Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [46]
Of course, the peacemakers were concerned about the spread of revolutionary ideas, but not necessarily Russian ones. The survivors of the Great War were weary and anxious. Apparently solid structures, empires, their civil services and their armies, had melted away and in many parts of Europe it was not clear what was to take their place. Europe had been a place of unsatisfied longings before the war—of socialists hoping for a better world, of labor for better conditions, of nationalists for their own homes—and those longings emerged again with greater force because in the fluid world of 1919 it was possible to dream of great change—or have nightmares about the collapse of order. The Portuguese president was assassinated. Later in 1919, in Paris, a madman would try to kill Clemenceau. In Bavaria and Hungary, communist governments took power, for a few days in Munich, but much longer in Budapest. In Berlin in January, and Vienna in June, communists tried, unsuccessfully, to do the same. Not everything could be blamed on the Russian Bolsheviks.
Many, and not just those on the left, refused to panic. Over lunch in the Hôtel Majestic one day, a Canadian delegate, Oliver Mowat Biggar, chatted cheerfully with a group that included Philip Kerr, Lloyd George’s personal assistant. “The feeling of all of us was that money had too much to say in the world—selfish money that is. The logical conclusion is communism, and we shall no doubt all arrive there in a quarter of a century or so.” In the meantime, as Biggar wrote to his wife in Canada, he was having a wonderful time: Saturday evening dances at the Majestic, Faust and Madame Butterfly at the Opéra, the music halls where he was struck, he told her, by the beauty of the prostitutes. The French, he noted, certainly had different standards from Canadians. In one comic opera, the lead actress “had nothing on above the hips except a few chains and in the other nothing on either above or below except ribbons and shoes. As a dancer she was dismal.” When his wife suggested that she come immediately from Canada to join him, Biggar had serious reservations. Of course, he wanted to see her but even now the flats in Paris were terribly expensive, and they had appalling bathrooms. And he had been told, by a senior politician, that revolution was about to sweep across Germany and possibly into France. There would be serious shortages of food and fuel. The lights would go out, the taps would run dry. “You must, however, make up your own mind to discomfort with, very remotely, danger.” Mrs. Biggar remained in Canada.7
Bolshevism had its uses. When Rumania claimed the Russian province of Bessarabia or Poland advanced into the Ukraine, it was to stop Bolshevism. Italy’s delegates warned of revolution at home if they did not get most of the Dalmatian coast. The peacemakers used it as a threat to each other. Germany, said Lloyd George and Wilson, would go Bolshevik if they imposed too harsh a peace.
Western reactions to the new regime in Russia itself were deeply divided. Lack of information did not, of course, prevent people from having strong views. If anything, it made it easier. Both left and right projected their own fears and hopes into the black hole in the east. The radical American journalist Lincoln Steffens, who unusually actually got to Russia in 1919, crafted his famous “I have seen the future and it works” on the journey out. Nothing he witnessed in Russia changed his mind. On the right, every horror story was credited. The British government published reports, allegedly from eyewitnesses, claiming that the Bolsheviks had nationalized women and set them up in “commissariats of free love.” Churches