Spectre of Europe - An Alternative Paris Commune Timeline

[Reydan]

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty Three: The Culture Pope and the Artistry of Dissent - Inside the Union of Europe

"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality"
First line of the Unconscious Manifesto, 1926.

The pulling down of the Vendomme Column, the monument to victory at Austerlitz, was a key moment in 1871, as symbolic as storming the Bastille in 1789​

When the Unconscious Manifesto appeared on the Parisian Art Scene in the season of 1926 it proved one of the most troubling, chaotic, divisive moments in Art History. The brainchild of two men, Andre Breton and Alfred Jarry, and one woman, Sonia Stern, it was an ardent rejection of an art-scene that had become increasingly derided as sterile and politically-subservient.

Art had been at the very heart of the Paris Commune since 1871. Gustave Courbet was one of the leading lights of realism, whose paintings of poor peasants and simple subjects in unflinching verisimilitude had earned him the ire of the established art world and made him the doyen of the counter-culture of the Second Empire. In 1871 he had brought together a group of some four hundred artists in Paris, during the height of the Commune, to set out an artistic vision of the socialist future at hand. No more salons, prizes, commissions, or codified and restricted "schools". Art was, like the masses, to be liberated in the new dawn of civilization.

And, in the 1880s and 1890s, it seemed that Courbet and his group would be proved right. A flourishing of artistic endeavor, from Impressionism to Communism [a less well-known group painting style], swept throughout France. The Communal Government remained remarkably open to the idea of allowing the arts to flourish, with first Courbet and then a series of important artists given free-hand in distributing the often ample funds provided by the central government and local communes. Yet the death of the patronage system, as many rich families fled first France and then the expanding socialist territories of Europe, meant that the government stipends were often the only secure source of income for aspiring artists. This led to charges the the Government was directing art through the funds, channeling support to those works that glorified the regime or spoke to the social realist style that ardent socialists favoured most.

Siege of Marseilles, 1903 by Eduard Lavalles - one of the works of art criticized by Alfred Kerr as sterile and politically subservient. ​

This stood in stark contrast to the art scene outside of the Union. In truth the new Exodism sweeping through the non-socialist art world was as much a product of refugees from Russia as from those leaving the Union of Europe, but from 1919 onwards the all-embracing forms of Exodism found particular expression in Berlin, in Prague, and in Edinburgh. An attempt to embrace the modernity of the new century whilst still echoing traditional and conservative national themes, Exodism embraced everything from furniture to sculpture, painting to interior design. Notable instances, for example, were Charles Rennie Mackintosh's medieval-inspired furniture and Gustave Klimt's richly gold-encrusted 'Byzantine Series' of murals in Bratislava. A rich and inspiring vein, it left many art critics derisive of the 'sterility' of socialist art. The influential Alfred Kerr, known as the 'Culture Pope', announced in 1926 that 'Art in Paris is Dead'.

It was this that stirred the Unconscious Circle to life. The publication of their manifesto, to great fanfare at a grand display in the 17th Arrondissement,divided public opinion. Most shocking of all was the manifesto's cover. It was a photomontage of the Vendomme column, toppled by Courbet during the Commune uprising of 1871 - a moment heavily invested in the memory of 1871 as a symbol of the new revolution's rejection of monarchy and tradition. But in the Unconscious image the column was erect again, the statue of Napoleon I replaced by a pompous looking Courbet, whilst the Unconscious artists had placed themselves around the base holding ropes and hooks.

Prisms Electrique, 1925, by Sonia Stern. One of the new Unconscious works that sought to challenge conventions of form and style in European art.​

'The collapse of the Vendomme Column was the first AND LAST act of radicalism in the history of the Commune' the group manifesto declared, causing a deep and bitter political argument across society. It was a worrying indicator of the growing discontent that was affecting the people of the Union.

 

[cgomes]

The old revolutionaries are long dead, it's time for a "second cultural revolution" in the commune.

 

[Reydan]

The old revolutionaries are long dead, it's time for a "second cultural revolution" in the commune.

One should always be careful in invoking the spectre of revolution again...

 

[Reydan]

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty Four: The Railway Journey

'The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long'.
Bertrand Russell.

And the deep thunder’s echoing roar

Came hurriedly upon me, telling

Of war, and tumult, where my voice

My own voice, silly child! was swelling

(O how would my wild heart rejoice

And leap within me at the cry)

The battle-cry of victory!

Tamerlane - Edgar Allen Poe.


Mikhail Frunze had always wanted to be a General. His childhood notebooks, now kept in the archive of the Vladivostock Museum, have margins filled with drawings of knights on horses, arrows flying from bows, and castles with high walls and ramparts. He was a talented student but also prone to daydreaming. When one teacher challenged him, at ten years old, to name the historical figure who most inspired him young Mikhail responded without hesitation. Tamerlane. University had radicalised him - he had become deeply involved with the Socialist Revolutionary Party and remained loyal to it throughout the Kyril fiasco. Recognised as a talented strategist and organizer by his comrades, and a dangerous subversive by his foes, he had spent the last decade fighting, evading capture, and organising workers and peasants.

In a later, staged, photograph Frunze [centre] confers with two staff officers​

Now, aged 42, he found himself in a slowly tightening pocket around Samara-Ivanovo. He had some 33,000 soldiers, who ran the gamut from trained veterans through to raw recruits lacking any sort of training, but also near 200,000 refugees. Food was scarce, despite his best efforts at organisation, and ammunition was too. So, crucially, was leadership. Suppressed by the Kyril Regime, many Socialist Revolutionary leaders were either dead, in prison, or in exile when the second Civil War broke out. The SRs, supporting neither side, was getting slaughtered by both. Time was running out.

This had led to possibly the most strangely populated power-structure of any revolutionary regime. Frunze, undisputed leader, had a four lieutenants under him who, on paper, seemed a poor hand in the strained situation. The first two were veteran SR politicos Alexandra Kollontai and her husband, the dashing ex-cavalry officer Pavel Dybenko. The third was a young engineer with a deep-seated passion for music, named Dmitri Shostakovich, and the fourth was the young SR agriculture spokeswoman Yulia Grigorievna. Yet from these disparate parts Frunze would assemble a strategy so audacious that it seems impossible even now.

The only other resource in the SR pocket was the Trans-Siberian Railway line. And it was here, following long talks with his team, that Frunze turned. The first train of 5000 soldiers left on 3rd April. On it were Kollontai, Dybenko, and Shostakovich. The first major town they encountered, Omsk, was in turmoil. Originally a Christian Socialist stronghold, the repeated demands of war taxation and conscription had seen the population simmer. Within hours of arriving Dybenko had led a small detachment into town, joined by a popular uprising, and overthrown the current leadership. The first leg of the journey was clear.

From then on the Long Journey, as it came to be known, ran day and night. All four under Frunze were key. Kollontai, always a gifted speaker, won over the Railway Trade Unionists in town after town on the route, keeping the essential running of the Trans-Siberian smooth and uninterrupted. Shostakovich seemed to be in eight places at once, checking bridges, repairing points, overseeing track maintenance, training new signalmen, and, in his odd moments, scratching out what was to become his first major symphony when put to orchestra years later. Grigorievna, passionate and driven, marshaled soldiers and refugees, railwaymen and families, children, party members, women, the sick and the elderly, everyone, in short, who wanted to come on the exodus. 'If we leave anyone behind' she had informed Frunze brusquely during the planning in February 'we may as well not go at all'. In other circumstances shipping so many non-combatants would have been suicidal and, despite the myth of the Long Journey that grew after the fact, not all 200,000 did leave the original pocket. But in addition to the 33,000 soldiers some 122,000 non-combatants of all stripes did travel on the trains that ran back and forth all day and all night.

Some of the events of the Journey were a fabulous mixture of luck and bravado combined with the collapse of authority and power of the two main struggling factions as Russia's central government lost all grip on power. The twenty-strong all woman section that stormed a rail bridge east of Irkutsk, routing a force ten times stronger, has been celebrated in three feature films since then, whilst the fleet of mobile bakery cars knocked up under Shostakovich's orders have even been the subject of their own award-winning novel in recent years. There were failures - a splinter faction of SR militia, who joined the Journey south of Bratsk, insisted on striking south instead, sure in their ability to overthrow the Mongolian Regime. 'It was as if they vanished into the mist one morning' recalled Grigorievna sadly in her memoirs. 'We never saw them again'. There were also casualties, medical care rough on the rails. But the column never stopped surging forward with soldiers fighting knowing their families, sometimes only a few kilometers behind, depended on their success.

One of the nearly four hundred bakery wagons Shostokovich had built between April and October 1927.
'Sometimes I go to sleep dreaming of flour' he noted sourly in his diary, but his tireless work kept the SRs fed.​

Their objective was the Far East. By August they had reached Chita and, concentrating their forces, Frunze and Bydenko struck.

Up to this point the Amur region and the Russian Pacific had been under the command of White General and Cossack Ataman Grigory Semyonov. Venal, corrupt, and sly, but a good military mind, Semyonov ruled the region as a petty Prince. Even after the agreement that had brought about the end of the first Civil War and established Kyril's rule, Moscow's control of the Far East had been nominal at best. Semyonov had played off of the Japanese, the Manchurian Chinese regime, White Mongolia, and even the USA at times in an effort to secure his independent fiefdom. Now, with an army of fired up revolutionaries crashing across the Amur River his regime folded like a paper castle.

Vladivostok fell, with hardly a shot being fired, on 1st October as the weather began to grow bitter. Three crushing field defeats in one month had put paid to Semyonov, ignominiously shot by his own revolting men as he tried to order them on a suicidal counter-attack at Khabarovsk. Frunze and his Central Committee were established in Vladivostock and soon consolidated control of everything west of a line between, roughly, Yakutsk and Chita. As the rest of Russia descended into Warlordism and anarchy, the locals, the refugees of the railway, and thousands of other exile, emigres, and SRs from across Russia descended on the newly christened Far East Republic. The reactions of the world powers would come later - for now Frunze consolidated.

The final trains of refugees and SR combatants arrive in October. Despite the cold, by this time Warlord armies
had largely collapsed the corridor created by the Long Journey. This was the last train out of Omsk.​

The aftermath of the Long Journey was totemic for the SRs in the Far East. Before the event the Party had a clear structure in exile and whilst Frunze was happy to make way for veteran party chairman Victor Chernov as the first President, many incoming party members who had been in exile abroad or elsewhere in Russia and unable to join until later, noted the standing that being a ''Ticket Holder'' as Journey veterans were dubbed held. Frunze, for now content to get to work as Defence Minister, was now the political rising star of the East.

 

[CrazyGeorge]

Amazing

 

[Zhou Yu]

It's the Long March! Excellent work!

 

[diestormlie]

Now that sides like a neat setting for a Vidya Game: Dashing ever Estawards, commanding and assigning your dispirate forces, knowing that you must press onwards, ever onwards...

 

[Prof_Chemical]

Now that sides like a neat setting for a Vidya Game: Dashing ever Estawards, commanding and assigning your dispirate forces, knowing that you must press onwards, ever onwards...

i'd play it

 

[Salvador79]

Wonderful, amazing, inspiring, at times highly amusing descriptions.
This is what I love so much about your timeline, @Reydan !

I can only presume that the arrival of so many politicised, heterogeneous people and the new political structures they`re creating there are going to change Russia`s Far East beyond recognition. A social laboratory - from where I live, at the end of the world, but ITTL rather close to the Chinese Republic. East Asia looks like a very interesting region right now!

I think I forgot: How does Japan look like right now?

 

[Reydan]

Amazing

It's the Long March! Excellent work!

Now that sides like a neat setting for a Vidya Game: Dashing ever Estawards, commanding and assigning your dispirate forces, knowing that you must press onwards, ever onwards...

i'd play it

Wonderful, amazing, inspiring, at times highly amusing descriptions.
This is what I love so much about your timeline, @Reydan !

I can only presume that the arrival of so many politicised, heterogeneous people and the new political structures they`re creating there are going to change Russia`s Far East beyond recognition. A social laboratory - from where I live, at the end of the world, but ITTL rather close to the Chinese Republic. East Asia looks like a very interesting region right now!

I think I forgot: How does Japan look like right now?

Thank you everyone. Somewhat surprisingly, this has been the second most popular post of the timeline (the most popular one was the war-film of the Revolutionary War).

We probably do need to return to Japan soon, as its position is somewhat different from OTL following no Sino-Japanese War or Empire building in Korea or Taiwan. But we should probably go back to the USA-Mexico border asap!

 

[Reydan]

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty Five - Desert Southwest

"But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous."

Rendezvous, Alan Seeger, 1916

​

"What a wonderland of wild cactus growth, of solitude, of mystery, of silence it is!... Miles and miles of such weary, cactus-strewn, alkali solitude..."

George Wharton James, Arizona, the Wonderland, 1917

​

Contrary to all expectation it was the Mexican Army, not the American one, that struck first. Two corps of Federales, supported by rolleurs and cavalry, lanced up the Rio Grande into New Mexico. Despite the preparations of the New Mexico National Guard the Mexicans brushed the defenders aside, inflicting a stinging defeat on the out-gunned Americans just outside of the town of Las Cruces. Mexican armor was key. 'We smashed the Yankee frontline' recalled one rolleur captain. 'We had maybe seventy armored vehicles and cavalry to support. I think I saw maybe one American rolleur. And that was burning'.

Mexican Federales take the fight to New Mexico National Guardsmen​

The attacks made newspaper headlines across America, shocking the nation that, to some extent, had sleep-walked into the conflict. But, realistically, they were desperate and short-term. Every success, like that of the Rio Grande campaign, was matched with failure. Three Mexican Corps were badly mauled as they made an ill-fated lunge towards San Diego across the border. Navy pilots from the Port strafed the columns whilst Army artillery smashed Mexican morale. There were so few prisoners that they struggled to bury the dead.

War in the East, though, was not as easy for either side. The US plan, to some extent, followed the same rough outline as the Mexican-American conflict of the last century. A large Army Group, hugging the coastline, was to push south and link up with the landing a Veracruz. The landing itself, undertaken by a Marine Corps battalion backed up by an Army Division, was largely successful. Serious resistance was overwhelmed by Naval bombardment, although several Marine companies were badly chewed up by machine gun fire from the Military Academy until a well-placed shell smashed in the roof and brought about surrender. The Army's drive southwards, though, was brutal.

An American soldier hangs, lifeless, in barbed wire. Mexican defense lines
caused serious problems for the advancing US Army Group.
​

Mexican Command has known that it would not be able to defeat the US in conventional pitched battle. Instead it opted for a tactic of deep-defense. Each regiment, each battalion, each company, was carefully placed at pre-built defense points. The first of these were at the border and, to Mexican dissappointment, caused little trouble for the US soldiers. But, as they fell back to pre-prepared positions deeper into Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon Mexican units began to extract a higher price. Progress was grinding and, American commanders noted, raw recruits and Stand-By volunteers paid a higher price for their inexperience. 'Three times I've seen raw companies charge forward only to get caught in enfilade fire from a cave or a pillbox hidden by brush or a slip trench hidden by the lip of a hill' Captain Maurice Rose wrote back to a friend from West Point. Some officers turned to the segregated black units, arguing that since this was battlefield engineering they were not strictly 'in combat'. Such a dubiously finessed excuse for throwing under-prepared units into the fray saw black units suffer appalling casualty rates.

Still, the Mexicans were being ground down. As the Marines in Galveston prepared for action against a series of other targets in the former Central American states swallowed up by Mexico, and the US forces began to maneouver closer to Mexico City, President Jackson sensed victory. 'The Mexican Zealot is an endangered species' he told one society lady at a function in New York, puffing away at a cigar 'my boys have him by the scruff of the neck and soon they will wring it'. Casualties on both sides, though, were mounting and behind closed doors Army and Navy commanders hoped that these new landings would be a decisive blow against the Cristero Regime.

​

They were not the only ones anticipating its collapse, though.

US Naval Ratings man an artillery piece captured during the landings
at Puerto Limon in former Costa Rica​

 

[Reydan]

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty Six - The Flapper and the Warlord

'At least, it has been interesting, if not comfortable, to witness a Gotterdammerung.'

'A what?'

'A dusk of the gods. Unfortunately, the Cristeros did think they were akin to gods.”

Part of the interviews between Augusto Cesar Sandino and Margaret Mitchell that made up ''Dreadful Twilight''.​

Whilst some literary scholars have pointed to her early journalism, particularly her first piece for the Atlanta Journal 'An American witnesses the German Revolution', as the root of Mitchell's success, the real impetus for Dreadful Twilight came about by chance.

Usually an irrepressible spirit that found it hard to remain in one place for long, Mitchell had been laid up in a Montevideo sanitarium on Doctor's orders for the Christmas of 1926 following a life-threatening struggle with tuberculosis. For a young woman who was always on the go, who at some point in her youth found herself engaged to five different men at the same time, the boredom of the clean white sea-side wards was unbearable. She toyed, as she had in the past, with writing a novel about the Civil War, but couldn't make it stick. 'I wish someone would break my leg or something' she quipped to a friend in a letter in November 'just to keep me from pacing and focus my mind'. Instead she avidly followed the sweep of the war in Mexico.

Cristero resistance was crumbling, despite the grinding casualties of the war on both sides, and by the time that Margaret was discharged in good health in April 1927 it seemed that President Jackson had the victory he predicted. Mexico City was encircled, although it would take another month to reduce it by siege at the cost of a good few US lives, and large swathes of the coastlines were under American control. What became obvious, though, as Margaret's steamer swept around the South American Atlantic coast en route for New Orleans and her Atlanta home, was that no-one in the Jackson administration had a plan for what to do next.

Margaret Mitchell interviews young Harvard men in 1924​

Jackson was adamant that the replacement for the Cristero not be socialism. 'I won't let the red fire-brand back in' he staunchly declared in cabinet, and it was this policy that saw him seize Obregon as the Communards tried to smuggle him into the country and have him executed. It was a plan, however, that was not rooted in the political realities of Mexico. Before the Cristeros had been the socialists. Before the socialists had been a military dictatorship. Before that, a corrupt oligarchy. There was no middle-of-the-road conservative democrat groundswell for the occupying power to tap. Cristero purges of the armed forces left few generals who were not ideological zealots unwilling to turn their coats. In seeking regime change President Jackson was forced into the uncomfortable realisation he had no-one to hand power to.

Where there were new regimes to establish, though, was in the former states of Central America. Jackon's pledge to restore the Banana Republics went hand-in-hand with the agenda of companies like United Fruit who wanted their monopolistic control back. In went the tin-pot dictators, the corrupt governing families, and the US-backed tyrants. And up popped resistance.

Some of this was banditry, or low-level peasant revolt, but by far the most powerful force coalesced around Augusto Cesar Sandino. In his early thirties, Sandino was charismatic, fiery, and committed to social revolution. He had first witnessed the US-backed crushing of a rebellion against corrupt rule in his home state of Nicaragua when he was a teenager. A few years later he had won one of the American Liberation Society's International Grants for Education. The ALS, run out of Buenos Aires with French money, oversaw Sandino's two year stint in France in 1919-1920 where he attended University, was trained at the Military Academy, and was radicalised by the Blanquist cause. Like Blanqui he was filled with a burning desire to achieve revolution and, like a moth to a flame, Mitchell was drawn in.

Ever head-strong, Mitchell demanded to be put off the boat at Panama, and traveled inland with little more than two local guides, a rucksack, and a fervent desire to meet this implacable foe. Sandino's reputation was fierce - his army controlled many of the mountains and valleys in upland parts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, and were engaged in a violent guerrilla campaign against both Cristero remnants and the US and its allies. Still, there was something about the small fierce woman that seemed to intrigue the revolutionary. Sandino allowed Mitchell to accompany him for two months, during which she filled notebooks with her interviews and observations, before guiding her safely to British-controlled Belize where she could find a ship home.

The interviews themselves, published in the Atlanta Journal, stunned literary America. Far from being an illiterate peasant, Sandino came across as a warrior-philosopher in Mitchell's accounts, fierce but with a keen intellect. Sandino recalled, throughout, how he had admired the principles of America as a child but now saw those ideals corrupted by greed and hate-mongering fear. 'The land of golden promises' he observed one evening by a camp fire 'faces a dreadful twilight'.

Some accused Mitchell of treating with the enemy, and she certainly glossed over some of the more negative and violent parts of Sandino's campaign of resistance such as the taking of heads as trophies. But she didn't pull any punches, putting the revolutionary through intense scrutiny, often setting their musings against backdrops as mundane as a jungle camp or as extraordinary as the burning of an ex-plantation.

Augusta Cesar Sandino - committed warlord and liberator​

Mitchell left Sandino trying to strike north, to link up with the resistance campaign being waged by Emiliano Zapata in south-central Mexico. Between them the two men were the last hope of an independent set of states in the area without US interference and, increasingly, they frustrated and sniped at the occupying forces. Their combined campaigns continued to elude US forces.

Back in America, Mitchell found herself just part of the wider political maelstrom over occupation. Passionately defending her work, which she had bound as "Dreadful Twilight" and republished, Mitchell's no nonsense persona secured her prominence in the world of literature. Questioned by an impromptu House Committee on the War, she was notably spiky and critical and eventually had to be discharged. Her appearance reportedly inspired Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to create Superman's tough talking and independent girlfriend Maggie Mitchum ten years later in Action Comics.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Jackson's "Mexican Ulcer" seemed to show no signs of healing as more and more Mexicans and Central Americans protested against the ongoing US occupation. At home, the President's enemies prepared to take advantage of a public mood shifting from jingoism to uncertainty about the lack of resolution.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter One Hundred and Forty Seven – Public and Private Spheres

‘Although the Commune believed it had, from the 1870s, successfully vanquished bourgeois notions of prejudice, privacy, and moralistic notions of society, the Varlin-Hof affair revealed that this was far from the case. Humans were still humans and the buried passions of a thousand discordant voices lay just below the ideological mantle of socialism’

Laura O’Brien, The Socialist Line? The socialist cause in crisis 1920-1934, Dublin University Press.

‘Stability, economy, democracy’

Moderate Party Slogan 1929

Zetkin and Luxemburg - the figures at the centre of the scandal​

On the morning of 19th March 1929 readers of the radical popular newspaper Rhineland Today across the Rhenish Socialist Republic were regaled with the sensational news that Clara Zetkin, radical feminist and European Union deputy, was in a lesbian relationship with senior executive chairwoman Rosa Luxemburg. In great detail the paper, which made the commercially minded decision to spread the story over three days of issues, exposed what it claimed were duplicitous dealings, financial corruption, and a serious dereliction of the duty of government. The rot went further than just these two Rhineland Today claimed - 'There exists in the top-levels of European Government a shadowy coven of sapphic nepotism, cronyism, and out-right debauchery that eats away at the honest work of building a stable society'.

Peeling away the inflammatory rhetoric, it was reasonably clear to the politically astute what faction was behind this. Talk of stability, of reasoned economic doctrine, and repeated claims of the need to 'clean up government' were, in the late 1920s, the hallmark of a rejuvinated and increasingly powerful Moderate Party.

Originally those who, in the 1870s and 1880s, had formed the legally-allowed anti-socialist group in the National Assembly, the end of the last war had seen the Moderates swell to encompass all shades of opposition politics across the new European Union. Although the party enjoyed reasonable grass-roots support, particularly among those ill-at-ease with socialist society, they had never really been more than an oddity in the Assembly. Now, though, as the friction in government between the coalition factions continued, the Moderates began to gain ground.

Their areas of most significant support were in newly ''liberated'' red republics or areas where the social revolutions of the communard age had not been fully realised. Hungary, which had never formally announced itself a socialist state, continued to have a liberal and even conservative representation in its Diet. Austria, although under the control of the Austrian Communard Party who had emerged from a decade of persecution after the war, likewise had a sizeable non-socialist delegation. And throughout the German Republics, as the various factions and state-lets bickered over respective hierarchies, Moderate groups formed in cities and towns, villages and hamlets.

Historians, like politicians at the time, have struggled to define the Moderates. Willi Brandt, then a sixteen year old clerk and activist for his local Centrist party in Hamburg, later mused that the Moderates sprung 'fully formed from the country clubs and smoking parlors not swept away in the revolution'. Harold Jackson-Rees, writing in the 1960s, described them as 'petty bourgeois and above - a thousand stiff-collared clerks and doctors, former bankers and army officers, shop-keepers, farmers, and individualists who considered themselves a cut above socialist society'. Indeed, the task of the historian is complicated by the growing use of class terminology in this period - something that the mixed social composition of the original Communard Regime in France had to some extent subsumed. 'Is this the petty revenge of a bourgeois-class desperate to deny the worker-class its spot in the sun' asked Zetkin in a letter to Luxemburg.

Moderate support was, and still is, hard to classify. One strong support group was among educated young women despite many having benefited from the egalitarian policies of the socialist regime. For many a sense of change was what attracted them to the Moderates.​

Luxemburg herself would not be drawn on the question. However this stoic refusal to even countenance the questions asked, whilst noble and courageous, did little to extinguish the blaze. Indeed, her refusal to answer the questions of reporters caused those questions to become more frantic. More heated. Was there a conspiracy to hide? Was the European Union's hierarchy, supposedly egalitarian, built on nepotism and corruption? It became, in essence, an informal and nasty poll on whether Luxemburg was a fit candidate for government at the highest level, and much of the critique was of her as a professional woman.

The situation was made much worse by the uncovering, in April, of the Varlin-Hof affair. Named after a government complex in Vienna, itself christened in honor of the French Socialist President, the scandal emerged when two reporters uncovered a cache of incriminating documents. They had, provoked by Luxemburg's stubborn refusal to address their questions, been digging for salicious stories of lesbian misdeeds. Instead they hit a rich vein of financial mismanagement. The Austrian Communard Party, it was revealed in these papers, had run its railway accounts deep into the red. This was shocking news in the Republic because, at the time, the ACP was negotiating for a loan from the European Union to help continue railway building programs across the state. Not only were promised networks not under-way, the documents revealed, but the fleet of locomotives ordered for the purpose had a significant mechanical flaw that made them useful for little more than scrap. Stations had been built of inferior concrete, staff retained with the wrong equipment, and safety measures ignored despite trade union protests. The Varlin-Hof affair triggered not just the collapse of the ACP government but, with it, the rise of the Moderate opposition to the government of the Republic.

Formerly a Social Democrat, Karl Renner had moved to the Moderates after finding the Communards
too extreme for his taste. Here, with colleagues, he celebrates forming the new Moderate government in Austria, April 1929
​

Taking place just a month before the European-wide elections of May, it was a shot in the arm for the anti-socialist groups and galvanised their campaign for change. It sent shockwaves through the socialist organisations of Europe too, especially as a key Moderate pledge was to break-up the European Union itself.

'Now is the darkest hour of our existence' wrote Olivier Martel to his fellow Blanquist Louise LaGrange. 'There seems almost no star in the sky to hold the promise of a better tomorrow for our cause'.

 

[Knightmare]

Someone's getting the boot.

 

[Alexander the Average]

I fear that these scandals may cause the socialists across Europe to be Austrocised somewhat...I'll show myself out.

 

[Salvador79]

Such things are bound to happen. Given the recent arrogant treatment of Eastern European and Greek transfer- and loan-recipients by Austria, Germany etc., I love the irony that corruption and dangerous slack become an endemic problem in Austria here.

 

[Reydan]

Chapter One Hundred and Forty Eight - Crisis

"Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life...or
the destruction of States, and new life starting again...
The choice lies with you!"
At cut-down version of Petr Kropotkin's The State that appeared in Purist Anarchist election material.

"Hungary is leading the way to freedom!"
Moderate Delegate Anton Duncker to his father, June 1929.


In early 1929 June Hungarians went to the polls and, with small pencils and scraps of ballot paper, dealt the Union of Europe a body blow.

Hungary, breaking free of Habsburg control, had become a Republic almost by accident. The Austrian invasion in the last war, which had brought with it a general uprising on the right-wing of Hungarian society, had led to the rise to government of the communards and other socialists under the Presidency of the Liberal Karolyi. Now, though, as Moderate Party gains in Austria shook the confidence of European socialists, voters in the Republic were tempted by the winds of change.

Much has been written by historians as to why the socialist vote crumbled in this election. From one perspective it seemed as though, after centuries of subjugation, Hungary had resumed vital role in the European New Order emanating from the Union Assembly. Bela Kun, formerly Prime Minister, had been elected as one of the first members of the five-strong Supreme Council in the immediate post-war and his clear, functional, and compromising tone had been much admired by his peers. At home the Hungarian Socialist Party counted on the support of Trade Unions, citizen soldiers, and the growing urban classes of Hungarian society. They formed a seemingly solid electoral block that had, for years, propped up socialist control in the Parliament.

Three reasons are often offered, sometimes conflicting, by historians of different stripes. The first, in the immediate shock election defeat that saw the socialist vote collapse by two thirds, was an anger that the Party had been too moderate. Kun, particularly, was accused by hard-line colleagues of not having pursued a true socialist transformation of society along French lines when he had the chance. A second, more nuanced view emerges from examination of the electorate though. The HSP had failed to capture key active voter groups, particularly the youth vote and those of women, whilst making great assumptions about the loyalty of its urban base.

Ardie Ganz's car manufacturing business was symbolic of the changing nature of the Hungarian Economy in the late 1920s. Ganz donated thousands of his own money to Small Holders' League campaigns.​

Perhaps most significant, though, was the economy. Post-war, the Hungarian economy progressed in leaps and bounds. With Germany fractured, and Russia in crisis, Hungary could assume a dominant position in Central and Eastern European markets. Likewise Democratic uncertainty about trade policy towards the Union meant that in many cases Hungarian products did not have to directly compete with US imports. A flowering of particularly mechanical industries was at the vanguard of economic change in the country, and the limitations of the Communard system made these budding entrepreneurs restless.

Ferenc Nagy's centre-party, the Small Holders' League, had a radical program for liberalising a society they felt shackled by socialism. Within weeks Budapest had signaled, despite protests from socialists in the streets, an intention to leave the Union and many of the major nationalised industries began to be broken up.

The ramifications in Munich, temporary home of the Assembly, were seismic. Kun was forced to resign, no longer having a constituency to represent, and this shifted the balance in the Supreme Council dramatically. The European-wide elections had been a triumph for the Moderates and the Blanquists, who tripled and doubled their proportion of seats respectively, but a disaster for the other parties. Centrist, Anarchist, and Internationalist blocks shrunk, although the Centrist-Internationalist group remained the biggest party (but now a minority). The Purist-Anarchists, for the first time, came off their communes in record numbers to split the Anarchist vote and contest a number of districts.

Left to Right: Anarchist Marta Lipskinski, and Moderates Anton Duncker and Mikhail Ostrovsky, the new anti-Union majority of the Supreme Council.​

Only the Blanquist Louise LaGrange and the Centrist Lev Kamenev kept their Supreme Council seats. Two moderates, Anton Duncker and Mikhail Ostrovsky, were elected out of the Assembly alongside a young Purist-Anarchist firebrand Marta Lipskinski. What this meant was, that even though their parties were by no means a majority in the Assembly, the anti-Union forces held sway in the Council. And, with Moderates partying in the streets of Austria and parts of Germany, Duncker and Ostrovsky began to plan the grand dissolution of the Union from the top down. For although Kamenev and LaGrange violently opposed the idea, Lipskinski represented that strain of Anarchism that hated the overly centralised and bureaucratic nature of the Union.

For many it seemed like the end of a dream of European socialist unity and, from beyond the Union's borders, hostile powers watched with interest.

 

[Pempelune]

What this meant was, that even though their parties were by no means a majority in the Assembly, the anti-Union forces held sway in the Council. And, with Moderates partying in the streets of Austria and parts of Germany, Duncker and Ostrovsky began to plan the grand dissolution of the Union from the top down. For although Kamenev and LaGrange violently opposed the idea, Lipskinski represented that strain of Anarchism that hated the overly centralised and bureaucratic nature of the Union.

For many it seemed like the end of a dream of European socialist unity and, from beyond the Union's borders, hostile powers watched with interest.

Why are you doing this

 

[Reydan]

Why are you doing this

It'll get worse I'm afraid...

 

[Undeadmuffin]

It'll get worse I'm afraid...

Noooo !