Europe: A History (187 page)
Practically every word in the declaration was false or misleading. But it made no difference. As Lenin and Trotsky had correctly calculated, there was no one in the capital with the will to oppose them. The government ministers still huddled in
the Winter Palace, waiting for a rescue that would never come. The imperial army was nowhere in sight. At 9 p.m. Bolshevik sailors on the cruiser
Aurora
fired one blank salvo at the Winter Palace. Some 30 shells were fired from the Peter and Paul Fortress, of which two found their target around 11 p.m. Most of the government guards just left; the mob moved in when they saw that no resistance was offered. The ‘storming of the Winter Palace’ was a later fiction. At 2.30 a.m. the Ministers surrendered. That was the moment when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. They did not intend to stop there. At a brief appearance that morning at the Congress of Soviets, Lenin hailed ‘the worldwide socialist revolution’. It was nothing of the sort. It was not even a rising of the Petrograd socialists. In the original draft of the declaration of the 26th, Lenin had ended with the slogan ‘Long Live Socialism’. But he crossed it out.
This is not to deny that Lenin and his Bolsheviks were revolutionaries of a most thoroughgoing kind. Once in power, they set about tearing up the old Russia root and branch. Under Lenin in 1917–21, and even more under Stalin from 1929 onwards, they reconstructed almost every aspect of Russian life. But they did it by coercion from above; and in defiance of Russia’s mainstream radical and socialist movements. Their methods had little in common with the spontaneous revolution from below which filled their textbooks.
Bolshevik actions in the immediate aftermath of the coup were summarized in the three famous ‘decrees’ which Lenin submitted to the Congress of Soviets in the evening of 26 October. None of them was quite what they purported to be. The Decree on Peace was, in effect, a private appeal to the Powers to accept a three-month armistice. The Decree on Land ordered the transfer of private landed property to the village communes. It had been lifted from the programme of the SRs, and was entirely inconsistent with the previous (and later) Bolshevik line, which supported the transfer of land to state ownership. The Decree on Government, which created the
Sovnarkom
or ‘Council of People’s Commissars’, chaired by Lenin, was proclaimed subject to approval by the future Constituent Assembly. On each and every score, Lenin was indulging in sophistry. The international peace, which was realized by the December armistice and by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany on 3 March 1918, was used for launching all-out war on the Bolsheviks’ opponents at home. The granting of land to the peasants was a well-timed tactic that calmed the rage of Russia’s most numerous class at a critical moment. It would soon be followed by an all-out ‘War on the Village’, when the Bolsheviks enforced their state monopoly over prices and the food trade.
The gesture to the Constituent Assembly was pure opportunism. The Bolsheviks let the country-wide elections for the Assembly proceed, as envisaged by the Provisional Government. The elections duly took place in the second half of November; and Bolshevik candidates polled 24 per cent of the vote. In this, the one and only free election in Soviet history, a clear victory went to the SRs, who took 40.4 per cent. But no such detail was going to deter Lenin. He allowed the Constituent Assembly to meet on 5 January 1918, then simply closed it down.
Between 3 and 4 a.m. on the 6th, the Chairman of the Assembly and leader of the SRs, Victor Chernov (1873–1952), was trying to pass a law for the abolition of landed property when he was tapped on the shoulder by a sailor, the commander of the Bolshevik Guard. ‘I have been instructed to inform you that all those present should leave the Assembly Hall,’ the sailor announced, ‘because the guard is tired.’
7
From that point on, Russia was condemned to a conflict in which more Russians would die than on the Eastern Front (see Appendix III, p. 1320).
The final year of the Great War, 1918, opened with the Central Powers planning a war-winning offensive, and ended with them in full retreat. The Eastern Front had been closed down; and the mountainous Italian Front was deadlocked. So everything turned on the Western Front. From March to July, the German command poured in their remaining reserves. They were not unsuccessful. On the British sector, they pushed forward some 35 miles south of Amiens. In the centre, they advanced once more to the Marne. But they broke neither the line nor the will of the Allies. In July, at the second Battle of the Marne, Pétain’s ‘elastic defence’ showed that the attackers did not possess the critical mass of offensive superiority. Then, on 8 August, on ‘the Black Friday of the German Army’, 456 British tanks surged through the line, winning back 8 of the lost 35 miles in one day. One week later, the German and Austrian emperors were told by their generals that the war must be ended. In September and October, in the eastern sector, American strength could at last make itself felt, first at Saint-Mihiel, where the largest salient of the Front was eliminated, and later in the Argonne. The German line never broke; the Germans did not feel defeated. But on 3 October they were sufficiently hard pressed to convey the offer of an armistice to President Wilson, [
HATRED
]
October 1918 was a remarkable month. The smell of peace did more to destroy the Central Powers than four years of fighting had done. The news from the minor fronts was bad. An Allied attack in Macedonia had succeeded, and Bulgaria had just collapsed. In Palestine, the British had finally achieved a competent battlefield victory at Megiddo near Mt Carmel; and the Ottomans were suing for peace. In Italy, after a last abortive push on the Piave, the Austro-Hungarian army had ceased to struggle. Everyone in Europe knew that the advantage lay with the
Entente
, that peace feelers were out, that further resistance would only prolong the agony. Whenever they could, the troops took matters into their own hands. The idle German and Austrian garrisons in the East were riddled with
Soldaten-r’äte
mimicking the Russian soviets. The Austrian army fell apart through the desertion of Czech, Polish, Croat, Hungarian, and indeed German regiments, who simply decided to go home. Everyone was claiming their national independence. On 20 October, when a German-Austrian assembly was convened in Vienna to prepare an Austrian Republic, the game was obviously up. The Emperor Charles, and 500 years of Habsburg rule, became irrelevant overnight Proclamations of independence were issued by several hitherto unknown states: Czechoslovakia (28 October), Yugoslavia (29 October), Hungary (1 November), and, in Lemberg, the West Ukrainian Republic (1 November). [
ŁYCZAKóW
]
HATRED
O
N
3 August 1918 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, preached at St Margaret’s, Westminster, before King and Queen, ministers, and both Houses of Parliament. Many in the congregation would have known that the Archbishop had repeatedly protested in private about the morality of the Government’s wartime policy. Many must have been discomfited by what he now said in public. ‘There is a form of wrath which may degenerate into a poisonous hatred running right counter to the principles of a Christian’s creed,’ he said in his soft Scot’s voice. ‘As pledged disciples of a living Lord and Master who died upon the Cross for all who hated Him, we have to see to it that the spirit of hate finds no nurture in our hearts.’
1
At his side, the Archbishop’s chaplain and his later biographer, was Revd George Bell (1883–1958), the future Bishop of Chichester. Given the lead, the chaplain was to blossom into Protestant Europe’s leading exponent of ‘Christian Internationalism’.
2
Bishop Bell was an unlikely internationalist. He spoke no word of a foreign language. But he possessed a firm command of Christian principles, and the courage to express them. In the post-war years he came under the close influence of Archbishop Nathan Soderblom of Uppsala, a Swedish Lutheran who had once been professor at Leipzig. In 1919 he attended the Wassenaar conference in Holland, which discussed war guilt; and in 1925, he helped organize the Stockholm conference on Christian ‘Life and Work’, which sowed the seed of the later World Council of Churches.
In the early 1930s, as chairman of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work (UCCLW), Bell was faced with the problem of German churches under pressure from the Nazis. In 1935 he insisted on a public resolution of protest; wrote a strong letter to Reichbishop Muller on behalf of the ‘Confessing Church’, and received an indignant von Ribbentrop in person at Chichester. Bell’s meetings of the UCCLW at Novi Sad (1933) and Fano (1934) paved the way for the Oxford conference of 1937, which united several ecumenical groups and, recognizing the totalitarian challenge of both Nazism and Communism, saw the start of the Oxford Group for Moral Rearmament.
As war loomed, Bishop Bell fearlessly spoke his mind. In June 1939, at Oxford University, he spoke on ‘God above Nation’, denouncing the ‘flagrant’ insistence on state sovereignty and ‘the havoc wrought by collective egoism’.
3
In November, he published ‘The Church’s Function in Wartime’:
The Church fails to be the Church if it forgets that its members in one nation have a fellowship with its members in every nation. [The Church] must… condemn the infliction of reprisals or the bombing by the military forces of its own nation. It should set itself against the propaganda of lies and hatred. It should be ready to encourage a resumption of friendly relations with the enemy nation. It should set its face against any war of extermination or enslavement, and any measures directly aimed at destroying the morale of a population …
4
These principles were not popular, not least with HM Government or with his diocesan congregation. But they were followed up by speeches in the House of Lords against the Internment of Aliens (August 1940), against ‘obliteration bombing’ (9 February 1944), and against the use of the atomic bomb, [
ALTMARKT
] On the Allied Bombing Offensive, he used no euphemisms:
It is no longer defence, military and industrial objectives which are the aim of the bombers. But the whole town … is blotted out. How can there be discrimination in such matters when civilians, monuments, military and industrial objects all together form the target?
5
In July 1942 the Bishop undertook a dangerous flight to Stockholm to meet members of the Christian resistance from Germany. His appeal to the allied powers on their behalf was to be rejected. But it was to George Bell that Pastor Bonhoffer would smuggle out his last message from his death-cell in a Nazi prison. ‘Tell him’, it read, ‘that… with him I believe in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood, and that our victory is certain.’
6
‘Christian Europe’ was always uppermost in Bell’s thoughts on the future. Of the authors of the bombing offensive he had asked: ‘Are they [alive] to the harvest they are laying up for the future relationships of the peoples of Europe?’ In a post-war broadcast to Germany in 1945, he appealed to ‘the spirit of Europe’:
Today, one of the principal goals … should be the recovery of Christendom. We want to see Europe as Christendom … No nation, no church, no individual is guiltless. Without repentance, and without forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.
7
These ideas held the foreground in the early phase of the postwar European movement before it was hijacked by economists (see pp. 1064–6). George Bell played a proper and prominent part in the founding of the World Council of Churches, which took place in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 22 August 1948—almost exactly thirty years after Archbishop Davidson’s Westminster sermon.
ŁYCZAKóW
O
N
24 November 1918 three young people were buried in a special military sector of the Catholic cemetery at Łyczaków in the suburbs of Lwów (L’viv). Zygmunt Menzel, aged 23, Jozef Kurdyban, aged 19, and Felicja Sulimirska, aged 21, had all been killed in fighting between Poles and Ukrainians for the former capital of Austrian Galicia. It was the first of several thousand burials which brought the bodies of the Polish dead from temporary graves in parks and squares, and the starting-point for the ‘Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów’, the
Campo Santo
of the ‘Young Eagles’.
1
The grave of the youngest would be that of Antoś; Petrykiewicz, killed in action, aged 13.
Like any of the great urban cemeteries of nineteenth-century Europe, Łyczaków was already a remarkable historical and artistic repository. Like Père Lachaise in Paris or Highgate in London, its sylvan setting guarded the ornate mausolea of the families who had enlivened the growth of a major city. Two separate plots contained rows of simple crosses marking the graves of soldiers from the Polish risings of 1830 and 1863.
The military cemetery at Łyczaków had its counterparts in hundreds of locations after the Great War, especially in Belgium and northern France. Constructed in 1919–34, in the period of Polish rule, it was dominated by an elevated
arc de triomphe
flanked by stone lions and a semicircular colonnade. The central arch was surmounted by the inscription
MORTUI SUNT UT UBERI VIVAMUS
(they died so that we might live free); the lions held shields carrying the city’s motto,
SEMPER FIDELIS
(always faithful) and
TOBIE POLSKO
(To Thee, Poland). Behind the graves stood an arcaded crypt flanked by steps leading to a rotunda chapel. The ensemble was decorated by evergreen shrubbery and lit by bronze lampstands. Individual monuments were raised in memory of the Posnanian volunteers, the French infantry, and American pilots who lost their lives defending the city against the Bolsheviks in 1919–20.
DOUAUMONT
] [
LANGEMARCK
]
If the origins of Łyczaków were unremarkable, its fate was not. In the years of Soviet annexation after 1945, the cemetery was vandalized and devastated. The crosses were uprooted, the inscriptions profaned, the monuments defaced, the chapel turned into a stonemason’s workshop. Guarded by fierce dogs, the overgrown site could only be visited at the risk of arrest. Its decline was documented in secret; visitors were not supposed to look beyond the vast Soviet War Memorial built alongside. Restoration work, at the request of the Warsaw government, did not begin until 1989.
In Western Europe, existing cemeteries generally survived the Second World War intact. Yet all over Eastern Europe, German, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian cemeteries fell under the Communist campaign of oblivion. They were an obstacle to the rewriting of history. In the
struggles of 1918–19, the defeated Ukrainians suffered similar casualties to those of their Polish foes. Yet the Ukrainian military cemetery in Lwów was honoured and tended throughout the years of Polish rule. Under Soviet rule, it was obliterated.
In 1991, as the chief metropolis of western Ukraine, L’viv became the second city of the independent Ukrainian Republic. The defeated dreams of 1918–19 were revived. The hopes of the young Poles buried at Łyczaków were finally dashed, [
ELSASS
]
