XI

TENEBRAE

Europe in Eclipse, 1914–1945

THERE are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together. The two World Wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45, in particular, were destructive beyond measure; and they spread right across the globe. But their main focus lay unquestionably in Europe. What is more, in the course of those two war-bloodied generations, the two most populous countries of Europe fell into the hands of murderous political regimes whose internal hatreds killed even more tens of millions than their wars did. A rare voice of conscience said early on that something vile was happening:

Why is this age worse than earlier ages? In a stupor of grief and dread have we not fingered the foulest wounds and left them unhealed by our hands? 

In the west, the fading light still glows and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun, but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses, and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.1

Future historians, therefore, must surely look back on the three decades between August 1914 and May 1945 as the era when Europe took leave of its senses. The totalitarian horrors of communism and fascism, when added to the horrors of total war, created an unequalled sum of death, misery, and degradation. When choosing the symbols which might best represent the human experience of those years, one can hardly choose anything other than the agents of twentieth-century death: the tank, the bomber, and the gas canister: the trenches, the tombs of unknown soldiers, the death camps, and the mass graves.

Consideration of these horrors, which overshadow all the life-giving achievements of the era, prompts a number of general remarks. In the course of the horrors, Europeans threw away their position of world leadership: Europe was eclipsed through European folly. In 1914 Europe’s power and prestige were unrivalled: Europeans led the field in almost any sphere one cared to mention—science, culture, economics, fashion. Through their colonial empires and trading companies, European powers dominated the globe. By 1945 almost all had been lost: the Europeans had fought each other to the point of utter exhaustion. European political power was greatly diminished; Europe’s military and economic power was overtaken; European colonial power was no longer sustainable. European culture lost its confidence; European prestige, and moral standing, all but evaporated. With one notable exception, every single European state that entered the fray in 1914 was destined to suffer military defeat and political annihilation by 1945. The one country to avoid total disaster was only able to survive by surrendering its political and financial independence. When the wartime dust finally settled, the European ruins were controlled by two extra-European powers, the USA and the USSR, neither of which had even been present at the start.

Map 24. Europe during the Great War, 1914–1918

On the moral front, one has to note the extreme contrast between the material advancement of European civilization and the terrible regression in political and intellectual values. Militarism, fascism, and communism found their adherents not only in the manipulated masses of the most afflicted nations but amongst Europe’s most educated élites and in its most democratic countries. Such was the distortion of worthy ideals that there was no shortage of intelligent men and women who felt compelled to fight ‘the War to end War’, to join the fascists’ genocidal crusade for rescuing ‘European civilization’, or to excuse the communists’ pursuit of peace and progress through mass murder. When the moment of truth arrived in 1941, Allied leaders fighting for freedom and democracy did not hesitate to enlist one criminal in order to defeat another.

On the historiographical front, one has to take account of the fact that the European horrors were committed within the span of living memory, and that subjective, political, and partisan opinions continue to dominate popular accounts. The history of all great conflicts always tends to be rewritten by the victors, who maximize the crimes and follies of the vanquished whilst minimizing their own. Such, after all, is human nature. In both World Wars, it so happened that victory was achieved by similar coalitions headed by the ‘Western powers’ and by their strategic ally in the East; and it is their version of the period which continues to dominate post-war education, media, and history books. This ‘Allied version’ was first given official credence after 1918, when representatives of the defeated nations were obliged to confess to their own exclusive war guilt. It was cemented after 1945, when an Allied tribunal applied itself exclusively to the war crimes of the enemy. Any public attempt to judge the Allied Powers by the same means or standards was politically impossible. Official war museums from Lambeth to Moscow and Washington continued to present a one-sided view of the evils and the heroism. The captured archives of the losers were fully accessible in all their gruesome detail; key archives on the winning side remained firmly closed. Fifty years on, it was still too early for a fair and objective balance sheet to be drawn up.

On the interpretational front, many years passed before some historians began to ponder the unity of the ‘European civil war’. People who lived through the two World Wars were often impressed by the discontinuities. The ‘soldiers’ war’ of 1914–18 was thought to be very different from the ‘people’s war’ of 1939–45. Anyone involved in the feud between communism and fascism was encouraged to think of the two movements as simple opposites. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is increasingly clear that the successive conflicts formed part of one dynamic process: the two World Wars were separate acts of the same drama. Above all, the main contestants of the Second World War were created by the unfinished business of the First. By entering into military conflict in 1914, the European states unleashed the mayhem from which were born not one but two revolutionary movements—one of which was crushed in 1945, the other left to crumble in the dramatic events of 1989–91 (see Chapter XII).

Faced by German expansionism, and then by the twin hydras of communism and fascism, the democratic Western Powers could only survive by calling in the USA—first in 1917–18 and then in 1941–5. After 1945 they relied very largely on American muscle to withstand the challenge of a bloated Soviet empire. Only in the 1990s, with Germany reunited and the Soviet empire in a state of collapse, could the people of Europe resume the natural course of their development so rudely interrupted in that beautiful summer of 1914.

In this scenario, therefore, the years between 1914 and 1945 appear as the time of Europe’s troubles, which filled the space between the long peace of the late nineteenth century and the still longer peace of the ‘Cold War’. They may be likened to the slipping of a continental plate, and to the resultant season of earthquakes. They encompass the initial military quakes of 1914–18, the collapse of four empires, the outbreak of communist revolution in Russia, the emergence of a dozen new sovereign states, the armed truce of the inter-war decades, the fascist take-overs in Italy, Germany, and Spain, and then the second, general military conflagration of 1939–45.

At the heart of the troubles lay Germany, Europe’s newest, most dynamic, and most disgruntled nation-state. The fault-line of the earthquake zone ran along Germany’s eastern border. Germany harboured few designs against Western Europe. But in Eastern Europe she faced both the temptation of relatively weak and poor neighbours and, in Russia, the challenge of the only European country large enough to contest German military strength. Hence, from the start, the major duel over Europe’s future lay between Germany and Russia. It was a duel which in the hands of totalitarian revolutionaries was destined to become a fight to the death. From the start, the Western democracies were cast in the role of spoilers, essentially uninterested in the fate of east Europeans, but determined to stop the growth of any overweening Continental power which might eventually turn against the West. This constellation of forces governed European politics for the rest of the twentieth century. It underlay the fighting of the two World Wars and, but for the invention of nuclear weapons and the involvement of the Americans, would probably have produced a third.

In the event, the era of open and general conflict was somehow confined to those 30 blood-soaked years. It began and ended, quite appropriately, in the German capital, Berlin. It began on 1 August 1914, in the imperial Chancellery, with the Kaiser’s declaration of war on Russia. It ended on 8 May 1945, in the Soviet field HQ at Berlin-Karlshorst, where a third act of capitulation finally concluded Germany’s acts of unconditional surrender.

The First World War in Europe, 1914–1921

The Great War, which began in August 1914, was widely expected to last for three or four months. It was going to be over by Christmas. Conventional wisdom held that modern warfare would be more intense than in the past, but more decisive. Whichever side could gain the upper hand in the early stages would have the means for a swift victory. In the event, the fighting lasted not for four months but for more than four years. Even then it was not decisive: the ‘Great Triangle’ of military-political power blocs was not resolved until 1945, and in some respects not until 1991. (See Appendix III, p. 1312.)

In their initial configuration, the geopolitical structures of the Great Triangle were somewhat tentative. The Western Allies (Britain and France) were severely handicapped by the fact that France alone possessed a large standing army. They had to pass two precarious years before their full potential could be realized. They held on, first, by tempting Italy to join the Allied camp in May 1915; secondly, by the steady military build-up in Britain and the British Empire; and thirdly, by the entry of the USA in April 1917. Britain’s Asian associate, Japan, which declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, did not play any part in the European conflict. The Allies’ main partner, imperial Russia, was thought to be handicapped by clumsy mobilization procedures, by a vast network of internal communication, by doubts over its industrial capacity, and by divided counsels over strategic aims. Yet Russia mounted an early offensive. She eventually collapsed, not through lack of shells or soldiers, but through political and moral decay.2

The Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) could benefit from all the advantages of consolidated policy and interior lines of communication. They lost one associate through Italy’s desertion, but gained an unexpectedly resilient ally in the Ottoman Empire, which was obliged to take sides in November 1914 from fear of Russia. In 1914 they were terrified by the prospect of a war on two fronts. They need not have worried: they were to prove themselves capable of sustaining major campaigns in eight theatres of operations—on the Western Front, in Belgium and France; on the Eastern Front, against Russia; in the Balkans; in the Levant; in the Caucasus; in Italy; in the colonies; and at sea.

The war aims of the combatants had not been articulated by the outbreak. The Central Powers started the war with defensive and deterrent purposes in mind. They aimed to prevent Austria being undermined, to break the encirclement of Germany, as they saw it, and to forestall French and Russian claims. Yet they were quick to formulate a catalogue of demands. They planned to transfer the eastern provinces of Belgium (Liège and Antwerp) to Germany, and parts of Serbia and Romania to Austria; to increase the German colonial collection, in order to undermine the British and the Russian Empires; and to establish political and economic hegemony over ‘Mitteleuropa’, including Poland. Only the Ottomans aimed merely to survive.

The Entente Powers took up arms because they were attacked, hence their incurable sense of moral superiority. Yet Serbia hoped to drive the Austrians from Bosnia, France aimed to recover Alsace-Lorraine, Britain was soon looking for colonial and financial compensation, and Russia harboured extensive plans for aggrandizement. In September 1914 the Russian General Staff published a ‘Map of the Future Europe’ which was remarkably similar to the one which was realized in 1945.3 In addition Russia extracted a secret promise from its allies for post-war control of the Straits. Italy aimed to gain the irredenta.

Several countries contrived to stay neutral. Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the three Scandinavian countries maintained their neutrality throughout, and prospered from it. Bulgaria was pulled into the war in September 1915, Romania in August 1916, Greece in June 1917. China, despite Japan’s seizure of the Chinese enclaves leased to Germany, attacked by Japan, entered the war on the Allied side in 1917. Others were less reluctant to fight. Several hundred members of Piłsudski’s Polish Legion opened up the Eastern Front by marching across the Russian frontier near Cracow on 6 August 1914. They were carrying cavalry saddles in the hope of finding mounts. They aimed to demonstrate that Poland was still alive after a century and more of Partition. They wisely retreated when Cossacks approached, and were incorporated into the Austrian army.

Military strategy and tactics, as always, were based on the lessons of recent wars. The Franco-Prussian War and the Boer War had proved the vulnerability of infantry attack. The solution was thought to lie in three areas—in the use of massed artillery as the primary offensive arm against battlefield positions, in the use of railways for the rapid deployment of attacking forces, and in the use of cavalry for encirclement and pursuit. On the Eastern Front these assumptions did not prove ineffective. But in the West, where fortified trench-lines came into being, it took thousands of abortive operations before the superiority of the concrete blockhouse over the high-explosive shell was even suspected. Despite the manifest advantages of defence over attack, the generals were slow to revise their assumptions. Aircraft, whose engines were weak and unreliable, could only be used for reconnaissance, artillery guidance, and aerial combat. In the majority of locations, where there were few metalled roads, horsepower remained indispensable. At sea, submarine torpedoes proved more lethal than the 15-inch guns of the Dreadnoughts.

On the Western Front, the German army very nearly pulled off a shock assault before the war of attrition set in. Whilst the central German thrust plunged into the heart of Champagne, the German right wing rode off on a huge wheeling arc through northern France. Aiming to repeat the triumph of 1870, they moved on Paris from three directions. They were briefly held by the Belgians at Liège, and by the British Expeditionary Force at Ypres. [LANGEMARCK] The central German forces were delayed by the cellars of Épernay. But by the first week of September 1914 the French capital was facing disaster. At the very last moment, General Joffre impressed 600 Renault taxis to ferry all available French reserves to the line of the Marne. The German centre had just too little momentum; the German right was just too far away. So the line fell back. In October and November the Front stabilized along the whole length of a double trench-line running from Switzerland to the Channel (see Map 24).

For the next three years the line hardly moved. Both sides expended men and materials in titanic proportions to straighten out the occasional salient, or to achieve a breakthrough. But every ‘push’ was to no avail. Never had European blood been spilled in such profligate quantities. In the three battles of Ypres, at Vimy Ridge, on the Somme, and, above all, at Verdun the loss of life could on occasion be counted in tens of thousands per hour or hundreds per square yard. Here was a mindless tragedy which no one had foreseen, and which no one knew how to stop. The planned German retreat to prepared defensive positions between Arras and Soissons in February 1917 was a rare act of rationality. Inevitably, the public finger was pointed at the impotent generals. Of the British army, it was said, ‘They were lions led by donkeys.’ [DOUAUMONT]

On the Eastern Front, which ran through the heart of Poland, the Central Powers enjoyed much greater success and the hell of unbroken trench warfare was avoided. In August 1914 two Russian army groups crossed the frontier, one entering East Prussia in the north, the other penetrating deep into Galicia in the south. Seeing that the ‘Russian steamroller’ was meant to move slowly, this was a considerable achievement. But then fortunes changed: in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September, Hindenberg and Ludendorff totally destroyed Russia’s northern armies, thereby avenging the German failure on the Marne. Russia’s southern group was halted on the outskirts of Cracow. In the winter of 1914–15 indecisive battles were fought both on the German/Russian frontier near Łódź and on the Hungarian border in the Carpathians. But then in May 1915, at Gorlice in Galicia, German troops managed to do what proved impossible in the West: they broke through enemy lines, and fanned out into the plain beyond. In August they occupied Warsaw, and retook Lvov. In the autumn they entered Lithuania, and were poised to cross the mountains into Romania, [PETROGRAD]

With the Russian Empire facing invasion along a 1,000-mile front, the Tsar took personal command of his forces in the field. In January 1916, Brusilov’s counter-offensive drove back deep into Galicia, laying an 18-month siege to the fortress of Przemyśl. But the toll was tremendous; and there it ended. In Romania, the Germans took Bucharest in December. In 1917 the main German and Austrian advance restarted, moving steadily into the Baltic provinces, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. With internal revolution compounding Russia’s military failure, it was a matter of fine judgement whether the Central Powers could destroy the Empire of the Tsars before it collapsed of its own accord. It is often said that the Russian army suffered excessive casualties; in reality the Russians lost a lower percentage of their population than other combatants. The key statistics refer to prisoners of war. For every 100 tsarist soldiers who fell in battle, 300 surrendered. The comparable figure for the British army was 20, for the French 24, for the Germans 26. The soldiers of the Tsar had little will to fight.4

LANGEMARCK

LANGEMARCK is a small village five miles to the north of Ypres in Belgium. Like all the villages in that district, it possesses a war cemetery filled with the dead from successive Anglo-German battles over the Ypres salient in 1914–17. In outward appearance it is indistinguishable from scores of others. Indeed, the long-overgrown grave of 25,000 unidentified German soldiers bears no comparison to the imposing monument at the nearby Menin Gate, where the names of 40,000 unidentified British casualties are inscribed. Yet, in the opinion of a leading military historian, ‘It is, in a real sense, the birthplace of the Second World War.’ For, unbeknown to many modern visitors, Langemarck shelters the last resting-place of the comrades of a young Austrian volunteer whom Providence spared for still greater deeds.

Hitler, an unsuccessful art student and draft-dodger from the Austrian army, had listened with rapture in a Munich crowd to the declaration of war on 1 August 1914, and had immediately signed up for service in the German Army. He was assigned to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry (List) Regiment, and arrived on the Western Front in October, just in time for the first Battle of Ypres. In this way he became a witness to the terrible Kindermord, the ‘Massacre of Innocents’, where tens of thousands of half-trained German recruits, mainly eager university students, were cut to pieces by the steady firepower of professional British soldiers. It was the first great slaughter of Germans, amply revenged, no doubt, at Passchendaele and on the Somme. Hitler never forgot it.

Hitler’s ‘supreme experience’ in the trenches, where for four years he lived the charmed life of a courageous Meldegänger or ‘regimental runner’, undoubtedly fired the pathological drive of his subsequent career. Tormented by the fate of his dead and mutilated comrades, and by a huge German sacrifice that led only to defeat, he set out to avenge their deaths; to humiliate Germany’s conquerors in their turn; and to make Germans feel once again proud, superior, hateful, ruthless. His vow of vengeance struck a common chord in millions of wounded German hearts.

Langemarck, therefore, symbolizes the essential psychological link between the First World War and the Second, between the slaughter of Ypres and Verdun, and that of the London Blitz, Warsaw, and Stalingrad.

DOUAUMONT

ON 25 February 1916, on the fourth day of the German offensive against Verdun, the troops of the Crown Prince seized the stone and concrete fortress of Douaumont. The fort lay 6 km from their starting-point on the circumference of the salient, and half-way to the centre of the city. For the next eighteen months it would be the focal point of a battle which in duration and intensity has no equal. Flanked to the west by the Fort de Vaux, it commanded the right bank of the Meuse and looked across to the hills of the left bank, especially to Côte 304 and to Le Mort-Homme. For the German attackers, it formed the pivot of a giant pincer operation fed by fourteen railway lines along a 130-mile arc. For the French defenders, it formed the terminus of the voie sacrée, the narrow corridor which brought reinforcements through the evacuated city from Bar-le-Duc. Shelled night and day, mined from below, and constantly rocked by explosions, its ruins and tunnels were the scene of hand-to-hand combat and of whole companies buried alive. The moonscape was steadily churned into a cold stew of mud, masonry, and human remains. It was regained by the French on 24 October, contested by the Germans until August 1917, but not definitively relieved until the American offensive of St Michel in September 1918. Pétain’s words proved true. ‘Courage,’ he had promised; ‘On les aura.’

Verdun claimed some 800,000 lives—forty times the population of the city. It is for the French memory what the Somme and Ypres were for the British and Caporetto for the Italians, or what Stalingrad would be for the Russians. For the Germans, it implied what all their military failures would do—titanic, futile sacrifices.

On the seventieth anniversary of the battle in 1986, the French President and the German Chancellor participated at Verdun in a ceremony of reconciliation. Their hands were linked in a gesture which few other leaders of Europe’s warring nations have been able to achieve.

By then, much of the devastated landscape had been reclaimed by vegetation. But the vast ossuary at Douaumont, with its tower of four crosses, guards the remains of 130,000 unidentified soldiers of both armies who rest in the common granite tombs. A memorial centre, equipped with exhibits, guidebooks, and video shows, attempts to communicate what a veteran once called the ‘incommunicable’. On the site of the disappeared village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, a Madonna adorns the façade of a memorial chapel. She is Notre Dame de I’Europe.1

PETROGRAD

IN 1914 the name of Russia’s capital, Sankt Petersburg, was changed to I the more patriotic-sounding Petrograd. As with the British royal family of Hanover-Saxe-Coburg, which was changed to Windsor, a name of German origin was thought inappropriate during the war against Germany. But Petrograd was to last for only one decade before it gave way in its turn to Leningrad, [GOTHA]

St Petersburg had grown into one of Europe’s most magnificent cities. In addition to the classical palaces and government buildings, the banks of the Neva housed a major port and commercial centre, a brilliant cultural community, an expanding industrial district, and a huge garrison. The spirit of the community of two million citizens was captured in the statue of the Bronze Horseman presented to the city by Catherine the Great in honour of her predecessor, Peter.

At the time of the first name-change, the city’s future dedicatee was exiled in Switzerland with no hope of an early return. He was no pacifist; and his statement on The Tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy, where he called for an ‘international civil war’ to exploit the conflict, envisaged the defeat of Tsardom. All his leading supporters in Russia were arrested on suspicion of treason. At their trial they were defended by a liberal lawyer, Alexander Kerensky, who must later have rued his choice of clients.1

Under Soviet rule, Petrograd/Leningrad was to be subjected to the most extreme of experiences. Spurned by the Bolsheviks, who had moved the capital to Moscow, it was repeatedly seen by Stalin as the conspiratorial nest of a non-existent opposition; it lost a significant part of its population first in the Revolution and again in the Purges. In 1941–4, it endured a 1,000-day siege on the edge of the German-Soviet frontline, and in conditions of indescribable cold, hunger, and starvation lost up to a million inhabitants.2 Although state officials and the military secured the means to fight on for three years, the Soviet authorities either could not or would not evacuate or supply the civilian population. The result was a daily mix of Coventry and the Warsaw Ghetto. Descriptions of carousing in the Party House, alongside corpses in the streets and scientific workers dead at their laboratory benches, only add to the tally of inhumanity.3

After each ordeal Leningrad was replenished by a fresh influx of immigrants. The ‘Hero City’ became a symbol of the human capacity for regeneration. Yet in 1991, on the eve of the Soviet collapse, the question of its name arose for the third time. To the horror of Communist veterans, the citizens’ referendum decided neither for Leningrad nor for Petrograd but for Sankt Petersburg.

Meanwhile, in the Balkan theatre, superior Austrian forces steadily gained the upper hand. They occupied Belgrade (October 1915), Montenegro, and Albania (1916). A heroic Serbian retreat across the mountains to the Dalmatian coast provided the stuff of legend. In 1915 the Serbs were corralled into Macedonia, where Bulgaria joined the Austrian attack. But the Macedonian Front held, partly through French support via Thessalonika. Merciless Western pressure on Greece forced the collapse of the government, and ended Greek neutrality. [FLORA]

In the Mediterranean, the Western Powers enjoyed naval supremacy, and several attempts were made to compensate for the stalemate in France. On 25 April 1915 a British force landed at Gallipoli on the Dardanelles. The aim was to seize Constantinople, to establish direct contact with Russia, and, in the words of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to attack ‘the soft underbelly’ of the Central Powers. The plan was brilliantly conceived, but ended in tragedy. The movements of the expeditionary force, which contained the heroic Anzac Division from Australia and New Zealand, had been betrayed in advance. The Turks were waiting on the cliff-tops, commanded by an energetic young officer called Kemal Pasha. After that, the Western Powers confined their activities to the Ottoman periphery. A young English visionary, T. E. Lawrence, single-handedly led the tribes of the Arabian peninsula into revolt. The French established themselves in Lebanon. In 1916 General Allenby advanced into Palestine from the British base in Egypt, riding into Jerusalem on Christmas Day. The British also entered Mesopotamia. They captured Baghdad after a humiliating reverse in March 1917, and pressed on into Persia. Both Arabs and Zionist Jews took heart from the British victories. On 2 November 1917 the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, was persuaded to issue a declaration accepting the principle of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. In the Caucasus, Russians and Ottomans struggled back and forth over the mountainous Armenian border region. The fighting provided the backdrop to the Ottoman Government’s reprisals against its Armenian subjects, [GENOCIDE]

In Italy, battle was joined with the Austrians in difficult alpine terrain on the edge of the lands which the Italians were claiming as their own. In eleven colossal battles on the River Isonzo, the fighting was no less sacrificial than in the West. Half a million men died at Caporetto (September-December 1917). Italy’s casualties were on the same scale as Britain’s. Her magnificent recovery from the brink of disaster greatly weakened the Central powers. The Austrian army was broken in Italy. The Italian sacrifice, largely discounted by her allies, left a deep sense of wounded pride.

FLORA

LATE in August 1914, the 35-year-old daughter of a Suffolk clergyman, Flora Sandes, arrived with seven companions in the Serbian town of Kragujevac. Some fifty miles from Belgrade, Kragujevac was the main base for Serbian forces fighting for their capital city against the Austro-Hungarian offensive. Flora’s group preceded several British, French, Russian, and American medical teams appointed by the Serbian Relief Fund. In mid-April 1915 they were joined by Mrs Mabel St Clair Stobart, a formidable dame who had raised a Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps during the recent Balkan wars. She now came up from Salonica, in command of a 70-strong field hospital staffed entirely by women, except for her husband, John Greenhaigh, their treasurer. She collected her casualties with a special ‘flying column’, which she led on horseback. Over 600 British female volunteers were active in Serbia.

Of all the women’s wartime organizations, the British women’s medical services were undoubtedly among the most professional. Known as the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), after their founder, an Edinburgh surgeon called Elsie Inglis, they set out to prove that women could cope with the most stressful and responsible of enterprises. In due course they sent fourteen fully equipped hospitals to all the Allied fronts except those controlled by the British army. Mrs St Clair Stobart had worked in Cherbourg and in Antwerp before sailing for Serbia. Dr Inglis died in November 1917 after a year in Russia.1 Female surgeons were still a novelty in those years, especially in military hospitals. A French journalist, who once asked to watch Dr Inglis at work, emerged looking green and yelling: ‘C’est vrai, elle coupe’ (It’s true, she’s cutting!)

In October 1915, when the Austrians and Bulgarians broke through, the Serbian army could escape only by a winter trek over the mountains to the Albanian coast. That terrible march through mud, snow, hunger, frostbite, typhus, and gangrene cost 40,000 lives. The Stobart Unit marched with them.

Of all the volunteers, Flora Sandes (1879–1961) went furthest in her career of gender inversion. She joined the Serbian infantry, survived the trek to Albania, fought in combat, was severely wounded, and was decorated for bravery. She ended the war with an officer’s commission. She later married a Russian émigré, settled in Belgrade, defied the Gestapo, and only returned to England in widowhood.3 She was following a well-worn East European tradition, observable from Russia and Poland to Albania, where women in hard times stand in for their decimated menfolk.

One source for the British women’s determination lay in the attitudes of their own government. When Elsie Inglis offered the services of the SWH to the War Office in August 1914, she was told: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.’

In the colonies, every outpost of the combatant powers felt bound to uphold the cause of the mother country. There was a remote campaign between the French and the German Cameroons. The British seized German East Africa (Tanganyika) and German South-West Africa. In this unequal contest the weaker German party generally proved the more resourceful. The German force in East Africa under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870–1964) survived intact until the Armistice.

At sea, the war ought in theory to have produced a series of almighty contests between the bristling fleets of battleships. In practice, the French fleet betook itself to the Mediterranean, whilst the German fleet, after one inconclusive engagement with the Royal Navy off Jutland (31 May 1916), betook itself to port. The British, who could nominally claim command of the seas, could not cope with German submarines operating from Kiel and Bremerhaven which sank over 12 million tons of Allied shipping. The British blockade, which practised unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Sea, contributed to serious food shortages in Germany. But Britain also faced acute deprivation. The sinking of the civilian liner Lusitania by submarine U20 on 7 May 1915, and Germany’s subsequent extension of unrestricted submarine warfare into the Atlantic (1917), were instrumental in ending American neutrality.

GENOCIDE

ON 27 May 1915, the Ottoman Government decreed that the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia should be forcibly deported. The Armenians, who were Christians, were suspected of sympathizing with the Russian enemy on the Caucasian Front, and of planning a united Armenia under Russian protection. Some two to three million people were affected. Though accounts differ, one-third of them are thought to have been massacred; one-third to have perished during deportation; and one-third to have survived. The episode is often taken to be the first modern instance of mass genocide. At the Treaty of Sévres (1920), the Allied Powers recognized united Armenia as a sovereign republic. In practice, they allowed the country to be partitioned between Soviet Russia and Turkey.1

Adolf Hitler was well aware of the Armenian precedent. When he briefed his generals at Obersalzburg on the eve of the invasion of Poland, he revealed his plans for the Polish nation:

Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees him only as a great state-builder… I have sent my Death’s Head units to the East with the order to kill without mercy men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the lebensraum that we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?2

The term ‘genocide’, however, was not used before 1944, when it was coined by a Polish lawyer of Jewish origin, Rafał Lemkin (1901–59), who was working in the USA. Lemkin’s campaign to draw practical conclusions from the fate of Poland and of Poland’s Jews was crowned in 1948 by the United Nation’s ‘Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide’.3 Unfortunately, as the wars in ex-Yugoslavia have shown, the Convention in itself can neither prevent nor punish genocide.

In the third year of war the strains began to be reflected in politics. In Dublin, the Irish Easter Rising (1916) had to be suppressed by force. In London, regular party government was overturned by the formation of Lloyd George’s coalition War Cabinet (December 1916). At that same time, in Austria-Hungary the death of Francis-Joseph struck a note of deep foreboding. The first wartime meeting of the Reichsrat (May 1917) broke up amidst Czech demands for autonomy and rumours of a separate peace. In France, an epidemic of mutiny provoked a prolonged crisis that was eventually brought under control by the combined efforts of the new commander, Marshal Pétain, and the new Premier, Georges Clemenceau. In Germany the Kaiser’s Easter message in 1917 proposed democratic reforms; and in July all parties of the Reichstag who had voted for war credits in 1914 now voted for a peace of reconciliation. On the Eastern Front, after the failure of moves for a separate peace with Russia, the Central Powers restored a puppet Kingdom of Poland in Warsaw. The kingdom had no king, and a regency council with no regent. It had no connection with the Polish provinces in Prussia, in Austria, or east of the Bug. Its formation was soon followed by the dissolution of Piłeudski’s Polish Legions, who refused to swear allegiance to the German Kaiser. In Russia, there was revolution. In the USA, there was war fever, [COWARD] [LILI]

Austria’s young Friedenskaiser (Peace Emperor) personally led one of several sets of secret negotiations with the Allied Powers. In the spring of 1917, in Switzerland, he twice met with his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, a serving Belgian officer, who acted as the go-between with Paris and London. He was ready to make territorial concessions to Italy, and accepted French claims to Alsace-Lorraine. But he did not convince either the Italians or the French of his ability to influence Berlin, and was forced to grovel before the German Emperor when Clemenceau eventually made the contacts public. From that point on, the fate of the Habsburg monarchy was tied to the military fortunes of Germany; and all hope for the peaceful evolution of the nationalities in Austria-Hungary was dashed.5

The entry into the war of the USA, which occurred on 6 April 1917, came after many American attempts to promote peace. The 28th President, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), an East Coast liberal and a Princeton professor, had been re-elected in November 1916 on the neutrality ticket; and his envoy, Colonel House, had visited all the European capitals. As late as January 1917 Wilson’s State of the Union speech was calling for ‘peace without victory’. But America’s maritime economy was mortally threatened by German submarines; and Germany’s clumsy scheme to recruit Mexico, as revealed in the Zimmerman Telegram of February 1917, finally removed all doubts. Wilson’s idealism openly confronted the secret diplomacy of the British and French. His Fourteen Points (January 1918) lent coherence and credibility to Allied war aims. He was strongly attached to the principle of national self-determination, equitably applied. Thanks to the musical soirees given at the White House by Ignacy Paderewski, he put Polish independence on the agenda.

COWARD

AT 6 a.m. on 18 October 1916, at Carnoy on the Western Front, Private Harry Farr of the West Yorkshire Regiment was shot dead by a British firing squad. A volunteer with six years’ service, not a conscript, he had twice been withdrawn from the front line suffering from shell-shock. On the third occasion he had been refused treatment at a medical station, since he had no wounds, and, after resisting the sergeant escorting him to the trenches, was arrested. He repeatedly said, ‘I cannot stand it’. At the court martial, the general commanding XIV Corps said that the charge of cowardice seemed ‘clearly proved’. This was confirmed by Commander-in-Chief Douglas Haig.

In due course Farr’s widow, Gertrude, received a letter from the War Office: ‘Dear madam, We regret to inform you that your husband has died. He was sentenced for cowardice and was shot at dawn on 16 October.’ She received neither a war widow’s pension nor an allowance for her daughter. But she did receive a message via her local vicar, from the regimental chaplain: ‘Tell his wife he was no coward. A finer soldier never lived.’ She lived to be 99 and to read the papers of the court martial, which were not released by Britain’s Public Record Office until 1992.

Private Farr was one of 3,080 British soldiers sentenced to death by court martial in 1914–18, mainly for desertion, and one of 307 who were not reprieved. In rejecting the plea of mercy in a similar case, Douglas Haig minuted: ‘How can we ever win if this plea is allowed?’

In the Second World War, some 100,000 British soldiers deserted, but none was shot. Recaptured deserters from the Red Army or from the Wehrmacht were not so lucky.2

Taken together, however, the changes of 1917 aroused great anxiety in the Allied camp. For the time being, the entry of the USA was more than offset by the chaos in Russia. The Entente was gaining a partner with great potential whilst losing its most powerful partner in the field. Twelve months would pass before the weight of American manpower and industrial production could be felt. In the mean time, as Russian resistance declined, the Central Powers could transfer an increasing share of their resources from East to West. The outcome of war was seen to depend on a race for time between the effects of mobilization in the USA and the effects of revolution in Russia.

LILI

SOME time in 1915, somewhere on the Eastern Front in the middle of Poland, a young German sentry was dreaming of home. Hans Leip imagined that two of his girlfriends, Lili and Marlene, were standing with him under the lamp by the barrack gate. He whistled a tune to cheer himself up, invented a few sentimental lines, then promptly forgot them. Twenty years later, in Berlin, he remembered the tune, and added some verses, merging the two girls’ names into one. Set to music by Norbert Schultz, it was published in 1937. Inter-war Berlin was one of the great centres of cabaret and popular songs. But The Song of a Lonely Sentry met no success.1

In 1941, when the German Army occupied Yugoslavia, the powerful transmitter of Radio Belgrade was requisitioned by the military. Amongst its stock of second-hand disks was a pre-war recording of Hans Leip’s song. By chance, Belgrade’s nightly music programme could be heard beyond the Balkans in North Africa, both by Rommel’s men and by the ‘desert rats’ of the British Eighth Army. This time, the voice of Lale Andersen, floating on the ether under the starlit Mediterranean sky, bewitched the listening soldiers. The words were soon translated into English, and recorded by Anne Shelton. After the siege of Tobruk, when a column of British prisoners passed through the lines of the Afrika-Korps, both sides were singing the same tune:

Vor der Kaserne, vor dem grossen Tor	Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate
Stand eine Láteme, und steht sie noch davor.	Darling, I remember, how you used to wait.
So wolln wir uns da wiedersehen, bei der Laterne wolln wir stehn Wieeinst Lili Marleen.	‘Twas there you whispered tenderly, That you lov’d me; you’d always be, My Lili of the lamplight, My own Lili Marlene.

When the USA joined the war, Lili Marlene was taken up by Marlene Dietrich. It was to cross all frontiers.2

Les Feuilles mortes was composed in the wartime Paris of 1943, where Lili Marlene was on everyone’s lips. Its bitter-sweet words were written by Jacques Prévert, its haunting melody by Joseph Kosma. Its theme of separated lovers might again have matched the mood of millions. But the Jean Gabin film for which it had been commissioned was cancelled; and the song was never issued. By the time it was rediscovered after the war, the social and political climate had changed; and the English words had lost the original flavour:

C’est une chanson, qui nous ressemble	The falling leaves drift by the window
Toi tu m’aimais, et je t’aimais.	The autumn leaves of red and gold.
Nous vivions tous les deux ensemble	I see your lips, the summer kisses,
Toi qui m’aimais, moi qui t’aimais.	The sun-burned hands I used to hold.
Mais la vie separe ceux qui s’aiment,	Since you went away, the days grow long,
Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit.	And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song.
Et la mer efface sur le sable	But I miss you most of all, my darling,
Les pas des amants désunis.	When autumn leaves start to fall.

Where were the waves on the seashore, and the lovers’ footprints lost in the sand? But in the 1950s Autumn Leaves was unstoppable.3

In the post-war era, popular songs headed the tide of American culture— good, bad, indifferent—which was to sweep over Europe. The transatlantic sound of Anglo-American songs was destined for dominance. But it is well to remember that in many parts of Europe, in Naples, in Warsaw, in Paris, and in Moscow, the native idioms preserved their excellence:

	(Not even the garden rustle is heard. Silence has fallen till the light. If only you knew how dear to me Are these suburban Moscow nights.
	So why, my sweet, do you hang your head, Look aside and stand apart? It’s hard to speak, and not to speak, Of all that weighs on my heart.)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 consisted of several interwoven chains of collapse. The two political eruptions—the February Revolution which overturned the tsarist monarchy and the second, October Revolution or coup which installed the Bolshevik dictatorship—were attended by upheavals reaching to the very depths of the Empire’s social, economic, and cultural foundations. They were also accompanied by an avalanche of national risings in each of the non-Russian countries which had been incorporated into the Empire, and which now took the chance to seize their independence.

The effects on the prosecution of the War were dramatic. In mid-February 1917 the last of the Romanovs still stood at the head of Europe’s largest war-machine. Within twelve months the Romanovs had been extinguished; their Empire had disintegrated into a score of self-ruling states; and the Bolshevik rulers of the central rump territory had pulled out of the war for good. Following an armistice agreed at Brest-Litovsk, all effective Russian participation in the war ceased from 6 December 1917. German policy, which had been supporting both the aspirations of the separatists and the machinations of the Bolsheviks, scored a triumph of unparalleled proportions.

The disintegration of the Russian Empire must be seen not simply as one of the effects of the Revolution but also as one of its causes. The Russian Tsar had been losing the allegiance of his non-Russian subjects long before the appearance of the Bolshevik dictatorship definitively confirmed their desire for a separate existence. When the Polish provinces were lost due to the German advance in 1915, the Empire’s leading Polish politician, Roman Dmowski, turned his back on Russia once and for all. Henceforth he was to work for Polish independence under the auspices of the Western Powers. A Polish National Committee was set up under his chairmanship in Paris in August 1916. In Lithuania, the Taryba or National Council was set up under German auspices in September 1917. In Finland, an independent republic had to fight for its existence, with German help, from mid-1917 to May 1918. In Ukraine, the national movement came to the fore as soon as imperial power weakened. A Ukrainian Republic was formed in Kiev in November 1917. By the so-called ‘Bread Treaty’ of 9 February 1918, it was able to gain recognition from the Central Powers in return for grain contracts. In the Caucasus, the independent Transcaucasian Federation came into being at the same time.

Faced with this spontaneous wave of separatism, successive Russian governments in Petrograd had little choice but to bow before the storm. The Provisional Government declared itself to be in favour of the independence of the nationalities in April 1917. The Bolsheviks and others followed suit. In reality, despite the rhetoric, the Bolsheviks had no intention of conceding independence to the nationalities. As soon as they seized power in Petrograd, the chief Bolshevik commissar for the nationalities, an obscure Georgian revolutionary known as J. V. Stalin, began organizing branches of the Bolshevik Party in each of the emerging republics, fomenting trouble against each of the fledgeling national governments. Bolshevik policy aimed to restore the defunct Russian Empire in new communist guise. From the start, they sought to impose a centralized Party dictatorship behind a façade of cultural autonomy and nominal state structures. Here lay one of the principal sources of the so-called ‘Russian Civil War’ (see below).

The Revolution in Petrograd, therefore, was addressed to the central government of a state that was already in an advanced state of decomposition. The immediate cause lay in a crisis of management in the tsarist court. The Tsar himself was absent at the front, floundering in his ill-judged determination to conduct the war in person. The Duma was ignored; and the Tsar’s ministers were left at the mercy of a paranoiac ‘German’ Tsarina and her mountebank confidant, the so-called ‘mad monk’, Gregory Rasputin (1872–1916). When urgent wartime business regarding inflation, food shortages, and army supply was neglected, members of the innermost tsarist circle rebelled. Rasputin was murdered by Oxford-educated Prince Felix Yusupov, son of the richest woman in Russia and husband of the Tsar’s niece. In other circumstances, the event might have gone down in history as a petty court intrigue. As it was, it added the last ounce of accumulated resentment that broke the stays of the entire system. For beyond the confines of court politics lay tens of millions of the Tsar’s voiceless subjects— disaffected intellectuals, frustrated constitutionalists, confused bureaucrats, workers without rights, peasants without land, soldiers without hope either for life or for victory. The glittering shell of tsarism stayed upright till the last second, then fell like a house of cards.

The chain of events which led from Rasputin’s murder on 17 December 1916 to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power ten months later was extremely tortuous and entirely unplanned. In late February the arctic winter, which had contributed to a breakdown of food supplies, changed suddenly to premature spring sunshine. Thousands of strikers and demonstrators poured on to the streets of Petrograd calling for peace, bread, land, and freedom. On 26 February, on Znamensky Square, a company of the Imperial Guard fired the first fatal volley. The next day 160,000 peasant conscripts of the capital’s garrison mutinied and joined the rioters. The Tsar’s generals prevaricated. The Duma dared to appoint a Provisional Government without him, whilst representatives of various socialist factions convened the Petrograd Soviet or ‘Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’.

In this way there arose the dvoyevlas’tye or ‘Dual Power’, where the Duma had to compete with the Petrograd Soviet. Each side took momentous decisions. On 1 March the Soviet issued its unilateral Order No. 1, which called on every military unit to elect a soviet of its own. At a stroke, the authority of the officer corps was ruined throughout the Army. On 2 March the Provisional Government issued an 8-point programme calling for the installation of elected officials in local government and for the replacement of the state police by a people’s militia. At a stroke, the authority of the police and of local officialdom was undermined throughout Russia. The Russian Empire fell apart ‘by telegraph’. That night, Nicholas II abdicated.

For a time an uneasy alliance between the constitutional liberals within the Duma and the moderate socialists within the Soviet—mainly Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SR), both opposed to the Bolsheviks—kept the Dual Power on an even keel. Here the central figure was Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970), a socialist and a lawyer, who was a member both of the Provisional Government and of the Soviet. But their policy of continuing the war was highly unpopular. They only succeeded in stoking the climate of ceaseless discontent which was to prove so favourable to more radical elements. The Provisional Government declared its intention of calling universal elections for a Constituent Assembly, which could then put Russian democracy on to a permanent footing. This gave the Bolsheviks their timetable: to stand any chance of ruling Russia, they had to take control of the soviets and overthrow the Provisional Government before the Constituent Assembly could meet, [FATIMA]

Prior to Lenin’s return to Petrograd in April, the Bolsheviks played only a minor role in the revolutionary events. But a deteriorating situation in the spring and summer created a fertile environment for disciplined subversives. On three occasions, in April, in June, and in July, they tried to exploit their growing influence in the Petrograd garrison, seeking to transform street demonstrations into armed insurrections. On the last occasion, the Provisional Government actually ordered the Bolshevik leaders’ arrest on charges of high treason, having learned of their German contacts. Lenin was forced to take refuge in the countryside. In August and September, however, the Government was paralysed by its conflict with the army under General Lavr Kornilov. Kornilov’s abortive putsch gave Lenin the respite to plan a coup of his own.

When Lenin slipped back into Petrograd early in October, Kerensky’s government was isolated and thoroughly discredited. The army was disaffected; the soviets were divided. Bolshevik plans aimed to neutralize the main Petrograd Soviet by calling a parallel Congress of Soviets crammed with Bolshevik delegates from the provinces. Simultaneously the Soviet’s key Military-Revolutionary Committee, now under Bolshevik control, was briefed to supply the necessary soldiers, sailors, and armed workers, for purposes which the Soviet itself had not approved. Trotsky took command, [SOVKINO]

FATIMA

ON 3 May 1917, at the height of the First World War, Pope Benedict XV appealed to the Blessed Virgin Mary for a sign in the cause of peace. Ten days later, three illiterate children reported a vision of Our Lady outside the village of Fatima in Portugal. They heard her say that she was ‘the Lady of the Rosary’, that the advent of Antichrist was at hand, and that a chapel of prayer should be built on the site. Some time afterwards one of the children, Lucia dos Santos, revealed that the Virgin’s prophecy had referred to Russia:

‘I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart. If my requests are heard, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors through the entire world, provoking wars and persecution of the Church … But in the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.’

The Marian cult was often associated with anti-Communism, especially during the Spanish Civil War. In 1942 Pius XI initiated the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. On 13 May 1981 Pope John Paul II, who played a prominent personal role in the downfall of Communism, was struck down by a would-be assassin’s bullet in Rome. He prayed to Our Lady of the Rosary, recovered, and joined the pilgrimage to Fatima.2

Practising Christians must still wrestle with the mysteries of prophecy. Visions of the Virgin, first recorded with that of Elizabeth of Schonau (1164), have persisted throughout modern times. They include La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1854), Pontmain (1871), Knock in Mayo (1879), Banneux in Belgium (1933), and Medjugorje in Bosnia (1981). The apparitions at Medjugorje, near Mostar, which continued to attract thousands, were not authenticated by the Catholic hierarchy. They were all the more disturbing for seemingly having occurred on the site of wartime massacres, foreshadowing the Bosnian horrors of 1992–3.3 [BERNADETTE] [MADONNA]

On the night of 25 October the plan was activated. Bolshevik pickets surrounded all government buildings. There was no reaction. On the morning of the 26th, at 10 a.m., Lenin issued a press release:

To the Citizens of Russia

The Provisional Government has been deposed. Government authority has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet… the Military-Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison. The task for which the people have been struggling has been assured—the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of the landed property of the landlords, worker control over production, and the creation of a Soviet Government. Long live the Revolution of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants!6

SOVKINO

ON 24 October 1917 the cinemas of St Petersburg were showing The Silent Ornaments of Life—a psychological drama centring on the complex relations of a Prince Obolensky with the gentle Claudia and the scheming Nelly. The very next day power was seized by the Bolsheviks. They had a very different, and very definite, view of cinematic art. ‘Of all the arts,’ wrote Lenin, ‘for us the cinema is the most important.’ Cinema was an instrument not to entertain but to propagandize the masses. In 1919, therefore, Lenin signed a decree transferring the photographic and cinematographic industry to the People’s Commissariat for Education. In due course a ‘Society of Friends of the Soviet Cinema’ was founded by none other than Felix Dzierzhynski, head of the political police.1

Russian cinema had made its debut shortly after silent movies were launched by Louis Lumière in the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895. There were Russian film directors, Russian newsreels, Russian film studios, and Russian film stars, such as the super-cool Vera Kholodnaya. The first Russian feature film was an historical drama, Drankov’s Sten’ka Razin (1908). After the February Revolution 1917 there was a brief flutter of sensational films about contemporary politics, such as Grisha Rasputin’s Amorous Escapades. Under the Bolsheviks, all such frivolity was to cease.

The Bolsheviks made no secret of their plans for turning cinema into an arm of the Party. In order to do so, they first had to destroy the existing institutions. In Kino-Fot (1922), the poet Mayakovsky wrote lines as if by order of the agitprop department:

For you, a cinema spectacle
For me, almost a Weltanschauung!
The cinema—purveyor of movement
The cinema—renewer of literature
The cinema—destroyer of aesthetics
The cinema—fearlessness
The cinema—a sportsman
The cinema—a sower of ideas.
But the cinema is sick. Capitalism has covered its eyes with gold …

Communism must rescue the cinema from speculators.2

After years of chaos, the State Cinema Board, Sovkino, did not really begin to operate until the mid 1920s. Even then, it was not the expected success until subordinated to thoroughgoing Stalinist planning in the 1930s.

Much of Soviet cinema history was taken up either by socialist realism or by the heroics of the Second World War. But there were shafts of light amidst the gloom—one of them connected with the brilliant productions of ‘The Thaw’ in the 1960s, when Bondarchuk’s War and Peace or Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying were released, others with directors of genius, notably Eisenstein.

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), son of the chief architect of Riga, belonged to that part of gilded Tsarist youth who threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. Apart from his technical brilliance, he had a clear idea of his objectives, the most important of which was to convey the irresistible tide of history. He completed only six films; in every one, the human collective is to the fore.

In his first film, Strike (1925), Eisenstein portrayed the passion of a workforce as it awakes to its own sense of power. He also caricatured the bosses in the manner of ‘Krokodil’. In Battleship Potemkin (1926), which embellished a true incident from the 1905 Revolution, he concentrated on the emotions of the ship’s crew and the oppressions of the common people. The tableau of the Odessa Steps, where a regiment of Cossacks slaughter innocent protesters, must be one of the most famous set-pieces in cinema history. In October (1927) he celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, once again by highlighting the role of the masses in such inspiring (but imaginary) scenes as the storming of the Winter Palace (see p. 920). In Old and New (1929) he examined the communal life of the peasantry.

When Eisenstein returned to Russia after several years abroad, he addressed more distant history. His Alexander Nevsky (1938) was a prophetic study of the coming conflict with Germany. The tableau of the medieval battle on the ice, where grotesque Teutonic Knights drown en massefrom the weight of their own armour, was an uncanny allegory of Stalingrad, five years before the event. To have directed a film of Ivan the Terrible (1945) while Stalin was still alive and watching—he was an eager movie buff—was a measure of Eisenstein’s unrivalled standing.

Eisenstein’s films prove that great art is not incompatible with overt propaganda. Indeed, as with religious art, when the message is unambiguous, the audience can concentrate on the skill by which it is being conveyed. At the Brussels Film Festival of 1958, Battleship Potemkin was voted No. 1 on the list of the world’s twelve best films, [POTEMKIN]

Practically every word in the declaration was false or misleading. But it made no difference. As Lenin and Trotsky had correctly calculated, there was no one in the capital with the will to oppose them. The government ministers still huddled in the Winter Palace, waiting for a rescue that would never come. The imperial army was nowhere in sight. At 9 p.m. Bolshevik sailors on the cruiser Aurora fired one blank salvo at the Winter Palace. Some 30 shells were fired from the Peter and Paul Fortress, of which two found their target around 11 p.m. Most of the government guards just left; the mob moved in when they saw that no resistance was offered. The ‘storming of the Winter Palace’ was a later fiction. At 2.30 a.m. the Ministers surrendered. That was the moment when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. They did not intend to stop there. At a brief appearance that morning at the Congress of Soviets, Lenin hailed ‘the worldwide socialist revolution’. It was nothing of the sort. It was not even a rising of the Petrograd socialists. In the original draft of the declaration of the 26th, Lenin had ended with the slogan ‘Long Live Socialism’. But he crossed it out.

This is not to deny that Lenin and his Bolsheviks were revolutionaries of a most thoroughgoing kind. Once in power, they set about tearing up the old Russia root and branch. Under Lenin in 1917–21, and even more under Stalin from 1929 onwards, they reconstructed almost every aspect of Russian life. But they did it by coercion from above; and in defiance of Russia’s mainstream radical and socialist movements. Their methods had little in common with the spontaneous revolution from below which filled their textbooks.

Bolshevik actions in the immediate aftermath of the coup were summarized in the three famous ‘decrees’ which Lenin submitted to the Congress of Soviets in the evening of 26 October. None of them was quite what they purported to be. The Decree on Peace was, in effect, a private appeal to the Powers to accept a three-month armistice. The Decree on Land ordered the transfer of private landed property to the village communes. It had been lifted from the programme of the SRs, and was entirely inconsistent with the previous (and later) Bolshevik line, which supported the transfer of land to state ownership. The Decree on Government, which created the Sovnarkom or ‘Council of People’s Commissars’, chaired by Lenin, was proclaimed subject to approval by the future Constituent Assembly. On each and every score, Lenin was indulging in sophistry. The international peace, which was realized by the December armistice and by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany on 3 March 1918, was used for launching all-out war on the Bolsheviks’ opponents at home. The granting of land to the peasants was a well-timed tactic that calmed the rage of Russia’s most numerous class at a critical moment. It would soon be followed by an all-out ‘War on the Village’, when the Bolsheviks enforced their state monopoly over prices and the food trade.

The gesture to the Constituent Assembly was pure opportunism. The Bolsheviks let the country-wide elections for the Assembly proceed, as envisaged by the Provisional Government. The elections duly took place in the second half of November; and Bolshevik candidates polled 24 per cent of the vote. In this, the one and only free election in Soviet history, a clear victory went to the SRs, who took 40.4 per cent. But no such detail was going to deter Lenin. He allowed the Constituent Assembly to meet on 5 January 1918, then simply closed it down. Between 3 and 4 a.m. on the 6th, the Chairman of the Assembly and leader of the SRs, Victor Chernov (1873–1952), was trying to pass a law for the abolition of landed property when he was tapped on the shoulder by a sailor, the commander of the Bolshevik Guard. ‘I have been instructed to inform you that all those present should leave the Assembly Hall,’ the sailor announced, ‘because the guard is tired.’ From that point on, Russia was condemned to a conflict in which more Russians would die than on the Eastern Front (see Appendix III, p. 1320).

The final year of the Great War, 1918, opened with the Central Powers planning a war-winning offensive, and ended with them in full retreat. The Eastern Front had been closed down; and the mountainous Italian Front was deadlocked. So everything turned on the Western Front. From March to July, the German command poured in their remaining reserves. They were not unsuccessful. On the British sector, they pushed forward some 35 miles south of Amiens. In the centre, they advanced once more to the Marne. But they broke neither the line nor the will of the Allies. In July, at the second Battle of the Marne, Pétain’s ‘elastic defence’ showed that the attackers did not possess the critical mass of offensive superiority. Then, on 8 August, on ‘the Black Friday of the German Army’, 456 British tanks surged through the line, winning back 8 of the lost 35 miles in one day. One week later, the German and Austrian emperors were told by their generals that the war must be ended. In September and October, in the eastern sector, American strength could at last make itself felt, first at Saint-Mihiel, where the largest salient of the Front was eliminated, and later in the Argonne. The German line never broke; the Germans did not feel defeated. But on 3 October they were sufficiently hard pressed to convey the offer of an armistice to President Wilson, [HATRED]

October 1918 was a remarkable month. The smell of peace did more to destroy the Central Powers than four years of fighting had done. The news from the minor fronts was bad. An Allied attack in Macedonia had succeeded, and Bulgaria had just collapsed. In Palestine, the British had finally achieved a competent battlefield victory at Megiddo near Mt Carmel; and the Ottomans were suing for peace. In Italy, after a last abortive push on the Piave, the Austro-Hungarian army had ceased to struggle. Everyone in Europe knew that the advantage lay with the Entente, that peace feelers were out, that further resistance would only prolong the agony. Whenever they could, the troops took matters into their own hands. The idle German and Austrian garrisons in the East were riddled with Soldaten-r’äte mimicking the Russian soviets. The Austrian army fell apart through the desertion of Czech, Polish, Croat, Hungarian, and indeed German regiments, who simply decided to go home. Everyone was claiming their national independence. On 20 October, when a German-Austrian assembly was convened in Vienna to prepare an Austrian Republic, the game was obviously up. The Emperor Charles, and 500 years of Habsburg rule, became irrelevant overnight Proclamations of independence were issued by several hitherto unknown states: Czechoslovakia (28 October), Yugoslavia (29 October), Hungary (1 November), and, in Lemberg, the West Ukrainian Republic (1 November). [ŁYCZAKóW]

HATRED

ON 3 August 1918 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, preached at St Margaret’s, Westminster, before King and Queen, ministers, and both Houses of Parliament. Many in the congregation would have known that the Archbishop had repeatedly protested in private about the morality of the Government’s wartime policy. Many must have been discomfited by what he now said in public. ‘There is a form of wrath which may degenerate into a poisonous hatred running right counter to the principles of a Christian’s creed,’ he said in his soft Scot’s voice. ‘As pledged disciples of a living Lord and Master who died upon the Cross for all who hated Him, we have to see to it that the spirit of hate finds no nurture in our hearts.’ At his side, the Archbishop’s chaplain and his later biographer, was Revd George Bell (1883–1958), the future Bishop of Chichester. Given the lead, the chaplain was to blossom into Protestant Europe’s leading exponent of ‘Christian Internationalism’.2

Bishop Bell was an unlikely internationalist. He spoke no word of a foreign language. But he possessed a firm command of Christian principles, and the courage to express them. In the post-war years he came under the close influence of Archbishop Nathan Soderblom of Uppsala, a Swedish Lutheran who had once been professor at Leipzig. In 1919 he attended the Wassenaar conference in Holland, which discussed war guilt; and in 1925, he helped organize the Stockholm conference on Christian ‘Life and Work’, which sowed the seed of the later World Council of Churches.

In the early 1930s, as chairman of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work (UCCLW), Bell was faced with the problem of German churches under pressure from the Nazis. In 1935 he insisted on a public resolution of protest; wrote a strong letter to Reichbishop Muller on behalf of the ‘Confessing Church’, and received an indignant von Ribbentrop in person at Chichester. Bell’s meetings of the UCCLW at Novi Sad (1933) and Fano (1934) paved the way for the Oxford conference of 1937, which united several ecumenical groups and, recognizing the totalitarian challenge of both Nazism and Communism, saw the start of the Oxford Group for Moral Rearmament.

As war loomed, Bishop Bell fearlessly spoke his mind. In June 1939, at Oxford University, he spoke on ‘God above Nation’, denouncing the ‘flagrant’ insistence on state sovereignty and ‘the havoc wrought by collective egoism’.3 In November, he published ‘The Church’s Function in Wartime’:

The Church fails to be the Church if it forgets that its members in one nation have a fellowship with its members in every nation. [The Church] must… condemn the infliction of reprisals or the bombing by the military forces of its own nation. It should set itself against the propaganda of lies and hatred. It should be ready to encourage a resumption of friendly relations with the enemy nation. It should set its face against any war of extermination or enslavement, and any measures directly aimed at destroying the morale of a population …4

These principles were not popular, not least with HM Government or with his diocesan congregation. But they were followed up by speeches in the House of Lords against the Internment of Aliens (August 1940), against ‘obliteration bombing’ (9 February 1944), and against the use of the atomic bomb, [ALTMARKT] On the Allied Bombing Offensive, he used no euphemisms:

It is no longer defence, military and industrial objectives which are the aim of the bombers. But the whole town … is blotted out. How can there be discrimination in such matters when civilians, monuments, military and industrial objects all together form the target?5

In July 1942 the Bishop undertook a dangerous flight to Stockholm to meet members of the Christian resistance from Germany. His appeal to the allied powers on their behalf was to be rejected. But it was to George Bell that Pastor Bonhoffer would smuggle out his last message from his death-cell in a Nazi prison. ‘Tell him’, it read, ‘that… with him I believe in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood, and that our victory is certain.’

‘Christian Europe’ was always uppermost in Bell’s thoughts on the future. Of the authors of the bombing offensive he had asked: ‘Are they [alive] to the harvest they are laying up for the future relationships of the peoples of Europe?’ In a post-war broadcast to Germany in 1945, he appealed to ‘the spirit of Europe’:

Today, one of the principal goals … should be the recovery of Christendom. We want to see Europe as Christendom … No nation, no church, no individual is guiltless. Without repentance, and without forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.7

These ideas held the foreground in the early phase of the postwar European movement before it was hijacked by economists (see pp. 1064–6). George Bell played a proper and prominent part in the founding of the World Council of Churches, which took place in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 22 August 1948—almost exactly thirty years after Archbishop Davidson’s Westminster sermon.

ŁYCZAKóW

ON 24 November 1918 three young people were buried in a special military sector of the Catholic cemetery at Łyczaków in the suburbs of Lwów (L’viv). Zygmunt Menzel, aged 23, Jozef Kurdyban, aged 19, and Felicja Sulimirska, aged 21, had all been killed in fighting between Poles and Ukrainians for the former capital of Austrian Galicia. It was the first of several thousand burials which brought the bodies of the Polish dead from temporary graves in parks and squares, and the starting-point for the ‘Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów’, the Campo Santo of the ‘Young Eagles’.1 The grave of the youngest would be that of Antoś; Petrykiewicz, killed in action, aged 13.

Like any of the great urban cemeteries of nineteenth-century Europe, Łyczaków was already a remarkable historical and artistic repository. Like Père Lachaise in Paris or Highgate in London, its sylvan setting guarded the ornate mausolea of the families who had enlivened the growth of a major city. Two separate plots contained rows of simple crosses marking the graves of soldiers from the Polish risings of 1830 and 1863.

The military cemetery at Łyczaków had its counterparts in hundreds of locations after the Great War, especially in Belgium and northern France. Constructed in 1919–34, in the period of Polish rule, it was dominated by an elevated arc de triomphe flanked by stone lions and a semicircular colonnade. The central arch was surmounted by the inscription MORTUI SUNT UT UBERI VIVAMUS (they died so that we might live free); the lions held shields carrying the city’s motto, SEMPER FIDELIS (always faithful) and TOBIE POLSKO (To Thee, Poland). Behind the graves stood an arcaded crypt flanked by steps leading to a rotunda chapel. The ensemble was decorated by evergreen shrubbery and lit by bronze lampstands. Individual monuments were raised in memory of the Posnanian volunteers, the French infantry, and American pilots who lost their lives defending the city against the Bolsheviks in 1919–20. DOUAUMONT] [LANGEMARCK]

If the origins of Łyczaków were unremarkable, its fate was not. In the years of Soviet annexation after 1945, the cemetery was vandalized and devastated. The crosses were uprooted, the inscriptions profaned, the monuments defaced, the chapel turned into a stonemason’s workshop. Guarded by fierce dogs, the overgrown site could only be visited at the risk of arrest. Its decline was documented in secret; visitors were not supposed to look beyond the vast Soviet War Memorial built alongside. Restoration work, at the request of the Warsaw government, did not begin until 1989.

In Western Europe, existing cemeteries generally survived the Second World War intact. Yet all over Eastern Europe, German, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian cemeteries fell under the Communist campaign of oblivion. They were an obstacle to the rewriting of history. In thestruggles of 1918–19, the defeated Ukrainians suffered similar casualties to those of their Polish foes. Yet the Ukrainian military cemetery in Lwów was honoured and tended throughout the years of Polish rule. Under Soviet rule, it was obliterated.

In 1991, as the chief metropolis of western Ukraine, L’viv became the second city of the independent Ukrainian Republic. The defeated dreams of 1918–19 were revived. The hopes of the young Poles buried at Łyczaków were finally dashed, [ELSASS]

38.Venus

39.Perspective

40.Allegory

41.Columbus lands at San Domingo, 1493

42.Luther enters Worms, 1521

43.Dream of Empire

44.Vision of Past Glory

45.The Board of Governors

46.Moscow Holiday

47.Sun king as Paterfamilias

48.Trouserless Philosopher

49.Master of the Continent

50.Lords of the Sea

51.Infanta in Pink

52.Reader and Listener

53.Mother

54.Summer

55.Royalist

56.Republican

57.The Children’s Friend

58.Knight in Shining Armour

59.Eternal Wanderer

60.Dynamo

61.No Surrender

62.Free Hellas

63.Musical Evening

64.Concert of Europe

65.Rural Poverty

66.Industrial Grime

67.Impressionist

68.Primitive

69.Surreal

70.Europe Deceived

71.Europe Divided

72.Europe in Torment

The peace disease spread rapidly into Germany, and demands for peace turned rapidly into demands for the head of the Kaiser. The imperial fleet mutinied in port at Wilhelmshaven. Socialist revolution broke out in Munich on 7 November, and in Berlin on the 9th, when the formation of a German Republic was proclaimed. On the 10th, having abdicated some days previously, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Crown Prince departed for exile in the Netherlands. In their very last throw, German military intelligence released their most dangerous Polish prisoner, Joseph Piłsudski, and put him on a train to Warsaw. He arrived on the morning of the 11th, supervised the disarming of the German garrison, and, to the chagrin of the Western Allies, took over the reins of an independent Poland.

In the end, therefore, like Russia the Central Powers were brought down more by political collapse than by outright military defeat. The German army, victorious in the East, was still intact in the West; it was never driven back onto German territory. But it had parted company with the political authorities that gave it orders. Armistice negotiations took place from 8 November onwards at Réthondes-sur-Aisne, near Soissons. Agreement was soon reached on the basis of Wilson’s 14 points plus 18 extra Allied demands. The latter concerned the evacuation of occupied territory, the creation of a neutral zone in the Rhineland, the surrender of Germany’s fleet, heavy armament, and transport, the payment of reparations, and the annulment of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. The Allies were insisting on capitulation terms so severe that they could dictate the terms of peace. The agreement was signed in a parked railway carriage at 3 a.m. on the 11th, to come into force six hours later. The guns fell silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Over 10 million soldiers were dead—overwhelmingly, young married men or bachelors (see Appendix III, pp. 1328–9). Casualty rates were specially high among junior officers. They were called the ‘lost generation’, les sacrifiés. The burden of their war service, of their loss, and of their injuries had to be borne by their families, especially by the womenfolk. Women during the war had been conscripted into jobs left vacant by the soldiers. They worked in the munitions factories, in offices, and in many occupations previously closed to them—as tram-drivers, managers, or journalists. For many girls this opened the road to social liberation, as symbolized by the fashion for short, ‘bobbed’ hair and for smoking in public. In the industrialized countries at least, European women moved out of the protective custody of their homes and families as never before. The change was reflected in the widespread advance of women’s suffrage. But the social and psychological cost was enormous. The lost generation of young men was matched by an abandoned generation of young widows and lonely spinsters, whose life-chance of a partner had disappeared with their loved ones in the mud of the trenches. The demographic damage, and the imbalance of the sexes, were to have lasting effects.

Statistics are not so comprehensible as the experience of individual families. On 5 September 1918, Second Lieutenant Norman Davies, aged 18, of Bolton, Lancashire, and of 11 Wing, 48 Fighter Squadron RAF, crashed in practice in a Bristol fighter near Saint-Omer, on his second day in France. His CO’s report showed greater concern for the loss of the machine than for that of the pilot.8 On 11 November 1918 the Bolton family, also of Bolton, celebrated the end of the war. On the 12th they received the ‘King’s telegram’ announcing, with regret, that their eldest son, Private James Bolton, aged 19, of 11 Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment, had died several minutes before the Armistice. Millions of French, German, Italian, Austrian, and Russian families suffered in the same way.

Europe was full of war refugees—principally from Belgium, from Galicia, and from Serbia. On top of that came the biggest pandemic visited on Europe since the Black Death. The ‘Spanish flu’ killed more Europeans than the War did, including Private Bolton. [EPIDEMIA] Europe became the subject of a vast external relief effort. The International Red Cross and the American Relief Administration faced a task, especially in Eastern Europe, of unprecedented proportions.

To say that Europe was at peace, however, was an exaggeration. Western Europe had won some respite; but there were huge areas of Central and Eastern Europe where all established order had broken down. A score of independent states had been born, every one at odds with its neighbours (see Map 25). The largest of them, Soviet Russia, was at war with most of its citizens and with all of its neighbours, and was acting as the provocateur to all sorts of revolutionary events elsewhere. Thus, while the victorious allies strove to make peace where they could, much of the Continent continued to be engulfed in raging conflict. ‘The War of the Giants has ended,’ wrote Churchill, ‘the wars of the pygmies begin.’ Geopolitically, the Great Triangle had been flattened to the point where only the Western Powers remained intact. Russia had been knocked out by the Central Powers, and the Central Powers by the West. Yet Russia and Germany were both breathing; unlike Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, they were not total casualties. In November 1918 the Western Powers were granted no more than a breathing-space within which a stable European order might be built ‘whilst Russia and Germany slept’. Unfortunately, the peace-making efforts of the Western Powers were seriously flawed from the start.

The Peace Conference, which deliberated in Paris throughout 1919, was organized as a congress of victors, not as a general assembly of the European states. Neither Soviet Russia nor the German Republic was represented; and the other successor states were only admitted in their capacity as clients and petitioners. All the major decisions were taken by the Council of Ten, its successor, the Council of Four— Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson, and sometimes Orlando of Italy—or, from January 1920, by the standing Conference of (Allied) Ambassadors. This in itself was sufficient to create the impression of a Diktat or ‘imposed settlement’. Despite the high-flown pretensions of the organizers, the Peace Conference did not take responsibility for many of Europe’s most urgent problems. It confined itself to the task of preparing treaties for signature by the ex-enemy states. Its reluctance to recognize the disintegration of the Russian Empire, whose interests it sought ‘to hold in trust’, had specially baleful consequences. The half-baked policy of Allied Intervention in Russia, which was half-heartedly pursued with half-measures throughout 1919, played straight into the hands of the Bolsheviks (see pp. 931–2 below).

Although the Wilsonian ideal of national self-determination was widely endorsed, it was not applied either consistendy or fairly. The victorious Allies saw no reason to discuss the aspirations of their own subject nationalities, such as the Irish, still less the wishes of colonial peoples. They encouraged far-reaching territorial changes at the expense of their ex-enemies, whilst discouraging demands at the expense of their own side. The Czechs, for example, whose demands encroached on Austria and Hungary, were fully supported in their claims to the medieval ‘lands of St Wenceslas’ (see Appendix III, p. 1317). The Poles, whose demand for the restoration of the frontiers of 1772 was incompatible with the restoration of the Russian Empire, were roundly condemned for ‘small-power imperialism’. For every satisfied customer there were two or three disgruntled ones.

The Western Powers showed little sense of solidarity among themselves. The Americans suspected the British and French of imperialist designs. The British suspected the French of Napoleonic tendencies. Both the British and the French suspected the strength of America’s commitment. Their fears were amply confirmed when the US Congress failed to ratify both the Treaty of Versailles with Germany and American membership of Wilson’s pet project, the League of Nations (see below). Allied diplomacy greatly underestimated the problem of enforcement. It was one thing for the politicians to make grand decisions in Paris. It was quite another for the decisions to be upheld in distant parts of Europe where the Western Powers had little influence and no control. Assorted inter-Allied Commissions gave temporary relief to assorted trouble-spots. But the League of Nations was born toothless. The USA turned its back on the settlement; the British demobilized; France shrank from policing the Continent single-handed. It was only a matter of time before those offended by the settlement began to guess that they might challenge it with impunity.

Of course, the Peace Conference worked its way through an astonishing amount of business. Five major treaties were put into effect. A dozen new states were given international recognition. A score of territorial awards were made. A batch of plebiscites were organized and administered. Much of Europe was given a basis for the new start which so many desired. Nor is it fair to say that the spirit of vengeance reigned supreme. As the Conference progressed, the tone softened. Lloyd George, the most flexible of the ‘Big Three’, arrived in January amidst cries of ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ but later took the lead in seeking the road of accommodation. The creation of the Free City of Danzig, for which he received no thanks, was an example of his moderating influence. There is no denying the vin-dictiveness which underlay the war guilt clauses, the principle of reparations, which set out to bill Germany for the entire cost of the war, and the one-sided plans for disarmament. At the same time, despite Clemenceau’s intransigence, there was a growing sense that Allied demands must be tailored to the limits of German tolerance, [SLESVIG]

Yet the resultant international climate was far from healthy. The mix of vengeance and cynicism portrayed by the victorious Allies did not augur well. Eastern Europe, the original source of conflict, was still unregulated. No sooner was the ink of the treaties dry than all sorts of people set out to revise them.

Most of the wars which erupted in 1918–21 were fuelled by disputes of a purely local nature. Whole encyclopaedias have been filled with the rights and wrongs of obscure localities which made the news, from Allenstein to Zips. Yet four of the wars had wider implications. These were Russian Civil War, the Hungarian Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War, and the Graeco-Turkish War. On each occasion, the inability of the Western Powers to exercise a benign influence on the Eastern part of Europe was amply demonstrated.

The ‘Russian Civil War’ of 1918–21 is arguably the victim of a misnomer. In reality, it was a series of civil wars and a series of international wars all rolled into one. It consisted of two main strands. One strand centred on a contest for control of the central Russian government, and was fought out between the Bolshevik ‘Reds’ and an assortment of their ‘White’ challengers. All the participants in this part of the proceedings aspired to the reconstitution of the Russian Empire in one form or another. A second strand involved a succession of conflicts between Reds or Whites on the one side and the independent republics of the former tsarist borderlands on the other. All the republics were fighting for the preservation of their new-found sovereignty. But that was not all. The Reds fielded local formations in each of the republics in addition to the central reserves based in Moscow. The Whites, too, fielded several separate armies. Numerous foreign forces intervened. The governments of the national republics were frequently confronted by local rivals; and there were a number of‘loose cannon’, such as the Czech Legion of ex-prisoners of war who in 1918 seized the Trans-Siberian Railway. As a result, the mêlée in most areas took the form of a multi-sided free-for-all. [B.N.R.]

In Ukraine, for example, which constituted one of the most valuable prizes, eleven armies took to the field. The forces of the Ukrainian Republic, which was formed in January 1918, were divided between supporters of the initial Rada or ‘National Council’ and those of the subsequent Directory. The German army of occupation on the Eastern Front had stayed on until February 1919 in order to give aid to Ukraine’s independence. The ‘Red Army’ of Ukraine had strong backing among Russian workers in the Donbass region, and was supplemented by units from the central Bolshevik command in Moscow. General Denikin’s ‘Russian Volunteer Army’, backed by a French force, landed in Odessa; its successor, Baron Wrangel’s ‘White Army’, camped in Crimea. Piłsudski’s Polish army defeated the forces of the West Ukrainian Republic in early 1919, before advancing on Kiev in April 1920 in alliance with the Ukrainian Directory. The peasant guerrillas of the anarchist, Nestor Makhno, took over a broad region of central Ukraine. The Ukrainian capital, Kiev, changed hands fifteen times in two years. To reduce such a kaleidoscope to the binary struggle of Reds versus Whites is simplification pushed to absurdity (see Appendix III, p. 1315).

The course of events was no less complicated than the orare de bataille. But seen from the Bolsheviks’ point of view in the centre, there were two successive phases, each with its own priorities. The first phase, which occupied the whole of 1918 and 1919, saw the Whites advance on Soviet Russia from all sides—General Yudenich from the West in Estonia, Admiral Kolchak from the East in Siberia, General Denikin from the South in Ukraine. The Bolsheviks were desperately strained to hold the Muscovite heartland and to repel each advancing army in turn. The second phase, which began in the winter of 1919–20, saw the ‘Red Army’ take the offensive, pursuing each of the retreating Whites before moving on to crush each of the national republics in turn.

The critical moment occurred in November 1919, when Denikin had reached Tula, only 100 miles south of Moscow, and the Poles stood not much further away, to the west near Smolensk. One concerted push might well have spelled the end of the Bolshevik regime. But Piłsudski’s emissaries received no satisfactory answer about Denikin’s attitude to the independence of Poland. So the Poles stood still, and began to negotiate with Lenin. Denikin hesitated fatally, until swept from his positions by the Red cavalry, hotfoot from their victory at the siege of Tsaritsyn. In his memoirs, Denikin was to blame Piłsudski for the Bolsheviks’ final victory.9

After that, having secured the centre, numerous Red armies fanned out in all directions, carrying all before them. Their reconquest of the republics in the European part of the former Empire reached its term in 1921, when a Bolshevik force overthrew the Menshevik regime in Georgia (see Appendix III, p. 1314).

The Bolsheviks’ victory, which confounded the military experts, must be attributed to the divisions of their enemies, to the talents of Leon Trotsky, Commissar for War and the ‘Russian Carnot’, to the strategic advantage of internal lines of communication, and to the utterly ruthless measures of their ‘war communism’. The Bolshevik regime was unwelcome to all the major classes of Russian society, including the peasants, to all the major groupings of the political spectrum from reactionary monarchists to liberals and socialists, and to all the non-Russian nationalities. But the outbreak of civil war—which Lenin himself provoked— provided the pretext for suspending all existing institutions and for wiping out all social and political opposition. The Cheká or ‘Extraordinary Commission’ of revolutionary police (forerunner of the OGPU, NKVD, and KGB) was organized by the Polish nobleman Felix Dzierzyński (1877–1926) with a ferocity that made Robespierre look faint-hearted. It struck down all ‘class enemies’, real or imagined, from the ex-Tsar and his family, murdered on Lenin’s orders at Ekaterinburg in July 1918, to unnumbered multitudes of nameless victims. The militarization of all branches of the economy, including labour, transport, and production, enabled the Bolsheviks to take over all enterprises and trade unions, and to shoot all dissenters for ‘counter-revolutionary sabotage’. Popular support rarely came into the reckoning, except when the Bolsheviks could appeal to patriotic Russian sentiment against the presence of foreign ‘interventionists’. In April 1920, when the Poles helped the Ukrainians to retake Kiev, all ideological pretence was cast aside. Lenin called for the defence of Holy Russia, and Trotsky for the enlistment of all ex-tsarist officers. Extreme necessity was the mother of extreme invention.