XI

TENEBRAE

Part II

Europe in Eclipse, 1914–1945

SLESVIG

ON 10 July 1920, King Christian X rode on a white horse across the Danish frontier to reclaim the district of Sónderjylland (‘South Jutland’ or ‘North Schleswig’), which had recently been awarded to Denmark by popular plebiscite.1 Thus ended one of the most bitter and protracted territorial disputes of modern Europe.

The neighbouring provinces of Schleswig and Holstein, situated at the base of the Jutland peninsula, had long formed the borderlands between Germany and Denmark. Historically, Schleswig—or ‘Slesvig’ in Danish— had been a Danish fief whilst Holstein had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. The ancient ‘Eider Stone’ embedded in the city gate at Rensburg marks the Empire’s traditional frontier. Although the population was ethnically mixed, Danish-speakers predominated in the north and German-speakers in the centre and south. (See Appendix III, p. 1305.)

The ‘Schleswig-Holstein Question’ had first raised its head in 1806, when the French awarded both provinces to Denmark. The award was confirmed by the Congress of Vienna, but was subsequently rendered ambiguous when Holstein was declared a member of the German Confederation. It was a recipe for trouble. In an age of growing nationalism, the ‘autochthonous Germans of the northern marches’ demanded their secession from Denmark. Patriotic ‘Danes on the Eider’ rallied to resist them. Nationalist claims soon became embroiled with the struggles to establish constitutional government. In 1848 Prussian troops occupied Schleswig-Holstein in response to appeals from the German-dominated provincial assemblies. They were eventually forced to withdraw after both Britain and Russia threatened counter-measures. Prussia had its eyes on the naval port of Kiel.2

A further crisis was precipitated in November 1863, when Frederick VII of Denmark died without male heir, having just approved a joint constitution for ‘Denmark-Schleswig’. Saxon and Hanoverian troops promptly moved in to secure Holstein. In 1864, amidst growing uproar, Prussia and Austria agreed to take joint action, establishing a six-year period of joint occupation of both provinces for the examination of all problems. These dispositions were overtaken by the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The Prussians’ victory enabled them to take sole control of the occupied lands, and then to annex them outright. Arrangements to hold a plebiscite, and to ease the position of people opting for Danish citizenship, were not honoured.

Danish national pride was greatly aroused by the wars of 1848–51 and 1863–4. The fortifications of the Dannevirke Line had seen heavy fighting; and points of fierce resistance, such as Dybbol Mill, were to become national shrines. Still more persistent were resentments caused by the maltreatment of the Danish ‘optants’, and by crude policies of germanizaron pursued, as in Prussian Poland, in the 1880s and 1890s.

The Schleswig plebiscites of 1920 were instigated under Allied auspices in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles. In the northern district, they showed a 92 per cent majority for Denmark; in Flensburg and central Schleswig, a 75 per cent vote for Germany. The agreed frontier has lasted ever since.

Lord Palmerston once said that only three people understood Schleswig-Holstein—’the Prince Consort, who was dead; a German professor, who had gone mad; and himself, who had forgotten all about it’. After 1920, the whole of Europe was free to follow Palmerston’s example, though many similarly intractable disputes remained elsewhere. For every territorial conflict settled at that time, several new ones were created.

Foreign intervention in Russia has been exaggerated. On the face of it, a terrible array of ill-intentioned outsiders had poked their noses into Russia’s distress. The regular German army was left over from the World War in the Oberost. The volunteer German army of the ‘Baltikum’ tramped round Latvia and Lithuania, the Polish irregulars of General Bulak-Balakhovich round Byelorussia; regular Polish troops appeared in the Oberost as soon as the Germans withdrew. British expeditionary forces landed at Murmansk and at Batum in Georgia; the French occupied Odessa; Americans and Japanese controlled Vladivostok and the Far East. It was an easy trick for Soviet propaganda to turn these foreigners into a concerted conspiracy of evil capitalists, hired to destroy Russia. There was no such conspiracy. The Allied governments were mainly concerned to hold the Russian Empire together; they had nothing to do with the presence of the Germans, and especially of the Poles, who expressly defied Allied advice to stay out. The Allied expeditions were despatched to guard the munitions which had earlier been sent to Russian ports for the benefit of the Provisional Government. Their sympathies undoubtedly lay with their former Russian allies whom the Bolshevik coup had overthrown and who were now begging for help. But they never sent the men or the money to conduct serious military operations. They withdrew when everyone could see that their presence was handing a major propaganda success to the Bolsheviks. By then the damage was done; Soviet history books beat the nationalist drum on this point for decades.

Western history books have their own peculiarities. The collapse of the Russian Empire is rarely discussed along the same lines as the parallel collapse of the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman Empires. Except for Poland, Finland, and the three Baltic States, which were all recognized by the Peace Conference, the national republics that broke free from Russian control are not given the same status as those which broke away from the Central Powers. Few historians seem to regard Soviet Russia’s reconquest of Ukraine or the Caucasus as anything other than an internal ‘Russian’ event. It is still more unfortunate that the creation of the Soviet Union, which began in December 1922, is often thought to have involved a mere change of name. In this way the lengthy process of decomposition of the Empire, and the five-year labours of the Bolsheviks to replace it, can be passed over in silence. Crucial distinctions between ‘Russia’, ‘the Russian Empire’, ‘Soviet Russia’ (RSFSR), and ‘the Soviet Union’ (USSR) only entered general discourse when the Bolsheviks’ handiwork started to fall apart 70 years later, [B.N.R.]

The scale of the Russian Civil War is equally overlooked. Yet if the victims of the fighting, of the White and Red Terrors, and of the terrible Volga Famine are all added together, the total number of deaths would not be lower than the mortality on all fronts of the Great War.10

The collapse of the Habsburg Empire was attended by a number of serious conflicts, but none more serious than in Hungary. The Soviet Republic of Hungary lasted for five months, from March to August 1919. Many European communist parties were founded at that time; but Budapest was the only city outside Russia where a communist regime managed to take power for any length of time. The short career of the first ‘Hungarian Revolution’ is very instructive. It was given its chance when the initial, liberal government of independent Hungary resigned in protest against the punitive nature of the peace settlement. Most Hungarians were appalled by the prospect of losing both Slovakia and Transylvania, which they saw as cradles of their civilization. The communist leader, Béla Kun (1886–?1939), a Jewish ex-prisoner of war freshly returned from Russia, exploited the nationalist fever. The Hungarian communists took power with the support both of the social democrats and the old officer corps, promising to drive the Slovaks and the Romanians from the disputed lands. In June 1919 a Hungarian army actually invaded Slovakia. At the same time a new Constitution was passed by delegates of workers’ and soldiers’ councils on the Soviet model, and radical reforms were decreed. All industry was nationalized; church property was confiscated; priests and peasants were subjected alike to compulsory labour.

B.N.R.

UNTIL recently, most Western historians were totally unaware of the Byelorussian National Republic (BNR), which was proclaimed in Miensk (Minsk) on 25 March 1918. Indeed, most Westerners were unaware that Byelorussia or Belarus’ was anything other than a district of Russia,1Before 1918, squeezed between Poland and Russia, Belarus’ had never known a separate political existence. Once known to the outside world as ‘White Ruthenia’, it had formed a major part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but had been submerged since the Partitions in the Tsarist Empire where it was renamed ‘White Russia’ (see pp. 655, 663).

German support during the First World War greatly strengthened the country’s separate national consciousness. In 1914–15 Byelorussian schools, bookstores, newspapers, and publishers began to operate in Vilna (Wilno) and Minsk. On 1 January 1916, a decree signed by Field Marshal von Hindenburg recognized Byelorussian asan official language in territories occupied by the German army. In 1916–17 Byelorussian theatres, seminaries, pedagogical institutes, and eventually political parties were free to organize.

The initiative was taken by a democratic socialist grouping, the Hramada. A Byelorussian National Congress assembled in Minsk in December 1917, only to be dispersed by the Bolsheviks. But the further advance of German forces in February 1918 expelled the Reds, and enabled the locals to take charge. The BNR, which was pledged to the welfare of all nationalities—Ruthenian, Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Tartar—functioned until the end of the year. It was forcibly suppressed in 1919 by the return of the Red Army, which created first a joint Lithuanian-Byelorussian SSR and then a Byelorussian SSR.

During the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20 (see pp. 934–7) most of Byelorussia was occupied by the Poles. The Treaty of Riga (1921) partitioned the country without reference to the population’s wishes. Under Soviet rule, the eastern sector was subject to repressions whose recipients regard them as ‘genocide’.2 The horrors continued in 1939–45 through Nazi murders and Stalinist deportations. But the memory of the BNR lived on. In 1992, when the Republic of Belarus’ was restored, the visiting doyen of the European Parliament expressed the firm conviction that Belarus’ had every right to be a candidate for future membership of the European Community.3 He was rather more sanguine on this point than many of the local population, whose administrative and managerial class had been almost completely sovietized and russified. The appalling modern history of Belarus’ had ensured that it was far more dependent on Russia than any of the other ex-Soviet republics.

At this point Hungary awoke to the monster it was feeding. Strikers were met by bullets. Armed peasant risings faced mass executions. A group of dissident officers formed at French-occupied Szeged. They were joined by Nicholas Horthy de Nagybánya (1868–1957), a former Habsburg admiral, and a government was created. The Romanians exploited the situation, and it was a Romanian army that entered Budapest in August and brought the Hungarian Soviet Republic to an end.

The Red Terror was now answered by a White Terror. Indiscriminate vengeance was wreaked on Kun’s followers, especially communists and Jews. In 1920 Horthy was declared Regent, and instituted a dictatorship that lasted for 24 years. Two attempts by the ex-Emperor Charles to. recover his Hungarian throne were rebuffed, as were attempts by the parliament to shake off military control. Although the ‘Fascist’ label was not yet used, and may not be entirely appropriate, Admiral Horthy is sometimes counted as ‘Europe’s first Fascist’. Not for the last time, however, an extreme communist adventure had provoked a strong anti-communist reaction (see Appendix III, p. 1318).11

The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20 had implications for the whole of Europe. Contrary to the Bolshevik version of events, it was not organized by the Entente; it was not part of Allied intervention in Russia; and it did not begin with Piłsudski’s attack on Kiev in April 1920. Of course, a territorial dispute did exist. But the main source of conflict lay in the Bolsheviks’ declared intention of linking their Revolution in Russia with the expected revolution in Germany, and hence of marching through Poland. This course of action was quite explicit in early Bolshevik ideology, and was a necessary step if the Soviet experiment in Russia was to be brought into line with Marxist doctrine.

The Bolsheviks first thought of marching across ‘the Red Bridge’ to Germany in the winter of 1918–19. At that time they ordered the Red ‘western army’ to probe the Polish borderlands. However, such were the demands of the civil war that the necessary million-strong strike force could not be assembled until a year later. Trotsky always expressed caution; and despite public utterances about the ‘infantile disease of leftism’, it was Lenin who became the enthusiast for revolutionary war.12 Regular fighting between Poles and Soviets began in February 1919, almost by accident, and continued for 20 months. It started when the German army evacuated the intervening area of the Oberost. Polish and Soviet forces were drawn into the vacuum from either side. The initial clash took place in Byelorussia at 6 a.m. on the morning of 14 February, when a Polish cavalry patrol disturbed a Bolshevik encampment at breakfast. At the time, Piłsudski was hoping to organize a federation of all the border republics, from Finland to Georgia. His scheme was repeatedly spiked by Poland’s dispute with Lithuania. But by August 1919, having taken both Wilno and Minsk, he was standing on Poland’s historic frontiers. He was tempted to help Denikin (see above), but in the event opened negotiations with the Bolsheviks.

For the Poles, the problem lay in the discrepancy between Bolshevik slogans and Bolshevik deeds. All the time that Lenin was making extravagant speeches about peace with Poland, the Red Army’s strike-force on the Berezina was steadily growing. So the Poles waited. In January 1920 Piłsudski made a foray across the frozen Dvina to confirm the independence of Latvia. Then he received the signal which he most feared: the command of Soviet forces on the Polish front had been given to the most successful Red general, the young Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937), conqueror of Siberia and theorist of revolutionary warfare. Convinced that the Bolsheviks’ long-postponed offensive was about to be launched, Piłsudski patched up a belated alliance with one of the Ukrainian factions and struck the Bolsheviks at their weakest point, in the south. The Poles and Ukrainians marched into Kiev, and were welcomed as liberators. Tukhachevsky’s preparations were interrupted. In the West, people who understood neither the politics nor the geography took up the Bolshevik shout of ‘Hands off Russia’.

The campaign of 1920 was no border skirmish. It was a vast war of movement, which inspired the young adviser to the French military mission in Warsaw, Col. Charles de Gaulle, to formulate his new ideas on modern warfare. Up to a million men on either side marched the best part of a thousand miles and back in six months. The arrival of the Red cavalry drove the Poles out of Ukraine in May-June. Their commander boasted of ‘clattering through the streets of Paris before the summer is out’. On 4 July Tukhachevsky finally launched his offensive with the order: ‘To the West! Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to world-wide conflagration.’ The speed of his advance was phenomenal. In mid-August his cavalry reached the bend of the Vistula near Thorn, only five days’ march from Berlin. Dzierżyński stood by in the rear, ready to assume power in Poland with a ‘Polish Revolutionary Committee’. Lenin cabled him to shoot more landlords. In Warsaw the papal legate, the future Pius XI, prepared to brave the hordes of Antichrist in person. Volunteers, including many Jews, flocked to defend their homeland. The Western governments despatched several generals, but no reinforcements, [KONARMYA]

The ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ occurred on 15–16 August. Piłsudski had secretly prepared a counter-attack from the southern flank. Tukhachevsky had failed to protect his extended lines of communication. When Piłsudski struck, five Soviet armies were decapitated. Three of them were annihilated; another took refuge in East Prussia. The rout was complete. On 31 August in the south, in the ‘Zamosc Ring’, the Red cavalry finally met its match. In the last great cavalry battle of European history, 20,000 horsemen charged and counter-charged in full formation, until the Polish uhlans carried the day. The Red Army had lost its first war. Lenin sued for peace. An armistice was signed on 10 October, the Treaty of Riga on 18 March 1921.

The wider significance of the Polish victory has not always been appreciated. Poland’s independence was secured, and with it the Versailles settlement. The British Ambassador to Berlin, who had viewed some of the action near Warsaw from his Rolls-Royce coupé, summed it up in Gibbonian tones:

If Charles Martel had not checked the Saracen conquest at Tours… the Koran would now be taught at the schools of Oxford…. Had Piłsudski and Weygand failed to arrest the triumphant march of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.13

KONARMYA

IN the summer of 1920 Izaak Babel’ (1894–1941) was serving on the Polish I front as a war correspondent of Yug-ROSTA, the South Russian Press Agency. He was attached to Budyonny’s 1st Red Cavalry Army, whose political commissar was J. V. Stalin (see p. 959). He later wrote up his experiences in Konarmiya (Red Cavalry, 1926), a masterful collection of short stories which throb with the immediacy of historical realism:

Crossing the River Zbrucz

The Divisional Commander reported that Novograd-Volhinsk had been captured at dawn. The Staff advanced from Krapivno, and the noisy rearguard of our train was stretched out all along the eternal road which Nicholas I once built from Brest to Warsaw on the bones of peasants …1

In this, the first paragraph of the first story, the reader might be forgiven for imagining that real events were being reported as they really happened.

Anyone familiar with the Polish-Soviet war, however, must soon smell a rat. There was a town called Novograd-Volhinsk, of course. In 1920 it was the headquarters of Semeon Petliura’s Ukrainian Directory. Yet it lies not on the Zbrucz but on the Slucz; and it was captured not by the 1st Cavalry but by the Soviet 14th Army. There was indeed a high-road from Warsaw to Brest built by serfs under Nicholas I. But it lay 200 miles beyond Novo-grad, and could not possibly have been cluttered by the rearguard….

Numerous such examples show that Babel’ was not simply making mistakes. He was deliberately jumbling dates, names, places, and events in order to create a precisely calculated effect. He was engaged in a form of literary collage, whose appearance is often more ‘historical’ than history itself’. ‘He is quite content to burgle history, so long as the resulting haul is artistically satisfying.’ The same can be said for his cult of violence. Red Cavalry is written in a special brand of ‘faction’, which is not historically accurate.2

Yet, taken in isolation, many of the facts can be verified. In Squadron Leader Trunov Babel’ tells the story of a macho Cossack commander who went out one day to shoot down one of the American volunteer pilots who were fighting for the Poles. The memoirs of the American ‘Kościuszko Squadron’, under Col. Cedric E. Fauntleroy, agree exactly with Babel”s account. They relate how a foolhardy Soviet machine-gunner kept firing at the American planes from an unprotected clearing, and how one of them peeled off, executed a low-level run, and shot him to pieces.3

In the long run, Babel’ fared no better. The author who perhaps did most to spread the fame of the Red Army died in Stalin’s Gulag.

Yet the impact on the Bolsheviks was equally great. The defeat of 1920 killed their strategic hopes of linking up with a revolutionary Germany. They were forced to retreat from internationalism. Soviet Russia had no option but to turn itself into the base for what Stalin was soon to call ‘socialism in one country’. Lenin retreated quickly from his leftist fervour. War communism was abandoned. In the same week in March 1921 that peace was signed with Poland, Lenin introduced his tactical compromise with capitalism—the New Economic Policy, known as NEP.

What is more, once Byelorussia and Ukraine were partitioned with Poland, the Bolsheviks were free to reorganize their state on federal lines. The formation of the USSR—which consisted initially of Soviet Russia, Soviet Byelorussia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Soviet Caucasus—could not have been undertaken until the Polish war had settled the fate of the borderlands. In reality, the Poles had won no more than a breathing-space: the Soviets’ advance into Europe had been repulsed, but not abandoned (see Appendix III, p. 1316).

The final collapse of the Ottoman Empire can hardly have come as a surprise. Yet the Western Powers held no contingency plans. They had once thought of installing their Russian allies on the Straits; but they were not going to grant such a favour to the Bolsheviks. So Greece, with Allied approval, moved into a vacuum.

In August 1920 the Treaty of Sévres was signed by a rump Ottoman government with little authority. An Allied fleet held Istanbul. The Italians occupied the southern coast; the French, Cilicia; separatist Kurds and Armenians held large regions in the east. The Greeks held both Thrace and Smyrna (Izmir). They had long memories of Constantinople, torn from Christendom in 1453; and they had genuine fears about the large Greek population of Asia Minor. So, when the last Ottoman parliament failed to ratify the Treaty, the Supreme Allied Council in Paris invited the Greeks ‘to restore order in Anatolia’. They had not counted on Kemal Pasha.

In the previous two years, Kemal had surfaced at the head of a Turkish national movement dedicated to the creation of a national republic based on a modern, secular society. His HQ was in Ankara, in the Turkish-speaking heartland. The hero of Gallipoli, he was the sworn enemy of the Sultan, the mosque, and the veil. A war against foreign invaders was exactly what he needed. In this light, the outcome of the Graeco-Turkish campaigns of 1920–2 was fairly predictable. The lonely Greek force marched up onto the Anatolian plateau, until held on the River Sakarya. Kemal roused the Turks to defend their native soil. In 1922 the Greek retreat turned into a rout: Smyrna fell; the Greek forces were driven into the sea. The great majority of Greeks from Asia Minor, where their ancestors had lived for three millennia, together with the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea littoral, were expelled. For them, this was ‘the Great Catastrophe’. Most of them would be exchanged for the Turkish population of northern Greece, which was expelled at the same time. In the process, Kemal established himself as Ghazi Pasha or ‘Warrior Lord’, and eventually as Atatürk, the ‘Father of the Turks’; and the Sultan was deposed.

Allied intervention in Turkey offered a more blatant case of foreign interference than that in Russia. But the effect was the same. It stimulated what it was supposed to restrain. The Republic of Turkey established exclusive control of its national territory. The imposed Treaty of Sévres had to be replaced by the negotiated Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Greece and Turkey undertook to organize an extensive exchange of population; and the demilitarized Straits were handed over to yet another International Commission.14 At which point the chain of conflicts generated by the Great War finally ground to a temporary halt, [SOCIALIS]

The Inter-War Period

In the inter-war period, which conventionally begins on Armistice Day in November 1918 and ends on 1 September 1939, Europe never escaped the shadow of war. The 1920s were passed amidst the after-shocks. The 1930s were passed in the growing conviction that a second quake was brewing. At the time there were statesmen and historians, including Churchill, who argued that lack of decisive action against the peace-breakers would inevitably lead to a renewal of conflict. In theory, their warnings proved to be correct; but they ignored both the political and the military realities. The Western democracies, horrified by the losses of 1914–18, could not be galvanized into action at the first sign of trouble. Also, their experiences with limited ‘fire-brigade’ operations were dispiriting. Allied intervention in Russia had shown that the West possessed neither the will nor the resources to control the Bolsheviks. French occupation of the Ruhr was to show that Germany could not be coerced by measured means. From then on, most military staffs were convinced that it had to be full-scale war or nothing. And full-scale war could not be prepared overnight.

What is more, if Russia and Germany could not be restrained separately, there was no chance of restraining them if they chose to work together. This nightmare was first glimpsed in April 1922, when German and Soviet delegates attending an Inter-Allied economic conference at Genoa decided to take an unscheduled train ride along the riviera to Rapallo, and to sign a German-Soviet trade treaty without reference to their outraged Allied hosts. In itself, the Rapallo incident was not crucial; but it revealed the central weakness of the Allies’ victory: it revealed that Moscow and Berlin in concert could defy the West with impunity. Often unspoken, it underlay all of Europe’s peacetime deliberations until the nightmare finally turned to reality.

Map 25. The New Europe, 1917–1922

SOCIALIS

IN the spring of 1920, the election results obliged the King of Sweden to I invite a socialist to head the government. But he did so reluctantly. He called in the leader of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Karl Hjalmar Branting (1860–1925), and said that he could become prime minister so long as there was ‘no socialism, no disarmament, and no constitutional change’. For a socialist party which had demanded defence cuts to finance social welfare, and which had demanded a republic, these were tough conditions. But the deal was struck; and Branting formed a coalition cabinet. The first step had been taken in the governmental career of a party whose record of office was to be unequalled in the democratic world.

The Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetarparti had been founded over thirty years before, in 1889. Closely modelled on the German SPD, it forgot its initial flirtation with Marxism and moved instead towards the parliamentary path and to a programme of social reform, redistribution of wealth, and state intervention. Like the British Labour Party, it possessed strong links with the trades unions, including block membership by affiliation; and it was well organized at the local level in workers’ communes. Its electoral muscle consisted mainly of Sweden’s new class of industrial workers, with an important leaven of middle-class and intellectual support. It gained a foothold in the Riksdag in 1896, and scored a landslide electoral success in 1914. By 1920 Branting commanded the largest single party in both houses of parliament.

Sweden’s system of proportional representation, which had been introduced in 1909 together with universal male suffrage, made it difficult for any one party to win a clear majority. Four democratic parties—the Conservatives, Liberals, Peasants’, and Socialists—participated in the main forum, and coalition or caretaker ministries were a frequent occurrence. A small Communist Party was also represented. Prior to the constitutional reform of 1952, it was possible for parties to run electoral cartels to increase their representation.

The SSDA’s rise to power and influence passed through several phases. In the 1920s Branting headed three coalitions—in 1920, 1921–3, and 1924–5(6). He once lost out through an unemployment bill, and once through his drive for defence cuts. He never formed a majority government.

From 1932 Branting’s successor, Per Albin Hansson, began to give the SSDA the look of a permanent ruling party. With one brief interval, he was to control Swedish government for fourteen years. The ministry of 1936–9 was a ‘Red-Green Coalition’ with the Peasant Movement, and that of 1939–45 a multi-party wartime coalition of national unity.

After the war, the Social Democrats gained such a hold that they could transform Sweden in their own image. Tage Erlander held office for twenty-three years from 1946. Sweden’s prosperity was as high as its taxation and its standards of state-sponsored health, education, and social security.1 A brief period of conservative rule separated the two socialist ministries of Olaf Palme (1969–76, 1982–6). The SSDA fortress did not crumble until 1988—after an unparalleled run of over half a century. And despite the King’s fears in 1920, the Swedish monarchy outlasted the socialists.

As for Socialism sitting uneasily in one of Europe’s richest countries, the paradox was more apparent than real. Socialist ideas can only be effectively applied where there is a substantial -productive surplus to distribute and a democratic government to ensure equitable distribution. Indeed, they worked ever less efficiently in Sweden as the gap between available resources and popular aspirations narrowed. Yet in countries where the surplus is meagre, or the government dictatorial, or both, the workers in a collective economy are vulnerable to exploitation and the ruling elite hoards all the benefits. Such was the case in the Soviet Union, ‘the world’s first socialist state’, which was not truly socialist either in spirit or in practice.

The limitations of the Western Powers were also made apparent in the wider world beyond Europe. Major problems of the Pacific, of China, and of global maritime power had to be settled at the Washington Conference of 1921–2, not at the Peace Conference in Paris. The Washington Naval Agreement (1921) set limits to naval tonnage in the ratios of USA 5 : Britain 5 : Japan 3 : France 1.5 : Italy 1.5. In the Gondra Treaty of 1923, the USA made its dispositions in Latin America without involving its former European partners. The centre of gravity of world power was shifting. Europe was no longer the sole master of its fate.

The legacy of the Peace Conference was not what its organizers would have wanted. Germany was gravely wounded, but not reconciled. The infant German Republic was extremely fragile. Its National Assembly, which met in permanent session at Weimar throughout 1919, was run by a coalition dominated by social democrats. Its representatives only signed the Treaty of Versailles under the express threat of coercion. Emotional ceremonies were staged to bid farewell to the Germans excluded from the Reich. Berlin, which had already experienced the left-wing rising of January 1919, when Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, now saw the right-wing Kapp Putsch of March 1920, and in August the approach of the Red Army. One cannot say what would have happened if Tukhachevsky had reached his destination. But by driving the Poles from disputed towns and handing those towns over to local Germans, he had betrayed his intention of playing the German card and of overthrowing the Versailles settlement. Three-hundred thousand armed Freikorps members were still on the loose. ‘Red Saxony’ was held by communists, Bavaria by ultra-conservatives talking of secession. Germany was one step from chaos.

The spectre of social upheaval stalked the land. The violent hostility of the German left and the German right was growing. In 1922 the Jewish Minister of Reconstruction, Walter Rathenau, was assassinated. Radical socialists fed on mass unemployment and the dire effects of hyperinflation. Radical nationalists fed on the humiliation of the war guilt clauses, on resistance to reparations, and on Allied occupation of the Rhineland. A new variety of desperado, seeking to fuse the grievances of both Left and Right, surfaced after 1920 in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Their leader, Adolf Hitler, reached the headlines on 8–9 November 1923, in the abortive fiasco of the ‘Beer-cellar Putsch’ in Munich.

For a time, however, a modicum of confidence was restored in Germany by Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929), sometime Chancellor and, from 1923, Foreign Minister. Stresemann allowed the German military to evade the disarmament clauses through secret co-operation with the Soviets. But he won Western approval by suppressing the communist governments in Saxony and Thuringia, and by restoring reparation payments. He then persuaded the Allies that the battle over reparations was harming Europe’s economy. In 1924, under the Dawes Plan, he negotiated a loan from the USA of 800 million marks backed by gold, which assured the recovery of German industry. In 1925, at Locarno, in exchange for a guarantee of the Franco-German frontier, he obtained Germany’s rehabilitation as a member of the international community, and in 1926 her admission to the League of Nations. In 1927 the last Inter-Allied Commissions were withdrawn. In the glow of improved relations with the West, few people cared to notice that Germany’s eastern frontiers, and Germany’s eastern policy, had been left open to revision.

In the realm of international finance, confusion reigned for years. Thanks to the arrangements of the wartime Entente, Britain and France were owed colossal sums, principally by Russia, whilst they themselves owed still greater sums, principally to the USA. The reparations plan incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles sought to make Germany pay the entire costs of the war, so that Allied governments could then pay off their war debts. But the plan proved unworkable: the sums involved could not be properly calculated; Germany refused full payment; the Soviet Government refused to recognize the debts of the Tsar; and the USA refused to consider rescheduling. So alternative arrangements had to be made. Already at the Peace Conference a British delegate, J. M. Keynes, had published stringent criticism of the prevailing approach. In his Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) he argued that support for the economic recovery of Germany was a precondition for the recovery of Europe as a whole, and that punitive reparations would harm the enforcers. His ideas met strong political opposition, partly because he seemed to be recommending preferential treatment for Germany over Germany’s alleged victims. But it gradually came to be realized that recovery must have priority.

Reparations initially fixed at 269 million German Goldmarks payable over 42 years, i.e. to 1962, were successively reduced. In 1921 the British made a move by promoting an Anglo-Soviet Trade Treaty, thereby breaking the boycott of the Bolsheviks. Having pressed for a reduction of German reparations to 132 billion Goldmarks, they acquiesced in the French threat to occupy the Ruhr if the reduced payments were not met. In 1922 they proposed the cancellation of all war debts, alternatively the limitation of British repayments to the USA to £33 million per annum over 63 years, i.e. to 1985. In 1923, having fuelled Germany’s hyperinflation by their demands, the French occupied the Ruhr to no good effect. In 1924, under the Dawes Plan, moderation at last prevailed. Germany was to pay reparations at a moderate rate until 1929, then at 2,500 million Reichsmarks per annum. An Allied loan of 800 million RM was to facilitate the next instalment. But even this proved impossible. In 1929, under the Young Plan, Germany was told to pay 34,500 million GM annually over 58 years, i.e. to 1988, on a mortgage secured against the German state railways. In 1932, at the Lausanne Conference, Germany was invited to make one final payment of 3,000 million RM—which was not achieved. By that time the whole business had become irrelevant. Germany had been receiving more by way of US loans than she was paying in reparations. In any case, as from 24 October 1929, the day of the Great Crash on the New York Stock Exchange, the world economy was moving into depression; and all US loans to Europe were suspended.

Inter-war politics were dominated by the recurrent spectacle of liberal democracies falling prey to dictatorship. The Western Powers had hoped that their victory would usher in an era modelled in their own image. After all, at the start of the Great War the European Continent contained 19 monarchies and 3 republics; at the end, it consisted of 14 monarchies and 16 republics. Yet the ‘Democratic Revolution’ soon proved illusory. Hardly a year passed when one country or another did not see its democratic constitution violated by one or other brand of dictator. It cannot be attributed to any simple cause, save the inability of the Western Powers to defend the regimes which they had inspired. The dictators came in all shapes and sizes—communists, fascists, radicals, and reactionaries, left-wing authoritarians (like Piłsudski), right-wing militarists (like Franco), monarchs, anti-monarchists, even a cleric like Father Tišo in Slovakia. The only thing they shared was the conviction that Western democracy was not for them (see Appendix III, p. 1320). [EESTI]

Of the two new states to come into existence between the wars, one, Ireland, was a national republic, the other, the Vatican state, an apostolic dictatorship. The Irish Free State was established in 1922, initially as a sovereign dominion of the British Empire. Millions of Irishmen had loyally served in the British army during the Great War. But opinion in 1918 was still split by the prospect of Home Rule. Ulster prepared once again to defend the Union by force, and in 1920 was turned into an autonomous province of the UK. The predominantly Catholic southerners prepared for independence. They succeeded, but only after two vicious wars—one against a British paramilitary police force, the ‘Black and Tans’, the other a civil war amongst themselves. The dominant personality, and many times Premier, Éamon de Valera (1882–1975), was a half-Cuban Catholic born of an Irish mother in New York. The Free State declared itself the Republic of Eire in 1937, severing all formal ties with Great Britain in 1949.

EESTI

IN 1923 one of the first offices of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-I European League was opened in the capital of Estonia, Tallin. Outside the office door was a brass plate with the inscription PANEUROPA UNION ESTONIA. Seventeen years later, when the Soviet Army invaded Estonia, the plate was hidden by members of the League. In 1992, during the visit to Estonia by the doyen of the European Parliament, Dr Otto von Habsburg, it was brought out of hiding and presented to him. It was the symbol of Estonia’s hidden aspirations, invisible to the outside world for half a century. ‘Don’t forget the Estonians!’, said Dr von Habsburg; ‘they are the best of Europeans.’

At the time, admirers of the Soviet Union were saying that the Baltic States were too tiny to be viable, sovereign countries. Similar things were said about the new-born republics of Yugoslavia. The point is: Estonia, or Latvia, or Slovenia, or Croatia, would be extremely vulnerable if left in isolation. But as members of the European Community they would be every bit as viable as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg or an independent Wales or Scotland. After all, Estonia is nearly twenty times larger than Luxembourg, and is four times as populous. In a united Europe, every small country can find its place alongside the former great powers.

The Vatican State, which was almost as papist as Eire, was created in 1929 in pursuance of the Lateran Treaty signed by Mussolini’s Italy and Pope Pius XI. It covered 44 hectares (c.100 acres) on the right bank of the Tiber in central Rome. Its population of perhaps 1,000 resident souls was to be ruled by the absolute authority of the Pope. Its creation ended 60 years of the Pope’s ‘captivity’ since the suppression of the Papal States in 1870.

Despite the victory of the Western democracies, the most dynamic political product of the Great War lay in the anti-Western, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic monster of totalitarianism. The term was coined by Italian fascists to describe their own aspirations. But it was taken up from 1928 to encompass the common denominator of both fascism and communism. After the suppression of Soviet Hungary, Soviet Russia (1917–22) and its successor, the USSR (from 1923), long remained the sole communist state. Its example was immensely influential. The main fascist regimes emerged in Italy (1922), Germany (1933), and Spain (1936).15

The concept of totalitarianism was rejected both by communists and by fascists, that is, by the totalitarians themselves. It was destined to become a political football in the era of the Cold War, and it has enjoyed only mixed fortunes among Western academics and political theorists.16 It has failed to attract those who demand tidy, watertight models, or who identify political phenomena with social forces. It is anathema, and abominable ‘relativism’, to anyone who holds either communism or fascism to be uniquely evil. On the other hand, it is strongly supported by those Europeans who have had practical experience of both communism and fascism at first hand. Communism and fascism were never identical: each of them evolved over time, and each spawned variegated offspring. But they had much more in common than their practitioners were prepared to admit. The features which they shared form a long list. A seminal study on the subject talks in terms of‘a six-point syndrome’.17 But six points are not enough:

Nationalist-Socialist ideology. Both communism and fascism were radical movements which developed ideologies professing a blend of nationalist and socialist elements. During the 1920s the Bolsheviks gradually watered down their inter-nationalist principles, whilst adopting the characteristic postulates of extreme Russian nationalism. Under Stalin, the ideological mix was classified as ‘National Bolshevism’. The German Nazis modified the socialist elements of their ideology over the same period. In both cases the socialist-nationalist or nationalist-socialist blend was stabilized at the same moment, in 1934.

At the conscious level, communists and fascists were schooled to stress their differences. On the other hand, when pressed to summarize their convictions, they often gave strikingly similar answers. One said, ‘For us Soviet patriots, the homeland and communism became fused into one inseparable whole.’ Another put it thus: ‘Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism, and extracted the [real] meaning of socialism from it. It also took Nationalism from the cowardly bourgeois parties. Throwing both together into the cauldron of our way of life, the synthesis emerged as clear as crystal—German National Socialism.’ It is not for nothing that people treated to such oratory were apt to think of communists as ‘red fascists’ and of fascists as ‘brown communists’.

Pseudo-science. Both communists and fascists claimed to base their ideologies on fundamental scientific laws which supposedly determined the development of human society. Communists appealed to their version of ‘scientific Marxism’ or historical materialism, the Nazis to eugenics and racial science. In neither case did their scientific methods or findings find widespread independent endorsement.

Utopian goals. All totalitarians cherished the vision of a New Man who was to create a New Order cleansed of all present impurities. The nature of the vision varied. It could be the final, classless stage of pure communism as preached by the Marxist-Leninists; the .racist, Jew-free Aryan.paradise of the Nazis: or the restoration of a pseudo-historical Roman empire in Italy. The building of the New Order was a task which justified all the sacrifices and brutalities of the present, [UTOPIA]

The dualist party-state. Once in power, the totalitarian party created organs within its own apparatus to duplicate and to oversee all other existing institutions. State structures were reduced to the status of conveyor belts for executing the Party’s wishes. This dualist dictatorial system was much more pervasive than that implied by the familiar but misleading term of the ‘one-party state’. (See Appendix III, p. 1321.)

The Führerprinzip or ‘Leader Principle’. Totalitarian parties operated on strict hierarchical lines. They exacted slavish obedience from their minions, through the unquestioning cult of the Party Leader, the fount of all wisdom and beneficence—the Führer, the Vozhd’, the Duce, theCaudilloor the ‘Great Helmsman’. Lenin shunned such a cult: but it was a centrepiece both of Stalinism and of Hitlerism.

Gangsterism. Many observers have noted the strong similarity between the conduct of totalitarian élites and that of professional criminal confraternities. Gangsters gain a parasitical hold over a community by ‘protecting’ it from the violence which they themselves generate. They habitually terrorize both their members and their victims, and eliminate their rivals. They manipulate the law and, whilst maintaining an important façade of respectability, use blackmail and extortion to take control of all organizations in the locality.

Bureaucracy. All totalitarian regimes required a vast army of bureaucrats to staff the bloated and duplicated organs of the party-state. This new bureaucracy offered rapid advancement to droves of opportunist individuals of any social origin. Entirely dependent on the Party, it arguably formed the only social constituency whose interests the regime had to consider. At the same time, it included a number of competing ‘power centres’ whose hidden rivalries gave rise to the only form of genuine political life in existence.

Propaganda. Totalitarian propaganda owed much to the subliminal techniques of modern mass advertising. It employed emotive symbols, son et lumiere, political art and impressive architecture, and the principle of the ‘Big Lie’. Its shameless demagoguery was directed at the vulnerable and vindictive elements of society uprooted by the tides of war and modernization, [PROPAGANDA]

The Aesthetics of Power. Totalitarian regimes enforced a virtual monopoly in the arts, propagating an aesthetic environment which glorified the ruling Party, embellished the bond between Party and people, revelled in heroic images of national myths, and indulged in megalomaniac fantasies. Italian Fascists, German Nazis, and Soviet Communists all shared a taste for portentous portraits of the Leader, for oversized sculptures of musclebound workers, and for ostentatious public buildings of ultra-grandiose proportions.

The dialectical enemy. No totalitarian regime could hope to legitimize its own evil designs without an opposite evil to contend with. The rise of fascism in Europe was a godsend for the communists, who otherwise could only have justified themselves by reference to the more distant evils of liberalism, imperialism, and colonialism. The fascists never ceased to justify themselves in terms of their crusade against Bolshevism, the communists through ‘the struggle against fascism’. The contradictions within totalitarianism provided the motor for the hatreds and conflicts which it promoted.

The psychology of hatred. Totalitarian regimes raised the emotional temperature by beating the drum of hatred against ‘enemies’ within and without. Honest adversaries or honourable opponents did not exist. In the fascist repertoire, Jews and communists headed the bill; in the communist repertoire, fascists, capitalist running dogs, ‘kulaks’, and alleged saboteurs were mercilessly pilloried.

Pre-emptive censorship. Totalitarian ideology could not operate without a watertight censorship controlling all sources of information. It was not sufficient to suppress unwanted opinions or facts; it was necessary to prefabricate all the data that was permitted to circulate.

Genocide and coercion. Totalitarian regimes pushed political violence beyond all previous limits. An elaborate network of political police and security agencies was kept busy first in destroying all opponents and undesirables and later in inventing opponents to keep the machinery in motion. Genocidal campaigns against (innocent) social or racial ‘enemies’ added credence to ideological claims and kept the population in a permanent state of fear. Mass arrests and shootings, concentration camps, and random murders were routine.

Collectivism. Totalitarian regimes laid stress on all the sorts of activity which strengthen collective bonds and weaken family and individual identity. State-run nurseries, ‘social art’, youth movements, party rituals, military parades, and group uniforms all served to cement high levels of social discipline and conformist behaviour. In Fascist Italy, a system of Party-run Corporations was established to replace all former trade union and employers’ organizations and in 1939 to take over the lower house of the national assembly.

Militarism. Totalitarian regimes habitually magnified the ‘external threat’, or invented it, to rally citizens to the fatherland’s defence. Rearmament received top economic priority. Under party control, the armed forces of the state enjoyed a monopoly of weapons and high social prestige. All offensive military plans were described as defensive.

Universalism. Totalitarian regimes acted on the assumption that their system would somehow spread across the globe. Communist ideologues held that Marxism-Leninism was ‘scientific’ and therefore universally applicable. The Nazis marched to the refrain ‘Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland, I Und morgen die ganze Welt’ (For today it’s Germany that’s ours, and tomorrow the whole wide world.) [LETTLAND]

Contempt for liberal democracy. All totalitarian despised liberal democracy for its humanitarianism, for its belief in compromise and co-existence, for its commercialism, and for its attachment to law and tradition.

Moral nihilism. All totalitarian shared the view that their goals justified their means. ‘Moral Nihilism’, wrote one British observer, ‘is not only the central feature of National Socialism, but also the central feature between it and Bolshevism.’

The concept of totalitarianism stands or falls on the substance of these points of comparison between its principal practitioners. Its validity is not affected by the various intellectual and political games for which it has subsequently been used.

However, communism and fascism obviously differed in the sources of their self-identity. Communists were wedded to the class struggle, the Nazis to their campaign for racial purity. Important differences also lay in the social and economic sphere. The fascists were careful to leave private property intact, and to recruit the big industrialists to their cause. The communists abolished most aspects of private property. They nationalized industry, collectivized agriculture, and instituted central command planning. On these grounds, communism must be judged the more totalitarian branch of totalitarianism, [GAUCHE]

Of course, one has to insist that the ‘total human control’ sometimes claimed on behalf of totalitarianism is a figment of someone’s imagination. Totalitarian utopias and totalitarian realities were two different things. Grand totalitarian schemes were often grandly inefficient. Totalitarianism refers not to the achievements of regimes but to their ambitions. What is more, the totalitarian disease generated its own antibodies. Gross oppression often inspired heroic resistance. Exposure to bogus philosophy could sometimes breed people of high moral principle. The most determined ‘anti-communists’ were ex-communists. The finest ‘anti-Fascists’ were sincere German, Italian, or Spanish patriots.

From the historical point of view, one of the most interesting questions is how far communism and fascism fed off each other. Before 1914, the main ingredients of the two movements—socialism, Marxism, nationalism, racism, and autocracy—were washing around in various combinations all over Europe. But communism crystallized first. Its emergence in 1917 occurred well in advance of any coherent manifestations of fascism. The communists, therefore, must be rated the leaders, and the fascists the quick learners. The point is: can chronological precedence be equated with cause and effect? Was fascism simply a crusade for saving the world from Bolshevism, as many of its adherents maintained? What exactly did the fascists learn from the communists? It is hard to deny that Béla Kun gave Horthy’s regime its raison d’être. The Italian general strike of October 1922, dominated by communists, gave Mussolini the excuse for his ‘March on Rome’. It was the strength of the communists in the streets and voting booths of Germany which frightened the German conservatives into handing power to Hitler.

But that is hardly the whole story. The fascists, like the communists, were notorious fraudsters: one should not take their pronouncements too seriously. Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), sometime ex-editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti (Forward), author of a pseudo-Marxist work on the class struggle (1912), embezzler and street brawler, had little commitment to political principle. He had no qualms about using his squads of Fascisti first to help the nationalists’ brutal seizure of Fiume in 1920, to support Giolitti’s liberal bloc in the general election of 1921, and later to murder the Socialist leader, Matteotti. He declared himself in favour of constitutional monarchy, for example, shortly before overthrowing it. One need not search for ideological consistency in such tactics: he was simply seeking to exploit the mayhem which he had helped to unleash.

The same must be said of Mussolini’s extraordinary, and extraordinarily successful, behaviour in October 1922. Having first contributed to the chaos which produced the general strike, he then cabled the King with an ultimatum demanding to be made Prime Minister. The King should have ignored the cable; but he didn’t. Mussolini did not seize power; he merely threatened to do so, and under the threat of further chaos Italy’s democrats surrendered. ‘The “March on Rome”’, writes the leading historian of Italy, ‘was a comfortable train ride, followed by a petty demonstration, and all in response to an express invitation from the monarch.’ Years later, when Mussolini’s regime was in dire trouble, Adolf Hitler insisted on saving him. ‘After all,’ the Führer was reported as saying, ‘it was the Duce who showed us that everything was possible.’ What Mussolini showed to be possible was the subversion of liberal democracy, and a second terrible round of Europe’s ‘total war’.

The tone of international relations was set by the almost universal abhorrence of war. On the surface at least, ‘non-aggression’ was obligatory. In twenty years, a large number of non-aggression pacts were signed (see Appendix III, p. 1322). For those states who intended no aggression, such pacts were irrelevant. For those intending aggression they provided excellent cover: both Hitler and Stalin were fond of them.

The creation of the League of Nations must be counted among the achievements of the Peace Conference. The Covenant of the League came into force on 10 January 1920, the same day as the Treaty of Versailles, into which it had been incongruously incorporated. It sought to provide for the settlement of disputes by arbitration and consent, and for the use of collective force against aggressors. It envisaged an annual General Assembly, where each member state had an equal vote, an executive Council, and a permanent Secretariat, all based in Geneva. The League also took over the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and the International Chamber of Labour. The General Assembly first convened in November 1920, and met every year thereafter until 1941. It dissolved itself in April 1946, when the residual operations were transferred to the United Nations Organization in New York.

The work of the League started too late to affect the immediate settlement of the Great War, and was hobbled by the non-participation of the powers who might have rendered it effective. At no time in the 21 years of its operation were all three of Europe’s power centres properly represented. Of the Western Powers, France alone played a full part. The USA, the League’s original sponsor, stayed away, and Great Britain failed to sign the fundamental Geneva Protocol (1924) on the pacific settlement of disputes. Germany only participated from 1926 to 1933, Italy from 1920 to 1937. The Soviet Union was admitted in 1934, and expelled in 1940. An important initiative was taken by France and the USA in 1928 to plug some of the League’s obvious failings. The Briand-Kellogg pact for the renunciation of war was eventually signed by 64 states, including the USSR. But it was never incorporated into the League’s own rules. Hence, whilst the League advocated military or economic sanctions against aggressor states, it did not possess the means to enforce its own sanctions. As a result, it played a major role in the management of minor issues and a negligible role in the management of major ones.

Thanks to the ambivalent attitudes of the Western Powers, the League was not empowered to challenge the general European Settlement which the former thought they had put into place in 1919–20. A fatal ruling determined that demands for Treaty revision could not be accepted as a ‘dispute’ under the terms of the Geneva Protocol. The principle of unanimity, which governed voting in the Assembly and the Council, ensured that no decision could ever be taken contrary to the wishes of the Powers. The crucial Disarmament Conference did not meet until 1932, by which time rearmament was well advanced in the USSR and was soon to be launched in Germany.

Overall, therefore, the sponsors of the League deprived it of the means to observe its high ideals. It ran the colonial Mandates Commission for Palestine and Syria. It administered the Free City of Danzig, the Saarland, and the Straits Commission. It mediated between Turkey and Iraq over Mosul, between Greece and Bulgaria over Macedonia (1925), and, unsuccessfully, between Poland and Lithuania over Wilno (1925–7). It could not cope with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) or the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1936). Through no fault of its own, it was completely out of its depth when the major powers of Europe began to unsheath their claws in the late 1930s.

The most active statesman in the field of European peace and co-operation was undoubtedly Aristide Briand (1862–1932). A reforming socialist born at Nantes, Briand had been ten times France’s Premier; but the most expansive phase of his career was reached in 1925–32, when he served as Foreign Minister. He was specially energetic in the pursuit of Franco-German reconciliation. He was the chief architect of the Locarno Pact; he forged the Kellogg-Briand pact for the renunciation of war; and he made proposals for European union. His noble ideals, and their lack of success, were typical of the times.

Briand’s proposals for European union had few immediate consequences. But they are important for all who seek the seeds of policies which eventually bore fruit twenty years later. They were first raised in a speech to the Assembly of the League on 5 September 1929:

‘I think that among peoples constituting geographical groups, like the peoples of Europe, there should be some kind of federal bond… Obviously, this association will be primarily economie, for that is the most urgent aspect of the question … Still, I am convinced that this federal link might also do useful work politically and socially, and without affecting the sovereignty of any of the nations belonging to the association …’

The key phrases were ‘geographical groups’, ‘primarily economic’, and ‘sovereignty’.

A more detailed Memorandum was presented in May 1930. This document spoke of ‘the moral union of Europe’, and outlined the principles and mechanics whereby it might be achieved. It insisted on ‘the general subordination of the economic problem to the political one’. It envisaged a Permanent Political Committee for executive decisions, and a representative body, the European Conference, for debate. In the immediate term, it called on the 27 European members of the League to convene a series of meetings to study a wide range of related issues, including finance, labour, and inter-parliamentary relations. From January 1931, Briand chaired a subcommittee of the League which examined members’ responses to the Memorandum. Of these, only the Dutch reply was prepared to accept that European union involved an inevitable reduction of sovereignty.

As it proved, 1931 was the terminal year both for Briand and for his ideas. His initial speech on European union had been closely followed by the Wall Street crash. Discussions on his Memorandum coincided with the first electoral success of the German Nazis. Briand’s European schemes were overtaken by his chairmanship of the Manchurian Committee, which, after much deliberation, issued a verbal reprimand to Japan for the invasion of China. In Asia, Japan flouted the League and reaped the rewards of aggression. In Europe, ‘the spirit of Locarno’ was sick. Stresemann was dead; Briand himself ailed, and resigned. Briand’s death elicited an impassioned tribute from Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain. Briand ‘was proud of his country, and jealous of her prerogatives,’ he said. ‘But his pride was only content when France stepped out like a goddess, leading the other nations in the paths of peace and civilisation. There is no-one of his stature left.’ It was a rare demonstration of Anglo-French solidarity.

In this atmosphere, an alternative plan for European security was advanced by Fascist Italy. Mussolini proposed a four-power pact of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. It represented a cynical return to the bad habits of the Concert of Europe, and would have dropped all pretence about the equal standing of states. It unashamedly attempted to mobilize the ‘West’ against the dangers of the ‘East’—that is, against the squabbles of the successor states, and the potential expansion of communism. It found a measure of favour in the British Foreign Office; but it did not appeal to the Quai d’Orsay, which preferred to stick to existing arrangements. Apart from the Munich Conference, its provisions remained a dead letter.

Europe’s cultural life was deeply affected by the hangovers of war, which heightened the questioning of traditional values and accelerated existing centrifugal trends. The tone of anxiety and pessimism was set by Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918), a specifically German view of‘Western civilization’. The advent of communism excited many Western intellectuals, for whom the defiant Utopian stance of the Bolsheviks in Russia proved unusually fascinating. Active communist politics was for the few; but marxisant opinions were much in fashion. The long stream of Moscow-bound pilgrims, for whom the most murderous regime in European history could do no wrong, offers one of the stranger spectacles of mass delusion on record.24 Fascism, too, was to recruit its academic and cultural collaborators. Some individuals, such as G. B. Shaw, managed to fawn on dictators of all hues. Visiting the USSR in 1931, he remarked: ‘I wish we had forced labour in England, in which case we would not have two million unemployed.’ His opinion of Stalin after a personal meeting was: ‘he is said to be a model of domesticity, virtue and innocence’.25 In retrospect, books such as the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation (1935) look simply fatuous; but they pandered to the genuine anxieties of the post-war generation whilst serving to hold the world in ignorance about Soviet realities. The lack of moral integrity among politically pressured intellectuals, as described in Julien Benda’s La Trahisón des clercs (1927), was a recurring theme. It would have been more convincing if Benda himself had not tried to justify Stalin’s show trials. The Spanish social philosopher José Ortega y Gasset saw totalitarianism as a sign of the threat from mass culture. In his Rebelión de las Masas (Revolt of the Masses, 1930), he warned that democracy carried the seeds of tyranny by the majority.

In religious thought, the conservative Catholic hierarchy took a stronger line against communism than did the Protestant churches. But in 1937 Pius XI’s twin encyclicals, Mit brennender Sorge and Divini Redemptoris, ruled that both Nazism and communism were incompatible with Christianity. At the same time, modernist Catholic philosophers such as the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) sought to update the Church’s social thought. Interdenominational religious debate was stimulated by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber (1875–1965), sometime Professor at Frankfurt, and by the Swiss, Karl Barth (1886–1968), whose influential Die kirchliche Dogmatik (1932) sought to reinstate Protestant fundamentals.

In literature, the post-war sense of devastation and disorientation was eloquently conveyed in T. S. Eliot’s marvellous Waste Land, in Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1920), and in the ‘stream of consciousness’ texts of James Joyce’s novels Ulysses (1923) andFinnegans Wake (1939). The year 1928 marked the creation both of D. H. Lawrence’s unpublishable Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a bold attack on English sexual mores, and of Berthold Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera), the best-known product of a politically left-wing and unconventional artistic milieu in pre-Nazi Berlin. In that same era the novelist Thomas Mann (1875–1955), who had made his name before the war with Buddenbrooks (1900) and Death in Venice (1911), took the lead in protecting German culture from the ill repute of German politics. He published more novels, such as Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), which explored the dubious legacy of Wagner and Nietzsche, before emigrating and becoming the epitome of ‘the good German’ in exile. In Russia, a brief interval of literary freedom in the 1920s gave space to the powerful talents of the revolutionary poets Alexander Blok (1880–1921) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). The advent of Stalinism divided Soviet writers into servants of the Party, such as Gorky and Sholokov, and persecuted dissidents, such as Osip Mandel’shtam (1891–1938) or Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). The memoirs of Mandel’shtam’s widow, Nadzezhda, Hope Against Hope, could not be published until the 1960s; but they provide the most eloquent testimony to Russian culture in the catacombs. In Central Europe, premonitions of totalitarianism hang over Kafka’s The Castle (1925) and The Trial (1926), over Karel Čapek’s allegorical drama The Insect Play (1921), over Witkiewicz’s novel Insatiability, as in the work of the Romanian Lucian Blaga (1895–1961) and the Croat Miroslav Krleža (1893–1975). Kafka’s anti-hero ‘K’, who is arrested on charges which he can never discover, is eventually killed by two men in opera-hats to the words ‘Like a dog’. Stanisiaw Witkiewicz (1885–1939), known as ‘Witkacy’, painter and mathematician as well as writer, is now acknowledged as the pioneer of the Theatre of the Absurd. Barely known in his lifetime outside Poland, he was destined to commit suicide on the day the Red Army joined in the invasion of the Nazi Wehrmacht. Nothing gained such popular acclaim, however, as the memoirs of a Swedish doctor on Capri, Axel Munthe, whose Story of San Michele (1929) was translated into forty-one languages, [INDEX] [WASTE LAND]

In the social sciences, the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ exerted a huge influence in a very short time. Opened in 1923 and closed by the Nazis in 1934, the Institut fur Sozialforschung at Frankfurt sheltered a circle of intellectuals working at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Figures such as Max Horkenheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–69), and Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) felt that modern science had yet to find effective methods for analysing human affairs and assisting their progress. Radical and left-wing, but opposed to all ideologies, including Marxism, they rejected conventional logic and epistemology, whilst fearing the evils of technology, industrial society, and piecemeal reform. Their search for a free-floating ‘critical theory’, conditioned but not determined by the times, was to impress a whole generation of social scientists both in the USA and in post-1945 Europe. The best-known fruit of their general research was the joint work by Horkheimer and Adorno, Die Dialektik der Aufklärung (The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 1947).26 [ANNALES]

In art, traditionalist styles continued to disintegrate. After Symbolism, Cubism, and Expressionism came Primitivism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Abstractionism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. The leading experimenters included the Russian exile Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), a Jewish exile, Marc Chagall (1889–1985), the left-wing Catalan exile Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the Italian exile Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), the Swiss Paul Klee (1879–1940), the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), the Frenchman Jean Arp (1887–1966), and the Spaniard Salvador Dali (1904–89). France was their Mecca. Their eclectic inventiveness matched their longevity. Klee painted abstractions in pure colour; Dali painted disturbing Freudian dreamscapes; Arp dropped pieces of paper onto the floor.

WASTE LAND

T. S. ELIOT’S The Waste Land appeared in 1922, the work of an American who had settled in Europe. The original draft began: ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place.’ The published version began:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Eliot’s 433-line poem, largely written in Switzerland, was inspired by the legend of the Holy Grail, and was composed from a string of arcane literary allusions and fragments. The overall effect resembled a ramble through the relics of a shattered civilization.

The final section deals, among other things, with the decay of Eastern Europe:

Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon …

A note refers to a quotation from the Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse: ‘Beautiful at least is that eastern half of Europe which is travelling drunk after the Holy Grail on the road to Chaos, singing like Dmitri Karamazov.’

The poem concludes:

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli af fina
Quando flam ceu chelidon.—O swallow, swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then lie fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

‘Various critics’, Eliot explained later at a Harvard lecture, ‘have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world … To me … it was just a piece of rhythmic grumbling.’

ANNALES

VOLUME 1, number 1 of the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale was dated Paris, 15 January 1929.1 A short preface ‘To our readers’ was signed by the two directors, Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). It expressed the belief that the new review would ‘make its mark in the sun’. Four main articles were published: Gustave Glotz on the price of papyrus in Greek antiquity; Henri Pirenne on the education of medieval merchants; M. Baumont on German industrial activity since the last war; and G. Méquet (Geneva) on the population problem in the USSR. A second section on ‘Scientific Life’ contained various news items, together with a technical description of plans parcelaires, or ‘sketch-plans of landed property’, by Bloch and an outline of the career of Max Weber by Maurice Halbwachs. A review section carried a dozen essays covering topics varying from Sicilian slavery to Welsh economic history. The back cover carried advertisements for the ‘Collection Armand Colin’, the journal’s principal sponsor, and for the 22-volume Géographie universelle of Paul Vidal de la Blache and L. Gallois.

Annales was to launch not just a journal but a school of history of unrivalled authority. Its aims were to break the dominance of established fields, and to broaden historical studies by techniques and topics drawn from the social sciences. Not just economics and sociology, but psychology, demography, statistics, geography, climatology, anthropology, linguistics, and medical science were all to have their place. Special emphasis was to be laid on the interdisciplinary approach.2

The intellectual pedigree of Annales is revealing. Febvre met Bloch at the University of Strasbourg. He had made his name through a regional study of the Franche-Comté. Bloch was working on French rural history. Neither felt attracted to the historical stars of the day such as Renouvin, the diplomatic historian, or Fustel de Coulanges, the apostle of documentary research. Both had come under the influence of very different masters. One of these was Émile Durkheim (d. 1917), pioneer sociologist. The second was the Belgian, Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), author of problem-centred studies on medieval democracy and ‘the social history of capitalism’. The third was Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), professor at the École Normale Supérieure and the founder of human geography. It was Vidal who had inspired Febvre and Bloch to go out into the countryside in search of new sources and perspectives on the past.3

Most revealing, perhaps, was the professional sin against which the original directors of Annales were preparing to do battle. It was the sin of specialization. Historians were concentrating their efforts ever more narrowly behind their own cloisonnements or ‘dividing walls’. The appeal was unambiguous:

‘Nothing would be better if all legitimate specialists, whilst carefully tending their own gardens, would take the trouble none the less to study the work of their neighbours. Yet the walls are so high that very often the view is blocked. It is against these formidable divisions that we see ourselves taking our stand.’

If the menace was recognizable in 1929, it was to grow inexorably in the decades which followed.

In music, the neo-Romantic and Modernist styles launched before the war both found new advocates in the Russians Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninov, in the Pole Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937), and the Hungarian Béla Bartok (1881–1945). The prominence of East Europeans, both as composers and as instrumentalists, emphasized the cultural bonds which overarched the growing political divide, [STRAD] The German Carl Orff (1895–1982) distinguished himself both in composition and in the realm of musical education. His popular secular oratorio,Carmina Burana (1937), set medieval poems to strong, deliberately primitive rhythms, [TONE]

In architecture and design, the German Bauhaus was founded at Weimar by Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and closed down by the Nazis. It drew its inspiration from Expressionism and Constructionism in turns, and pioneered functional methods. Its stars included Itten, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and Klee.

Except in music, where international barriers were most permeable, the East European contribution to the cultural avant-garde remained long and widely unrecognized. A number of groups or individuals gained renown either through migrating to the West, like the Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), or through state-sponsored Soviet exhibitions in the 1920s which brought attention to figures such as Kazimierz Malewicz (1878–1935), Pavel Filonov (1882–1946), Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), or Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). Naturally, the full acceptance of the avant-garde proceeded slowly everywhere. But in Eastern Europe the advent of fascism and the still longer reign of communism drove non-conformist culture into the shadows for half a century. The ‘Osma Group’ of early Czech Cubists, for example, centred on painters such as Antonin Prochazka (1882–1945) or Bohumil Kubista (1884–1918), was known only to the most specialized experts. The importance of the pioneer Lithuanian symbolist Mikalojus Ciurlionis (1875–1911) or of Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952), theorist and practitioner of Constructivism, or the strength of the Jewish presence, was not revealed until exhibitions planned in the 1990s.27 The cultural unity of a politically divided Europe was much deeper than was realized at the time.

TONE

IN 1923 Arnold Schoenberg completed his Serenade. It was the first piece composed entirely by the rules of dodecaphony or ‘twelve-tone serialism’. Dodecaphony was the chosen medium of the pioneering school of atonal music.1

Ever since the Middle Ages, the twelve keys, in major or minor mode, had formed a fundamental element of European musical grammar; and the eight-note octave of each key presented composers with the pool of notes from which to build their melodies, chords, and harmonies. In dodecaphony, in contrast, the traditional keys and octaves were abandoned in favour of a basic set or ‘row’ of notes using all points of the twelve-point chromatic scale. Each set could begin at any pitch on any point in the scale, and could be arranged in inversions and regressions, giving 48 possible patterns to every series. The resultant music was filled with previously unknown intervals and combinations of notes and was, to the unaccustomed ear, excruciatingly discordant. It represented a break with the past as radical as abstract, non-representational art, or non-grammatical ‘stream-of-consciousness’ prose. Its principal practitioners after Schoenberg were Berg, Webern, Dallapiccola, Lutyens, and Stravinsky.

Atonality, however, was not the only way of deconstructing musical form. The Parisian ‘Six’, who took Erik Satie (1866–1925) as their master, and who included Artur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), and Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), experimented with poly-tonality, that is, using two or more keys simultaneously. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) extended tonal harmony by exploiting harmonic series. Olivier Messiaen (1898–1993), organist of St Sulpice, developed complex rhythms inspired by oriental music, melodies based on bird-song, and musical tones matched to visual colours. Henryk Gorecki (b. 1933) sought inspiration in medieval harmonies and in free time. Harrison Birtwhistle (b. 1934) turned Renaissance monody to new uses. Anthony Burgess (1917–93) wrote ‘post-tonal’ music alongside criticism and fiction.2

Both Messiaen and Górecki were Catholic believers, seeking modernist methods to recapture old effects. The former’s Quattuor pour la fin du temps (1941), written during wartime imprisonment in Silesia, and the latter’s phenomenally popular Symphony No. 3 (1976), also motivated by wartime experiences in Silesia, reflect a special sensitivity to time and mood. They appealed to a wider musical audience than the cerebral dode-caphonists ever could.3

Nevertheless, the growing prominence of Modernism should not conceal the fact that the strongest influences on inter-war European culture came from two other directions—from technological change and from America. The impact on popular consciousness of radio, of the Kodak camera, of affordable gramophones, and above all of the cinema was immense. Thanks to Hollywood, Charles Chaplin (1889–1977), an orphaned entertainer from London’s East End, probably became the best-known person in the world. Many of his films, such as City Lights (1931), Modern Times(1935), or The Dictator (1939), contained clear social and political messages. Other Europeans re-exported by the silver screen included the Swede Greta Garbo, the German Marlene Dietrich, and the Pole, Pola Negri. American imports of the era included popular motoring, Walt Disney’s animated cartoons (1928), jazz, and popular dance music. Much of young Europe danced its way from war to war to the strains of ragtime, the Charleston, and the tango.

In the socio-economic sphere the modernization of European society surged ahead, but in highly irregular patterns. The demands of the war had given a strong stimulus to heavy industry and to a wide range of technological innovation. Yet the peace began amidst the widespread disruption of markets, trade, and credit. Despite the great potential for development, especially in new sectors such as oil and motorization, the industrialized countries faced the threat of post-war recession and mass unemployment, and of accompanying social protest.

The struggle for women’s rights was barely started, let alone won. In Great Britain, for example, Constance Gore-Booth (Countess Markiewicz, 1868–1927), who had once been condemned to death for her part in the Easter Rising, had the distinction of being both the first female British MP elected and the first female Irish Cabinet Minister.28 But the movement for women’s suffrage, which had been founded during the childhood of its most devoted activist, Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), did not achieve success in Britain until the year of her death. The pioneer of birth control, Marie Stopes (1880–1958), who opened the UK’s first birth-control clinic in 1921, was also a professional palaeontologist employed by Manchester University, [CONDOM]

The peasant societies of Eastern Europe were faced by the problems of rural overpopulation, by dwindling opportunities for migration, by a drastic fall in agricultural prices, and by the dearth of capital investment, both local and foreign. In all these matters the economic paralysis of Germany and the unnatural isolation of the Soviet Union caused untold disruption beyond their borders. No sooner had a measure of stability been restored than the whole of Europe was hit by the Great Depression.

The countries of East Central Europe, trapped between Germany and the USSR, faced very special difficulties. Whilst struggling to establish stable political regimes, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Baltic States were forced to carry the economic consequences of the collapse of the empires. Semi-industrialized but still largely agrarian in character, their infant economies started life under the multiple burdens of hyperinflation, post-war industrial recession, and rural distress. Łódź, for example, the largest textile city in the region, suffered a 75 per cent drop in production between 1918 and 1939, when its traditional Russian market was closed. Peasant societies were increasingly polarized by conflicts between conservative landowning interests and radical peasant parties, by the impositions of new government bureaucracies and foreign-based enterprises, and by class and ethnic protests. In this light, the great advances made in education and the elimination of illiteracy, in parcelling out of the large estates, and in urban development command much respect—not least because later regimes were to deny that any such progress had been made.

The greatest ever experiment in planned modernization took place from 1929 onwards in the Soviet Union. It was so radical and so ruthless that many analysts would maintain that this, and not the events of 1917, constitute the real Russian Revolution.29 It was made possible by the rise to supreme power of Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the CPSU since 1922.

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (1879–1953), alias ‘Koba’, alias ‘Stalin’, is the clearest example in history of a pathological criminal who rose to supreme power through the exercise of his criminal talents. In The Guinness Book of Records he holds the top place under ‘mass murder’. He was born in the mountain village of Didi-lilo, near Gori in Georgia, the son of a drunken father and of a devout, abandoned mother. Georgians say that he was an Ossetian. At all events, he was not a Russian, though he was sent to be educated in a Russian Orthodox seminary. He was expelled, but not before he had imbibed the paranoiac nationalism of a Russian Church which, in Georgia, was an alien creed. He drifted into revolutionary politics, in the seedy area where the political and the criminal undergrounds overlapped. He made his name in the Bolshevik Party in 1908, when he staged the most spectacular armed robbery in tsarist history, ambushing the Tiflis mail-coach and leaving the scene with a haul of gold. He was repeatedly arrested and exiled to Siberia, whence he repeatedly escaped. This circumstance created the suspicion, first voiced by Trotsky, his most jaundiced biographer, that he was an agent of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. He arrived in Petrograd early in 1917 after the latest of his escapes, and, with no qualifications in journalism or Marxism, assumed the editorship of Pravda. In the revolutionary years he was Lenin’s choice as Commissar for the Nationalities, and built up a circle of loyal accomplices, notably at Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad), who followed his fortunes thereafter. His most dangerous moment came in Poland in August 1920 when, as political commander of the South-west Front he had ignored orders to link up with Tukhachevsky and was held responsible by a Party tribunal for the ensuing disaster. As usual, he could not be nailed; but he never forgot it. (Seventeen years later, the death warrant of Tukhachevsky and of four other associates from 1920 was signed by three generals who had all served on Stalin’s Southwest front.)

Stalin became General Secretary of the Party during Lenin’s first illness, and he survived Lenin’s belated advice to have him removed. According to Trotsky, he poisoned Lenin to prevent further enquiries. Thereafter, with the Cheka and the Party Congresses in his practised hands, there was no stopping him. He proceeded with a masterful display of cunning and cynicism. He outmanoeuvred all his senior rivals, setting them up on policy issues which he coolly adopted for himself or used to discredit them. It took him five years to ruin Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, and seven to ruin Trotsky. He then set about killing them. He had no family life. He drove his second wife to suicide. He lived like a hermit in one room of the Kremlin, attended by his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, whose memoirs are a prime source. He slept all day and worked all night with his cronies, endlessly playing the gramophone and watching silent movies, and visiting his dacha for relaxation. He rarely emerged, and made few speeches. On his annual trip to Georgia he travelled in one of five identical trains, each of the others carrying a ‘double’ to lessen the risk of assassination. He need not have bothered. He lived out his natural term. Later, though he spoke no foreign language except Russian, he proved himself as skilful in diplomacy as in home tyranny and in war management. When he was finally struck down, he was the unchallenged master of a superpower.

In looking for superlatives to describe Stalin’s chief rival, an American officer in Petrograd had once called Trotsky ‘A four-kind son-of-a-bitch, but the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ’.30 Yet Stalin’s record was to make Trotsky’s achievements look like the small change of history. And Trotsky saw it coming: already in 1924 he was correctly predicting that ‘the gravedigger of the Party of the Revolution’ would take over:

The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them, by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the nepmen, by the kulaks, by the upstarts, by all the sneaks that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the revolution … He speaks their language, and knows how to lead them. Stalin will become the dictator of the USSR.31

As a manipulator of political power, Stalin has every claim to be judged the greatest man of the twentieth century. He once said, modestly, ‘Leaders come and go, but the People remain.’ In fact, under his guidance the people had to come and go and the Leader remained. The only person whose evil can be compared to his own was another small man with a different moustache, whom he never met, and who was not so successful.

Once Stalin was firmly in the saddle, the tempo of Soviet life began to whir. Lenin’s NEP had done much to restore social and economic equilibrium; but it did nothing to further communist ideals or to equip the Soviet Union for modern warfare. So, confident in his command of unlimited coercion, Stalin plunged into a breakneck programme which was designed to forge a first-class industrial and military power within a decade. Its ambitions were breathtaking; yet in terms of human life its destructiveness outdid any other disaster in European history, even the Second World War. Its apologists, who still thrive in distant universities, are apt to maintain that ‘omelettes can’t be made without breaking eggs’.33 But Stalin was breaking the people whose lives he was supposedly improving; and in the end the omelette proved inedible. There were six main interlocking elements: central planning, accelerated industrialization, rearmament, collectivized agriculture, ideological warfare, and political terror.

Stalinist planning methods exceeded anything previously attempted anywhere. The State Planning Commission, Gosplan, was empowered to draw up Five-Year Plans that determined every detail of every branch of economic activity—production, trade, services, prices, wages, costs. Every enterprise, and every worker, was given ‘norms’ that were to be fulfilled without discussion. Since the Soviet state was a monopoly employer, all workers became ‘slaves of the Plan’. Indeed, since the Party insisted on the ethos of ‘socialist emulation’, that is, forcing workers to outdo their norms in the manner of the legendary coalminer Alexei Stakhanov, over-fulfilment of the Plan was regularly demanded. The Five-Year Plans of 1928–32, 1933–7, and 1938–42 set unprecedented targets for economic growth and productivity of labour. Industrialization was to be achieved in exchange for a marked reduction in consumption. In practice, this meant ‘work harder, eat less’. Industrial growth rates were set at over 20 per cent per annum. Total crude industrial output rose astronomically: in 1928 the index stood at 111 per cent of the 1913 level, in 1933 at 281 per cent, in 1938 at 658 per cent. Absolute priority was given to heavy industry—steel, coal, power, and chemicals. Quantity reigned supreme over quality. Falsified statistics became the object of an official cult whose central temple stood in the Permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievement in Moscow.

Rearmament was not announced, though the military-industrial complex was evidently the chief beneficiary of the changes. A separate and secret military-industrial sector was supplied with its own favoured factories, personnel, and budget. (The very existence of that separate budget was denied until 1989.) From 1932 onwards the Red Army was able to invite its German partners to participate in training and manoeuvres using the most modern equipment, including tanks, war-planes, and parachute troops.

The collectivization of agriculture, postponed in 1917, was now put into effect with utter disregard for the human cost. The aim was to ensure that the state took full control of the food supply at a period when a large part of the rural labour force was being drafted into the new industrial towns. In the ten years 1929–38,94 per cent of the Soviet Union’s 26 million peasant holdings were amalgamated into a quarter of a million kolkhozy or state-owned ‘collective farms’. After 70 years of emancipation, the Russian peasant was returned to serfdom at the point of a gun. All who resisted were shot or deported. A fictional social enemy, the kulak or tight-fisted peasant, was invented in order to justify the murders. An estimated 15 million men, women, and children died. Agricultural production dropped by 30 per cent. Famine, both natural and artificial, stalked the land.

Stalinist ideology, as instituted in the 1930s, involved the adoption of numerous official fictions which were then enforced as the absolute and incontrovertible truth. These fictions had little to do with serious political philosophy, and took a radical turn away from Lenin’s internationalist Marxism. They included: the role of Stalin as ‘the best disciple’ of Lenin; the role of communists as the chosen leaders of the people; the role of the Great Russians as ‘elder brothers’ of the Soviet nationalities; the status of the Soviet Union as the crowning achievement of ‘all patriotic and progressive forces’; the function of the Constitution as a source of democratic power; the unity of the Soviet people and their love for the communist system; the ‘capitalist encirclement’ of the USSR; the equitable distribution of wealth; the joyous freedom of learning and art; the emancipation of women; the solidarity of workers and peasants; the justness of ‘the people’s wrath’ against their enemies. Many of these fictions were enshrined in Stalin’s Short Course (1939) on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the bible of the faithful. Soviet scholars, educators, and legislators were obliged to propagate them for fear of their lives; Western scholars were not.

The cult of Stalin’s personality knew no bounds. All the country’s foremost poets and artists were conscripted to the chorus:

Thou, bright sun of the nations,
The unsinking sun of our times,
And more than the Sun,
For the Sun has no wisdom …34

In religious matters, Stalinism followed the established atheist line. State education was militantly anti-religious. In the 1920s and 30s the Orthodox Church was mercilessly attacked, churches destroyed, and priests killed. Later, the emphasis shifted more towards manipulation: during the Second World War, Stalin would call for the defence of Holy Russia and reopen the churches. Mature Stalinism contained a strange symbiosis of state atheism and Orthodox patriotism.

The main instruments of coercion and terror—the Cheka (OGPU/NKVD/ KGB), the Gulag, or network of state concentration camps, and the dependent judiciary—had been refined during the early Bolshevik period. In the 1930s they were expanded to the point where the manpower of the security agencies rivalled that of the Red Army, and the camps contained up to 10 per cent of the population. By 1939 the Gulag was the largest employer in Europe. Its prisoner-employees, the zeks, who were systematically starved and overworked in arctic conditions, had an average life expectancy of one winter. Innocent victims were rounded up in their homes and villages; others were charged with imaginary offences of ‘sabotage’, ‘treason’, or ‘espionage’, and tortured into confession. The usual sentences consisted either of summary execution or of fixed periods of imprisonment or exile, such as 8, 12, or 25 years, from which very few could emerge alive. Show trials of the most prominent victims were staged for the benefit of publicity. They also served to mask the nature and scale of the main operations. Such was the paralysing fear that gripped the largest state in the world for three decades that most of the concrete information about the Terror was successfully suppressed. [VORKUTA]

VORKUTA

IF space in history books were allotted in proportion to human suffering, then Vorkuta would warrant one of the longest chapters. From 1932 until 1957, this mining town on the Pechora River, in Russia’s Arctic, stood at the centre of Europe’s most extensive complex of concentration camps. In Stalin’s ‘Gulag Archipelago’, the Vorkutlag ranked second only to Kolyma in north-eastern Siberia, whose entrance gates were surmounted by the slogan: ‘LABOUR IS A MATTER OF HONOUR, COURAGE, AND HEROISM.’ At the time of the zek rebellion in 1953, Vorkuta held some 300,000 souls. Over the years, more human beings perished there than at [AUSCHWITZ]; and they died slowly, in despair. But few history books remember them.1 There are many eye-witness reports from Vorkuta, several of them published in English;2 but few people have read them. There is even a detailed guidebook to over 2,000 ‘facilities’ of the Soviet Gulag written by a Jewish survivor in the 1970s. His account was barely noticed.3 In addition to the familiar categories of camps, prisons, and psikbol’nitsa or ‘psychiatric prisons’ [DEVIATIO], it contains a section on ‘death-camps’. These were installations like those at Paldiski Bay (Estonia), Otmutninsk (Russia), and Cholovka (Ukraine), where prisoners were forced to work without protection on tasks such as the manual cleaning of atomic-powered submarines or the underground mining of uranium. Death from radiation was only a matter of time.4 (See Appendix III, p. 1330.)

At the height of the Glasnost era, local people started digging in the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk in Belarus’. They knew that it sheltered the remains of men, women, and children killed during the Great Terror fifty years before. They uncovered several circular pits, each containing a mass grave for c.3,000 bodies. They could see that scores, if not hundreds more such pits lay under the pines. But in 1991 they were ordered to stop. They planted a cross by the roadside, and left the secrets of the forest intact.5

In 1989 the Russian ‘Memorial’ organization, which devotes itself to discovering the truth about Stalinist times, unearthed a pit at Chelyabinsk in the Urals dating from the 1930s. It contained 80,000 skeletons. Bullet holes in skulls told an unambiguous story. These were not victims who had been worked to death in the Gulag. ‘People were taken out of their flats’, said the local photographer, ‘and shot with their children at this place.’

One was entitled to ask; how many more such sites did the immensity of Russia conceal?

The three phases of the Stalinist Terror succeeded each other in a rising tide of brutality and irrationality. The preliminary terror was directed against carefully selected targets. Its victims were mainly second-rank figures—the ex-Menshevik managers of the pre-1929 Gosplan, internationalist Marxist historians, the Byelorussian intelligentsia, and the minor associates of major figures. Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, was warned that she wasn’t ‘irreplaceable’. The Peasant Terror or ‘anti-kulak drive’ mushroomed after 1932, as peasants resisted collectivization or slaughtered their livestock in protest. No clear definition of a kulak was available, though poorer peasants were urged to denounce their more prosperous neighbours. The Terror-Famine 1932–3 was a dual-purpose by-product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw, [HARVEST]

The Political Terror or ‘Purges’ began in earnest in December 1934 with the murder of S. M. Kirov, the Party leader in Leningrad. From that starting-point, it spread out in ever-widening circles until it engulfed the leadership of the CPSU, including officers of the Red Army and of OGPU itself, and eventually the entire population. Since every victim was required to denounce ten or twenty ‘accomplices’ and their families, it was only a matter of time before the numbers involved were being counted in thousands and, in the end, in millions. The initial purpose was to destroy all the surviving Bolsheviks and everything they stood for. But that was only a beginning. Participants in the XVIIth Party Congress of 1934, the ‘Congress of Victors’, meekly hailed Stalin’s triumph over the ‘opposition’, only to find themselves accused and decimated in turn. After the three main show trials of Zinoviev (1936), Pyatykov (1937), and Bukharin (1938), the sole Bolshevik leader left alive was Trotsky, who survived in his fortified Mexican refuge until 1940. But the full fury of the indiscriminate Yezovshchina, the Terror of N. I. Yezhov, Stalin’s chief hangman, was still to be unleashed. Such was the dynamic of the infernal machine that early in 1939 Stalin and Molotov were signing lists of several thousand named victims each morning, whilst every regional branch of the security police was scooping up far greater quotas of random civilian innocents. The Terror did not take a pause until at the XVIIIth Congress of March 1939 Stalin coolly denounced Yezhov as a degenerate; and it did not stop completely until the Vozhd’ himself expired.

For many decades, opinion in the outside world was unable to comprehend the facts. Prior to the documentary writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s, and the publication of painstaking research by a few courageous scholars, most people in the West thought that stories of the Terror were much exaggerated. Most sovietologists sought to minimize it. The Soviet authorities did not admit to it until the late 1980s. Stalin, unlike Hitler, did not pay the price of public exposure. The total tally of his victims can never be exactly calculated; but it is unlikely to be much below 50 millions.35

Without doubt, Stalinism was the child of Leninism; on the other hand, it acquired many specific characteristics which were not important in Lenin’s lifetime. Trotsky classified the change as the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’, and it greatly complicates all debates on Soviet and Communist history. The central fact to remember is that Stalinism was the mode within which Soviet Communism stabilized, and which provided the foundations of Soviet life in the USSR until 1991. For this reason it is Stalin’s version of Communism, not Lenin’s, that must be addressed whenever any general assessment of the system is to be made. (See Appendix III, p. 1321.)

HARVEST

AQUARTER of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying’ in ‘a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants’, ‘like one vast Belsen’. ‘The rest, in various stages of debilitation’, ‘had no strength to bury their families or neighbours’. ‘(As at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.’

In 1932–3, as part of the Soviet collectivization campaign, the Stalinist regime had unleashed a man-made terror-famine in Ukraine and the neighbouring Cossack lands. All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the ‘class enemy’. The death toll reached some 7 million.2 The world has seen many terrible famines, many aggravated by civil war. But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.

The writer Vasily Grossman would later describe the children:

Have you ever seen the newspaper photos of the children in German camps? They were just like that; their heads like heavy balls on thin little necks, like storks … and the whole skeleton was stretched over with skin like yellow gauze … And by spring, they no longer had faces at all. Instead they had birdlike heads with beaks—or frog heads—thin white lips—and some of them resembled fish, mouths open … These were Soviet children and those who were putting them to death were Soviet people.3

The outside world was not informed. In the USA a Pulitzer Prize was given to the New York Times correspondent, who spoke freely in private of millions of deaths but published nothing.4 In England, George Orwell complained that [the terror-famine] had ‘escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles’.5

The historian who eventually brought convincing proof to the event struggled to convey its enormity. He wrote a book of 412 pages, with about 500 words per page, then stated in the Preface: ‘about twenty human lives were lost, not for every word, but for every letter in this book.’

As it happened, 1929, the year of Stalin’s revolution in the USSR, was also the year of crisis in the capitalist world. Historians have wondered whether the two events were not somehow linked, perhaps through the rhythms of post-war economic adjustment. At all events, on 24 October 1929, ‘Black Thursday’, the prices of shares on the New York Stock Exchange suddenly collapsed. Panic set in; banks recalled their loans; and, before anyone could control it, the Great Depression was rolling round all the countries with whom the USA did business. It was a backhanded compliment to the extent of American influence in the world economy. In the USA itself, the sudden end to the easy credit of the ‘roaring twenties’ caused a massive wave of bankruptcies, which in turn caused an accompanying wave of unemployment. At the height of the ‘Slump’, in 1933, one-third of the American labour force was out of work; the steel industry was working at 10 per cent of its capacity; food stocks were destroyed because hungry workers could not afford to buy them; and ‘poverty raged amidst plenty’.

In Europe, which was struggling to pay its war debts, often from dwindling reserves of gold, the effects of the Slump were felt with little more than a year’s delay. In May 1931 Austria’s leading bank, the Kreditanstalt of Vienna declared itself insolvent; in June the USA had to accept a moratorium on all debts owed by European governments; and in September the Bank of England was forced to take sterling off the gold standard. Confidence, the corner-stone of capitalism, was breaking down. Within a couple of years business had lost its way, and 30 million workers had lost their jobs. By 1934 the USA had a new, dynamic President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal programme of government-funded works was to haul America back to prosperity. ‘The only thing we have to fear,’ he said, ‘is fear itself’. But Europe had no Roosevelt, and no New Deal. Recovery was as slow as the Slump was sudden.

The effects of the Depression were psychological and political as well as purely economic. Everyone from banker to bellboy was perplexed. The Great War had brought death and destruction; but it had also brought a purpose to life and full employment. Peace appeared to bring neither. There were men who said that life amidst the danger and comradeship of the trenches was preferable to life on the dole. Others said that Spengler’s gloomy broodings about Europe returning to a Dark Age were correct. The anxieties brimmed over into violence on the streets: left-wing battle squads pitched into right-wing gangs in many European cities. It was the season for charlatans, adventurers, and extremists, [MOARTE]

In Germany, the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party was unquestionably connected to the Great Depression. But the connection was not a simple one. The Nazis did not march on Berlin at the head of an army of unemployed; there was no ‘seizure of power’. Hitler did not have to topple a weakened government as the Bolsheviks did, nor threaten the head of state, like Mussolini. He came to power through participation in Germany’s democratic process, and at the invitation of the lawful authorities. It is beside the point that he and his ruffians were anything but democrats or constitutionalists at heart.

German politics were specially vulnerable to the Depression, whose effects were poured into a cup of insecurity already full to the brim. The rancour of defeat still lingered. The street battles of extreme left and extreme right were ever-present. Democratie leaders were mercilessly squeezed both by the Allied Powers and by voters’ fears. The German economy had been tortured for a decade, first by reparations, then by hyperinflation. By the end of the 1920s it was exceptionally dependent on American loans. When Stresemann died in October 1929, several days before the Crash, it took no genius to forecast turbulence ahead. None the less, the turbulence which ensued in 1930–3 was accompanied by several unusual and unforeseen circumstances.

In those years, the Nazis took part for the first time in a rash of five parliamentary elections. On three successive occasions they increased both their popular vote and their list of elected deputies. On the fourth occasion, in November 1932, their support declined; and they never won an outright majority. But in a very short time they had established themselves as the largest single party in the Reichstag. What is more, the rising tide of street violence, to which Nazi gangs greatly contributed, took place in a much-changed international setting. In the early 1920s, Communist-led strikes and demonstrations were overshadowed by the apparently limitless power of the Entente. German industrialists and German democrats knew exactly whom to call in if the Communists ever tried to take over. But in the early 1930s Britain, France, and the USA were in no better fettle than Germany, and the Soviet Union was seen to be modernizing with remarkable energy. With the communists claiming almost as many votes as the Nazis, Germany’s conservative leaders had much-reduced means to keep the red menace at bay.

Somewhere in German political culture there also lurked the feeling that general elections could be supplemented by a national plebiscite on specific controversial issues. Given the chance, Hitler would not miss it. In the chaos of crumbling Cabinets, one of the transient ministers invoked emergency presidential powers. In September 1930, in the interests of democracy, one minority Chancellor persuaded President Hindenburg to activate Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Henceforth, the German president could ‘use armed force to restore order and safety and suspend ‘the fundamental rights of the citizen’. It was an instrument which others could exploit to overthrow democracy.

The sequence of events was crucial. The storm raged for three years: deepening recession, growing cohorts of unemployed, communists fighting anti-communists on the streets, indecisive elections, and endless Cabinet crises. In June 1932 another minority Chancellor, Franz von Papen, gained the support of the Reichstag by working with the Nazi deputies. Six months later, he cooked up another combination: he decided to make Hitler Chancellor, with himself as Vice-Chancellor, and to put three Nazi ministers out of twelve into the Cabinet. President Hindenburg, and the German right in general, thought it a clever idea: they thought they were using Hitler against the Communists. In fact, when Hitler accepted the invitation, suitably dressed in top hat and tails, it was Hitler who was using them.

Less than a month later, and a week before the next elections, a mysterious fire demolished the Reichstag building. The Nazis proclaimed a Red plot, arrested communist leaders, won 44 per cent of the popular vote in the frenzied, anti-communist atmosphere, then calmly passed an Enabling Act granting the Chancellor dictatorial powers for four years. In October Hitler organized a plebiscite to approve Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and from the Disarmament Conference. He received 96.3 per cent support. In August 1934, following the President’s death, he called another plebiscite to approve his own elevation to the new party-state position of’Führer and Reich Chancellor’ with full emergency powers. This time he received 90 per cent support. Hitler was in control. In the final path to the summit, he did not breach the Constitution once. The personal responsibility for Hitler’s success is easily pinpointed. Four years after the event, Hitler received his former partner, von Papen, at Berchtesgaden. Hitler said: ‘By making me Chancellor, Herr von Papen, you made possible the National Socialist Revolution in Germany. I shall never forget it.’ Von Papen replied, ‘Certainly, my Führer.’