Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Whole provinces of southern Ireland have become battlefields in a bitter guerrilla war. ‘The area of active lawlessness is extending to counties which have hitherto been comparatively free from the more violent kinds of crime’, reads the weekly report to the British cabinet. There are thirty-two British casualties in Ireland for that week alone. Attacks are reported against the distribution of the mail. London is informed of the case of a thirteen-year-old girl found in possession of a machine gun and three revolvers, sentenced to detention in a Catholic reformatory.

  The war divides, building walls of mistrust between communities and individuals. The longer the violence continues, the more impossible it is to stand above the fray. Ireland’s people find themselves in one camp or the other. Friend or enemy. Patriot or traitor. These are the only categories left. There is no middle ground–or at least none that is safe.

  Over the winter weeks, an Irish woman in County Cork–a Presbyterian landowner–is kidnapped by the IRA. Her offence is to have passed on information about a planned IRA ambush when advised by a local grocer not to take a particular road one day. She pleads for her life and is shot as a spy. In Cork itself, the houses of Protestant businessmen suspected of loyalty to the old regime are burned down. British reprisals are now met with IRA counter-reprisals. Six civilians are caught in the crossfire when a train carrying British soldiers is shot up. The house in which Michael Collins was born–now occupied by his brother Johnny–is destroyed. Eight children of the Collins family are left without a home.

  In those areas under martial law, life is lived with the constant threat of disruption and arrest, and of intimidation by friends and foes alike. New weapons are devised to try and shift the odds of victory. Empty shell cases fired by the British into the sea to test their artillery are recovered by fishermen and filled with a home-made explosive known as ‘Irish cheddar’ and turned into road mines. Normal daily life has been sabotaged by war. Nothing escapes it.

  MUNICH: The NSDAP is still in start-up mode. It is growing fast–and yet never quite fast enough. It must compete for attention and support with plenty of other more established organisations. The Freikorps and nationalist and patriotic associations of Bavaria have fifty or a hundred times as many members as Hitler and Drexler’s party. They look askance at the upstart on the fringes of Munich’s patriotic scene, with no substantial links to the Bavarian establishment but plenty of Protestants and non-Bavarians. At a nationalist anti-Versailles congress where all these groups are represented and which Adolf hopes to hijack, his attempt at a speech is drowned out by a brass band.

  There are those who think that, if it wants to grow, the NSDAP needs to merge with other like-minded groups. Adolf is against it. Some even propose trying to get close to the Communists as a means of siphoning off their support amongst the workers. The party’s financial situation is disastrous. The Beobachter makes no money. The NSDAP survives from speech to speech. The bigger the audience at Hitler’s events, the greater the fees. In February, Adolf speaks to a crowd of six thousand at the Zirkus Krone at an entry price of one mark per person: war wounded go free, Jews not allowed.

  Adolf himself relies on the kindness of strangers to provide him with enough money and food to get by, never much worrying where it comes from. He has a sweet tooth, it turns out. Cakes home-baked by the party faithful are a favourite. He wears the same blue suit and trench coat almost every day. In between his speaking engagements, and meetings with the inner circle of the party, he hangs around in cafés. In these months, he often only gets out of bed at midday. One might almost mistake him for a Bohemian.

  PARIS: A new play is about to begin at the Théâtre Deux Masques. The curtain rises on the office of Madame de Challens, aristocratic headmistress of a private girl’s school in Versailles called Les Fauvettes. Preparations are under way for prize-giving, an event marked the previous year by the unexplained death of one of the school’s pupils.

  The plot of Les Détraquées, or ‘The Crazed Women’, is clunky. Its themes are both racy and gruesome: sex, murder and the power of mind over matter (and occasionally mind over mind). The school, it turns out, is little more than a playground for the predatory lesbianism of Madame de Challens and her lover Solange, a Parisian dance teacher with a taste for heroin. Both are drawn to Lucienne, the prettiest girl in the school, who obeys de Challens as if controlled by telepathy. ‘I’ve never met anyone with such a passive nature’, Madame de Challens tells Solange excitedly. ‘She obeys my thoughts.’ An unequal ménage à trois is formed.

  In the play’s second half, Lucienne has disappeared. The local police are stumped. Ultimately it is a doctor with experience of psychiatric patients who unravels the mystery. Solange is a ‘femme fatale’, he declares–something that the unimaginative police believe to be nothing more than a cinematic invention. The doctor insists that such characters really exist and they are more common after the war than ever before: women whose psychiatric sickness drives them to seek ever greater nervous stimulation. When opium and cocaine are not enough, he explains, they seek still more risky highs. Why not sex and murder? ‘Everyone poisons themselves their own way, no?’ the doctor asks, before offering a cigarette to a policeman. At the end of the play, Lucienne’s body is found in a cupboard, evidently tortured to death in a sexual game by the two older women.

  For André Breton, the whole affair is captivating. His enjoyment is no doubt enhanced by knowing the true identity of one of the play’s authors. Referred to in the programme simply as Olaf, he is none other than André’s former teacher and Freud’s former colleague the great neurologist Babinski. For André, Les Détraquées is not a spectacle, but an act of literary bravery: a serious attempt to embrace the latest theories of the mind–even where these are shocking. The psychological mechanisms to which the play alludes–telepathy, mind control, addiction, unseen drives–all echo Breton’s own obsessions, adventures and experiences. The play speaks to a world coming to terms with its own neuroses, confronting it with the realities it would prefer to cover up.

  Why can’t Dada be more like this?

  MOSCOW: The latest zigzag takes definite form in the impatient revolutionary’s mind. Some people will not like it. But then again, the ends–if anyone can remember what they were–will surely justify the means.

  Vladimir is still pushing for concessions for foreign businesses, a little too eagerly for several of his party colleagues. His latest concern is that the oilfields of Baku will collapse without the involvement of foreign enterprise. ‘Disaster is imminent’, Vladimir writes: ‘The working out of the terms must be speeded up.’ Now he is thinking of something even more radical: allowing peasants to sell whatever surplus they produce individually, upending several years when the policy has been for the state to requisition it and private commerce was declared anathema. The change is a matter of political and economic common sense, Vladimir has come to believe. The peasants must be brought onside. More grain must be produced. A regime that cannot feed its people is not long for this world, as Lenin knows, and no one denies that profit can be an incentive. Lenin can already hear the clamour of opposition from the old Bolshevik believers. Unthinkable! Preposterous! Letting the very seed of capitalism back into the bosom of the Soviet Republic. Giving in to the backward peasants. Giving up on state monopoly. Turning back the clock. Vladimir Lenin turned into a shopkeeper.

  Well, yes. But maybe it is the only way to save the regime–and nothing is more important than that. To give up power would be to give up on the revolution. And that is something that Vladimir will not do. Party, regime and revolution are all one in the end. What helps one, helps the other. ‘The proletarian class = the Communist Party = Soviet Power’, he wrote last year. When it comes to weighing up means and ends, Vladimir (and Leon too) have always thought that the latter justifies the former. There is a certain devious charm to using the market to save its supposed antithesis. That appeals to Lenin’s mind, a sort of intellectual one-upmanship over the capitalists. If it w
orks, that is. The emergency is acute. Last year was dry, this year has been little better, and if the weather does not change and the peasants do not plant, Russia will face famine. There are peasant risings in the Volga region, protest marches in Moscow. Now the rot has even spread to Petrograd, birthplace of the revolution.

  How bad will it get? Some sense a dangerous mood in Russia’s second city resembling that of 1917. The authorities take away soldiers’ shoes to prevent them from joining demonstrations. Strikers are locked up. There are rumours that the Kronstadt sailors are ready to revolt, not to defend the Bolsheviks but to destroy them, saying they do not represent the will of the people. Already in February, newspapers in Paris and New York report that the Kronstadt batteries are trained on Petrograd. At the end of the month, a proclamation spread around the streets of Petrograd calls for freedom of assembly for workers, new elections to the Soviets, the release of political prisoners–another revolution, in other words. Isn’t this what the Bolsheviks once stood for themselves? That was then. Now it sounds like dangerous talk.

  Party, country, all at sea. ‘My nerves are kaput’, Vladimir writes to Comrade Clara. He starts putting his zigzag down on paper.

  BERLIN: In February, Einstein gets his answer from the Americans. He asked for too much money. But then, almost immediately, another opportunity arises: to go to the United States at the invitation of the Zionist organisation to raise money for a new university planned for Jerusalem. This appeals to Albert. How could it not? A charitable mission with a political purpose. Plans are made. The Rotterdam will sail from Plymouth in the spring. Chaim Weizmann, the British chemist and leader of the Zionist movement, will host Albert and Elsa aboard.

  Albert’s German friends cannot believe the news. For any German to travel to America while a state of war still exists between the two countries, and just as a schedule for the payment of German reparations is being prepared–well, the optics, as they say, are bad. ‘The whole world looks on you as the most important German Jew’, Albert’s friend Fritz Haber tells him. ‘If, at this moment, you ostentatiously cosy up to the British and their friends, people in this country will see that as evidence of Jewish faithlessness.’

  Einstein responds the same day. He has made up his mind. No argument will deflect him. ‘I am not needed for my abilities, of course, but only for my name’, he admits. ‘Its promotional value is anticipated to reap considerable success amongst our rich tribespeople in Dollaria.’ In the name of internationalism, he is bound to do his duty: to spread the word of science and to link arms with like-minded people across the ocean.

  In any case, Einstein writes, ‘I must go… the steamship seats have already been booked’.

  CHICAGO–CINCINNATI–NEW YORK: ‘There is nothing in the wide world–in the great universe–to intimidate Marcus Garvey’, Garvey says in a pit stop in Chicago. He tells police spies in the audience not to worry: he doesn’t mind them taking notes of what he says, as long as they understand he is not a Bolshevik.

  Look how few statues there are to black men and women in the United States, he tells an audience in Cincinnati. ‘All that we have done was to carry mortar for the other fellow when he was building up his property’, he says. ‘The time has come for us to build up in Africa’. (Garvey is at this time trying to develop a business relationship with Liberia through the good offices of the mayor of its capital, Monrovia.)

  Back in New York, he prepares his departure for a tour of the Caribbean. He obtains a new British passport and secures an apology from The Crisis for a misstatement of fact in one of their articles on Garvey, the UNIA and the Black Star Line. The correction reads: ‘Our statement that the Yarmouth is a wooden vessel is incorrect, as it is in fact steel.’

  Before he leaves, the Provisional President of Africa gives a speech to the faithful at Liberty Hall. He takes aim at those who call Africa the ‘dark continent’, noting rather the diamond-and-gold brilliancy of its future, its mineral wealth waiting to be tapped by its rightful owners. And he launches a verbal assault on the new British Secretary of the Colonies, just moved sideways from his post at the War Office. ‘This temperamental, unscrupulous, and audacious and irresponsible person’, Garvey contends, ‘has done more than any ten men in the British Empire to bring disrepute and bad credit morally and financially upon the British government.’ He is referring, of course, to Winston Churchill.

  VIENNA: Freud writes to a Russian psychoanalyst who has recently fled the Bolsheviks. He promises to help him settle in Prague, fast becoming one of the centres of Russian émigrés in Europe. ‘Your wishes that your great fatherland may soon awaken again, and come out of its crisis’, Freud writes, ‘find in us the strongest sympathetic response.’

  There seems little chance of Freud visiting Russia. ‘How much would I have liked–protected by powerful connections–to see your magnificent Moscow’, he confides. It is not to be: ‘All gone! There will be no change in my lifetime.’

  KRONSTADT FORTRESS–MOSCOW: Across the ice from Petrograd, the island fortress of Kronstadt, home of the Baltic Fleet and symbol of the revolution of 1917, is in open mutiny against Bolshevik rule. The local Soviet is deposed and Bolshevik leaders thrown in jail. New elections will be organised. In Paris, Prague and Istanbul there is rejoicing–Russia’s exiled leaders offer what assistance they can.

  The Communist Party has alienated itself from the workers, the mutineers declare. All they want is what the revolution promised them: freedom. Lenin calls the rebellion a White plot cooked up in Paris. The White generals, says Pravda, have ‘bared their fangs’. Family members of sailors are taken hostage in Petrograd. Trotsky, the man who made Kronstadt his second home in 1917, is sent to smash the uprising. Mercy will only be shown to those who give up unconditionally. ‘Your clemency, Mr Trotsky, will not be needed’, the mutineers respond. A pamphlet dropped from the air tells the sailors to surrender, or they will be ‘shot like partridges’. De Gaulle’s acquaintance Misha is sent to command the assault.

  One ultimatum is ignored. A second passes also without surrender. At the beginning of March, the Red Army launches a first attack across the ice. The Kronstadt newspaper issues its own retort. The Communists have replaced the ‘hammer and the sickle’ with the ‘bayonet and the barred window’. They have stifled the creative spirit of revolution with bureaucracy, turned work into slavery. Now that they have won power, there is nothing they will not stoop to in order to keep it: slander, violence, deceit. But a third revolution is on its way: ‘At last, the policeman’s club of Communist autocracy has been broken’. On the ground, a Red Army attack is repelled.

  Even as the guns are firing outside Petrograd, in Moscow Vladimir commends his latest policy zigzag to a meeting of the Communist Party: letting the peasants sell their grain, accelerating concessions to foreign capitalists. He rips into his opponents from all sides. The splits and squabbles must stop. To some arguments–Kronstadt arguments, he calls them–there is only one response: ‘a gun’. He jibes Trotsky, accusing him of grandstanding on the trades union business, of going too far in his call to simply make them servants of the state, the shock troops of a militarised labour force. But nor is Lenin going to tolerate the opposing tendency advocating putting independent unions in charge of the economy, which Vladimir considers a dangerous deviation towards syndicalism. Where would the revolution be then? It needs a party vanguard. To simply hand things over to the workers–many of whom are not even Bolsheviks–would be an abdication of responsibility.

  One must not make a ‘fetish of democratic principles’, as Trotsky puts it with characteristic hauteur, after his own position has been rejected. No one should forget the ‘historical birth-right of the party’, the war commissar says, ‘obliged to maintain its dictatorship regardless of temporary wavering in the spontaneous moods of the masses, regardless of the temporary vacillations even in the working class’. Trotsky has a way with words. But he uses them too much.

  In Moscow, Vladimir alternates defence and attack. H
e acknowledges that the state has ‘bureaucratic distortions’–but these can be corrected. He accepts that ‘we may have made mistakes’ in the past–but there was ‘no alternative’. Perhaps we nationalised too much, too quickly. Perhaps we abolished the market too readily. He is quite plain in admitting what he now proposes: letting peasants sell their produce means ‘turning back towards capitalism’. But it is expedient. He is vague about how it will work: ‘I only wish to prove to you that theoretically it is conceivable.’ There is no alternative. Taxing something is better than trying to requisition nothing. Vladimir wants to reassure his followers he has not gone soft on the peasants: ‘The peasant must do a bit of starving so as to relieve the factories and towns from complete starvation.’ Proletarian dictatorship will not be weakened. Compulsion will be used where necessary. Meanwhile, Kronstadt is bombed from the air.

  Reconstruction will take perhaps a decade, perhaps more, Lenin says. The country has been beaten to within an ‘inch of its life’ for seven straight years: ‘It’s a mercy she can hobble about on crutches.’ Foreign concessions are such a crutch. He recalls being told by Clare Sheridan in the Kremlin last year that when the Bolsheviks came to power, British politicians called them crocodiles. Vladimir smarts: ‘Crocodiles are despicable’. Now Britain wants to trade. See how far the Soviet Republic has come! (A trade agreement is signed the following day, including a promise to stop hostile propaganda against each other–a promise Moscow has no intention of abiding by.)

  In the final minutes of the congress, when everyone is exhausted or beaten into submission, Lenin pulls off his masterstroke. A motion on party unity. Who can be against that? The odd voice raised in comradely enquiry as to the correctness of the party line–totally ineffectual, anyhow–will be permitted. But organised dissent against the party line will be met with expulsion. Factions are banned. Some sense that a Rubicon is being crossed, even if they cannot quite perceive the full significance of Lenin’s move for themselves. (Trotsky has no conception it could be ever used against him.) The Soviets have already been hollowed out, and made the creatures of the Bolsheviks. Now party democracy is set aside. For all practical purposes, the leadership will rule over the party as it wishes, and the party will rule over everything. The structure is completing itself. All it needs is a mechanic to sit at the controls and make it work better. If only there was someone loyal and reliable who could do the job. Certainly not Trotsky. ‘A temperamental man’, Vladimir decides. ‘As for politics, he hasn’t got a clue.’