MOSCOW: Vladimir orders imported German sedatives from the special Kremlin pharmacy, off-limits to outsiders. ‘My nerves are still hurting.’
He toys with the idea of going on holiday to the Caucasus as a rest cure. He enquires about a possible spot. Quiet, and not too high in the mountains would be best (Nadya’s heart could not manage it, and they must go for walks). On the other hand, he worries about the goings-on in the capital which may have to draw him back. There is the upcoming diplomatic conference to worry about. He has given clear instructions for how it is to be handled: the goal is to secure a trade deal and ensure there is no rapprochement between Germany, France and Britain. But who can be trusted these days? Lenin and Trotsky are squabbling like hens again about reform. Why are they not more like eagles?
One of Vladimir’s doctors proposes an operation to remove the bullets still lodged in the impatient revolutionary’s body from that assassination attempt back in 1918. There are concerns he is suffering from lead poisoning. Some think that perhaps the bullets were dipped in some kind of slow-working poison, a fiendish idea cooked up by his political enemies. An operation is arranged for the day after Vladimir’s fifty-second birthday. A German surgeon is brought in from Berlin.
At least the party is now in safer hands. Comrade Stalin is made General Secretary of the Communist Party in April, becoming its coordinator-in-chief, the man to cut through the chaos and make things work. A hard job, but someone has to do it. And he is virtually doing it already, with all the different posts he holds, with the way he is always there to help. Not like Trotsky, who has developed the annoying habit of ostentatiously studying English during Politburo meetings, only piping up irregularly to make the odd withering remark about how one or other of his fellow colleagues has screwed something up.
CHICAGO–GENOA, ITALY: A postcard arrives at the Hemingway family residence, with a picture of a European hilltop fort. ‘If you’ve read the Daily Star you know all about this town’, Ernest scribbles home to his father.
The town in question is Genoa, an industrial port in northern Italy, chosen as the venue for a major diplomatic conference, the first where the Soviets are invited to attend as a semi-recognised power. British ambitions in the lead-up to the conference are high. They hope that the United States, the new master of world finance, can be prevailed upon to financially underwrite the architecture of what would amount to a revised European peace. Germany will be brought in from the cold, and a moratorium placed on its reparation payments. The French will be kept sweet by Russia being forced to repay Tsarist-era debts. The Soviet presence at the conference is unpalatable but unavoidable: after all, how can the Bolsheviks be made to pay the debts of the Tsars if no one will speak to them?
It is a crowded agenda. It proves impossible to line up all sides behind a new deal. The French are unimpressed by what they see as a manoeuvre to let the Germans wiggle out of reparation payments while they are left to cover the cost of rebuilding their country (and remain on the hook for their debts to the Americans). Everyone knows that the Russians cannot be trusted and will make whatever mischief they can. In the end, the Americans do not even bother to attend the Genoa conference, dashing hopes that the United States will play a constructive role in resetting Europe’s affairs.
The conference goes ahead anyway. For weeks Ernest is run off his feet trying to figure out what the hell is going on, attempting to get the right accreditations for the right meetings, gossiping with the other journalists over Chianti in a local trattoria and guessing who will do what next. The British and French delegations strive to keep things serious and dull. The Germans, though more desperate for some kind of breakthrough, seem no more exciting. Ernest finds the Russians most interesting to watch.
Some see the Soviet regime as little better than a gang of criminals. Stories of Soviet excesses–starvation, murder, repression–are commonplace. It is well established that Soviet agents and sympathisers are actively working to overthrow the governments of Europe and America. To have even been invited to Genoa is, therefore, a magnificent Soviet propaganda coup. It gives legitimacy to Lenin’s regime. It confirms the practical recognition–if not the formal acceptance–that the Communists are firmly in charge in Moscow. It also stirs the hornet’s nest of Italian politics. Nervous soldiers patrol the city in pairs, a warning to leftist troublemakers to stay indoors. Hemingway notes the graffiti on the streets of the working-class parts of Genoa: Viva Lenin! Viva Trotsky! (The possibility of an assassination attempt–Polish agents, perhaps–is considered too great for Vladimir or Leon to attend in person.)
Ernest hangs around the villa housing the Soviet delegation–safely located some miles outside town–as much as possible. It may not be as magnificent or so well located as other residences, but the cast of characters is unbeatable. Take Louise Bryant’s friend Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik feminist who advocates sexual revolution as the necessary accompaniment to social and political revolution. Consider the case of Chicherin, the former anti-war activist turned Commissar of Foreign Affairs who once spent time in London’s Brixton jail (and who later that year pays a visit to D’Annunzio at his new palace by Lake Garda). Then there is the businessman-turned-Bolshevik Krasin, a man as familiar with the techniques of bank-robbing as he is with German industrial management (and who was once sculpted by Clare Sheridan). ‘Four years ago, they were hunted, fleeing men,’ Hemingway writes enthusiastically; ‘now they sit at the table with representatives of every great power, except the United States.’ It is hard not to find these characters more interesting than the stuffed shirts down the road. (The young journalist’s commentary on the attractiveness of Russian secretaries leads to the screaming headline back home, ‘Russian Girls at Genoa’.)
In the end, it is the Russians and the Germans–the two outsiders at the conference–who manage to steal the show, by signing their own separate agreement, a few miles from Genoa in Rapallo. Germany formally recognises the Soviet regime and renounces any financial claims on Russia. Both sides proclaim their goodwill towards the other and their intention to cooperate on economic matters. (Inevitably, German nationalists call Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau a traitor for signing up to what they consider to be a Communist stitch-up, unaware of secret military protocols allowing for a new German army to be trained on Soviet soil and for a secret poison-gas facility to be built.) The British and French are taken by surprise. They had not expected such audacity. Their worst nightmare is now taking shape: the two enemies of the Versailles Treaty in alliance.
Though the main conference stumbles on, it is beginning to look like a fiasco. The British are embarrassed; the French are worried. ‘What was the use of four years of war?’ asks one French nationalist newspaper: ‘What was the point of losing one and a half million French lives?’ Having won the war, is the French government now losing the peace? Some blame the British, accusing London of failing to back up Paris sufficiently on the matter of reparations, and thus opening the way for German adventurism. The wartime alliance is looking a little rocky now. The French view the British as unreliable backsliders; the British worry that France’s reparation anxieties are just a cover for their intention to establish the border on the Rhine which they had been unable to achieve at Versailles.
In a speech in the eastern province of Lorraine–directed as much at London as Berlin–the French premier makes clear his concerns. Poland is directly threatened by German–Russian rapprochement, he notes. The threat to France is more indirect, but no less real. ‘France, which clearly sees the dangers of tomorrow, will try to convince our allies that the best way to avoid their realisation is to never answer intimidation with weakness’, he says. ‘As for us, we are resolved to do whatever it takes to keep what was given to us in a treaty paid for by our heroes’ blood.’ The message is clear. France is prepared to act alone, if necessary.
Meeting in the occupied Rhineland, French political and military leaders dust off old plans to occupy the valley of the Ruhr. If Germany c
annot be made to pay, France will take what is hers by force.
MOSCOW: Vladimir’s operation has been a success. The doctors congratulate the patient. One bullet was three millimetres from his carotid artery, it turns out. The course of history was almost very different.
Lenin’s physical recovery is slow. The dictator’s body is weak. He suffers relapses. But he will not let this keep him from his duties. There is always more work to do. His mind races. He writes a celebratory article for the tenth anniversary of Pravda, crowing that imperialism is now on the run all around the globe. The so-called Great Powers have been fatally weakened by the war. They are helpless to resist the awakening of the peoples of the world against their overlords. ‘The present “victors” in the first imperialist slaughter have not the strength to defeat small–I might say, tiny–Ireland.’ Rebellion in India and anti-imperialist revolt in China will be next. The ‘not far distant’ triumph of the world proletariat is a matter of historical inevitability, Lenin writes.
But there can be no let-up in the struggle just yet. Around the world, ‘the bourgeoisie is still able freely to torment, torture and kill’. And enemies of the revolution are everywhere, plotting and scheming. Barely risen from his sickbed, the dictator’s thoughts return to the need to eliminate potential sources of opposition at home. Traitors must be rooted out. No weakness and no remorse. A show trial of fifty Orthodox priests and laymen is organised in Moscow in front of an audience of two thousand to make the point. Eleven are condemned to death. A trial of Lenin’s old socialist rivals is planned along the same lines.
One day, the dictator writes to the head of the GPU with a still-bolder proposition: the wholesale deportation of intellectuals deemed anti-regime. He suggests that each member of the Politburo spend two or three hours a week looking through periodicals and magazines to identify potential candidates for expulsion: economists, anyone with religious convictions, socialists who still seem to think that Bolshevism is up for debate. The charges against them need not be precise. What a person thinks may be just as dangerous as what they do.
Particular attention should be paid by the security services to collecting information on the personal lives of professors and writers. ‘Assign all this to an intelligent, educated and scrupulous man at the GPU’, Lenin instructs. Again, no copies.
VIENNA: Anna Freud becomes a member of the inner circle of psychoanalysis after the successful reading of a paper to the Vienna psychoanalytic society on ‘Beating Fantasies and Day Dreams’. Vienna’s first private psychoanalytic clinic–the ‘Ambulatorium’–opens its doors around the same time.
AMERICA: Marcus Garvey is on tour again, speeding through the Midwest on his way to California, untroubled by the multiple crises he has left behind in New York.
In Washington, the anti-lynching bill is still stuck in Senate committee where Southern Democrats want to kill it dead and Republicans worry about its constitutionality, unwilling to pass a law which the Supreme Court may then slap down. Some blame the President for raising unrealistic expectations.
In Florida, a UNIA commissioner, sent to proselytise in the black churches of the South, is kidnapped in broad daylight by members of the Ku Klux Klan. ‘I tried to let out a cry, but was struck in the mouth by a man weighing 200 pounds’, he writes to Garvey. They horsewhip him to within an inch of his life then tell him to get out of town. Battered and bleeding, he struggles three miles to the nearest town. He can barely walk for weeks.
In Texas, three blacks are burned alive for the alleged murder of a seventeen-year-old white girl. The newspapers run the story for a day. Then it disappears. There is no investigation.
SUMMER
GORKI: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aged fifty-two, walks around the house at night like a ghost. He cannot sleep. He throws pebbles at a nightingale singing too loudly. Later, he falls asleep, only to be awoken feeling stranger than usual. His head swims. He grabs a nearby cupboard to steady himself. All right, all right. Nothing serious. Nothing serious! He gasps. He throws up. He falls. Doctors are called. Nadya is there. Vladimir is put back in bed. For a time, he cannot move one side of his body. Thoughts start forming in his mind, and then disappear as if into a heavy mountain fog. He tries to follow them into the mists, but then they are gone. Words that used to flow from him as if there was no gap between thought and expression at all now seem like strange-shaped objects in his mouth, which he cannot quite get his lips to fit around or his tongue to express. A neurologist is fetched from Moscow.
Speech returns, but it is slower, more forced. His language is impaired. (‘Years, years’, he says at one point, as if asking how long this will last.) He finds simple mathematical calculations difficult. He spends three hours trying to work out, by a painful process of arithmetic, the answer to the doctors’ question of what’s seven multiplied by twelve. For several weeks he cannot write properly. The doctors are stumped. A spinal tap reveals no particular disease. Vladimir’s symptoms seem too broad for a single, agreed diagnosis. Epilepsy, perhaps? Or–this can be only whispered, and is soon rejected as a hypothesis–syphilis contracted in Paris many years ago? His eyes are inspected by a top ophthalmologist, to look for any signs of disease there. Perhaps there are several things going wrong at once. Neurologists suggest neurasthenia. Others diagnose a hardening of the arteries, believing Lenin may have suffered a stroke. Maria and Nadya are there at Gorki to look after him. So is Vladimir’s brother Dmitri, a doctor.
Leon has just returned from a fishing trip, and is himself not well. He does not attend his old rival’s bedside. Comrade Stalin is called instead. Lenin has a very particular job in mind for him: to procure cyanide so that the impatient revolutionary can kill himself in the proper fashion should the paralysis get worse. Vladimir has been reading up on his symptoms. There is something impressively unsentimental about suicide, he decides. Stalin is sent back in to persuade the dictator that he will make a full recovery. ‘You’re being sly’, Vladimir tells the Georgian bank-robber. ‘When did you ever know me to be sly?’ Stalin responds.
Gorki buzzes with doctors, sworn to secrecy about the dictator’s true condition. A famous specialist is flown in from Berlin. The public are told Lenin has a stomach complaint and will recover soon. He is quite at home at Gorki now, with his Rolls-Royce in the garage (with snow tracks for bad weather), lots of books, his personal chef and a film projector which he can use to watch newsreels of Henry Ford’s assembly lines churning out new automobiles.
EICHHOLZ-IN-MURNAU, BAVARIA: A large house in the foothills of the Alps. Adolf is taking tea with the family of one of his party’s major supporters: an engineer, co-author of the Nazi party’s twenty-five-point programme of 1920 and one of Hitler’s teachers from his army course in 1919. (He lectured Adolf on the pernicious nature of debt interest.)
An unexpected guest arrives, another one of Adolf’s teachers, a historian who spotted his speaking talent when he found him haranguing the other students after class. The engineer hisses in the historian’s ear as he crosses the threshold. ‘Don’t quote anything in Latin which he doesn’t understand’, he whispers. ‘He’ll never forgive you’.
The former field-runner of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment has acquired a more dictatorial tone of voice since he last saw him, the historian notes. His voice has become more of a growl. Adolf prefers not to talk about politics over tea. Instead, he gives his forthright opinions on alcohol and nicotine (both of which he detests) before going to play with the children in the garden, rattling a sweet tin to get their attention and chuckling along like a merry infant.
The historian’s son gives his opinion on the strange man. ‘Fanatical’, he says, ‘but trivial’.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Marcus Garvey, self-proclaimed Provisional President of Africa, arrives in the capital of the South for a business meeting with someone he thinks could be useful to the UNIA: Edward Young Clarke, the head of the Ku Klux Klan.
The two men speak for hours. The KKK leader explains he has nothing a
gainst blacks, he just wants America to be reserved for whites. Garvey wants black Americans to move to Africa; so do the KKK. On this rather shaky ground, an alliance of sorts is built. Garvey invites Clarke to come to New York to the UNIA convention in the summer.
Garvey writes a public letter defending his action. To speak to the KKK is plain common sense: it is to negotiate with those who really run the country. ‘In spirit and in truth America shall be a white man’s country’, he contends, however many anti-lynching bills are passed.
America offers comfort but Africa offers redemption. ‘Will you forget just for a while the beautiful lights of Broadway, the comforts afforded by a 1920 or 1921 model Sedan, and the temptation of a well-furnished parlor with Persian rugs’, Garvey asks, ‘and go to Africa, even now, and help to fell trees, help to clear the land and build up the city, build up the nation and extend the bounds of the empire?’
The messianic tone is back. Men like Du Bois are ‘living in the air’, Garvey writes, ‘as far from understanding the Negro problem of America and the western world as a monkey is in understanding how far Mars is from Jupiter’.
BERLIN: The anti-relativist physicist Ernst Gehrcke adds a new article to his anti-Einstein scrapbook: a review of the so-called Einstein Film, a two-hour educational movie about relativity taking Germany by storm.
More propaganda, as far as Gehrcke is concerned, full of clever trick shots and Dada-style splicing. (Eighty thousand pictures are taken in the course of making the film, and then cleverly cut in with the movie to create all kinds of illusions making the impossible appear real.) No better than advertising, really. The movie is shown at trade fairs, in research institutes, and wherever there is an audience willing to let themselves get thoroughly confused. ‘The Film of Physical Nihilism’, runs the headline of one review. German nationalists hate it.
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