The World

Pahlavis and Songs, Roosevelts, Mafiosi and Kennedys

ATATüRK, REZA, LENIN: FATHER OF THE TURKS, LIGHT OF THE IRANIANS AND GREATEST OF GENIUSES

Blond, blue-eyed and lithe, Kemal was the son of a Turkish soldier and an Abkhazian mother, raised in Thessalonica, who joined the Young Turks and fought the Italians when they seized Libya in 1911 and then the Bulgarians in Thrace in 1912. He had warned Enver not to join Germany in the war, but made his name at Gallipoli before halting the Russians in the Caucasus and holding back the British in Syria. Now he faced the Anglo-French partition of the Ottoman heartland that granted swathes of territory to the Great Idea, the new Greek empire, much favoured by the enthusiastic Classicist LG.

In September 1921, Marshal Kemal, speaker of a Grand National Assembly in Ankara, halted the Greeks, then in August 1922 in a clash of 400,000 men routed them at Dumlupınar, bursting into the cosmopolitan Graeco-Turkish city of Smyrna where, in scenes of infernal slaughter, the Greeks were driven out in what they called the Catastrophe. The fiasco brought down Lloyd George. In November, Kemal abolished the monarchy: the last sultan, Mehmed VI, departed on a British warship, though a cousin was temporarily installed as caliph. The forty-three-year-old Kemal, elected president of a new republic of Türkiye, was acknowledged by the Allies, agreed a population swap of 350,000 Turks and 1.1 million Greeks^* and cancelled independent Armenia and Kurdistan.

Kemal was implacable to his opponents, who were assassinated or hanged,^* and he massacred and bombed the Kurdish rebels who threatened his regime.

Kemal had a vision of a Turkish nation. He rejected Ottoman decadence, separated religion from politics, commissioned a Turkish alphabet in Latin letters, founded Ankara university, liberated women from the veil and granted female education and suffrage. He moved the capital to Ankara and in the formally renamed Istanbul he converted the Hagia Sophia (the former church built by Justinian, converted into a mosque by Mehmed II) into a museum. He also ordered Turks to take surnames for the first time: he became Atatürk – Father of Turks.

Atatürk was a sultanic autocrat who lived in the old Ottoman palaces, cruising in his presidential yacht; although he was a raffish epicurean, a womanizer with a complicated love life and a hard drinker of rakı, he was also a generous paterfamilias, adopting thirteen orphans.^* He never became a sultan, but he inspired another general to become a shah.

On 25 April 1926, in the hall of the Golestan Palace in Teheran a tall soldier of obscure origins placed the crown on his own head and was hailed as shah of Iran. In a few years he had gone from stableboy to monarch, creating a dynasty that would rule until the 1970s, temporarily restoring Iran to power and wealth. A harsh, uneducated martinet, grandson and son of soldiers, ramrod straight and irascible, Reza had been born in the Mazandaran Province on the Caspian Sea and had joined the Persian Cossack Regiment set up by Russian advisers. Adept on horseback and expert with Maxim guns, he rose to the rank of commander and married the top general’s daughter – just as Persia was falling apart. Its oil was essential to British power. In 1906, the Qajar shah had been forced to grant a constitution, but the kingdom was dominated by Britain and Russia. After Lenin’s revolution, the Soviets were pushed out by the British general Edmund Ironside, who sought a strongman. Then he met Reza for the first time. ‘Well over six foot, with broad shoulders,’ noted Ironside, ‘his hooked nose and sparkling eyes gave him a distinguished look.’

Reza seemed an ideal frontman. In 1921, he proposed to seize power. When the British approved, ‘He began dancing, whistling,’ recalled one of his officers, ‘and snapping his fingers.’ Reza and 600 horsemen rode into Teheran and overthrew the premier, setting up a replacement and becoming war minister himself; he announced his arrival with posters that began, ‘I command’. After crushing rebellious warlords, Reza emerged as a visionary reformer, a passionate patriot and a paranoid autocrat, while the ineffectual young shah sulked in Europe.

In October 1925, when the Majlis (parliament) debated the end of the Qajars and the installation of Reza as shah, two future potentates were present: a rich Paris-educated landowner, Mohammad Mosaddegh, aged forty-three, who had already been foreign minister, warned that Reza was too capable to serve as a constitutional monarch; while a twenty-three-year-old student of Islamic scholarship and history at the Qom seminary, and sometime poet, Ruhollah Khomeini, watched the debates, disgusted by foreign interference as much as by the rise of this irreligious general. Reza’s henchmen assassinated an opponent of his accession on the steps of the Majlis. Though they killed the wrong man, it did the trick. In December, the Majlis approved a new monarchy.

At the coronation, an urbane aristocrat, Abdolhossein Teymourtash, presented the crown to Reza, now forty-eight, sporting uniform and royal cloak. Teymourtash, a womanizing, gambling and boozing sophisticate, educated in Petersburg, designed the new monarchy: Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was recited, Cyrus and Darius quoted. Inspired by his ally Atatürk, Reza ordered Persians to adopt surnames and wear western dress, while women were to remove veils and go to school; he also built railways, factories, roads, secular schools and a university in Teheran. Wielding his cane, he barked at his nation of ‘bigoted and ignorant’ subjects and beat anyone who contradicted him. He kicked insubordinates in the groin; and although he paid lip-service to the powerful mullahs, when an ayatollah commented on the dresses of the shah’s daughters, Reza slapped him.

One thing mattered to Reza: his son Mohammad, aged six, born with a twin sister Ashraf, must succeed him. He nicknamed the prince Bird of Good Omen. But regarding any indulgence as likely to encourage homosexuality, Reza and son called each other ‘sir’, and Mohammad thought his father ‘most frightening’. But his mother Tadj ol-Molouk taught him that he was a man of destiny.

Teymourtash was influential too – Mohammad’s first love was the minister’s daughter. Teymourtash recommended that the boy study at Le Rosey in Switzerland, enabling him to escape his father. Here from the age of eleven the crown prince discovered the joys of western sybaritism – and finally found a friend, Ernest Perron, the school’s twenty-three-year-old gardener and assistant poetry teacher who introduced him to Rabelais and Mozart. This was not quite the virile instruction that Reza had envisioned for his heir.

As Atatürk and Reza shaped their new states, the third creator, Lenin, was forging a new Russia, unafraid of the human cost. ‘A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,’ he said, and in his orders to henchmen he frenziedly demanded mass killings. Now he devised a state, ruled by himself as chairman of the council of people’s commissars (premier), controlled exclusively by a small Communist Party and actually governed by a tiny cabal of leaders. The cabinet, known as the Political Bureau (Politburo), dominated by the talented Trotsky and Stalin, assumed a quasi-sacred prerogative of omniscient decision-making on behalf of the people that Lenin called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. As Lenin temporarily instituted a soft capitalism to cope with a country ruined by war, he and Stalin debated its ethnic shape with a view to keeping Ukraine and controlling what they called the ‘limitrophes’ (border-countries from Roman limitrophus). Stalin, a Georgian, proposed a Russian Soviet federation; the Ukrainian, Georgian and other ethnic Bolsheviks wanted independence from Russia. Lenin, who loathed ‘Great Russian chauvinism’, agreed with them. He aimed to keep Ukrainians in and Poles out, proposing a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia in which the four main peoples had their own republics. This was designed to satisfy the aspirations of Ukrainians and Georgians who had supported the revolution to escape the tsarist ‘prison of nations’. Its genius was that technically the peoples could ‘check out’ any time they liked, but they could ‘never leave’. Its flaw was if the Party was ever weakened, the republics could seize theoretical independence and become ready-made countries. But no one considered that. It was never likely to happen.^*

The effort had broken Lenin. In May 1922, resting at a dacha outside Moscow, he suffered a stroke, leaving him half paralysed and unable to speak. At the Bolshoi Theatre, on 28 December, Stalin oversaw the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which national cultures such as the Ukrainians or Georgians were encouraged within their republics. When Lenin returned to the Kremlin, he had another stroke. Like all leaders, he believed he was irreplaceable: he appointed Stalin, his high-handed but self-deprecating Georgian henchman, as general secretary, to balance the haughty, flashy Trotsky, war commissar. Now he begged Stalin to give him cyanide so he could commit suicide. Stalin refused. Yet while Trotsky did little to create a faction, Stalin, sociable, accessible and modest, cultivated allies among the tough provincial praktiki who preferred his dourness to Trotsky’s arrogance. Besides, the Russians would never support a Jewish leader. When Stalin’s coarse will to power emerged, the paralysed Lenin tried to remove him, but it was too late. While Trotsky and other hifalutin ideologists continued to underestimate Stalin, he was already making decisions: in January 1923, he supported Sun Yat-sen who, after thirty years, finally found a backer who could deliver.

THE SONG SISTERS: SUN, CHIANG AND MAO

Sun and his young wife Qingling Song had lived for five years see-sawing between power and disaster. In 1917 Sun, backed by the Germans, seized power in Guangzhou and declared himself grand marshal, but he was swiftly deposed. As Lenin fell ill, Sun returned to Guangzhou as president, until in June 1922 one of his generals tried to assassinate him. Sun fled for the port, ruthlessly leaving his young pregnant wife Qingling as bait to cover his escape: it was ‘a life-and-death struggle’, she recalled; ‘we were literally buried in a hell of constant gunfire’, after which ‘I disguised myself as an old countrywoman with a guard disguised as a pedlar …’ She suffered a miscarriage, but she and Sun were reunited and protected by a young KMT general, Chiang Kai-shek, who arranged their sanctuary in Shanghai as Sun appealed to Moscow.

Soon after Lenin’s coup, Sun had telegraphed his admiration to the ‘great man’. There was something about Sun and Lenin that was similar. ‘Do you know,’ said Meiling Song, ‘I’ve noticed the most successful men are usually not the ones with great powers as geniuses but the ones who had such ultimate faith in their own selves that invariably they hypnotize others as well as themselves.’ Lenin had ordered the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, but it was tiny: Moscow backed Sun.

On 21 January 1924, Lenin, just fifty-three, died, having ordered a plain burial. Stalin, the ex-seminarist, recited ‘We vow to you, Comrade Lenin’, a credo of devotions to ‘the greatest of geniuses of the proletariat’, and had Lenin embalmed and displayed as a Christlike Soviet tsar-batiushka – little father – in a red porphyry mausoleum. ‘We Communists are people of a special mould,’ said Stalin. ‘We’re made of a special stuff.’ That was already apparent. As he played off his Party rivals and promoted ‘socialism in one country’, he sent cash to Sun, enabling him to found the Whampoa Military Academy and train his military; in return Sun allowed him control of Mongolia and Xinjiang and folded the new Chinese Communist Party into his ruling KMT. Sun, advised by Qingling and her brother T. V. Song, armed by Stalin, planned to conquer warlord-infested northern China, in a campaign under thirty-seven-year-old Chiang Kai-shek. Among the Communists who now arrived at KMT headquarters was a tall, dishevelled figure with shaggy hair: Mao Zedong, aged thirty-one. Together with Sun, these two would decide the fate of China for the rest of the century.

Violent, irascible, skin-headed yet emotional, Chiang, a poor salt merchant’s son empowered by a worshipful mother whom he adored, had been trained in the Japanese army, before joining the Green Gang of Shanghai in 1911 and embracing Sun’s cause. Now Sun dispatched him to Moscow, where he developed a loathing for the arrogant Bolsheviks (particularly Trotsky), their dogma and their veiled ambitions in China. Concealing his misgivings, he sent his only son, by his first wife, Chiang Ching-kuo, to study at the newly created Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. Although her brother was an enthusiastic capitalist, Qingling embraced Marxism.

Just as Sun, now fifty-eight, was preparing his Northern Expedition, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. As he lay dying, he backed the Soviet alliance and told Qingling, ‘I wish to follow the example of my friend Lenin in having my body embalmed,’ and insisted his tomb be built on the Purple Gold Mountain in Nanjing next to Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming. Sun was almost deified as Father of China and Liberator of the Nation, echoing Lenin’s cult – and Chiang emerged as a contender for the leadership. ‘I have position,’ Chiang told his wife, ‘but I lack prestige,’ adding, ‘I need to get close to the Song family.’ The Song family agreed.

In June 1926, the eldest sister Ailing – married to the wealthy banker H. H. Kung – invited Chiang to a dinner where he sat between the hostess and her youngest sister, Meiling, both glamorous in bright cheongsams. Meiling was surprised to find that the crude, short-tempered general was serious and sensitive, while Chiang saw the chance of marriage to the sister-in-law of Sun.

Soon afterwards Chiang, now commander-in-chief, led the Northern Expedition, pushing his power into the north, but his successes empowered the Communists within the government. Mao Zedong, both a radical Marxist and a nationalist, worked with the KMT as an alternate member of its Central Executive Committee: a group photograph shows him standing behind Qingling and T. V. Song. Son of a well-off peasant from Hunan – he never lost his accent – Mao had clashed with his father, but he admitted, ‘I worshipped my mother,’ a Buddhist with bound feet, ‘three-inch golden lilies’, a definition of beauty at that time. Bathing in her indulgence, he enjoyed a carefree youth, writing poetry, then joined a republican army, before training as a teacher and reading about history and struggle: ‘When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible … like a hurricane from a gorge, a sex maniac on heat, prowling for a lover.’ The excitement of conflict and of power over life and death has never been better expressed. ‘Revolutionary war is an anti-toxin which not only eliminates the enemy’s poison,’ he argued, ‘but also purges us of our filth.’

When the Communist Party was founded in Shanghai, he attended its first meeting. Even while cooperating with the KMT, he focused on land reforms, his views and nature implacably radical. Impulsive and unscrupulous, a supreme manipulator of personalities with a fine turn of phrase, a relentless reader and history buff, with a superb memory, he possessed an unyielding will to dominate. Influenced like so many by social Darwinism, which dovetailed with Marxist class struggle, Mao believed that ‘Long-lasting peace is unendurable to humans’; rather ‘We love sailing on a sea of upheavals.’ China had to be ‘destroyed and reformed’ to rise again.

When Chiang captured Wuhan, the Communists, backed by Madame Sun, took over, launching a reign of terror as small Red armies seized territory. The KMT congress was hijacked by its Communist minority, and Communists in Shanghai, led by a subtle young leader, Zhou Enlai, seized businesses: Chiang was losing control of China. The Songs urged action: recruiting his gangster-boss ally ‘Big-Eared’ Du, Chiang planned a counter-coup and compiled death lists: Mao and Zhou were on them.

Chiang’s son was still in Moscow, but Chiang said, ‘I can’t sacrifice national interests for my son.’ On 12 April 1927, he pounced: ‘Big-Eared’ Du and his gang members beheaded Communists in the streets of Shanghai. Ten thousand were killed. ‘Better to kill 1,000 innocent people,’ said Chiang, ‘than let a single Communist escape.’ Mao escaped and met up with a Communist army, later launching an uprising that was obliterated. Demoted for ‘military opportunism’, Mao fled to a Communist enclave in Jiangxi, but he learned the lesson of Chiang’s purge, telling Stalin’s envoy, ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun.’^* Taking command in Jiangxi, he spotted a skinny, neurotic graduate of the Whampoa Academy, the twenty-one-year-old Lin Biao, who later became the best Communist general and the chosen heir but who died trying to overthrow him. Mao felt the ferocity of the struggle when his wife was beheaded by the KMT, though he swiftly married a young comrade, with whom he had more children. While Zhou organized clandestine work in Shanghai, Mao held public executions of landlords at Party rallies, declaring, ‘Revolution’s not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor embroidery,’ but ‘an act of violence by which one class overthrows another’. Stalin noticed that Mao was ‘insubordinate but successful’ and started to back him.

Now Chiang courted Meiling Song, inviting her on a series of dates. He agreed to study Christianity and dismiss his concubines. In September 1927, they were engaged, marrying in December, the ‘biggest wedding Shanghai ever saw’, wrote Meiling, who tamed Chiang, emerging as his chief adviser, eschewing western clothes and always sporting a silk cheongsam, slit to the knee on both sides. It was never a passionate romance. ‘Here was my opportunity,’ she wrote. ‘With my husband, I would work ceaselessly to make China strong.’

Chiang set up his dictatorship at Nanjing styled as chairman of the State Council and generalissimo. He disdained Chinese people as ‘lazy, indifferent, corrupt, decadent’ and ‘walking corpses’, and he trusted no one, setting up rival secret-police organs whose operatives assassinated his rivals and tortured his enemies. When Chiang had a Communist comrade executed, Madame Sun screamed at him, ‘Butcher!’ Afterwards, he planned her assassination in a faked car crash, but cancelled it.^*

Yet in the north an aggressive empire was keen to expand. The Tiger of Mukden, Grand Marshal Zhang Zuolin, still ran Manchuria, with Japanese backing. On 25 December 1926, Hirohito became emperor at a time when his generals sought to guide the nation. The army’s Imperial Way faction saw the new reign as an unmissable opportunity to remove cautious liberal politicians and bring in a militaristic nationalist dictatorship under the emperor: a Chinese empire was Japan’s right as a great power.

Two men stood in their way: in Manchuria, Marshal Zhang; and in the rest of China, Chiang Kai-shek. Without any permission from Tokyo, Japanese generals solved the first problem. On 4 June 1928, they blew up the marshal’s train. Manchuria was inherited by the Tiger’s opium-addicted son, known as the Young Marshal, but his grip was much weakened. Next they needed to deal with Chiang, who had emerged as national leader at the same time as the man who would ultimately back him.

On 6 November 1928, Franklin Roosevelt pulled off an astonishing rebirth. The Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith, had proposed that FDR run for New York governor, presuming that a crippled man would never be able to challenge him at a national level. Though he was lifted out of cars and helped to rostrums, Roosevelt proved him wrong. ‘Well, here’s the helpless cripple my opponent is speaking about,’ he said on the pitch. ‘This is my sixteenth speech today.’

JAZZ: ROOSEVELT, JOSEPHINE BAKER, LUCKY LUCIANO AND THE ROARING TWENTIES

To everyone’s surprise, even his own, Roosevelt won the governorship, and Smith lost the presidency resoundingly to Herbert Hoover. A reporter asked Eleanor how she felt. ‘I’m not excited about my husband’s election. I don’t care. What difference can it make to me?’ Roosevelt promised ‘an era of good feeling’.

Although America had stayed outside Wilson’s League of Nations, the economy was booming, the stock market soaring, the Twenties roaring and American ‘good feeling’ conquered the world. At home, where alcohol was still banned, Americans drank in blind tigers – covert bars or speakeasies – to the sound of jazz, a word that originated in jasm, which among black musicians in New Orleans meant sexual energy. Jazz, a fusion of African-American blues, ragtime and jig piano, was developed there in New Orleans. Its seminal ballad, ‘Strange Fruit’, sung by Billie Holiday, recounts a lynching: most of the musical movements that swept twentieth-century Euro-America would be rooted in the horror and passion of the African-American experience. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young novelist who chronicled the careless wealth and mysterious pasts of the new grandees in his novel The Great Gatsby, called the period the Jazz Age. In Chicago and New York at the same time, vertiginous skyscraping towers were built. Jazz was now embraced by white Americans spending money made in industry, on the stock market or from crime in glamorous clubs controlled by Italian, Irish and Jewish gangsters where Scottish and Canadian whisky was served. Lucky Luciano was recruited as a hitman by the pudgy, epicurean New York padrino Joe Masseria; Meyer and Bugsy often assisted at his killings. Masseria was confronted by challengers and survived (with only two bullet holes in his hat) a gun-blazing assassination attempt, with hitmen firing tommy-guns while riding on the running boards of a motor car. He emerged as capo di tutti capi – boss of bosses – forcing other Mafiosi from Detroit and Buffalo to pay tribute.

‘The Brain’ Rothstein was the quintessential Roaring Twenties man of elegant violence, holding court at racetracks, restaurants and blind tigers surrounded by his bodyguards, but even he could not control his gambling addiction, and he accumulated a debt that led to his shooting. Dying in hospital in 1928, he refused to reveal his killers. ‘You stick to your trade,’ he told the police, ‘I’ll stick to mine,’ joking, ‘My mudder did it.’

In Paris, the end of war and pandemic sparked a joie de vivre, les années folles – Crazy Years – when a black ex-soldier Jim Europe and his Harlem Hellfighters brought American ragtime and the Charleston to the city in their Revue Nègre. Paris was dazzled by a nineteen-year-old American mixed-race dancer, Josephine Baker from Missouri, who had started dancing on St Louis street corners but hated American racism. ‘I just couldn’t stand America,’ she said, ‘and I was one of the first colored Americans to move to Paris’ – which she took by storm, dancing almost naked except for a loincloth of bananas. ‘The most sensational woman anyone ever saw,’ recalled an American novelist, Ernest Hemingway. It was not just music: in 1927, Baker was the first African-American to star in a movie, a silent French production La Sirène des tropiques, but it was American cinema that now conquered the world. If a family of Russian immigrants pioneered the ‘talkie’, it was a piratical Irish banker who made the first movie fortune that helped launch his family as an American political dynasty.

RIN TIN TIN: KENNEDY, LITTLE CAESAR AND FDR

On 6 October 1927, at a Warner brothers’ cinema in New York, the Warner brothers premiered their first talkie movie, The Jazz Singer, using the new Vitaphone system. When the star, Al Jolson, delivered his trademark ‘Wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet,’ the audience were first astonished and then almost hysterical. The movie made the Warners $2.6 million and opened a new era.

Edison’s patent had allowed him to claim a film monopoly until 1915, when it was overturned, but already others were making silent movies. By the time Edison died in 1918, a generation of Russian Jews – furriers, glovers, cobblers – had moved to Hollywood, attracted by the sunny climate, ideal for filming. In 1917, the four Warners had founded Warner Brothers, which first made money in a film about German atrocities, then lost more in a story about venereal disease and then made it big with a series featuring a dog named Rin Tin Tin whom Jack Warner thought was cleverer than most of his actors.

As 15,000 theatres across America showed movies and millions listened to the radio, the business attracted a banker from Boston, Joe Kennedy, the fair-haired Bostonian dynamo who had proclaimed himself ‘America’s youngest bank president’ while making a fortune on the stock market. Kennedy understood that movies along with radio would change life. ‘This is another telephone,’ he said, ‘and we must get into this.’

He was not alone. Randolph Hearst, heir to the Deadwood gold fortune and newspaper mogul, was making movies to help his actress paramour Marion Davies. Kennedy met Hearst and proposed an amalgamation – to ‘foment the talkie revolution and a model of corporate control and vertical integration’ – but when the newspaper baron did not bite, he bought into a bankrupt studio, moved to Los Angeles and soon controlled three studios. Married wholesomely to Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Honey Fitz, long-serving Boston mayor, Kennedy had nine children, including four boys, but he left them in Boston so that he could enjoy Hollywood where he swiftly beguiled the lost, gamine movie star Gloria Swanson. An insatiable womanizer, often asking his henchmen for ‘good-looking girls’ because he had to be ‘fed on wild meat’, his seduction techniques resembled his business style: he burst into Swanson’s bedroom, announcing, ‘No longer, no longer! Now!’ Gloria recalled. ‘He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free’ and reaching a ‘hasty climax’.

In October 1928, Kennedy merged his studios into RKO, then cashed out with $5 million, selling his last studio to Pathé for $4 million. Abruptly abandoning Swanson and LA, he returned to New York where the stock market was soaring in frenzied trading. Kennedy liked to claim that when a shoeshine boy gave him share tips, he knew it was time to sell all his holdings.

On 29 October 1929, ‘Black Tuesday’, shares crashed on Wall Street, then on stock markets globally, followed by a grinding depression, economic and psychological, a massive sell-off, then falls in prices, demand and credit, leading to the devastation of US industry and agriculture, with thirteen million unemployed. America lost its confidence.

The Crash accelerated a crisis in another American industry: organized crime. Joe the Boss’s rival, Salvatore Maranzano, a murderous braggart from Sicily’s Castellammare del Golfo who saw himself as the Julius Caesar of crime, persuaded Luciano to kill the padrino. In April 1931, Luciano invited Joe to play cards at a Coney Island restaurant. When Luciano went to the bathroom, Bugsy Siegel burst in with three others and killed the Boss, marking the end of what came to be called the Castellammarese War. Pompously declaring himself capo di tutti capi, ‘Little Caesar’ Maranzano organized the Mafia into five New York ‘families’ along with city ‘families’ across America.^* Obsessed with the Julio-Claudians, suspicious of the Jewish Meyer and Bugsy and jealous of his deputy, Maranzano ordered a hit on Luciano. Instead, in September, Bugsy and Meyer sent four Jewish hitmen dressed as policemen to Maranzano’s Park Avenue office where they stabbed him to death. Crime was so big that Luciano made millions a year, but he did not declare himself godfather, instead creating a commission to act as a board of directors which supervised organized crime for the next fifty years.

In respectable New York, Governor Roosevelt tried progressive measures to fight the Depression as President Hoover floundered in Washington. In 1932 FDR ran against Hoover. ‘I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people,’ he declared, promising vast spending and the repeal of Prohibition. Hoover called him ‘a chameleon in plaid’, but America was desperate for hope: FDR won the presidency. Even before his inauguration, a lunatic tried to shoot him, but Roosevelt reassured Americans that ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ In a blizzard of legislation that enacted his New Deal, he restored faith in the banks and spent lavishly. Setting up a new Stock Exchange Commission to impose rules on the stock market that had caused the crash, he chose as its chairman one of the most successful speculators, Joe Kennedy, who had put his gains into property and, after Prohibition had been overturned by Congress, into Scotch whisky. Kennedy planned to run for president himself, but FDR privately mocked the ‘red-haired Irishman’.

FDR exuded a breezy confidence with his sonorous voice and debonair cigarette holder, backed up by his own story of recovery. Broadcasting aristocratic radio lectures from his people’s fireside, he proved the ultimate political thespian, scarcely hinting at the devious player behind the urbane smile.

FDR encouraged Eleanor to become the ‘conscience of the New Deal’, which she popularized in a daily column. As she travelled around the country, Eleanor was invaluable for Franklin: she tapped the perfect man to direct the Works Progress Administration that created three million jobs, a social worker named Harry Hopkins who, after Howe died of cancer, became Roosevelt’s essential aide. Roosevelt needed his family at his court, but he understood that ‘One of the worst things in the world is being child of a president.’ Jimmy became stressed by serving as his assistant; Elliott became a shady playboy; Anna married twice, but later returned as his favourite companion.

‘I realize FDR’s a great man and he’s nice to me,’ Eleanor confessed, ‘but as a person I’m a stranger and I don’t want to be anything else.’ This was perhaps a coping mechanism after the heartbreak of FDR’s affair, but she found warmth in a special friend, a sturdy cigar-chomping ex-reporter called Lorena Hickock, known as Hick, with whom Eleanor enjoyed something close to love. ‘I couldn’t say je t’aime and je t’adore as I longed to do,’ she wrote, but ‘I go to sleep thinking of you.’ It was probably sexual: ‘I’d never do what I did to you with anyone else,’ wrote Eleanor. Roosevelt’s White House was a presidential court: Missy LeHand taking notes in her nightgown, Hick, who moved into the White House, following Eleanor ‘like a St Bernard’.

On 30 January 1933, as Roosevelt prepared for his inauguration, Adolf Hitler called on the German president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who at 11.15 a.m. swore him in as chancellor of Germany. Like his polar opposite Roosevelt, Hitler was made by the Crash, but although he insisted his rise was providential, it was far from inevitable. It was made possible by the titanic Old Man, the greatest living German.

THE FIELD MARSHAL AND THE CORPORAL

‘It was against my inclination,’ declared Hindenburg, who had retired to write his memoirs, farm his estate and enjoy his hunting, ‘to take any interest in current politics.’ That was not quite true. In 1919, the ambitious old Junker had testified that Germany had not been defeated – just ‘stabbed in the back’ by mysterious traitors. In 1920 he wanted to run for president, but he had been distracted and heartbroken by the death of his wife.

Then in late 1923 his old quartermaster-general Ludendorff approached him with an extraordinary idea: he was going to seize power with a vulgar rabble-rouser. Hindenburg firmly rejected such impertinence.

On 8 November that year, Hitler, Ludendorff and 2,000 Nazis marched on the Munich Beer Hall where the Bavarian government commissioner was speaking. Firing his pistol into the ceiling, Hitler jumped on a chair yelling, ‘National revolution has broken out! The hall’s surrounded … Nobody can leave.’ After a long night of confusion, Ludendorff and Hitler led the revolutionists towards the Bavarian Defence Ministry, but at the Odeonsplatz soldiers manning a barricade opened fire. Fourteen Nazis and four policemen fell dead; Hitler ran down a side street, jumped into a car and, when the car broke down, limped to a supporter’s house. ‘I opened the door,’ wrote Helen Hanfstaengl. ‘There he stood pale as a ghost, without a hat, his face and his clothing covered in dirt …’ He promised to kill himself.

Hindenburg called for national unity. Hitler was sentenced to a five-year jail term for treason. His nine months in Landsberg Prison were ‘my state-university’, and it was there that he wrote his essential work, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), dictated to his devoted secretary Rudolf Hess, son of a wealthy businessman. This laid out with brazen clarity his stupendously ambitious and murderously vicious programme, from the ‘eradication’ of the Jews to the conquest of Aryan ‘living space’ in Russia and Poland, achievable only by war and killing under his providential leadership. The instant bestseller made him rich, and after its publication none of his backers could ever claim to be ignorant of his intentions.

As Hitler emerged from prison, Germany was recovering, even thriving, aided by the US Dawes Plan, under President von Hindenburg, who in 1925 had secured the permission of the ex-kaiser – his ‘king and lord’ – to run for the presidency.

Hitler had to reconquer his own Party, bringing in a young socialist journalist, Joseph Goebbels, who was dazzled by ‘those large blue eyes like stars’ and helped him build his personal leadership, founded on a quasi-messianic cult, with its own bible, Mein Kampf, its own official greeting ‘Heil Hitler!’ and its own bodyguard, the black-clad Schutzstaffel (SS). The SS was commanded by Heinrich Himmler, a failed Bavarian chicken farmer with nervous stomach ailments, the gawky, myopic son of a headmaster and royal tutor. Hitler believed his time would come: ‘I have been the prophet of many things.’ In October 1929, the Crash threw Germany into a desperate economic spiral of inflation, unemployment and violence.

In March 1930, Hindenburg, advised by the camarilla of his son Oskar and his wartime adjutant Colonel Kurt von Schleicher, rejected parliamentary government and resorted instead to autocratic rule through Article 48 of the constitution, appointing a chancellor and ruling by decree. Hindenburg was repudiating parliamentary democracy just as Hitler’s extremism, along with proliferating rightist movements, became popular not just among the threatened middle class but among the elite who hated the socialists, feared the Communists, resented Versailles and craved authoritarianism. Prince Wilhelm August, a son of the kaiser (still living in Holland), was one of the first of many aristocrats and tycoons to join the Nazis.^*

In the elections of September 1930, Hitler won 18.3 per cent of the vote, second only to the Social Democrats. While the SA terrorized the streets, the Nazis, led by Göring, dominated the Reichstag. The Nazis expected power, but none came. Instead Hitler suffered a familial blow. His niece Geli Raubal, cheerful daughter of his half-sister Angela, nineteen years his junior, was his frequent companion on his tireless political tours, but when she fell in love with his chauffeur, Uncle Alf banned the relationship. Hitler admired women, often praising them as ‘big and blonde and wonderful’, but unlike his priapic father he was awkward, asking at least two girls, ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ to which they answered, ‘No, Herr Hitler.’ But he probably loved the omnipresent Geli, encouraging her to become a singer, and he certainly preferred younger girls, as his father had. ‘There’s nothing better than educating a young thing,’ he reflected, ‘malleable as wax.’ In September 1931, Geli shot herself with a pistol given to her by Uncle Alf. No one knows why she killed herself, but most likely she found herself suffocated by Hitler’s control.

‘The days are sad right now,’ a poleaxed Hitler told Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law and one of the devoted hostesses who served as surrogate mothers. The suicide made him a vegetarian and confirmed that love and family mattered little to him. ‘I’m the most limited person in the world in this area,’ he said, ‘I am a fully non-familial being.’ Soon afterwards, Hitler, now forty, met the eighteen-year-old Eva Braun, a schoolteacher’s daughter and assistant to his photographer Hoffmann, who fitted Hitler’s ideal of ‘big and blonde and wonderful’. When she too attempted suicide, it won her a permanent place in his life – ‘This girl did this out of love for me’ – but her discretion allowed him to declare frequently, ‘I have another bride. I am married: to the German people.’ That marriage looked like it might never happen. In autumn 1931, Hindenburg met Hitler at a conference. Hitler thought him ‘an old fool’ while Hindenburg hated ‘that Austrian corporal’. It seemed unlikely he would ever come to power and it was not Germany but Japan that became the sparkwheel of world conflict.

On 18 September 1931, Japanese officers blew up a bridge outside Mukden that pushed the emperor and his generals into sending more troops into China. Hirohito backed the seizure of much of Manchuria, where he allowed the last Manchu, Puyi, to be crowned puppet emperor. The success encouraged ultra-nationalists and expansionist generals who were convinced that a Japanese empire in China was their country’s right. Force was the only way: at home they assassinated the premier and planned coups; abroad they provoked fighting with Chinese troops in Shanghai.

Chiang Kai-shek realized that a Japanese war was inevitable but sought ‘Domestic Stability First’ – the eradication of Communist Jiangxi. He also tried to get his son back from Stalin. ‘I’ve been longing to see my son more than ever,’ he wrote. ‘I dreamed of my late mother and cried out to her twice … I’ve committed a great sin against her.’ Advised by German generals, he launched five campaigns to destroy Mao’s Communist base, encircling it with blockhouses. Stalin punished Chiang by sending his son to work in the mines.

In October 1934, as Chiang closed in, Mao broke out on a long twisting trek during which he lost, by disease, war and defections, 80,000 of his 100,000 followers. Mao himself abandoned his own brother as well as a wife and several babies, but in January 1935 at Zunyi he won power over the Party Secretariat. The trek was later mythologized as the Long March, with many of its heroic battles invented by Mao’s propagandists. He was no military genius, his leadership quixotic and costly – Chiang was bewildered by this ‘wandering in circles’. Finally, when Mao and just 4,000 troops set up headquarters at Shaanxi, on the Yellow Earth Plateau close to the Yellow River, he was joined by his former superior Zhou Enlai, sophisticated, French-speaking and feline, as lieutenant and backed by the comrade who would one day rule China, Deng Xiaoping, a diminutive, peppery Sichuan landlord’s son aged thirty-one.^* Setting himself up at Yan’an in comfortable cave houses filled with his books, Mao built up military power, determined to destroy Chiang. He would remain at this base for ten years as Japan advanced into China, disdaining the League of Nations.

In March 1932, Hindenburg beat Hitler in the presidential elections. Hindenburg, who now faced soaring Nazi violence, was determined to be the leader of the right. ‘I won’t abandon my efforts for a healthy move to the right,’ he promised, appointing a new chancellor, Schleicher’s wartime friend Franz von Papen, a rich Catholic nobleman, prize-winning equestrian and decorated wartime officer who during the First World War had tried to orchestrate a Mexican attack on the USA. Schleicher, now defence minister, controlled this ‘cabinet of monocles’, but Hindenburg offered the vice-chancellorship to Hitler, leader of the largest Reichstag party, who overreached by demanding the chancellorship. ‘I can’t entrust the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to a corporal from Bohemia,’ growled the president, but he received Hitler regally: ‘I want to extend my hand to you as a fellow soldier.’ The corporal and the field marshal had different styles but much in common: both were German nationalists, both loathed the republic and Versailles, both planned to dismantle Poland.^* Both believed they personified the German nation (though Hindenburg revered the monarchy and preferred a Hohenzollern restoration), both believed in the ‘stab in the back’ by socialists and Jews, both revered a militaristic Volksgemeinschaft – national community – and despised democracy, as did the Japanese generals who now accelerated conflict in the east.

Schleicher and Papen were already negotiating with the Nazis, hoping to exploit their thugs on the streets and their votes in the Reichstag. Schleicher regarded them as a vulgar but essential manifestation of the nation, yet the Nazis had passed their peak: in November 1932 they lost votes. By Christmas Hitler was in despair.

As Papen struggled to maintain order, Hindenburg fired him and appointed Schleicher. Papen, still close to Hindenburg, craved the chancellorship. On 4 January 1933, he met Hitler at the Cologne house of the Nazi banker Baron Kurt von Schröder, typical of the magnates now backing Hitler. The Nazi was back in the game. Papen still insisted on the chancellorship, but finally, on 23 January, meeting at the house of a Nazi champagne salesman, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Papen agreed to propose Hitler as chancellor.

When Schleicher resigned, the president, despite his promises never to appoint ‘the corporal’, asked Papen to form a cabinet that included Hitler. Even though Papen learned that Hitler would dismiss the Reichstag and assume absolute powers, he persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to the chancellorship with himself as deputy, both men supporting the principles of Hitler’s openly stated programme – ‘removal [from society] of Social Democrats, Communists and Jews’ and ‘re-establishment of order’ – while convinced they themselves could stop any excesses. Papen recruited Alfred Hugenberg, former Krupp executive, leader of the National People’s Party and media baron, who agreed to become economics minister. ‘We’ve bought Hitler,’ claimed Papen. Hugenberg agreed that Hitler was their ‘tool’ and they would ‘limit his power as much as possible’.

At the last minute, Hitler, securing the police and military portfolios, shook hands with Hindenburg. It was, thought Goebbels, who arranged a torchlit parade, ‘like something out of a fairy tale’, while Hitler believed it was ‘nothing less than the renewal of a millennial condition’. Moving into the chancellery, Hitler confided to a henchman, ‘Now we can really get started. I am never leaving here.’

In February, Hindenburg agreed to curtail free speech and assembly, cracking down on leftist parties. On the 20th, Göring hosted a meeting between Hitler and twenty-two industrial tycoons, led by Gustav Krupp, chief of the armaments dynasty favoured by Wilhelm II, now a convinced Nazi, who contributed a million of the total three million Reichsmarks raised from business magnates to fund the election that would deliver the votes to seize absolute power. On 28 February, a fire at the Reichstag, lit by a Communist lunatic, provided the excited Hitler with the excuse to crush and ban the Communists. In March, Hindenburg ordered the Nazi insignia, the swastika, to become the official flag alongside the old imperial banner, while the SS commander Himmler and his sidekick Reinhard Heydrich, from a well-off musical and intellectual family that had lost its standing (he himself was an ex-naval officer cashiered for immorality), moved from Munich to create Hitler’s security organs, founding the first concentration camp, Dachau. In April, Göring, Prussian police minister, formed the Gestapo – Geheime Staatspolizei – secret police – later handed over to Himmler. At a ceremony in the Garrison Church in Potsdam, Hitler, in black coat, bowed before a tearful Hindenburg, who, in marshal’s uniform, prayed in the crypt of Frederick the Great. Addressing the president, Hitler acclaimed ‘your wonderful life’ – a fusion of Hohenzollerns and Nazis.

Two days later, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act that made Hitler dictator – and a week later he ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses and embarked on antisemitic legislation that excluded ‘non-Aryans’ (defined as those with one Jewish grandparent or more) from the civil service, culminating in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that removed German citizenship from Jews and banned them from relationships with Aryans. Hindenburg agreed, provided Jewish veterans were excluded. From the start, Hitler looked abroad to destroy Versailles, renouncing membership of the League of Nations, and planned to reunite the German peoples, starting with his own homeland, Austria, where democracy was already compromised. Of the new nations of Versailles, Hitler particularly hated Poland and Czechoslovakia. But his interest in Austria clashed with the ambitions of his early hero, Mussolini.

When the two met in Venice, Il Duce was unimpressed by Der Führer – ‘more mule-headed than intelligent’, Mussolini believed. But Hitler’s first Austrian move failed when local Nazis attempted a coup that collapsed. Mussolini was furious, but he was busy building up his forces in Eritrea and Somaliland to attack Ethiopia. Hitler meanwhile reduced unemployment by spending profusely on autobahns and other big projects, but the economic miracle could not last. When Krupp expelled Jews from the Reich Industrial Board, his wife Bertha was dubious. ‘The Führer’s always right,’ replied Krupp. Hitler appointed him Führer of Industry.

In June, Papen, finally glimpsing reality, denounced Hitler. When Goebbels refused to report the speech, Papen complained to Hindenburg, who suddenly threatened to dismiss Hitler: he could have done so. The industrialists and generals feared the SA, whose chieftain Röhm hoped to supplant the army and nationalize industry. Krupp appealed to Hitler, who in June 1934 visited the Krupp factories. The Prussian generals now backed Hitler. They were essential, the SA dispensable.

Hitler agonized at his vertiginous eyrie on the Obersalzberg. It was his self-fulfilling belief that made his speeches so alluring and his personality so compelling. Inscrutable and secretive – his codename for himself was Wolf – Hitler was ruled by a conviction that he might die young, often reflecting, ‘When I’m no longer here …’ He was a reckless gambler whose dreams defied conventional sense: ‘I go the way that providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.’

Two heroes particularly inspired him as warlord-cum-artist, Frederick the Great and Wagner. Portraits of Frederick hung in all his offices; his stays with the Wagners at Bayreuth were sacred. All politicians exist twice – as individuals representing just their personal qualities and as phenomena representing something more: the magic lies in the fusion of the two. Capable both of insinuating charm and of foam-flecked rages, Hitler played many roles, joking that he was ‘the greatest actor in Europe’. As performer and manipulator, he was capable of overawing and co-opting aristocrats and workers, Germans and foreigners, while also skilled in balancing his intimate ‘familial’ court of devoted henchmen in what his architect Albert Speer called ‘a carefully balanced system of mutual enmity’.

Although he slept late and rarely sat at a desk, he was capable of sustained concentration, whether dictating speeches to several secretaries simultaneously or later directing the war. Vegetarian and teetotal, an obsessive germophobe with bad teeth, rotted by Bavarian cakes, which later caused eyewatering halitosis, he was most relaxed with certain families, his early patrons and friends in Munich, followed by the Wagners, later the Goebbelses and Eva Braun. But he increasingly embraced the ultimate test of power: the dictator’s reversal of time. Hating solitude, he treated his retainers to long monologues that first fascinated and later bored them. Armed with his autodidact’s omniscience and the adventurer’s braggadocio, he despised experts and always knew better. ‘My life,’ he said, ‘is the greatest novel in history.’

LONG KNIVES; GREAT TERROR; MASS MOMENTUM AND PERSONAL POWER: HITLER AND STALIN

‘In God’s name,’ exclaimed Hitler. ‘Anything’s better than this waiting around. I’m ready!’ On 30 June 1933, the killing started small. Hitler approved the death lists compiled by Himmler and Heydrich, giving the codeword Hummingbird to Goebbels, who telegraphed it to Göring and Himmler in Berlin.

Hitler flew to Munich. Röhm was arrested in bed (with a male lover) by a splenetic Hitler, holding a whip; several other SA leaders were also caught in homosexual clinches, much to Hitler’s horror. All were then shot by the SS; in Berlin, Schleicher (and his wife) and Nazi rivals were killed; perhaps 180 died altogether. Hindenburg was shocked by the killing of the Schleichers, but Hitler apologized, claiming the general had drawn a pistol. Hindenburg, now dying of cancer, approved.

Hitler arrived back in Berlin, revelling in the drama: ‘Brown shirt, black tie, dark brown leather coat, high black military boots, everything dark upon dark,’ wrote a witness. ‘Above it all, bareheaded, a chalkwhite, sleepless, unshaven face … from which a pair of extinguished eyes stared through some clotted strands of hair.’ Next morning, Hitler told his secretary, ‘I’ve just had a bath and feel like I’ve been born again.’ On 2 August, Hindenburg died, leaving letters pleading for the restoration of the monarchy – and praising Hitler’s ‘historic mission’. Hitler now combined the presidency with the chancellorship; the army swore allegiance to him as ‘Führer of the German People’.^*

‘That Hitler is quite a fellow,’ said an unexpected admirer, Stalin, to his Kremlin epigones, impressed by the Night of the Long Knives. A born extremist, backed by a murderous secret police, now called the OGPU, and a network of concentration camps, the GULAG, Stalin mastered the propulsive politics of the Mass Age, mobilizing millions of people, particularly the young, in the Bolshevik project to destroy the old and build a new, more just world in the thrilling drama of revolution. But he also appreciated that modernity was a struggle of geopolitics, driven by mass weapons, mass killing, mass production and mass spectacle. He combined his Marxist mission with his own personal power and Russia’s exceptional imperial destiny. The more he mobilized the masses, the less power they had and the more he wielded – the irony of mass politics. Stalin had embarked on a radical and colossal gamble to industrialize Russia at breakneck speed, using American advisers and technology to collectivize agriculture in Ukraine and other regions, mercilessly collecting grain to pay for the industrialization. Initially the Bolsheviks had promoted Ukrainian culture, as part of their policy of korenizatsiia (indigenisation), providing Moscow was paramount. But when the peasants in Ukraine resisted, Stalin ‘broke their backs’ by repression and famine. Remembering the Polish invasion and fearing that ‘We may lose Ukraine’, he cracked down on Ukrainian language and culture, arresting, shooting or deporting 4–5 million people. Yet neither the repression nor the famine were limited to that republic: the starvation also hit the lower Volga, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Later Stalin casually told Churchill ten million had starved, and demographic research confirms the vanishing of eight and a half million people. Four million peasants died of starvation in Ukraine – one in eight people – the atrocity today known as the Holodomor (‘Death by Hunger’) that was, writes Serhii Plokhy, ‘a man-made phenomenon, caused by official policy’, resulting from ‘policies with a clear ethnonational coloration’. Simultaneously, it was part of a wider Soviet famine – 1.2 to 1.4 million Kazakhs starved to death: ‘This,’ writes Stephen Kotkin, ‘was the highest death ratio in the Soviet Union.’ Stalin’s self-made calamity could have destroyed the USSR, but instead the cruel gamble paid off: the USSR emerged with collectivized farms worked by 100 million farmers as oppressed as serfs – and modern industry that could soon outproduce Germany.

Benefiting from the exceptional moment of Marxist internationalism in a realm usually dominated by ethnic Russians, this Caucasian, pockmarked and compact, with a withered arm, a Marxist-Leninist fanatic who always spoke Russian with a heavy accent, now ruled the tsar’s empire. But within the Party Stalin’s comrades mocked his obscurity, challenged his dictatorship, questioned his collectivization and, he believed, encouraged his manic-depressive wife, Nadezhda, to commit suicide. If Russia faced a new war against Hitler, Stalin needed to enforce total supremacy. Killing was his way to do it. ‘Our system,’ he told a confidant, ‘is bloodletting,’ later explaining that his method was ‘quicker but requires more blood’.

Five months after the Night of the Long Knives, on 1 December 1934, Stalin’s ally and Leningrad (formerly Petrograd) leader Sergei Kirov was assassinated, most likely by an unstable comrade whose wife he had seduced – though it also possible that Stalin organized it. Always a master improviser, Stalin took emergency powers and launched a Terror, ordering arrests, deportations and killings to purge the Party not just of traitors but even of those who might think disloyal thoughts. Terror was part of the DNA of the Communist Party; autocracy was part of the DNA of the Russian state; and killing was Stalin’s essential political tool but also part of a personality shaped by his underground life, the savagery of the civil war and, above all, by the experience of power and insecurity in the Kremlin. Dictatorship makes its own monsters. The bizarre mayhem of the Terror was the creation of all of these, driven by Stalin’s ferocious darkness, implacable will, political skill and his cool but totally reckless violence. No great power has ever mutilated itself in such an extraordinary frenzy of chaos and murder. Suspicious of veteran Bolsheviks and generals, Stalin orchestrated a national witch-hunt, staging melodramatic show trials at which respected leaders confessed to outlandish plots. He and his NKVD commissar, a dwarfish myrmidon called Nikolai Yezhov, drew up death lists known as ‘albums’ of thousands of comrades whom Stalin often knew intimately; meanwhile hundreds of thousands of unnamed victims, singled out via quotas of place, race and background, were also targeted: in the ‘national operations’, Poles and Koreans were decimated; within the republics, the terror hit Ukrainians most intensely. The vindictive torture of old enemies, the killing of friends and families and the paranoid scenarios of lurid conspiracies all reflected the strangeness of Stalin himself, but he believed that terror was the only way to ensure total loyalty. ‘Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away,’ he said. ‘When you chop wood, chips fly.’ During his reign, eighteen million innocents passed through the atrocious GULAG camps. Starting from a mere 79,000 slave labourers in 1930, rising to a million in 1935 and around seven million by 1938, these slaves toiled on canals or in mines; yet, as in the American south, slavery was not only diabolical but economically inefficient. During 1936–8, a million victims were officially liquidated but real numbers were much higher. Forty thousand officers were executed, including three out of the five marshals. The total killed during Stalin’s rule will never be known but it was probably close to twenty million.

Watching Stalin’s self-destructive ‘meatgrinder’, Hitler was convinced that the Soviet Union had been severely weakened. He revelled in the messianic mystical union of Volk und Führer, performing at vast theatrical rallies at Nuremberg. ‘Once in the days of yore you heard the voice of a man,’ Hitler told the rally in September 1936, ‘and … it awakened you, and you followed it … When we meet here we are suffused with wonder at our coming together. Not all of you can see me, and I can’t see all of you. But I can feel you, and you can feel me.’

ETHIOPIA WITH OR WITHOUT ETHIOPIANS: HAILE SELASSIE AND MUSSOLINI

In December 1934, as the Führer turned to Europe and Stalin launched his Terror, the Duce turned to Ethiopia to avenge Adowa.

Five years earlier, its thirty-seven-year-old regent, Ras Tafari, had been crowned as Negus Negust Haile Selassie in St George’s, Addis, a ceremony attended for the first time by guests from all the European powers, designed to dazzle with traditional Ethiopian glory and independent modernity. Haile Selassie annexed the last of the Muslim sultanates and created a constitution with an assembly that established an absolutist monarchy.^* But Ethiopia’s position between Italian Eritrea and Somaliland made it an ideal place to launch Mussolini’s new Roman empire.

‘Only he and I knew what was going to happen,’ boasted General Emilio De Bono, promising the Duce that its conquest ‘wouldn’t be difficult’.

‘Full speed ahead,’ ordered Mussolini.

In Addis, as the Italians tried to provoke the Ethiopians at the remote Ogaden oasis of Wal-Wal, Haile Selassie refused to mobilize and appealed to the League of Nations. Britain and France, already alarmed by Hitler and keen not to drive Mussolini into a German alliance, disgraced themselves by acquiescing in the Duce’s predation.

On 3 October 1935, without any declaration of war, De Bono from Eritrea and Rodolfo Graziani from Somaliland invaded Ethiopia with 476,000 men, including 60,000 Eritrean Royal Colonials, 17,000 members of the irregular Gruppo Bande Eritrea and Somalians under Sultan Olol Dinle, along with 500 tanks and 350 planes. Of Haile Selassie’s 250,000 soldiers, only the 20,000 Imperial Guards were fully armed; he had eight operative planes, and the Italians had suborned some Ethiopian magnates.

Outside the Menelik Palace, to the beat of drums, the khaki-clad negus negust, calm and poised, reviewed his troops, his Guardsmen armed with Vickers machine guns on mules but many with sticks, spears and empty ammunition belts. As the Italians bombed Adowa, Mussolini sacked De Bono and appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, whom he ordered ‘to use gas and flamethrowers even on a vast scale’, adding, ‘Use all means of war.’ Mussolini’s pilot sons Bruno and Vittorio revelled in their bombing raids and boasted of slaughtering Ethiopians.

The emperor counter-attacked in southern Tigray but was thrown back, his troops poisoned with gas. ‘Of all the massacres,’ he recalled, ‘of this terrible and pitiless war, this was the worst. Men, women, animals were blown to pieces or burned with mustard gas, the dying, the wounded, screamed with agony.’ In March 1936, Haile Selassie and the last army in the north were defeated at Maychew by Badoglio, with 11,000 killed. The emperor retreated to pray at Lalibela’s subterranean rock-cut cathedrals before halting at Addis, where his advisers begged him not to fall into Italian hands. Badoglio declared a March of the Iron Will from the north, while Graziani, who like Badoglio had made his name massacring Libyans in north Africa, advanced from the south. In May Haile Selassie escaped Addis three days ahead of Graziani, who became viceroy. Four days later, in Rome, Mussolini appeared on the balcony of the Palazzo Veneziano. ‘Ethiopia is Italian!’ he told ecstatic crowds. ‘Adowa is avenged.’ Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed emperor of Ethiopia.

In July, Mussolini and Hitler received envoys from a rebel general in Spain. The country had been damaged by dictatorship, inequality, depression and bewilderment at the loss of empire. Its Bourbon king Afonso XIII was exiled, with the impoverished republic lethally divided between secular socialists and Catholic conservatives. Now when socialists won the election, the general, Francisco Franco, joined the rebellion. Tiny, broad-hipped and high-voiced, cautious and cunning, Franco had become the country’s youngest ever general as commander of the brutal African Legion fighting in Spain’s Moroccan colony, but now his legionaries were stuck in Morocco, allowing the Republican government to retain control of much of the country.

His envoys were lucky to find Hitler staying with the Wagners at Bayreuth. ‘That’s no way to start a war,’ the Führer exclaimed, fearing that ‘Jewish Bolsheviks in Moscow’ would seize Spain. Hitler and Mussolini airlifted Franco’s troops to the mainland, followed by 50,000 Italian troops and 16,000 Germans. The fight against Fascism attracted 40,000 volunteers, known as the International Brigades. Slowly, Stalin came round to backing the Republic, sending 3,000 advisers and armaments and launching a terror in Spain to match the one he was conducting in Russia. Franco, a murderously plodding generalissimo, failed to take Madrid but, aided by Italian and German bombing, he saw himself as El Caudillo of the Last Crusade, annihilating godless socialists. Both sides killed civilians: the Republicans shot around 38,000, but Franco shot 200,000.^* There were similarities between Spain and Ethiopia.

Graziani, now marquess of Neghelli, banned ‘racial commingling’ and, after an assassination attempt in Addis on the day Ethiopians recall as Yekatit 12 (February 1937), he unleashed Italian soldiers and Black Lion militiamen who, shouting ‘Duce! Duce!’ and ‘Civiltà Italiana!’, butchered 20,000 people. ‘Whole streets were burned down,’ their occupants machine-gunned or stabbed.

‘The Duce will have Ethiopia,’ said Graziani, ‘with or without the Ethiopians.’ The year before, while inspecting a church at Jijiga, the viceroy fell through a hole concealed under a carpet, a humiliation he was determined to avenge. At Debre Libanos, Graziani ordered: ‘Execute summarily all monks without distinction, including the vice-prior.’ Two thousand monks were killed. Altogether the Italians killed 400,000 Ethiopians. The League of Nations passed then cancelled sanctions. ‘Italy considers it an honour to inform the League,’ Mussolini’s foreign minister and son-in-law, Count Ciano, boasted, ‘of her efforts to civilize Ethiopia.’ In Geneva, Haile Selassie, serene and solemn, warned the League, ‘It’s not merely a question of Italian aggression; it’s collective security,’ and asked, ‘What reply shall I take back to my people?’

There was none – and Hitler was not the only one who understood that the League was toothless. On 25 November 1936, Japan signed an anti-Soviet pact with Germany, soon joined by Italy – the future Axis alliance. Emperor Hirohito’s own views remain opaque, but it is likely that he along with his courtiers and generals became convinced that it was the time to conquer China.

In February 1936, a coup by nationalist officers had placed further pressure on Hirohito. The rebels were executed, but Hirohito, his generals and the genro, his political veterans, intensified the cult of militaristic nationalism, laced with bushido chivalry, Shinto ritual and imperial cult. Hirohito privately did not regard himself as divine, but he believed that the emperor was synonymous with nation and state. In May 1937, he backed kokutai no hongi – the fundamentals of national polity – which saw the emperor as a ‘living god’. Everyone must ‘live for the great glory of the emperor, abandoning the small ego and thus expressing our true life as a people’: this was kodo, the imperial way. Hostile to western democracies, this Pan-Asian ideology was conditional on Japanese supremacy. The genro regarded China as racially subhuman, merely a territory that Japan, thanks to the blood sacrifices of 1895 and 1904, was fated to rule.

On 7 July 1937, an unplanned exchange of fire between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge which provided access to Beijing provided the pretext to invade China – the start of a struggle that would kill fourteen million Chinese (only Russia would lose more) and provide a spark for world war.

* Self-determination was a noble ideal, still universally accepted as the correct basis for the organization of the modern world, but in practice, it was painful. The new nation states had to be hacked out of territories long ruled by multi-ethnic empires. In Ireland, Britain, faced with a Catholic Irish revolt and civil war, would now negotiate a partition between an independent Catholic republic in the south and a Protestant province in the north. Just as the creation of Greece in the 1820s had led to the departure of Muslims, now the creation of Türkiye brutally expelled the Greeks. After the Second World War, such brutal partitions created new states in Germany and Poland 1945; India and Pakistan 1947; Israel 1948.

* Enver, once Ottoman vice-generalissmo but now outmanoeuvred by Kemal, left for Berlin then Moscow and Central Asia where he declared himself amir of Turkestan and launched a Turkic uprising, resisted by Lenin’s Red Army, which was seeking to secure central Asia. Not far from Dushanbe (Tajikistan), he was killed by the Bolsheviks in a skirmish. The other two pashas, Talaat and Jemal, were assassinated by Armenians.

* During the war Atatürk’s secretary Fikriye Hanım was his main lover, but now he met the cultured Latife Us˙aklıgil, forming a triangle that ended with Fikriye shooting herself (with a pistol that was a gift from Kemal). In 1938, just fifty-seven, Atatürk died of cirrhosis at the Ottoman Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul. His vision, guarded by the army, which intervened repeatedly to seize power, endured until 2003 when the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, first as premier, then as president, enforced an Islamist autocracy, symbolically reconverting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

* ‘The right of the republics to secede freely from the Union was included in the text,’ wrote a Russian historical essayist in 2021, but ‘by doing so, the authors planted in the foundation of our state a dangerous timebomb’. The essayist was Vladimir Putin. The original four republics were Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transkavkazia (Caucasus). The central Asian republics were then added and Transkavkazia broken up. After 1940 there were fifteen.

* Mao channelled the fifth-century BC philosopher Sun Tzu: ‘When the enemy advances, we retreat. When the enemy rests, we harass him. When the enemy avoids battle, we attack. When the enemy retreats we advance.’

* ‘There’s no genuine friendship or kindness or love under heaven,’ wrote Chiang in his surprisingly emotional diary. ‘The relationship of mother and son is the only exception.’ He trusted only Meiling: ‘Apart from my wife, not a single other person can share a little responsibility or a little work with me.’ Chiang granted subsidies to the warlords who backed him and Meiling organized payments, while T. V. Song and H. H. Kung served as premier and finance minister. When assassins tried to kill Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, they shouted, ‘Death to the Song Dynasty!’

* Each family had a hierarchy of boss, captains and soldiers. In a quasi-Catholic ritual, the finger of a ‘made man’ was pricked, blood dripping on to a picture of St Francis of Assisi which was then lit as he swore omertà – silence – with the words: ‘As this saint burns so shall my soul. I enter alive and I only leave dead.’ Crime families recreated the loyalty of real families, though their bosses were actually elected; only the Trafficante family of Florida passed from father to son.

* The kaiser’s eldest, the ex-crown prince Wilhelm, supported Hitler initially, hoping to run for president himself and restore the monarchy.

* At fifteen, Deng had travelled to study and train as a fitter in France, where he became a Marxist and met Zhou Enlai, afterwards returning to join the army of a warlord allied to Chiang. When the general turned against the Communists, Deng fled to Mao and accompanied him on the Long March. At his new base, Mao also promoted Xi Zhongxun, son of a local Shaanxi landowner. Xi’s work during the Forties included United Front work to win over KMT leaders and territory. He met a young girl from Beijing whose father was a KMT official, but she joined the Communists and they married in 1943. When he moved to Beijing, she went with him, working in the propaganda department. Their son Xi Jinping would rule China in the twenty-first century, and his mission would be to complete his father’s work by reclaiming the last KMT bastion, Taiwan.

* After defeating the Bolsheviks in 1920, Piłsudski had retired, returning in 1926 in the face of growing instability, to rule as minister of military affairs. Unusually in a Europe seething with antisemitism, Piłsudski welcomed Poland’s many Jews into his national project, a policy he called ‘national assimilation’. Aware of Polish vulnerability to Hitler, he may have suggested to France launching a pre-emptive strike – before his death from cancer in 1935, which left Poland as a dictatorship without a dictator.

* A visitor from another world witnessed these events. A delegation of American Baptists was touring Germany that month: Michael King, a Baptist minister in Atlanta and father of a boy Michael Jr, aged five, was inspired by visiting Martin Luther’s house in Wittenberg but horrified by Hitler’s antisemitic racism. On his return, he changed his name and that of his son to Martin Luther King and helped draft a declaration by the Baptist World Alliance that ‘This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.’

* Ras Tafari’s coronation, together with Marcus Garvey’s Return to Africa movement which predicted that ‘Kings would come out of Africa’, inspired a new movement, Rastafarianism, in Jamaica whose adherents believed that Haile Selassie marked a black Second Coming of Christ.

* Franco was not the only autocrat in Iberia, but Portugal followed an entirely different model. After the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown in 1910, the country was ill managed and impoverished, though maintaining its empire in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and Goa. But after a military coup in 1926 officers did an unusual thing: instead of appointing a general, they recruited a talented economics professor, António Salazar, son of a provincial estate manager who had almost become a priest, as finance minister. Salazar balanced the budget, then as premier, creating what he called a pluricontinental, imperialist Catholic Novo Estado (New State), he stabilized Portugal as a conservative dictator, based on God, Country and Family, suppressing opposition at home with the help of his secret police the PIDE and rejuvenating the empire by sending settlers to Angola and Mozambique. He was illiberal and authoritarian but also professorial and cerebral; there were few rallies and minimal racism. But the PIDE operated a camp on Cape Verde where prisoners were tortured and killed. Salazar kept out of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War, but he was willing to fight to maintain the Portuguese empire.