X

DYNAMO

Part II

Powerhouse of the World, 1815–1914

ABKHAZIA

THE Abkhazians are a small nation of less than a quarter of a million souls living on the Black Sea Coast some 300 miles east of the Crimea. Their chief city is Sukhum or Sukhumi. Their language and Moslem culture, which resemble those of the Circassians, have little in common either with the Russians to the north or the Christian Georgians to the east. They say that they live ‘at the end of Europe’.

The site of a medieval kingdom, which flourished under Byzantine-Greek influence, Abkhazia has always occupied a vital location linking southern Russia with the Caucasus. Its conquest by the Tsars between 1810 and 1864 (see Appendix III, p. 1290) forced many natives to flee. From 1931, it became one of three nominally autonomous republics within the Georgian SSR; and a major influx of Russians and Mingrelian-Georgians turned the local population into an absolute minority in their own land. Stalin’s police chief, Beria, who was himself a Mingrelian, deported the entire community of Pontic Greeks whilst initiating the brutal policy of georgianization.

Hence, when Georgia broke free from Moscow in 1991, the Abkhazians sought a measure of genuine self-rule from Georgia. Yet their conflict with Tiflis during the devastating Georgian civil war of 1992–3 only opened the way for the re-occupation of Abkhazia by Russian forces. As a foreign reporter was told by a Cossack ataman, the fate of peripheral territories like Abkhazia or the Kurile Islands would test Russia’s greatness. ‘These are ours—and that’s the truth.’

Discord among the ex-Soviet nationalities was fuelling an ugly brand of Russian nationalism. Voices in Moscow called for the re-conquest of Russia’s ‘near abroad’. For after Abkhazia, there waited several further targets for Russian intervention, including Tatarstan and Chechenia, and other non-Russian lands within the Russian Federation. Sooner or later, Russia would be forced to choose between its new-style democracy and its old-style imperialism.

Folklore, or Volkskunde, was mined for all it was worth. For one thing, it was thought to join the modern nation to its most ancient cultural roots; for another, its authenticity could not be easily checked. Unlike Herder, whose collection of Volkslieder (1778) had included songs from Greenland to Greece, nationalist scholars confined themselves to national folklore. In this connection, the work of the brothers Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) must be regarded as seminal. Their huge range included the über den altdeutschen Meistergesang, the Deutsche Sagen, theDeutsche Grammatik, and the world-famous Kinder- und Hausmârchen (1812–15), ‘Grimms’ Tales’. Their Serbian contemporary Vuk Karadzic* (1787–1864) published a well-known collection of Serbo-Slavonic tales in addition to his grammar, his dictionary, and his reform of the Cyrillic alphabet, [KALEVALA]

Religion was mobilized to sanctify national sentiment, and in many instances to erect barriers between ethnic groups. For national Protestant or Orthodox Churches this form of separatism had long existed. But even the Roman Catholic religion could be turned against its universal mission, to separate Croats from Serbs, to keep Lithuanians immune from russification, or Poles from germaniza-tion. In some countries Christians looked on bemused as interest was revived in the rites and practices of the nation’s pagan gods. Welsh Baptist ministers dressed up as Druids at the Welsh nationalEisteddfod; the Germanic gods rode again on the stage and page of imperial Germany, [SHAMAN]

Racial theories exerted powerful attractions. The notion of a Caucasian race was invented in the late eighteenth century. The allied notion of the ‘Aryan race’ was first uttered in 1848 by a German professor in Oxford, Max Muller. Every nationality in Europe was tempted to conceive of itself as a unique racial kinship group, whose blood formed a distinct and separate stream. Extraordinary interest was devoted to ethnology, and to the study of ‘racial types’ that supposedly corresponded to each of the modern nations. In London, the Royal Historical Society sponsored a series of experiments on its Fellows showing that the brain-pans of those with Celtic names were inferior to those of Anglo-Saxon origin.27 (There is no hope for the Davieses.) In Germany, the science of eugenics came up with similar results. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), an Englishman resident in Germany, narrowed the creative race from Aryans to Teutons. ‘True history’, he wrote, ‘begins from the moment when the German with mighty hand seizes the inheritance of antiquity.’ Or again, ‘Whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or dishonest.’[CAUCASIA]

In Russia, the pan-Slav movement was loaded with racial overtones. Arguing for the unification of all Slav peoples under the aegis of the Tsar, it often assumed that political solidarity would emerge from the (non-existent) racial affinity of the Slavs. It enjoyed little resonance among Catholic Poles and Croats, who had both produced earlier versions of pan-Slavism, and who now countered with scientific papers showing that the Russians were really slavicized Finns.29 It enjoyed its greatest currency amongst Serbs, Czechs, and Bulgars, all of whom looked to Russia for liberation. Russian nationalism, blended with pan-Slavism, exhibited unparalleled messianic fervour. Dostoevsky could wring an optimistic note from the most unpromising material:

Our great people were brought up like beasts. They have suffered tortures ever since they came into being, tortures which no other people could have endured but which only made them stronger and more compact in their misfortunes … Russia, in conjunction with Slavdom, and at its head, will utter to the world the greatest word ever heard; and that word will be a covenant of human fellowship… [For] the Russian national idea, in the last analysis, is but the universal fellowship of man.30

This was wishful thinking on a scale well suited to the country concerned.

KALEVALA

THE Kalevala or ‘Land of Heroes’ is generally regarded as the national epic of the Finns. It is a poem of some 50 cantos or 22,795 lines, published first in 1835 and in its second, definitive edition in 1849. It is a semi-literary epic compiled largely from authentic folklore. In fact it is, in large measure, the product of its main compiler, Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), who used classical models to transform and embellish the raw oral materials which he had collected among the peasants of eastern Finland and Russian Karelia. As such, it illustrates not only the legacy of Europe’s pagan folklore but also the process whereby nineteenth-century activists drew on neglected popular sources to create a national consciousness. Herder (1744–1803) had established the idea that modern nations can only flourish when they possess a distinct cultural identity based on the vernacular language and on popular traditions. The Kalevala was a Herderian exercise par excellence.

In Lönnrot’s time the Finns passed from rule by Sweden to that of Tsarist Russia, and were feeling the urge to dissociate themselves from the culture of their Swedish and Russian masters. The stories centre on Vainamoinen, the ‘Eternal Sage’ who presides over the land of Kalevala, leading it in the struggle against Pohjola, peopled by gods, giants, and unseen spirits:

Siitävanha Väinämöinen,	Then the aged Vainamoinen
Laskea karehtelevi	Went upon his journey singing,
Venehellà vaskisella,	Sailing in his boat of copper,
Kuutilla kuparisella	In his vessel made of copper,
Ylaisihin maaemihin	To the land beneath the heavens
Alaisihin taivosihin.	Sailed away to loftier regions.
Sinne puuttui pursinensa,	There he rested with his vessel
Venehinensà vàsàhyti.	Rested weary, with his vessel,
Jàtti kantelon jalille,	But his kantele he left us,
Soiton Suomelle sorean,	Left his charming harp in Suomi,
Kansalle ilon ikuisen,	For his people’s lasting pleasure,
Laulut suuret lapsillensa.	Mighty songs for Suomi’s children.1

All the nations of Europe passed through the phase of compiling, romanticizing, and inventing their folklore. The republication of the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory belonged to the same trend. Even the Americans wanted to participate; and Lonnrot’s work exerted a strong influence on the Hiawatha (1855) of Henry Longfellow, who knew a German translation of Kalevala published in 1851 by a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg.

National epics such as the Finnish Kalevala or the Welsh Mabinogion held special significance for those nations whose drive towards a separate cultural identity was inhibited by political dependence. It is not surprising to find that both Hiawatha and the Kalevala had been translated into Polish by the 1860s.

SHAMAN

THE Shaman, or tribal ‘medicine man’, is a well-known figure among the native peoples of Siberia, and further afield among the Innuit and Amerindians. Folk healer, sage, and magician, he is a member of an immemorial profession whose potions, rituals, and proverbs give him unique authority. Dressed perhaps in a horned mask, and carrying the characteristic instrument of his trade, the drum, with which he communes with the spirits of wood, stone, and sky, he can be a force for good or for evil. He travels unseen to the other worlds, above and below, and brings mankind the wisdom of the Great Spirit. Shamanism has survived until modern times in many remote parts of Russia; but it is not entirely expected in Central Europe.1 Women, too, can shamanize.

In Hungary, controversy over the origins of the Magyars raged throughout the nineteenth century. They were popularly thought to be related to the Huns, [csaba] But scholars thought otherwise. One school looked to Iranian or Khazar forebears. Another, founded by Janos Sajnovits (1733–85), looked farther to the east. Since then, the Finno-Ugrian connection has been definitively proved by philologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists. A burial site at Bol’she Tigan on the Kama River, for example, discovered in 1974, has been confirmed as one of the major staging-posts before the Magyars moved off to the West. Similarly, modern research into Magyar folklore has revealed numerous traces of Shamanism, thereby underscoring the once unsuspected association with Siberia.2

All over Europe, every branch of art and literature was mobilized to illustrate and to embroider national themes. Poets sought to win the accolade of national bard or ‘poet laureate’. Novelists developed a penchant for writing historical or pseudo-historical romances about national heroes and national customs. The Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) were the acknowledged model in this field, although earlier examples can be found. A novel called Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) by Jane Porter (1776–1850), who fictionalized the life of Kosciuszko, gained international celebrity. Painters and sculptors followed Romantic hankerings in the same direction. France’s leading Romantic, Victor Hugo (1802–85), contrived to shine in all fields at once.

Musicians recruited the harmonies and rhythms of their native folk dance and folksong to elaborate distinctive national styles that became the hallmark of numerous ‘national schools’. From the exquisite mazurkas and polonaises of Chopin and the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, a brilliant trail leads through the delights of the Czechs Bedfich Smetana (1824–84), Antonin Dvorak (1841–1904) and Leoá Janáéek (1854–1928); the Norwegian Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), the Finn Jan Sibelius (1865–1957), and the Dane Carl Nielsen (1865–1931); the Spaniards Isaac Albeniz (1860–1909), Enrique Granados (1867–1916), and Manuel de Falla (1876–1946); the Hungarians Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967); the Englishmen Edward Elgar (1857–1934), Frederick Delius (1862–1934), and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958); and the famous Russian ‘Five’—Cesar Cui (1835–1916), Mily Balakirev (1836–1910), Alexander Borodin (1833–87), Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1909) and Modeste Mussorgsky (1839–81). These national schools served to widen the social appeal of music. What is more, nations who were thwarted by the language barrier from furthering their cause through literature could address the whole of Europe through the concert hall.

Interestingly, the abstract nature of music invited a wide range of reaction to the same scores. A composer like Chopin could appeal not only to listeners who were well attuned to his political message but equally to others who were totally oblivious. There was no contradiction between the national and the universal aspects of his genius. The deliciously ambiguous emotional qualities of his bitter-sweet Polish melodies were woven into alternating moods of rousing protest and melancholic languor. For some, he translated Polish history into notes on the keyboard; for others, he conjured up poignancies of a purely personal and intimate character. As Robert Schumann said of perhaps the most famous piece by Chopin, the ‘Revolutionary Étude’, Op. 10 No. 12, it spoke of ‘guns buried in flowers’:

In the world of opera, national myths were yoked to stupendous sounds to form musical dramas of unequalled power. An audience which has watched and listened, riveted to their seats, during a performance of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov or Wagner’s Ring lose all concern for the rights and wrongs of history. National operaties is a field where the magnificence of the music only seems to be enhanced by the unlikeliness of the libretto, [NIBELUNG] [OPERA] [SUSANIN] [TRISTAN]

That the growth of nationalism was closely intertwined with the modernization of European society is undeniable. Indeed, some historians of the Marxist persuasion go so far as to insist that the correlation was absolute. ‘The basic characteristic of the modern nation and of everything connected with it’, writes one of them, ‘is its modernity.’ This sort of assertion spoils a good case by overstatement. Political oppression could be every bit as effective as socio-economic modernizationin stimulating modern nationalism; and there are several instances of precocious national movements which were well developed long before modernization took hold. What the modernizing processes certainly did do was to change the nature of existing nationalisms, and to expand their social constituency beyond all previous limits. ‘The Transformation of Nationalism’ in the prime era of Europe’s modernization after 1870 was a reality which few would want to refute.

Nationalism also underlined an important distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’. Civilization was the sum total of ideas and traditions which had been inherited from the ancient world and from Christianity, it was grafted onto the native cultures of all the peoples of Europe from the outside, to form the common legacy. Culture (Kultur in the German sense), in contrast, grew from the everyday life of the people. It was made up from all that was specific to a particular nation: their native speech, their folklore, their religious deviations, their idiosyncratic practices. In earlier times, civilization had been extolled and culture despised. Nationalism now did the opposite. National cultures were extolled, and common civilization downgraded. The educated, multilingual, cosmopolitan élite of Europe grew weaker; the half-educated national masses, who thought of themselves only as Frenchmen, Germans, English, or Russians, grew stronger.

Theorizing about Nationalism has not abated with time. Among the ideas in vogue in the late twentieth century, one would have to consider the above-mentioned sociological link between Nationalism and Modernization: the psychological concept of the Nation as ‘an imagined community’, to which uprooted or newly educated individuals chose to belong: and the notion of ‘Invented Tradition’—the mechanism whereby nascent nations created their own mythologies. It is interesting to note that each of these very contemporary ideas can be found in the writings of a little-known Polish socialist and social theorist, Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905).32

The passions of nationalism inevitably fuelled conflict. Almost all parts of Europe contained ethnic minorities whose popular nationalisms were bound to clash with the state-led nationalism of the authorities. In Britain there were three potential separatist movements; in the Russian Empire there were seventy. Even in the German Empire, which was remarkably homogeneous from the ethnic point of view, long-running conflicts emerged in the former Polish provinces, on the Danish border in Schleswig-Holstein, and in Alsace-Lorraine, [ELSASS] [SLESVIG] Important conflicts also arose between leaders of the national movements and leaders of liberal or socialist opinion who either disagreed with nationalism per se or objected to the priority given to national goals.

Russia was a case in point, where the imperial state-building of the Romanov dynasty came into conflict not only with the non-Russian peoples of the Empire but also with the popular nation-building sentiments of the Russians themselves. In the old Muscovite heartland, the ‘Empire’ lived uneasily alongside the ‘Nation’. Imperial institutions based on the court, the nobility, and the bureaucracy operated like a foreign occupying power within a largely peasant society with which they had little in common. Emancipation of the serfs only postponed the frustrations of this peasant nation, whose life was based on the village commune and the Russian Orthodox Church. The failure of early nineteenth-century attempts to launch a vernacular Russian Bible, which could have served as the foundation-stone of a modern national culture, has been seen as crucial.33

As the decades passed, nationalism frequently assumed a more truculent tone. National movements which had started as part of the liberal crusade against reactionary dynasties became frustrated when their demands could not be fully realized. Hence in the last quarter of the century, the ‘old liberating and unifying nationalism’ frequently gave way to an intolerant strain of ‘integral nationalism’. Talk began about the expulsion of minorities, and of the ‘treason’ of anyone not conforming to the nationalists’ own dogmatic definition of their community. (It was in this negative sense that the term ‘nationalism’ entered general currency in the 1890s.) Germany was to be for Germans alone, ‘Romania for the Romanians’, Ruritania for the Ruritanians.

It was in imperial Germany, perhaps, that the ideas of Blut und Boden or ‘blood and soil’ took deepest root. But it was in France that integral nationalism found its most coherent advocates, in the writings of Maurice Barres (1862–1923) and of Charles Maurras (1868–1952), co-founders in 1899 of the movement Action Française. For them, France was for Frenchmen alone, and for loyal, native-born, Catholic Frenchmen at that. Barres, Deputy for the Moselle, spent his career fighting for the return of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany. His book Les Déracinés (The Uprooted, 1897) gave a label to the idea of rootless and hence worthless elements of society. It would soon be turned against the Jews, amongst others. La Colline inspirée (1913) advanced the notion that Catholicism and true Frenchness were inseparable. Maurras took a leading role as an anti-Dreyfusard, and later as a supporter of Pétain in Vichy France. His language became so extreme that in 1926 his writings were placed on the Catholic Index.

Integral nationalism affected all the national movements of the fin de siècle. In addition to Germany and France, it made a deep impact in Poland, where the National Democratic Movement of Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was very characteristic of the trend. In Italy it was inherent in the activities of the irredentists, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), who were trying to prise Trieste and South Tyrol from Austria. In Russia it led to the rejection of all who did not conform to the identification of Russianness with Orthodoxy. In Great Britain it could be observed among all who equated ‘British’ with ‘English’. In Ireland it was represented both by the stance of many Protestant Ulstermen, who saw no place in Ulster for Catholics, and by the extreme tendency among Irish Catholic nationalists, who regarded all protestants and Anglo-Irish as agents of alien domination. Among Jews it could be observed in the wing of Zionism which saw Palestine not just as a refuge for oppressed Jews but as the land for a ‘Jewish State’, where non-Jews would have to live on sufferance.

Much depended on the political environment within which the various national movements were obliged to operate. Some political theorists have been tempted to place the ‘moderate, humane, and liberating’ forms of nationalism in Western Europe, and to lump the nationalisms of Eastern Europe into the intolerant, ethnic category.34 This classification is patently unjust. There are many instances of intolerant, ethnic nationalism in Western Europe, from the IRA to the Flemish Fatherland Front. Many national movements in Eastern Europe have included both so-called ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ elements. The labels simply do not fit. What is true is that the autocratic empires of Eastern Europe inhibited nationalism of the liberal type, encouraging violent opposition from all sources. Whereas popular nationalism was given full rein in most parts of Europe in the fifty years after 1870, many of those peoples who found themselves under the control of the Russian Empire had to postpone their hopes of liberation for nearly a century. This delay was due more to the nature of successive Russian states than to the inherent characteristics of their captive peoples.

The Italian national liberation movement was in action for three-quarters of a century before its objective was achieved in 1871. It is known as il Risorgimento, ‘the Resurgence’, after a newspaper founded in 1847 in Turin by its most effective leader, Count Camillo di Cavour (1810–61), Prime Minister of Sardinia. But its origins lay among the secret independence societies, among them the famous Carbonari, who launched the abortive revolts in Naples (1820), Turin (1821), and Rome (1830), and the Giovane Italia or ‘Young Italy’ of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72). Mazzini, national revolutionary and prophet, spent much of his life in exile, in Marseilles, Berne, and London. He created a national ideology, roused his compatriots from apathy, and called on sympathetic rulers, like Charles Albert of Sardinia, to support them. ‘A nation’, he declared, ‘is the universality of citizens speaking the same tongue.’ In 1834 he founded an international branch of his campaign, Young Europe, which trained a network of conspirators for preparing democratic constitutions all over the Continent.

1848, the Year of Revolutions, brought Italy to the forefront of the eruptions sweeping Europe. Independent republics were proclaimed in Venice and Rome. Sicily and Naples turned on their Bourbon monarch, Ferdinand II. Charles-Albert launched a ‘Holy War’ on Austria, hoping to benefit from the revolt of Milan. All were crushed amidst the counter-attacks of General Radetzky and the merciless bombardments of ‘King Bomba’. Mazzini’s slogan, ‘Italia farà da sé’ (Italy will do it alone), had failed. His romantic associate Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), who had fought both in Rome and in Venice, fled to South America.

Conditions improved a decade later. Cavour’s Sardinia was converted to the Italian cause as the best means of dislodging the Austrians. After the fine performance of Sardinian troops in the Crimea, Napoleon III asked quaintly, ‘What can I do for Italy?’ and a Franco-Sardinian Pact was duly signed. France undertook to support Sardinia in the north against Austria, whilst continuing to defend the Papal States in the centre. Three wars later the game was complete. In 1859–60 the victories at Magenta and Solferino assured the success of the Franco-Sardinian attack on Austrian Italy, whilst the sensational private expedition of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ redshirts assured the fell of Sicily and Naples. Plebiscites in Parma, Modena, and Tuscany all voted for Italy; France took Savoy and Nice; Austria still held Venetia; and with French help the Pope still ruled in Rome. But in May 1861 an all-Italian parliament at Turin proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II (r. 1849–78) King of Italy. In 1866, with Austria at war with Prussia, Italy contrived the cession of Venetia. In 1870, with France at war with Prussia, Italy seized the remainder of the Papal States and confined the Pope to the Vatican. Except for the Trentino (South Tyrol) and Istria, the Kingdom of Italy was complete. Cavour was dead; Garibaldi retired to the Isle of Caprera; Mazzini, the republican, still in exile, was heartbroken. (See Appendix III, p. 1304.) [GATTOPARDO]

The progress of the German national movement resembled that of its Italian counterpart in all essential respects. It began amidst the enthusiasm of the ‘War of Liberation’ of 1813–14 and the secret societies of the Restoration period. It met its greatest setback in 1848, when an all-German assembly was convened only to be disbanded. It reached its goal in 1871, when the King of Prussia was converted to the cause.

In the period before March 1848, known as the Vormãrz, the futility of the German Confederation became self-evident. Its Diet declined into little more than a court of appeal. It was still preoccupied in settling debts from the Thirty Years War. The article of its constitution requiring each of the German princes to convene a parliament was observed or ignored at will. Liberal initiative was stifled by the princes’ right to annul legislation and to call in outside assistance. In 1848–9 Germany was set alight, like France and Italy, with risings in Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Prague, Dresden, Baden, and elsewhere. The national Vorparlament which met in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt drew up a constitution for a future German Empire. But it could not put any of its deliberations into effect. It was deeply divided by the question of Schleswig-Holstein. It could not decide whether Germany should be confined to German ethnic territory or should include all of the Austrian Empire, which was predominantly non-German. It offered the Crown to Frederick-William IV of Prussia, who turned down an honour ‘that smelled of the gutter’. It broke up in July 1849 amidst recrimination and repression. (See Appendix III, p. 1303.)

Prussia’s conversion to German reunification took place in the 1860s, largely as a means for breaking out of the German Confederation and the hopeless entanglement with Austria. In the early years of William I (r. 1861–88) Prussia’s affairs had reached a very ambiguous condition. The authoritarian establishment had been strengthened by the military reforms of von Roon, whilst the Landtag elections had produced a liberal majority headed by the Fortschrittspartei of Waldeck. In 1862 Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) was appointed Premier to sort out the resultant crisis, if necessary by unconstitutional measures. His aim was to put Prussia ‘in the saddle’ in Germany, and Germany in the saddle in Europe. Immense friction was being caused by the joint Prusso-Austrian administration of Schleswig-Holstein. William I could not decide whether to lead the Confederation or to leave it to Francis-Joseph, as he did for the Frankfurt Furstentag in 1863. All these issues were settled by Bismarck’s determination to create a new North German Confederation without Austria, and by the masterly use of limited war. In 1864 Prussia attacked and defeated Denmark for annexing Schleswig. In 1866, when Austria referred the Schleswig Question to the Confederation Diet, Prussia promptly walked out, attacking and defeating Austria and Austria’s German allies. The lightning victory at Sadová, near Hradec Králové (Königgrätz), ensured Prussian supremacy, and the formation of the North German Federation. In 1870–1 Prussia attacked and defeated France. In the ensuing euphoria, Bismarck arranged for the Federation to admit the South German states and for William I to be proclaimed German Emperor. Germany was reunited; the conservative citadel was triumphant, and the liberals baffled. [HERMANN]

GATTOPARDO

MAY 1860. ‘Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.’ The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Sorrowful and the Glorious Mysteries; other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word; love, virginity, death. During that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing room seemed to change. Even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed. Even the Magdalen between the two windows looked penitent…

Now everything returned to its usual order or disorder. Bendico, the Great Dane, came wagging his tail through the door by which the servants had left. The women rose slowly to their feet, their swaying skirts baring the naked, mythological figures painted all over the milky depths of the tiles. Only an Andromeda remained covered by the soutane of Father Pirrone, still deep in extra prayer.. ,1

Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, was performing the ageless family rituals at his villa above Palermo. Sicily was passing through the uneasy interval between the abortive rising in Messina in April and Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala on 11 May. The Prince, known from his coat-of-arms as ‘the Leopard’, was entering the twilight of the Bourbon monarchy, of feudal privilege, and of his own blighted emotional life.

Historical novels come in many categories. The cheap ones pillage the past to provide an exotic backdrop to unrelated fiction. Some use it as a neutral stage to impart conviction to the discussion of timeless issues. A few can enrich one’s understanding both of history and of humanity. //Gattopardo (The Leopard), published in 1958, was the posthumous work of Giuseppe Tomasi (1896–1957), Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa. Rarely has a novelist shown such empathy, such historical sensitivity.

May 1910. Don Fabrizio’s three maiden daughters still live at the Villa Salina. The relics of the family chapel have to be cast out, having been declared false by the Cardinal Archbishop. By chance, Bendico’s fur, long preserved as a rug, is thrown out with them. As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with humble reproach. What remained of Bendico was flung into a corner of the yard. During its flight from the window, its form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air there seemed to be a dancing quadruped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a little piece of livid dust. Poi tutto trovó pace in un mucchietto di polvere livida.3

The Polish national movement had the longest pedigree, the best credentials, the greatest determination, the worst press, and the least success. It traced its origins to the anti-Russian confederations of the eighteenth century, and it bred an armed rising in every generation between the Partitions and the Second World War—in 1733,1768,1794,1830,1848,1863,1905,1919,1944. It nourished a precocious brand of nationalism which was already maturing in Napoleonic times. At heart this had little to do with economic rationale, everything with the will to preserve culture, identity, and honour.

The Polish risings of the early nineteenth century aimed to restore the crucified commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. They were driven on by the mystical images of romantic poetry, by the conviction that Poland, ‘the Christ of Nations’, would have its ‘Third Day’:

Hail, O Christ, Thou Lord of Men!
Poland in Thy footsteps treading
Like Thee suffers, at Thy bidding
Like Thee, too, shall rise again.35

The principal actions were directed from the Congress Kingdom against Russia, although Poles from Austria and Prussia also took part. Sympathetic outbreaks occurred in Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. In November 1830 a wild conspiracy, provoked by rumours of the Tsar’s plan to dispatch his Polish army against Belgium, sparked a Russo-Polish war. The Tsar rejected the advice of a government in Warsaw taken over by the conservative Prince Czartoryski and refused all dialogue. So matters were left to the intransigents. On this occasion the professional Polish army had a real chance of victory, but was gradually outflanked and overwhelmed. In September 1831, when the Russians stormed the last emplacements near Warsaw, they found the corpse of General Sowiński still upright among the fields of dead and dying. The old Napoleonic officer had ordered his men to plant his wooden leg ‘firmly in the Polish soil’, so as not to bow to tyrants. The constitution of the Congress Kingdom was suspended. All insurgents were deprived of their freedom and their property. Ten thousand exiles found their way to France; tens of thousands more were marched to Siberia in chains.

HERMANN

T HE Hermannsdenkmal, the monument to Arminius, stands on a lofty outcrop above the wooded slopes of the Teutoburgerwald near Detmold in Westphalia. It commemorates the victory in ad 9 of the Germanic chieftain Hermann, or Arminius the Cherascon, who somewhere nearby annihilated the invading Roman legions. A colonnaded pedestal supports a gigantic statue in beaten copper nearly 30 m in height. Ten times life size, Hermann frowns under his winged helmet as he brandishes a huge sword of vengeance over the plain below.

The monument took nearly forty years to build. Like the classical Temple of Walhalla (1830–42), built by the King of Bavaria on a bluff overlooking the Danube near Regensburg, it was conceived in a generation that remembered Napoleon and the wars of liberation. But it was not completed until Germany was united and German nationalism was assuming a more muscular form. The designer and prime mover of the project, Ernst von Bandel, had repeatedly failed to find the necessary finance. He finally succeeded by raising subscriptions from schools throughout the German empire. Hermann was unveiled in 1875, a fitting symbol of the Empire’s new-found pride.

In the heyday of nationalism, every self-respecting nation felt honour-bound to find heroes suitable for commemoration; and public monuments served a definite social and educational purpose. The Hermannsdenkmal led the field in a special pseudo-historical genre that swept Europe.1 In Germany it had several rivals, including the Niederwaldsdenkmal on the banks of the Rhine, the equestrian statue of Emperor William I on the Kyffhauser Mountain in Thuringia, and the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (1913), which was erected by a league of patriots in Leipzig on the centenary of the Battle of the Nations. In time and spirit, it closely resembles the statue to that most unparliamentary of kings, Richard Cceur de Lion, erected beside the Houses of Parliament in London, the Grunwald monument (1910) in Cracow, and the monument to Vercingetorix on the Plateau de Gergovie near Clermont-Ferrand.

Perhaps the ultimate in the political aesthetics of national sentiment can be found in the monument to Prince Llewellyn’s dog, Gelert, which was erected at Beddgelert (Gelert’s Grave) in North Wales in the 1790s.2 The greater the pathos, the remoter the time, and the more the Romantic generation enthuse over these reminders of their roots.

Polish activities in 1848 were dampened by the fiasco of an intended general rising two years earlier, when the Republic of Cracow had sealed its fate by not controlling the revolutionaries. Thousands of nobles had been massacred in the surrounding Galician countryside by peasants abetted by Austrian officials. Poland’s contribution to the ‘springtime of other nations’, therefore, was one minor disturbance in Posnania, two outbursts in Cracow and Lemberg, and a major contingent of exiles, headed by General Jozef Bern, which fought for Hungary.

In January 1863, the Congress Kingdom erupted once more, frustrated by the contradictions of the ‘Tsar Liberator’, Alexander II. Whilst emancipating the serfs of his Empire, Alexander was not prepared to grant the Poles a constitution. Two years of patriotic demonstrations in Warsaw led by priests, pastors, and rabbis ended with the formation of a secret National Government. Sixteen months of fierce guerrilla warfare ended with the executions of the insurgent leaders on the walls of the citadel. On this occasion the Congress Kingdom itself was suppressed. Eighty thousand Poles made the terrible journey to Siberia—the largest of all political contingents in tsarist history.

In 1905 the torch of patriotic insurrection was taken up by the Polish Socialist Party. Waves of strikes and street battles in Warsaw and Lodz long outlasted the contemporary Russian revolt in St Petersburg. Huge conscriptions of sullen young men from the Polish provinces filled the ranks of the Russian army, fighting with no great conviction against the Japanese in Manchuria.

The persistent defeats of Polish nationalism fostered two important developments. Later generations of patriots often chose to work for their country rather than fight for it. Their concept of ‘organic work’ aimed to strengthen economic and cultural resources, and to curb all political demands beyond local autonomy. This became the standard strategy for all national movements whose military and diplomatic support was deficient. At the same time, ‘integral nationalism’ made its appearance in each of the nationalities of the Polish lands. Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Zionist Jewish nationalism each took a stance which effectively paralysed any sense of a common struggle. Dmowski’s Polish nationalists fiercely contested Piłsudski’s Polish independence movement. Its slogans demanding a ‘Poland for the Poles’ revealed deep anti-German, anti-Ukrainian, and antisemitic complexes.

Within the Russian Empire, important gradations could be seen in official attitudes to the rising tide of nationalism. Byelorussians and Ukrainians were simply not permitted to possess a separate identity. Poles, until 1906, were not permitted any form of political expression. Yet in the Grand Duchy of Finland, Finns enjoyed the autonomy of which many of their neighbours were deprived. The Baltic Germans, largely Lutherans, enjoyed the religious and cultural toleration that was denied the other inhabitants of the Baltic provinces. ‘The prison of the nations’ had many bars, and many holes in the wall.

The national question in Austria-Hungary was particularly recondite. The Ausgleich of 1867 was intended to moderate the problems; in practice it rendered them insoluble. There was no chance that the German-speaking élite could. impose its culture throughout Austria, let alone extend it to the whole of the Dual Monarchy. After all, ‘Austria was a Slav house with a German façade’. In practice the three ‘master races’—the Germans, the Magyars, and the Galician Poles— were encouraged to lord it over the others. The administrative structures were so tailored that the German minority in Bohemia could hold down the Czechs, the Magyars in Hungary could hold down the Slovaks, Romanians, and Croats, and the Poles in Galicia could hold down the Ruthenians (Ukrainians). So pressures mounted as each of the excluded nationalities fell prey to the charms of nationalism. What is more, when Habsburg politics were complicated by the introduction first of the Reichsrat or ‘Imperial Council’ and eventually, in 1896, of universal suffrage, the three ruling groups could only maintain their supremacy by an endless game of deals and compromises. The Austrian Germans, who dominated the court and army, could only fend off the fiery Magyars by upholding the interests of ultra-conservative Polish aristocrats from Galicia. As a result, the Poles remained the most staunchly Kaisertreu element to the end. The Magyars were eternally dissatisfied; German opinion in Austria was increasingly drawn back to the old idea of a Greater Germany, and the Czechs in particular felt hopelessly trapped. Francis-Joseph I (r. 1848–1916), who described himself as ‘the last monarch of the old style’, ruled over a truly multinational state, where the imperial hymn could be sung in any one of seventeen official languages, including Yiddish. He was popular exactly because of his political immobility. Under the surface, the untreated ills were starting to fester. As one Prime Minister was ready to admit: ‘It is my policy to keep all the nationalities in the Monarchy in a balanced state of well-modulated dissatisfaction.’ [GENES]

Europe was filled with national movements which do not feature in the textbooks. Many of the smaller communities willingly confined themselves to cultural tasks. In Provence, Frederic Mistral (1830–1914) was able to organize the revival of Provencal language and culture and yet be elected to the French Academy. In Wales, the custom of an annual Eisteddfod or bardic meeting was revived in 1819 after centuries of abeyance. The pseudo-druidical ceremonies initiated at Llangollen in 1858 became an essential feature of the series. In Germany, Slavonic Polabs, Sorbs, and Kashubs, resurrected their ancient Slavonic cultures. The Polabs had survived in a tiny enclave round Liichow near Hanover; a collection of their literature and a grammar-book were published with Russian assistance in 1871. The Sorbs of Lusatia, who numbered perhaps 200,000, established aMacica or ‘cultural society’ at Budisyn (Bautzen) in 1847. The Kashubs of Pomerania did likewise.

Both constitutional and autocratic systems could prove hostile to national aspirations. In this respect the experience of the Irish and the Ukrainians is worthy of comparison; the political arithmetic was stacked against both of them.

The Irish participated in a prominent ‘Western democracy’. From 1801, when the Union of Ireland and Great Britain was enacted, over fifty Irish MPs sat in the British Parliament at Westminster. It gave them all sorts of benefits except the one they most desired—control over their own affairs. But their political activities were incessant. The Catholic Association of Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), which organized huge ‘monster’ public meetings for years, achieved religious toleration in 1829. Discontent was later kept on the boil by the sufferings of the Famine, by the injustices of successive Land Acts, and by the lack of political progress. The complacency of English Conservatives, the tenacious resistance of the Ulster Protestants, and the violent exploits of the Irish radical wing, which was represented by the Fenians (Irish Republican Brotherhood, from 1858) and by Sinn Fein (from 1905), made for political deadlock. In the Irish countryside the long-running war between government-backed landlords and the rebellious tenants of the Land League (1879) created a pervasive climate of fear. Even when C. S. Parnell (1846–91) and his Irish party at Westminster gained the support of Gladstone’s ruling Liberals, three successive bills for Irish Home Rule were blocked in the House of Lords. The true cultural awakening of the Irish occurred late, in the 1890s, when the Irish Literary Theatre, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and the Gaelic League were all founded, ‘On the necessity for de-anglicising the Irish People’. In 1900 Queen Victoria visited Dublin for the first time in forty years, rescinded the ban on ‘the wearing of the green’, and encouraged massive St Patrick’s Day parades throughout the Empire. But it was too late for symbolic gestures. In 1912, when a fourth Home Rule Bill was prepared, both the Ulster Volunteers in Belfast and the National Volunteers in Dublin raised formidable armies. As Europe approached the Great War, Ireland stood on the brink of civil war. Ireland was indeed divided. Ulster, defiant, had no sense of Irishness. ‘Ireland is not a nation,’ said a future British prime minister, ‘but two peoples separated by a deeper gulf than that dividing Ireland from Great Britain.’ Sinn Fein, which had always looked to the USA for support, now sought aid from Germany. [FAMINE] [ORANGE]

GENES

IIN 1866 Father Gregor Mendel (1811–84), abbot of the Augustinian I monastery at Brno in Moravia, published the findings of his experiments into the propagation of the common green pea, Pisum sativum. For several years the abbot had been observing the peas in the monastery garden. By careful cross-pollination, and by concentrating on just a few specific characteristics such as height and colour, he was able to demonstrate definite patterns of inheritance in successive plant generations. He established the existence of dominant and recessive characteristics whose recurrence in hybrids he could empirically predict. His results were totally ignored. The ‘Mendelian Laws of Inheritance’, which form the starting point of modern genetics, were separately rediscovered in 1900 by three different biologists.1

Mendelism remained in the experimental stage for many decades. Although the presence of chromosomes in living cells was established early in the twentieth century, the mechanics of the genes, or ‘unit-characters’, as Mendel had called them, long defied the researchers. The significance of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was not realized until 1944, and the double-helical spiral structure of the DNA molecule not demonstrated until 1953. In this regard, biology lagged well behind the corresponding advances in modern physics and chemistry.

In the mean time, a Soviet scientist claimed to have solved many of the fundamental problems. Troflon Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) rejected the chromosomal basis of heredity, arguing instead that inheritable changes could be induced in plants by environmental influences and by grafting. He published experimental results showing that the germination of wheat seed could be dramatically improved by subjection to low temperature. He even tried to make wheat plants produce rye seed. It was all a scam: his results had been falsified. But having persuaded Stalin that his theories would remedy the failures of Soviet agriculture, Lysenko shaped himself a dazzling career that flourished for three decades. Elected President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science in 1938, he ordered millions of acres to be sown with grain treated by his methods. When the grain failed to sprout, the farmers were arrested for sabotage. Critics, including Russia’s leading geneticist N. I. Vavrilov, were cast into the Gulag. Teachers had to present Lysenkoism as gospel. Soviet biology was blighted almost beyond repair. Lysenko received two Stalin Prizes, the Order of Lenin and the title Hero of the USSR.2

Western biologists treated Lysenko as ‘illiterate’. In return, Lysenko derided all orthodox geneticists as ‘reactionary decadents grovelling before Western capitalism’. Foremost among the targets of his scorn was Father Gregor Mendel.3

The Ukrainians lived under two ‘Eastern autocracies’. Once subjects of Poland, they were now subjects either of Russia or of Austria. An overwhelmingly peasant people, their level of national consciousness was necessarily low until the bonds of serfdom were severed in mid-century. Traditionally known as Rusini or ‘Ruthenians’, they now began to adopt the ‘Ukrainian’ label in reaction to the misleading and insulting designation of’Little Russians’, which tsarist officialdom had invented for them. (A Ukrainian simply meant a politically conscious Ruthene.) Their cultural awakening was greatly stimulated by the poetic writings of Taras Shevchenko (1814–61); their political awakening gathered pace in later decades. In Russia they were faced by a regime which refused to recognize their existence, regarding them as a regional Russian minority, and allowing them only one religion—Russian Orthodoxy. In Austria, where they enjoyed greater cultural and political freedom they preserved the Uniate Rite, and were slow to adopt the Ukrainian label. At the turn of the century, they organized Ruthenian schooling on a large scale. But there they were faced by a strong Polish community, which held the numerical majority in Galicia as a whole, including Lemberg. [UKRAINA]

FAMINE

BETWEEN 1845 and 1849 Ireland suffered one of Europe’s worst natural disasters. The Irish potato famine caused a million deaths, drove over a million more to emigrate, and reduced the island’s population of 8.2 million (1845) by at least a quarter. Although Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, the most powerful state of the era, she received little effective relief. To some observers, it was the ultimate Malthusian apocalypse: to others, the culmination of centuries of misrule.1

The immediate cause of the disaster lay in the fungal blight phytoph-thora infestans, which decimated the potato crop in three successive years. The blight had been noted in the Isle of Wight a year before it crossed the Irish Sea in 1845. In England it was a minor nuisance, in Ireland the agent of death.

By the early nineteenth century, large sections of Ireland’s rural population had become totally dependent on a ‘potato culture’. A vegetable rich in vitamins and protein, it grew easily in the moist Irish earth. It sustained large numbers of poor people who were left with too much time for singing, dancing, drinking poteen, and telling stories. They had as many names for potatoes as the English had for roses. They called it the murphy, the spud, the tater, the pratie, and the ‘precarious exotic’.

Potato dependency was the product of many disorders. In the six decades after 1780, Ireland experienced a demographic explosion—an increase of nearly 300 per cent as compared with 88 per cent in England and Wales. Yet, with the exception of Ulster, she experienced little industrialization to absorb the surplus numbers, though emigration to the USA and Australia began after the Napoleonic Wars. Most seriously, Irish society was clamped by a body of repressive legislation, which blocked many obvious solutions to her distress. Conditions on the land had been atrocious for longer than anyone remembered. Until 1829, Catholic Irishmen were not even allowed to buy land, and few had money to do so. Anglo-Irish landlords, often absentees, demanded high rents or deliveries in kind on pain of instant eviction. Evictions were enforced by the military, who customarily razed or ‘tumbled’ the houses of defaulters. Irish peasants had no security, and little incentive to work. They frequently murdered their persecutors, or joined the British army. In the words of the Duke of Wellington, ‘Ireland was an inexhaustible nursery for the finest soldiers’. But it was also the home of squalor—with large ragged families living in mud huts with no furniture and the company of pigs. As a German traveller remarked: ‘it seems that the poorest among the Letts, Esthonians and Finnlanders lead a life of comparative comfort’.2

A generous Irish historian writes that the initial policies of Sir Robert Peel’s government ‘were more effective than sometimes allowed’.3 In 1846 prices were controlled, Indian meal distributed, and public works started to provide employment. But Peel’s fall over Corn Law repeal ushered in a Whig ministry that did not believe in intervention. ‘Rotten potatoes have done it all,’ exclaimed the Iron Duke. Irishmen paid their rent, and ate nettles.

In 1847, 3 million public soup rations were served. But they did not stop typhus, or the crowds fleeing the countryside. In the district of Skibbereen in County Cork, where a dozen landlords took £50,000 in rent, there were corpses in the fields and children dying in the workhouse; and grain was still being exported under guard to England. Robber bands pillaged the country towns. ‘What we have to contend with’, said the Treasury Minister responsible for relief, ‘is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’

In 1848 the potato crop failed again, and the human exodus swelled to a flood. Ragged families garnered their last strength to walk to the ports. Landlords often paid for them to go. They collapsed on the roads, perished in the overcrowded steerage holds, and died in droves on the docks of New York and Montreal. They landed racked with fever, stomach cramps, and anglophobia.

The famine put an end to Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to reject the Union. But it also killed any real hopes of reconciliation. And the exodus continued:

A million a decade! Calmly and cold
The units are read by our statesman sage.
Little they think of a Nation old,
Fading away from History’s page:
—Outcast weeds by a desolate sea
Fallen leaves of Humanity!5

This was not Europe’s last famine. It was followed in 1867–8 by similar catastrophes in Finland and in Belgium. Nor was it on the scale of the Volga famine of 1921 or in the nature of the terror-famine in Ukraine of 1932–3 [HARVEST]. But it was shameful for where and how it happened. The British government’s final relief measure, in August 1849, was to send Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on a state visit to Dublin.

In both empires, then, the Ukrainians had to contend with the fact that their homeland was inhabited by several other nationalities—Poles, Jews, and Russians—all of whom were hostile to Ukrainian nationalism. It was frustrating, to say the least. The potential membership of the Ukrainian nation was as numerous as the French or the English. Yet nowhere could they bring their numbers to bear. Like the Irish, they remained a stateless nation. Like the Irish, their activists began to look to Germany.

Balkan nationalism grew specially intense. The Ottoman Empire had always tolerated a large measure of religious and cultural autonomy, whilst extirpating political dissidence. Assimilation into the ruling Muslim culture, except in Bosnia, Albania, and parts of Bulgaria, was low. As a result, ready-made Christian nations were waiting to emerge as soon as Ottoman power receded. Typically, they enjoyed a long period of practical autonomy, subject to the presence of nominal Ottoman garrisons, prior to acquiring absolute sovereignty. They also tended to start life on a minimal territorial base, which failed to satisfy their aspirations, and which led to repeated conflicts with their neighbours. None of them possessed even the semblance of ethnic homogeneity. Greece won its formal independence in 1832, the Romanian principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) in 1856, Montenegro in i860, Serbia and Bulgaria in 1878. The Albanians, the only predominantly Muslim nation in the region, lacked the support of the Christian powers, and were kept waiting until 1913. (See Appendix III, p. 1302.) [SHQIPERIA]

The Greeks’ experience was not felicitous, least of all with their monarchs. In seven reigns between 1833 and 1973, there were five abdications. The first King of the Hellenes, Otto I of Bavaria (r. 1833–62), a Catholic enthusiast for Germanic efficiency, proved more unpopular than the Ottomans. The second, George I (r. 1864–1913), was imported from Denmark to found an accident-prone dynasty. Nationalism and foreign kings did not mix. The Serbian experience was no happier: the blood feud between the rival dynasties of Karadordević and Obrenović fuelled ten royal assassinations. Russian support aroused a strong reaction from Austria, especially since the Slavs of the Dual Monarchy were increasingly impressed by the Serbian example. Serbia’s success in the Balkan Wars finally pushed Vienna into a show-down.

Unfortunately, the ethnic mosaic of the Balkans impeded the creation of stable national states. ‘Balkanization’ became a byword for political fragmentation, petty-minded nationalism, and vicious feuds. In the three Balkan wars of the early twentieth century, the Christian successor states fought no less eagerly among themselves than against the retreating Turks (see below).

Historians must also address the problem of why, in a continent brimming with popular nationalisms, a number of countries did not follow the general trend. Why, for example, did an effective national movement fail to develop in nineteenth-century Scotland? The Scots, after all, were exposed to intense modernization at an early date; and as junior partners within the United Kingdom they could easily have found early cause to resent English domination. But they did not. The answer must lie partly in the divisions between the Gaelic and the Lowland elements within Scottish culture, which impeded the growth of a common identity, and partly in the powerful attractions of British state nationalism. Like Cardiff or Belfast, Scotland’s principal city, Glasgow, thrived mightily from the enterprises of the British Empire. Scotland’s attachment to a successful Union would not decline until the Empire itself began to fade. The pioneer bard of Scottish nationalism, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978), did not start to write until the 1920s. The key political tract of the movement, Tom Nairn’s Break-up of Britain, was not published until 1977.38

In the meantime, one of the most prescient observers concluded that nationalism was no more than a phase. Speaking in 1882, Ernest Renan made the startling observation that no state or nation was eternal. Sooner or later all would be supplanted by something else, ‘possibly a European confederation’. Metternich had once said, ‘For me Europe has long held the essence of a fatherland.’ The hope was planted that such sentiments might some day return in more practical form.

Socialism, like Nationalism, was a collectivist creed. It opposed the exploiters and manipulators for the protection not just of the individual but of society as a whole. It took its name from the idea of fellowship or, in the modern idiom ‘solidarity’—socius in Latin meaning ‘companion’. It maintained that the poor, weak and oppressed could not be guaranteed a tolerable life except by the pooling of resources, by the equitable distribution of wealth, and by the subordination of individual rights to the common good. Unlike liberalism, it did not fear the modern state; on the contrary, it looked to the state as the arbiter and often as the prime mover of compassionate measures. Socialism was to be directed against oppressors both at home and abroad. The feeling of international solidarity made it the natural opponent of nationalism. Nineteenth-century socialism is generally considered to have drawn its strength from four separate sources: from Christian socialism, from the trade union movement, from the co-operative movement, and from the ‘utopian’ socialist theorists. (See Appendix III, p. 1308.)

Without ever using the label, Christian socialism had a centuries-old tradition. Christian doctrine had always urged service to the community and the renunciation of personal wealth. The Sermon on the Mount had been regularly invoked to justify collectivist economic schemes, from the practical workings of the monastic orders to the utopias of More, Campanella, Harrington, and Morelli. In the nineteenth century, Protestants generally showed the most initiative, through figures such as J. F. D. Maurice (1805–72), first principal of the Working Men’s College (1854), Charles Kingsley (1819–75), Adolf Wagner (1835–1917), or the Kaiser’s preacher, Adolf Stoecker (1835–99). The Oxford Movement also had a socialist streak, which came out in its ‘missions’ to city slums. The Roman Catholics were more inhibited until the publication of Rerum novarum in 1891. In Russia, the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, the collectivist traditions of the peasant communes, and existence of an all-powerful state all furnished fertile ground for the reception of socialist ideas.

The trade union movement grew out of the vulnerability of wage-labourers in the free-market economy. From the days of Dorset’s Tolpuddle Martyrs, working men and women painfully won the right to form unions, to bargain collectively over pay and conditions, and to strike. The critical launch dates are seen as 1834 in Britain, 1864 in France, 1869 in Germany. By 1900 most European countries possessed an active labour movement. From the start, the trade unions adopted a variety of structures and ideologies. Apart from the non-ideological unions of the British type, there were ‘horizontal’ craft unions, which grew out of the old guilds, ‘vertical’ industrial unions, anarcho-syndicalist unions on the French or Spanish model, liberal workers’ associations, pacifist ‘yellow’ unions opposed both to strikes and to war, and Church-based Christian unions. In many countries, as in Belgium, several different types of union worked alongside each other. In Russia, the initiative was taken by the Tsarist police, who decided to outflank various illegal organizations by forming official unions of their own. This experiment in ‘police socialism’ came to a bad end on 5 January 1905, when a demonstration headed by Father Gapon, a police agent, was fired on by the police. ‘Bloody Sunday’ launched the revolutionary outbreak of 1905; and Father Gapon was murdered. Russian trade unionism enjoyed barely one decade of independent existence before being suppressed by the Bolsheviks.

The formation of co-operatives, which sought to protect their members from the evils of big business, took place in three main sectors—manufacturing, consumption, and agriculture. In 1800 the experimental textile settlement of New Lanark Mills was set up in Scotland by the visionary Robert Owen (1771–1858). It guaranteed a ten-and-a-half-hour working day and sickness insurance, but did not outlast its founder. In 1844 the first consumers’ co-operative, the Rochdale Pioneers, appeared in Lancashire. Agricultural co-operatives, which first emerged in Germany at the initiative of F. W. Raiffeisen (1818–88), were to have a broad future wherever peasant farmers were free to organize, and especially in Eastern Europe.

Socialist theorizing had been in progress ever since the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ was organized in Paris in 1796 by Francois-Noël Babeuf (1760–97). Like Babeuf, who was executed by the Directory, all the founding theorists were French Utopians. They included Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Charles Fourrier (1772–1837), Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), Louis Blanc (1811–82), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65). Saint-Simon, a Christian socialist who had been close to Comte, sought to mobilize science and technology for an ideal community governed by experts. His Nouveau Christianisme (1825) led to the foundation of a sectarian Church, model communes, and trials for immorality. Both Fourrier and Cabet established model co-operative settlements in the USA. Fourrier’s Theorie des Quatre Mouvements (1808) envisaged a scientifically ordered society, free from all government, which would ascend through various stages of perfection on the road to ‘Harmony’. (It is often regarded as the source of Marx’s ideas on the stages of history and the withering of the state.)

Blanqui, known as ‘ľEnfermé’, ‘the Interned’, was a Babouvian class conspirator, who spent a total of 33 years in prison for persistently organizing insurrectionary cells against monarchy and republic alike. His seizure of the Hotel de Ville in Paris for two days in 1839 was a disaster; but his followers played a leading role in the Commune of 1871. (He missed the event himself by being arrested the day before its outbreak.) His motto was ‘Ni Dieu, ni maitre’ (Neither God, nor boss). Louis Blanc, in contrast, argued for the creation of egalitarian, worker-controlled, and state-funded workshops, where the workers were to contribute according to their ability and be paid according to their needs. The scheme outlined in ĽOrganisation du Travail (1839) was briefly put into practice during the Revolution of 1848, before its author was exiled in England. Proudhon was in some ways the most influential of them all. His attack on (excessive) private property in Qu’est-ce que c’est la propriété? (1840) was a sensation, especially when its most famous phrase, ‘Property is theft’, was quoted out of context. His Philosophie de la Misère (1846) provoked one of Marx’s more trenchant retorts in La Misère de la Philosophies whilst his Ideé générale de la Revolution (1851) described a future Europe free of frontiers, central governments, and state laws. Proudhon was the founder of modern anarchism, which soon led his followers into conflict with mainstream socialism; but his support for direct action by workers against the state became the corner-stone of French syndicalism.

French influences were strong in the thought of the early German socialists. Ferdinand Loslauer (Lassalle, 1825–64), a Silesian Jew, who was killed in a romantic duel after founding the first German socialist party, spent a formative period in Paris. The two inseparable exiles, Friedrich Engels (1820–95) and Karl Marx (1818–83), who met in Paris, based many of their arguments on study of the French Revolution. Their Communist Manifesto (1848) was well timed. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’, it claimed, ‘the spectre of communism. Let the ruling classes tremble … The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains … Working men of all countries, unite!’

Marx and Engels were an odd pair. Expelled from Prussia for their radical journalism, they settled in England. Engels soon established himself as a prosperous capitalist, managing a cotton factory in Manchester. Marx eked out a penurious living in London, supported as a private scholar by a stipend from Engels. His life’s work, Das Kapital (Capital, 3 vols., 1867–94) was the fruit of thirty years’ lonely study in the Reading Room of the British Museum. It was a sustained exercise in speculative social philosophy, a rambling jumble of brilliant insights and turgid pedantry. It borrowed a number of disparate ideas current at the time, and reassembled them in the original combination of ‘dialectical materialism’. Marx aimed to create the same sort of universal theory for human society that Darwin had done for natural history; and he had hoped to dedicate his first volume to Darwin. He took the subject of materialist history from Feuerbach, the class struggle from Saint-Simon, the dictatorship of the proletariat (which he soon rejected) from Babeuf, the labour theory of value from Adam Smith, the theory of surplus value from Bray and Thompson, the principle of dialectical progress from Hegel. All these components were put together in a messianic doctrine whose psychological roots are thought to lie in the Judaism which his family had deserted during his childhood. Marx was the Prophet; the Proletariat was the Chosen People; the socialist movement was the Church; the Revolution was the Second Coming; Communism was the Promised Land.40

Marx had little to do with practical politics. He helped found an International Working-men’s Association, a phantom body later eulogized as ‘the first International’, for which he wrote a constitution and some fiery addresses. In his later years he attracted a substantial following among German socialists and their Russian disciples, but not in Britain. When he died he was buried in Highgate Cemetery, in a tomb which faces that of Herbert Spencer, with the inscription: ‘Philosophers have so far explained the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.’ Engels wrote up the last two volumes of Kapital from Marx’s notes, thereby completing a joint oeuvre whose individual elements cannot always be disentangled. But he had ideas of his own. He was more familiar with social conditions than Marx, and more concerned with the practical implications of their theories. By expounding the ‘withering of state power’, his Anti-Dühring (1878) and The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) gave great encouragement to active revolutionaries.

Latter-day commentators tend to be rather dismissive of Marxism’s credentials. Marx, they say, was ‘illustrative of liberal Europe’, or ‘a typical mid-19th century social theorist’.41 They may be right; but they miss the point. The intellectual rigour of Marxism proved to be far inferior to its emotive power. The great majority who came to believe that Marx had provided a scientific basis for their dreams of social justice never gave a moment’s critical thought to his writings. Marx had unwittingly provided them with yet another substitute religion.

The obvious social constituency for socialism was provided by the new working class. In practice, many workers steered clear; and almost all socialist organizations were dominated by middle-class intellectuals. The English Fabian society was archetypal. In Eastern Europe, where the fledgeling working class remained small, socialism was taken up either by internationalist conspirators, as in Russia, or, as in Poland, by that branch of the independence movement that wished to overcome the ethnic divisiveness preached by its nationalist rivals. Attempts to mobilize socialist movements with a mass following repeatedly foundered on the rocks of local interests, governmental repression, or intellectual frangipanery. In most countries, socialist parties of one sort or another struggled into existence, often after decades of frustration. It was the 1890s before a respectable parade of parties could be consolidated (see Appendix III, p. 1308). The most important, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was permanently established in 1890, after twelve years of banishment under Bismarck’s anti-socialist law. It traced its origin to the Gotha Programme of 1875, and to the merger of Lassalle’s association with various Marxist groups. The Erfurt Programme of 1891 was largely formulated by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), and was openly Marxist. But it was soon modified both by the revisionist criticisms of Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), who rejected the apocalyptic vision of socialism, and by the pragmatic inclinations of party leaders in the Reichstag.

The internationalist branch of the movement encountered similar difficulties. The ‘First International’ fell apart amidst recriminations between Marxists and anarchists. The ‘Second International’, which in 1889 succeeded in setting up a permanent secretariat in Brussels, was soon dominated by representatives of the SPD. It organized congresses, acted as a pressure group largely in the pacifist cause, and evaporated in 1914 when none of its national branches opposed the war. Its demise left the field deserted by all except the revolutionary Russian party, which was run by exiles like V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin, 1870–1924) and other like-minded conspirators.

The Russian revolutionary tradition was as old as the autocracy which fuelled it. Its first incarnation in the nineteenth century broke surface with the Decembrists of 1825—a fraternity of army officers influenced by French and Polish ideas. But in subsequent decades, under the guidance of Alexander Herzen (1812–70) and Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89), it took on increasingly socialist, populist, and anarchist flavours. In the 1860s and 1870s Russian populism—narod-nichestvo or ‘the movement to the people’—saw starry-eyed idealists going out to the villages to convert the peasantry, only to be met with incomprehension. In 1879 the populists split into two wings, with one emphasizing agrarian and educational reform and the other, the Narodnaya Vol’ya or ‘People’s Will’, advocating violence. A member of the latter assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

One key figure, P. N. Tkachev (1844–85), is often overlooked in Western accounts. Nor was he chosen for the later Bolshevik pantheon. Yet he was the true precursor of bolshevism. A ‘Jacobin’ among the Populists and an economic materialist, he provided the intellectual link between Chernyshevsky and Lenin. He spurned the education of the masses, calling instead for the training of a revolutionary élite. ‘The question “What should be done?” should no longer concern us,’ he wrote in the 1870s. ‘It has long since been resolved. Make the Revolution!’ He spent his later years in exile in Switzerland, where Lenin was to read his works avidly whilst denouncing him in public. There were no ‘filial ties’, but a definite fellow spirit.42

The history of Lenin’s group well illustrates the impossible dilemmas forced on would-be socialists in a hostile setting. As exiles or illegals, they had no chance to practise the democratic methods of the German SPD, from whom their original inspiration was taken. As revolutionaries, they could appeal to a certain body of Russian opinion that would cheer on anyone promising to fight the Tsar. But as socialists, they were bound to conflict with other branches of the movement, notably the Social Revolutionaries or SRs, who were better attuned to the Empire’s two largest constituencies, the peasants and the non-Russian nationalities. As Marxists, they had to concede that a genuine working-class revolution had little chance of success wherever, as in Russia, the working class was small; and as the group most devoted to conspiratorial methods, they were reluctant to organize an open, mass following. (Despite the name of Bol’sheviki or ‘Majoritarians’, which Lenin seized on at a suitable moment, they usually formed a minority, even within the Russian SDP.) Lenin rightly suspected, like Tkachev, that a disciplined minority could seize power without popular support. Yet in trying to justify such a strategy on socialist principles he was condemned from the outset to cloak it in fantasy. ‘Mendacity is the soul of bolshevism.’ Put another way, Leninism was cargo-cult socialism—a weird and distant imitation of the original model. ‘The Marxism which prevailed in the Russian Revolution’, comments a critic who came to be highly regarded in post-Communist Russia, ‘bore about as much relation to the original as the “Christianity” of T’ai Ping to that of Thomas Aquinas.’ It has taken the best part of a century for this fact to be generally recognized.

Anarchism, though passing its infancy in the company of socialism, soon grew up to be incompatible. At the core of anarchist thought lies the contention that all forms of domination are hateful, that government is not just unnecessary but harmful. One early strand, which could be traced to the Anabaptists and Diggers of the seventeenth century,45 came to fruition in England in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) of William Godwin (1756–1836) and in the soaring vision of Prometheus Unbound written by Godwin’s son-in-law, Shelley:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself…
And women, too, frank, beautiful and kind …
From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel
And changed to all which once they dared to be,
Yet being now, made earth like heaven …46

A second strand, in France, in the work and writings of Proudhon and his disciple, Anselme Bellegarrigue, centred on the doctrine of mutualité (mutualism). This held that the workers should avoid involvement in parliamentary politics, and should liberate themselves by direct action on the streets and in the factories.

A third strand grew from an extreme reaction against the extreme autocracy of the Russian Empire. It was nourished by two aristocratic Russian exiles, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) and Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). Bakunin, who once declared that ‘the passion for destruction is also a creative urge’, broke up Marx’s First International. ‘The Communists believe that they must organize the working class in order to seize power in states’, he declared. ‘Revolutionary socialists [meaning anarchists] organize in order to destroy states.’ He was the inspiration of the collectivist variant of anarchism that took hold in the Latin countries. Kropotkin, a distinguished author and geographer, wrote The Conquest of Bread (1892), Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899), and Mutual Aid (1902) in his campaign for a communist society free from all central government.

A fourth strand, initially described in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Individual and His Property, 1845) was launched by the Berlin journalist Max Stirner (1806–56). It stressed the absolute rights of the individual to freedom from institutional control. This proved attractive to numerous avant-garde artists and writers, from Courbet and Pissarro to Oscar Wilde. But it also shows why the anarchists’ own principles ruled out any chance of an effective anarchist organization.

In practical terms, anarchism bore fruit in several directions. Revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists dominated workers’ movements in France, Italy, and especially in Spain, where the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) developed into a major popular movement. Their favoured weapon was the general strike, designed to paralyse all working institutions. Peasant anarchists wielded influence in scattered locations from Andalusia to Ukraine. Anarchism also inspired the birth of modern terrorism—what the early Italian militant, Enrico Malatesta, called the ‘propaganda of the deed’. The idea was that sensational acts of murder or destruction would publicize injustice, break the resolve of government policy, and shatter the nerve of the ruling élite. The list of victims included Tsar Alexander II (1881), President Sadi Carnot of France (1894), Empress Elizabeth of Austria (1896), Premier Cánovas del Castillo of Spain (1897), and King Umberto I of Italy (1900). Nowhere did these violent preludes precipitate the peace and harmony which anarchists see as their ultimate destination.

Finally, and in diametric contrast, anarchism has inspired an important tradition of moral protest against all forms of coercion. Starting with Count Leo Tolstoy, the novelist, who felt that marriage was no less coercive than tsarism, the gospel of non-violence has attracted many dedicated followers, from Mahatma Gandhi in India to the Solidarity movement in Poland and to modern environ-mentalism.47 Bellegarrigue’s famous battle-cry, ‘L’Anarchie, c’est l’ordre’, is widely dismissed as a purely negative sentiment. But it contains a very serious moral constituent that underlies much of the modern concern about the mindless juggernauts of political and technological power. It is in this sense that anarchism has been classed as ‘the most attractive of political creeds’.48 It stood at the opposite end of the political spectrum from that of the one politician, Bismarck, who was as central to European politics as the anarchists were marginal.

Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) bestrode the Germany of the late nineteenth century much as the German Empire, which he designed, bestrode the rest of Europe. He, more than anyone else, was the architect of the European order which emerged from the turmoil after 1848, the year when he entered politics, and whose revolutions he detested. He was a man of immense contradictions both of personality and of policy. The ‘Iron Chancellor’, of fearsome countenance in Reichstag or diplomatic encounter, he was in private a hysteric, an insomniac, and, as recently revealed, a morphine addict. He was a landed Junker, wedded to his estates at Schonhausen and Varzin, who presided over Europe’s mightiest programme of industrialization. He was an antiquated Prussian conservative and monarchist who despised his sovereign, who adopted the nationalism of the liberal opposition, and who gave Germany both universal suffrage and social insurance. He was a victorious militarist who was infinitely suspicious of the fruits of victory. He was the hero of so-called German unification who chose to keep Greater Germany divided. The key to his success lay in a marvellous combination of strength and restraint. He built up positions of great power, only to disarm his opponents with carefully graded concessions that made them feel relieved and secure. ‘You can do everything with bayonets’, he once said, ‘except sit on them.’

Yet Bismarck’s reputation is a mixed one. No one can deny his mastery of the political art; but many question his morality and his intentions. For German patriots and conservative apologists, he was the person who gave his country, and his continent, an era of unparalleled stability: one has only to see what conflicts arose after his downfall when Wilhelm II ‘dropped the pilot’. For liberal critics, however, he was and remains, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, ‘a great and an evil man’. They see him as an aggressor, who used war as a conscious instrument of policy (and, what is worse, succeeded); as a cheat, who introduced democratic forms in order to preserve the undemocratic Prussian Establishment; as a bully, who bludgeoned his opponents with the blunt instruments of state power—the Catholics with the Kulturkampf, the Poles with the Colonization Commission, the Social Democrats with proscription. He would not have denied it. He believed, no doubt, that minor surgery and small doses of nasty medicine were well justified if major diseases were kept at bay. To quote a rare admirer of a leftist persuasion: ‘The history of modern Europe can be written in terms of three Titans: Napoleon, Bismarck, and Lenin. Of these three… Bismarck probably did the least harm.’

European Jewry has played such a prominent role in modern times that its story has been the subject of all sorts of myths and misunderstandings, both sympathetic and hostile. The main lines, however, are clear. After the break-up of Poland-Lithuania, the only large state to have provided a safe haven in preceding centuries, three closely related developments took place. First, the Jews began a new era of migration. Secondly, they received full civil rights in most European countries. And thirdly, they rebelled in ever increasing numbers against the traditional restrictions imposed on them by their own community.50

Jewish migration was mainly set in motion after 1773 by the Partitions of Poland. Jews from the western districts of Poland, in Posen or Danzig, found themselves to be citizens of Prussia, and free to travel without restriction to Berlin, Breslau, and other German cities. Jews from Galicia, who became Austrian citizens, began to move to other Habsburg provinces, especially to Bukovina, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia, and at a later stage to Vienna. Jews living in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania or in eastern Poland found themselves citizens of the Russian Empire, where they were required by law to inhabit the Pale of Settlement. (See Appendix III, p. 1311) But the law was often observed in the breach; and new, dynamic Jewish communities began to form in the great Russian cities, particularly in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. Jewish migrants who left their homes in the ultra-conservative religious communities of historic Poland were subject to several new trends: to the Haskalah or ‘Jewish Enlightenment’, to assimilation, and to secular Jewish politics.

The scale and tempo of Jewish migration markedly increased in the second half of the nineteenth century. To some extent, the outflow can be explained by mounting demographic pressure and by the regular processes of modernization and urbanization. The Jewish population of Europe multiplied from about two millions in 1800 to about nine millions in 1900. But persecution, and still more the fear of persecution, were also factors. Under Alexander III (r. 1881–94), the Tsarist government sought to enforce the laws of the Pale. In the ensuing stampede, the distinction between migrants and refugees was often lost. Hundreds of thousands of Jews left Russia for good, heading for Western Europe and the USA. [POGROM]

Jewish migration was greatly assisted by the growing circle of European states where Jews enjoyed full civic rights. Here, the lead had been taken by revolutionary France, where on 27 September 1791 the Convention granted citizenship to all Jews swearing an oath of loyalty. The initiative had been taken by the Convention’s President, the Abbé Gregoire (1750–1831), who regarded the equal treatment of Jews as part of his Christian duty. During the debate, the Marquis de Clermont-Tonnerre had made the famous distinction: ‘The Jews must be refused everything as a separate nation, and be granted everything as individuals.’ Henceforth, the legal emancipation of Jews became a standard article of European liberalism, and was gradually introduced almost everywhere except for the Russian Empire. (See Appendix III, p. 1295.)

Yet Jewish emancipation was a double-edged operation. It required a fundamental change in the conduct and the attitudes both of the host societies and of the Jews themselves. It demanded the dismantling not only of the constraints imposed on Jews from outside but also of the ‘internal ghetto’ in Jewish minds. Modern concern with the roots of anti-Semitism sometimes overlooks the severity of the Jews’ own laws of segregation. Observant Jews could not hold to the 613 rules of dress, diet, hygiene and worship if they tried to live outside their own closed community, and intermarriage was strictly forbidden. Since Judaic law taught that Jewishness was biologically inherited in the maternal line, Jewish women were jealously protected. A girl who dared to marry out could expect to be disowned by her family, and ritually pronounced dead. Extreme determination was needed to withstand such acute social pressures. It is not surprising that Jews who rejected their religion often turned to extreme alternatives, including atheism and communism.

The Haskalah, which first appeared in Berlin, was associated with the name of Moses Mendelsohn (1729–86) the prototype of Lessing’s ‘Nathan der Weise’. A natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment which had been at work in the Christian world for some time, it sought to modify the exclusively religious content of Jewish education, and to give Jews access to the mainstream of European culture. Its disciples, known as maskilim or ‘men of understanding’, found some adherents in the shtetlakh further east, especially in Galicia, where German-language Jewish secular schools began to open. A ban on the maskilim pronounced in 1816 by the Rabbi of Lemberg revealed the anxiety of Orthodox Jewish leaders.

In due course the limited educational ideals of the early Haskalah were extended. Some Jewish leaders began to advocate full-scale assimilation, whereby Jews were urged to participate in all branches of public life. This trend sought to confine Jewish practices to the private circles of family and synagogue, and to turn out Jews who were otherwise indistinguishable from their co-citizens. In so doing it broke many of the traditional taboos, and necessitated the foundation of Reformed Judaism, a new denomination which appeared in Germany in 1825. Reformed Judaism sought to reconcile the principles of Jewish religion with the demands of life in a modern society; its adherents were not required to observe the same degree of rules and restrictions. It became the norm for the majority of migrant Jews in Western Europe and the USA, but did not affect the great mass of traditional Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe.

POGROM

IN April 1881 the town of Yelizavetgrad in Ukraine was the scene of an organized pogrom. It was the opening outrage in a wave of attacks over the next three years against Jewish communities in Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw, and Nizhni Novgorod. Frightened by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the Russian authorities did little to deter reactionary societies and town mobs from turning the Jews into a public scapegoat. Pogrom was an old Russian word meaning ‘round-up’ or ‘lynching’. It was used to denote a coordinated assault by one ethnic group against another, and had been applied to many sorts of victims, including Armenians and Tartars. After 1881 it gained the special connotation of assaults on Jews.1

A second wave of pogroms occurred in 1903–6. Official propaganda made a point of associating Jews with revolutionary troublemakers. Forty-five people died in Kishinev (1903), 300 in Odessa (1905), and 80 in Bialystok. In all, over 800 casualties were sustained in incidents across the Empire.

The third wave, in 1917–21, far exceeded all previous horrors. An initial massacre at Novgorod Severski was perpetrated by the Red Army, which had invented the slogan ‘Beat the bourgeoisie and the Jews’. Ukrainian nationalist and Russian ‘White’ forces proved themselves still more merciless. Denikin’s army flaunted the slogan Biy zhyda, spassiy Rossiyu, ‘Thrash a Jew and save Russia’. 1,700 were killed at Proskirov (1919), 1,500 at Fastov (September 1919) and 4,000 at Tetiev. Total Jewish casualties exceeded 60,000. How far they were victims of civil war, or exclusively of antisemitism, is another matter.2

On the night of 22–3 November 1918, just after the Polish army had recaptured Lwow (Lemberg) from the Ukrainians (see p. 921), riots were sparked in several sections of the city, where the Polish soldiery claimed to have been fired on. In the ensuing bloodbath an estimated 374 persons lost their lives, 55 of them Jews. Three Allied missions disagreed about the causes. Could antisemitism have lain at the heart of a massacre where the great majority of the victims were Christians? None the less, the Lembergerpogrom was widely reported, and ‘Pogroms in Poland’ became one of the post-war headlines. The worst atrocities had been perpetrated elsewhere. But, not for the last time, Poland bore the brunt of the adverse publicity.3 [ŁYCZAKóW]

In Western Europe, and in some of the larger centres of the East, the combination of legal relaxations and of growing Jewish assimilationism created unprecedented opportunities. Jewish names appeared ever more frequentiy on the lists of financiers, lawyers, doctors, writers, scholars, artists, and politicians of the age. It was an era, in the words of one of its beneficiaries, Sigmund Freud, when ‘every industrious Jewish schoolboy carried a Cabinet Minister’s portfolio in his satchel’. Important landmarks were reached in Britain, for example, when in 1841 the City of London elected Baron Lionel de Rothschild as its (disqualified) Member of Parliament, and in 1868, when Disraeli emerged as Europe’s first Jewish Prime Minister.

To be exact, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), Earl of Beaconsfield, grandson of a Sephardi immigrant from Venice, would have counted himself in the category of ex-Jews. Having been baptized with his entire family into the Anglican communion, he had broken for ever with Judaism, which, his father said, ‘cuts off the Jews from the great family of mankind’. ‘Yes,’ he told his friends, ‘I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.’

Yet, as Disraeli’s career well illustrates, the success of assimilation posed a threat to the very existence of a Jewish community. If all Jews had followed his example, all would soon have become ex-Jews. As a result, as migration and assimilation accelerated, a serious reaction set in. The onset of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), first in cultural and later in political form, was part of the Europe-wide nationalist trend; but it was boosted by anxieties born of specifically Jewish experiences. Cultural Zionism appeared in the work of the so-called Hebrew Revival, which succeeded in transforming Hebrew from a ‘dead’, liturgical language into a vehicle for modern literary and political usage. Its pioneers included the Galician satirist Jozef Perl (1774–1839), the philologist I. B. Levinsohn (1788–1860) of Krzemieniec, the historian Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840) of Tarnopol, and the poet Jehudeh Loeb Gordon (1830–92) of Wilno, author of Hakitzah Ammi (Awake, my people). It was important in founding the brand of secular Jewish culture which was to be adopted a century later in Israel; but it enjoyed only marginal influence in Europe.

The opposing Yiddish Revival occurred at a slightly later date. In 1897, 90 per cent of Jews in the Pale and in Galicia still spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue. The Hasidim used it widely in written form, but only for religious purposes. At the turn of the century, Yiddish written in Hebrew characters was promoted by leaders opposed both to Zionism and to assimilationist education in Polish, Russian, or German. For 40 or 50 years it gave life to a thriving press, a lively collection of belles-lettres, and a secular school system supported in particular by the Bund. Its best known practitioners were I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) of Zamoác” and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–92), both of whom began their careers as Polish writers.

Political Zionism differed from other manifestations of European nationalism mainly in the fact that its sacred national soil lay outside Europe. Otherwise, it possessed all the characteristics of the other national movements of the day—a dedicated, visionary élite; a complex ideology based on nationalist interpretations of history and culture; a wide spectrum of political opinions; a mass clientele that still needed to be convinced; a full panoply of enemies; and, at the outset, no obvious chance of practical success. It began in the 1860s with the first attempts to send Jewish colonists to Palestine. One of the colonist associations, Hoveve Zion (Friends of Zion), obtained financial support in 1882 from Baron Edmund de Rothschild. Their first federal conference was held at Kattowitz (Katowice) in Silesia two years later; and a united World Zionist Organization (WZO) was created at the congress at Basle in Switzerland in 1897. The movement’s founding fathers consisted largely of independent-minded Polish rabbis such as Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874) of Thorn or Samuel Mohilever (1824–98) of Biafystok. But leadership of the WZO fell to lay activists, headed by the Budapest-born journalist Theodore Herzl (1860–1904) and later by figures such as David Wolfson (1856–1914), a Cologne banker, and Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), an academic chemist working in Manchester. Zionist ideology can be traced to Krochmal’s A Guide to the Perplexed (1851), but received its most persuasive texts in the tract Autoemancipation (1882) written by Dr Leo Pinsker, a physician from Odessa, and in Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896).

From the start, deep divisions separated the religious wing of Zionism, the Mizrachi or ‘spiritual centre’, from the dominant secular nationalists. Bitter differences also separated the socialist wing, based on the Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) party of David Gruen, alias Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), who was born at Plock on the Vistula, from the integral Jewish nationalists, who duly emerged in the Zionist Revisionist grouping of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940). The one thing which they shared was the conviction that life for Jews in Europe was becoming less and less tolerable. For the time being the future of Zionism turned on three great imponderables—the fluctuating levels of antisemitism, the radicalization of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, and negotiations for a suitable tract of land. No Zionist could yet feel confident of an early solution. Negotiations for the acquisition of a Zionist homeland produced few results. Herzl’s audiences with the Ottoman Sultan in 1901–2 did not bear fruit; and in 1903 the British offer of a land grant in the Kenyan highlands of East Africa split the WZO from top to bottom. This last experience strengthened the conviction that the Zionist dream could not be divorced from the historic ‘land of Israel’ in Palestine. No progress could be made on that front until the British conquest of Jerusalem in 1916, and the Balfour Declaration which followed.

Antisemitism in the sense of ‘Jew-hatred’ had been endemic throughout European history. Its causes have been classified as religious, economic, social, and cultural. But it is essentially a vicious psychological syndrome, where the stereotyping of Jews precedes accusations of conspiracy and treachery. It turned the Jewish community into the archetypal scapegoat for all sorts of ills. Its embers were always alight, bursting into flame and dying down in patterns that are not easily explained. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was fanned by the migrations which brought many Europeans into contact with Jews for the first time, by adverse social conditions, especially in the burgeoning cities, and by the rising tide of nationalism, which made many people less tolerant of ethnic and cultural diversity. It came to the surface in the Russian pogroms, in the Dreyfus Affair in France, and in the sinister invention of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.52

On the other hand, liberal opinion held that patience and education would eliminate the prevailing frictions. Well-integrated Jewish communities, such as that represented by the Anglo-Jewish Association in London, decried what they saw as the Zionists’ desire to exaggerate antisemitism for political ends. In 1911 the view was expressed by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, that ‘With the passing away of anti-Semitism, Jewish nationalism will disappear’.53 It could not have been more mistaken. For both antisemitism and Jewish nationalism were due to increase. To a degree, they fed off each other. What could not have been easily predicted was that antisemitism, which was widespread in those countries, such as Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, where Jews were most numerous, would assume its most virulent form in Germany and Austria, where Jews were relatively few.

Radical Jewish politics thrived particularly among the Jewish masses of the East. Zionism was only one of the competing trends. Revolutionary communism, which condemned all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, gained a large number of Jewish, or rather ex-Jewish, recruits. They formed an important segment of the phenomenon which one of their number defined as ‘the non-Jewish Jew’.54 The socialist Jewish Workers’ League or Bund, which aimed to improve conditions for Jews within the societies where they actually lived, opposed both Zionists and communists.

There remains the fascinating puzzle of why Europe’s Jews should have made such a formidable contribution to all aspects of European culture and achievement. This development of the period aroused both envy and admiration, and has generated a wide variety of speculation. Jewish prowess undoubtedly touched the raw nerves of the last-ditch defenders of Europe’s Christian civilization, and of those inadequates who felt threatened by the success of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and ‘aliens’. In retrospect, however, it can reasonably be connected to the psychological drives mobilized in families struggling to overcome both the rejection of the closed Jewish communities which they had left and the suspicions of the predominantly Christian society where they strove to gain acceptance. It was clearly related, too, to the Jewish passion for education, which was rooted in the study of the Torah, but which could be easily redirected to the early acquisition of foreign languages, of legal qualifications, or of scientific expertise. It must also be related to the expanding frontiers of knowledge and communications, where people with international contacts stood at an advantage over their homegrown confrères. For talented individuals, the right measure of insecurity could prove positively beneficial. [e=mc*] [WIENER WELT]

Most Jews, of course, did not either shine or thrive. Statistically, the greater part of European Jewry in the early twentieth century remained exactly what it was 100 years before—a scattered mass of poor, ultra-religious, rural communities huddled in the unchanging backwaters of the former Polish provinces. In many ways their outlook had less in common with their children who had migrated to the West than with the poor, ultra-religious, rural peasants among whom they had always lived. These downtrodden Ostjuden were the butt of much prejudice, not only from the locals but also from their fellow-Jews who had made the grade in Germany and Austria, and who had left the old Jewish world completely behind.55

European Imperialism in the late nineteenth century differed from earlier forms of the phenomenon in several important ways. It was part of a world-wide scramble for control of the last remaining countries suitable for exploitation. It was evident that the world’s resources were finite: states which set up a colonial empire quickly stood to gain a permanent advantage; those who delayed might be excluded from the ‘First Division’ forever. In the two decades starting in 1875, over one-quarter of the land surface of the globe was seized by half-a-dozen European powers. Colonies were viewed as an integral part of the advanced industrial economies. The supply of raw materials, cheap labour, and semi-finished products was planned to maximize the benefit to the ‘mother country’. There was a qualitative as well as quantitative leap in the intensity of exploitation. In the eyes of some, including the Marxists, the growing competition for colonial resources was bound to lead to international conflict. Lenin’s Imperialism as the Highest Form of Capitalism (1916) was a typical work of this genre.

Political and economic imperialism was attended by a conscious cultural mission to ‘europeanize’ the colonies in the image of the mother countries. In this, Christian missionaries formed an important element, though their relationship to the political authorities and to the commercial companies was rarely a direct one. Unlike their predecessors, such as the Spanish missionaries in the Americas, they often saw their task in broad terms, encompassing medicine, secular education, administrative reforms, and technological innovation.

The imperial powers sought to exploit the military potential of the colonies. The introduction of colonial regiments to Europe was as strange as the earlier arrival of European soldiers overseas.

As the map of the globe rapidly filled up, the European imperialists were obliged to focus their attention on a shrinking range of targets. The Americans had already emerged from the colonial experience. Most of Asia had been subdued at an earlier stage. By the 1880s only Africa, Indo-China, China, and the Pacific Islands remained.

Important distinctions must be made in the various types of colony established. Britain held the largest of empires with a minimum of military force. It continued to rely heavily on native princes and on local troops. There were fewer British bureaucrats in Delhi, ruling an Indian population of 400 millions, than Austrian bureaucrats in Prague. All the larger territories settled by British immigrants were given self-governing dominion status—Canada in 1867, Australia in 1901, New Zealand and Newfoundland in 1907, South Africa in 1910. France, in contrast, followed a policy of closer integration. The Algerian and Tunisian départements were joined to France’s metropolitan administration. French migration to North Africa, especially of Alsace-Lorrainers displaced by the Franco-Prussian War, was officially encouraged. This centralizing tradition was closer to Russia’s than to Britain’s. It caused immense problems when the time came for the links to be severed.

WIENER WELT

BETWEEN 1848 and 1914 Vienna’s population multiplied five times over, to c.2 million. Vienna’s Jewish population increased thirty-five times, from 5,000 to 175,000, rising from c.1 per cent (1848) to c.9 per cent (1914).

Jews came to Vienna to escape from traditional Jewish life in the East, particularly from Bohemia and Galicia, and to receive a modern, secular education. For these reasons the number of Jews in Vienna’s high schools, universities, and professions, was extremely high. In the peak years of 1881–6 they formed 33 per cent of the student body. In 1914 they accounted for 26 per cent of law students and 41 per cent of medical students. They reached 43 per cent (1910) in the teaching faculty. By 1936 62 per cent of Viennese lawyers were of Jewish origin, and 47 per cent of doctors.1

Numbers, however, were only part of the story. Thanks to their special circumstances, as rising professionals, Vienna’s Jews formed a bulwark of the bourgeoisie. They were prominent patrons and activists in educational, cultural, and artistic charities. As a predominantly immigrant minority, anxious to establish their equality, they provided the backbone of liberal politics and of the socialist movement. As people who, in different degrees, had rejected their own culture, they were specially disposed to everything modern and innovative in the cultural world. Their experiences were a preview of a later wave of Jewish migration to America. The Jews of Vienna were only one of the major forces in the European avant-garde around 1900. But it was its Jews who made Vienna what it was in the realm of modern culture.’

A selection of names might indicate the depth and variety of Jewish talent:

Music: Mahler, Schoenberg, Korngold, composers; Guido Adler, musicologist; S. Sulzer, liturgist; Ed Hanslick, critic; J. Joachim, violinist. Philosophy: T. Gomperz, L. Wittgenstein, and the Wiener Kreis; Frank, Hahn, Neurath. Law: J. Glaser, J. Unger, jurists; E. Steinbach and J. Ofner, social legislators; A. Loeffler, S. Türkel, criminologists. Medicine: Zuckerhandl, anatomist; Schenk, embryologist; Steinoch, physiologist; Gruber, hygiënist; Landsteiner, haema-tologist; von Basch, pathologist; Pick, pharmacologist; Benedikt, neuropathologist; Karplus, neurologist; Freud and Adler, psychotherapists; Kassowitz, paediatrician; Klein, ophthalmist; Mandl, surgery; Halban, gynaecologist; Neuburger, medical historian. Literature: A. Schnitzler, J. Roth, S. Zweig, R. Beer-Hofmann, M. Herzfeld, writers; M. Szeps, M. Benedikt, T. Herzl, F. Austerlitz, editors and journalists; K. Kraus, critic. Politics: N. Birnbaum, Jewish autonomist; T. Herzl, Zionist; Eugenie Schwartzbach, educational reformer; Josephine von Wertheimstein, liberal hostess.

The relationship of Vienna’s Jews to Judaism was not simple. A strong religious group supported the city’s synagogues under their forthright Chief Rabbi, Moritz Güdemann (1835–1918). There were also Sephardi and Hasidic congregations. Yet many people seen as Jews would have thought of themselves more as ‘ex-Jews’. Mahler was one of a large contingent who had converted to Catholicism. Freud was one of those who rejected all religion. ‘I gladly and proudly acknowledge my Jewishness.’ he wrote, ‘though my attitude to any religion is critically negative.’

One must also remember that the Jews did not form either the sole or the largest of Vienna’s immigrant groups. Vienna received more Slavs and Hungarians than Jews, many of them on the lowest rung of the social scale. Considering Austrian anti-semitism at the turn of the century, one cannot overlook the generalized xenophobia of which it was part. As shown by Vienna’s best known anti-semite, Adolf Hitler, the hatred of Jews was accompanied by, and often confused with, contempt for Slavs. The paranoia about ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ had deep Viennese roots.

Nor should one forget the Jews’ own prejudices. Westernized Jews were tempted to look down on Jews from the East: ‘The Frankfurt Jew despises the Berlin Jew; the Berlin Jews despise the Viennese Jew; and the Viennese Jew the Warsaw Jews.’ All tended to look down on the Jews from Galicia, ‘the lowest of all’.4

Even the Chief Rabbi could express dubious sentiments. Responding to a Catholic lady who asked him to read her pamphlet on anti-semitism, he replied in psychoanalytic vein, saying, among other things, that ‘Christianity finds itself in the unsatisfactory role of a hermaphrodite’:

The Christian kneels before the image of a Jew, wrings his hands before the image of a Jewess: his Apostles, Festivals and Psalms are Jewish. Most free themselves from [this contradiction] by Anti-semitism. Obliged to revere a Jew as God, they wreak vengeance on the rest of the Jews by treating them as devils…

You may say, dear Madam, that the Aryan people have emancipated the Jews. This is not the case. The Aryan people have emancipated themselves from the Middle Ages. This is one of the quiet and gradual influences which the Jewish Bible has exerted on mankind.5

The Chief Rabbi urged: ‘Judaism bids me love and respect everyone.’

The bitter-sweet climate of Vienna mixed gall with gaiety. The Emperor had to hold the balance. When an openly anti-Jewish politician, Karl Lueger, was elected Lord Mayor in 1897, Francis-Joseph refused to confirm. Relenting after two days’ reflection he accepted Lueger’s appointment, whilst awarding a medal to Chief Rabbi Güdemann.

Africa, ‘the Dark Continent’, retained many of its geographical secrets until a surprisingly late date. European colonies had been planted on the northern coast from ancient times. But the source of the Nile, which watered the land of the Pharaohs, was not properly identified until 1888. Missionary explorers such as David Livingstone could still be lost in the 1870s for years on end. Contrary to European belief, Africa was devoid neither of organized government nor of ordered religion; and a huge variety of languages and cultures belied the idea that all Africans were Stone Age savages. However, the ‘scramble for Africa’ took place on the assumption that the land and the peoples were there for the taking. Such was the discrepancy in military technology that even the venerable kingdoms of West Africa could offer no more resistance than the Aztecs and Incas. Abyssinia was the only native empire to maintain its independence, perhaps because it adhered to Coptic Christianity.

China, which possessed the most ancient civilization in the world, also possessed an Emperor whom the European governments recognized. Formal colonization of the African type was not permitted; so leases of territory, and of trading concessions, became the order of the day. Such indeed was the value of the Chinese Imperial Government to Europeans that in 1901 it became the object of a joint European protectorate. This humiliating episode provided the impetus which led ten years later to the creation of the National Republic of China and the beginnings of modern Chinese history, [BOXER]

China’s neighbour, Japan, was totally closed to outside influence until 1855; but so learned the essence of European ways that within a short time it was able to establish a colonial empire of its own, first in Korea and then in Chinese Manchuria. Japan’s comprehensive defeat of Russia in the war of 1904–5, both on land and at sea, provided one of the sensations of the age, undermining many of Europe’s most cherished delusions.

The Pacific Islands remained immaculate the longest. The final steps in the imperialist story saw Germany take Western Samoa (1898) and the USA take Hawaii (1900), whilst an Anglo-French condominium was established in the New Hebrides (1906).

If European imperialism, through ‘europeanization’, furnished one of the most powerful formative experiences of the modern world at large, it also subjected Europe itself to a wide range of stresses and influences. It divided Europe’s nations into those which had been provedimperiumgültig or ‘empire-worthy’ and those which had not, adding an extra tier onto the older category of ‘historic’ and ‘unhistoric’ nations. It gave a marked boost to the economies, and hence to the military potential, of those countries which had acquired empires, tipping the strategic balance in the favour of Western Europe. It greatly increased Europe’s familiarity both with non-European cultures and with exotic ‘colonial’ products. In some cases, such as Britain, it made people more familiar with Tibet or Bechuanaland than with their European neighbours. Yet it also strengthened Europe’s religious and racial prejudices, creating barriers and complexes that lasted as long as the empires themselves. Those prejudices were sufficiently extreme, for example, that in 1904 the city of Hamburg could exhibit a bevy of Samoan women in an enclosure of the local zoo.56

BOXER

ABOUT 2 p.m. on the afternoon of 14 August 1900, a multinational relief force fought its way into Peking after a ten-day march from Tientsin. It raised the siege of Peking’s stockaded foreign quarter, which had been cut off from the outside world for the previous eight weeks.

China in the twilight of the Dowager Empress was gripped by the Boxer Rebellion—a xenophobic movement which was bent on expelling all ‘foreign devils’ and all their works. The Boxers, whose English name derived from their Chinese emblem—’the fist of righteous harmony’—were enraged by everything European, from railways to Christianity. They believed that the foreign legations exercised a nefarious influence over their own government. In their attempts to expel them they had not hesitated to murder European missionaries and diplomats, to massacre Chinese Christians, and to burn down much of the old city. They were aided by the collusion of at least part of imperial officialdom, and were joined by regular Chinese troops.

In European history, the China expedition of 1900 was unique in that it briefly united all the powers in a common enterprise. British, French, Germans, Italians, Russians, Americans, and Japanese joined forces to suppress the common threat. The defence of the foreign quarter was undertaken by a body of marines of various nationalities under the British Minister, Sir Claude Macdonald. The relief column, 20,000 strong, was led by General Sir Alfred Gaselee, and consisted of Russians, Americans, Japanese, and a brigade of the Indian army. A permanent expeditionary force of 20,000 German troops under Field Marshal Count von Waldsee arrived at the end of September, only to be promptly withdrawn.

For the solidarity of the Europeans broke down as soon as the immediate emergency was saved. Germany and Italy insisted on reparation claims far in excess of their partners. Russia refused to participate in moves to prosecute Chinese responsible for the massacres. Indeed, the Russian troops who had taken control of Manchuria had perpetrated large-scale massacres of their own. Britain and Germany interpreted the concluding convention in widely differing ways. Not for the first or the last time, all the participants demonstrated that European unity, if it existed at all, was best described as a flash in the pan.1

As predicted by the pessimists, colonial conflicts began to occur at the turn of the century. In 1898 Britain and France almost came to blows after their expeditionary forces came face to face at Fashoda in Sudan. In 1899–1902 Britain’s war against the two Boer Republics in South Africa was complicated by Germany’s support for the Boers. In 1906 and again in 1911, French moves to gain control of Morocco fired active German protests. But on no occasion did colonial rivalry result in all-out war. It certainly added to the sum total of resentments; but it could usually be defused by the sort of ‘open-door policy’ for commercial interests as adopted both in China and in Morocco.

Naval power was the key to imperial success. Battleships were related to the control of world-wide commercial interests in a way that land armies could never be. (The classic study, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), was written by a US admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan.) The issue was brought very much to the fore in 1898. In that year, during the Spanish-American War, the US Navy stripped Spain of a string of its remaining colonies from Cuba to the Philippines. At the same time the German War Minister, von Tirpitz, took the strategic decision to launch a programme of shipbuilding and to challenge Britain’s fleet of super-battleships. The arms race was on.

Late Imperial Russia was a magnificent beast. Its obvious defects were offset by a seemingly inexhaustible store of power and energy. It had been identified long since, by Alexis de Tocqueville and others, as the only power capable in the future of challenging the USA. It possessed the largest consolidated state territory on the globe, the largest population in Europe, and the world’s largest army. It was Europe’s chief source of agricultural exports and, with untold mineral resources, the chief recipient of external investment. Culturally, Russia had recently shot forward as one of the most glamorous stars of the European firmament. The Russian language, whose earlier literary traditions were limited, had grown to sudden maturity. Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov could be counted among the giants of world literature. In the hands of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian music was unsurpassed. The Ballet Russe and the Stanislavsky Theatre School were leaders in their field. Socially, Russia still rested on a backward peasant society of ex-serfs. But the lot of the peasants was improving; and nowhere did the Peasant Question receive more serious attention. The agrarian reforms of P. A. Stolypin in 1906–11 gave the peasants mobility and the means to buy land. In European eyes, much of Russia’s backwardness was masked by the glittering court of the Tsar and by the stream of Russian aristocrats, merchants, artists, and professors who were thoroughly integrated into every aspect of European life. Politically, Russia was thought to be making serious liberal progress after 1905; the problem of the nationalities was largely submerged. Stability was required above all; internal crises had been repeatedly provoked by the side effects of external wars. What Russia needed to realize its enormous potential was an indefinite prolongation of the European peace, [CHERNOBYL]

Late imperial Germany was the country which felt the most cheated by the imperial experience. In many ways it was the model nineteenth-century state— modern, scientific, national, prosperous, and strong. But it has been likened to a magnificent machine with one loose cog—a machine that began to judder, to overheat, and, in its terminal explosions, to wreck the whole factory. Under Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918), whose withered arm was seen as a mark of his country’s flaws, it assumed an arrogant and a truculent air. Germany’s mighty industrialization had occurred later than that of Britain and France. Political unification had only come about in 1871. As a result, the German colonial empire had not assumed the proportions which Germany’s pride and prowess seemed to deserve. German ideas of Lebensraum, or ‘living space’, were first voiced in connection with her modest colonial swag. Objectively, Germany’s disadvantage was more imagined than real: her economic penetration of adjacent areas in Eastern Europe more than offset the lack of distant colonies. Yet her psychological resentments ran deep. The Kaiser and his court did not see that peace was the key to Germany’s eventual domination of Europe’s political and economic scene. [e=mc2]

Modernism. Europe’s political unease was matched by many of the cultural trends of the fin de siècle, which are often subsumed under the omnibus term of Modernism. Modernism involved a series of fundamental breaks with tradition that went far beyond the usual ebb and flow of intellectual fashion. As one critic was to write, ‘The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned’.57 It affected all the arts, and is often correlated by theorists with other fundamental developments of the period, notably with Freudian psychology, Einstein’s relativity, Frazer’s anthropology, even with anarchist politics. Whether or not it was a direct reflection of political and social tensions, it was certainly accompanied by a deep feeling of malaise, [ARICIA] [SOUND]

The brilliant and unstable German, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), Professor at Basle, articulated many of the era’s most shocking thoughts. He once described the philosopher as a ‘stick of dynamite’; and in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–4), From the Genealogy of Morality(1887), The Twilight of the Gods (1889), and The Will to Power (1901) he proceeded to explode received attitudes. He railed against Christianity, and democracy, and the accepted norms of morality. ‘Morality’, he explained, ‘is the herd-instinct in the individual.’ And ‘religion is a world of pure-fiction’. Modern mankind was despicable. In its place, ‘I teach you the Superman’. Ruling élites have always prevailed through violence. ‘The blond beast, hungry for plunder and victory, is not to be mistaken.’ Most daringly, he announced ‘Gott ist tot’ (God is dead), adding, ‘there may still be caves in which his shadow will still be shown.’ God’s death was supposed to be a liberating event.

CHERNOBYL

Chernobyl, see CZARNOBYL. A small town on the River Pripet in Ukraine, 20 versts from the confluence of the Dnieper, and 120 from Kiev. Inhabitants 6,483—Orthodox 2,160; Old Believers 566; Catholics 84; ‘Israelites’ 3,683. The castle of the estate, which is the property of Count Wtadyslaw Chodkiewicz, is charmingly set on a hill overlooking three rivers. The town lives from the river-trade, from fishing, and from growing onions.’

The Polish Geographical Dictionary, from which the above extract is taken, was published in 1880 with a misleading title designed to beat the tsarist censorship. It contains an entry on every town and village that had ever belonged to the Polish Commonwealth. Chernobyl was a typical town of those vast territories which had once been part of Poland, and which were later to become part of the Russian empire and of the Soviet Union. Its Jewish inhabitants would have called it their shtetl. The Polish landowners, the Jewish townsfolk, and the Ruthenian peasantry had lived there side by side for centuries.

Chernobyl first appeared in a charter of 1193, described as a hunting-lodge of the Ruthenian Prince Rostislavitch. Some time later it was taken into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where it became a crown village. The castle was built for defence against marauding Tartars. In 1566, three years before the Grand Duchy’s Ukrainian provinces were transferred to the Kingdom of Poland, Chernobyl was granted in perpetuity to a captain of the royal cavalry, Filon Kmita, who thereafter styled himself ‘Kmita Czamobylski’. In due course it passed by marriage to the Sapiehas, and in 1703 to the Chodkiewicz family. It was annexed by the Russian empire after the second partition of Poland in 1793.

Chernobyl had a very rich religious history. The Jewish community, which formed an absolute majority, would probably have been imported by Filon Kmita as agents and arendators (leaseholding managers) during the Polish campaign of colonization. Later on, they would have included Hasidic as well as Orthodox Jews. The Ruthenian peasantry of the district would have largely turned to the Greek Catholic (Uniate) religion after 1596, only to be forcibly converted to Russian Orthodoxy by the Tsars. The Dominican church and monastery was founded in 1626 by Lukasz Sapieha, at the height of the Counter-Reformation. In those days Chernobyl was clearly a haven of toleration. There was a group of Old Catholics, who opposed the decrees of the Council of Trent, just as the seventeenth century saw the arrival of a group of raskolniki or Old Believers from Russia. They all escaped the worst horrors of Khmyel’nytsky’s rising of 1648–54, and that of 1768–9, when one of the rebel leaders, Bondarenko, was caught and brutally executed by Chodkiewicz’s hussars. The Dominican monastery was sequestrated by the Tsarist authorities in 1832, the church of the Raskolniki in 1852.

Since 1880, Chernobyl has seen many changes of fortune. In 1915 it was occupied by the Germans, and in the ensuing civil war was fought over by Bolsheviks, Whites, and Ukrainians. In the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20 it was taken first by the Polish Army and then by the Red Cavalry. From 1921 it was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR, and experienced the mass killings of Stalin’s collectivization campaign and Terror-Famine. The Polish population was deported during the frontier clearances of 1936. The Jewish community was killed by the Nazis during the German occupation of 1941–4. Twenty years later, it was chosen as the site of one of the first Soviet nuclear power stations. From 1991, it was joined to the Republic of Ukraine, [HARVEST] [KONARMIA]

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia mentions none of these facts. A six-line entry talks only of a regional city of the Ukrainian SSR, which possesses an iron foundry, a cheese plant, a ship-repair yard, an artistic workshop, and a medical school.2

As it happens, the name of Chernobyl/Czarnobyl is taken from one of the Slavonic words for the wormwood plant (artemisia), which flourishes in the surrounding marshes. In the Bible, wormwood is used as a synonym for bitterness and hence for the wrath of God:

And there fell a great star from Heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood… . And many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.3

For anyone who takes their New Testament literally, the explosion at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986 was surely caused by the wrath of God.

Nietzsche seemed to be preaching that life had no meaning beyond the mastery of the strong. He was seen by his enemies as the prophet of wickedness, and of cultivated irrationality. He was to philosophy what Kierkegaard had been to theology. Both were pioneers of existentialism. ‘Christianity resolved to find that the world was bad and ugly,’ declared Nietzsche, ‘and has made it bad and ugly.’ [FOLLY]

e = mc2

ON 28 January 1896 Germany’s Interior Ministry approved an unusual application for renouncing state citizenship. The applicant, resident in Switzerland, was only 16 years old. He had failed the entrance exam to the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, and was studying at the cantonal school in Aarau. Born at Ulm and raised in Munich, the refugee student hated the regimentation of German schooling. He disliked his Catholic primary school, and fled his Gymnasium early. He felt very insecure after his family moved to Milan. Like many young ex-Jews, he was anti-religious, pacifist, and attracted by radical socialism. His one talent was with mathematics.

Finally admitted to the ETH, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) cut the lectures but conducted electrodynamic experiments of his own in the laboratories. He was friendly with Friedrich Adler, who later assassinated the Austrian Prime Minister in Vienna. When employed at the Swiss patent office in Berne in 1901–5, he continued to puzzle over the theoretical implications of work by Maxwell, Hertz, and Mach.

It is said that Einstein’s hunch about the relativity of time and space was stimulated by daily tram-rides up the Kramgasse in Berne, where he imagined that he was travelling towards the clock-tower at the speed of light. Presuming that the light waves reflecting his image were moving at the same speed, he wondered for years whether or not he could have seen himself in the driver’s mirror. At all events, in the principle of ‘the relativity of simultaneity’, he came to realize that Nature knows no instantaneous interactions. Whilst the speed of light is absolute, c.186,300 miles per second, intervals of time and space are relative. In 1905, in the Annalen der Physik, he published an article entitled ‘Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?’. It contained the equation which would overturn classical physics and would lay the foundations for the nuclear age. Where e = energy, m = mass, and c = the speed of light, e = mc2.

In due course, in addition to this Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein produced the General Theory of Relativity (1916), replacing Newton’s Laws of Gravitation. It made a major contribution to quantum physics. He moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1914, receiving a Nobel Prize in 1921.

In the days before his theories were shown to be correct, Einstein worried constantly. ‘If Relativity proves right,’ he once said, ‘the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss, and the French will call me a great scientist. If Relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.’

In 1933, when Einstein sought refuge in Paris from the Nazis, the College de France refused him employment because of his German citizenship, thereby obliging him to leave for the USA. Europe’s most brilliant mind was lost to Europe.