Swooping down over the Habsburg capital, at last we can see who is flying one of the planes: Gabriele D’Annunzio. He grabs a fistful of leaflets in the colours of the Italian flag. They flutter to the ground like confetti. A camera on board one of the planes captures the moment on film. The citizens of Vienna come out to watch. They should be terrified. Some almost cheer.
Some leaflets are written in Italian in D’Annunzio’s own flowery prose. ‘We didn’t come except for the delight of our own audacity, except to prove what we dare to do and what we can do, whenever we want’, one of them reads. ‘Long live Italy!’ A few bear the poet’s signature. The leaflets in German are cruder. ‘Do you want to continue the war?’ the Viennese are asked. ‘Do so, if you wish to commit suicide’. Next time, we will be back with bombs. There will be two million American soldiers in France by next month, they warn. Your destiny is defeat.
The press in Vienna puts a brave face on it. The Italians were actually over Vienna for only a few minutes, one journalist writes. One plane was forced to land outside the city as a result of engine trouble. They never could have actually bombed the city, as the weight of the ordnance would have made it impossible for the planes to cover the distance to and from Vienna safely. Still an impressive display of modern aviation, and how wonderfully theatrical. Austria could do with a bit of Italian flair. ‘Where are our D’Annunzios?’ the Arbeiter-Zeitung asks.
MOSCOW: A dark night in the Red capital. The impatient revolutionary gives a rousing speech at a factory–his third of the evening–railing against the evils of bourgeois democracy and offering his listeners a stark choice for the future of the revolution: ‘victory or death’. Leaving the factory, without bodyguards, he is attacked.
Lenin’s chauffeur initially mistakes the sound of gunfire for a motor car backfiring. Then he realises. The crowd scatters. The boss is lying face down on the ground. He is rushed to the Kremlin, his driver constantly turning around to check his condition. Vladimir’s face grows paler and paler. ‘Lenin!’ his driver shouts at the guards to make them open the Kremlin gate. The Bolshevik leader is helped inside and his coat taken off. What is to be done? There are no proper medical facilities on hand in the Kremlin. In a panic, Vladimir’s sister suggests someone go out and buy a lemon–but then worries that the grocer could be part of the plot as well. A doctor is called. Someone is sent to the pharmacy to get whatever medical supplies they can. A Bolshevik comrade’s wife with medical training comes in, checks the leader’s pulse and calmly administers morphine.
What has happened? Eyewitness testimony is confused. Was the assassin a man or a woman? How many shots? One shooter or several? Were there accomplices? A half-blind woman, a Socialist Revolutionary, is picked up and interrogated by the Cheka overnight. She claims that she is solely responsible. Her bag is searched: cigarettes, a brooch, hairpins–but no gun. Within days she is executed and her body burned. The case is closed; the mystery remains. Who ordered the hit? The Socialist Revolutionaries are soon blamed–they deny it–alongside their puppet-masters, the British and the French. A more awful thought is left unexpressed: that the enemy comes from within. Why was Lenin without bodyguards when, that very morning, the head of the Petrograd Cheka had been gunned down? Scores are being settled, people are being moved out of the way–but by whom? Is a power struggle under way within the regime?
The Bolshevik leadership crowd anxiously around the patient’s bed. It might be convenient for some if he were now to die. Some wonder if they could do a better job without him, this disputatious, difficult and intransigent man, this perpetual, impatient schemer. Yet at this moment, far from the public eye, everything is done to keep Vladimir Lenin alive. Nadya is picked up from a conference on education she has been attending. She is driven home to the Kremlin in silence to find her husband fading fast. She cannot bear to watch his agony, taking refuge in the room next door. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asks those around her in desperation. Vladimir urges her to make arrangements in case he does not pull through. Later, and to her consternation, he asks to see Inessa Armand, his old flame from years ago. When she arrives, Nadya discreetly takes Inessa’s sixteen-year-old daughter on a tour of the Kremlin to give her husband and his former lover some privacy.
The telephone rings incessantly. No one sleeps that night. Across Russia, the outcome of the civil war is on a knife edge. But tonight, its cockpit is Moscow, where a man in late middle age fights for his life behind the walls of the Kremlin. Blood-soaked dressings are removed and washed in the leader’s private bathtub. ‘What’s there to look at?’ the impatient revolutionary asks when he sees the frightened expressions on his followers’ faces. The doctors are concerned his gullet may be punctured. He is denied all liquids. He tries to persuade Nadya to get him a cup of tea. She refuses. Press bulletins announce that an assassination attempt has taken place. Within twenty-four hours, in prisons around the country, hundreds of prisoners have been executed by way of crude retaliation.
Trotsky is telegrammed to return to Moscow at once: ‘ILYICH IS WOUNDED; IT’S UNCERTAIN HOW DANGEROUS THINGS ARE’. He rushes to the capital, not knowing whether his old rival will live or die. As in 1917, he turns his talents to propaganda. The epoch of Europe’s bourgeois development, when society’s contradictions could accumulate quite peacefully and blood flowed only in the colonies, is over, Leon Trotsky proclaims. He declares Lenin the man for the new tumultuous age into which the world has been thrown, an era of ‘blood and iron’. Of course, the victory of the proletariat does not depend on one person, Trotsky says–and yet he praises Vladimir’s personality as if it did. ‘Any fool can shoot through Lenin’s skull’, he declares, ‘but to recreate that skull is a difficult task even for nature itself.’ Trotsky is not alone in transforming Lenin from the obstreperous political operator of real life into the semi-divine figure of myth. Another Bolshevik leader compares the writings of Lenin with the Bible and calls him ‘the greatest leader ever known by humanity, the apostle of the socialist revolution’. At times like this, it pays to be seen to praise the leader–all the more if one intends to bury him.
From Tsaritsyn, Stalin has an earthier message to deliver after the assassination attempt. What is needed, he writes, is ‘open, mass, systemic terror against the bourgeoisie’. Even as his life hangs in the balance, the impatient revolutionary’s mind turns in the same direction. No crisis can be allowed to go to waste in the struggle for the revolution: ‘it is necessary secretly–and urgently–to prepare the terror’. Now that a pretext for extreme measures has been helpfully provided, nothing must be held back.
FORT GIRONVILLE, FRANCE: At five in the morning, the first major American offensive of the war begins, to try and flatten the front and force the Germans out of the Saint-Mihiel salient. The US Secretary of War is on hand to observe the opening attack. Jim Europe is doing his duty in Paris, where his band plays in hospitals and army camps and even in the theatre where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was premiered back in 1913.
The second wave of the attack is launched three hours later, the sun now rising over the battlefield. Pershing watches from his command post, trying to make out what is going on through the rain and the mist. By the time he leaves Fort Gironville, at nine o’clock, there are the first signs that the American offensive is successful: thousands of German prisoners are brought in. By early afternoon it is clear that the objectives set for the attack have been achieved and, in places, exceeded. ‘The boys have done what we expected of them’, Woodrow writes to his general. ‘We are deeply proud of them and of their Chief.’
America savours the victory. ‘Pershing Leads Army in First Big Drive’, runs the headline in the New York Times: ‘Gain of Five Miles; 8,000 Prisoners Taken’. A new chapter in American history–and at least a paragraph in world history–has just been written in France, one journalist writes: ‘This operation far and away transcends anything that our troops have previously attempted.’
American soldiers are still arriving in France b
y the thousand every day.
MOSCOW–KAZAN: ‘Recovery proceeding excellently’, Lenin telegraphs to Trotsky. He urges the war commissar to be ruthless in suppressing ‘kulak extortioners’. He cracks jokes with his doctors, while impatiently cross-examining them about the attempt on his life. (He has not yet been informed that the woman accused of shooting him has been put beyond further questioning.) He is eager to return to work.
On 10 September, Pravda announces that the Bolshevik leader is out of danger. Kazan is retaken by the Reds the same day. ‘Comrades, it is no accident that it was yesterday that the doctors detected such a marked improvement that they allowed him to sit up in bed’, the atheist Trotsky tells his troops, asserting a mystical connection between the leader’s health and the military situation. A few days later, Lenin’s home town of Simbirsk is retaken. The military situation, while still dire, is at least stabilising. The scattered regiments of Red Guards with which Trotsky began the year–essentially, revolutionaries with guns–are slowly being welded into something more substantial.
By the middle of September, two weeks after the attempt on his life, the Bolshevik leader is back at his desk, dictating, cajoling and threatening in his usual manner, as impatient with the pace of change as ever. Faster, faster, more, more. The impatient revolutionary demands that newspaper articles are made shorter and punchier. They should be charge sheets against the forces holding back the revolution, not long-winded political analysis. ‘Fewer highbrow articles; closer to life’, he commands. Class enemies should be identified in print. Inefficient military officers should be named and shamed. ‘Where is the blacklist with the names of the lagging factories?’ Lenin demands to know. A prominent German Marxist theoretician has written a pamphlet criticising the Bolshevik dictatorship. Vladimir fires off a furious note to his representatives in Berlin, Berne and Stockholm demanding it be sent to him–‘as soon as it appears’.
Another day, the impatient revolutionary writes to the commissar in charge of education to express his fury that there is no bust of Marx on public display in Moscow yet. And another thing: why is there not more revolutionary propaganda on the streets? ‘I reprimand you for this criminal and lackadaisical attitude, and demand that the names of all responsible persons should be sent me for prosecution’, Lenin writes: ‘Shame on the saboteurs and thoughtless loafers.’
When he finds out that the Kremlin lift has still not been fixed after three days out of action, Lenin writes an angry note asking for a list of those in charge and demanding that ‘penalties’ be imposed. ‘There are people suffering from heart disease’–his wife Nadya is one of them–‘for whom climbing the stairs is harmful and dangerous’, the Bolshevik leader writes. ‘I have pointed out a thousand times that this lift must be kept in order and one person should be responsible for it’.
The bullets may have weakened Vladimir Lenin’s body; but his mind is still sharp. On matters large and small, there can be no let-up. No one else can be trusted but him to get things done. The pressure must remain firmly on.
AVESNES-SUR-HELPE, FRANCE: A psychiatric doctor arrives at German army advance headquarters, sent for by the army’s medical staff to speak to one of its most senior officers: Ludendorff himself.
As the German army is on the brink of collapse, senior officers worry about their military leader’s state of mind. Some say Ludendorff has burst into tears on more than one occasion. Others report his worrying inability to make decisions, or the shortness of his temper when faced with further bad news; an independent peace démarche sent by Austria–Hungary to the Allies without telling Wilhelm first; the dire situation in Bulgaria; further British and French attacks. The general is said to stay up late into the night telephoning front commanders at random. One doctor has already tried to convince the general to alter his habits, without effect. Now, with Hindenburg’s approval, a doctor has been sent for whom Ludendorff knows and trusts, a man with experience of nervous disorders from his clinic in Berlin. He arrives unannounced one morning at the general’s door.
Ludendorff freely admits to this familiar face that he has not felt himself for some time. As Dr Hochheimer describes it in a letter to his wife, ‘he hasn’t spared a thought for the well-being of his soul for years’. The doctor advises more regular sleep and exercise. He prescribes breathing exercises and massages. He places flowers in Ludendorff’s room to remind him of the beauty of nature. Finally, he suggests the general adapt his speaking voice from its usual military bark. The general seems to take well to the treatment over the next few days. He asks after the doctor’s family. His mood seems to lighten.
Occasionally, he expresses optimism that a heroic defence of Germany can be organised. Perhaps the army can hold out despite everything. Hope dies last.
THE BRONX, NEW YORK: Friends suggest he should lay low for a while back in America. That is not John Reed’s style. He has a story to tell, he must tell it, he must be part of it.
In July, he is in Chicago to witness the trial of over a hundred members of the radical trades union the Industrial Workers of the World, arrested for hindering the draft and encouraging desertion. Reed praises the ‘hardrock blasters, tree fellers, wheat binders, longshoremen, the boys who do the strong work of the world’, noting that though their union representatives are just now facing judgement in an American courtroom, he sees in the faces before him the same proud, unquenchable revolutionary fire which set Petrograd alight. In September, he gives a fierce pro-Bolshevik speech in Harlem, recounting his Russian experiences. He has started to write a book about them.
The next day, Reed is arrested for sedition. The third time since his return.
GORKI, OUTSIDE MOSCOW, RUSSIA: Finally accepting the need for a little rest–while not being too far from the Kremlin–Lenin agrees to take a working holiday in a mansion just outside town which used to belong to one of Moscow’s leading families.
Vladimir and Nadya are greeted by the guards with a large bunch of flowers and a little speech before being shown around the house, built in the classical style with a splendid portico (a good place to read, Lenin notes), electric lighting throughout and countless bathrooms. The large grounds in which the house is situated vaguely remind Lenin of Switzerland–a public park in Zurich, perhaps. It is quite unlike anywhere they have actually lived before.
A trifle overwhelmed, Vladimir chooses the smallest bedroom (even that has three huge standing mirrors on the floor, Nadya notes). One evening, when it begins to get chilly, the champion of proletarian dictatorship asks one of the guards to light a fire in one of the house’s many fireplaces. Too late they discover that that particular fireplace was only decorative. It has no chimney–what a ridiculous bourgeois conceit! The attic catches fire. The flames have to be doused with pails of water. Lumps of plaster fall off the ceiling onto the floor below. They get over the embarrassment soon enough.
BUDAPEST: In the magnificent surroundings of the Gellért Hotel and a hall in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, an international Psychoanalytic Congress is held in Budapest. Sigmund Freud is beaming.
For the first time in a psychoanalytic congress, participants include senior government officials, keen to understand how psychoanalysis may help war-wounded soldiers get back from the Continent’s psychiatric hospitals to where they are most needed: the front. Officers in Austrian and German uniforms sit stiffly behind student desks, as if back in training school. Someone spots a general. There are no French or British or American participants, of course. A few hardy Dutchmen have made their way across Germany, bearing gifts from neutral Holland. There is an official reception with the mayor. A banquet is laid on. Despite Freud’s warnings to Ferenczi not to let the generosity of psychoanalysis’s benefactors make things too lavish, lest this should detract from the more serious matters at hand, he cannot but be pleased with the result. At last, a proper congress, with all the trappings. At last, psychoanalysis seems socially acceptable–hoffähig, presentable at court, as the stuck-up Viennese would say. Food appears
from nowhere, as if the war were a million miles away rather than a few hundred. Spirits rise at such unexpected largesse. The trip, it seems, has been worth it.
The proceedings of the business part of the congress are more dour. Speaker after speaker addresses the immediate problems of the war. The symptoms of shell shock are described and methods of treatment discussed, including the one of using strong electric currents to try and force patients out of their mental state. Other world events are mentioned. Ferenczi jokes about the hard-pressed Bolsheviks. They are just beginning to realise, he suggests, that it is psychoanalysis and not Marxism which is the key to understanding human behaviour, as he boasts of a steady stream of Bolsheviks asking questions about Freud. The soldiers in the audience nod along, or nod off. Civilian officials cross their arms and assume a look of intense concentration, while their minds wander off elsewhere. Freud sits in the front row, loudly sucking a lump of sugar, his thoughts inevitably drifting towards nicotine. Eventually he can contain himself no longer. He lights up, and as he does–as if driven by some unconscious group urge of imitation for their leader–Freud’s disciples follow suit and search inside pockets for their pipes and cigars. Soon smoke billows through the hall in oily puffs. A red-faced building caretaker comes in to protest. No one listens. A Budapest hack writes up the congress in an article for a local magazine under the headline ‘Freud’s Cigar’.
When Freud’s turn comes to speak he plays the father-preacher to his flock. He looks beyond the war to the peace which must follow. ‘There are only a handful of us’, he intones severely, reminding his audience of the importance of their role: ‘Compared to the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world–and perhaps need not be–the quantity we can do away with is almost negligible.’ Unless… And here Freud makes his pitch. He summons up a picture of the future where, with state support, psychoanalytic treatment is no more unusual than treatment for toothache or tuberculosis. He envisages a time when psychoanalytic clinics flourish across the world, providing free services for all those who need it. ‘It may be a long time before the State comes to see these duties as urgent’, Freud tells his audience. ‘Some time or other, however, it must come to this.’ These are revolutionary times, after all.
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