All posts tagged Germany

Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920)

A figure stripped to the waist, with ripped-open back, leaned against the parapet. Another, with a triangular flap hanging off the back of his skull, emitted short, high-pitched screams. This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. (p.31)

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) fought for the German army in the First World War. Wikipedia details his war career.

Ernst Jünger in World War One

Most other memoirs and fictions about the war took years to surface, while the authors struggled with their memories and to find words to describe the experience. No such hesitation for Jünger, who converted the 16 diaries he’d kept during his three-year service into a narrative – titled In Stahlgewittern – which he had privately printed in 1920 in an edition of 2,000.

Ernst Jünger in 1919 – looking miraculously untouched after three years of war and some 20 wounds

Over the course of his very long life, Jünger not only wrote many more books and articles, but rewrote In Stahlgewittern half a dozen times, each time moving further from the diary format, adding passages of reflection, toying with the emphasis – the 1924 edition is the most blood-thirsty, giving precise details of how he shot British soldiers; the 1934 edition is much more muted, removing those references, as Jünger realised he was by now reaching an international audience i.e. British and French readers.

By the 1930s Storm of Steel (first translated into English and given that title in 1930) had become acknowledged as one of the classic accounts of trench fighting in the Great War.

Translating Jünger into English

English written by an English person tends to indicate their social class, with traces of the kind of school they went to (private or state), sometimes their regional origins, and so on – all kinds of traces.

Translations into English, on the other hand, generally tell you more about the translator than about the original author.

This translation is by Michael Hofmann, the poet, and was published in 2003. Although it won prizes I found it very easy to dislike. Hofmann’s English prose doesn’t flow, in fact it regularly (two or three times per page) breaks down into unidiomatic and clunky phrasing. Again and again I found myself thinking ‘No native English speaker ever spoke or wrote like that – so why are you?’

‘They asked us how things were back in Hanover, and whether the war might not soon be over.’ (p.8)
How about … ‘and whether the war was going to end soon’

‘I was given a couple of hours to find an exhausted sleep in a bare chalk dugout.’ (p.9)
‘To find an exhausted sleep’??

‘If it’s all one to you, I’d just as soon hang on to it.’ (p.18)
No English speaker ever said ‘If it’s all one to you’. An English speaker would say ‘If it’s all the same to you…’

We had the satisfaction of having our opponent disappearing for good after a series of shots had struck the clay ramparts directly in front of his face. (p.65)
Why the -ing on the end of disappear?

‘Recouvrance was a remote village, nestling in pretty chalk hills, to where all the regiments in the division dispatched a few of their young men to receive a thorough schooling in military matters..” (p.16)
Why not just delete ‘to’? And replace ‘dispatched’ with ‘sent’?

Maybe the resolutely unEnglish nature of many of the sentences and the unEnglish atmosphere which hovers over the entire text is a deliberate strategy to convey the unEnglish nature of Jünger’s German. I doubt it, though, because many of the sentences in Hofmann’s introduction have the same broken-backed, wrong word order, clumsy clauses, not-quite- English feel about them.

As I read Hofmann’s translation I compared it with the 1930 translation of Storm of Steel by Basil Creighton, which I borrowed from my local library. Creighton’s translation of that last excerpt reads:

Recouvrance was a remote little village hidden among delightful chalk hills. A certain number of the more youthful of us were sent there from the division to receive a thorough military training…

Though not perfect, Creighton’s version has more of the rhythm of ordinary English prose, and is therefore much more readable, than the Hofmann.

Hofmann is an acclaimed poet – which maybe explains why in some places he shows a deliberately refractory choice of phrasing and word order – why he often flaunts odd words and phrases – compared with Creighton’s straightforward (if often dated) prose.

This often leads to what I thought was a curiously tin ear for register, by which I mean the way a writer chooses vocabulary and phrasing, manages the positioning of subordinate clauses and so on, in order to create a consistent style or voice.

To give a specific example, Hofmann seems to deliberately combine terms which are inappropriate or anachronistic in order to create a clash of registers. Take this sentence:

After this incident I betook myself to my dugout, but today too there was no chance of any restorative kip. (p.74)

‘betook myself to’? When do you think that phrase was last used in everyday speech or writing? It sounds like Dr Johnson and the Augustans to me. Googling it you find that ‘betook myself’ is included in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven, which was written in the mid-19th century in a deliberately archaic and Gothic style. In other words, the phrase was old in 1845.

On the other hand ‘kip’ is a slang term for sleep which reminds me of George Orwell’s useage in Down and out in Paris and London in the 1930s, where it has the feel of the rough, lower-class, Victorian words used by Orwell’s tramps.

Bringing them together in the one sentence – an extremely archaic 18th century idiom running into a 1930s slang term – creates, for me, a car crash of registers. And neither of them are what you’d call modern colloquial or formal English. They create a made-up register.

Why? Maybe we are meant to accept it as a famous poet playing with language. Which is all well and good in the privacy of his own writing, but when he is translating a foreign author surely he should try to recreate a consistent register of English which is the nearest possible replication of the original author’s tone of voice.

(Incidentally, the insertion of ‘too’ in that sentence is something no English speaker would do, but is instead a quite obvious direct translation of the German word auch and is placed where the German word comes in the sentence: aber heute auch. An English writer might say: ‘After this incident I went back to my dugout but once [or yet] again there was no chance of a restorative sleep.’]

Another tiny, jarring detail: I was pulled up short when Hofmann has Jünger use the term ‘grunt’ (pp.133, 196) for infantryman. Now ‘grunt’ is a well-known word to anyone who’s read about the Vietnam War of the 1960s, where it became the universal term for American infantryman, expressing a combination of embattled fondness for the dumb front-line soldiers, along with contempt for the shitstorm their superiors had dumped them in. Apparently, ‘grunt’ was first recorded in this sense in print in 1969.

My point is that all its associations are to Vietnam, to choppers, ‘gooks’, napalm at dawn and so on. Dropping it into your translation of Jünger in 1920 is like dropping a couple of seconds of colour film into a black-and-white Charlie Chaplin movie, a deliberately jarring anachronism.

It seemed to me that at moments like this the translator is grandstanding, making more of an effort to display his modernist taste for unexpected juxtapositions of register, than to translate Jünger into clear, effective and tonally consistent prose.

Elsewhere he makes Jünger use phrases like ‘argy-bargy’ (pp.155, 245) and ‘getting on our wicks’ (p.149) phrases more evocative of Eastenders than an élite Germany infantry officer of 1917.

And yet, at the other extreme of class diction, after our hero survives a violent foray into the British trenches, he overhears a soldier saying:

‘I must say, though, that Lieutenant Jünger is really something else: my word, the sight of him vaulting over those barricades!’

‘My word’! An ordinary soldier – one of the ‘grunts’ – is meant to talk like that? While posh, upper-class says things are ‘getting on our wicks’.

Where and when is this English set? Is it with Edgar Allen Poe in 1845, with Orwell’s tramps’ during the depression, in 1920s Jeeves and Wooster banter, or in 1967 Vietnam slang? This prose is all over the place.

One last example which shows that the way that Hofmann clings to the German word order obscures Jünger’s meaning.

Jünger first experiences a really heavy artillery barrage at les Éparges in 1915. He feels weirdly disconnected from the mayhem around him. Hofmann has:

This meant I was unafraid; feeling myself to be invisible, I couldn’t believe I was a target to anyone, much less that I might be hit. So, returned to my unit, I surveyed the territory in front of me with great indifference. (p.27)

Now note the way he handles the subordinate clauses in these sentences.

French and German users often put descriptions of something or someone or an action they’ve taken, in a subordinate clause right next to the subject or object: they write:

The ball, having been kicked, rolled across the grass.

It often makes French and German prose seem clotted or lumpy. Deciding what to do with these stumpy subordinate clauses is one of the chief problems facing anyone translating from those languages into English.

In flowing idiomatic English, we prefer to give such clauses a main verb and subject of their own, sometimes inserting them into the main sentence, or – if that’s too tricky – just breaking a long clotted sentence up into two simpler ones. This makes them flow better, and it makes the prose more punchy and effective because, instead of a passive past participle, you have an active verb. So we write:

He kicked the ball and it rolled across the grass.

Clearer, simpler, more active. Let’s look at that passage again:

Twice in this short passage Hofmann uses subordinate clauses, and these create a sense of passivity: ‘feeling myself to be invisible’; ‘returned to my unit’ are both adjectival phrases describing the ‘I’ which immediately follows. They blunt the potential for active verbs. They weight the subject down like a ball and chain. They make the prose inactive and weighed down.

Compare and contrast that with Creighton’s translation of the same passage:

At the same time I had no fear. For I felt that I was not seen, and I could not believe that anyone aimed at me or that I should be hit. Indeed, when I rejoined my section I surveyed our front with complete calm. It was the courage of ignorance.

Not perfect prose either, I grant you. But note:

Hofmann’s passive subordinate clauses have become phrases led by an active verb – ‘feeling myself to be invisible’ has become ‘I felt that I was not seen’, and ‘returned to my unit’ becomes ‘when I rejoined my section’. Feels brighter and more lively, doesn’t it? The point is that Hofmann tucks away a lot of information in clauses which – as the name suggests – are subordinate – passive, veiled and hidden. Creighton’s prose brings this information out into the daylight as active phrases which contribute to the flow of the prose.
And this greater activity is really rammed home by Creighton’s final sentence which has the ta-dah! impact of the pithy couplet at the end of a Shakespeare sonnet. ‘It was the courage of ignorance’ is exactly the kind of didactic punchline the paragraph is crying out for, which brings the point out into the open and rams it home.

The result of all this is that I didn’t notice this passage at all when I read the Hofmann. It just drifted by, passive, subordinate and veiled. Whereas when I read the Creighton version, this passage really stood out as the pithy and powerful conclusion of a man who had been through his first artillery barrage and now, looking back, realises how naive and foolish he was. I got the point Jünger was making.

So: from very early on I had the impression that Hofmann was more interested in tickling the tastebuds of modish readers who like poetic effects (contemporary, modernist, poetic effects) than in finding a consistent register which would allow Jünger’s meaning and conclusions to come over as clearly, consistently and powerfully as possible.

To be even blunter – I felt that in reading the Hofmann, I not only had to put up with a steady flow of clunking unEnglish phaseology, but that I was missing a lot of what Jünger wanted to say.

Hofmann’s clunks

At four o’clock already we were roused from our bed put together from bits of furniture, to be given our steel helmets. (p.93)
This is German word order, not English. French and German uses the equivalent of ‘already’ a lot more than we do in English. It’s a giveaway sign that the German is being translated word for word rather than into idiomatic English.

All was swathed in thick smoke, which was in the ominous underlighting of coloured flares. (p.95) ??

When morning paled, the strange surroundings gradually revealed themselves to our disbelieving eyes. (p.97)
Show-off poetic use of pale as a verb.

In my unhealthy irritation, I couldn’t help but think that these vehicles followed no other purpose than to annoy us… (p.102)
I don’t think ‘to follow a purpose’ is an English idiom. We’d say ‘had no other purpose’, though it’s still clunky phrasing. How about: ‘I couldn’t help thinking the only point of these vehicles was to annoy us…’

The following morning, the battalion marched off into the direction of heavy firing… (p.131)
Doesn’t he mean either ‘in the direction of’ or, more simply, ‘towards’?

We ate heartily, and handed the bottle of ’98 proof’ around. Then we settled off to sleep… (p.166)
‘Settled off’? Obviously he means ‘settled down’. Why wasn’t this book proof read by an English speaker?

Our first period in position passed pleasantly quietly. (p.142)

In the evening, the shelling waxed to a demented fury. (p.161)
‘Waxed’? I know that it can mean ‘grew’, but it hasn’t been used in this sense since Shakespeare.

I saw myself face to face with a young man of about twenty-six… (p.210)
‘Saw’? An English speaker would write ‘found’

German humour

Maybe they simply don’t survive Hofmann’s translation, but what appear to be German jokes aren’t very funny. For example, I think the following is intended to include both a stylish reference to a German literary figure, and be itself a humorous description of trying to get rid of lice.

Fairly unscathed myself thus far by that scourge, I helped my comrade Priepke, an exporter from Hamburg, wrap his woollen waistcoat – as populous as once the garment of the adventurous Simplicissimus – round a heavy boulder, and for mass extermination, dunk it in the river. Where, since we left Hérinnes very suddenly, it will have mouldered away quietly ever since. (p.20)

This is godawful English prose. What a mouthful of marbles! In Creighton’s version this becomes:

As I had been more or less free from this plague, I assisted a friend, Priepke, to deal with his woollen vest, which was as populous as the habit of Simplicius Simplicissimus of yore. So we wrapped it round a large stone and sank it in a stream. As our departure from Herne followed very suddenly upon this, it is likely that the garment enjoys a quiet resting-place there to this day.

Creighton’s version is not brilliant either, but at least he makes the sensible move of breaking up the long clotted main sentence into two smaller sentences. the use of ‘so’ at the start of the second sentence gives a sense of logic and clarity to the description.

Still not that rib-tickling, though, is it?

In his introduction Hofmann devotes a couple of pages to explaining what an awful translator Creighton was, and how he made literally hundreds of elemental mistakes in his German. Maybe. But his version is much more readable than Hofmann’s. It seems like we are stuck with two very flawed translations.

Worse, the Creighton contains passages of reflection and philosophising which are simply not present in the Hofmann. Presumably this is because Creighton was translating from one of the more wordy and reflective versions of the book. In these passages Jünger gives his thoughts about the nature of meaning of war and bravery. None of them are in the Hofmann. Maybe this makes the Hofmann version more pure and elemental but it does mean the average English reader will never get to see and read Jünger’s thoughts about his subject – men in war.

What this book really deserves is a variorum edition, which clearly explains the textual history of the book, summarises the changes between all the different versions, decides which version to translate (and explains why) and renders it into clear, unfussy English, but has extensive footnotes or endnotes which include the important passages from all the other versions, so we can see how Jünger chopped and changed the text, and with notes explaining why he did this and how it reflected his evolving attitude towards the subject matter.

Jünger’s detached attitude

What comes over, despite the clunky translation, is that, for much of the time, Jünger’s approach is strangely colourless.

There is absolutely no build-up in the way of the author’s birth, upbringing, family, education, feelings on the outbreak of war, agonising over which regiment to join and so on, none of the bonhomie and chat and certainly none of the humour which characterises, say, Robert Graves’s famous war book, Goodbye To All That.

Instead, the narrator just steps off a train in France, is told to line up with his squad, is marched to a village, has his first experience of shellfire, sees some men from a different unit get killed, and then he’s taken up the line and starts the trench soldier’s existence of sleeplessness, cold and discomfort.

It is a little as if an utterly detached intelligence from another planet has been embedded in a human body and proceeds to do everything it’s told, while all the time observing the strange human creatures and their customs.

I still viewed the machinery of conflict with the eyes of an inexperienced recruit – the expressions of bellicosity seemed as distant and peculiar to me as events on another planet. (p.27)

It’s only some way into the text that we even learn the year he’s describing, namely 1915. In the fifth chapter (‘Daily life in the trenches’) the text reverts to its original format as a diary, each paragraph starting with a date, and with a chronological sequence of dates which takes us through summer and autumn 1915, through Christmas and into the spring of 1916.

The names of lots of colleagues are given, but generally in a dry, clinical way. Often they’re only mentioned on the date they die, in fact most of the diary entries are clipped descriptions of who died on what day, and how.

Jünger doesn’t seem to have any close friends. He certainly doesn’t have witty conversations with them that Graves does, or hang out with a few close buddies like Frederick Manning does in his brilliant war memoir, The Middle Parts of Fortune.

Instead, Jünger observes with detachment everything that happens around him. After he’s wounded the first time – a shrapnel laceration across his thigh – Jünger is brought back to a clearing station, where the surgeon is overwhelmed with casualties.

At the sight of the surgeon, who stood checking the roster in the bloody chaos, I once again had the impression, hard to describe, of seeing a man surrounded by elemental terror and anguish, studying the functioning of his organisation with ant-like cold-bloodedness. (p.32)

Now, among his many other achievements, Jünger was an entomologist i.e. an expert on insects, and went on to write books on the subject after the war. So it strikes me that his portrait of the surgeon, calm and detached among the slaughter, is in fact a self-portrait.

Jünger’s vision of war

But what it lacks in warmth, humour or human touch, the book more than makes up for with the thing that makes it so powerful, which helped it grow into a classic – which is Jünger’s hugely compelling descriptions of the brutal, the eerie, the strange, the heroic and the primordial nature of this utterly new kind of war, and of the terrifying new race of men it seemed to be breeding.

Physical disgust

In the rising mist, I leaped out of the trench and found a shrunken French corpse. Flesh like mouldering fish gleamed greenishly through splits in the shredded uniform. Turning round, I took a step back in horror; next to me a figure was crouched by a tree. It still had gleaming French leather harness, and on its back was a fully packed haversack, topped by a round mess-tin. Empty eye-sockets and a few strands of hair on the bluish-black skull indicated that the man was not among the living. There was another sitting down, slumped forward towards his feet, as though he had just collapsed. All round were dozens more, rotted, dried, stiffened to mummies, frozen in an eerie dance of death. (p.25)

Not only are there corpses all around, but the book gives us hundreds of descriptions of men being shot, eviscerated, decapitated, buried alive, flayed by shrapnel, burned to death by fire, stifled by gas, and exploded.

There was another whistling high up in the air. Everyone had the choking feeling: this one’s heading our way! Then there was a huge, stunning explosion – the shell had hit in our midst.

Half stunned I stood up. From the big crater, burning machine-gun belts spilled a coarse pinkish light. It lit the smouldering smoke of the explosion, where a pile of charred bodies were writhing, and the shadows of those still living were fleeing in all directions. Simultaneously, a grisly chorus of pain and cries for help went up. The rolling motion of the dark mass in the bottom of the smoking and glowing cauldron, like a hellish vision, for a moment tore open the extreme abysm of terror. (p.225)

The rate of deaths, the endless stream of deaths Jünger sees at first hand, right in front of him, never lets up, is staggering, stupefying. So many men, so many terrifying woundings, eviscerations, liquidations, smashings, manglings and screams of pain.

NCO Dujesiefken, my comrade at Regniéville, was standing in front of my foxhole, begging me to get into the trench as even a light shell bursting anywhere near would cause masses of earth to come down on top of me. An explosion cut him off: he sprawled to the ground, missing a leg. He was past help. (p.230)

Beside the ruined cottage lay a piece of trench that was being swept with machine-gun fire from beyond. I jumped into it, and found it untenanted. Immediately afterwards, I was joined by Oskar Kius and von Wedelstädt. An orderly of von Wedelstädt’s, the last man in, collapsed in mid-air, shot through one eye. (p.237)

One man beside me from the 76th, a huge Herculean dockworker from Hamburg, fired off one shot after another, with a wild look on his face, not even thinking of cover, until he collapsed in a bloody heap. With the sound of a plank crashing down, a bullet had drilled through his forehead. He crumpled into a corner of the trench, half upright, with his head pressed against the trench wall. His blood poured onto the floor of the trench, as if tipped out of a bucket. (p.248)

On his six visits to dressing stations in the rear and then on to the hospitals, Jünger is in the company of men weeping and screaming from all sorts of pitiful wounds. At one hospital he is told they had received 30,000 casualties in the previous three weeks. Men die horrible deaths left, right and centre, all the time, unrelentingly.

In the spring the ice and frost melt and the trenches thaw and dissolve, revealing the massed bodies and equipment of the men of 1914 and 1915, whose bodies were built into the defences, and the soldiers find themselves treading on the slimy gloop of the decomposing corpses from last year’s battles.

The scale of the killing is inconceivable.

Heightened alertness

Yet Jünger combines countless examples of disgusting physical injury and the ubiquity of slimy, popping, farting, rotting corpses, with an unquenchable lust for life and excitement. Nothing can stop his unquenchable patriotism, and lust for excitement.

Whenever possible he volunteers to go on night patrols into no man’s land, risking his life for often trivial rewards or none at all, generally ending up haring back to his own lines as rifle and machine gun fire starts up from the British or French opposite. But to be out there, sneaking silently in the presence of Death, is to be alive as nowhere else.

These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterable menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow burst; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape. ( p.71)

Battlefield stress

Sometimes it all seems like a dream or a nightmare, a waking nightmare from which there is no escape. Caught out in no man’s land when his little squad bumps into some foraging Brits, the two groups fall to mad hand-to-hand fighting in which all their 20th century weapons fail, leaving only wordless horror.

After one shot the magazine had clicked out of my pistol grip. I stood yelling in front of a Briton who in his horror was pressing his back into the barbed wire, and kept pulling the trigger. Nothing happened – it was like a dream of impotence. (p.88)

Later, Jünger is behind the lines in the village of Fresnoy when it comes under a pulverising artillery bombardment that blows houses to pieces and shreds human beings.

I saw a basement flattened. All we could recover from the scorched space were the three bodies. Next to the entrance one man lay on his belly in a shredded uniform; his head was off, and the blood had flowed into a puddle. When an ambulanceman turned him over to check him for valuables, I saw as in a nightmare that his thumb was still hanging from the remains of his arm. (p.135)

It is a world of despairingly horrific sights and intense visions. A world in which everything is bright, overlit, too vivid, permanently visionary.

Like a vision in a dream, the sight, lit only by falling sparks, of a double line of kneeling figures at the instant in which they rose to advance, etched itself into my eye. (p.147)

A world in which even the recently lived is so outside normal human experience that it is impossible to process in any rational way.

I experienced quite a few adventures in the course of the war, but none was quite as eerie as this. It still makes me feel a cold sweat when I think of us wandering around among those unfamiliar trenches by the cold early light. It was like the dream of a labyrinth. (p.190)

Unsurprisingly, so many close encounters with death, not just close, but so irrational, so uncanny, so deep, arousing the cave man or the prehuman in their souls, led to psychological repercussions.

It was only afterwards that I noticed that the experience had taken its toll on my nerves, when I was lying on my pallet in my dugout with my teeth chattering, and quite unable to sleep. Rather, I had the sensation of a sort of supreme awakeness – as if I had a little electric bell going off somewhere in my body. The following morning I could hardly walk. (p.88)

But like the men he so fulsomely praises, he does get up, he commands, he leads, he doesn’t stop.

The emotions of war

The intensity of the war, the relentless bombardment, the lack of sleep, the continual toll of deaths from snipers or random mortar bombs, gives rise to new emotions and feelings – strange hilarities, clarities, hysterias – which he observes working within himself.

Here, and really only here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country. In moments when I felt it, I experienced no fear as such but a kind of exalted, almost demoniacal lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress. (p.93)

And he repeatedly describes the madness of combat, the crazed exhiliration of the charge, bayonets fixed, down a confusing warren of corpse-strewn trenches, towards the top, and over into the face of the enemy.

On, on! In one violently bombarded defile, the sections backed up. Take cover! A horribly penetrating smell told us that this passage had already taken a good many lives. After running for our lives, we managed to reach a second defile which concealed the dugout of the front-line commanding officer, then we lost our way again, and in a painful crush of excited men, had to turn back once more. At the most five yards from Vogel and me, a middle-sized shell struck the bank behind us with a dull thump, and hurled mighty clods of earth over us, as we thought our last moment had come. Finally, our guide found the path again – a strangely constellated group of corpses serving as a landmark. One of the dead lay there as if crucified on the chalk slope. It was impossible to imagine a more appropriate landmark.

On, on! Men collapsed while running, we had to threaten them to use the last energy from their exhausted bodies. Wounded men went down left and right in craters – we disregarded their cries for help. We went on, eyes implacably on the man in front, through a knee-high trench formed from a thin chain of enormous craters, one dead man after another. At moments we felt our feet settling on soft, yielding corpses, whose form we couldn’t make out on account of the darkness. The wounded man collapsing on the path suffered the same fate: he too was trampled underfoot by the boots of those hurrying ever onwards. (pp.96-97)

Courage

And in this strange landscape, between the midnight hunting in no man’s land, the grinding lack of sleep of sentry routine, and the appallingly unrelenting artillery bombardments unleashed by the British, amid all this horror, Jünger’s comrades do not defect or resile. They stand to when ordered to. They muster by the revetments of the trenches.

It was in the course of these days that I learned to appreciate these men with whom I was to be together for two more years of the war. What was at stake here was a British initiative on such a small scale as barely to find mention in the histories of both armies, intended to commit us to a sector where the main attack was not to be. Nor did the men have much to do, only cover the very small amount of ground, from the entrance of the shelter to the sentry posts. But these few steps needed to be taken in the instant of a great crescendo of fire before an attack, the precise timing of which is a matter of gut instinct and feeling. The dark wave that so many times in those nights welled up to the traverses through fire, and without even an order being possible, remained with me in my heart as a personal yardstick for human trustworthiness. (p.85)

Something awesome is happening, and Jünger brilliantly conveys its tensed uniqueness.

These instants, in which the entire complement of men stood behind the traverses, tensed and ready, had something magical about them; they were like the last breathless second before a hugely important performance, as the music is turned off and the big lights go up. (p.77)

New men

For amid this inferno, a new race of men is being forged.

A runner from a Württemberg regiment reported to me to guide my new platoon to the famous town of Combles, where we were to be held in reserve for the time being. He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as the denizen of a new and far harsher world… Nothing was left in his voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It’s men like that that you need for fighting. (p.92)

Invulnerable, invincible men of steel, forged in the furnace of war.

As the storm raged around us, I walked up and down my sector. The men had fixed bayonets. They stood stony and motionless, rifle in hand, on the front edge of the dip, gazing into the field. Now and then, by the light of a flare, I saw steel helmet by steel helmet, blade by glinting blade, and I was overcome by a feeling of invulnerability. We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered. (p.99)

New men. Men of the future. The Overmen.

There was in these men a quality that both emphasised the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevalieresque urge to prevail in battle. Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood. (p.140)

Something primordial

Men being shaped anew in the storm of steel because these are conditions and circumstances unlike any ever experienced by any humans in all previous human history.

From nine till ten, the shelling acquired a demented fury. The earth shook, the sky seemed like a boiling cauldron. Hundreds of heavy batteries were crashing away at and around Combles, innumerable shells criss-crossed hissing and howling over our heads. All was swathed in thick smoke, which was in the ominous underlighting of flares. Because of racking pains in our heads and ears, communication was possible only by odd, shouted words. The ability to think logically and the feeling of gravity, both seemed to have been removed. We had the sensation of the ineluctable and the unconditionally necessary, as if we were facing an elemental force. (p.95)

The sheer unrelenting killing machine mincing its way through human flesh on an unprecedented scale awakes echoes of something infinitely primitive, primordial, echoes of pre-human conditions, the beginning or end of the world.

The whole scene – the mixture of the prisoners’ laments and our jubilation – had something primordial about it. This wasn’t war; it was ancient history. (p.150)

Conclusion

Storm of Steel has a narrative of sorts in that Jünger’s diary gives the German point of view of a number of Western front battles, in chronological order, including the Battle of the Somme and leading up to the German spring offensive of 1918, and then the Allied counter-attack in summer of 1918, at which point Jünger is wounded for the sixth time and is recuperating back in Germany when the war ends.

The text could be used as evidence of the camaraderie of the German forces, or of their officers’ awareness of their material inferiority to the Allies, but their confidence in the superiority of their fighting spirit.

In the introduction to the Creighton edition, R.H. Mottram, who himself fought in the war, says the entire text is evidence of the obtuse refusal to face reality of the entire Germany military class. The war could only ever end with Allied victory yet they stretched it out for four years of psychological denial, resulting in ten million unnecessary deaths.

Half way through there’s an unexpected section about the discovery that his brother, who had also enlisted, is fighting in a different unit right alongside his, and the two brothers even meet up in the heat of a battle, when Jünger arranges for his wounded brother to be carried back to a field hospital in a piece of tarpaulin.

So there’s enough material for historians or literary critics, psychologists or military analysts to excerpt and analyse.

And there are countless details to shock and grab the casual reader’s attention, like the little girl lying in a pool of her own blood, or the soldier thrown into the exact pose of the crucifixion by a shell blast, the kind of details which feed into the modern liberal consensus that war is hell.

But in my opinion, all these elements are eclipsed by Jünger’s terrifying sense of a new world of war emerging, a world of unprecedented destruction and obliteration, in which a wholly new breed of heartless, battle-hardened warriors would arise to fight and flourish. Emerging from all the other elements I’ve mentioned is a nightmare vision of the future, and an even more destructive conflagration.

As though waking from a deep dream, I saw German steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest. (p.235)

Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) and multi-ethnic societies

Mutual suspicion, brinkmanship, arrogance, belligerence and, above all fear were rife in the halls of power across Europe in the summer of 1914. (p.8)

I’m very surprised that this book won the ‘2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History’ and the ‘Society of Military History 2015 Distinguished Book Award’ because it is not really a military history at all.

It’s an epic book – 788 pages, if you include the 118 pages of notes and 63 pages of bibliography – and it gives an impressively thorough account of the origins, development and conclusion of the First World War, as seen from the point of view of the politicians, military leaders and people of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

But I found it much more of a sociological and economic history of the impact of war on German and Austro-Hungarian society, than a narrative of military engagements.

Watson gives a broad outline of the German invasion of Belgium and northern France, but there are no maps and no description of any of the vital battles, of the Marne or Aisnes or Arras or Ypres. Instead he spends more time describing the impact on Belgian society of the burning of villages and the atrocities carried out as the Germans overcompensated for what they claimed were guerrilla and francs-tireurs (free-shooter) attacks by civilian snipers.

I was specifically hoping to learn more about the famous three-week-long battle of Tannenberg on the eastern front, but there is no account of it at all in this book. Instead Watson gives a detailed description of the impact on society in Galicia and East Prussia of the ruinous and repressive Russian advance. Little or nothing about the fighting, but a mass of detail about how individual villages, towns and cities were subject to Russian administration and violence, and a lot about the impact of war on the region’s simmering ethnic tensions. I didn’t realise that the Russians, given half a chance, carried out as many atrocities (i.e. massacring civilians) and far more forced movements of population, than the Germans did.

Watson does, it is true, devote some pages to the epic battle of Verdun (pp.293-300) and to the Battle of the Somme (pp.310-326), but it’s not what I’d call a military description. There are, for example no maps of either battlefield. In fact there are no battlefield maps – maps showing the location of a battle and the deployment of opposing forces – anywhere at all in the book.

Instead, there are lots of graphs and diagrams scattered throughout the text showing things like ‘Crime rates in Germany 1913-18’, ‘Free meals dispensed at Viennese soup kitchens 1914-18’, ‘German psychiatric casualties in the First and Second Armies 1914-18’ (p.297) and so on. Social history.

Longer than the accounts of Verdun and the Somme put together is his chapter about the food shortages which kicked in soon after the war started and reached catastrophic depths during the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916-17. These were triggered by the British naval blockade (itself, as Watson points out, of dubious legality under international law), but also due to the intrinsic shortcomings of German and Austro-Hungarian agriculture, compounded by government inefficiency, and corruption (pp.330-374).

So there’s more about the food shortage than the actual battles. Maybe, in the long run, the starvation was more decisive. Maybe, he would argue, there are hundreds books devoted to Verdun and the Somme, whereas the nitty-gritty of the food shortages – much more important in eventually forcing the Central Powers to their knees – is something you rarely come across in British texts. He certainly gives a fascinating, thorough and harrowing account. But it’s not military history. It’s social and economic history.

A lot later in the book, he gives gripping accounts of the German offensive of spring 1918, and then the Allied counter-offensive from July 1918 which ended up bringing the Central Powers to the negotiating table. But in both instances he gives a very high-level overview, and only enough detail to explain (fascinatingly) why the German offensive failed, but the Allied one succeeded – because his real motivation, the meat of his analysis, is the social and political impact of the military failure on German and Austrian society.

Something else I found disappointing was his neglect of campaigns even a little outside his main concern with German and Austro-Hungarian military politics and social impacts.

He gives a thrilling account of the initial Austrian attack on Serbia – which was, after all, the cause of the whole thing – and how the Austrians were, very amusingly, repelled back to their starting points. But thereafter Serbia is more or less forgotten about and the fact that she is later successfully invaded is skated over in a sentence. Similarly, none of the fighting on the front between Austria and Italy is described, and there is only one reference to Romania being successfully occupied and nothing at all about Bulgaria until a passing mention to her capitulation in 1918. In other words, I had been hoping that the book would give an account of the First World War in the East, but it doesn’t. The text – as the title, after all, indicates – is pretty ruthlessly focused on the military capabilities, mobilisation, economy and society of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Ethnic tension

If there’s one theme which emerges from this very long book it is the centrality of ethnic and nationalist divisions in the Central Powers themselves, and in the way they treated their conquered foes.

Throughout its examination of the impact of war on German and Austro-Hungarian society – on employment, women’s roles, propaganda, agriculture and industry, popular culture and so on – the book continually reverts to an examination of the ethnic and national fracture lines which ran through these two states.

For example in the food chapter, there are not only radical differences in the way the German and Austro-Hungarian authorities dealt with the crisis (the effectiveness of different rationing schemes, and so on) but we are shown how different national regions, particularly of Austria-Hungary, refused to co-operate with each other: for example, rural Hungary refusing to share its food with urban Austria.

What emerges, through repeated description and analysis, is the very different ethnic and nationalist nature of the two empires.

Germany

Germany was an ethnically homogenous state, made up overwhelmingly of German-speaking ethnic Germans. Therefore the fractures – the divisions which total war opened up – tended to take place along class lines. Before the war the Social Democrat Party (much more left-wing than its name suggests) had been the biggest socialist party in Europe, heir to the legacy of Karl Marx. However, when war came, Watson shows how, in a hundred different ways, German society closed ranks in a patriotic display of unity and so the SDP, after some debate, united with all the other parties in the Reichstag in voting for the war credits the Chancellor asked for.

Watson says contemporaries called this the Burgfrieden spirit of the time, meaning literally ‘castle peace politics’ but more accurately a political policy of ‘party truce’, all parties rallying to the patriotic cause, trades unions agreeing not to strike and so on. The sense that Germans were encircled by enemies and must all pull together.

Typical of Watson’s social-history approach is his account of Liebesgaben or ‘love gifts’ (pp.211-214), the hundreds of thousands of socks and gloves and scarves knitted and sent to men at the front by the nation’s womenfolk, and the role played by children in war charity and some war work.

He has three or four pages about the distinctive development of ‘nail sculptures’, figures of soldiers or wartime leaders into which all citizens in a town were encouraged to hammer a nail while making a donation to war funds. Soon every town and city had these nail figures, focuses of patriotic feeling and fundraising (pp.221-225).

Watson is much more interested by the impact of war on the home front than by military campaigns.

Austria-Hungary

The spirit of unity which brought Germany together contrasts drastically with the collapse along ethnic lines of Austria-Hungary, the pressures which drove the peoples of the empire apart.

The Empire was created as a result of the Compromise of 1867 by which the Austrians had one political arrangement, the Hungarians a completely different one, and a whole host of lesser ethnicities and identities (the Czechs, and Poles in the north, the Serbs and Greeks and Croats and Bosnians in the troublesome south) jostled for recognition and power for their own constituencies.

Watson’s introductory chapters give a powerful sense of the fear and anxiety stalking the corridors of power in the Austro-Hungarian Empire well before the war began. This fear and anxiety were caused by the succession of political and military crises of the Edwardian period – the Bosnia Crisis of 1908, the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1911 and 1912, the rising voices of nationalism among Czechs in the north and Poles in the East. There was a very clear First Division of empires, a class of Great Powers, and the rulers of Austria-Hungary were petrified that the collapse and secession of any part of their heterogenous empire would relegate them to the class of also-rans, beginning them on the path to humiliation and impotence being experienced by the disintegrating Ottoman and powerless Chinese empire.

Watson shows how, as soon as war broke out, the empire began dividing. Vienna ceded control of large regions to localised governments best placed to mobilise the war effort among their own peoples, not least in Galicia, inhabited by a majority Polish community.

This tended to have two consequences:

one was to encourage nationalism and the rise of nationalist leaders in these areas (it was via wartime leadership of the Polish Legions, a force encouraged by Vienna, that Józef Piłsudski consolidated power and the authority which would enable him to establish an independent Poland in 1918 and successfully defend its borders in 1920, before eventually becoming Poland’s strongman in the interwar period)
the second was to encourage inter-ethnic tension and violence

The difference between homegenous Germany and heterogenous Austria-Hungary is exemplified in the respective nations’ responses to refugees. In Germany, the 200,000 or so refugees from Russia’s blood-thirsty invasion of East Prussia were distributed around the country, welcomed into homes and communities all over the Reich, and were recipients of charity from a popular refugee fund which raised millions of marks. Even when the refugees were in fact Polish-speaking or Lithuanians, they were still all received as loyal members of the Fatherland (pp.178-181).

Compare and contrast with the bitter resentment which greeted refugees from the Russian invasion of the Austro-Hungarian border region of Galicia. When some 1 million refugees were distributed round the rest of the empire, the native Hungarians, Austrians or Czechs all resented having large number of Poles, Ruthenians and, above all, Jewish, refugees imposed on their communities. There was resentment and outbreaks of anti-refugee violence.

The refugee crisis was just one of the ways in which the war drove the nationalities making up the empire further apart (pp.198-206).

Two years ago I read and was appalled by Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, which describes the seemingly endless ethnic cleansing and intercommunal massacres, pogroms and genocides which took place in the area between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s.

Watson’s book shows how many of these tensions existed well before the First World War – in the Balkans, going back centuries – but that it was this massive pan-European conflict which lifted the lid, which authorised violence on an unprecedented scale, and laid the seeds for irreconcilable hatreds, particularly between Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and Jews.

The perils of multi-ethnic societies

Although I bet Watson is a fully paid-up liberal (and his book makes occasional gestures towards the issue of ‘gender’, one of the must-have topics which all contemporary humanities have to include), nonetheless the net effect of these often harrowing 566 pages of text is to make the reader very nervous about the idea of a multinational country.

1. Austria-Hungary was a rainbow nation of ethnicities and, under pressure, it collapsed into feuding and fighting nationalities. 2. Russia, as soon as it invaded East Prussia and Galicia, began carrying out atrocities against entire ethnic groups classified as traitors or subversives, hanging entire villages full of Ukrainians or Ruthenians, massacring Jewish populations. 3. The to and fro of battle lines in the Balkans allowed invading forces to decimate villages and populations they considered dangerous or treacherous.

Austro-Hungarian troops hanging unarmed Serbian civilians (1915) No doubt ‘spies’ and ‘saboteurs’

In other words, everywhere you have a mix of ethnicities in a society put under pressure, you get voices raised blaming ‘the other’, blaming whichever minority group comes to hand.

Unable to accept the objective truth that their armies and military commanders were simply not up to winning the war, the so-called intelligentsia of Austria-Hungary, especially right-wing newspapers, magazines, writers and politicians, declared that the only reason they were losing must be due to the sabotage and treachery of traitors, spies, saboteurs and entire ethnic groups who were declared ‘enemies of the state’.

Just who was blamed depended on which small powerless group was ready to hand, but the Jews tended to be a minority wherever they found themselves, and so were subjected to an increasing chorus of denunciation.

Ring of Steel is a terrible indictment of the primitive xenophobia and bloodlust of human nature. But it is also a warning against the phenomenon that, in my opinion, has been ignored by generations of liberal politicians and opinion-formers in the West, who think that importing large groups of foreigners can only be a good thing which ‘enriches’ our rainbow societies. Maybe, at innumerable levels, it does.

But import several million ‘foreigners’, with different coloured skins, languages, cultures and religions into Western Europe – and then place the societies of the West under great economic and social strain thanks to an epic crash of the financial system and…

You get the rise of right-wing, sometimes very right-wing, nationalist parties – in Russia, in Poland, in Hungary, in Germany, in Sweden and Denmark, in Italy, in France, in Britain and America – all demanding a return to traditional values and ethnic solidarity.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying the evidence seems to be that human beings are like this. This is what we do.

And I’d have thought this was one of the main lessons of history. You can’t look at the mass destruction of the Napoleonic Wars and say – ‘Well at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the appalling suffering created by industrialisation and say, ‘Well at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the mind-blowing racist attitudes I’ve been reading about in the American Civil War and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the mad outbreak of the First World War and the stubborn refusal to give in which led to over ten million men being slaughtered and say – ‘Well, we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the Holocaust and say – ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’.

Because in my lifetime the savagery of the wars in former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, the genocide in Darfur, the failure of the Arab Springs and the civil war in Syria, the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of ISIS, the war in Yemen, the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar prove, if they prove anything, prove that —

WE ARE STILL LIKE THAT

We are just like that. Nothing has changed. Given half a chance, given enough deprivation, poverty and fear, human beings in any continent of the world will lash out in irrational violence which quickly becomes total, genocidal, scorched earth, mass destruction.

In the West, in Britain, France, Germany or America, we like to think we are different. But in my opinion, we are not intrinsically different at all. We are just protected by an enormous buffer of wealth and consumer goods from having to confront our basest nature. The majority of the populations in all the Western nations are well off enough not to want, or to allow, any kind of really ethnically divisive politics or inter-ethnic violence to take hold. Or are they?

Because creating multi-cultural societies has created the potential for serious social stress to exacerbate racial, ethnic and nationalist dividing lines which didn’t previously exist. When I was growing up there was no such thing as ‘Islamophobia’ in Britain. 40 years later there are some 2.8 million Muslims in Britain, some 5% of the population – and I read about people being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ almost every day in the newspapers.

It’s not as if we didn’t know the risks. I lived my entire life in the shadow of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland which were based entirely on ethnic or communal hatred. And now not a day goes past without a newspaper article bewailing how Brexit might end the Good Friday Agreement and bring back the men of violence. Is the peace between the ethnic groups in Northern Ireland really that fragile? Apparently so. But British governments and the mainland population have always had an uncanny ability to sweep Ulster under the carpet and pretend it’s not actually part of the UK. To turn our backs on 40 years of bombings and assassinations, to pretend that it all, somehow, wasn’t actually happening in Britain. But it was.

Anyway, here we are. Over the past 40 years or so, politicians and opinion makers from all parties across the Western world have made this multicultural bed, and now we’re all going to have to lie in it, disruptive and troubled though it is likely to be, for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

Although it certainly includes lots of detail about the how the societies of the Central Powers were mobilised and motivated to wage total war, and enough about the military campaigns to explain their impact on the home front, overall Watson’s book is not really a military history of the Central Powers at war, but much more a social and economic history of the impact of the war.

And in the many, many places where he describes ethnic and nationalist tensions breaking out into unspeakable violence, again and again, all over central and eastern Europe – Watson’s book could very easily be read as a manifesto against the notion of a multicultural, multi-ethnic society.

Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) A synopsis

Introduction

Ring of Steel sets out:

to explore how consent for war was won and maintained in Austria-Hungary and Germany
to explain how extreme and escalating violence radicalised German and Austro-Hungarian war aims, leading to the institution of slave labour and the stripping of agricultural and industrial resources in the occupied territories, and encouraging plans for permanent annexation of Belgium, northern France and west Russia
to describe the societal fragmentation caused by the war, in an Austria-Hungary already deeply fissured by ethnic tensions which eventually collapsed into a host of new nation states; Germany was more ethnically homogenous and had been more socially unified in support of war so the end, when it came, unleashed a flood of bitterness and anger which expressed itself not along ethnic but along class lines, leading to street fighting between parties of the extreme left and right

Chapters

Decisions for war
- The conspirators– Elements in Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry and military had been waiting an opportunity to suppress Serbia, on its borders and fomenting nationalist unrest. When Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian (A-H) throne was assassinated on 28 June, they blamed Serbia and spent most of July devising an ultimatum they, and everyone else in Europe, knew could not be fulfilled. Germany, not that concerned, gave A-H unqualified support, the so-called blank cheque. Both countries changed their tune when they realised that Russia was mobilising to support their fellow Slavs, the Serbs.
- War of existence – Reasons the Austro-Hungarian hierarchy were so harsh on Serbia i.e. a review of the many tensions tearing the Austro-Hungarian empire apart. ‘The actions of Austro-Hungarian rulers in the summer of 1914, although secretive and aggressive, were motivated less by belligerence than a profound sense of weakness, fear and despair’ (p.14).
- The miscalculated risk – The pressures on German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, reflect a nation anxious about the growing might of Britain and France, the industrialisation of Russia, but well aware of the risk of world war. He gambled that a) the Austrians would whip Serbia quickly, within a week and b) Russia would be so slow to mobilise that the conflict on the ground would be over and the whole thing handed over to international mediation. He was wrong on both counts.
- World war – Russia mobilises out of fear that an A-H vistory over Serbia would give the whole Balkans to Germanism, demolish Russia’s traditional claim to lead the Slav peoples, relegate her out of the league of Great Powers. Fear and anxiety led her to full mobilisation. Hearing of this, Bethmann tried to roll back and curtail Austrian aggression
Mobilising the people
- Assassination – The impact of the assassination on public opinion i.e. increased racial tensions across the Austro-Hungarian empire (p.57) Germans attack Czechs, Poles attack Germans.
- The July crisis – Austria-Hungary issues its ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July. 27 July Serbia rejects it. 28 July Austria-Hungary declares war. The emperor Franz Joseph issued a proclamation to his people defining it as a defensive war. This would be echoed by the German authorities and the Kaiser who sincerely felt they were pushing back on a decade of slow encroachment by France and Russia, by a series of Balkan wars and international crises in all of which Germany was ganged up on by France and Britain and Russia.
- Mobilisation – Millions of men were mobilised with bewildering speed. Companies large and small lost their workforces, producing a depression and unemployment. Families lost wage earners. Widespread fears of terrorism and spies. The Kaiser made the grand declaration that he no longer recognised parties – only Germans. Fear of invasion by backwards Russia persuaded leaders of the largest party in Germany, the million-strong SPD, to back the government. On 4 August the Reichstag voted overwhelmingly for war credits, establishing the Burgfrieden ‘fortress peace’, the sense of one nation united to defend its values. 250,000 men volunteered to fight in August alone. Networks of women’s support groups sprang up across Germany. Austria-Hungary was very different: loyalty to the emperor and Hapsburg dynasty aroused much loyalty, but each of the different nations and races considered their own positions – the Hungarians, the Poles, the Czechs. The Poles set up a volunteer Polish Legion which was to form the seed of the independent Polish nation declared in 1918. Many local leaders took the opportunity to lock up troublesome nationalists, inflaming nationalist tensions.
War of illusions
- War plans – The German army only had one plan, the infamous Schlieffen Plan drawn up in the 1890s, which called for the army to knock out France with a lightning 6-week strike through Belgium, ensuring a swift capitulation as in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, before turning all its attention to Russia, which it was assumed would mobilise very slowly. Wrong. The attack through Belgium a) took too long b) guaranteed that Britain entered the war in defence of France and Belgium, with just enough soldiers to force the German advance to a halt. Meanwhile in the east the Russians mobilised faster than expected and invaded East Prussia. Meanwhile everyone expected Austria to conquer little Serbia in weeks but due to ‘spectacularly incompetent’ leadership, its invasion not only failed but was repelled. Both nations, in other words, were scuppered by the ‘illusions’ of their military leaders.
- The Western front – On the night of 1 August advance German forces secured Luxemburg’s railways. Deployment of 2 million men, 118,000 horses, 20,800 rail transports carrying 300,000 tons of material to the border with France and Belgium go like clockwork. But as soon as the lerge-scale invasion started things went wrong. The Belgians were better armed and more resistant than expected. The French stood their ground and even counter-attacked. Both sides were jittery. Even the suspicion of potshots by civilians, spies and franc-tireurs drew terrible revenge. Houses, sometimes entire villages were burnt down. Civilians were taken as hostages, used as human shields, executed as spies or massacred. The Germans atrocities in Belgium were a propaganda gift for the Entente and sealed the German army’s reputation for brutality but Watson shows that, given half a chance the French could match them, and everything on the western front was dwarfed by the brutality of the Russian army as it invaded and occupied East Prussia.
- The Hapsburg war – ‘The Hapsburg army fought a vicious and unusually unsuccessful war in the summer of 1914’ (p.136). Watson explains in detail why the Austro-Hungarian army was repulsed from Serbia (‘a spectacular humiliation’) and, because of the changes of mind of supreme commander Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf (‘indecisions and errors’ p.148) led to catastrophic defeat in Galicia, the Polish-speaking eastern border of the empire, which the Russians swiftly over-ran. In one month of terrible decisions, Conrad had nearly destroyed the Hapsburg army (p.156).
The war of defence
- Invasion – News of the Russian sweep into Galicia and Eastern Prussia, and the atrocities they promptly started committing, prompted fear and anxiety, and its corollary, patriotic fervour, across Germany.
- Allenstein – Watson focuses on this town of 33,000 in East Prussia as an example of what happened when the Russians invaded i.e. terrible threat of arbitrary violence which the mayor, police and other civili authorities desperately tried to fend off i.e. by handing over all the food the Russians demanded.
- Russian atrocities – The Cossacks raped, burned and pillaged wherever they went. In the first two months some 1,500 civilians died. As in the west, a lot of violence was fueled by the ordinary soldier’s fear of being shot by civilians, by spies, by the general terror of this new kind of warfare. It depended on the officers, and military discipline was more patchy in the Tsar’s army than in the western armies. 1 in 20 of those killed were cyclists. Bicycles were unknown in Tsarist Russia, so soldiers who saw bicycles assumed they were some kind of weapon, arrested the cyclists, smashed up the bikes and, more often than not, shot the cyclist on the spot. The Russians also deported tens of thousands of ‘suspect’ civilians into the Russian interior, often dumping them in makeshift camps, or just in the steppes, where about a third died of illness and neglect. 800,000 refugees fled west and were distributed through the Reich and efficiently looked after, charity raising huge sums, and their stories helping to solidify Germany’s resolve to fight on. Russia’s atrocities in the first few months helped make the war last so long.
- Race war – Wherever they went the Russians carried out pogroms against Jews.
- Life in Great Russia – The Russians’ brutal and counter-productive efforts to make occupied Galicia (which straddles the modern-day border between Poland and Ukraine) part of Mother Russia by suppressing nationalist Poles, Ukrainians and, especially, Jews.
- ‘Unwelcome co-eaters’ – In Watson’s view the Russian occupation of Galicia sowed the seeds of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Galicia was the breadbasket of the empire; combined with the naval blockade which the Entente began to put in place, this ensured food shortages, slowly developing towards starvation over the next four years. But also, over a million refugees fled Russian-occupied Galicia and whereas a flood of refugees cemented Germany identity, here the arrival of Poles, Ruthenians, Jews and other minorities in Germany, Hungarian or Czech lands bred resentment and hostility, social tensions and racial antagonism’ (p.205). Watson quotes an Austrian describing the penniless refugees as ‘unwelcome co-eaters’.
Encirclement
- The long war – By Christmas 1914 it was clear this was a new kind of war, the stalemate in east and west was going to take time to beat down and, in the meantime, this would be a people’s war, requiring unprecedented levels of public support and consent.
- A war of love – A description of the widespread volunteer activity in civilian Germany, including Liebestätigkeiten, ‘activities of love’, including sending Liebesgaben or ‘gifts of love’, i.e. socks and gloves and pants and scarves, to the millions of men at the front. In January the Reich set up its first propaganda campaign, to educate the population about Britain’s starvation blockade of Germany, and the need to ration food. The cult of nail figures.
- Germany versus Britain – German ruling class and intelligentsia were bitterly disappointed that Britain ended up joining the war – many had gambled that she would stay out – and, when Britain imposed a complete naval blockade of Germany – which had never been self-sufficient in food production – this resentment was focused by government propaganda into real hatred. Gott strafe England became a popular greeting. All this helped conceal that German authorities badly mismanagement the production and distribution of what food there was.
- Austria-Hungary’s local wars – As soon as war started the Austro-Hungarian army, which turned out to be rubbish at fighting other armies – in Serbia or Galicia – turned out to be excellent at suppressing dissidents, spies and traitors in their own countries, waging what Watson describes as a ‘war on its own peoples and civil administrations’ (p.253), with the inevitable result that, over the next four years, all of those people lost faith in the Hapsburg administration and increasingly hankered after rule by their own people. Watson’s descriptions of the Hapsburg army’s heavy-handed banning of Czech symbols and language in Bohemia has to be read to be believed, as an example of self-defeating heavy-handedness. On 23 May 1915 Italy, formerly their ally, declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. Italy had been bribed with the promise of extensive Austrian territory and with gold, by France and Britain. The sense of bitterness and betrayal in the Central Powers was further exacerbated. Austria-Hungary now had to face war on a new front.
Security for all time
- Mitteleuropa – In September 1914 Chancellor Bethmann Holweg approved a provision war aims plan. The goal was long-term security, which required pushing the borders with France and Russia further away, by permanently annexing Belgium and northern France and West Russia. These areas could then be turned into colonies, run by populations bred to supply the needs of the Reich. This had to be kept secret because the public was told it was a war of defence, but debate about whether it was, in actuality, a war of annexation, and just what should be annexed, and how and when, continued to exercise German leaders and politicians.
- Eastern utopias – In 1915 Germany counter-attacked against Russia and took back East Prussia and Galicia as well as conquering Tsarist Poland the Baltic states. Watson describes the German plans to administer and exploit this large new territory, including the racialisation of civil administration, and the asset stripping of most of Poland.
Crisis at the front
- Blood – By the start of 1916 all sides knew they were in a war of attrition. The idea of bleeding the opponent white underpinned the three big offensives of the year, the Germans against Verdun, the British on the Somme, the Russian Brusoliv offensive.
- The Grognards – The armies of all the combatants were much larger than in 1914, much better armed and supplied, but had also changed social composition. Lots of the career officers had been killed, replaced by men of lower social classes. Combined with fewer keen volunteers, this led to more tension in the ranks.
- Verdun – Verdun was a complex of forts which stuck out into the German trench line. General von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, carefully planned co-ordinated attacks on the complex, designed to draw in an endless stream of French troops who could be massacred by Germans facing them and controlling the flanks. In the event, both sides suffered immense casualties, about 300,000 men killed and wounded.
- Brusilov’s offensive – The Russians storm through the Austro-Hungarian Fourth and Seventh Armies in the East, ‘yet enother blow to the sinking prestige of the Hapsburg monarchy’ (p.310).
- The Somme – The Somme offensive failed because Field Marshall Haig broadened its at-first limited and carefully planned objectives into unacheivable over-reach. Watson thinks the Entente failed to deploy superior material and manpower in a focused enough way to secure a breakthrough. The biggest impact (apart from 100s of thousands of dead and maimed men) was the psychological blow to the German army whch, for the first time, really felt the Entente’s superiority.
- Outcomes – By the end of 1916, stalemate on all fronts. The Central Powers defeated and occupied Romania in autumn 1916. Late in the year a) German officers were gazetted at all levels of the useless Austro-Hungarian army b) in August the German General Staff was reorganised into a new body, the third OHL (see below).
Deprivation
- Suffering and shortage – Rationing, ersatz food (bread made of sawdust or sand, sausages made from slime and water), foraging, the black economy.
- The causes of shortage – An economic survey of the shortfall of agricultural production before and during the war.
- Mismanaging shortage – Various impacts of rationing and food shortages ‘huge inefficiency and disastrous errors’ (p.359).
- Shattered societies – In Germany the beginnings of class resentment, in Austria-Hungary further polarisation between nationalities and races (e.g. Hungary refused to share its food surpluses with starving Austria), rising crime, loss of faith in the authorities, youth rebellion. There were food riots and, for the first time in two years, strikes. The social compact which had helped the Central Powers enter the war, was breaking down.
Remobilisation
- The Third OHL – 29 August 1916 Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was appointed commander of the German army, with Erich Ludendorff as his Quartermaster General. OHL stands for Oberste Heeresleitung, Supreme Army Command. Over the next two years this pair gained total control of Germany’s war machine and, eventually, of its society, completely eclipsing the Kaiser and the civilian authorities
- The Hindenburg Programme – The complete remodelling of German society from top to bottom, for Total War, refocusing agricultural and industrial output. Crucially, it represented an ideological shift from state authorities working through consent to working through compulsion.
- Forced labour – In occupied Belgium, among prisoners of war in the Reich, and slave labour in Poland. ‘At war’s end 1.5 million prisoners were spread across 750,000 German farms and firms’ (p.389) about a third of them Poles.
- The occupied territories – By 1916 the Germans had overrun 525,500 square kilometres and taken control of 21 million non-German citizens (p.392). How the Germans stripped labour, agricultural goods, machinery from occupied lands, the worst case being the ‘Ober Ost’ region in the Baltic, under Ludendorff. The Belgians got off lightest because of the Commission for Relief in Belgium organised by millionaire mining engineer and future U.S. president Herbert Hoover (p.406).
- By far the most important thing to emerge from this analysis of German OHL attempts to militarise society, fleece occupied countries and create a mass semi-slave workforce was that it didn’t work it did not succeed in either feeding the German population better or significantly increasing war output. A lesson the Nazis failed to learn.
U-boats
- The worst decision of the war – In January 1917 the Reich declared ‘unrestricted’ U-boat warfare on merchant ships supplying Britain and France. This was bound to impact America, who made up over half the shipping. As American merchant ships began being sunk American public opinion became vociferous for war. On 6 April America entered the war on the Entente side, changing the alliance into ‘the Allies’. Watson explains the background to the German decision i.e. an authoritative report analysed the shipping Britain required, the tonnage U-boats could sink, and calculated that Britain’s food supplies could be driven into crisis and Britain forced to capitulate before the Americans entered. In other words it was another German gamble which, like the Schlieffen Gamble back in 1914, failed.
- The unrestricted submarine campaign – A fascinating account of the development of the U-boat fleet, the experience of sailing on a U-boat, the resilience of its crews, some amazing stories of miraculous escapes, then analysis of why the strategy failed; partly due to the Allies adopting a convoy system, to the use of mines, but mostly because Germany never had enough submarines but most fundamentally – because the strategy was based on faulty calculations.
- Wonder weapon blues – At first the German population was given a huge lift by publicity around the new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, putting its faith in this new ‘wonder weapon’ to end the war soon. Watson describes the enormous propaganda drive which surrounded subscription to the Sixth War Loan. America suspended diplomatic relations in February 1917, but German military leaders and intellectuals didn’t mind because of their confidence in the wonder weapon. But even patriots were dismayed when, on 1 March, allied newspapers published the notorious Zimmerman telegram in which the German Foreign Minister had offered an alliance with Mexico against America, in return for which the Mexicans would get money, as well as the states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. To educated people it came as no surprise when America declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. And it was no coincidence that a few weeks later Germany saw the first really large-scale strike of the war when 217,000 workers downed tools in Berlin (p.446).
- In Watson’s opinion the decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare was the single biggest cause for the defeat of the Central Powers (p.449).
Dangerous ideas
- Reactionary regimes – 1917 brought big changes. The Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph died and was succeeded by the 29-year-old emperor Karl, who turned out to be shallow and indecisive. The Austrian Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, who had overseen so many defeats, was replaced in February 1917. In March 1917 the Tsar of Russia was overthrown and replaced by an uneasy partnership of a middle-class Provisional Government and a workers and soldiers’ soviet. President Woodrow Wilson’s announcement that America was fighting the military regime and not the people of Germany was cleverly devised to drive a wedge between population and rulers. Watson describes the response of the Kaiser, the third OHL, the socialists and the conservatives in the Reichstag to combat these political pressures.
- Going for broke – Early in 1917 at a conference with the Chancellor and the Kaiser, Hindenburg and Ludendorff pushed through a policy of Maximum Annexation, with a view to permanent control of Belgium, northern France, Poland, the Baltic and the Balkans. In secret, the new young Austrian emperor had opened a channel of communication with the French and British, prepared to concede a peace ‘with no annexations and no reparations’. The Allied leaders were interested but the opportunity was crushed by the Italian Prime Minister who refused to abandon the promise he’d been made of gaining significant Austrian territory. Her peace overtures rebuffed, Austria found herself tied to an increasingly militant Germany.
- Opposition – How the nationalities – the Czechs, the Poles, the south Slavs and the Hungarians – distanced themselves from the failing Habsburg administration. In Germany there was a rise in strikes, and for the first time, mutinies, in the navy. Evidence that the example of the Petersburg Soviet had speak among politically aware workers. The SPD split, with an independent SPD pursuing calls for an immediate peace, and a tiny splinter group, the Sparticists, who were to be involved in the post-war revolutionary uprisings.
The bread peace
- Brest-Litovsk – The Bolsheviks staged their coup d’état in November 1917 and a few weeks later sued for peace. the armistice on the eastern front started on 15 December 1917. Peace talks were held at the town of Berst-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks delayed and played hardball, so the Germans attacked and moved forward 200 kilometres in five days. Panicking, Lenin signed a peace treaty on 3 March 1918, by which he conceded 2.5 million square kilometres of territory with 50 million inhabitants, 90 percent of Russian coal mines, 54 % of its industry and a third of its railways and agriculture (p.494). Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Ottakar Czernin made one of the greatest mistakes of the period by signing an independence deal with Ukraine which gave the new country much of southern Poland, in exchange for urgently needed food supplies. In the event the grain never turned up, but the entire Polish provisional council and Hapsburg diplomats in Poland resigned in protest.
- Goodbye Galicia – The ill-fated decision to cede Ukraine land traditionally associated with Poland finished all lingering loyalty to the Hapsburgs. Watson details the riots in Cracow, the replacement of the Hapsburg eagle with Polish symbols, while Hapsburg insignia and even medals were publicly ridiculed, hanged and spat on. The corollary of this was the end of easy-going multinationalism, with a rise in attacks on non-Poles and especially Jews.
- The Hapsburg military – In summer 1918 Austria-Hungary could have sued for a separate peace with the Allies, but failed to do so. After the peace with Russia about a million prisoners of war began returning, many bringing with them the virus of Bolshevism, but even more disillusioned by the futility of war. The army handled them badly, sending them to quarantine camps to be debriefed, where conditions were bad, then deploying them to areas where they weren’t nationals in order to prevent them furthering the nationalist chaos which was threatening the empire. Nationalist leaders in Poland and Czechoslovakia were finished with the Hapsburgs. Yet instead of negotiating a separate peace and possibly hanging onto their empire, the ruling class tied its wagon to Germany’s fortunes. In May Karl made a humble trip to OHL headquarters in Spa, to apologise to Hindenburg and pledge his nation’s army to the neverending war.
Collapse
- The last chance – The Germans made a final, enormous and well-organised push on the western front in spring 1918. Watson shows how the preparations were immaculate but the offensive lacked clear targets. If it had taken the major supply depots of Amiens or Haezebrouck it might have forced to the Allies to the negotiating table. But Ludendorff made the fateful decision to support the army which made the quickest breakthrough of Allied lines, the Eighteenth Army attacking south of the Somme. It shattered the British Fifth Army, took some 90,000 prisoners, and advanced 60 kilometres. But it was 60 kilometres of wasteland, still devastated after the terrible Battle of the Somme of 1916. He followed this up with Operation Georgette which broke through French lines on the Chemin des Dames and advanced 20 kilometres in a day, the biggest advance in one day achieved by either side in the war. But this and the final attack in Champagne merely highlighted a fatal truth. No matter how far they advanced, the British and French always had more men and munitions, and the Americans were coming. Supply lines were stretched. Ammunition was running low. And the men, who had suffered huge losses, were recycled back to the Front and expected to fight again and again. they were exhausted.
- Defeat – Which explains why, when the French and British counter-attacked in mid-July the Germans collapsed. Soon the Allies couldn’t cope with the number of Germans who were surrendering. The failure of the spring offensive had brought it home to them, one and all, that they could never win. In which case they just wanted the war to end. Between March and July the German army suffered 980,000 casualties, and the Allies captured 385,000. There were mutinies but also plenty of cases where officers led their men in surrendering. All ranks up to and including the High Command realised they had lost. Ludendorff had a nervous breakdown and a nerve specialist was called in to keep him going. On 28 September he gave in to reality and told Hindenburg that Germany must ask for an immediate armistice.
- Revolution – It all ended very quickly. By October the German and Austrian rulers had agreed to approach Woodrow Wilson asking for an armistice. Watson details the complicated sequence of events. American demands hardened after a U-boat sank a ship in the Atlantic, killing more women and children and some American civilians. Negotiations between the German leaders were tortuous. I knew the Generals suddenly became impatient for the war to end, but had no idea that they then changed their minds and tried to get the Kaiser to fight on. but by then power had shifted to the Reichstag and the bulk of the population. Demoralised by the publication Germany’s initial peace overture of 3 October, the sailors of the German fleet simply refused to put to sea for a last-ditch Götterdämmerung battle with the British. Instead they instigated mutinies which swept across barracks in Germany, leading to the declaration of a Munich soviet and revolution in Berlin. A hurriedly convened committee of left and centre politicians announced that the Kaiser had abdicated (although he hadn’t). The long awaited armistice came into force on 11 November 1918. By then Austria-Hungary had collapsed. The Hungarian Revolution started on 27 October with thousands streaming onto the streets in defiance of the Hapsburg army, with soldiers mutinying and the Hapsburg insignia everywhere torn down and replaced by the red, white and green flag. On 31 October crowds took to the streets of Prague declaring Czech independence. More violent was the declaration of independence in Poland, accompanied by violence against rival Ruthenes and, as usual, pogroms against Jews. If the peace of November 1918 signalled a genuine return to the status quo ante in France and Britain, it brought just the opposite in central and eastern Europe, it led to entirely new and unprecedented political and nationalist forces being unleashed, forces which destabilised the new fledgling nations for years, until they were all caught up in the conflagration started by the Nazis, which only ended in 45 years of subjection to the Soviet Union.
Epilogue – It took a long time to sign the peace treaties. Peace with Germany was only signed on 28 June 1919, with Austria in September 1919, with Hungary in June 1920. Most of the Central Power leaders escaped scot free, the Kaiser enjoying retirement in his Dutch villa, General Hindenburg never ceasing to blame ‘the politicians’ for Germany’s defeat and, amazingly, getting elected President of the Weimar Republic in 1925. The enormous reparations imposed on Germany are usually singled out as the cause for post-war Germany’s financial and political instability. But Watson singles out Woodrow Wilson’s claim that the key to the peace would be the principle of ‘self determination’. This led many people to hope for a nation and government of their own in a region which was just too racially intermixed. With the result that racial conflict was to plague all the post-war nations of central and eastern Europe. Above all tens of millions of people were left wondering what all their suffering and loss had been for, and with a deep, abiding, smouldering sense of resentment and anger. Bitter and violent anger combined with ethnic and racial tensions were to lead Europe into an even worse disaster just 20 years later. For which, read The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)

Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 (2017)

The Great Man theory…

Catherine Merridale’s book Lenin on the Train describes the journey by sealed train which Lenin and 30 or so of his Bolshevik supporters made across Germany, up into Sweden, across the border into Finland and then south to St Petersburg, in April 1917.

The whole thing was laid on and funded by the German High Command in the hope that returning this noted troublemaker to the febrile political atmosphere of wartime Russia, only a few weeks after the Tsar had been toppled in the February revolution, might lead to even worse political disarray, and that this might cause Russia to abandon the war altogether, thus allowing Germany to concentrate her forces in the West.

In the chapter titled ‘Gold’ Merridale speculates on just how extensive German support for the Bolsheviks in fact was. Was laying the train, passports, visas, food and so on just the beginning? Did the Germans also siphon money to the Bolsheviks to fund their party newspaper, Pravda, and their campaigning leaflets, to pay for meetings and venues?

The evidence is murky, but underlying the whole enquiry is a variation on the Great Man theory of history, namely: if only someone had stopped Lenin getting to Russia, if only he had been arrested at the Finland order (which, apparently, he nearly was), or simply executed by British Intelligence (who had more than one opportunity) – then maybe the whole Russian Revolution, with the immense worlds of suffering it produced, would never have happened. Maybe it all came down to one man or, at the least, to one small political party – the Bolsheviks.

… versus the hunger for change

Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 is the massive coffee table book of last year’s enormous Royal Academy exhibition about the radical, world-changing new art and design which was inspired by the Russian Revolution.

I spent an afternoon flicking through it (and dipping into the 16 intense and detailed essays which address every genre and type of art influenced by the Revolution). And it dawned on me that the extraordinary explosion of high and popular art, all across the nation, art for factories and workshops and steelyards and barracks, radical innovations in film and design and posters and graphics – mitigates against the Great Man theory.

At the very least the sheer scale and scope and dynamism of the new movements, which lasted for at least a decade (until Stalin suppressed it in favour of his bland, conventional ‘Socialist Realism’ in the early 1930s) show the enormous hunger for change and for radical, world-changing experimentation among all the artists, poets, authors, film-makers, craftsmen and designers of 1910s Russia.

Moreover, the fact that these outpourings of propaganda films and wallpaper and textiles and ceramics and architecture and completely new styles of graphics and design were welcomed, watched, read and distributed so widely, suggest the Russia as a whole was a society straining at the leash for an incredibly total transformation.

Maybe, possibly, the Bolsheviks might not have seized power in October 1917. But the existing dual government couldn’t have continued – somebody would have seized power.

And all the art on display at the exhibition and in this book suggests that whoever took the reins would not have been able to hold back the tremendous, society-wide thirst for complete change in social, political, economic and cultural values which was straining Russia to breaking point.

Maybe Lenin could have been stopped and the Bolsheviks banned. But the evidence of this exhibition and book suggest that whoever took power in Russia in late 1917 would still have been compelled to make wide-ranging and sweeping changes, which would have led to much the same end – a dictator force-marching Russia through agricultural and industrial modernisation. Given Russia’s long history of secret police and prison camps, any faction which had come to power – on the right or left – would probably have wreaked just as much social and personal havoc as the Bolsheviks.

In other words – speculation about how much the German High Command makes for interesting reading, and leads to fanciful speculation – but I don’t think it would have changed the outcome of events.

Completely new visual styles

Abstract art

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) by El Lissitzky

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge by El Lissitzky (1919)

Figurative art

After the battle by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1923)

Architecture

Model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, Moscow, 1920

Ceramics

Russian revolutionary plate (1921)

Design

Propaganda poster by Alexander Rodchenko

Fabrics

Red spinner by Andrey Golubev (1930)

Film

Still from Battleship Potemkin, the 1925 avant-garde film directed by Eisenstein

Avante-garde photography

Osip Bril by Alexander Rodchenko (1924)

Socialist realist photography

A Komsomol at the wheel (1929) by Arkady Shaikhet

Posters

Poster for Man with a movie camera (1929)

Even if Lenin had never lived, and the Bolshevik party never existed, the complete and utter collapse of Russian society, with all its traditions, its religion, its class system, king and aristocracy, its system of land ownership and industrial production, would have triggered an immense social and cultural transformation, regardless.

Artists reflecting these changes would have fallen in line with the discoveries of the other European avant-gardes, themselves based on the transforming impact of the new technologies of the day which were driving all Western societies – mass production of ceramics and fabrics, the new popularity of film and radio, the excitement of cars and fast trains – and everywhere the transforming impact of electricity with its ability to power lights in streets and public buildings, as well as driving a whole new world of consumer goods.

My argument is that seismic change would have happened no matter what the precise alignment of political parties in Russia. Or who the German High Command had funded.

Reviews of books about communism and the Cold War

Reviews of other Russian art exhibitions

Russia and the Arts @ National Portrait Gallery (March 2016)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)

1 Comment

by Simon on September 5, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Architecture, Art, Books, European History, Exhibition, Great War, History, Photography, Poetry, politics, Russia, Russian literature, Sculpture, War

Posted by Simon on September 5, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/revolution-russian-art-1917-1932/

Lenin on The Train by Catherine Merridale (2016)

Dominic Lieven’s book about the diplomatic build-up to the Great War – Towards The Flame – was very demanding, every page full of analyses and counter-analyses of complex international situations, which took a good deal of concentration to understand.

By contrast, Catherine Merridale’s book is like a series of articles in a toney travel supplement, or the book version of a TV script – chatty, opinionated, entertaining, lightweight and, in the end, a bit disappointing.

The story

In April 1917 the German High command laid on a sealed train to transport Lenin and 30 or so communist colleagues to war-weary Russia, in the hope that his subversive activities would weaken the Russian war machine. It was a well-established strategy. At the same time, the Germans were arming independence fighters in Ireland and trying to foment rebellion against British rule in India.

This book sets out to recreate the fateful journey, describing the broader context of the war and wartime St Petersburg, the nexus of German agents and dodgy Russian businessmen who arranged the deal, the journey itself, and the fraught political situation in which Lenin found in wartime St Petersburg when he arrived.

Lenin’s train journey from Switzerland to the Finland Station in St Petersburg

Three parts

Merridale’s book isn’t formally divided into three parts, but that’s what it feels like, to this reader at any rate.

Part one – Catherine’s adventures and pukka Brits

For such an important and, in its consequences, tragic subject, the introduction and part one are light, chatty and disconcertingly frivolous.

In the introduction Merridale describes her own attempt to recreate Lenin’s journey on modern-day trains and ferries, with a great deal of travel magazine observations – people smuggle booze on the ferry from Germany to Sweden, it’s very cold in Finland, and so on. Her observations are often disappointingly trite – in one place she points out that when Lenin took the journey Europe was at war, whereas in 2016 – Europe is at peace! Back then it was a dangerous and uncomfortable journey – but now crossing frontiers is easy and the seating is nice and comfy!

Then, in the first 80 or so pages of the text proper she plunges us not into the fraught economic, military and political situation of 1917 Europe but… into the world of quirky upper-class characters who populated the British Embassy and diplomatic corps in 1917 St Petersburg (which is, she tells us, a simply magical city!).

The journey ends in the magical city of St Petersburg, Lenin’s wartime Petrograd, the second Russian capital. (p.17)

Chaps like Sir Samuel Hoare, Sir George William Buchanan, Major-General Sir Alfred William Fortescue Knox, Sir John Hanbury-Williams, and so on.

When Dominic Lieven introduces diplomatic personnel or political leaders into his narrative it is always to summarise their ‘line’, their views on geopolitical issues, and to feed them into his intricate portrait of the complex debates about prewar Russian strategy.

When Merridale introduces key players it is generally to tell us a funny story about their parrot or their umbrella.

When Lieven introduces Marxist revolutionaries, it is to explain their theories and how they had developed out of the economic and social situation of Russia, the threats they posed to the Tsarist order, and to clarify the convergence of circumstances which made them viable.

When Merridale introduces her revolutionaries it is to tell us about their love lives and taste in wine.

So, for example, she tells us that in 1905 Trotsky and his wife arrived at the Munich apartment of Alexander Helphand, known as ‘Parvus’, Marxist theoretician, revolutionary, and activist in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. You might expect Merridale to give us at least a hint of their theoretical discussions and how they influenced the man who went on to be number two in the Russian Revolution, but no. The Trotskies:

became unofficial lodgers at the big man’s place, sharing all the news and imbibing Parvus’ theories of revolution along with his strong coffee and delicious late-night wine. The two men talked about the revolutionary potential of the general strike, they honed their idea of a world revolution (for Russia was only ever meant to be a starting point) and they dared each other to get tickets for the next train east. (p.60)

Instead of anything about his theoretical contribution or political strategy, we learn that Parvus was so fat that the children of German Marxist leader, Karl Kautsky, nicknamed him ‘Dr Elephant’.

When Parvus persuades the German High Command to fund his plan to send revolutionaries to Russia, with the initial downpayments he sets himself up in Zurich’s Baur au Lac hotel where he establishes an entourage of bosomy blondes and orders champagne for breakfast (p.63).

This may all be true, but these first hundred pages or so present serious, tragic, even catastrophic history, as jolly japes retold by Bertie Wooster. The British Embassy, we learn, was situated in the impressive Saltykov Palace, although the diplomats had to share it with:

an ancient princess, Anna Sergeyevna Saltykova, who still lived in the back with her servants and a loquacious parrot. (p.31)

The British ambassador to Petersburg was supported by his wife, Georgina, his daughter Meriel, and – a bad-tempered Siamese cat.

The acting head of intelligence at the time was Major Cudbert Thornhill, an old India hand and ‘a good shot with rifle, catapult, shot-gun and blowpipe.’ (p.33)

It feels a lot like ‘Miss Marple investigates the Russian Revolution’.

Part two – the Russian revolution and train journey

Around page 100 things pick up. Merridale begins to pay more serious attention to Lenin’s beliefs and theories. We still get a lot about his haircut, his boots and how he was dragged off to a department store in Stockholm to buy new clothes so that he would look more presentable on arriving in Russia (and pleasant travelogue about how Merridale herself has visited as many of these shops and cafes and sites as remain).

But for the central hundred and fifty pages or so Merridale’s narrative becomes genuinely gripping.

The genesis of the idea to send Lenin to Russia remains a bit murky. Some communist fixers-cum-shady businessmen (hence the portrait of Parvus and others of his type) appear to have volunteered their services as go-betweens with the communist agitators, at just the time that the German secret services were casting around for characters likely to cause the most damage to the Russian state.

Contacts and discussions had been floating in the foggy atmosphere of war more or less since the outbreak of hostilities. What suddenly kick starts everything is the February Revolution – covered in gripping detail by Merridale – when a march of women to celebrate International Women’s Day attracts other protesters, swells in size and then – crucially – the soldiers sent in to suppress it refuse to obey orders, and even turn on their own officers.

After a winter of escalating strikes and unrest, exacerbated by severe food shortages, it was the mutiny of the soldiers in garrisons all across Petersburg which led to the Revolution.

The members of the Duma, the Russian Parliament, were confused by events: the conservatives fled, many resigned, but a hard core of liberals stayed on to set up what they called a Provisional Government, under the benign figurehead of kindly old Prince Lvov. Meanwhile, there was unstoppable momentum from politicised workers (especially from the working class Vyborg area of Petersburg) and representatives of the mutinous regiments, to set up their own council or soviet.

Meanwhile the Tsar had been forced to abdicate, excluding his sickly son from the succession, and passing the throne on to his brother, Grand Duke Michael, who himself deferred taking it up until until ‘the people were allowed to vote through a Constituent Assembly for the continuance of the monarchy or a republic’. This never happened, and it was Grand Duke Michael’s demurral which, in effect, brought the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty to an end.

Thus in a few hectic days came about a situation in which Russia had become a republic, but was lumbered with two governing bodies – the Provisional Government and the Petersburg Soviet – who eyed each other with suspicion. The initial euphoria of the revolution settled down into a pattern of all-night debates and arguments in smoke-filled rooms – while all the while Russia was still fighting a war against an extremely professional opponent, imperial Germany, and trying to motivate a huge army of some seven million men who now wondered what on earth they were fighting for.

Merridale explains all this very well, not least because she draws heavily on the eye witness accounts of the British diplomats and writers present in Petersburg. It is only now that the reader understands why we were introduced to all these upper-class twits in the first 80 or so pages – it was because they would turn out to be invaluable source material for describing and interpreting the confusing chaos of events in Petersburg that fateful spring.

It would have helped a lot if Merridale had prefaced her opening chapters by saying: ‘I am now going to introduce you to a florid collection of British upper class eccentrics, incompetents and curiosities which might seem odd but, trust me, they will turn out to be vital eye-witness testimony to one of the most seismic events in history.’

Anyway, Merridale now skillfully intersperses pretty much everything that is known about the eight-day journey of the train – the organisation of the train by German authorities, the gathering up of Lenin’s associates, the setting off, the stops, the delays, the invasions by drunken soldiers, the professional and personal rivalries of many of the figures aboard it, the border passports control (which I was surprised to read included humiliating strip searches) – all interspersed with sections describing the fast-moving events in Petersburg.

Above all, for the first time, the narrative starts to sound political. For the first time she descends into the feverish mesh of argument and counter-argument which engulfed every educated person living in Russia, and gives it a sense of urgency:

Should Russia continue fighting? Some socialists thought Russia should offer an immediate ceasefire in what was, after all, a brutal imperialist war. Liberal pacifists agreed. But right-wing traditionalists thought Russia must fight on to defend her honour, the Holy Church etc. And many socialists thought to surrender would be simply to allow imperial Germany to invade and conquer European Russia.

Among socialists there was fierce and bitter debate about whether the ‘revolution’ needed to be continued or whether it had achieved its aim. You have to understand that Marx thought that Western societies would inevitably and unstoppably pass through certain fixed stages of development, and that orthodox Marxists therefore thought that Russia had to pass from a peasant autocracy into a bourgeois democracy, before it could go on to have a workers’ revolution. The Tsarist autocracy had quite clearly been overthrown and the new provisional Government, made up mostly of lawyers, academics and some industrialists, quite clearly represented the triumph of the bourgeoisie. This stage should be given a chance to bed in, to establish western norms of democracy, a free press and so on, while the socialists continued to educate the workers and peasants in order to prepare for the next stage, the socialist revolution which was just around the corner. Manana. Soon. Probably.

Merridale’s very English, pragmatic, unintellectual approach to the situation brings out some more basic, humdrum psychological explanations for delay – namely that many of the so-called socialists and communists were in fact scared of assuming responsibility in such a perilous situation. Power looked like a poisoned chalice. Russia was losing the war and the people were starving. With the convenient scapegoat of the Tsar removed, whoever took the reins would get all the blame.

This is the backdrop against which Lenin’s train finally steams into the Finland station and he is greeted by a large cheering crowd and dignitaries with bouquets of flowers etc.

Merridale has, by this stage, done such a good job of bringing out Lenin’s spartan, puritan, obsessive personality that we’re not surprised that he throws away the bouquets, ignores the pompous welcome speeches and goes straight out onto the balcony to address the crowd of workers to announce that – the Time Is Here, the time is now for uncompromising revolution. No-one must cooperate with the bourgeois provisional government. It must be stormed and overthrown and all power vested in soviets or communes of workers and peasants.

Merridale brilliantly conveys the shock Lenin’s unbending zealotry had on absolutely everyone: the bourgeois liberals, the meek-minded socialists, let alone conservatives and reactionaries. Even the more radical Bolshevik faction which Lenin had himself founded back in 1903 was surprised, with Bolsheviks just back from Siberian exile such as Kamenev and Stalin having to readjust their positions to match Lenin’s. No-one else was thinking so radically and violently.

Merridale shows how Lenin was in a minority of one even among his own followers, and quotes both socialists, and provisional government officials, who were eye-witnesses in the days and weeks that followed, to meetings, debates, speeches and presentations in which Lenin was booed and roundly lost the argument. The acting premier, Kerensky, initially worried by his return, watched Lenin alienate his entire party and confidently concluded that he was ‘finished’.

How to end?

If you think about it, Merridale and her publishers had always faced a problem with this book which is, where to end it? The train journey lasted just eight days, from 9 to 17 April. How far either side of the actual journey should the book extend?

You can see how you’d need a build-up to the journey, in Merridale’s case using the accounts of British diplomats to paint in the privations and discontents of wartime Petersburg.

You can see how you’d need a section describing the very shady activities of the immense swamp of spies, middle men, entrepreneurs, smugglers, double agents, conspirators, fanatics, political zealots of all colours and so on who infested wartime Switzerland, in order to give a flavour of the struggle the German High Command had to weed out hundreds of absurd plots from the handful of ideas which might really contribute to their war effort. And how you’d then drill down to the specific contacts between Russian Bolshevik supporters (often themselves pretty shady businessmen) and named individuals in German secret service. using whatever archive material still exists.

Merridale does all this and summarises what is currently known about the contacts, agreements, payments and practical details fixed up among these men.

Then you’d want a detailed description of the train journey itself, right down to the most trivial detail, right down to the way Lenin hated smoking and insisted that people use the only toilet in his set of ‘sealed’ carriages to smoke in – which made it uncomfortable for people who actually wanted to use the loo as a loo. So that, in the end, Lenin devised a ticketing system: second class tickets for those who wanted to smoke in the lav, first class tickets for those who needed to use it for its primary function.

Then you’d want to gather all the eye witness accounts that exist, from the memoirs and diaries and letters of survivors, to describe Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station.

And then you’d want to follow the excitement of his arrival and the stimulus it gave to the left wing cause, on into the days and weeks afterwards to gauge the impact Lenin had on the political situation (and, incidentally, to assess the value for money which the German High Command got for what, it turns out, was quite a hefty investment in the train plan).

But where should the book end? One week after Lenin arrives? One month? Six months were to pass between Lenin’s arrival in April and the October Revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power. Is Catherine going to describe all six months in the kind of intense detail with which she had described the crucial eight days of the journey and the first week or so of his arrival?

No.

It would be too much, it would be too long. Other people have done it better, more comprehensively and thoroughly following the immensely complicated twists and turns of the revolution – and the ongoing fighting – for that six months. Even if you took the story up to the October Revolution, you’d still have to stop at some stage, before the peace with Germany, before the Russian civil wars break out.

Merridale continues her account of the fierce arguments among all shades of political opinion which Lenin’s arrival had brought to a head, up until the writing of the ‘April Theses’, the set of ten directives which Lenin hammered out immediately upon his arrival, announced in speeches on 17 April and subsequently published in Pravda.

The core of Merridale’s book is devoted to showing how Lenin’s absolute, unwavering insistence that the next stage of the revolution needed to take place now, with the declaration of peace with Germany, the complete overthrow not only of the Provisional Government but of all the bourgeois instruments of the state, and the assumption of power by workers’ and soldiers’ soviets.

With the April Theses Lenin established clear blue water between the Bolsheviks and every other party in Russia, and positioned them as more or less the only alternative to the bodged ‘dual government’ situation of Provisional government and Petersburg Soviet. There is a compelling logic to stopping here.

Then something odd happens. The book changes tack completely.

Part three – German money and Catherine’s reflections

The historical narrative morphs into a chapter (‘Gold’, pp.242 to 266) devoted to investigating one specific issue: how much did the German High Command fund the Bolshevik revolution?

Quite clearly the German High Command laid on the train to carry Lenin back to Russia. His opponents weren’t blind to the propaganda value of this simple fact, and many of them – both rival socialists and opposition liberals and conservatives – set out to prove that the entire Bolshevik operation was in fact a German front designed to take Russia out of the war and let Germany win. That the Bolsheviks were German agitators, and traitors. Were they right?

Merridale lays out the pros and cons of these claims and shows how. down the years, they continued, until well into the 1950s and even 60s. Russians in exile after the Revolution continued the accusations and, periodically, dubious individuals popped up, both in Russia and later in Europe, even including an American (Frank Chester) – all of whom claimed to have been involved and to have proof that the entire Russian Revolution was a German scam.

I found Merridale’s exposition of all this a little confusing. I think in the end she is saying that (apart from the obvious fact of the Germans laying on the train, making all the practical arrangements, arranging all the passports and visas etc) the initial operations of the Bolsheviks in Petersburg – the running of the printing press, distribution of pamphlets and so on – must have cost a lot more money than the party was making simply through membership fees (although membership of the Bolshevik party did rocket from some 13,000 to around 80,000 by the time of the October coup). Where did this money come from?

Well, there is archive evidence that several of the dubious middle-men who we met earlier, socialist-minded fixers who ran a healthy smuggling trade from Germany through Sweden to Russia – did receive substantial payments from German authorities, which can’t be accounted for solely by their business activities – so, yes, it is quite possible that the Germans funded the Bolsheviks, after Lenin’s arrival, via various middle-men.

But this is all very murky. It was wartime. The Germans didn’t keep full accounts of their off-the-record espionage activities and anyway Berlin was bombed to the ground in 1945, destroying most archives. For their part, the smugglers didn’t exactly keep legitimate accounts. The Bolsheviks had no incentive to tell the truth at the time and, under Stalin, became past masters at suppressing any inconvenient truths.

This was sort of interesting in a gossipy, John le Carré sort of way, but I mentally consigned it to the same place as speculation about who killed JFK.

Does it really matter? Even if it could be proved that the Germans actively funded the Bolsheviks in the months between Lenin’s arrival and the October Revolution, it is only really icing on the basic fact that they sent Lenin back to Russia. Moreover, no-one denies the fact that the Germans were pouring millions of Marks into funding all kinds of subversive activity in Russia (in April 1917 alone, the German Foreign Ministry authorised five million Marks to be used for propaganda, and there were numerous other German agencies doing the same, p.257).

And in any case, once the war in Europe was over, the civil wars in Russia got into full swing, and the sums of money pouring into Russia to support the different sides dwarfed anything the Germans might have spent on the Bolsheviks.

The money, important on one level, is only really of interest to obsessives who think that somehow the Russian Revolution could have been averted – exactly like the geeky types who think that, if only JFK hadn’t been assassinated, the Americans would never have gone into Vietnam and brought their own country to the brink of civil war. If only if only.

But, in my opinion, ‘if onlies’ like this, counterfactuals and hopeful speculations, are rendered irrelevant by the sheer scale of the economic and political crisis, the enormity of the vast social collapse Russia found itself in. It was falling to pieces. It was the Titanic sinking.

For me, this and the other accounts I’ve read tend to show that Lenin’s unflinching extremism matched up to the extremism of the situation.

If it hadn’t been Lenin, Russia would still have collapsed into chaos and probable civil war between red and white factions, maybe allowing Germany to have advanced into undefended territory and establishing a Germanic empire in Russia. Other extremists would have been pushed to the surface and into leadership roles, and any of these would have found it very difficult if not impossible to resist the soldiers’ calls for peace and the hundred million peasants’ clamour for land reform. Extreme circumstances called for extreme solutions, no matter who provided them.

But none of these alternatives took place. Deeper realities prevailed. And even though sending Lenin to Russia did lead to not only political disruption, as the Germans hoped, but to a comprehensive revolution – which must have exceeded their wildest fantasies – and then to a hugely advantageous peace settlement in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, precisely what they wanted in order to free up their eastern armies to take part in the massive Spring 1918 offensive against the West —-

The Germans still lost the war. In the end, the entire policy of the Lenin train and payrolling the Bolsheviks was a failure for the Germans.

Aftermath and Catherine’s views

Having brought her historical narrative to and end with the discussion of the funding issue, Merridale then concludes the book with a chapter outlining the fates of many of the key characters and personalities we have met through the book, before jotting down a few final reflections.

Most of the Bolsheviks who greeted Lenin so enthusiastically, and were either appalled or enthused by the fierce line he took, were murdered in the 1930s during Stalin’s judicial purges. So the final pages turn into a litany of gruesome and ironic deaths. The shrewdest members of the Provisional Government, such as the egregious Kerensky, managed to escape, living on in exile in Paris or New York. And the British embassy staff, with their Siamese cats and expertise at blowpipes, lived on to claim their knighthoods from a grateful monarch.

Merridale’s concluding thoughts mix reflections on the characters we’ve met in the narrative, and of her own visits to museums enshrining the memory of Lenin – in Zurich, or at his sisters’ flat (where he stayed in the period before the October Revolution) – with reflections about the lasting significance of Lenin in Russian history.

These are, to be polite, disappointing. Having worked hard to read up to the level of Dominic Lieven’s intellectually demanding account of prewar Russian and European diplomacy, it was a long plummet back down to the Readers Digest level of many of Merridale’s reflections.

She is, basically, a nice Radio 4-type of white, middle-class professional lady, who often finds herself wondering why the world is such a beastly place.

There is as much instability across the planet now as there once was in Lenin’s day, and a slightly different collection of great powers is still working hard to make sure that they stay on top. One technique that they use in regional conflicts, since direct military engagement tends to cost too much, is to help and finance local rebels, some of whom are on the ground, but some of whom must be dropped in exactly as Lenin was. I think of South America in the 1980s, of all the dirty wars in central America since that time. I shudder at the current conflicts in the Middle East. (p.9)

This paragraph contains almost no useful information at all, in fact it blunts understanding. Great powers use regional conflicts to their advantage? This is elementary, GCSE level knowledge.

The most salient feature of the paragraph is the centrality of Catherine herself to it. The way she ‘thinks’ of South America in the 1980s doesn’t tell us anything at all about South America but is designed to emphasise what a thoughtful and concerned soul she is. And then, whenever she thinks about the current conflicts in the Middle East, Catherine shudders, yes shudders.

In these final pages we learn that Stalin used the cult of Lenin to underpin and validate his authority, and so Lenin’s reputation was whitewashed as thoroughly as his body was preserved in its mausoleum.

That both Lenin’s memory and his body rotted in the stagnant decades of the 1960s and 70s due to incompetent mummification techniques. That the 1980s period of glasnost under Gorbachev was a period of ‘dangerous’ change. That after a decade of chaos in the 1990s, Russia reverted to the strong man rule of Vladimir Putin.

We learn, in other words, nothing that any fifth former studying history or anybody who reads serious newspapers, doesn’t already know.

Merridale’s book ends with sentimental descriptions of her visits to the fading museums of Leninism and chats with their sad curators.

Shame. There are few if any insights or ideas worth recording or summarising.

But, to emphasise the positive, the long central section of the book detailing the personalities and circumstances surrounding the train journey, and Merridale’s description of the incredibly intense political crisis into which Lenin arrived, are thrilling, convey a gripping sense of the chaos and confusion and knife-edge political atmosphere of the time, and are worth reading.

Lenin’s Address at the Finland station in Petrograd, 1917 by Nicolai Babasiouk (1960)

Lenin’s Address at the Finland station in Petrograd, 1917, painted by Nicolai Babasiouk in 1960

Nowhere man

Maybe the most symptomatic of the various encounters Merridale describes having with railway officials, passport checkers, museum keepers and so on when she undertakes her own version of the Lenin journey, is when she arrives at the swanky Savoy Hotel in Malmö, where Lenin and his entourage stopped for lunch after an unpleasant crossing of the stormy Baltic Sea.

Merridale knows that Lenin ate here. In fact she later finds a plaque commemorating his visit tucked away in a corridor. But when she asks about him, the concierge looks blank. ‘Lenin? Lenin? Do you mean John Lennon?’

The world moves relentlessly on. People forget their history and – it could be argued – that’s a blessing.

Credit

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale was published by Allen Lane in 2016. All quotes and references are to the 2017 Penguin paperback edition.

Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (2) by Dominic Lieven (2015)

Lieven concludes his rather exhausting history of the diplomatic buildup to the First World War as seen from Russia, with some Big Ideas:

The First and Second World Wars were essentially wars fought between Russia and Germany for control of Europe. The first war ended in stalemate, Russia won the second one.

This explains why both the world wars started in eastern Europe, in the badlands between the two empires – with the Austrian attack on Serbia in 1914, and the Nazi attack on Poland in 1939.

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire led to a vacuum. It led to the creation of a host of smaller nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, alongside the existing weak powers of Bulgaria and Romania), none of which was strong enough by itself to stand up to either Germany or Russia, making the second war, if not quite inevitable, then a lot more likely.

In both these wars France was the only liberal democracy on the continent of Europe, and was too weak by itself to decide the outcome.

Britain was in some ways an onlooker to both wars: her armies fought and suffered, horribly in the first war, but in neither was she defending her own territory – in both she was fighting in line with her centuries-old policy of preventing any one of the ‘powers’ from establishing dominance of Europe, to make sure her ‘back’ was protected while she concentrated her efforts on building up an overseas empire. In the eighteenth century this threat had come from France – in the twentieth century it came from a unified Germany.

In both 1914 and 1939 the German leadership gambled that Britain would not get involved in a European war, and both times there were influential British voices raised against involvement. But both times we surprised and dismayed the Germans by plunging in, thus preventing quick wins.

America was even more of a spectator than Britain and reluctant to get involved in either war, until forced to in 1917 and 1941, respectively i.e. three years and two years after they’d both started.

In Lieven’s eyes the Treaty of Versailles which ended the Great War had two great weaknesses:

1. The two powers at the centre of the conflict, the two powers likely to tear Europe apart, were both excluded from the peace treaty. Soviet Russia wasn’t interested and was too busy fighting her own civil wars (1917 to 1920) or trying to invade Poland (in 1920). Germany was completely excluded and had the treaty imposed on it, thus allowing German politicians and especially the Nazis, to claim they had never agreed to it, had had it imposed on them, victors’ justice, profoundly unfair etc etc.

2. The Versailles treaty was largely the creation of the United States and its idealistic President Wilson. When the United States Congress refused to either ratify the treaty or join the League of Nations which was set up to safeguard it, they removed the treaty’s most powerful support. Given that Great Britain was busy during the 1920s pursuing its imperial aims in the Middle East, India and Far East, the onus of defending the terms of the treaty ended up being left to France which – once again – was simply too weak to resist a resurgent Germany.

And the situation today? The European Union is a massive geopolitical experiment designed to address the same ongoing problems.

It was born from the attempt to bind Germany and France together with such intricate economic ties that they can never again fight a war.
For the first forty years of its existence, it was an attempt to create an economic and political bloc which could stand up to the Soviet Union and its communist satellite nations in eastern Europe, an economic counterpart of the NATO military alliance.
Nowadays it is an attempt to create a sort of European ’empire’, i.e. a geopolitical power bloc which can compete with the global superpowers of America and China. Huge argument goes on within the EU about its ability to convert this economic power into political power.

To return to the idea of 20th century history consisting of a war between Russia and Germany for control of Europe, for 44 years after the end of the Second European War, the Russians had, in effect, won.

They had achieved everything the most ambitious Russian generals and politicians of 1914 could have imagined. They had extended the reach of Russian control through the Balkans almost as far as Constantinople, they had swallowed the Baltic nations and Poland, they had extended their grip across Europe as far as Berlin.

With the collapse of Soviet power in 1900, the pendulum swung the other way, with Germany rapidly reuniting into one super-nation, and the other, newly liberated east European states all joining NATO whose force now extends right up to the traditional borders of Great Russia.

It was this rapid extension of the NATO alliance right up to Russia’s borders, with the threat that even Georgia in the Caucasus might join, and the threat that Ukraine, pointed like a dagger into the heart of Russian territory, and which many Russians regard as part of their spiritual homeland, was about to join forces with the West, which prompted Russian intervention in both Georgia and eastern Ukraine, and the present atmosphere of Russian anxiety, paranoia and bravado.

Maps of NATO in 1990 and 2015 showing how NATO has extended its reach right to the borders of Russia © Stratfor http://www.stratfor.com

In other words the issue which plagued the Edwardian era, the struggle which defined European and to some extent world history for most of the 20th century, is continuing in our time – a Germanised Europe faces an anxious, unpredictable, and increasingly nationalistic Russia.

What will happen next? Who knows? But Lieven’s book, in supplying such a detailed account of Russian diplomatic and strategic thinking in the build-up to the first war, forms a kind of training manual of all the possible permutations which the problem, and its solutions, can take.

It certainly made me want to understand Russo-Turkish history better, particularly at a moment when the nations’ two strongmen are both causing liberal Europe such concern.

Towards The Flame prompts all kinds of thoughts and ideas about how we got where we are today, and gives its readers the long historical perspective as they watch current Russian foreign policy play out.

Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia by Dominic Lieven (2015)

Towards the Flame is a diplomatic history of imperial Russia in the years 1905 to 1920. By diplomatic history, I mean a detailed, a really detailed, account of the men who ran Russia’s Foreign Ministry and its embassies (with sometimes a nod to the heads of the army, navy or other government ministers), their policies, debates and disagreements. We are given pen portraits of Russia’s premiers, foreign and finance ministers, and key ambassadors to London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and beyond.

And the guts of the book is a history of their diplomacy – the papers and memos they wrote laying out Russia’s strategies – the information they gathered about rival nations’ aims and goals – the assessments each nations’ military attaches made about their rivals’ readiness for war. (Position papers like the brilliantly prescient memorandum former head of secret police Petr Durnovo gave Tsar Nicholas in February 1914 which said the biggest risk of a prolonged war was that it would trigger a massive social and political revolution (p.304).)

In intricate detail Lieven builds up a picture of the web of political and diplomatic intrigue which took place in the crucial run-up to the Great War, not only between nations, but within nations, as ruling elites were riven by conflicting strategies and visions, by political and personal rivalries, under pressure from often rabidly nationalistic newspapers, and harassed along by a series of international crises which repeatedly threatened to plunge the continent into war.

In Lieven’s account the question is not, ‘Why did the First World War happen’, but ‘How did they manage to put it off for so long?’

Like many historians of twentieth century Europe, Lieven tells us he has benefited enormously from the opening of Russian archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. He has obviously used the opportunity to track down pretty much every diplomatic telegraph and memo and report and study written by all the key ambassadors, Foreign Ministers, the Tsar and his prime ministers, during these fateful years, and summarises and contextualises them.

This is what gives the book its character and distinction. At every crux – say, over the Bosnian Crisis of 1908 – Lieven briefly tells us what happened on the ground (his book deliberately skips over purely military details, just as it skips over detail of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand – all this can be found in thousands of other sources) in order to analyse the attitude of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Lieven details disagreements in overall strategy between the Foreign Minister, his Deputy, the Finance Minister, the Tsar and the Tsar’s unofficial advisers (like his uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas, leader of the so-called Panslavic tendency).

He gives us summaries of the reports and recommendations coming in from the embassies in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, as well as opinions from the Russian officials on the ground in the Balkans: Count so and so reports back on a conversation with the King of Bulgaria, Prince such and such writes a long summary of the political situation in Serbia.

Lieven explains:

how each of these varying opinions fit in with their authors’ visions of what Russia is or could be (because over the course of the book we get to know most of these diplomats and get a sense of their individual capacities and opinions)
how they fit in with conflicting views in the Russian elite about whether Russia should be allying with France and Britain, or with Austria and Germany
how the reports map onto the enduring belief in Russian elite opinion that Russia’s ‘history destiny’ was to conquer the Turks, take Constantinople and become leader of the world’s Slavic peoples
how they effect ongoing debates in the Russian government about whether Russia should be focusing its energies and resources to the east, to settle Siberia, or should cleave to its traditional role in the European balance of power

And so on. It is a deep, deep immersion into the small, densely populated and fiercely argued world of the government officials, and particularly the men of the Russian diplomatic service, who managed Russian foreign relations in the buildup to the war.

World War One an eastern war

Lieven opens his book with a bold claim: Contrary to all Western writing on the subject, the First World War was an east European war, triggered by events in eastern Europe, exacerbated by rivalries between east European empires, and with seismic consequences across east and central Europe.

So his focus in this book is on Russia and the East and his aim is to reorientate our thinking away from France and the Somme, towards the Eastern powers and the problems they faced, which he proceeds to describe in absorbing detail.

His core focus is Russian history 1905 to 1920, but to even begin to understand this period you have to range back in time by about a century, as well as comparing Russia’s imperial problems with the challenges faced by other countries around the world, as far afield as America and Japan.

The balance of power

The backdrop to all this – the worldview of the time – is the diplomatic and military game which dominated the world for the century leading up the Great War, and the idea of a balance of power.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the victorious Allies who had defeated Napoleon tried to parcel out Europe’s real estate to ensure that no one power could ever secure domination over the continent (pp.120, 124).

The 1848 revolutions, the Crimean War (1853-6), the Franco-Prussian War (1870), unification of Germany (1870), the unification of Italy (1871), the spread of nationalism, the spread of the industrial revolution – all these events were processed by the leaders of every European nation insofar as they affected this will o’ the wisp, this fictional entity – the balance of power.

Every large nation was kept on constant tenterhooks about whether the latest little war in the Balkans, or the bids for independence by Hungary or Bulgaria or the Czechs, whether the Austrian alliance with Germany, or the Russian alliance with France, or Britain’s influence over Ottoman Turkey, would affect the balance of power.

And not only nations were concerned. Every nation contained factions, ruling parties, opposition parties and, increasingly, ‘public opinion’, which had to be taken into account. (It is one of the many ironies of history that the spread of literacy, education and ‘civil society’ i.e. newspapers and a free press, which is so assiduously promoted by liberals, in actual fact, in the event, tended to encourage rabble-rousing nationalism. The press in Serbia comes in for special criticism for its ferociously nationalistic warmongering, but the panslavic Russian newspaper, Novoe Vremia, was so consistently anti-German that the authorities in Berlin singled it out as a prime cause of the poisoning of German-Russian relations, pp.215,220, 289.)

One of the few critics of the entire balance of power idea was Baron Roman Rosen (Russian minister to Tokyo during the Russo-Japanese War, posted to Washington, then served on the Tsar’s Council of Ministers until 1917). Rosen thought that, far from creating a secure basis for peace, the so-called balance of power had merely created two armed camps which lived in constant fear of each other. As you read on in the book you can’t help agreeing with Rosen’s view (p.138). Lieven himself appears to agree, stating that the problem with the diplomacy of the 1900s was it was armed diplomacy, with the constant threat of violence behind it. This is what made it so inherently unstable – the slightest misunderstanding threatened to escalate into armageddon (p.339).

Age of empires

It was an age of empires – the British empire, the French empire, the German Reich, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire and the Russian empire. But Lieven’s book is at pains to make you put aside the traditional Anglophone notion of ’empire’ as power exerted over black and brown people far overseas in Africa and Asia. He is concerned with the great land empires of Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans and Russia, the empires which were mostly land-locked and had to expand, if at all, into territory contested by the other empires.

It was a zero sum game, meaning that Russia could only gain territory at the expense of the Ottomans or the Austrians; the Austrians, when they formally annexed Bosnia Herzegovina in 1908, did so at the cost of the humiliation of Russia, which considered itself to have a special leading role in the Balkans. And both Russia and Austria expected to seize or annex territory at the expense of the failing Ottoman Empire.

In fact it was almost an age of super-empires, for around 1900 there was a lot of chatter from journalists, writers, commentators and even politicians from the larger nations about consolidating themselves into ethno-religious power blocs.

What does that mean? An example is the way the hugely popular British politician Joseph Chamberlain proposed to create a new federation out of the white nations of the British Empire, bringing together Canada, Australia and New Zealand into a confederation with the UK, creating a free trade organisation, bringing their laws into harmony, to create a ‘British white empire-nation’ (p.21).

On an even bigger scale, some Brits and Yanks fantasised about bringing America into this union, to create a massive trading, political and military bloc – the Anglosphere.

(This is the background to a lot of Rudyard Kipling’s writings at the turn of the century, his marriage to an American, his friendship with America’s buccaneering president Teddy Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, his hopes for a union of white English-speaking peoples. This explains conservative support for the Boer War, the Boers being seen as a backward people who were blocking Cecil Rhodes’ great vision of a corridor of white imperialist rule running the length of Africa, from Cape Town to Alexandria. They had a vision, not of power for its own sake, but for the union of white English-speaking peoples to bring economic development and liberal civilisation to the non-white world.)

For their part, diplomats and statesmen in both Germany and Austria continued to speculate about a merger between the two countries to create a Greater Germany, something which had been debated since Bismarck had wondered whether to bring Austria into, or leave it outside, his project for a United Germany in the 1860s. Gross-Deutschland would of course want to reclaim the German-speaking populations of the Czech lands and of Poland. The other continental powers were well aware that this tendency to expansion was a powerful strand in German political thought (and, of course, it was revived by the Nazis with their claim for Lebensraum which led them to invade first Poland, then the Soviet Union).

The price of failure And all the empires were nervously aware of what happened if your empire failed. They had before them the woeful examples of the Ottoman empire and, further away, the Chinese Qing empire, both of which were visibly falling to pieces. (Interestingly, Lieven uses the phrase ‘scramble for China’, which I don’t think I’d heard before, saying that if the 1880s saw a scramble for Africa, the 1890s saw a ‘scramble for China’.)

Everyone could see what happened to a failing empire. The great powers imposed unequal trade treaties on you, humiliated your government, annexed the tastiest parts of your lands, dismissed your culture and traditions. Total humiliation. Indeed, Russia and Japan were to sign conventions in 1910 and again in 1912 agreeing ‘spheres of interest’ in China’s north-east borderlands (p.195).

None of these rulers could see forward a hundred years to our happy European Union of liberal democracies. The only alternative they could see in their own time to building up strong, aggressive empires was total collapse, anarchy and humiliation.

In the age of high imperialism, there was nothing strange in Austrian arrogance towards lesser breeds. In this era, Anglo-American Protestants most confidently stood at the top of the ladder of civilisation and looked down on everyone. The Germans were climbing the ladder fast, but their sense of superiority still lacked the confidence of their British rivals and could be all the more bruising as a result. The Russians knew that they stood well down the ladder of civilisation in Western eyes, which helps to explain many undercurrents in Russian culture and society of the time. By despising and measuring themselves off against the weak, barbarous and un-Christian Turks, they in turn asserted their membership in the world’s exclusive club of European, civilised great powers. (p.208)

Hence the stress, hence the anxiety in so many of their calculations. It was a dog eat dog world. It was win, or be eaten alive.

Russian rearmament reflected a desperate search for security and status born of a deep sense of weakness and humiliation. (p.226)

But then running counter to all these trends to expand and build up empires, the latter half of the 19th century was also the age of nationalism. In his epic biography of Karl Marx, Gareth Stedman Jones shows in detail how the virus of nationalism was spread by the troops of Napoleon’s army to the Rhineland of Marx’s boyhood, and the rest of Germany. The French took it everywhere as they tramped across Europe in the early 1800s, telling peoples and ethnic groups that they should be free.

The struggle for Greek independence in the 1820s was an early example of the trend which was then eclipsed by the massive central European struggles for the unification of Germany and Italy which dominated the mid-century.

But it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the spread of industrial technology led to the dissemination of at least basic education and literacy to more remote populations, and that the growth of interest in folk stories, languages and traditions among newly educated intelligentsias helped to foment ‘independence’ and ‘nationalist’ movements among smaller nationalities – the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the long-suffering Poles, the Ukrainians and, fatefully, among the squabbling peoples of the Balkans.

Nationalism was, to use the Marxist notion of the dialectic, the antithesis to the thesis of imperialism. One bred the other. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century nationalisms popped up all across Europe as a result of the civilising impact of their imperial rulers, threatening to undermine the great land empires, and continually jeopardising the famous balance of power.

So, the central political problem of the age for the administrators of empires was – how to handle the nationalist demands for independence which threatened to undermine the homelands of empire.

Ireland Lieven takes the unexpected but illuminating example of Ireland. Irish Home Rule from the 1880s onwards was so bitterly opposed by the British Conservative and Union Party because the British elite was well aware how relatively small and fragile the homeland of the global British empire – i.e. the four nations of the British Isles – really was. Knock away one of the four legs supporting the table and maybe the whole thing would collapse.

Austro-Hungary It is one of the many insights thrown up by Lieven’s book that he applies the same logic to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Balkans. In the late 19th century virtually all the European nations clambered on the bandwagon of empire building, seeing it as the only viable way to maintain economic and political equality with the leading nations, France and Britain. Hence the ‘scramble for Africa’ in which even little Italy and puny Spain took part (claiming Libya and the north of Morocco, respectively).

Even landlocked Germany seized some choice parts of Africa (German South West Africa, Cameroon, German East Africa).

But Austro-Hungary was not only landlocked but – having lost territory in Italy and France in the 1870s – its rulers were struggling to hang on to what they’d got, struggling to manage the rising tide of Czech nationalism in the borderlands with Germany on the north, and the bickering of Balkan nationalities (Bosnians, Croats, Serbs) at the south-east fringe of Europe (p.205).

(Lieven quotes the opinion of Alexander Giers, ambassador to Montenegro, that there was little to choose between the Serbs, the Greeks, the Bulgarians and the Romanians: ‘They all hate each other’, quoted p.142).

Permanently anxious about her alliance with Germany, and permanently twitchy about the presence of the huge Russian Empire on her borders, the Austrians felt about the Serbs something like the British felt about the Irish. And reacted with just the same over-violence born out of stress and anxiety, as the British did to the Irish.

Serb nationalism Thus when Serb nationalists assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914, hawks in the Austrian government thought it would make an excellent opportunity to crush little Serbia’s bid for independence and put paid to bickering in the Balkans for good. Show them who’s boss. Make the Austrian empire secure for a generation.

This is just one of the many insights and fruitful comparisons thrown up Lieven’s deliberately non-Anglocentric perspective.

Russia

The majority of his content is about Russia. He takes you swiftly by the hand through the highlights of the previous two hundred years of Russian history – Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, 1812, Crimea, the emancipation of the serfs – Russia’s geographical situation and economic and political development – and shows how parties or factions naturally and logically arose from the specific Russian situation.

Court and country parties

For example, Lieven goes heavy on the idea that there were ‘court’ and ‘country’ parties in Russian government. The court party surrounded the young, inexperienced and shy Tsar Nicholas II. Sophisticated St Petersburg liberals, they thought Russia should welcome Western influences, Western industrialisation, Western technology and Western values. They promoted alliance with France and Britain. (p.106)

By contrast, the ‘country’ party despised Petersburg intellectuals. Half of them had foreign (often German) names or Jewish ancestry, for God’s sake! The country party were based in Moscow, good old patriotic, heart-of-Russia Moscow (p.129). They thought the Tsar should reject western values. They thought Russia should ally with the most powerful nation in Europe, Germany, and her handmaiden, Austria. (p.70)

Some of the country party subscribed to various shades of ‘Slavophilia’ i.e. the notion that Russia was special, had a special Orthodox culture, a special social system, a special ruler etc, and so should emphatically reject all Western ideas and the Western route to ‘modernisation’, which were corrupt, decadent and irrelevant to Russia’s special traditions.

A major thread of ‘Slavophilia’ was the notion that the Slavic Russians should support their Slav brothers in the Balkans, the peoples of Serbia or Bulgaria, defend and lead the noble Slavic inheritance.

Onwards to Constantinople

A complicated mix of motives kept the issue of Constantinople bubbling at the top of the agenda. One was religious-ethnic. Some Russian thinkers thought that Russia had a historic destiny to sweep through the Balkans and recapture Constantinople from the weak and failing Ottoman Turks. This would

Unite all the Slavic peoples of the Balkans, reviving and glorifying Slavic culture.
Allow Constantinople to be reborn as a great Christian capital, as it had been until conquered by the Turks as recently as 1453. It would unite the ‘second Rome’ of Byzantium with the ‘third Rome’ of Moscow.

Less quixotic than these millennial religious fantasies, hard-headed military men also thought a lot about Constantinople. Russia possessed the largest territory in the world, with immense land, people and resources. And yet it was prevented from projecting that power outwards, unlike all the nations on the ocean e.g. Britain, France, Spain, Holland, and especially America, sitting astride the two great oceans. (The importance of naval power was crystallised in the widely read book by American theorist Alfred Mahan, summarised on page 160).

Russia possessed three big fleets and naval ports, in the Baltic, at Vladivostok in the far Pacific East, and at Crimea in the Black Sea, but all of them were problematic. The Baltic was nearest to homeland Europe but was frozen half of the year, and egress was blocked by Germany and Denmark. Vladivostock was too far away from the European centres of power.

All thoughts were therefore focused on the Black Sea, where Russia’s main shipyards were, and Crimea which was the base for a large, modern naval fleet.

Yet it was a permanent irritation to the Russian military that this fleet was blocked up in the Black Sea, prevented from sailing through the Dardanelles and into the Mediterranean. The subtle way round this perennial problem was to negotiate alliances and pacts with the other European powers to bring pressure to bear on the Ottoman controllers of the Dardanelles to allow the Russian fleet out to patrol the high seas and claim her rights as a Great Power.

The not-so-subtle approach was to launch the umpteenth Russo-Turkish War, march on Constantinople and seize the Straits, solving the problem once and for all. After all – as Lieven points out in a thought-provoking comparison, the British had bullied their way to seizing Egypt and the Suez Canal in 1882, and the Americans had created the country of Panama in 1903 solely in order to drive a canal joining the Pacific and Atlantic, both empires acting in unashamed self-interest.

The only catch being that the major European nations would probably pile in to stop Russia – as they had during the disastrous Crimean War when Britain and France came to Turkey’s aid against aggressive Russian incursions into Ottoman territory.

All of these ‘country’ party ideas – pan-Slavism, conquering Constantinople – were deprecated by the ‘court’ party, who thought they were:

low and vulgar, usually whipped up by rabble-rousing nationalist newspapers
contrary to Russia’s true interests – Russian peasants and workers couldn’t give a damn about Constantinople
and anyway, Russia’s course was best left to the professional aristocratic diplomats like themselves, who knew best

Nonetheless, Russian leaders of all parties looked on with dismay as British ascendancy over the Turks, which had lasted into the 1880s, was slowly replaced by the influence of Germany, which sent soldiers to train the Turkish army and engineers to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad (as Lieven points out, the Germans were the only European power who had not at some stage tried to seize Ottoman territory – you can see how that might work in their favour.)

(And, of course, Turkey would end up coming in on the side of the Germans in the Great War. With the result that the Allies in 1915 took up the Constantinople Question, floating the possibility that Russia would be encouraged to take the city. Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi was even named the future Russian commissar of the city.)

West or East?

Another school of thought, and advisers, recommended leaving the complex problems of Europe to sort themselves out, and focusing on what Russia already possessed, namely the vast extent of Siberia and the East – a policy which, after the Revolution, would come to be known as ‘Eurasianism’ (p.143).

It was under Nicholas II that the great Trans-Siberian Railway was built. Proponents of an Eastern policy pointed out that Siberia had huge untapped natural resources, it just needed:

the infrastructure to join up the tens of thousands of settlements scattered across this vast waste of steppe and tundra
the emigration of settlers into the vast empty spaces
the creation of new towns and cities
the harvesting of the country’s natural and human potential

Given peace in the troublesome West, given enough time – Russia could develop its economy and resources enough to compete with Germany, even compete with America, to become a truly great power.

The Russo-Japanese War 1904-5

All of these hopes came crashing down when Russia came into conflict with the new, aggressive and confident Japanese Empire in 1904 and was badly beaten. Beaten for a number of reasons – their army was big but badly trained and under-equipped, the navy had to steam all the way from the Baltic to the Far East, by which time the major land battles had already been lost, and it was then comprehensively trashed by the much better-led Japanese navy.

Defeat rocked all the traditional pillars of Russian society. The Tsar was personally blamed, the Army and Navy looked like fools, even the Orthodox Church which had blessed the war as a ‘crusade’ was made to look powerless and irrelevant.

The war gave rise to a revolution whose specific trigger was when troops fired on a protest march in Petersburg on 22 January 1905, which went down in folklore as ‘Bloody Sunday’, and rebellion, mutiny, strikes and insurrection spread like wildfire across the country.

The revolution was, in the end, only quelled when the Tsar issued the October Manifesto of 1905 which pledged major political reforms such as the creation of a parliament – called the Duma – with elected representatives, plus land and industrial reforms. The strikes ended, the agrarian disturbances subsided, the mutinies were crushed – but to many, even committed supporters of the Romanov Dynasty, the clock was ticking.

Towards the flame

Believe it or not, this is all just introduction to the book’s core and is covered off in just the first 100 pages or so. If you recall, the text’s main focus is on the period 1905 to 1920, i.e. beginning after the war and the revolution.

Having set the scene and established many of the enduring themes of Russian politics and diplomacy in the first hundred pages or so, Lieven now goes into very great detail about the personnel, the men who manned the key roles in the Russian government – Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry, Army, Navy and so on. These men’s backgrounds, their families and family connections, their beliefs and the policies they pursued are all described in a long chapter titled The Decision Makers (pages 91 to 181).

Lieven gives pen portraits of the main diplomats, their careers and their views, including:

Count Vladimir Lambsdorff, Foreign Minister to 1906
Count Alexander Izvolsky, Foreign Minister 1906 to 1910, architect of the alliance with Britain
Sergey Sazonov, Foreign Minister from November 1910 to July 1916 i.e. during the crisis of 1914
Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia and Minister of Internal Affairs from 1906, who tried to counter revolutionary groups and pass agrarian reforms, until he was assassinated in 1911
Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, editor of the Monarchist newspaper, Grazhdanin, the only paper Tsar Nicholas read, unpopular reactionary
Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, replaced Stolypin as Prime Minister of Russia from 1911 to 1914
Count Sergei Witte, Finance Minister 1892 to 1903, Chairman of the Committee of Ministers 1903 to 1905, first Prime Minister of Russia 1905-6 during which he designed Russia’s first constitution – intelligent businessman who thought Russia needed a generation of peace to blossom
Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi, epitome of liberal imperialists and the panslavic policy, head the Near Eastern Department of the Foreign Ministry, which was responsible for Balkan and Ottoman affairs 1912-14 i.e. at the heart of the 1914 crisis
Baron Roman Rosen, 1903 ambassador to Tokyo, ambassador to USA 1905, State Council of Imperial Russia 1911-17 – believed Russia should forget Constantitnople and the Balkans and focus on developing Siberia and the East
Alexander Giers, Consul General in Macedonia, Press Council 1906, saw at first hand how rubbish the Balkan Slavs were and warned that the Serbs were manipulating Russia into backing them against Austria
Nikolai Hartwig, Russian ambassador to Persia (1906–1908) and Serbia (1909–1914), strong pro-Slav, sometimes described as ‘more Serbian than the Serbs’

Lieven then gives similar treatment to the main military leaders of the period – heads of the army and navy, major military thinkers, their dates, relationships and the often bitter in-fighting between them for resources and about strategy.

Having established a) the deep themes or concerns of the Russian state and its ruling elite, and having b) described in some detail all the key personnel, all the ‘decision makers’ of the period – Lieven then takes us through the years leading up to Armageddon, with chapters devoted to:

the emergence of the Triple Entente 1904-9
the sequence of crises 1909-13, being:
- The First Moroccan Crisis, 1905–06 – Germany challenged France’s control of Morocco – worsening German relations with both France and Britain
- The Bosnian Crisis, 1908 – Austro-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been under its sovereignty since 1879 but which infuriated the Serbs and pan-Slavic nationalism in the region
- The Agadir crisis in Morocco, 1911 – the French sent troops into Morocco, angering the Germans who sent a gunboat to Agadir, eventually backing down but the crisis cemented the alliance between France and Britain
- The Italo-Turkish War, 1911–12 – Italy invaded what is today Libya but was then a province of the Ottoman Empire. Nobody came to Turkey’s aid which showed that Turkey was now friendless – which meant that land grabs in the Balkans would go unopposed – i.e. the delicate balance of power had vanished
- The First Balkan War, October 1912 to May 1913 in which the Balkan League (the kingdoms of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro) defeated the Ottoman Empire and seized almost all of Turkey’s territory in Europe
- The Second Balkan War, June to August 1913, in which Bulgaria, dissatisfied with the settlement of the first war, attacked Greece and Serbia, and also managed to provoke neighbouring Romania, all of whom defeated Bulgarian forces, forcing it to concede territory to all of them
the crisis of 1914
The First World War and the Russian Revolution

Some thoughts

The backwardness and repressiveness of Russia bred a special kind of fanatic – extreme socialists or anarchists – who thought they could bring about change through strategic assassinations.

Russia was riddled by extremist political factions for the fifty years before the revolution, and plagued by the assassinations of high officials. As Lieven points out, it is no coincidence that the Russian aristocracy and gentry produced the two greatest anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century, Prince Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin (p.119)

It is another great irony that the assassins who murdered Tsar Alexander II in 1881 did so just as he was about to authorise a set of liberal laws. His successor, Alexander III, was an old-style, clumsy, bearish, paternal reactionary who inaugurated thirty years of repression, thus condemning Russian radicals to decades of repression, arrest, Siberian imprisonment and exile, and polarising the intelligentsia.

The view from the upper classes

Lieven is posh. From Wikipedia we learn that:

Dominic Lieven is the second son and third child (of five children) of Alexander Lieven (of the Baltic German princely family, tracing ancestry to Liv chieftain Kaupo) by his first wife, Irishwoman Veronica Monahan (d. 1979).

He is the elder brother of Anatol Lieven and Nathalie Lieven QC, and a brother of Elena Lieven and distantly related to the Christopher Lieven (1774–1839), who was Ambassador to the Court of St James from Imperial Russia over the period 1812 to 1834, and whose wife was Dorothea von Benckendorff, later Princess Lieven (1785–1857), a notable society hostess in Saint Petersburg.

Lieven is ‘a great-grandson of the Lord Chamberlain of the Imperial Court’ of Russia.

He was privately educated at Downside School, the famous Benedictine Roman Catholic boarding school.

Having just read Edmund Wilson’s long study of the communist tradition, and Engels’s powerful pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, my head is full of revolutionary thoughts about the industrial proletariat and about the way the ruling classes everywhere use repressive ‘ideologies’ to keep the exploited in their place, ideas like ’empire’ and ‘tsar’ and ‘religion’, ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ and ‘fatherland’.

There is little of that sensibility present here. Lieven takes it for granted that there were empires and that they were ruled by an extraordinarily privileged aristocratic elite. I’m not saying he’s naively in favour of them. But he takes them on their own terms. This became obvious during the long, sometimes pretty boring chapter, about the Decision Makers. Prince so and so of the court party was related to Count so and so who took a slavophile line, while his cousin, the archduke so and so was more a supporter of the policy of eastern expansion. And so on for a hundred pages.

In a way typical of prewar European diplomacy, the Foreign Ministry and Russian diplomacy were a nest of the aristocracy and gentry. The nest was very, very small: in 1914, there were fewer than two hundred men of all ages who had passed the diplomatic exam and in principle were eligible for mainstream posts. (p.119)

Later he points out the importance of notions of honour to the Russian aristocracy, and the vital importance of remaining a great power to the entire diplomatic, military and political leadership.

But to the ordinary Russian, these concepts were all but meaningless. The Russian ruling classes thought that, when push came to shove, the masses would demonstrate their love for the Tsar and for Mother Russia and the Great PanSlavic Cause, but they were wrong, so wrong.

Exciting the Russian masses about Constantinople or their Slave brothers proved an impossible task. In 1909, Grigorii Trubetskoy’s brother Prince Evgenii Trubetskoy wrote that only someone who believed Russia to be a ‘corpse’ could imagine that when it stood up for its honour and the Slave cause against Germany, there would not be a surge of ‘powerful and elemental patriotism’.

The First World War was to prove him wrong. (p.131)

What makes it puzzling is that the Russian elite had already had the test drive of the 1905 revolution in which they should have learned that – far from rallying to the cause of Mother Russia – peasants and workers all across the country rose up against the court, the aristocracy, the police, the Church and everything the elite believed in.

For me the big question is, ‘How was the Russian ruling elite able to persist in their obtuse ignorance of the true nature of the country they were living in?’

Without doubt the tiny coterie of men Liven describes made up the diplomatic and foreign policy elite, and their decisions counted, and it was the clash of their policies and ideas which made up ‘debate’ in the ruling elite and determined Russia’s strategy through the decade of crises leading up to 1914.

Without doubt this is precisely the point of Lieven’s book, to give an unprecedentedly detailed account of the sequence of events 1905 to 1920 from the Russian point of view, explaining the key personnel and their ruling ideas and concerns.

In this aim the book doubtless succeeds and can’t help impressing you with the depth of its research and the thoroughness of its analysis.

But it feels so airless, so claustrophobic, so oppressively upper class. Clever, well educated, sensitive and sophisticated though the Russian ruling class so obviously are, you can’t help cheering when the enraged workers storm their palaces and throw all their fancy paintings and porcelain out into the street.

To rephrase it, as Lieven himself does half way through the book, the Russian ruling élite believed its own ideology, defined itself in terms of its preposterously unreal, disconnected value system – forged its identity in terms of Russian dignity and nobility and honour and the need to remain an Empire and a Great Power.

They were staggered when they discovered that the overwhelming majority of the Russian people didn’t give a toss about these fantasies, was incapable of defending them, and eventually rebelled against them. In a nice detail, Lieven tells of a German officer during the Great War, whose job was to debrief Allied prisoners of war. He discovered that the French and British soldiers had a clear sense of what they were fighting for, but the Russian soldiers didn’t have a clue. Pan-Slavism – what was that? Controlling the Turkish Straits – what were they? Preserving the European Balance of Power – what on earth was that?

Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain

The First World War ended on 11 November 1918. To mark the end of the conflict Tate Britain has been hosting an extensive exhibition devoted to the aftermath of the war in the three main nations of Western Europe – Britain, France and Germany. Thus there is nothing by artists from, say, Russia, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, nor from the white colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or America which entered the war in 1917. It is a Western European view of Western European art.

Paths of Glory (1917) by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson © IWM

Layout

The exhibition is in eight rooms which take you in broad chronological order:

Images of battlefields and ruins, early movies, and memorabilia (helmets, medals, cigarette cases)
The official War memorials of the three featured nations (statues, designs and paintings by conventional artists such as William Orpen and the sculptor Charles Sergant Jagger)
A room devoted to images of disfigured and maimed soldiers
Dada and Surrealism i.e. the extreme irrationalist response to the war of Swiss, German and French artists – including signature works by George Grosz, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters
A room on black and white prints showcasing series of lithographs and woodcuts made by Max Beckman, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix and Georges Rouault
The ‘return to order’ in a revival of nostalgic landscapes in works by Paul Nash and George Clausen, sculptures of sleek femininity by Eric Gill and Aristide Maillol, neo-classical portraiture by Meredith Frampton, and the revival of a strange post-war type of Christian faith in the work of Stanley Spencer and Winifred Knights
Politics and pass-times – divided between gritty depictions of a newly politicised working class by socialist and communist artists, such as The International by Otto Griebel, and a rare opportunity to see an original ‘portfolio’ or pamphlet of lithographs by George Grosz – and on the other hand, depictions of the newly fashionable night-life, the craze for jazz dancing depicted in The Dance Club 1923 by William Patrick Roberts, cabaret clubs of the Weimar Republic, or the Folies Bergers as painted by English artist, Edward Burra
The exhibition ends with brave new world visions of technology, machinery, skyscrapers, Russian constructivist images by El Lissitsky, the geometric paintings of Fernand Leger, and the sleek new design and architecture of the German Bauhaus school

The war

A rare black and white film shot from an airship shows the devastation, alongside paintings of corpses in trenches or hanging on barbed wire. A display case contains an original infantry helmet from each of the three featured nations, one French, one German and one British.

Masterpieces

The show includes a staggering number of masterpieces from the era, interspersed with fascinating works by much less-well-known artists.

Room one contains the Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, possibly my favourite work of art anywhere, by anyone. For me this hard brooding metallic figure contains the secret of the 20th century, and of our technological age.

Torso in Metal from “The Rock Drill” (1913-14) by Jacob Epstein. Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein

In terms of memorials I don’t think you can do better than Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall, arresting in its monolithic abstraction. The show includes three large memorial sculptures by Charles Sergeant Jagger.

No Man’s Land (1919-20) by Charles Sargeant Jagger

The room of disfigured servicemen is hard to stay in. The grotesques of Otto Dix and Gorge Grosz are faceable because they have a cartoon savagery and exaggeration. But the realistic depictions of men with their jaws shot away, half their faces missing, skin folding over where their eyes should be, and so on by artists like Heinrich Hoerle and Conrad Felixmuller are hard to look at.

Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran, Two Victims of Capitalism by Otto Dix (1923) © Estate of Otto Dix

The exhibition takes on a completely different tone when you enter the room of works by Dada and Surrealist artists, and yet the grotesques of the previous room make you realise how so much of Dada’s strategy of cutting up and collage, of rearranging anodyne images especially from magazines and adverts, to create incongruous and grotesque new images, is a actually a very reasonable response to the grotesqueness of war and its dismemberments.

Here there are works by Kurt Schwitters, pioneer of cut up and paste art, as well as the stunning painting Celebes by early Surrealist Max Ernst.

Seeing a number of examples of post-war collage, works by Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, the English Surrealist Edward Burra and peers like Hannah Hoch and Rudolf Schlichter all together, brings out the superiority of George Grosz. It’s probably because I’m a longstanding fan but he seems to me to combine the best eye for design and caricature, with the best eye for how to create a collage of elements cut out from newspapers and magazines.

As well as a good selection of his biting political satires, there is an opportunity to see a reconstruction of the Dada-mannequin he created for the 1920 Berlin Dada exhibition.Why be sensible? How could you be sensible and take any of the standards and values of the old order seriously? After what they had seen in the trenches? After that old order had brought about armageddon?

The Petit-Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture (1920) by George Grosz © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J.

In the print portfolio room it is interesting to compare the style of the four featured artists: Max Beckman was too scratchy and scrappy and cluttered for my taste. The Georges Rouault images are harsh but with feel sensual with a lot of shading and depth, as if done with charcoal.

‘Arise, you dead!’ (War, plate 54) (1922-27) by Georges Rouault. Fondation Georges Rouault © ADAGCP, Paris and DACS, London

By contrast Käthe Kollwitz’s series War is made from harsh, stark, pagan woodcuts, which exude a really primeval force. This set is a masterpiece. You can see the continuity from the harsh emotional extremism of pre-war German Expressionism, but here a widely used technique has found its perfect subject. Kollwitz is a great artist. Her images may be the most profound in the show.

The Survivors (1923) by Käthe Kollwitz

After the physical and metaphysical gloom of the print room, room six is large and well lit and full of images of sweetness and delight. In all kinds of ways the European art world experience a post-war ‘return to order’, a revival of neo-classical technique, in music as much as in painting. It had quite a few distinct strands.

Landscape One was a return to painting idyllic landscapes, represented here by a haycart trundling down a lane by the pre-war artist George Clausen, and a similarly idyllic but more modern treatments of landscape by the brothers Paul and John Nash.

Woman After the disfigurements of the war and the parade of grotesques in the previous galleries, this one contains a number of images of complete, undisfigured bodies, particularly female bodies, used as celebrations of beauty, fertility, of life. These include the big, primeval statue Humanity by Eric Gill, alongside a more realistic depiction of a naked woman, Venus with a Necklace by Aristide Maillol. After such horror, why not? Why not unashamed celebrations of peace, whole-bodiedness, beauty, youth, fertility – a new hope?

Venus with a Necklace by Aristide Maillol (cast 1930) © Tate

Interestingly this room contains three or four works by Picasso, portraits of women or a family on a beach, done in a kind of revival of his rose period, with the figures now more full and rounded.

Neue Sachlichkeit Another strand was the particularly German style known as ‘New Objectivity’ which I’ve written about extensively elsewhere, not least because it was itself sub-divided into a number of strands and styles.

It’s represented here by a signature work from the era, Christian Schad’s half realistic, half cartoonish, and wholly haunting self-portrait of 1927.

Self-Portrait (1927) by Christian Schad © Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London

Christianity Amazingly many artists retained their Christian faith, but it emerged in sometimes strange and eccentric new visions. these are exemplified by the English artists Stanley Spencer, who supplies one of the many paintings setting Christian stories in his native home town of Cookham, but also the strange and eerie vision of Winifred Knights, here represented by her unsettling vision of the Flood.

The Deluge (1920) by Winifred Knights

Not so long ago I saw a whole load of Knights’ paintings at a retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Seeing it here makes you realise the link to the stark geometric modernism of someone like Paul Nash. But also to the deliberately naive style of Spencer. It is a kind of Christianity by floodlights.

Separate from these varieties of self-conscious modernism was an entire strand of neo-classical portraiture. A style which had observed and absorbed the entire Modernist revolution from Cezanne onwards, and then reverted to painting exquisitely demure neo-classical portraits, generally of demure and self-contained young women. Exemplified here by Meredith Frampton’s still, posed portrait of Margaret Kelsey.

Marguerite Kelsey by Meredith Frampton (1928) © Tate

Is this a portrait of refinement and sensibility? Or is there an eerie absence in it, a sense of vacuum? Does it have all the careful self control of someone recovering from a nervous breakdown?

Room seven juxtaposes images of The People, The International and the proletariat – with images of jazz bands and people getting drunk in nightclubs. Which is the real world? The International by the German communist painter Otto Griebel faces off against William Roberts modernist depiction of a jazz nightclub (heavily influenced, I’d have thought, by Wyndham Lewis’s pre-war Vorticism).

The Dance Club (1923) by William Roberts. Leeds Museums and Galleries © Estate of John David Roberts

By now it felt as if the exhibition was turning into an overview of artistic trends of the 1920s. A number of the works were painted 10 or 12 years after the end of the war. When does an aftermath stop being an aftermath?

The last room is devoted to technocratic visions of the machine age. Russian constructivists, French futurists, some of the old Vorticists, all the Bauhaus artists, looked to a future of skyscrapers, chucking out Victorian ideas of design and taste and creating a new, fully twentieth century art, architecture and design.

Fernand Leger perfected a post-cubist style based on brightly coloured geometric shapes suggesting a new machine civilisation, and the exhibition includes footage from the experimental film he made, Ballet Mechanique with music by the fashionably machine-age composer George Antheil. The Russian constructivist El Lissitsky devised an entirely new visual language based on lines and fractured circles. Bauhaus teacher Oskar Schlemmer is represented by an abstract figurine. Oskar Nerlinger evolved from pencil sketches of the war to developing a distinctive style of constructivist illustration featuring stylised views of up to the minute architecture.

Radio Mast, Berlin (1929) by Oskar Nerlinger

Now I like this kind of thing very much indeed but I feel we had wandered quite a long way from the First World War. Much of this last room struck me as having next to nothing to do with the war, or any war, instead being the confident new visual language of the hyper-modern 20s and 30s.

Wandering back through the rooms I realised the exhibition splits into two parts: rooms one to five are unambiguously about war, the horrors of war, trenches and barbed wire and corpses, moving onto war memorials and horrible images of mutilated soldiers, how those disfigurements were taken up into the distortions and fantasies of Dada and Surrealism and then extracted into a kind of quintessence of bleakness in the woodcuts of Kollwitz.

And then part two of the show, rooms 6, 7 and 8 show the extraordinary diversity of forms and style and approaches of post-war art, from nostalgic or semi-modernist landscape, through neo-classical if unnerving portraiture, Christianity by floodlight, from bitterly angry socialist realism to the frivolities of jazz bands and strip clubs, and then onto the Bauhaus and Constructivist embrace of new technologies (radio, fast cars, cruise liners) and new design and photographic languages.

Whether these latter rooms and their contents can be strictly speaking described as the ‘aftermath’ of the Great War is something you can happily spend the rest of the day debating with friends and family.

But there is no doubting that the exhibition brings together a ravishing selection of masterpieces, well-known and less well-known, to create a fascinating overview of the art of the Great War, of the immediate postwar period, and then the explosion of diverse visual styles which took place in the 1920s.

From the po-faced solemnity of:

To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921-8) by William Orpen © IWM

to the compelling crankiness of:

‘Daum’ Marries her Pedantic Automaton ‘George’ in May 1920, John Heartfield is Very Glad of It (1920) by George Grosz © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J.

From the earnest political commitment of:

Demonstration (1930) by Curt Querner. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie © DACS

to the vision of an all-metal brave new technocratic future:

Abstract Figure (1921) by Oskar Schlemmer

The promotional video

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)

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by Simon on September 1, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, European History, Exhibition, Great War, History, War

Tagged 1918, Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One, Aristide Maillol, art, Ballet Mechanique, Bauhaus, Berlin Dada exhibition, Britain, Celebes, Charles Sergant Jagger, Christian Schad, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Cookham, Curt Querner, Dada, Edward Burra, El Lissitsky, Eric Gill, exhibition, Fernand Leger, First World War, France, George Antheil, George Clausen, George Grosz, Georges Rouault, German Expressionism, Germany, Hannah Höch, John Nash, Käthe Kollewitz, Käthe Kollwitz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckman, Max Ernst, Meredith Frampton, Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, Oskar Nerlinger, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Otto Griebel, painting, Paul Nash, Rock Drill, Rudolf Schlichter, sculpture, Stanley Spencer, Surrealism, Tate Britain, Vorticism, Weimar Republic, William Orpen, William Patrick Roberts, Winifred Knights, Wyndham Lewis

Posted by Simon on September 1, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/aftermath-art-in-the-wake-of-world-war-one-tate-britain/

To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (1940)

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was one of mid-twentieth century’s great literary journalists and critics. Friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and many other authors from that generation, he wrote extended essays on the French Symbolist poets, on T.S. Eliot, Proust, James Joyce and the classic Modernists, on Kipling, Charles Dickens, a study of the literature of the Civil War, memoirs of the 1920s and 30s, a book length study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and much, much more.

Edmund Wilson in 1951

His style now seems very old-fashioned, a leisurely, bookish approach which was long ago eclipsed by the new professionalism of academia and the blizzard of literary and sociological theory which erupted in the 1960s.

Most of Wilson’s books are not currently in print, and many passages in this book demonstrate the relaxed, belle-lettreist, impressionist approach – more in love with the sound of its own rolling prose than with conveying any clear information – which shows why.

Though Marx has always kept our nose so close to the counting-house and the spindle and the steam hammer and the scutching-mill and the clay-pit and the mine, he always carries with him through the caverns and the wastes of the modern industrial world, cold as those abysses of the sea which the mariner of his ballad scorned as godless, the commands of that ‘eternal God’ who equips him with his undeviating standard for judging earthly things. (p.289)

That said, Wilson was an extremely intelligent man, more of a literary-minded journalist than an academic, capable of synthesising vast amounts of information about historical periods, giving it a literary, bookish spin, and making it accessible and compelling.

To The Finland Station

To The Finland Station is Wilson’s attempt to understand the Marxist tradition, and its place in the America of his day i.e. the angry left-wing American literary world produced by the Great Depression of the 1930s. He began researching and writing the book in the mid-1930s as well-meaning intellectuals all across America turned to socialism and communism to fix what seemed like a badly, and maybe permanently, broken society.

Like many guilty middle-class intellectuals who lived through the Great Depression, Wilson went through a phase of thinking that capitalism was finished, that this was the big crisis, long-predicted by Marxists, which would finish it off.

He was also attracted and repelled by the psychological extremism and religious fervour of communism. Even after actually visiting Russia and seeing for himself the poverty, mismanagement and terror as Stalin’s grip tightened, Wilson couldn’t eradicate this feeling. He tried to analyse its roots by going back to the intellectual origins of socialism then reading everything he could about Marx and Engels, and so on to Lenin and the Russian Revolution.

The myth of the Dialectic As he prepared the book he realised that to understand Marx and his generation you need to understand Hegel – and he couldn’t make head or tail of Hegel, as his chapter on ‘The Myth of the Dialectic’ reveals. He ends up comparing it to the Christian notion of the Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Ghost giving way to Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis) in a way that’s superficially clever but ultimately pointless. More telling is Wilson’s point that Marx invoked his version of Hegelianism to give a mystical, quasi-religious sense of inevitability, a pseudo-scientific rationale for what is simply, at bottom, a burning sense of moral outrage (i.e. at poverty and injustice).

A later chapter dwells at length on Capital Volume One, pointing out that it is an aesthetic as much as an economic or political text, before going on to point out the ultimate inaccuracy of Marx’s Labour theory of Value.

The Labour Theory of Value Marx thought he had invented a new insight, that the value of a product is the value of the labour invested in it, and that the bourgeois owners of factories only paid their workers the bare minimum to allow them to live, thus stealing from them the surplus value which the workers had invested in the industrial products.

This theory appeared to give concrete economic basis for the moral case made by trade unionists, socialists and their allies. Capitalists really were thieves. The only flaw is that there are quite a few alternative theories of ‘value’ – for example, as I’ve discovered whenever I’ve tried to sell anything on Ebay, the ‘value’ of something is only what anyone is prepared to pay for it. In fact ‘value’ turns out to be a tortuously convoluted idea, deeply imbricated in all sorts of irrational human drives (what is the ‘value’ of a gift your mother gave you?).

Wilson is onto something when he says that both the idea of the ‘Dialectic of History’ and the ‘Labour Theory of Value’ are fine-sounding myths, elaborate intellectual schemas designed to give some kind of objective underpinning to the widespread sense of socialist anger – but neither of which stand up to close scrutiny.

And although socialism or communism are meant to be a little bit about the working class, Wilson’s book about Marx and Lenin, like so many others of its ilk, is a surprisingly proletarian-free zone, almost entirely concerned with bourgeois intellectuals and their highfalutin’ theories, with almost no sense of the experience of the crushing work regimes of capitalist industry, which were at the heart of the problem. I’ve worked in a number of factories and warehouses (a Dorothy Perkins clothes warehouse, a credit card factory, the yoghurt potting section of a massive dairy) as well as serving on petrol pumps in the driving rain and working as a dustman in winter so cold the black binliners froze to your fingers. As in so many of these books, there is little or nothing about the human experience of work.

Wilson’s book is, then, more like a series of interesting magazine articles about a sequence of oddball left-wing thinkers, often throwing up interesting insights into them and their times, always readable and informative, but lacking any theoretical or real political thrust.

The book is divided into three parts.

Part one – the decline of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition

I was deeply surprised to discover that part one is a detailed survey of the careers of four of France’s great historians and critics, namely:

Jules Michelet (1798-1874) author of a massive history of the French Revolution
Ernst Renan (1823-1892) expert on Semitic languages and civilizations, philosopher, historian and writer
Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) critic, historian and proponent of sociological positivism
Anatole France (1844-1924) poet, critic, novelist and the most eminent man of letters of his day i.e. the turn of the century and Edwardian period

Why? What’s this got to do with Lenin or Marx? It is only in the very last paragraph of this section that Wilson explains its intention, which has been to follow ‘the tradition of the bourgeois revolution to its disintegration in Anatole France’ (p.68). Scanning back through the previous 68 pages I think I see what he means.

The idea is that Michelet came from a poor background, taught himself to read and study, and expressed in his sweeping histories a grand Victorian vision of Man engaged in a Struggle for Liberty and Dignity. He was heavily influenced by the memory of the Great Revolution, which he dedicated his life to writing about. Thus Michelet is taken as a type of the post-revolutionary intellectual who espoused a humanist commitment to ‘the people’.

Renan and Taine in different ways moved beyond this humanist revolutionary vision, Renan to produce a debunking theory of Christianity in which Jesus is not at all the son of God but an inspired moral thinker, Taine embracing Science as the great Liberator of human society. Both were disappointed by the failure of the 1848 French Revolution and its ultimate outcome in the repressive Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon.

Anatole France, 20 years younger than Renan and Taine, was a young man during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. This turned him completely off revolutionary politics and steered him towards a dandyish appreciation of art and literature. France represents, for Wilson, a disconnection from the political life around him. He continues the trajectory of French intellectuals away from Michelet’s humane engagement.

Anatole France A Corpse

During the 1890s the Symbolist movement in art and literature continued this trajectory, moving the artist even further from ‘the street’, from the deliberately broad social concerns of a Michelet.

And, finally, the Paris Dadaists chose the day of Anatole France’s funeral in 1924 to publish A Corpse, a fierce manifesto excoriating France for representing everything conventional and bourgeois about French culture which they loathed.

The Dadaists morphed into the Surrealists who proceeded to turn their back completely on politics and the public sphere – turning instead to ‘automatic writing’, to the personal language of dreams, to the writings of people in lunatic asylums.

So Wilson’s point is that between the 1820s and the 1920s the French intellectual bourgeoisie had gone from socialist solidarity with the poor, via sceptical Bible criticism and detached scientific positivism, to dilettantish symbolism, and – in Dada and Surrealism – finally disappeared up its own bum into art school narcissism.

Now all this may well be true, but:

It would have been good manners of Wilson to have explained that this was his aim at the start of part one, to prepare the reader.
It is odd that, although he takes a literary-critical view of the writings of Michelete, Taine et al, he doesn’t touch on the most famous literary authors of the century – for example, the super-famous novelists Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola.
This is all very literary – there is next to nothing about the politics or economics of the era (apart from brief mention of the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1870 as they affect his writers). There is no historical, social, economic or political analysis. The whole argument is carried by a commentary on the literary style and worldview of the four authors he’s chosen, with no facts or figures about changing French society, industrialisation, wars, the rise and fall of different political parties, and so on.

So even when you understand what Wilson was trying to do, it still seems a puzzling if not eccentric way to present an overview of bourgeois thought in the 19th century – via a small handful of historians? And why only in France? What happened to Britain or Germany (or Russia or America)?

Having made what he thinks is a useful review of the decline of bourgeois thinking of the 19th century, Wilson moves on to part two, which is a review of the rise of socialist thinking during the 19th century.

Part two – the origins of socialism through to Karl Marx

You can’t deny that Wilson writes in a clear, accessible magazine style.

The opening chapters of this section present entertaining thumbnail portraits of the theories and lives of some of the notable pre-Marxist radical thinkers of the early 19th century, men like Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen.

Wilson’s account of the large number of utopian communities which were set up across America in the first half of the century is very funny, particularly the many ways they all collapsed and failed.

The Mormons Although it is intriguing to think of the Mormons as the virtually the only religiously utopian community from the period to not only survive but thrive, despite fierce opposition. The key to survival is have a strong leader second leader to succeed the founding visionary. All the communities Robert Owen founded failed when he left, because he himself was the charismatic leader. But when the founder of Mormonism, Robert Smith, died, he was succeeded by an even stronger, better organiser, Brigham Young.

Babeuf But these chapters bring out two Big Themes. François-Noël Babeuf was a French political agitator during the French Revolution of 1789 who vehemently supported the people and the poor, founding a Society of Equals, calling for complete equality. As the bourgeois class which had done very well out of the overthrow of the king and aristocracy consolidated their gains during the period of the Directory (1795-99) his attacks on it for betraying the principles of the revolution became more outspoken and he was eventually arrested, tried and executed for treason. But the idea of complete equality, everyone living in communes with little or no property, no hierarchy, everyone working, work being allotted equally, everyone eating the same, was to endure as a thread of 19th century communism and anarchism.

Robert Owen ran a cotton factory in Scotland, and really brought out in his writings the paradox which plenty of contemporaries observed, that the world had experienced a wave of technological inventions which ought to have made everyone better off – and yet everyone could see the unprecedented scale of misery and poverty which they seemed to have brought about.

Young Karl Marx was just one of many thinkers determined to get to the bottom of this apparent paradox. The difference between Marx and, say, most British thinkers, is that Karl was drilled in the philosophical power of Hegel’s enormous philosophy of World History.

Marx arrives in chapter five of part two and dominates the next eleven chapters, pages 111 to 339, the core of the book. Karl is the cleverest child of his Jewish-convert-to-Christianity father. He rejects advice to become a lawyer, studies Hegel, gets in trouble with the police and starts work as a newspaper editor.

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels Through the newspaper Karl meets Friedrich Engels, who sends him articles to publish. Two years younger, full of life, Engels is sent by his father to supervise the family factory in Manchester, north-west England. Here Engels is appalled by the staggering immiseration of the urban proletariat, packed several families to a damp basement room in the hurriedly built shanty towns surrounding Manchester, enslaved 12 hours a day in the noise and dirt of factories, and whenever there was a depression, immediately thrown out of work, whole families begging on the street, boys turning to theft, the girls to prostitution, in order to survive.

And yet talk to the factory owners – and Engels was of their class, an owner himself – and all they saw was profit margins, capital outlay, money to be made to build big mansions in the countryside. Questioned about their workers, the owners dismissed them as lazy, shiftless good-for-nothings. Engels was disgusted by their greed, selfishness and philistinism.

Traipsing the streets of the city, shown into the homes of hundreds of workers, awed by the scale of the misery produced by the technological marvels of the industrial revolution, Engels could see no way to reform this society. The only way to change it would be to smash it completely.

The hypocrisy of classical economists As to almost all British political and economic writing, it was a con, a sham, a rationalisation and justification of the rapacious capital-owning class. Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the rest of the ‘classical’ economist merely provided long-winded rationalisations of exploitation. Smith said that the free market worked with a kind of ‘hidden hand’, a magic force which united people all over the globe in common enterprises, like the cotton pickers in America who supplied factories in Manchester to manufacture clothes sold in India. Smith predicted that this ‘hidden hand’ of capitalism would, as if by magic, mean that everyone in society pursuing their own interests would ineluctably be brought together in the ‘market’ to improve the lot of all, to create a balanced and fair society.

Well, Marx, Engels and anyone else with eyes could see that the exact opposite of these predictions had come about. British society circa 1840 was full of outrageous poverty and misery.

Marx meets Engels These were the thoughts Engels brought when he met Marx in Paris in 1844. His ideas and his practical experience electrified the brilliant polymath political philosopher and provided Marx with the direction and focus he needed. He set about reading all the British political economists with a view to mastering classical economics and superseding it.

Although Wilson periodically stops to summarise the development of their thought and give a précis of key works, I was surprised by the extent to which this middle section about Marx was mostly biographical. We learn a lot about the squalid conditions of Marx’s house in Soho, about Engels’s ménage with the Irish working class woman, Mary Burns, and there are entertaining portraits of figures like Lassalle and Bakunin.

All this is long on anecdote and very thin on theory or ideas. Wilson tells us a lot more about Lassalle’s love life than the reason why he was an important mid-century socialist leader. I learned much more about Mikhail Bakunin’s family life than I did about his political theories.

Wilson is at pains to point out that he has read the entire Marx-Engels correspondence, but makes little more of it than to point out how Engels’s natural good humour struggled to manage Marx’s bitter misanthropy and biting satire.

Friedrich Engels

Swiftian insults Wilson is happier with literary analysis, comparing Marx to the great Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, than he is trying to explain his roots in either German Hegelianism or economic theory. He repeatedly compares Marx’s misanthropy, outrage and bitter sarcasm to Swift’s – passages which make you realise that bitterly anti-human, savage invective was core to the Marxist project right from the start, flowering in the flaying insults of Lenin and Trotsky, before assuming terrifying dimensions in the show trials and terror rhetoric of Stalinism.

Failures of theory In the last chapter of the section Marx dies, and Wilson is left to conclude that Marx and Engels’s claim to have created a scientific socialism was anything but. Dialectical Materialism invokes German mystical philosophy. The Theory of Surplus Labour doesn’t stand up to investigation. Their idea that the violence and cruelty needed to bring about a proletarian revolution will differ in quality from the violence and cruelty of bourgeois repression is naive.

There is in Marx an irreducible discrepancy between the good which he proposes for humanity and the ruthlessness and hatred he inculcates as a means of arriving at it. (p.303)

The idea that, once the revolution is accomplished, the state will ‘wither away’ is pitiful.

This all betrays:

the crudity of the psychological motivation which underlies the worldview of Marx (p.295)

the inadequacy of the Marxist conception of human nature (p.298)

In a telling passage Wilson shows how happy Marx was when writing about the simple-minded dichotomy between the big bad exploiting bourgeoisie versus the hard-done-by but noble proletariat, in The Communist Manifesto and to some extent in Capital. But when he came to really engage with the notion of ‘class’, Marx quickly found the real world bewilderingly complicated. In the drafts of the uncompleted later volumes of Capital, only one fragment tries to address the complex issue of class and it peters out after just a page and a half.

Marx dropped the class analysis of society at the moment when he was approaching its real difficulties. (p.296)

Larding their books with quotes from British Parliamentary inquiries into the vile iniquities of industrial capitalism was one thing. Whipping up outrage at extreme poverty is one thing. But Marx and Engels’ failure to really engage with the complexity of modern industrial society reflects the shallowness and the superficiality of their view of human nature. Their political philosophy boils down to:

Bourgeois bad
Worker good
Both formed by capitalist society
Overthrow capitalist society, instal communist society, everyone will be good

Why? Because the Dialectic says so, because History says so. Because if you attribute all the vices of human nature to being the responsibility of the ‘capitalist system’, then, by definition, once you have ‘abolished’ the ‘capitalist system’, there will be no human vices.

At which point, despite the hundreds of pages of sophisticated argufying, you have to question validity, the meaning, of the Marxist conception of both the ‘Dialectic’ and of ‘History’.

Marx’s enduring contribution to human understanding was to create a wide-ranging intellectual, economic and cultural framework for the sophisticated analysis of the development and impact of industrial capitalism which can still, in outline, be applied to many societies today.

But the prescriptive part of the theory, the bit which claimed that capitalism would, any day now, give rise inevitably and unstoppably to the overthrow of the capitalist system, well, look around you. Look at the device you’re reading this on – the latest in a long line of consumer goods which have enriched the lives of hundreds of millions of ‘ordinary’ people around the world (the telephone, cheap cars, fridges, washing machines, tumble dryers, microwaves, radios, televisions, record players, portable computers, smart phones) invented and perfected under the entirely capitalist system of America which – despite a century of hopeful prophecies by left-wingers – shows no signs of ceasing to be the richest, most advanced and most powerful nation on earth.

As so many people have pointed out, the Great Revolution did not take place in the most advanced capitalist societies as both Marx and Engels insisted that it inevitably and unstoppably must. Instead it came as, in effect, a political coup carried out in the most backward, least industrialised, most peasant state in Europe, if indeed it is in Europe at all – Russia.

Part three – Lenin and the Bolsheviks

The final section of 123 pages goes very long on the biography and character of its two main figures, Lenin and Trotsky. (It is strange and eerie that Wilson describes Trotsky throughout in the present tense, describing his latest thought about this or that, because it was only later the same year that To The Finland Station was published – 1940 – that Trotsky was assassinated on Stalin’s orders).

Thus I remember more, from Wilson’s account, about Lenin and Trotsky’s lives than about their thought. Lenin’s closeness to his elder brother, Alexander, images of them playing chess in their rural house, the devotion of their mother, the family’s devastation when Alexander was arrested for conspiring with fellow students to assassinate the Tsar, Lenin’s exile in Siberia and then wanderings round Europe.

I was startled to learn that he lived for a while in Tottenham Court Road, where there was a longstanding centre for communist revolutionaries. Wilson also quotes liberally from the memoirs of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, about their trials and tribulations.

What comes over is that Lenin was good at lending a sympathetic hearing to working men and women, quick to make friends everywhere he went. Unlike Marx he didn’t bear rancorous grudges. Unlike Marx he didn’t have an extensive library and lard his books with literary references. Lenin was totally focused on the political situation, here and now, on analysing power structures, seizing the day, permanently focused, 24/7 on advancing the revolutionary cause.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin

Hence his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement addresses the practical problems of the communist movement at that moment.

I sort of know about the Russian Revolution itself. What fascinates me are the dog years between the death of Engels in 1895 and the Great War. These were the years in which the legacy and meaning of Marxism were fought over by a floating band of revolutionaries right across Europe, with parties splitting and dividing and reuniting, with leading communists bitterly arguing about how to proceed, about whether there would ever be a workers’ revolution and, if so, where.

Wilson brings out the constant temptation to bourgeois reformism i.e. abandoning the hope for a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society, forming a democratic party, campaigning for votes and getting into the national parliament (in Britain, France, Germany, wherever). This was the position of Edward Bernstein in Germany, who pointed out that the Social Democratic Party was having great success being elected and introducing reforms to benefit the working classes, building on the establishment of a welfare state, old age pensions and so on by Bismarck. On a theoretical level, far from being removed by the war between factory owners and impoverished proletariat, the middle classes were growing, the working classes were better off, all of society was becoming more bourgeois (p.382).

This, we now know, was to be the pattern across all the industrialised countries. A working class, frequently embittered and given to strikes and even general strikes, was to endure until the 1970s – but the general direction of travel was for the middle classes, middle management, white collar workers, to grow – something George Orwell remarks on in his novels of the 1930s.

The vision of an ever-more stark confrontation between super-rich capitalists and a vast army of angry proletariat just didn’t happen.

Lenin was having none of it. Wilson calls him the watchdog, the heresy hunter of orthodox Marxism. He turns out pamphlets attacking ‘reformism’ and ‘opportunism’. In Russia he attacks the ‘Populists’, the ‘Legal Marxists’, in books like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) (p.384).

His 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement attacks Bernstein and bourgeois opportunists. What is to be done is that the working classes can never get beyond trade union level of political activity by themselves – they need to be spurred on by a vanguard of committed professional revolutionaries.

The same thinking was behind the creation of the ‘bolsheviks’. At the Second Congress of the Social Democrats in summer 1903 some delegates brought forward a motion that the party should let concerned and sympathetic liberals join it. Lenin vehemently opposed the idea, insisting that the party must remain a small, committed vanguard of professional revolutionaries. When it came to a vote Lenin’s view won, and his followers became known as the majority, which is all that bolsheviki means in Russian, as opposed to the mensheviki, or minority. Over time, the overtones of majority, the masses, the bigger, greater number, would help the Bolsheviks on a psychological and propaganda level.

Throughout his thought, Lenin also dwells on the special circumstances of Russia, namely that

a) 999 in a 1,000 of the population are illiterate peasants
b) even educated intellectuals, liberals and socialists, had been demoralised by centuries of Tsarist autocracy, reinforced by the recent decades of anti-socialist repression (all the revolutionaries had been arrested, spent time in prison even – like Trotsky – long periods in solitary confinement, as well as prolonged stays in Siberia)

The vast gulf in Russian society between a handful of super-educated elite and the enormous number of illiterate peasants, and a smaller number of illiterate proles, meant that the only practical way (and Lenin was always practical) way to run a revolution was with top-down leadership. Lenin writes quite clearly that Russians really will require a dictatorship not only to effect the revolutionary transformation of society, but to educate the peasants and workers as to what that actually means.

While even close associates in the communist movement such as Bernstein and Kautsky criticised this approach, while many of them wrote accurate predictions that this approach would lead to dictatorship pure and simple, others, like Trotsky, were energised and excited by the psychological vision of a ruthless and cruel dictatorship. The only thing the Russian people understood was force, and so the revolutionaries must use force, relentlessly.

Amid the civil war of 1920 Trotsky found time to write a pamphlet, The Defense of Terrorism, refuting Kautsky’s attacks on the Bolshevik government and defending the shooting of military and political enemies. What this all shows is how difficult it is for liberals and people with moral scruples to stop revolutionaries who eschew and ignore moral constraints, particularly when it comes to revolutionary violence and terror.

At the Finland Station

In his chapter on Capital Wilson had pointed out (rather inevitably, given his belle-lettrist origins) that the book has an aesthetic, as well as political-economic-philosophic aspect. I.e. that Marx had crafted and shaped the subject matter in order to create a psychological effect (namely arousing outrage at the injustices of capitalist exploitation, then channeling this through his pages of economic analysis, and climaxing with a revolutionary call to action).

Wilson’s book is similarly crafted. Having moved back and forth in time between the childhood of Lenin and Trotsky through the 1920s and 30s and even mentioning Trotsky’s activities in the present day (1940), Wilson concludes the book with a detailed account of Lenin’s journey in the sealed train laid on by the German Army High Command, from exile in Switzerland, through Germany, by boat across to Sweden, and then another train through Finland until he finally arrived in St Petersburg in April 1917, after the first revolution had overthrown the Tsar and installed a liberal provisional government.

He is welcomed by pompous parliamentarians but it is to the workers and soldiers present that Lenin, with typical political insight, devotes his speeches. He knows that it is in their name and with their help, that his small cadre of professional revolutionaries will seize power and declare the dictatorship of the proletariat. Which is what they finally do in October 1917.

‘All power to the soviets’ would be their catchphrase. Only time would reveal that this meant giving all power to the Bolshevik Party, leading to civil war and famine, and, a mere 15 years later, all power to Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers of all time.

Karl Marx on the American Civil War (1861-65)

Marx the journalist

Karl Marx fled the revolutions which rocked Europe in 1848, to the relative calm and safety of London. Although he never intended to, Marx then ended up spending the rest of his life – three quarters of his adult life – in England.

Ironically, he lived here during pretty much the quietest period of 19th century English history. The uproar surrounding the Great Reform Act of 1832 was long over, and the Chartist Movement failed and fizzled out after 1848. There followed 25 years or so of growing wealth, accompanied by, admittedly piecemeal, legislation to try and improve the lot of the working classes toiling in the new industrial cities in their grim seven-days-a-week factories. It was the era of the triumphant bourgeoisie and the unstoppable rise of British Imperialism, in India, China and around the world.

Although Karl wanted to write great masterworks of historical and economic theory, these wouldn’t pay the rent for himself, his wife and growing family. Although he wanted to be at the head of great revolutionary organisations, the Communist League with which he’d been associated during the 1848 revolutions, splintered and fizzled into insignificance.

So Karl turned to journalism, which he had actively pursued in Germany since his student days (it was his editorship of the seditious the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne which was the reason he was kicked out of Germany in 1849).

Incongruously, Mark got a job with the New York Daily Tribune, as its European correspondent, from 1852 to 1862. The Tribune had wide working-class appeal and, at two cents, was inexpensive. It had a circulation of 50,000 copies per issue and its editorial line was progressive and anti-slavery.

The New York paper paid the rent. But when civil war broke out in America, in the spring of 1861, it was for the Liberal Vienna paper Die Presse that Karl wrote 37 articles about it, starting six months into the conflict, on 20 October 1861.

Karl Marx

Marx’s articles about the American Civil War

The American Civil War began with the secession of the southern slave states, starting with South Carolina, which declared independence in January 1861.

The eight seceded states went on to declare themselves a new nation, the Confederacy, with its capital at Montgomery, Alabama. On 12 April 1861 Confederate forces shelled Fort Sumter, a fort off the coast of South Carolina which was still held by units of the U.S. or Union army. It was this action which signalled the start of the American Civil War.

Of Karl’s 37 articles just two are translated and published in the Penguin selection of Karl’s Writings From Exile 1848-1863. Shame. I wonder if you can read the lot in a pamphlet somewhere.

Karl begins by lining up the London papers of the day, The Times, The Economist, The Saturday Review and summarising their positions.

Apparently, most of the British press sympathised with the southern states. They thought the war was mostly about the issue of trade tariffs. The North imposed various tariffs on imports and exports, whereas the South didn’t. Moreover, an enormous amount of southern cotton was bought by British factory owners, turned into clothes, and traded back to the South (or sold on to India).

This explains why Britain, being a free trade nation, and economically linked to the region, had strong sympathies with the South.

It was because of this economic self-interest – Karl argued – that Britain’s papers and politicians argued, ‘Why shouldn’t the South declare itself a separate nation?’ And ‘Why should the North bother, or dare, to try and invade and suppress this nation?’

Buried, pushed aside, undiscussed in all the mainstream media articles which Marx quotes, is the issue of slavery. In the two articles published in the Penguin selection, Marx sets out to contradict and refute the British bourgeois position.

Karl’s knowledge

Marx is incredibly knowledgeable. I found reading the nineteen pages which these articles make up in the Penguin edition nearly as illuminating as reading James McPherson’s 860-page history of the war. Karl demonstrates a surprisingly detailed grasp of the geography, the economic facts, the population, and of the political manoeuvring that led up to the war.

Karl gives his unstinting support to the North and says it must conquer the South and overthrow its iniquitous slavery system. Otherwise the South will triumph in its pre-war attempts to impose and spread slavery to all parts of America and with it, to enslave the working classes, too.

Karl says the war is about slavery pure and simple. The Founding Fathers may have been slave-owners (most famously Washington and Jefferson), but they thought slavery was an evil imported from England which would eventually die out. By contrast, apologists for the South treat slavery as a good in itself which deserves to be spread as widely as possible. According to them, slaves love their slavery. The South is fighting, as one apologist put it, for ‘the foundation of a great slave republic.’ (p.336)

Karl details the political build-up to the war, including:

the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which established 36º 30′ as the northernmost extent of slavery)
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 (which retracted that ruling)
the attempt to spread slavery into New Mexico
the 1857 Dred Scott case which established that slave owners had a right to take their slaves anywhere in the country
the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which forced northern officials to acquiesce in the hunting, kidnapping and return south of runaway slaves from their territories

He describes the revival of the slave trade in recent years which, he claims, has resulted in 15,000 new Africans being kidnapped and brought to America (making a bigger deal of it than McPherson does in his history).

And repeats the outrageous but widely publicised aims of the southern states to conquer Cuba for America, and extend their rule throughout Central America (specifically in Nicaragua where, for a year, a southern American mercenary did, indeed, manage to become president!).

All of these political events show, to Karl, the wish of the South not just to defend slavery, but to actively extend it throughout the states.

Why?

An economic explanation for the motives of the Confederate states

Karl gives a characteristically economic explanation for political events.

The old slave states are exhausting their soil. Maryland, Virginia, even South Carolina, have become net exporters of slaves. ‘Breed ’em and sell ’em,’ is the slavers’ policy. Therefore, the slave states need a steady supply of new markets, they need to make new territorial conquest, in order to maintain their economies.

Even in South Carolina, where slaves form four sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has remained almost stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil… South Carolina has become partly transformed into a slave-raising state by pressure of circumstances in so far as it already sells slaves to the states of the Deep South and South-West to the tune of four million dollars annually. As soon as this point is reached the acquisition of new territory becomes necessary, so that one section of the slave-holders can introduce slave labour into new fertile estates and thus create a new market for slave-raising and the sale of slaves. (p.341)

There is also politics. Each American state sends two senators to the Senate, regardless of population. Therefore, there is a naked power struggle whenever a new state is admitted to the Union as to whether its two senators will be pro or anti slavery, each new state’s nature threatening to upset the very finely tuned balance of power between slave and anti-slave states in Congress.

Who is doing all this? Karl estimates that there are only some 300,000 significant slave owners in the whole of the country. So an oligarchy of 300,000 has been trying to impose the political, legal and economic system which underpins its wealth onto the other 20 million Americans.

The ‘plantocracy’ was well aware what it was fighting for, that to restrict slavery to its current territories would:

reduce slaver representation in the senate i.e. undermine their political power
lead, over the long term, to the inevitable extinction of slavery
the consequent general impoverishment of the South would lead to class warfare with poor whites who would, finally, realise how they are being exploited by the wealthy 300,000

Thus the war is nothing to do with free trade and tariffs, as the respectable London papers were trying to claim. It was about whether:

the 20 million free Americans should submit to a political and economic system imposed by an oligarchy of 300,000
the vast new territories of the Republic should be slave or free
whether the foreign policy of America should be peaceful – or get dragged into further wars with Cuba and Central America

Punchy and pithy

Karl is at his journalistic, punchy and pithy best. In the second article he makes the rhetorical point that the South – which had declared itself a new nation – isn’t a proper nation at all.

It is not a country at all, it is a battle-cry. (p.344)

In the second article he gives a detailed description of the geography and slave populations of all the ‘border’ states between south and north and describes how the slave states had made political, legal and, finally, armed attempts to infiltrate and capture these states for slavery.

Conventional opinion had it that it was the northern armies who had invaded the south, and indeed most of the fighting was done on the soil of southern or the so-called ‘border’ states. But Karl’s list of, first, the political attempts to suborn the border states, and then his detailed accounts of border incursions and raids by southern forces, makes a powerful case that the war is in fact:

a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery. (p.350)

A glance at the map of America in 1854 shows what was being fought over. The southern slave states (dark green) already controlled significantly more land than the northern free states (pink). The issue was: should slavery be extended into the huge expanse of land to the west (light green), nearly half of the American land mass, which was still only roughly defined as territories such as Kansas, New Mexico, Oregon etc, but which would, in the near future, attain the status of ‘states’ and be admitted to the union. Should they be slave – or free?

American states in 1854

Marx was wrong about lots of things, but the materialist worldview which predisposed him to see all major events in terms of their economic basis and in terms of the class conflicts which they inevitably give rise to – often gave him a thrillingly incisive vision which cut through the painful bombast and wordy rhetoric of the stuffy, obtuse Victorians he lived among.

Thus in Marx’s view the American Civil War was emphatically not about tariffs or free trade or the right to have a separate culture or any of the other mystifications and obfuscations which filled so many speeches and newspaper columns, no:

The present struggle between South and North is thus nothing less than a struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully co-exist on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

He thought the North would win and that the full emancipation of the slaves was inevitable.

Given that he was writing in November 1861, with the war only six months old and most Republicans (including President Lincoln) still reluctant to countenance slave emancipation under any circumstances, Karl in these articles was not only typically incisive and insightful, but remarkably prophetic.

All posts tagged Germany

Translating Jünger into English

Hofmann’s clunks

German humour

Jünger’s detached attitude

Jünger’s vision of war

Physical disgust

Heightened alertness

Battlefield stress

The emotions of war

Courage

New men

Something primordial

Conclusion

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Ethnic tension

Germany

Austria-Hungary

The perils of multi-ethnic societies

Conclusion

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Introduction

Chapters

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The Great Man theory…

… versus the hunger for change

Completely new visual styles

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The story

Three parts

Part one – Catherine’s adventures and pukka Brits

Part two – the Russian revolution and train journey

How to end?

Part three – German money and Catherine’s reflections

Aftermath and Catherine’s views

Nowhere man

Credit

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World War One an eastern war

The balance of power

Age of empires

Russia

Court and country parties

Onwards to Constantinople

West or East?

The Russo-Japanese War 1904-5

Towards the flame

Some thoughts