Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  The press has a field day. The New York Tribune describes how a communist meeting in Yonkers was broken up by a priest leading his parishioners in singing the national anthem. ‘Russian Plot Nipped in the Bud’, shouts the Wausau Daily Record in Wisconsin. Days later, on Armistice Day, an American Legion march in the mining town of Centralia, Washington, is fired upon from a building belonging to the local chapter of a radical trades union. Four are killed. Rage against the Reds notches up another level.

  America is fighting back, and it is Palmer, not Wilson, who is leading the crusade. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle runs a cartoon of Uncle Sam striding across the land, picking up tiny gesturing figures marked ‘Reds’–one looks like Lenin, a worker’s cap atop his head and a single hand raised in exhortation. The ‘Reds’ are placed in a sack marked ‘Deportation’. But there is a particular detail to the cartoon. A few of the prisoners manage to escape the sack through a hole at its bottom marked ‘Legal Technicalities’.

  IRELAND: The Dáil is suppressed, and operates in the shadows. In the nationalist south and west, brigandage is rife. Military zones are declared. In County Clare, there are attacks on police posts, and ambushes on their patrols. Rifles and ammunition are stolen. In County Cork, attacks on post offices aim to disrupt police operations and steal their correspondence (armoured cars are used from now on).

  The Royal Irish Constabulary, barely ten thousand strong, finds it hard to keep up its strength. Irish constables tread carefully or retire from fear, warned by their neighbours that they are now in danger of their lives should they be too zealous in their duties. In some rural parts, IRA volunteers patrol the lanes with impunity.

  Once a week, Michael Collins visits Sinéad de Valera to hand over her husband’s salary.

  MILAN: Benito wins just five thousand votes in elections in Milan (out of some quarter of a million cast). Neither a victory, nor a defeat, he claims in public. In private, he is bitterly disappointed. The Socialists, the most popular party across the country, organise a mock funeral march for Benito, passing by the front door of his apartment building and terrifying his wife Rachele trapped inside.

  Mussolini takes stock. He needs more money, he concludes. He needs to distinguish himself as a man who understands the politics of compromise, rather than just being perceived as a subspecies of the crazy liberators of Fiume or a has-been like Marinetti (or an ex-socialist, which is what he really is).

  His profile is lifted when he is arrested for illegally hoarding weapons. But the government opts not to prosecute. It may need Mussolini in the future, and Italy already has enough martyrs.

  LONDON–SIBERIA–MOSCOW: By December, even Winston is ready to accept the bitter truth. ‘The last chances of saving the situation are passing away’, he writes. ‘Very soon there will be nothing left but Lenin and Trotsky, our vanished 100 millions, and mutual reproaches.’

  Denikin’s troops are in full flight from Moscow towards the south. In the east, along a single railway line, Admiral Kolchak, his army, and supporters and their families struggle to make good their own escape. Rebellions against his rule flare up along the way. White refugees freeze to death in railway carriages; others try to trudge through the Siberian winter on horse or foot. In Moscow, war commissar Trotsky is the hero of the hour.

  At a ceremony in the Bolshoi he is awarded the Order of the Red Banner. To smooth things over between the two rivals, the Georgian bank-robber is given the same award. ‘Can’t you understand?’ one old Bolshevik mutters to another. ‘This is Lenin’s idea–Stalin can’t live unless he has what someone else has.’

  WASHINGTON DC: The Senate is deadlocked on the treaty. Yet Woodrow does not answer his opponents’ letters and will hear of no compromise. He will not see his treaty, his League, mutilated. He comes up with fantastic schemes to try and save it: challenging fifty-six Senators to stand for immediate re-election, as a kind of referendum on the treaty. When visitors come to see him he hides his paralysed left arm under the covers and arranges state papers by his bed in an attempt to show that his bedroom is a hive of government activity–before relapsing exhausted when they have gone.

  AMERONGEN: Wilhelm reaches the twelve thousand mark in November. By early December his total stands at thirteen thousand logs. Some days the ex-Kaiser only breaks his labours for an occasional glass of port, or a rambling discussion with his adjutant about the state of Europe while sheltering from the rain in the children’s playhouse. ‘Aged and Melancholy, the War Lord in Exile’, runs the headline in the Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford’s newspaper, above a picture of Wilhelm in civilian clothes, snapped illicitly by a Dutch photographer. There are rumours that Wilhelm offered to buy the plates in order to have them smashed.

  Wood-chopping seems the only thing to stop the ex-Kaiser from chain-smoking and fantasising about bloody revenge in his room. His wife, physically fragile, worries about the ‘dark musings’ her husband has become prone to. There are particular reasons for Wilhelm’s mood. The newspapers have got hold of some of his marginalia on diplomatic reports going back to 1914 which make it look as if the Kaiser actively wanted war. Wilhelm’s entourage worry about the effect on public opinion. The Dutch might hand him to the French and British after all.

  Wilhelm’s mind wanders freely over past, present and future. He talks extemporaneously to anyone within earshot about his pet subjects: the war, Germany’s need for a strong Führer, the situation in Russia, or his grandmother, Queen Victoria. He tells Count Bentinck’s daughter that the Queen died in his arms, and that it was a Union Jack from his yacht which lay on her coffin at her funeral, because her English family–how typical!–had forgotten to arrange it themselves.

  Earlier that autumn the Kaiser explains to a bewildered guest how he has been fighting a shadow war with the Catholics and Jews all along, who have been conspiring to replace the Hohenzollerns with the Habsburgs. He goes on to explain that the parlous economic situation in Britain and France means Germany has won the war not lost it, and that all that is needed now is an alliance with Russia to finish the job. In the board-game of world politics, Wilhelm seems to have things sewn up in a trice. ‘Japan I will attach to Russia in the east’, he explains, ‘and then we’ll march together with Russia against England!’ The French will eventually feel obliged to attack England too, the Kaiser insists. Such imperial fantasies leave his young guest quite shaken. Has Wilhelm always been this way?

  Occasionally one of his sons drops by. Wilhelm takes little interest in them. He expresses positive disgust for August Wilhelm, whose wife has run off with one of the servants. He blames the moody temperament of Prince Joachim on Jewish influence. Indeed, he blames the Jews for his wife’s illness too. In December, he writes to one of his most trusted generals to explain that it is the Jews who carry the responsibility for pretty much everything which has befallen him and his country. ‘Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil!’ Wilhelm writes. He calls the Jews a ‘poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree’. He thirsts for revenge.

  As the wet winter weather causes the Rhine to flood the meadows on his estate, Count Bentinck wonders whether the imperial couple might move temporarily to another house. Impossible, as the only option available would require the Kaiser and his wife to share a dressing room, which apparently they cannot do. In The Hague, some wish the waters of the Rhine would force Wilhelm out of Holland altogether. ‘If, indeed, by some act of Providence, this self-invited and embarrassing guest could be sunk without a trace,’ a diplomat reports, ‘such a solution would be hailed with unmitigated relief.’

  SAGUA LA GRANDE, CUBA–NEW YORK: After a journey which the ship’s captain describes euphemistically as ‘adventurous’–including running aground on a sandbank–the first Black Star Line vessel arrives in Cuba from New York. The captain blames saboteurs amongst the (mostly British) crew for problems along the way. ‘The passengers’, he writes, ‘are behaving splendidly.’

  ‘
The Eternal has happened’, Garvey tells his faithful readership. This is a moment to savour, a moment of regained self-confidence, the firing of the starter’s gun in a struggle between the races. ‘We black folks believe so much in the omnipotence of the white man that we actually gave in all hope and resigned ourselves to the positions of slaves and serfs for nearly five hundred years’, he writes. ‘But, thank God, a new day has dawned’. He beseeches his readers to ‘steel their souls’ for the revolution to come and buy as many shares in the Black Star Line as they can.

  MODLIN, POLAND: Captain de Gaulle has one more course to teach. One hundred officers of the Polish army attend his lectures on how morale makes the difference between victory and defeat, and why France must stand by Poland to the end.

  He prepares to leave before the spring. ‘The Polish army will have been what I intended it to be for me: a military restoration’, he tells his mother. He has been awarded the Légion d’honneur for his bravery prior to his capture in 1916. The shame of being a prisoner of war has been erased.

  MOSCOW: ‘Our banking on the world revolution, if you can call it that, has on the whole been fully justified’, the impatient revolutionary declares in his end-of-year report to an All-Russia Congress of Soviets. Nonetheless, ‘from the point of view of the speed of its development we have endured an exceptionally difficult period’, he admits. Developments have been, for want of a better word, full of ‘zigzags’.

  ‘I think we may say without exaggeration that our main difficulties are already behind us’, Vladimir reassures the Soviet representatives. The Whites have been chased away like children. The foreigners have pulled out. Kiev is Red Kiev once again, and the Ukrainian nationalist leader has gone into exile. The imperialists have been caught out by their hypocrisy. They call themselves democrats but lock up opponents. They say they stand for the rights and freedoms of small nations, but try to bribe them to fight their wars. The workers are waking up to such tricks; they will not be duped by propaganda: ‘the lie being spread about us is fizzling out’. In the frightened Western capitals they call the Bolsheviks terrorists, Vladimir snorts indignantly: ‘We say terror was thrust upon us.’ He quotes a Swedish newspaper suggesting Churchill had expected to be in Moscow by now: ‘just try it, gentlemen!’

  Life in Russia is hard. The population of the cities has collapsed. Those that remain eat in collective canteens to avoid starvation. Wooden fences are burned so the people can keep warm. But it won’t be long now, the impatient revolutionary declares, before the Bolsheviks will be able to turn from fighting wars to building socialism. ‘Comrades, the task which now confronts us is to transfer our war-time experience to the sphere of peaceful construction.’

  It is already happening. Look around you, Vladimir exhorts: the workers’ state is coming into existence, the old bureaucrats are being pushed out. Efforts are already being redirected to the struggle against cold and hunger, how to provide the people with grain and fuel. To allow peasants to sell their produce in the market, like before the war, is no solution: ‘if you want free sale of grain in a ruined country, go back, try out Kolchak and Denikin!’ No, the challenges now are organisation and distribution, keeping up socialist self-sacrifice, continuing the fight against plotters and saboteurs.

  And then there is the battle against disease. The scourge of typhus must be subdued. ‘Either the lice will defeat socialism’, Vladimir thunders, ‘or socialism will defeat the lice!’

  KIRŞEHİR, OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Struggling west through mud and snow to reach Ankara, the hilltop city he has chosen as his new base of operations, Mustafa Kemal stops one night in the small town of Kırşehir.

  He has carried all before him in the elections. The nationalists are triumphant. A new Ottoman parliament is to assemble in Istanbul, where patriotic demonstrations against foreign occupation are now gathering pace. After dinner, Kemal gives a campaign speech to the notables of Kırşehir. He quotes a few lines of poetry: ‘The enemy has pressed his dagger to the breast of the motherland / Will no one arise to save his mother from her black fate?’

  Kemal answers his question with a smile. Surely they can see that he is the saviour they have been waiting for.

  MUNICH: Wearing black trousers, white shirt, black tie and an old jacket he bought years ago in Vienna, Adolf Hitler opens a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in December.

  Adolf is still fed and housed at the expense of the army, unable to stand on his own two feet. But now that he has found his calling as a speaker he is growing more confident in his own ideas. Anti-capitalism, German nationalism, a hatred of the Versailles Treaty, and a firm belief in German unity rather than Bavarian particularism still form the bedrock of his speeches, alongside popular anti-Semitism. Occasionally he allows himself to range more widely. In December, he talks expansively about how Britain’s colonisation of India and the opium war with China expose the hypocrisy of the Great Powers and demonstrate the fundamental truth that legitimacy is ultimately derived from power, not the other way around. ‘Is right possible without might?’ Adolf asks. America does not wish to join the League of Nations because it believes itself too strong to need it. The strong do not want constraints on their action.

  Hitler divides the world into two. There are temporary enemies with whom Germany may be drawn into occasional conflict but with whom a future alliance cannot be ruled out. Russia falls into this category. And then there are Germany’s permanent and perpetual enemies, of which the most prominent are the British and Americans, who think only of money ‘even if it is soaked in blood’. Adolf Hitler does not mention Bolshevism once. International capitalism rather than international socialism is the chief focus of his anger.

  VIENNA: As the year shivers towards its end Sigmund Freud is busy corresponding with his British and American nephews.

  Sam has dutifully dispatched a food parcel from Manchester to Austria as requested. But nothing has yet arrived in Vienna. Perhaps the goods are lost in a railway siding somewhere, or making a feast for a hungry postmaster and his wife, or waiting unclaimed in an Austrian customs office. ‘You seem not to be aware of the whole amount of governmental stupidity’, Sam reads in the latest missive from his uncle. Permits are required for everything these days, Sigmund explains. Hopes for the parcel being recovered grow slighter with each passing day.

  Around the same time, Sigmund finally hears back from his American nephew Edward, the publicity man. Edward blames strike conditions for his silence over the last few months. But he has good news: despite Sigmund’s second thoughts about the whole business, the American translation of one of his books is now nearly ready. A first instalment of one hundred dollars is on its way. Edward suggests that a well-paid lecture tour could be arranged, as well: ‘America would listen eagerly to what you would say.’ Flattery, and money, he hopes, will soothe his uncle’s nerves.

  Edward even suggests that Freud write a public appeal for the American people to come to the aid of the suffering population of Austria, which would make his name better known in the United States. Freud politely declines the offer. ‘I do not consider myself a person of public notoriety such as may be entitled to appeal to the American people on behalf of the Austrian people’, he writes, ‘and in my own country at least I am in the dark.’

  Where is Freud’s country now anyhow? Fear of revolution and civil war stalks the streets. The Habsburgs are banished. Prague and Budapest are now foreign capitals, where German is the dirty language of a defeated, humiliated power. Freud’s homeland is no more. Even his thoughts about psychoanalysis tend to darkness. ‘I have finished sowing’, he writes gravely to a colleague. ‘I shall not see the harvest.’

  NEW YORK–RUSSIA: One cold morning in December the USAT Burford, an old naval ship from the Spanish–American War, slips past the Statue of Liberty into open water, carrying the first wave of foreign radicals deported from the United States away from American shores.

  ‘This is the beginning of the end for the United States’, shouts the famou
s anarchist Emma Goldman, as the ship pulls away. Another deportee’s words are more menacing: ‘we’re coming back–and we’ll get you.’ On board, the passengers share out clothing with those who did not have time to pack before they were forced to leave. Someone strikes up a Russian folk song.

  John Reed is already in Russia waiting for them, having worked his way across the Atlantic to Norway as a stoker under false papers and then making the last leg of his journey by sleigh and on foot.

  In the Kremlin, the latest recipient of a personal copy of Ten Days that Shook the World is writing a note on the Russian language. It is being spoiled by too many foreign words, Lenin tells his colleagues. His attention has been drawn to the increasingly common use of defekty–meaning defect, fault, imperfection, shortcoming. He points out that Russian already has three perfectly good words for that.

  1920

  Here was a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The old family, in which the man was everything and the woman nothing, the typical family where the woman had no will of her own, no time of her own, no money of her own, is changing before our very eyes.

  Alexandra Kollontai

  WINTER

  PARIS–WASHINGTON: The Great War is over.

  The Versailles Treaty comes into effect. The League of Nations council meets for the first time in Paris, in the same room where Woodrow read his draft of the covenant a year ago. A new world order has begun. The American chair is empty, for now.