Crucible Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Charles Emmerson

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  Cover image copyright © Sputnik/Alamy Stock Photo

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Originally published in 2019 by Bodley Head in the United Kingdom

  First U.S. Edition: October 2019

  Published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The PublicAffairs name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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  Library of Congress Control Number:2019948260

  ISBNs: 978-1-61039-782-7 (hardcover), 978-1-61039-783-4 (e-book)

  E3-20190924-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1917

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  1918

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  1919

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  1920

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  1921

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  1922

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  1923

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  Epilogue: 1924

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Notes and Sources

  Notes on Names, Language and Dates

  Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Also by Charles Emmerson

  Notes

  For E. W

  All else is folly

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  PREFACE

  No one believed a modern war could last this long. But by 1917 Europe has already been at war for three years. The fabric of the Continent has been torn up. Now it begins to collapse from the inside. This book tells the story of that collapse, and the energies unleashed which made a new world to replace the old.

  In Petrograd a fire is lit. People crowd the streets. The Romanov realm begins its journey into oblivion. The Tsar is packed off to the Urals, to spend more time with his family, his wood-chopping and his God. A Russian exile crosses war-torn Europe to make a triumphal entry into Petrograd at the Finnish railway terminus. ‘Peace now!’ the crowds cry. They cannot expect what happens next: another offensive, another revolution, anarchy and a civil war loosed across Eurasia.

  November 1918: an armistice is signed to end the Great War on the Western Front. The shell-shocked begin their journey home. Yet even as the ink is drying on this promise of an end to Europe’s nightmare, fresh conflicts and upheavals are in preparation elsewhere. True peace does not return for years to come. Risings in the Middle East are crushed. A massacre in India tarnishes Britain’s imperial prestige. In Europe, new militia armies arise, unbound by the old rules of conflict. The peacemakers of Versailles draw lines on maps. Meanwhile, the Continent slips out of their control. Politics takes a violent turn. Modernity and barbarity develop side by side.

  Defeated German soldiers return from the front and are sent to suppress a Communist rising in Berlin. Bodies bob along the river Spree. A dismal period in German history now begins, punctuated by plots, coups and foreign occupation. The country swings wildly from economic depression to boom to immiserating inflation. Nothing is solid any more; old hierarchies are upended. A lowly army field-runner is trained to give rousing speeches to the masses to prevent a slide to Bolshevism. Soon he is mixing with the generals who lost the war, and railing against the Jews.

  The established order is swept away. Women are given the vote. Emperors, Kings and generals depart furtively on midnight trains or submarines. People who were nothing are catapulted into prominence. Europe explodes into a frenzy of creative energy. The real becomes sur-real. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. A former patent clerk from Switzerland becomes an instant celebrity when his theory of relativity is proven to be true. Time and space lose their fixedness.

  Civilisation is released from its pre-war moorings. People search for meaning in the wreckage. Agitprop trains criss-cross Russia, spreading the gospel of revolution. A playful Italian prone to grand flourishes takes a train to Rome to proclaim a new era for his country. The city runs out of flowers to strew in front of its saviour. In the back streets, fascist violence ensures the socialists understand who is now in charge.

  Paris bustles with new arrivals. Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and Russian aristocrats seek refuge. Americans armed with dollars live it up in Montparnasse for a pittance. A boy from Chicago who set out to see the world as a reporter starts writing literary sentences in a Paris attic–the shorter the better. There is a surge in Frenchwomen taking vows as nuns–there are no husbands left to be had. The government plans for the next war while its people mourn the last.

  In Central Europe, the hole left by the Austro-Hungarian Empire is filled with plebiscites and martinets. The father of psychoanalysis advises his disciples to withdraw their libido from the Habsburg cause: seven centuries of their rule come to an end. In Budapest, a muckraking journalist becomes a fiery Red commissar, only to be ousted by an admiral without a fleet. An Italian writer marches into an Adriatic seaside town at the head of a ragtag band of troops. A soldier-revolutionary released from a German jail becomes leader of a resurrected Poland. Vienna survives on starvation rations.

  Having saved the Continent from the overweening ambitions of the Kaiser, America turns its back on old, warring, disease-ridden Europe. The President, welcomed as a hero abroad for his vision of a new era of peace, loses the fight at home to take the United States into the League of Nations. The country turns its mission inwards–from saving the world, to saving itself. Red scares spread from New York to Los Angeles. The sale of alcohol is prohibited. Black American soldiers who have done their duty in France return to an uneasy welcome. Lynching carries on across the South. The black fight against injustice gears up.

  And at opposite ends of Europe conflict continues unabated. In Ireland, atrocity and reprisal mar a nation’s struggle for independence. The price of freedom from British rule is civil war and a divided island. In the east, a tangle of peoples fight for their share of what was once the Ottoman Empire. A heartbreaking, raki-drinking army officer crushes Greeks and Armenians who claim a historic homeland in Anatolia.
He renames himself ‘father of the Turks’ and sets his country on a new path for the future.

  It is seven years since the fire was lit in Petrograd before the crucible burns out. No new wars are fought in 1924: a decade since the Great War began, six years since the armistice, five since Versailles. The Russian exile who wanted to paint the globe red and the American President who wanted to make the world safe for democracy are both dead. New figures have arisen to take their place. Dreams of renewal are twisted into new fantasies of power. The Furies of war fade back into the past.

  An uneasy peace settles over the European Continent, scarred by its experiences and purged of its old certainties. The world is forged into the shape of the twentieth century.

  1917

  The Earth shivers

  starving

  stripped.

  Mankind is vaporised in a blood bath

  only so that

  someone

  somewhere

  can get hold of Albania

  Vladimir Mayakovsky

  WINTER

  PETROGRAD, RUSSIA: It is a lurid affair. The press, though heavily censored, have a field day. A popular hate figure–a holy man accused of hijacking the imperial family, cuckolding the Tsar and leading Russia to ruin–has been murdered by one of Russia’s most prominent aristocrats. Rasputin’s mutilated body is laid to rest in the foundations of a new church at Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar’s estate just outside Petrograd. Nicholas Romanov is there, his German-born wife Alexandra, and their four daughters (their son Alexei is too ill to attend). Boards are placed on the ground to protect their clothes from the frozen mud. Alexandra is in tears.

  Russia is in crisis. The price of bread–and apples and cabbage and underwear and everything else–keeps going up. The soldiers’ boots are worn out. There are rumours of a possible palace coup. The French Ambassador is told of plans to assassinate the Tsarina.

  Nicholas is tired. He prays fervently for salvation.

  ZURICH, SWITZERLAND: A man with narrow eyes, hobnail hiking boots, and clothes that smell faintly of sausage–he lives with his wife above a butcher’s shop–fills in a questionnaire from the city authorities. Name and profession: ‘Ulyanov, lawyer and writer’. Wealth: none. Ulyanov confirms that he is not a deserter from one of Europe’s armies, nor a draft-dodger. Not entirely untruthfully he reports his income as coming from ‘literary and journalistic work for a Petrograd publisher’. The authorities grant the Ulyanovs leave to remain until the end of 1918.

  Vladimir Ulyanov–whose wife Nadya, former lover Inessa and political intimates call him by his patronymic Ilyich–is a familiar face in the narrow streets of Zurich. A little eccentric, perhaps, but no more than any of the other foreigners in the city. The Ulyanovs’ neighbours include a former German soldier and an Austrian actor with a marmalade cat. All seem to be escaping something. Zurich is full of writers and performers and cranks and crackpots looking for a safe haven in the middle of a war.

  The Russian couple live a spartan existence. They eat horsemeat to save money. To judge by Vladimir’s daily routine alone–to the library at nine in the morning, home for a quick lunch between midday and one, and then back to the library again till six–one might at first mistake him for being an academic (albeit on forced sabbatical, apparently). Pretty much the only time Ulyanov is not in the library is Thursday afternoon, when it closes early. On those days, the Russian couple are to be seen walking up the Zürichberg, the low, wooded mountain outside town. Vladimir purchases hazelnut chocolate bars wrapped in blue paper to share with Nadya. On the way down, in season, the two carry mushrooms and berries foraged from the mountainside.

  But is he really so harmless? Look closer. The hobnail boots suggest a rougher past than a university lecture hall or the well-appointed offices of a publishing house. There is something quite worldly about him, quite physical, perhaps even a little coarse. His clothes are made of thick material, as if they might be his only set. And then there are those occasional flashes of intensity–those eyes, again–when Vladimir exudes a sense of inner purpose, unfathomable to the outsider, quite magnetic. He is always in a great hurry to get wherever he is going, even when just walking through town. His wife calls him her ‘Arctic wolf’, prowling within the bounds of polite society but always striving for the wilderness. He rarely seems fully relaxed, even when tucked up at home. The slightest sound can set him off. He can be tyrannically impatient with the world at times. When he goes to the theatre, which is not often, he and Nadya tend to leave after the first act.

  As a younger man, Vladimir Ulyanov was quite a sportsman: a walker, a swimmer, a hardy (if not particularly skilled) fisherman prepared to wade perilously deep into Siberian rivers to try and catch a few small fish, a mountain hiker and keen hunter, a skater and skier. He is still a man who finds a winter without snow and ice not a real winter at all. And winter is his favourite season. He likes the Swiss mountains because the cold frosty air reminds him of Russia. He believes in mens sana in corpore sano–a healthy mind in a healthy body. He once thought that ten minutes’ gymnastics every morning was the key. More recently he has turned to cycling to keep fit and burn off his excess energy. But his body is less cooperative than it used to be. He has headaches now; he sleeps badly. He is often short-tempered. ‘It’s the brain’, a doctor tells him, when asked where the trouble lies. Vladimir is forty-seven. His father Ilya–hence Ilyich–was dead at fifty-four. What restless, anxious thoughts fill that bare skull of his?

  The more one looks at this Vladimir Ulyanov, the more one digs into his past and certainly the more one listens to what he has to say, the less innocent he becomes. On the city’s registration questionnaire, he writes that he is a ‘political émigré’. Well, Russia produces plenty of those. But what kind of émigré? In revolutionary circles, he is known by the pseudonym Lenin, a name he picked up after returning from a stint in internal Russian exile in Siberia. Is he a paper tiger, or could Vladimir Ulyanov, aka Lenin, be dangerous? There is perhaps something a little sinister about him when he pulls his face into that leering half-smile of his, full of subtly demonic charm. Then there is the chilling way he narrows his gaze into a squint when he looks at people sometimes, as if he were actively sizing them up for the revolutionary judgement day. Then again, it could just be short-sightedness.

  At the Zurich public library, Vladimir terrorises the staff with prodigious requests for works of German philosophy, revolutionary socialist theory and economic history. He admires the organisational efficiency of the Swiss in meeting his demands through their extraordinary system of inter-library loans. This would never work in Russia, Lenin sighs. There, one could not get hold of such books at all. He piles them on his desk like a barricade, warily eyeing anyone who might take them away from him. He fills notebook after notebook with agitated observations on what he has read. Occasionally, the scribbling stops and the squinty Russian mutters something inaudible under his breath.

  The muttering generally happens when Vladimir thinks he has caught out some fellow Marxist in a misinterpretation of the theories of Karl Marx. For the man his political followers call Lenin, this is a frequent enough occurrence and an infuriating one. He feels himself to be in constant battle with those who do not understand Marxist theory the way he does. Lenin’s own theoretical-historical-economic postulates, which his library studies serve to buttress and to elaborate, boil down to three. First, capitalism must eventually collapse in social revolution and reform attempts are, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a betrayal of the workers. Second, the majority are stupid and need a correctly indoctrinated minority to lead them: not a stance calculated to win many friends perhaps, but certainly consistent with Vladimir’s own ability to be outnumbered even in avowedly socialist gatherings–Lenin has always been a splitter amongst splittists. Third, the world war–understood as an expression of the inherent tendencies of capitalist business interests–has created a revolutionary situation ripe for exploitation: so long as middle-class pacifists do
n’t screw it up by settling for a bourgeois peace, and as long as the proletariat stop listening to patriotic socialists and start turning their weapons against their masters, rather than against each other. In the glowing embers of the imperialist-capitalist conflict, Lenin spies the spark needed for a European civil war, a class war, and with it: revolution!

  The first step to victory is defeat all round–defeat for the French with their colonial empire across North Africa, defeat for the British with their imperialist designs across the globe, defeat for the autocratic regime of the Russian Tsar, defeat for the German Kaiser, defeat for the American business interests inexorably pushing their country further into the cauldron. Can a lose–lose scenario be arranged from which social revolution might spring? Vladimir’s ears prick up at any sign that his message is getting through. Every encounter is an opportunity to make his case for the revolutionary necessity of defeat all round. Over the summer he is, in his wife Nadya’s memorable phrase, like a ‘cat after lard’ when he identifies a soldier recovering from tuberculosis staying in the same small guesthouse, halfway up a mountain near St Gallen. He tries repeatedly to engage the patient in political chit-chat, asking him leading questions such as whether he agrees about the predatory character of the war. In Zurich, Vladimir is delighted when his wife relates to him the comment of one of the other women huddled around a gas stove that maybe soldiers should start attacking their own governments.

  A flow of insistent questions and hectoring demands issue constantly from Vladimir’s pen to his followers (not many, these days). His letters to fellow Bolsheviks–the name Lenin gives to his faction of the Russian left–are generally brief and unembellished, written in the shorthand of someone who expects his correspondent to immediately grasp their correctness, importance and urgency. They overflow with snap judgements on the shortcomings of others. To Lenin, the world is full of hypocrites. He is particularly disdainful of a group of former political associates known as the Mensheviks and a man called Kautsky, Marx’s literary executor, who Lenin thinks has gone soft. For Lenin, calling someone a ‘Kautsky-ite’ is the highest term of abuse. He has no time for what he calls, with visceral hatred, opportunists. He considers the mainstream socialist movement to be full of them.