The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  * Six criteria had been laid down at the instigation of the Finance Ministry in 1927, any one of which qualified someone as a kulak: (1) the hiring of two or more labourers; (2) ownership of three or more draught animals; (3) sown area of more than 10–16 desyatins (the threshold varied by region); (4) ownership of any kind of processing enterprise; (5) ownership of a trading establishment; or (6) ownership of one or more agricultural machines or of a considerable quantity of good-quality implements. However, these were modified in 1929 and were still far from easy to apply in the field when collectivization began.

  * The situation was just the reverse of the famine of 1920–21, when there had been food in the country but none in the cities. This gave rise to the joke: ‘What is the difference between Bolshevism and Communism?’ ‘Bolshevism is when there is no food in the cities, and Communism is when there is no food in the country.’

  †It was Duranty who wrote the line ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs’ in his report of May 14, 1933. Three months later he dismissed ‘any report of a famine in Russia… today’ as ‘an exaggeration or malignant propaganda’ (August 23, 1933).

  * The Soviet Union in the 1930s has been called a ‘quicksand society’, but people could rise up from the bottom just as others sank. Indeed, what gave the regime its dynamism was the incentives it created for men like Luznevoy to better themselves through overwork and conformism. Others were encouraged to participate in the cycle of Terror by denouncing their superiors, or even their neighbours if they saw a chance of getting a better apartment.

  * Gulag is an acronym for Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, Main Camp Administration.

  * Ob’edinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, the All-Union State Political Directorate, formed in 1923. Renamed the GUGB (Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti, the Main Directorate of State Security), in 1934 it was subordinated to the NKVD (Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). By 1930 the OGPU wielded control over nearly all the camps and exile settlements in the Soviet Union.

  †Frenkel was a small-time Jewish trader born in 1883 in Haifa, in Ottoman Palestine. In 1923 he was sentenced to ten years in the camp for illegal border-crossing. Within a short time he had been promoted from prisoner to guard and was formally released in 1927.

  * Extraordinary official photograph albums have been preserved which convey if nothing else the scale of these camps.

  * Margaret Cole recalled a second visit to Moscow with Sidney Webb in 1934: ‘As we inspected factories, farms, cooperative stores, schools, hospitals, maternity homes, reformatories, community centres, parks of recreation and rest, visited crowded theatres and opera houses, seated in the state box or side-by-side with rough-handed peasants and workers, attended trade union meetings or industrial courts, or watched, at work or at play, healthy and happy-looking peasants and workers, young mothers and children, Sidney would whisper to me, with the relish of the scientist whose theoretic proposition has stood the test of practical experiment: “See, see, it works, it works.”’

  * Pavlik Morozov, a 14-year-old schoolboy from a village eastof Ekaterinburg, became a hero for denouncing his own father. When he was subsequently murdered, four of his relatives – his grandparents, a cousin and an uncle – were arrested and shot. Morozov became a Stalinist martyr, endlessly celebrated in Soviet propaganda. In fact he had denounced his father at his mother’s instigation because he had walked out on her.

  * Genrikh Yagoda was shot as a Trotskyite in 1938; Nikolai Yezhov, his successor, was shot as a British spy in 1940; Lavrenti Beria was shot shortly after Stalin’s own death.

  †What had in fact happened was that the chairman of the Society had informed on some members who had been selling things on local trains to make ends meet. This denunciation led to the NKVD’s involvement. The chairman himself was subsequently implicated in the alleged conspiracy and shot. The following year the NKVD decided that the original investigation itself was suspect. The local police were then arrested.

  * The process is unforgettably delineated in the former Party member Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, published in 1940. The depths to which the Old Bolsheviks could sink was epitomized by Nikolai Bukharin’s letter to Stalin of December 10, 1937:

  ‘I am innocent of those crimes to which I admitted… All these past years I have been honestly and sincerely carrying out the Party line and have learned to cherish and love you wisely… I have formed… the following conception of what is going on in our country: there is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge.

  ‘It is connected a) with the pre-war situation and b)… with the transition to democracy. This purge encompasses 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion and 3) persons potentially under suspicion.

  ‘This business could not have been managed without me… It is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, agonizing paradox…

  ‘My heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and that in your heart of hearts you think that I am really guilty of all these horrors. My head is giddy with confusion, and I feel like yelling at the top of my voice. I feel like pounding my head against the wall. What am I to do? What am I to do?

  ‘I am oppressed by one fact which you have perhaps forgotten: once… I was at your place, and you said to me: “Do you know why I consider you my friend? After all, you are not capable of intrigues, are you?” And I said: “No, I am not.”

  ‘At that time, I was hanging out with [Lev] Kamenev [already executed in August 1936]. Oh God, what a child I was! What a fool! And now I am paying for this with my honour and with my life. Forgive me, Koba! [Stalin’s nickname]

  ‘I weep as I write. But… I bear no malice towards anyone… I ask your forgiveness… Oh Lord, if only there were some device which would have made it possible for you to see my soul flayed and ripped open! If only you could see how I am attached to you, body and soul.’

  In vain, Bukharin pleaded to be allowed to go into exile in the United States, or to be sent to a labour camp in Siberia, or at least to be allowed to drink poison rather than be shot. He faced a firing squad on March 14, 1938.

  * Roosevelt nevertheless opposed the Costigan–Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill for fear that to support it might cost him the Southern states in the 1936 election.

  * It has been argued persuasively that the March on Rome was an ‘historical event which never occurred’. The press talked up the effectiveness of fascist moves to seize power in Cremona, Pisa, Florence, Turin and elsewhere, but these were only successful when unopposed. The only thing that actually ‘marched’ on Rome was the train that took Mussolini from Milan to the capital on the evening of the 29th, after the King had asked him to form a government.

  * A list of all the treasonous clerics who flirted or did more than flirt with fascism would be a book in its own right. If only to give an illustration of how widespread the phenomenon was, dishonourable mention may be made of the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who established his own tinpot tyranny in post-war Fiume; the poet T. S. Eliot, who wrote that ‘totalitarianism can retain the terms “freedom” and “democracy” and give them its own meaning’ the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, as Rector of Freiburg University, lent his enthusiastic support to the Nazi regime; the political theorist Carl Schmitt, who devised pseudo-legal justifications for the illegalities of the Third Reich; the novelist Ignazio Silone, who shopped former Communist comrades to the fascists; and the poet W. B. Yeats, who wrote songs for the Irish Blueshirts. Thomas Mann, who had made his fair share of mistakes during the First World War and only with difficulty broke publicly with the Nazi regime, was not wrong when he spoke of ‘the thoroughly guilty stratum of intellectuals’.

  * The German reaction to defeat was brilliantly captured by Sebastian Haffner: ‘How shall I describe my feelings – the feelings of an eleven-year-old boy whose entire inner world has collapsed? However much I
try, I find it difficult to find an equivalent in ordinary, everyday life. Certain fantastic catastrophes are only possible in dream worlds. Maybe one could imagine someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his bank, and when one day he asks for a statement, discovers a gigantic overdraft instead of a fortune; but that only happens in dreams.’

  * The Young Plan, named after the American banker Owen D. Young, replaced the 1924 Dawes Plan, which had also been named after an American, Charles G. Dawes. By rescheduling German payments over 58½ years, the Young Plan reduced Germany’s annual payments from around 2.5 billion gold marks – i.e. marks of 1913 – to just over 2 billion. It also removed the Reparations Agent, who had exerted a limited foreign control over German economic policy. But the reduction was much smaller than the Germans had hoped for.

  * Himmler’s ascent had an important bearing on the institutional development of the Third Reich. The SS was at first subordinate to Ernst Rohm’s SA. Himmler’s first official post was as Commissary President of the Munich Police. In 1934, however, he became Inspector of the Prussian Secret State Police (‘Gestapo’ for short) and after Rohm’s murder in the Night of the Long Knives succeeded in merging the Gestapo with the political police in all the other Länder. From 1936 he controlled all police activity and was accorded the uniquely grand title of Reicbsfübrer-SS. Heydrich’s SD was not a state institution, but a party one. Nevertheless, his power grew along with Himmler’s and was cemented with the creation of the over-arching Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) in 1939.

  * In a speech in early 1936 Walther Darré defined ‘the natural area for settlement by the German people’ as ‘the territory to the East of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the South by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea’.

  * The amendment in fact commanded majority support on the League Commission; eleven of seventeen members voted for it. But Wilson insisted on the need for unanimity.

  * Baldwin ruled out the traditional compromise of a morganatic marriage, the sort that Archduke Francis Ferdinand had made when he married Sophie Countess Chotek von Chotkova, whose family was not of royal blood. As Duff Cooper noted, however, the timing of events was not to the King’s advantage. He waited until after his accession to the throne to raise the question of marrying Wallis Simpson. Nor did it help matters that he was stridently supported by both the Rothermere and Beaverbrook papers, to say nothing of Winston Churchill, at that time in the political wilderness.

  * In 1929 the British had restored tariff autonomy to China (as did the Americans and Japanese) and ended their embargo on arms shipments. The following year, they restored the North China naval base of Weihaiwei to Chinese control.

  * A distinctive feature of the radical militarist societies was the influence on them of the Nichiren Buddhist guru Tanaka Chigaku (1861–1939). Tanaka used the thirteenth-century mystic Nichiren’s teachings as the basis for the claim that Japan’s ‘heaven-ordained task’ was to seek ‘a spiritual unity’ throughout the world. Among Tanaka’s followers was Ishihara Kanji, mastermind of the Manchurian Incident and later director of strategy at the General Staff Office.

  * How far Japan should be considered a military dictatorship during the war is controversial. It is true that Tōjō Hideki concentrated considerable power in his own hands, serving for a time simultaneously as Prime Minister, War Minister and Army Chief of Staff. There ceased to be multiple parties or effective opposition in the Diet, which had virtually no influence at all on military decision-making. On the other hand, the essentials of the Meiji constitution remained intact. Although the chiefs of staff and service ministers (also military men) wielded an effective veto power, the institutional structure remained more or less unchanged. Indeed, Tōjō fell from office before the war’s end.

  * See the following rather revealing exchange between Inskip and J. C. Little, President of the AEU, in April 1938: ‘Little: Up to now we see very little reason for recommending any kind of relaxation to our members, because frankly we are not satisfied with your policy. Inskip: You mean our foreign policy. Little: Your foreign policy, if you can call it a policy.’ This was a sarcastic allusion to the government’s policy of ‘non-intervention’ in the Spanish Civil War, which many trade unionists regarded with good reason as a betrayal of the legitimate republican government, especially given the assistance its enemies were receiving from Italy and Germany. In reality, what probably worried the AEU more was the memory of the First World War, when wartime dilution had been followed by post-war unemployment. Ernest Bevin, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, feared the AEU would resist dilution ‘until the bombs came over’. He was almost right.

  * In November 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which included a secret protocol committing each to non-intervention in the event that the other should become involved in a war with the Soviet Union. In November 1937 Mussolini removed his opposition to the Austrian Anschluss; the quid pro quo, which Hitler had long before envisaged, was the continuation of Italian sovereignty over the Germans of the South Tyrol. In February 1938 Germany recognized Manchukuo.

  * The phrase, often attributed to Napoleon (who called the English ‘une nation de boutiquiers’), in fact originated with Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: ‘To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.’

  †The motion on February 9, 1933 was that ‘This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. It was passed by 275 votes to 153. Churchill denounced it as an ‘abject, squalid, shameless avowal’; the Sunday Times as ‘unnecessary and in very poor taste’, but ‘in no way… representative of Oxford thought’. In fact the result reflected the influence of the Left in the Union at that time and is best understood as a vote against the government, not a vote for pacifism. When asked about the vote when he travelled through Germany less than a year later, Patrick Leigh Fermor ‘depicted the whole thing as merely another act of defiance against the older generation. The very phrasing of the motion – “Fight for King and Country” – was an obsolete cliche from an old recruiting poster: no one, not even the fiercest patriot, would use it now to describe a deeply-felt sentiment. My interlocutors asked: “Why not?” “Für König und Vaterland” sounded different in German ears: it was a bugle-call that had lost none of its resonance. What exactly did I mean? The motion was probably “pour épater les bourgeois,” I floundered. Here someone speaking a little French would try to help. “Um die Börger zu erstaunen? Ach, so!” A pause would follow. “A kind of joke, really,” I went on. “Ein Scherz?” they would ask. “Ein Spass? Ein Witz?” I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth… I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem.’

  * Of all the leading Nazis, Ribbentrop was the one who most resembled a character out of a Heinrich Mann novel. Having tried to make his fortune in Montreal before the First World War, Ribbentrop had married into the Henkell Sekt family; got rich by importing champagne and Scotch; hobnobbed with Catholic politicians and Jewish businessmen; and acquired the prefix ‘von’by getting himself adopted by a suitably named old lady, who, in true Weimar fashion, had lost her money in the inflation and was grateful for the monthly pension he was offering. (Also in true Weimar fashion, Ribbentrop discontinued the payment some time later.) He met Goebbels in 1928; secured an introduction to Hitler via some old army friends; quietly joined the NSDAP in Bavaria in May 1932; and within months was acting as an intermediary between Hitler and Papen, whom he had known in the war. A number of the decisive meetings whi
ch led to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 took place in Ribbentrop’s Berlin-Dahlem villa. On October 1936 he was sent as ambassador to England, having convinced Hitler that he knew the ‘top people’ there. As Göring retorted: ‘The trouble is that they also know Ribbentrop.’

  * Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, had cut his teeth in Lord Milner’s South African ‘Kindergarten’ of liberal-imperialist administrators. Though a scion of an old Catholic family, his friendship with Nancy Astor, the Conservative MP and wife of Viscount Astor, led him to join the Church of Christ Scientist as well as to visit Russia with George Bernard Shaw.

  * Hilaire Belloc amused Duff Cooper with a poem that summed up Chamberlain’s policy nicely: ‘Dear Czechoslovakia / I don’t think they’ll attack yer / But I’m not going to back yer.’

  †The ‘Uitlanders’ (Afrikaans for ‘foreigners’) were the British settlers who had been drawn to the Transvaal by the discovery of gold. They were treated by the Boers as aliens, furnishing the British government with a pretext for intervention in the region. Joseph Chamberlain, the arch-enemy of Home Rule for Ireland, demanded ‘Home Rule for the Rand’, meaning that the Uitlanders should be granted the vote after five years’ residence.