A History of the World (75 page)

Had this been all, Zimmermann’s impact on his century would already have been remarkable. But this was not all. As foreign secretary, he was also privy to secret German plans to bring Czarist Russia, already reeling from military defeat, to total collapse. Once Russia
sued for peace, the German armies in the east would be free to reinforce their comrades on the Western Front: this was another side of the ‘one last throw’ of German policy that Zimmermann lived for. Yet its outcome was perhaps even more disastrous than the botched Mexican plot against America.

During the early spring of 1917 the Swiss town of Zurich was seething with people displaced by war – Italians, French, Germans, Irish, Russians. They included famous composers like Busoni, writers such as James Joyce, Stefan Zweig and Romain Rolland, and a modest platoon of professional agitators and revolutionaries. One of these, from a family of minor nobility, was a quiet-looking man who lived with his wife and a female assistant and spent much of his time reading in public libraries or going for long walks in the Swiss forests and mountains. He had never had a job and, apart from a few months in 1905, had been living outside Russia for seventeen years. During that time he had spent most of his energy on ferocious political arguments with a wide range of left-wing and liberal thinkers. He avoided classical music because it made him feel soft and sentimental; he had little use for literature; and his writing style was leaden. He had adopted the revolutionary name Vladimir Ilich Lenin.

Like the other Communist leaders, Lenin was taken by surprise when the February Revolution erupted in St Petersburg (then known as Petrograd). The war had been disastrous for the Czar and his regime. German armies had made mincemeat of the under-equipped, if huge, Russian forces. Terrible suffering by ordinary soldiers was matched by increasingly dangerous shortages of food, including bread, in the cities. Nicholas II had sacked most of his competent ministers, lost the loyalty of many of his officers, and had rejected out of hand any suggestions for reform. Lenin, though he had thought that with the war would come some kind of crisis, had worried that he would not see an actual revolution in his lifetime. So when the news was brought to him by a young Polish neighbour that four regiments of the Petrograd garrison had joined striking workers and protesting women and provoked a full-scale uprising, Lenin was delighted – but astonished and anxious too.

He had to get back. This was the moment he had spent his life waiting for, and here he was, stuck, thousands of miles away and with
a war going on in between. Lenin had strengthened his grip on the ‘majority’, or Bolshevik, group of the Russian Communists by insisting that good Marxists must not take sides in a capitalists’ war. Other socialists, in Germany, France, Britain, and indeed Russia, had put aside their hostility to their governments and had been swept along by patriotic feeling. For Lenin, a war in which the rich sent the poor to fight one another was disgusting. A plague on all their houses – as a Russian, he would be pleased to see Russia lose.

The only advantage of war, he thought, was that it might so shake the ‘bourgeois’ countries and Czarist Russia that they would come tumbling down, leading to a real war, an uprising of workers against owners. Now that seemed to be happening. But as the revolution swept ahead in Russia, it was not Lenin who was leading it, but unknown voices in the Petrograd workers’ soviet along with a broad coalition of liberal reformers and moderate socialists who had formed a provisional government. Despite the chaos and a breakdown of law and order in parts of Petrograd, the two groups seemed to be working relatively harmoniously together. In London, Paris and Washington there was widespread pleasure that the Czar had abdicated and a feeling that a new government would strengthen, not weaken, the Russians’ appetite to keep fighting.

Zimmermann, the Kaiser and the German high command were worried about exactly that. They wanted a fast and preferably complete collapse in Russia. So, for rather different reasons, did Lenin. Would it not suit Berlin to help get Lenin back to Petrograd? The Russian revolutionary Maxim Litvinov and the British Conservative Winston Churchill spoke in similar terms. Litvinov said the Germans needed to eliminate the Russian army from the scene before the Americans arrived: ‘Objectively we played the part of a bacillus introduced in the East,’ he said later. Churchill commented that the Germans (with friend Zimmermann to the fore) had with a sense of awe ‘turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.’ James Joyce, when he heard the news about his Zurich neighbour, compared it to a German Trojan Horse. Everyone involved understood what was going on; one German general compared Lenin to poison gas.
⁴²

The ‘sealed truck’ was in fact an ordinary German train whose
carriages were marked on the outside in such a way as to avoid customs and keep up the pretence that the dangerous Russian revolutionary had never set foot on German soil. With the revolutionaries ensconced in their second-class carriages enjoying good German food, and having insisted smoking could only be done in the lavatories, Lenin and his helpers rattled and wrote their way across Germany and through neutral Sweden to Petrograd’s Finland railway station. Zimmermann’s foreign office and Ludendorff’s high command were so keen to get Lenin into Russia that, had Sweden blocked him, they would have sent him through the German front lines.

He did not disappoint them. On the train he had written down his essential arguments. They included no cooperation with the Provisional Government, an immediate demand for peace with Germany on any terms, and power to be taken by the soviets, the committees of workers and soldiers – led, of course, by himself and the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the Germans had helped fund Lenin’s revolutionaries as well as transporting them, something the cheering crowd at the station could not have known. The bacillus had been delivered.

Up to then, the Communist faction in the Russian capital had been seriously divided. Many orthodox Marxists believed, following the philosopher, that proper revolution could only come about after a bourgeois, liberal era – that you could not simply leap from an underdeveloped peasant economy into a socialist one. So their job would be to wait, educate and agitate, while the moderates got on with the job of holding Russia together. They were aghast at Lenin’s uncompromising message, laced as it was with torrents of satire and abuse.

Russia was certainly at boiling point, and Lenin’s readiness to provoke civil war in no way alarmed the desperate workers and soldiers to whom he appealed. As the arguments raged, alongside demonstrations, marches and late-night meetings, the Provisional Government pledged to carry on the war with Germany. Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist leader (whose father had been Lenin’s schoolteacher), emerged as the man who could meld the Petrograd soviet and the government together. He became prime minister, tried to rally the troops, and declared Russia a republic with himself as president. But Kerensky, for all his rhetoric and energy, was no more able to direct the Russian armies to victory than the Czar had been. For the troops had given up. They would fight no longer. The Bolsheviks, now
fully under Lenin’s direction, and his spell, chose their moment and struck. The October Revolution, promising bread and peace, was swiftly followed by the peace treaty the Germans had required; and by something close to a group dictatorship directed by Lenin; and then by civil war, famine and catastrophe.

In a fair court of history, Arthur Zimmermann would be acquitted of responsibility for these terrible events. Of direct responsibility, anyway. Though a key player, he was only one of the German clique that sent Lenin to Russia – Kaiser Wilhelm signed off the idea, and the military leader Ludendorff was also involved. Nor can we be sure that Lenin would not have found another way home, though it is hard to see how; or know what would have happened in Petrograd had Lenin never arrived, or had he been delayed during those crucial months of mid-1917. It is possible that others would have orchestrated the overthrow of the Provisional Government, and that Russia would have anyway fallen into dictatorship and civil war. On these grounds, the Scottish legal verdict of ‘not proven’ would surely have been handed down.

And yet . . . Lenin was a very rare, self-certain, charismatic, frightening and narrowly focused leader, much more impressive than his rivals. He scared, out-argued, bullied, out-organized and out-thought lesser revolutionaries, always pushing things towards the extreme, always knocking compromise aside; and never flinching at the terrible cost in blood and suffering that his politics inflicted. He was another Robespierre, a man with ice in his blood; utterly convinced that some kind of human paradise was in the offing, and that any means justified getting there. With his tight little system he called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, his secret police and his purging of those who dared disagree, Lenin started what Stalin finished. Both, of course, employed many hard-working, zealous state bureaucrats with an eye to the next promotion, affable men who liked a drink and just wanted to belong. Arthur Zimmermann, one suspects, would have fitted in rather well.

The Best and Worst of Centuries

Two men are sitting in a Russian prison during the Stalin Terror. One has just been tortured. The other is awaiting his turn. They are arguing about history. Aleksey holds out no hope for humanity. He says: ‘Man is simply man, and there’s nothing that can be done with him. There is no evolution. There is one very simple law, the law of the conservation of violence. It’s as simple as the law of the conservation of energy. Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. It does not disappear or diminish; it can only change shape.’

The other man, Ivan, disagrees. For him, ‘human history is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom’. Aleksey, who will soon be dead, mocks Ivan. There is no history. It is just ‘grinding water with a pestle and mortar . . . the humanity in humanity does not increase. What history of humanity can there be if man’s goodness always stands still?’
¹
The argument takes place towards the end of an angry novel,
Everything Flows
, by the Russian writer Vasily Grossman. He was writing it in the early 1960s, looking back at life under Stalin, the second most lethal mass killer of modern times. (The first is Mao, the third, Hitler.) His argument, however, was about mankind, not simply Russia. The twentieth century made it the most important argument of all. Do we learn? Do we become better? Does the violence stop or does it get greater, the more of us there are?

It was a century of a great apparent paradox. The killing
was
greater than ever. In raw numbers it outstripped even the Mongols, all the plague-armed catastrophes of the European invasion of the Americas, and all earlier wars. This killing happened because leaders arose promising to radically improve humankind, or part of humankind, and were able to exercise near-total power. The ‘bloodiest century in history’ has become a cliché of history. Yet it is challenged by, among others, the scientist Steven Pinker, who points out that the terrifyingly
large numbers of deaths are partly accounted for by the vastly greater number of people alive: you can’t kill people who are not there. If the blood-count is adjusted for population, then modern times do not look quite as bad. The Mongol Conquests (already described), the very violent revolt in eighth-century China, the conquests of Tamerlane, the fall of ancient Rome and the final fall of the Ming dynasty – all killed proportionally more than did the Second World War.
²

Furthermore, our knowledge of recent violence, photographed, totted up, filmed and kept for us in diaries, memoirs and speeches, is more detailed and more vivid than our knowledge of the violence of, say, sixteenth-century Africa or medieval French villages, or the empires of early Korea. This ‘historical myopia’, Pinker argues, encourages us to view the past far too leniently and our recent history too bleakly. For specific historical reasons, unlikely to be repeated, the twentieth century saw a war of annihilation between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia which, having spread to much of the rest of the world, was ended by the use of nuclear weapons.

Of itself that hardly means that people have become more violent or more wicked. In fact, Pinker claims, when one includes small wars, domestic violence, violence against children and the old, cruelty to animals, religious sacrifices, slavery and violent crime, people are actually becoming less violent and ‘better’. This is so even in Africa, which has been particularly plagued by wars in recent times. Societies with a rule of law, in which women have more authority, and which are bound together by international treaties (and kept from huge wars by nuclear weaponry), are producing gentler ways of living. Backing up Pinker, the US researcher Matthew White, who introduced the word ‘atrocitology’ to explain his ranking of lethal events, points out that during the twentieth century more than 95 per cent of all deaths were from natural causes.

This is a crucial point, which should be underlined from the start. The vast majority of us live most of our lives in what I have called ‘the lulls’, those long periods of quiet social stability. Then we die of diseases of old age. Better medicine and food, cleaner water and more effective policing have brought a huge rise in lifespans, as well as a huge (and unsustainable) rise in human numbers; so the lulls have gone on for longer. To take just one example: without that discovery by Fritz Haber in 1919 of how to fix nitrogen to produce man-made
fertilizer, it is said, two billion people now alive would not be alive.
³
And in some countries that have suffered hideous famine – China being the clearest example – the twenty-first century has seen an explosion of material wealth and opportunity. Far more people have lived better, more peaceful lives in the past century than ever before. Alongside the slaughter of twentieth-century industrial wars and the threat of nuclear war, we have to remember the good times brought to hundreds of millions of people who have experienced peace and plenty on a scale that has no historical precedent, not even during the ‘Roman Peace’ of the early empire. So, the best of times, too.