Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  The Italians care mostly about the territory promised them for joining the war. The French are mostly concerned with regaining Alsace-Lorraine and keeping Germany down (for a while they even think of breaking up the fifty-year-old Reich entirely, and maybe pushing the French border to the Rhine). The British have wider horizons: the freedom of the oceans, the security of the empire, and the future of everything in between. The Americans, some of them at least, aspire to something greater still: a permanent peace, a just peace, a scientific peace, a peace based on principles and facts. But which facts? Whose principles? Diplomats in a position of influence find themselves hot property in Paris. A twenty-six-year-old American diplomat, Allen Dulles, is taken out for a slap-up private dinner by the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia. ‘And so it goes’, the well-fed diplomat writes home to his mother.

  Russia perplexes everyone. ‘Europe and the world cannot be at peace if Russia is not’, Woodrow notes in January. But who is willing to sort out the mess? Having made a separate peace with the Germans and Austrians in early 1918, whatever now constitutes ‘Russia’ can hardly be invited to the conference as one of the victors a year later. On the other hand, surely Russia’s war sacrifices up to 1917 demand some kind of recognition. The brutal victors’ peace of Brest-Litovsk cannot be allowed to stand.

  So what to do about the Bolsheviks? Some in Paris urge a policy of containment: trying to hold back the Bolshevik tide from the rest of Europe through the imposition of what amounts to a militarised quarantine. A cordon sanitaire, as the French call it. Others demand a more muscular approach, arguing for striking at the heart of the beast where Lenin’s regime is weak. The Red Army is on its last legs. In February, a British military assessment concludes that Trotsky’s army has no winter boots or gloves left and its political capital is spent.

  The forces for a more energetically interventionist approach are already in place, contend its advocates, Winston Churchill chief amongst them. Eurasia is dotted with contingents of Allied troops–from the British in Archangel to the French in Odessa, and Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Romanians and Italians elsewhere. The Czechs, though less willing than before, are still a serious factor in Siberia. Piłsudski’s Poles have been probing east to see how far they can push Poland’s border before the Reds push back. The Royal Navy is the dominant factor in the Caspian and the Baltic, where it has provided support to local anti-Bolshevik forces. There are still German troops in the region, not to mention Yudenich’s White army in Estonia. The British have already given support to Kolchak, sending tons of ammunition along the trans-Siberian railway. In Siberia, the Whites joke that they get their uniforms from Britain, their boots from France, their bayonets from Japan and their orders from Omsk.

  The material is to hand, the interventionists argue, and the situation ripe. As the peacemakers gather in Paris, Denikin’s White forces are romping through southern Russia. Kolchak is rallying for an offensive. Why not go all out now and settle things? When Winston hears that Woodrow may return home without a proper decision on the subject one way or the other he races to Paris to put his case to the Allied leaders (shattering his car windscreen along the way). He arrives just as everyone is getting ready to pack up.

  Attempts to talk to the Bolsheviks directly are botched. Early in February, a plan is hatched to meet their delegates in Turkey. An invitation is transmitted by short-wave radio to the Kremlin, suggesting Prinkipo, near Istanbul, as a suitably private venue for the parley. The answer from Moscow is one long sneer, skirting the demand for a ceasefire. A couple of weeks later, a junior American diplomat is sent to Russia on a fact-finding mission. The self-assured twenty-eight-year-old manages to convince himself that his real job is far grander: to broker the outlines of a comprehensive peace deal with the Bolsheviks. He has a wonderful time in Moscow, dining with Lenin and attending the opera in the Tsar’s box. The Bolsheviks consider him a useful messenger to the Western powers; they do not take him seriously as a negotiator.

  When it comes to the League, Woodrow seems to score complete success, a justification of his decision to come to Paris in person. On St Valentine’s Day, to a packed gathering, he presents a draft constitution of the League–called, somewhat religiously, a covenant–so far hashed out in private. ‘Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentlemen,’ Woodrow says after reading out the sacred text line by line, ‘but some very beautiful things have come out of it’ too. Edith, without a ticket for the presentation, is smuggled in by the President’s doctor and hides behind a curtain to watch her husband speak. Several hundred copies of the covenant are printed and distributed among the politicians and diplomats in Paris.

  That very evening, after two months in Europe, Woodrow sets sail for a brief trip home to convince America about its new role in the world. He leaves House in charge for the period of his absence from the peace conference. House promises to have the whole thing–the German peace deal, mostly–wrapped up by the time Woodrow gets back.

  WASHINGTON DC: A Senate inquiry, originally set up to look at German subversion during the war, now turns its attention to the latest menace: Bolshevism. A general strike in Seattle in which sixty thousand workers take part causes panic in America in February. The city’s mayor calls in the troops and claims it is a revolution averted.

  One witness talks about Trotsky’s time in New York. He is ‘very radical looking in appearance as well as in speech’, the subcommittee is told, and rather shorter than is normally thought. Another witness reports on the role of Soviet legations in foreign countries as fronts for agitation and the use of foreign journalists as financial couriers for shadowy international revolutionary networks (the name John Reed is mentioned). Others describe the conditions in Russia itself. One witness terrifies–or fascinates?–the Senators with stories of just how far the Bolsheviks are prepared to go in upending the norms of civilised society:

  Senator OVERMAN (D-N.C.): Do they have as many wives as they want?

  Mr. STEVENSON (a witness):In rotation.

  Maj. HUMES:Polygamy is recognized, is it?

  STEVENSON:I do not know about polygamy. I have not gone into the study of their social order quite as fully as that.

  Senator NELSON (R-Minn.):That is, a man can marry and then get a divorce when he gets tired and get another wife?

  STEVENSON:Precisely.

  NELSON:And keep up the operation?

  STEVENSON:Yes.

  OVERMAN:Do you know whether they teach free love?

  STEVENSON:They do.

  It is said Russian women have been nationalised by the state like everything else.

  Over the course of a whole day in mid-February, while Woodrow Wilson is still on his way back from Paris, the subcommittee hears from a Methodist missionary about conditions in ungodly, degenerate Bolshevik Russia. Ancient monasteries have been robbed by the revolutionary heathens, Reverend Simons reports. Churches have become dance halls. He suggests that most Bolshevik agitators in Petrograd are foreign Jews rather than Christian Russians (he claims a black American is the sole exception in one district of the city). Many hail from New York’s Lower East Side. ‘Shortly after the great revolution of the winter of 1917 there were scores of Jews standing on the benches and soap boxes and what not, talking until their mouths frothed’, the missionary reports: ‘I often remarked to my sister “Well, what are we coming to anyway? This all looks so Yiddish”’.

  The reverend raises the subject of a text he came across in Russia entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and which he clearly views as representing some sort of game-plan for Jewish world domination. ‘Now, I have no animus against the Jews but I have a great passion for the truth’, Mr Simons says: ‘if there is anything in it, I think we ought to know.’ The President of the American Jewish Committee writes a stiff letter of complaint to the committee for the slanderous equation of Jews and Bolsheviks.

  The committee faces its slipperiest witnesses towards the end of the month: Louise Bryant, and her husband, the
journalist and revolutionary rabble-rouser John Reed.

  Senator OVERMAN (D-N.C.):Miss Bryant, do you believe in God and in the sanctity of an oath?

  Miss BRYANT:Certainly, I believe in the sanctity of an oath.

  Senator KING (D-Utah):Do you believe there is a God?

  BRYANT:I suppose there is a God. I have no way of knowing.

  Senator NELSON (R-Minn.):Do you believe in the Christian religion?

  BRYANT:Certainly not. I believe all people should have whatever religion they wish because that is one of the things—

  NELSON:You are not a Christian then?

  BRYANT:I was christened in the Catholic Church.

  NELSON:What are you now, a Christian?

  BRYANT:Yes; I suppose that I am.

  NELSON:And you do not believe in Christ?

  BRYANT:I did not say that I did not believe in Christ.

  NELSON:But do you believe in Christ?

  BRYANT:I believe in the teachings of Christ, Senator Nelson.

  OVERMAN:Do you believe in God?

  BRYANT:Yes; I will concede that I believe in God, Senator Overman.

  KING:This is important, because a person who has no conception of God does not have any idea of the sanctity of an oath, and an oath would be meaningless.

  Senator WOLCOTT (D-Del.):Do you believe in punishment hereafter and a reward for duty?

  BRYANT: It seems to me as if I were being tried for witchcraft.

  Louise admits to carrying certain documents out of Russia as a messenger for the Bolsheviks, but insists that was the only way of leaving the country. Contrary to what other witnesses have alleged, she saw no one killed in Russia. (It was dark when the October revolution took place, she says.) One Senator asks if she saw beggars in Bolshevik Russia. ‘No more than I see here in the United States’, she shoots back. And as to whether she ever met any black Americans in Russia, as suggested by Reverend Simons in his testimony, Louise replies that she met just one: ‘He was a professional gambler.’ Senator Nelson enquires as to whether Louise would like a Bolshevik government set up permanently in Russia. ‘I think the Russians ought to settle that’, she responds. ‘I said I believed in self-determination.’

  Bryant is quite clear what she is against: American intervention. The Russians should be allowed to work things out amongst themselves, even at the point of a gun, just as Americans did in their civil war. She does not imagine that a Soviet regime would fit America ‘at the present time’. Yes, Russia is currently a dictatorship–but a dictatorship of the majority, and only temporarily. She defends the head of the Cheka as ‘an idealist, a very aesthetic young man, not the kind of man who is a real butcher’. Perhaps there has been Red terror in Russia, she admits: but then there has been White terror as well.

  Bryant expresses particular anger at the idea that Russian women have been ‘nationalised’, explaining that they are ‘even more belligerent’ than the men and would never allow such a thing. Her own belligerence as a witness before the committee goes down badly. When her husband John appears in order to give evidence the following afternoon the atmosphere is more genial. He is a Harvard man after all (albeit one recently suspended from the Harvard Club in New York for being behind on paying his club-house bill). He charms everyone. The subcommittee and Mr Reed engage in long exchanges on the nature of law and a friendly discussion about land reform. Jack pleasantly admits being in favour of revolution, but without violence. Reed and the Senators part on pleasant terms, with Jack recommending other potential witnesses to balance the subcommittee’s proceedings.

  By then, America’s political attention has turned again to the Atlantic, and to the imminent arrival of Woodrow Wilson, carrying the draft covenant of the League of Nations back from Paris. (His ship is forced to dock in Boston rather than New York, owing to a longshoremen’s strike.) The newspapers no longer carry stories about John Reed, but about Senator Reed, a Democrat from Missouri, who declares the League of Nations ‘infamous’ and anti-constitutional, putting power in the hands of foreign delegates.

  NEW YORK–PARIS: ‘A triumphal epoch in the history for the colored population of New York’, the New York Age calls it. The 369th Regiment is back in town. Others have a jazzier name for them: the Harlem Hellfighters.

  They did not have a parade when they left. They make up for it now. Sixteen abreast, the soldiers turn from 25th Street into Fifth Avenue. Jim Europe’s band beats out the steady time of military marches (syncopation is banished for the downtown part of the parade). Harry Johnson, the little man from Albany who disembowelled a German soldier with his bolo knife and killed another with a single blow to the head, is carried in an automobile at the rear, standing to take the salute of the crowds. (The same day, an impostor claiming to be Johnson draws a crowd of ten thousand in St. Louis, Missouri.) At 110th Street, the regiment enters Harlem and the formation is relaxed. Jim switches to ragtime and jazz. Marcus Garvey is moved to tears.

  An ocean away, Du Bois is taken on a tour of the French battlefields. He searches out material for a book he is writing on the black contribution to the war effort, arguing that ‘the black soldier saved civilization in 1914–1918’. On the margins of the peace conference, he attends the first Pan-African Congress in nineteen years, with fifty-seven delegates from around the world. A declaration demands that ‘wherever persons of African descent are civilized and able to meet the tests of surrounding culture, they shall be accorded the same rights as their fellow-citizens’. If these rights are denied, the League of Nations must be asked to intervene.

  Garvey would not be satisfied with such a statement, with the rights of blacks made conditional on someone else’s assessment of whether they are ‘civilized’. But for Du Bois, it is a start: ‘the world-fight for black rights is on!’

  LIBAU, LATVIA: A Freikorps unit led by a German general lands in Latvia.

  Some are here for honour, to show the Germans still have some fight left in them. Some have come to the defence of the ancestral ethnic German population of the Baltic, imagining themselves reincarnations of the Teutonic Knights and recalling when this part of Latvia was named Courland (as the Kaiser and Ludendorff still call it). Others fight to resist the tide of Bolshevism–and better to do so on Baltic soil than in Prussia. (By way of thanks, the Latvian government which has invited them in offers soldiers full Latvian citizenship after four weeks’ service.) A few join up to keep the German northern flank in play, in preparation for the next war and the inevitable final showdown against Russia. These are the kind of men who fancy themselves as far-sighted strategic thinkers, who spend time in beer halls with maps of Europe rolled out on trestle tables, a stein holding down each corner.

  But not all Freikorps volunteers have such highfalutin ambitions. Some fight to win land for themselves and their families: ‘excellent colonisation opportunities’ are promised. Some fight for the lack of anything better to do back in Germany. One Freikorps commander recruits by simply sitting outside a country pub near Berlin and offering passing men a chance of eastern glory. Amongst those who journey to Latvia this winter is Captain Pabst, the officer in charge at the Eden Hotel when Liebknecht and Luxemburg were killed. There are plenty such men in Germany now, their mercenary instincts fired by patriotism and the lure of booty to continue the war in the east.

  Fighting their way through Latvia, proclaiming themselves as the vanguard of German Kultur against eastern barbarism, these volunteer soldiers dispense entirely with regular army discipline. The Hamburg Freikorps let their beards grow long, sing old pirate songs and recognise no one’s will but their own–and that of whoever they have chosen as their Führer. Normal rules of warfare break down. Summary judgement and gruesome collective punishment are common. Latvians accused of helping the Bolsheviks are skewered on German bayonets. Entire families, and sometimes whole villages, are murdered by Freikorps troops this way.

  For these men–some of whom spent four years in the trenches, others who were too young now making up for lost time–it
is as if a psychological dam has been broken. In the Baltic, they are free to live out their most bloody fantasies, against enemies they are told are everywhere. Nothing is too brutal. Everything is possible. To burn down a village: a mere bagatelle. To string up a farmer who gave food to a Bolshevik: simple justice. This is violence meted out face to face, not like the huge, mechanical artillery bombardments of the war on the Western Front. For some, it is intensely liberating. It is as if these soldiers, freed from all restraint, some of them only teenagers, have become Nietzschean supermen, endowed with super-powers over their fellow humans. The aftertaste of such power will linger long after they have left the Baltic far behind. (In some cases, it propels them to the obscenity of Auschwitz.)

  Occasionally, news from the rest of Europe breaks through the Baltic fog to reach the Freikorps and their leaders. Some celebrate at the news that Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s hapless revolutionary premier, has been shot dead by a right-wing radical (who is immediately killed himself), throwing Munich into a new bout of unrest, as the parliamentary left and the revolutionary far left compete for power. (A member of the Thule Society decides to mark the place of Eisner’s assassination by sprinkling it with the urine of a bitch on heat, ensuring it will attract the attention of other dogs.) Towards the end of winter, Berlin too explodes in violence once more when a general strike turns sour. (‘The dead are rising up again’, declares Rosa Luxemburg’s old paper, the Rote Fahne, with blood-curdling glee.) Communist militias are accused of murdering sixty policemen in cold blood. Government soldiers are given permission to execute suspects on the spot. Aeroplanes bombard pockets of resistance.