‘anarchy and devastation’.

  Sweat trickles down Trotsky’s forehead at these accusations of Bolshevik hypocrisy. The Austrian Foreign Minister even feels a twang of sympathy for the principled non-tipper at his obvious discomfort at being upbraided in such terms. But by the end of the Ukrainian’s speech Trotsky has sufficiently recovered his composure to try to verbally reoccupy the moral high ground. ‘I can only thank the President’, he says, ‘that he, in harmony with the dignity of this assembly, has not opposed in any way the free-speaking of the preceding orator.’ The Austrians and the Germans now declare that they recognise the full independence of Ukraine. The old Russian Empire is drifting from Bolshevik control.

  Trotsky’s attempts to delay and confuse proceedings grow more desperate. He requests a visa for Vienna so as to speak with the Austrian working classes directly. The suggestion is refused. On the question of admitting Polish representatives to the conference, he opens up a new Pandora’s box by asking whether the proto-kingdom which Berlin and Vienna have established to try and keep the Poles on their side–without definite borders and without a sovereign–can be considered a state at all. ‘The negotiating powers have not come here to engage in intellectual combat’, Kühlmann notes curtly. Trotsky’s tricks are wearing thin.

  In Berlin, the Austrian and German Foreign Ministers are confronted by Ludendorff over the delays in signing a final peace treaty with Russia. He is incensed that it is taking so long to reach a deal which will allow him to transfer troops west, and even crosser at apparent Habsburg willingness to countenance a peace unlikely to give Germany every little scrap of territory she wants. ‘If Germany makes peace without profit, then Germany has lost the war’, he rants. Back in Brest-Litovsk, and above Trotsky’s protest that it is an interference in internal Russian affairs, the Austrians agree peace with the Rada Ukrainians and get the promise of the grain they need. Whether any of this will work remains to be seen. ‘I wonder if the Rada is really sitting at Kiev’, the Austrian Foreign Minister writes in his diary the day the peace is signed. Their claim to rule is fragile.

  Trotsky is down to his final card. He plays it with aplomb. ‘The war ceased long ago to be a defensive war’, he tells the conference at Brest-Litovsk. ‘When Great Britain takes African colonies, Baghdad and Jerusalem, then that is certainly not a defensive war. When Germany occupies Serbia, Belgium, P
oland, Lithuania and Romania, that is a struggle for the partition of the globe.’ Russia wants no further part in this war, he says. Russia’s aim is to build socialism. ‘Our peasant soldiers must return to their land to cultivate in peace the field which the revolution has taken from the landlords and given to the peasants.’ In anticipation of worldwide revolution, Bolshevik Russia is leaving the war, its forces are returning home but–it is not going to sign a peace. No war, no peace. Trotsky allows no further discussion on the matter. His team get up to leave. ‘Unerhört, unerhört!’ General Hoffmann exclaims: ‘Unheard-of, unheard-of!’ The German minister asks how the Russian delegation can be contacted in future. There is always the wireless radio, Trotsky suggests.

  ‘So, what is going to happen now?’ a German major asks his Russian counterpart. ‘Do we have to go back to war with you?’ The Russian shrugs his shoulders. On the train home, the Bolsheviks are jubilant. Trotsky seems confident the Germans will not start a war again. Lenin is not so sure.

  PETROGRAD: Anarchy reigns in the Bolshevik capital. The Italian Ambassador is robbed blind in the middle of the street (they even take his snow boots). A former colonel in the army begs the head waiter at the Hôtel d’Europe to give him a bowl of soup. He used to be a regular customer, he explains. The Patriarch of the Orthodox Church declares all Bolsheviks to be anathematised. ‘Hell’s fire awaits you in the next life beyond the grave’, he warns those who do not repent.

  John Reed decides to head back to America. He spends several weeks at a loose end in Norway while American officials debate whether to grant him a passport or not. He begins to write a book about the Russian revolution of October 1917.

  HASKELL COUNTY, KANSAS: A windswept, poor, empty kind of place. Far from the war, far from anything. But beautiful in its way, with all that sky to look at. There are few roads in this part of the country. People get around on horseback, mostly. The railway is a recent arrival. It gets cold in the wintertime.

  The local doctor is a large, well-educated man who passes his evenings reading the classics in ancient Greek. He also tries to keep up with the scientific literature. His wife, from a wealthy Kansas landowning family, is head of the Red Cross Women’s Work Committee. And the doctor is busy this February. Everyone seems to be sick. It almost seems as if God–whom Dr Loring Miner is not particularly fond of anyway–has sent a plague upon the people of Haskell County.

  Not just the old, but the young as well, are falling ill. This is influenza, but more virulent than anything he has seen before. It spreads quickly. It kills. ‘Most everybody over the county is having la grippe or pneumonia’, a local paper reports. At Camp Funston, over near Kansas City, where soldiers are trained up for France, a thousand young men fall sick over the next few weeks.

  BREST-LITOVSK: If the Russians want to denounce war and peace, fine, the Germans decide. But then the armistice must be considered to be over as well.

  ‘Tomorrow we are going to start hostilities again against the Bolsheviks’, General Hoffmann writes in his diary. ‘No other way out is possible, otherwise these brutes will wipe out the Ukrainians, the Finns and the Balts, and then quietly get together a new revolutionary army and turn the whole of Europe into a pigsty.’ He does not expect much resistance: ‘the whole of Russia is no more than a vast heap of maggots–a squalid, swarming mess.’

  When Lenin hears of the German plans, he proposes to his comrades that the enemy be given whatever he wants–immediately. Trotsky is against it. Again, Lenin is outnumbered. Only when the Germans actually begin their advance–virtually unopposed–does the penny drop. Stalin is blunt: ‘The Germans are attacking, we have no forces, the time has come to say that negotiations must be resumed.’

  This time it is the Germans who want to delay proceedings. When a message comes in from Petrograd requesting another armistice, Hoffmann asks for it in writing. He wants German troops in Estonia at least before calling a stop to the advance. ‘It is the most comical war I have ever known’, he writes in his diary. ‘We put a handful of infantrymen with machine guns and one gun on a train and push them off to the next station; they take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops and go on.’ Petrograd is wide open. Some in the capital are delighted at the prospect of a return to order (even if it wears a German jackboot). ‘Everyone is radiant with joy’, a Frenchman writes in his diary.

  Panicking that his revolution is about to be swept away, Vladimir writes a spiky article in Pravda castigating those who would hide behind slogans rather than look reality in the face. ‘The slogans are superb, alluring, intoxicating’, he writes, ‘but there are no grounds for them.’ The expectation that the German proletariat will prevent an attack by the enemy has been disproved. He dismisses the argument that, just as in the revolution in October 1917, the struggle itself will produce the means to victory as ‘so childishly ridiculous that I should never have believed it possible if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears’. He threatens to resign.

  VIENNA–BAY OF KOTOR: February is over, and Sigmund Freud is still alive. He sighs. His long-held superstition that he would die in February 1918, in his sixty-first year, can now be buried. Or can it? Perhaps it was only the month that was incorrect. It is another nine weeks before he will escape the age of sixty-one entirely. Freud remains in a state of nervous apprehension waiting for his birthday.

  In February, a mutiny breaks out in the Austro-Hungarian navy. For two long days, the red flag flutters over the mutineers’ vessels in the Bay of Kotor. The rebels demand not only more cigarettes–such requests Charles Habsburg can understand–but an immediate end to the war and self-determination for all the empire’s nationalities (several ringleaders are Czech). Loyal units crush the uprising. A Hungarian naval captain named Horthy is promoted. A news blackout means that the public know nothing of what has happened.

  The promise of grain from Ukraine brings some prospect of alleviation in the food situation, but the political price–a peace deal with the Ukrainians–infuriates the empire’s Poles who hoped to win territory now accepted by Vienna as Ukrainian. The contradictions of the Habsburg realm are becoming harder and harder to contain.

  PETROGRAD: Lenin wins. An extraordinary congress of the party–renamed the Communist Party (Bolsheviks)–ratifies the punishing German peace terms. The Russia of the Bolsheviks is a shadow of its former imperial extent. Trotsky refuses to go to Brest-Litovsk and sign the peace himself, but he accepts that the revolution has no choice.

  Another decision is taken which will change the character of the revolution: to move the capital to Moscow. The regime calls it a temporary measure. The vague possibility is raised that perhaps Petrograd will be redesignated a free city, an economic boomtown open to the world; one newspaper suggests it will become a ‘second New York’. In the meantime, government offices are stripped. Anything that can be moved is taken away: books, curtains, ashtrays, stoves, mirrors, blankets, furniture.

  Foreign embassies are not long behind in planning their departure, burning diplomatic papers and settling accounts. Old retainers are laid off. Foreign diplomatic staff leaving the country altogether in expectation of Bolshevik collapse face tense passport checks at the border. When a French diplomat gets through to Finland he is thrilled at the order and cleanliness which appears to prevail there–despite a bloody civil war between Finnish Reds and Whites–and enjoys the refreshing taste of a glass of fresh milk. One of the last acts of the regime in Petrograd is to send the Tsar’s brother Michael into exile to Siberia. He is sent to Perm in a first-class carriage with all the windows missing. A journey that once took two days now takes eight.

  When the time comes for the Bolsheviks to leave the cradle of the revolution, they do so in the dead of night and in total secrecy. Crates marked with the Sovnarkom stamp are conspicuously loaded onto a train at the city’s main railway station. Meanwhile, the rail convoy that will actually carry the Bolshevik leadership to Moscow is prepared far from public view, in a disused siding south of the city
. Vladimir, Nadya and his sister Maria travel in the first train to set out that night, with the electric lights switched off to avoid any unwanted attention. Other trains follow at regular intervals behind. The head of the Cheka travels with a single briefcase. The case files follow separately, leaving some prisoners locked up in Petrograd with no paperwork to indicate what they have been incarcerated for.

  In Moscow, there is a scrum for office and living space when the Bolshevik leadership and their officials arrive. Some move into the city’s hotels. The National Hotel is renamed the House of the Soviets No. 1. The Cheka find lodgings on the Lubyanka (and later acquire an imposing building around the corner which used to be an insurance company headquarters). Lenin and Trotsky move into the Kremlin, where the clock tower still rings ‘God Save the Tsar’ and dinner is served on plates adorned with the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs. The only food available is tinned meat and caviar that is no longer exported. On the wall of Trotsky’s office hangs an allegorical painting of classical love between Cupid and Psyche.

  The Georgian bank-robber is less fortunate in the lodgings he is assigned. Joseph Stalin arrives in Moscow with his new wife Nadya, an innocent girl twenty-two years his junior whom he has known since childhood–Joseph is rumoured to have had an affair with her mother–and who still addresses her husband with the formal vy rather than the informal ty. The newly-weds are given a noisy apartment in a Kremlin outbuilding to live in while Stalin has to make do with some offices the Cheka did not want to continue his work on the nationalities question.

  Lenin promises that things will get better for the Bolsheviks now. Moscow is less vulnerable than Petrograd. But the regime must be adaptable. ‘History is moving in zig-zags and by roundabout ways’, he writes. The revolution must learn from its enemies. He expresses admiration for the ‘scientific American efficiency’ of the Taylorist system, and the German genius for ‘modern machine industry, and strict accounting and control’.