Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  But the impatient revolutionary will not be held back. Visions of sweeping conflagration dance before his eyes: the defensive turned into the offensive again. A Red empire stretching from Moscow to Berlin–or further. ‘It is time to encourage revolution in Italy,’ he wires to Stalin. ‘Hungary must be sovietised, and maybe also the Czech lands and Romania.’ (The loyal Georgian replies that it would indeed be ‘sinful’ not to promote revolution in Rome.) The prestige of military victory will surely knock any moderate socialist doubters off their perches, and push the international workers’ movement Moscow’s way.

  Confident of success, throwing all caution to the wind, Vladimir demands an acceleration of the military campaign. A timetable is set: six weeks to conquer Poland.

  MUNICH–SEBASTOPOL: ‘The fate of Poland today should be a warning sign to the Entente’, Adolf tells an audience in Rosenheim, where a new party chapter has been opened by a local railway administrator and his wife. Germany’s salvation, he says, will not come in the west. It will come in the east. Once Lenin has been overthrown, he sees a match made in heaven of agrarian Russia and industrial Germany. Grain for iron. ‘We must seek an Anschluss with national, anti-Semitic Russia’, Adolf declares, a new geopolitical grouping to take on the world: an unbeatable, Eurasian bloc.

  At that very moment, a far-right delegation of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians arrives in Crimea to explore the possibilities of an alliance with like-minded Russians.

  BAD GASTEIN: The sacred summer break has arrived. Freud is in the mountains again, this time with his sister-in-law Minna, as far away as possible from Vienna. ‘The peace is delightful,’ Freud writes to Anna, ‘not even an organ grinder.’ There is a waterfall nearby. Every day after lunch, while Minna takes her siesta, Freud settles down to work. And in this high solitude, far from the city, Freud decides to turn his mind to that most salient feature of his age: the crowd.

  It is a subject that Freud knows he must address. Everyone is writing about it. Everyone has views on it. Psychoanalysis cannot be left behind. And it is a matter of which Freud has some experience. After all, he has seen the infectious power of crowds. He remembers well the Parisian crowds he wandered through as a student, astounded by the volatility of their moods, so easily manipulated by the martinets and mountebanks of French politics, a type Freud profoundly despises. He has experienced for himself the exhilaration which can go with feeling part of a group united for a single purpose: he remembers 1914.

  Freud fears the tendency of his age to discount the individual in favour of the group. He reads about its vicious consequences every day: in wars, pogroms, revolutions and riots from Petrograd to Munich to East St. Louis. He knows the strange influence which the masses exert on the individual–and vice versa. He worries about those rabble-rousers who seem to want to exploit matters further rather than calm them down, who celebrate the collective against the individual, and in so doing make the baying crowd (or the lynch-mob) the only true source of legitimacy. The cult of the masses–whether that of the faceless proletariat or the millions of war dead or the identikit consumer–is all around these days.

  What are the masses, psychologically speaking? What is it that makes humans seek sublimation in a group? By what means of hidden communication does a group of individuals cohere into a group, as if possessed of a single will and a single mind? These are not simple problems. Nor are they dry and academic. What makes an army follow its commanders to the death? What makes a revolutionary mob act as one? By what strange power does a leader direct a crowd? And by what craven instinct of submission does a crowd decide to follow? To answer these questions is to unlock the public mind. It is to expose the hidden, subterranean workings of society. And it turns the person who can read them into a god.

  What Sigmund seeks to analyse, others are already trying to apply. The notion that the whims and fancies of the masses can be understood in scientific terms fascinates those with the ambition to convert such knowledge into power. Sigmund’s nephew Edward hopes to turn crowd psychology into a marketable business proposition: the management of the public mind for private ends. Benito Mussolini reads the same texts on crowd psychology as Freud in his Austrian hideaway–Gustave le Bon, in particular–looking to improve his political technique. The plasticity of human emotions which so terrifies Sigmund is, for Benito, a thrilling fact, an incredible opportunity. For those who know the workings of the public mind will be those best placed to control it. Politics can become a science and individuals mere cells within the greater body of society, all directed by a fascist super-brain.

  Mussolini knows he is not the only one to have picked up on the idea of a leader conjuring the masses to follow his will. There is one other European leader whose methods he admires above all others. ‘Lenin is an artist who has worked with human beings as other artists work with marble or metals’, Benito gushes. It is just a pity that the artwork he has produced has not lived up to his promise.

  In Bad Gastein, high up in the mountains, the nightmares of the modern world crowd into Freud’s makeshift study.

  WARSAW: Having returned to France to an administrative job which bored him, Charles de Gaulle is back in Poland. He has been here now almost as long as he served on the Western Front in the war.

  He left in April, when Poland was thrilled by reports of constant victory. By July, the news is all of defeat. The currency has collapsed; the queues for bread have grown longer. The mood is less one of anger than one of Slavic resignation. ‘The more the danger approaches, the less they react,’ Charles writes in his diary, ‘which explains why, throughout history, a handful of barbarians have been able to dominate such huge territory.’ This is the captain’s own pet theory, of course, that wars are won or lost on the question of popular morale.

  Occasionally, he catches sight of a flash of resistance. One Sunday, after a solemn Catholic Mass in what was once a Russian Orthodox cathedral, he attends a parade of volunteers, mostly students. They carry imitation guns. ‘What tragic destiny that the energy and spirit of these people’s elites has never been equal to the virtue and readiness of the masses’, de Gaulle jots down. His own students from last year are now all at the front. Several have been killed. His military acquaintances in Warsaw–Charles has made no real friends here–ask him what the French will do to help. De Gaulle chafes under the restrictions of neutrality. Once again, he is a bystander to great historic events. It is particularly vexing that the young commander of the Red Army, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, is a man de Gaulle remembers from their time in the same German prisoner-of-war camp. (Mikhail was called Misha then and, unlike Charles, he managed to escape.)

  But this war is quite unlike the last one. Then, for three years, the Western Front barely moved. Its symbol was Verdun. This war is fought on horseback, like a Napoleonic campaign, with a front line that moves this way and that with the speed of a cracking whip. Cavalry emerge from huge dust clouds, scattering their foes, sabres slashing through the air. The open borderlands are like an ocean: empty and immeasurable, the enemy hidden in its vastness. The Red Army survives off the land and the promise of rapid conquest. Horse-drawn wagons are mounted with machine guns. Where will they come to rest?

  The fate of Western civilisation seems to hang by a thread.

  NEW YORK: The bare-faced cheek.

  Marcus Garvey sends William Du Bois a free pass for the upcoming UNIA convention and asks if he would like to throw his hat into the ring as candidate for ‘accredited spokesman of the American Negro People’, a subsidiary position to that of the worldwide leader.

  Du Bois bristles. He takes a week to respond to the Jamaican upstart. He wants his name put forward ‘under no circumstances’. Instead he requests that Garvey answer a series of basic questions about the UNIA so The Crisis can provide a ‘critical estimate’ of the organisation and its leader in an upcoming issue. ‘I expect only such answers as you are willing to divulge and to have the public know’, he writes.

  LONDON: ‘It is late in the day
to consider all these matters after so many opportunities and resources have been thrown away with both hands through all these disastrous months’, Winston writes. But it is not too late. Churchill demands the suspension of trade talks with Soviet Russia and more aid to Wrangel. British supplies and aircraft should be sent to Warsaw and arms provided to Finland, Romania and Serbia to help them intervene on the Polish side. All the material, in other words, to fight a new world war.

  PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: In an atmosphere of intense excitement, two hundred delegates meet in Petrograd for the opening of the second congress of the Comintern. They arrive on false passports from around the world.

  It is a far more impressive gathering than the year before, when delegates were rounded up from whoever happened to be in Moscow and the entire conference barely filled a single room. Last year the congress was over in a few days. This year, it takes three weeks, divided between Petrograd and Moscow. The invitation to attend is answered by delegates from far and wide. A raucous contingent of Italians represent Benito Mussolini’s old Italian Socialist Party. They bring their own Chianti, and share it nightly in one of the Comintern leader’s hotel rooms. Serious-minded delegations arrive from Germany (Rosa Luxemburg’s lawyer amongst them) and France (including a former stretcher-bearer from Verdun with a new book out entitled Revolution or Death). Several Asian delegates arrive in Soviet Russia by various routes in the weeks leading up to the congress. A group of Irish delegates register at the congress under code names, and use their presence to advertise support for the Irish cause as an opportunity for world communism to strike a hammer blow against British imperialism. There is one Pole: he soon leaves for the front.

  Amongst the more familiar figures, one can spot John Reed, still recovering from his Finnish ordeal, his skin pale and his cheeks sunken. His romantic ideas about Lenin and his regime are wearing thin. But the Comintern still fires his imagination: as a gathering of like-minded spirits, united by the cause of world revolution, free to debate and argue their way to the victory of the proletariat. One such spirit, Sylvia Pankhurst–Emmeline’s militantly left-wing daughter–decides to make the journey to Russia in spite of an ongoing dispute with Lenin about the correct tactics to use in the struggle in Britain. (Incredibly, Vladimir considers Sylvia’s approach to be too radical and deals with the disagreement in his usual way, writing a pamphlet accusing her and others of being ‘infantile’ and making sure every delegate gets a copy as soon as they arrive.) Amongst the Russian delegates, by far the most numerous, are both Vladimir’s wife Nadya and his former lover Inessa, who is given the job of organising a women’s conference on the margins of the main affair.

  No expense is spared to impress the foreign delegates. They feast in the colonnaded grandeur of the Smolny, the epicentre of the revolution in 1917. A six-hour open-air agitprop performance is put on with thousands of conscript soldiers, even grander than the May Day show. A Red Mass commemorates fallen comrades, accompanied by the music of Wagner. Monuments are erected to the Paris Commune of 1871–from which Communism derives its name–and to Rosa Luxemburg. A special commemorative plate is produced. Despite paper and ink shortages, a Comintern bulletin is produced in four languages.

  At the congress opening, a huge orchestra plays the Internationale to specially composed new music. All delegates then rise for a funeral march in memory of the martyrs of the revolution. Vladimir gives the opening speech. He declares that Versailles has turned Germany into a colony of the American banks. He quotes approvingly from a new book by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He talks encouragingly about the possibility of communist revolution in otherwise ‘backward’ colonies, forgetting his earlier insistence that socialism could only follow a period of capitalism. But these are heady days. Revolution is on the march again in Europe–and soon in Asia too. A painter is commissioned to capture the moment for posterity.

  In Moscow, the congress reassembles a few days later in the coronation hall of the Kremlin. The golden eagles atop the building have been especially regilded for the occasion, for the first time since the revolution. (Some delegates take the opportunity to test the springs of the imperial mattresses in a nearby bedchamber.) A huge map is set up with little red flags to show the daily advance of Red Army troops towards Warsaw. The scent of victory on the battlefield a thousand miles to the west permeates proceedings in the Kremlin. The world is going Moscow’s way.

  DUBLIN: A new force appears in Ireland, screeching down country lanes in speeding lorries, stomping through towns and villages. They are not quite soldiers, but not quite policemen either. London’s answer to the IRA. Winston’s answer, too.

  Their accents are estuary English, rather than the familiar Irish of the police or the cut-glass accents of the British officer class. They wear a jumble of khaki and green and black leather, topped with a Scottish military beret, rather than the dark bottle green of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the force with which they are supposedly associated. They become known to locals as the Black and Tans after a well-known fox hunt in Limerick. And it is to hunt that they have come to Ireland: to hunt down the IRA, and neutralise them by whatever means most expedient. They arrive in Ireland in dribs and drabs, a few dozen every month at first, then a few hundred.

  There is a coarse swagger to these battle-hardened men, men who have come to expect no kindness or sweetness in their lives but what is bought and paid for with blood and money, former British soldiers operating under military law when they feel like it, and outside the law when it suits them. They wear their pistols strapped onto their thighs, or one on each hip, for easy shooting. They are careless about how much ammunition they use, or who they use it on. They have little stake in Ireland’s future and little care for Ireland’s woes. They hunt for King and Empire–and for the sake of a job when no work is on offer back home. They hunt as a pack, travelling around in lorries with machine guns poking out the back. A pound a week and no questions asked. The IRA fights dirty, and so they will fight dirty too, outrunning and outgunning them where they can.

  The rhythm of outrage and reprisal continues, of assassination and counter-assassination. In Tuam, County Galway, it is Irish police who lead reprisals against the town for an IRA ambush on the road to Dunmore which leaves two officers dead. In what has become the pattern now, houses and shops are burned to the ground in retaliation. The town hall is torched. A visitor is reminded of the war-scarred villages of Belgium and France.

  Sinéad de Valera visits her husband in America that August. (Michael Collins provides her with a false passport for the journey.) Éamon is not best pleased to see her. He is overworked with his fight for control of Irish America, he explains. He cannot spare her much time. There are rumours that he is having an affair with his secretary.

  UPSTATE MICHIGAN: The greatest soldier-journalist-fisherman Horton Bay has ever seen (currently unemployed, having left the Star) is at it again: Hemingway is back by the lake.

  He seems happy enough to those who meet him, the same chipper character, the same attitude. He has picked up the habit of shadow-boxing when he speaks, as if constantly sparring with an imaginary opponent. On his extended holiday in the country, Ernest fishes and plays tennis nearly every day. (Occasionally he gambles at roulette–and loses.) But something is eating him up inside, the same thing which has been gnawing at him since he got back from the war, just as it gnaws at thousands of other young Americans who have seen a glimpse of the wider world and then had it snatched away. The war has opened up their minds. Peace seems dull. America seems dull. Life seems dull. Ernest Hemingway’s parents seem particularly dull. The war boom has turned into the peace slump. Metaphorically, and in every other way. (Share prices on Wall Street drop almost one third this August; a get-rich-quick scheme dreamed up by a man named Ponzi shuts down around the same time.)

  ‘I’m for a job in New York’, Ernest writes to Grace Quinlan, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he has befriended in Petoskey, ‘but then
I’m also for the open road and long sea swells, and an old tramp steamer hull down on the oily seas.’ Open warfare breaks out with his mother, who warns Ernest to ‘cease your lazy loafing and pleasure seeking’. For a while the prodigal son becomes the black sheep.

  The plan to go to Yokohama withers on the vine. Hemingway moves to Chicago instead.

  MOSCOW: The Russians dominate. At a football match organised to celebrate the gathering of the Comintern, a team made up of international delegates including John Reed is soundly beaten by a local Moscow squad. The winners are given prizes of outstanding current value: a jar of fruit and a bag of flour each.

  In the Comintern meeting the same pattern prevails. There is no doubt the Russians are in charge. Everyone uses the word ‘comrade’; that does not mean that they are always comradely themselves. Procedures are manipulated, debate curtailed, bully tactics employed. At one point, John Reed is called a liar when he points out how his own words are being misrepresented. (His threat to resign from the Comintern is laughed off as petit-bourgeois indulgence.) Sylvia Pankhurst, arriving late, is cut off when she speaks for too long in a direction of which Lenin disapproves. Rosa Luxemburg might have received a better hearing, but she is long gone. Vladimir scuttles in when necessary to make sure the delegates are kept in line. His prestige is critical. A Scottish delegate accepts correction from Lenin ‘as a child accepts the rebuke of a father’.

  Dissent turns to deference. The Moscow line is pushed through: the dictatorship of the proletariat conducted by the dictatorship of the party. The organisational principles of Russian Bolshevism become the principles to be adopted by all communist parties the world over: unity, hierarchy, ‘iron proletarian centralism’. Rules are drawn up to ensure that all future decisions of the Comintern will be binding for its member parties. Moscow rule.