Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  REVAL, ESTONIA–MOSCOW: Exhilarated, transformed and convinced that Bolshevism is a wonderful experiment in new living–whatever nasty things Cousin Winston might have to say about it–Clare Sheridan prepares to leave Russia. She hands out her spare stockings, soap, shoes, gloves and hat to her new friends. To one she donates a particularly valuable item: her hot-water bottle. Boarding her ship home on the Baltic coast, Clare begs the captain to be particularly careful with the oversized packing cases she has brought from Moscow. ‘They contain the heads of Lenin and Trotsky’, she explains. The captain looks impressed. ‘Plaster heads and breakable’, she adds.

  Back in the Kremlin, Vladimir receives an old friend from Germany, a woman he has not seen since the revolution: Clara Zetkin. They are joined by Nadya–and a cat, which reminds them of the times Rosa Luxemburg’s cat used to purr contentedly in the impatient revolutionary’s lap. The old comrades drink black tea together. Someone goes off in search of jam as a special treat. They talk about life and art. Vladimir admits to feeling somewhat out of touch when it comes to artistic matters. ‘We don’t understand the new art any more, we just limp behind it’, he says. He admits to even being something of a ‘barbarian’ in such matters.

  The tendency towards artistic experimentation leaves him cold: ‘I cannot value the works of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other isms as the highest expressions of artistic genius. I don’t understand them. They give me no pleasure.’ Art for art’s sake? A bourgeois idea. Over the autumn, Vladimir orders that the organisation responsible for all this cultural experimentation be reined in, with the party placed firmly in charge and class war made the cultural lodestar for the future.

  In the end, what really matters, of course, is not whether people go to the theatre or the opera–landlord culture, Vladimir calls it, though he used to hum arias after going to the opera as a young man in Kazan–but whether the great broad masses of the people can read. ‘Don’t complain so bitterly of the illiteracy’, Comrade Clara objects. The illiteracy of the masses helped the revolution: ‘It prevented the mind of the workers and peasants from being stopped up and corrupted with bourgeois ideas and conceptions’. Vladimir nods. Yes, he says, but what about bureaucracy? If the people can read, they can do more things for themselves and require less supervision. The path to communist utopia lies through literacy. Nonetheless, there remains an important question of what people read–which is why it is essential to ensure that libraries stock the right books. People must not be led astray.

  Another time, Clara comes to Vladimir’s office in the Kremlin to talk business: whether Germany is ripe for another revolutionary attempt, how women’s organisations should relate to the Communist Party and so forth. They end up talking about sex. Vladimir upbraids her. He has been told that in Communist Party circles in Germany, women spend most of their time debating marriage and sex. ‘What a waste!’ he exclaims. Everything that needed to be said on that score was said years ago. He is particularly cross about the Viennese, with their pseudoscientific pamphlets and dissertations on the matter. ‘Freudian theory is the modern fashion’, Vladimir complains. Personally, he dislikes all this ‘poking about in sexual matters’. It is a hobby of the intellectuals. It distracts people from the proletarian revolution–and that is all that matters in the end. Class war is more urgent than ‘marriage forms of Maoris or incest in olden times’.

  Worse, all this Vienna stuff is getting at the young, Vladimir says. It is positively unhealthy. He worries about the ‘over-excitement and exaggeration in the sexual life of some of them’. All these ideas that sex should be as simple as drinking a glass of water. Nonsense! A thought straight from the bourgeois gutter! All this so-called ‘living to the full’ is rubbish. Vladimir tells the story of one young comrade he knows who seems to stagger from one love affair to the next. And how is that going to help the revolution? ‘The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces,’ he tells Clara; ‘it cannot tolerate orgiastic conditions, such as are normal for the decadent heroes and heroines of D’Annunzio.’ What young people need is sport, fresh air and a good dose of Karl Marx. Healthy bodies, healthy minds!

  There is hardly time to discuss the other matter Clara came to talk about: bringing more women over to the revolutionary cause. If only Comrade Inessa were here! Vladimir gives Clara a lecture on the subject. Working women should understand that the root of their problems is capitalism. Their freedom can only be achieved under communism. He is all in favour of more agitation amongst women–‘working groups, commissions, committees, bureaus or whatever you like’. But that is not feminism. It is simply ‘practical, revolutionary expediency’. There can be no special organisations outside the party. Vladimir warms to his theme; Clara cannot get a word in edgeways. Male workers must be taught to help with the housework, rather than act as if they were a factory boss at home. The problem is bourgeois mentality. Proper communism will change that, he explains.

  There is a knock at the door. The impatient revolutionary’s next meeting. Ten minutes later there is another knock. Lenin is late. He tells Clara he will blame it on women who talk too much. He helps her with her coat: ‘You must dress more warmly. Moscow is not Stuttgart. Don’t catch cold. Auf wiedersehen!’

  VIENNA–NEW YORK: The truce between the old-world Viennese and the New Yorker trying to help him to his share of American-style fame and fortune does not last so far as the end of the year. Edward conjures up the possibility of a well-paid lecture tour, detailing it in a long cable. Freud’s initial reply is brusque: ‘NOT CONVENIENT’, an Austrian telegraphist taps out. It is some weeks before Freud gets around to composing a letter on the subject to send to his nephew.

  A lecture tour would make the American analysts jealous, Freud explains. And the money on offer–a guarantee of at least ten thousand dollars–is not enough. There is a psychological element to this for Sigmund. ‘The outcome of this undertaking would be that the New York people had got the better of me’, he complains. ‘They could get my treatment cheaply while I would get nothing out of them.’ His fee should be five or ten times higher. After all, ‘it is not much in America’.

  DEARBORN: The Independent has become a machine, a production line spewing out anti-Semitism every week. The hack who has to write all this stuff–a sometime preacher who believes Anglo-Saxons are the Bible’s ‘chosen people’ and that Britain and North America are the true Holy Land–starts taking to the bottle. The articles published between May and October are collected in a book entitled The International Jew that is sent out to influential community leaders, for free. Hundreds of thousands of copies are produced.

  ISTANBUL–BIZERTE, TUNISIA: The first of the Russian ships offered to France as security set sail again for Bizerte naval base in the French protectorate of Tunisia.

  There, the Russian sailors are treated with suspicion, as if infected with the virus of Bolshevism. (It does not help that they are penniless too, relying on a French wage of ten francs a day.) The authorities in Tunisia suggest that the Russians be sent on immediately to the neighbouring French colony of Algeria.

  Wrangel’s refugee army has become a problem no one wants.

  MUNICH: Adolf declares that he is against Germany joining the League of Nations. Would it be right for young Germans to be sent to defend someone else’s land? Has the League ever done anything to help the Irish in their national struggle, he asks, or the Indians in their fight against the British? Even in America, the country of the League’s originator, it is viewed as a ‘crazy utopia, yet amongst our own enslaved people you still find people willing to defend it’. The only strength any country can rely on is the strength of their own people, the solidarity of the Volk. This is the national in national socialism.

  ‘We want to build’, the mangy field-runner declares on another occasion, ‘not just smash everything up like the Bolsheviks in Russia.’ Germany’s productive forces–from the business managers to the workers–must function as one national unit. The needs and interests of t
he community must predominate over the individual. Every German citizen–every person, that is, whom the NSDAP determines is worthy of membership in the German Volk–must have equal rights and bear equal responsibilities in the collective. Work must be upheld as a cardinal virtue. The young must be educated and protected. This is the socialism in national socialism.

  Hitler’s events are sold out. But is progress quick enough for the party to break free from its beer-hall origins and become a serious political player? The number of fee-paying party members, though double what it was in the summer, is still less than a single Hofbräuhaus audience. In order to give an impression of greater scale, numbered membership cards start at 500.

  In December, a unique opportunity arises. The Thule Society’s Völkischer Beobachter comes up for sale. In the past, though not controlled by the Nazi Party, the newspaper has been favourable to it. If ownership were to fall into the wrong hands now, the party might lose that thin oxygen of publicity on which it survives. The Beobachter has only a few thousand readers, nothing like Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. But as Ford himself has shown, readership can expand with the right editorial line. Adolf persuades Dietrich Eckart to mortgage his home to find the money to buy the paper. A Freikorps general agrees to get hard cash from an army slush fund. Within twenty-four hours the newspaper is secured.

  The first edition of the Völkischer Beobachter after the change of ownership is much the same as before. In between advertisements for hot chocolate and requests for subscribers to send in their fees early for the year 1921 it includes a helpful primer on the swastika and the announcement of the publication of an address book for non-Jewish businesses, allowing völkisch consumers to exercise the power of their wallet.

  By the end of the year the newspaper has become a purely party paper, advertising Nazi meetings and finding an anti-Semitic slant to every story. Adolf Hitler can add articles to speeches in his propaganda armoury, reaching out to a far larger potential audience than can be accommodated in a beer hall.

  PARIS: Breton takes odd editing and consultancy jobs to keep off the breadline. Despite the support of Marcel Proust, he loses out on a major literary prize. Yet not everything is gloomy. Simone Kahn has agreed to marry him. André feels like a changed man.

  Tzara and Breton avoid each other. Paris Dada descends further into spectacle: high jinks, jazz, and a lot of self-indulgent laughter. Over the course of the year, Tzara produces no fewer than four Dadaist manifestos. His tricks are starting to wear thin.

  ‘Hold on to your overcoat’, André writes in the December edition of Littérature, ‘Dada is not dead’. But who is in charge?

  LUDWIGSHÖHE, BAVARIA: Travelling through Germany from the Netherlands on the occasion of his honeymoon, Kaiser Wilhelm’s equerry pays a visit to a large villa on the outskirts of Munich. The villa’s owner is a rather portly man, given to conspiracy theories. He hopes a new volume of his wartime documents, some hundreds of pages long, will ‘fill the German people with renewed national will and open their eyes to the truth’. They will prove his own blamelessness for Germany’s wartime defeat once and for all. As Wilhelm’s equerry is ushered in, General Ludendorff shows off a statuette of the Kaiser sitting on his desk, and a portrait of Wilhelm on the wall. No hard feelings, it would appear.

  Conversation quickly turns to the chances of Wilhelm’s restoration. Ludendorff proclaims himself in favour of the Hohenzollerns but, he warns, perhaps the Kaiser’s sons might be better placed to take over the reins. Other German dynasties–he mentions the royal houses of Baden and Hanover–might stand in the way of the Hohenzollerns by asserting their rights as co-creators of the empire if Wilhelm were to propose simply returning to the post of Kaiser himself.

  On his return to Huis Doorn, the equerry finds a dark mood. The Kaiserin is sick. It is uncertain whether she will recover. As usual, Wilhelm takes refuge outside. ‘The park looks ever barer’, an aide writes. ‘One tree falls after another’. Occasionally the Kaiser shares his latest insight on the world situation, predicting war between America and Japan, or war between Russia and China against Japan, or war by Russia, China and Japan against all of Europe. Such a race war cannot be far off. Europe must prepare for it.

  NEW YORK: William Du Bois launches his broadside in the direction of uptown Harlem.

  Marcus Garvey’s first commercial scheme, Du Bois writes, was for a farm school in Jamaica which ran into financial difficulties and failed, causing Garvey to come to America. His political projects in the United States were similarly unsuccessful until a sufficient number of his Jamaican compatriots had moved to New York to provide him with a solid base in the city. Du Bois provides a short history of the Black Star Line. The convention of August 1920 is covered in a few lines.

  Then come the questions on matters of honesty, businesslike attitude and practical chances of success. On the first of these, Du Bois is generous to Garvey, a man he has never met. His tone is patronising–that of an upper-crust patrician looking down on a West Indian peon–but not unkind. ‘He has been charged with dishonesty and graft,’ Du Bois writes, ‘but he seems to me essentially an honest and sincere man with a tremendous vision, great dynamic force and an unselfish desire to serve.’

  There, the compliments end. The list of defects William Du Bois finds in his rival is long. He is ‘dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious’, Du Bois writes. He mentions the breakdown of his marriage, as well as various lawsuits in which Garvey has had to make an account of himself. Worse, ‘he has absolutely no business sense, no flair for real organization’. Du Bois is highly doubtful of the back-to-Africa movement.

  A tone of mockery enters into the article when the editor of The Crisis describes the personality cult which Garvey seems to have encouraged within the UNIA: all the grandiose titles and gowns and pretensions to nobility. ‘He has become to thousands of people a sort of religion.’

  A second instalment of the article is promised for January.

  FIUME: D’Annunzio is now officially Regent of his mini-state, Canaro. A constitution is promulgated. Postage stamps emblazoned with his profile appear. Men shave their heads in emulation of Gabriele’s baldness. Some go so far as to imagine that Fiume will now annex Italy, rather than the other way around.

  On the surface, the Fiume experiment seems as lively as ever. The legionnaires take to wearing an extraordinary range of self-designed military uniforms, complete with feathers and Roman daggers. When the Italian conductor Toscanini (once an election candidate for the Fascists) comes to Fiume with his orchestra, a mock battle with live weapons is staged for the orchestra’s entertainment, leading to several injuries amongst the musicians (a few of whom get so excited they decide to take part themselves). Several musical instruments are shattered by shrapnel.

  But, in truth, D’Annunzio’s adventure is reaching a dead end. When Gabriele learns of a treaty about to be signed by the Italian and the Yugoslav governments which will make Fiume a self-governing Free State, never to be incorporated into either Italy or Yugoslavia, he flies into a rage. This is not the ending he wanted. The fact that Mussolini and others view the treaty as a great success makes it worse. Public attention shifts elsewhere. In November, three hundred Fascists interrupt the swearing-in of the new Socialist administration in Bologna. Several are killed in the ensuing fracas. This is the front line now.

  D’Annunzio withdraws into seclusion. The Italian government issues an ultimatum for him to leave. Some of his closest followers urge him to clear out now and accept the laurels that must come his way for saving Fiume from the Yugoslavs. Gabriele’s response is blistering: ‘I have to consider you as deserters to the Cause in the face of the enemy.’

  He waits for the ultimatum to pass. Surely the Italian army will not attack its own.

  CHICAGO: Ernest Hemingway’s latest from the seamy underside of prohibition-land. American gunmen from the big cities are being shipped across to Ireland–the ‘Red Island’–to carry out contract killings.
The going rate, Ernest reports, is four hundred dollars: enough to then go to France and have a good time blowing it all on the horses. ‘They say that if you throw a stone into a crowd at the famous Longchamps racecourse outside of Paris, you would hit an American gunman, pickpocket or strong-arm artist’, he reports. So much for American hoodlums. On the other hand, bootlegging business is bad. Too much booze is just being made right here under the noses of the police.

  ANKARA: Mustafa Kemal’s twenty-three-year-old female admirer Fikriye plays the piano at his hillside villa. He knocks back rakı late into the night with his army buddies. The Armenians have been defeated in the east–crushed between the Bolsheviks and the Turks. The Greek nationalist government in Athens has fallen.

  Kemal dashes off two diplomatic telegrams to new friends. ‘We know how vital it is that the European proletariat and the enslaved and colonised peoples fight against the common enemy’, he writes to the Bolshevik nationalities’ commissar, Comrade Stalin. He thanks him for his work bringing Bolsheviks and Muslims closer together. He notes the importance of smashing imperialism to achieve the ‘demolition of capitalism’.

  Then one to Lenin greeting the Bolsheviks’ recognition of the independence of Dagestan in the north Caucasus, referring to Moscow’s new tendency to establish autonomous republics in its unruly extremities. ‘Autonomy does not mean independence’, Stalin is at pains to point out when he travels there himself. The language has changed but the territorial ambitions remain. The Russian Empire is being recreated under another name.

  MOSCOW: ‘We are now passing through a crucial period of transition,’ Lenin announces, ‘something of a zigzag transition from war to economic development’. Transition! Zigzag! Those words again.