Europe: A History (233 page)

Map 29.
Europe, 1992

14 February 1992, Summertown
. In the beginning, there was no book. Now the last words are rolling onto the last pages. The desk beside the window of the top studio is dimly lit by the dawn. The night frost has left patches of damp on the roof that glistens through the glass. Clouds amble over the dark skyline towards the brightening band of pale yellow. The leafless apple trees of the old Thorncliffe Orchard straggle through the gloom towards the next row of red-brick Victorian houses. A solitary crow stands sentinel on the tip of the highest beech, as on a thousand such dawns since ‘The Legend of Europa’ was written. For once, the foul fumes of the Oxford Automobile Components factory are blowing elsewhere. The family slumbers on towards school-time.

The family connections of this house span half of Europe. One side of the family is firmly attached to this offshore island, to Lancashire and, further back, to Wales. The other side was rooted in the eastern parts of old Poland, which spent most of the last hundred years either in Austrian Galicia or in the Soviet Union. After education in Oxford and in Cracow, the two principals of the house met on the Boulevard Gergovia in Clermont-Ferrand, in the city of Blaise Pascal, who might well have been amused by such an infinitesimal probability. These happy accidents inevitably colour one’s sense of history. Time and place in the writing of history are sovereign. Historians are a necessary part of their histories.

Today is the feast-day of SS Cyril and Methodius, the co-patrons of Europe. Prayers at the Jesuit church of St Aloysius ‘celebrate the origins of the Slavonic peoples … May their light be our light.’ The rosary is recited ‘in the intention of the peoples of eastern Europe’. The priest explains, eccentrically, that Cyril and Methodius were apostles of the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians (see Chapter V).

School-time. This week at Squirrel School, the headmistress has been talking at assembly about the needy children of Albania.

The morning’s newspapers have nothing to say about SS Cyril and Methodius. The
Independent
leads with ‘UN Troops for Croatia’. The
Guardians
‘Europe’ supplement leads with an extended report on shopping in Murmansk. Yesterday’s
El País
from Madrid leads with the formation of joint Franco-Spanish brigades to fight the Basque organization ETA; it has just recruited ‘Mikailo Gorbachov’ as a monthly columnist. In
Le Monde
, three pages of North African news predominate.
De Telegraaf from
The Hague gives its top spot to a problem with NATO’s low flying F-16 fighters. The front page of
Süddeutsche Zeitung
from Munich is taken up with the affairs of the federal finance ministry.
Gazeta Wyborcza
, two days in the post from Warsaw, is preoccupied with the Constitutional Tribunal and its rejection of a statute on pensions passed by the communist-run parliament. The
Oxford Times
writes a leader about its own letter column, which is headed by a communication from the Anglican Bishop of Oxford on the priestly ordination of women.
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The only major story of historical interest appears on the front page of the
Corriere della Sera
, under the headline ‘Massacrateli’ ordine di Lenin’. Moscow is the growth-point of knowledge about modern European history. A correspondent
in Moscow, quoting
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, lists hitherto secret documents from the archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. They reveal the Bolshevik leader’s personal insistence on revolutionary atrocities. On 11 August 1918, for example, Lenin wrote to the Comrades at Penza:

The rising of the five Kulak regions must be met with merciless repression … There’s need to make an example. 1) Hang not less than 100 Kulaks, rich ones, blood-suckers, … 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their food away. 4) Pick hostages according to yesterday’s telegram. Do everything so that the people will see, tremble, and groan for miles and miles around … PS. Search out hard people. Lenin.
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These flourishes do not come from the correspondence of Hitler, comments the
Corriere
. So it’s true. Bolshevik barbarity did not start with Stalin.

The week’s home news has been dominated by mean pre-election wrangles, mainly about money. Abroad, one could choose between the travails of the French President, the future of the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal, the conviction of a world boxing champion, or a decision of Ireland’s Constitutional Court to deny abortion to a 14-year-old rape victim. The President of the European Commission has submitted proposals for a larger budget—’to match the Age of Maastricht’. The British tabloids have greeted this last item with derision. Under the headline ‘No, Jacques, It’s Not All Right’, the editorial of the
Daily Mail
comments: ‘Such Euro-largesse could so easily find its way into the pockets of shady contractors, or under the mattresses of colourful, but lazy, characters, basking in the Mediterranean sun.’
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Le Monde
analyses the phenomenon: ‘La Grande-Bretagne se mobilise contre les “eurocrates”’.
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Above all, there is the 16th Winter Olympics at Albertville and Courchevel in Savoy. The ‘blue ribbon’ event, the men’s combined downhill and slalom skiing, has been won by an Italian, Josef Pollg.

The
European
, which claims to be the only all-European newspaper, has recently lost both its crooked publisher and its hero in the Kremlin. This week’s lead story, ‘Italy Faces the Wrath of Europe’, reports on Rome’s poor record in implementing EC directives. The business section slams opposition from ‘American isolationists’ to a $10 billion IMF scheme for stabilizing the Russian rouble.
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In late morning, as predicted, it has started to rain. The papers’ weather maps illustrate the range of their readers’ interest.
The Times
publishes three weather maps—two larger ones for the British Isles (less the west of Ireland), for a.m. and p.m., and one centred on the mid-Atlantic.
Le Monde
has two weather maps for Europe, and one for France. The
Corriere
has one for Europe from the Atlantic to the Crimea, another for Italy. The
SZ
has three spacious maps, all for the whole of Europe, providing detailed information from a score of weather stations bounded by Reykjavik, Luleå (Sweden), Lisbon, and Athens.
Gazeta Wyborcza
has no weather map, but lists the previous day’s temperatures from selected European capitals—Rome and Lisbon (13 °C), London (10 °C), Athens (9 °C), Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, and Minsk (+1 °C), Kiev and Prague (+1 °C), and Bucharest (+3 °C). Varsovians do not know what the temperature is in Moscow.

The
European
splashes out with the largest of all weather maps, in colour. It marks the new republics, including Slovenia, Croatia, Belarus, and Moldavia, but not Russia, which is wrongly equated with the CIS. The accompanying list of ‘European road works’ mentions nothing further east than the A9-Bad Dürrenberg crossroads near Leipzig. So it’s true: they don’t mend roads in Eastern Europe.

Such is the tangle of daily information from which future historians will have to make sense.

Today is St Valentine’s Day. By tradition, it is the day when birds begin their mating; so it also became the day when human lovebirds exchange suitable signals.
The Times
publishes page after page of cryptic, and frequently ungrammatical, messages:

AGATHA AARDVAARK, All my love Hector Tree…. ARTEMIS, Not only Hesperus entreats Thy Love, Algy… . CHRISTIANE, Un vraie couscous royale. Je t’aim infini-ment, King… . MENTEN, Blue Seas in Basalt Rocks… . MOONFACE loves Baby Dumpling and Smelly… . POOPS, Ich bin deiner, bist du meine? Wirst du sein mein Valentine?
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Several papers give contradictory explanations of the origins of St Valentine’s Day. One version says that the medievals adopted the Roman festival of Lupercalia; Lupereal or ‘the wolfs lair’ was the cave where Romulus and Remus had been reared by the she-wolf and where Romans would later smear themselves in goats’ blood in the hope of parenthood. Neither of the two Roman martyrs called Valentine can be held responsible for the pagan frolics.

Today is also the tricentenary of the Massacre of Glencoe. It turns out that only 38 persons were killed. ‘In the context of clan history,’ says Lord Macdonald of Skye, ‘the numbers involved were minimal.’ So there are still Macdonalds enough to march with the pipes to the Glen of Weeping. In any case, as
The Times
reports, the Campbells were acting ‘as agents of the Westminster government’. Now that’s a topical note. Last week’s
Die Zeit
devoted a major feature article to the roots of Scotland’s separate identity; it was accompanied by a photo of a huge graffito from Glasgow, ‘Brits Out Now’.
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Writing to music is a practical habit. BBC Radio 3 helps the ink to flow. At 07.35 the first paragraphs were started to Bach’s Concerto for oboe d’amore, BWV1055. The morning papers were accompanied by Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3. St Valentine’s Day was suitably preceded by Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasia,
Francesca da Rimini
. At 2 p.m. the Katowice Brass was missed, but Beethoven’s Eighth is giving strength to the afternoon. Today, there is a good balance between West and East. For once, BBC 3 is not playing Janáček.

It is an irony that historians, who study the past, are invariably pressed to predict the future. It helps to have followed the drift of events, but not much.

To the west, across the ocean, the USA has surely reached the peak of its power. It looks to be heading for trouble with its debt, for trouble with its allies, and for trouble from the ‘diversity’ of its own citizens. It has specially intransigent problems with Japan, whose economic prowess has wounded America’s pride. It is drifting away from Europe, to which it is no longer bound by the chains of the late Cold War. Vice-President Quayle in London this week, protesting to the contrary, did protest too much.

To the north, in Scotland, the independence movement has started to roll again. This week, an absolute majority of Scots expressed a preference for changing the country’s status. They possess the power to destroy the United Kingdom, and thereby to deflate the English, as no one in Brussels could ever do. They may make Europeans of us yet.

To the south, in the heartland of the present European Community, both the French and the Germans are feeling the strain. France is beset by the weight of Muslim immigrants from North Africa, by the nationalist backlash of M. Le Pen, and by a socialist presidency that has outstayed its welcome. Germany is reeling under the costs of reunification. In their distress, both governments have turned to closer European union for comfort and support. This week, a television programme on ‘The Germans’ showed the German Chancellor quoting Thomas Mann, who longed ‘not for a German Europe, but for a European Germany’. The Germans may lose their enthusiasm if they have to lose their Deutschmark.

To the east, the map of Europe is still in flux: a new state seems to be established every month. There is much talk of the dangers of nationalism. Where does it come from? It would be more convincing if it targeted the larger and more dangerous nationalisms, not the petty ones. Not that the dangers do not exist. The three Baltic States are afloat in a sea of troubles. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia are aiming at full membership of the EC by the end of the decade. Czechs and Slovaks may be heading for a divorce. Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania have nowhere to go. The Yugoslav Federation must surely split up soon. Slovenia and Croatia, like Belarus’, Ukraine, and Moldavia, should prove viable, if left in peace. The Commonwealth of Independent States, however, is unlikely to survive; and in its present form the Russian Republic looks no more healthy than the CIS. It is still a vast artificial amalgam, twice the size of the USA, with a very uneven economic infrastructure and no political cement. Its leaders can hardly hold it together by democracy and a prayer. They may have a chance if Moscow allows the Far Eastern Region to drift in the direction of autonomy and Japanese investment, and if Siberia is encouraged to develop its own resources with foreign help. European Russia, as always, has too many people and too many soldiers, and not enough to feed them. The Russians have drawn on their exceptional powers of stoic endurance through two years of Soviet collapse; but they may not do so indefinitely. If democratic Russia does not prosper, it will start to fragment still further. In that case, autocratic Russia will try to reassert itself with a vengeance.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire is certainly ‘the greatest, and perhaps the most awful event’ of recent times. The speed of its collapse has exceeded all the
other great landslides of European history—the dismemberment of the Spanish dominions, the partitions of Poland, the retreat of the Ottomans, the disintegration of Austria-Hungary. Yet it is hardly an event which calls for the historian to sit on the ruins of the Kremlin, like Gibbon in the Colosseum, or to write a requiem. For the Soviet Union was not a civilization that once was great. It was uniquely mean and mendacious even in its brief hour of triumph. It brought death and misery to more human beings than any other state on record. It brought no good life either to its dominant Russian nationality or even to its ruling élite. It was massively destructive, not least of Russian culture. As many thoughtful Russians now admit, it was a folly that should never have been built in the first place. The sovereign nations of the ex-Soviet Union are picking up the pieces where they left off in 1918–22, when their initial flicker of independence was snuffed out by Lenin’s Red Army. Almost everyone agrees: ‘Russia, yes. But what sort of Russia?’
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