Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
Carl Eric Bechhofer (1923)
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- BATUM
- Oil Fever and Bluebottles
- Knut Hamsun (1903): Æventyrland. Oplevet og drømt I Kaukasien Fridtjof Nansen (1927): Gjennom Armenia Erik Linklater (1941)
- DANZIG
- Sponge Cake with Hitler
- Hermann Rauschning (1939): Hitler Speaks Günter Grass (2009): The Tin Drum Die Blechtrommel (1979)
- FAR EASTERN REPUBLIC
- Utopians on the Tundra
Carl Eric Bechhofer (1923): In Denikin’s Russia and the Caucasus 1919-1920 Anton I. Denikin (1975): The Career of a Tsarist Officer: Memoirs 1872-1916 A comet with a filthy tail of robbery and rape LEON TROTSKY, OF THE WHITE ARMY
Oil Fever and Bluebottles The history of Batum is almost exclusively about the interests of the great powers and the lust for oil, and follows a pattern that has persisted ad nauseam right up to the twenty-first century. And as so often elsewhere, Great Britain is right at the centre of events. It ruled Batum from December 1918 to July 1920. Batum started out as little more than an average seaside town on the Caucasian Black Sea coast. Nonetheless, as the terminus of the Trans-Caucasian Railway, it had gained a certain international lustre by the time Norwegian writer Hamsun came on a visit in 1899. The city lies in a fertile region, surrounded by forests, cornfields, vineyards. High up, the mountains are burnt here and there, and on these bare patches, Kurds walk about herding their sheep. The ruins of castles protrude from the velvety forests.… There is something South American about life in Batum. People come into the hotel dining room dressed in modern clothing and silk dresses and jewellery.… Its streets are broad but not cobbled: you drive and walk on sand. The harbour is teeming with ships, with small sailing vessels from southerly towns all the way down to Turkey, and big European coastal steamers on their way to Alexandria and Marseille.153 Hamsun is fascinated, but is nonetheless struck by the large ‘unhealthy’, swamp areas close to the city, an impression shared half a century later by the travel writer, Erik Linklater, who mentions the tremendous numbers of bluebottles. ‘Our bedrooms were noisy hives, and the restaurant by day a buzzing cloud.’154 Rainfall is the cause. Because it rains a lot in Batum, even more than on the western coast of Norway at its worst. A couple of years after Hamsun’s visit, the young Joseph Stalin cut his revolutionary teeth in the town, organizing strikes and repeatedly being jailed for agitation. Stalin was so proud of these feats that he asked the author Mikhail Bulgakov – best known for his surreal novel, The Master and Margarita – to write the biographical play, Batum. With Stalin peering over the author’s shoulder it is hardly surprising that the play turned out stilted and flat. When the critics savaged it, a humiliated Stalin had the whole thing shredded and punished Bulgakov with a permanent travel ban. Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen came to Batum in 1925 as the High Commissioner in the League of Nations. The aim was to help survivors of the Armenian genocide to find a better life, deeper in the Caucasus region. Nansen was travelling with his secretary, Vidkun Quisling. The city made a positive impression on them. Nansen was not a man to be bothered by flies, but the ill-kempt avenues of fan palms along the main boulevards irritated him: ‘Like worn-out tassels on top of long poles, they look like tattered besoms on long handles.’155 And he had some plain advice for the city administration: ‘Leafy maple and linden trees would have done much better.’156 Nansen and Quisling also went to inspect the pipeline that had been transporting oil overland from Baku by the Caspian Sea since the turn of the century. This was the site of the world’s largest oilfield. Production had started in the 1870s and it was soon delivering more than fifty per cent of the world’s oil. At the centre of it all was the Swedish company Branobel, run by Ludwig Nobel, Alfred’s brother. He had been quick to declare that petroleum, previously deemed a non-resource, had ‘a bright future’,157 then went on to design the world’s first oil tanker, and to develop technology for transporting oil through pipelines. The pipeline between Baku and Batum had an internal diameter of 20 cm, was 900 km long and was carried over a ridge almost 1,000 m high by way of an intricate system of pumping stations. Nansen was impressed. And so were the English, some years earlier, when they decided to occupy the port in Batum. Since the English fleet had switched from coal to oil in 1913, the motivation was greater than ever. Oil fever was absolutely raging throughout post-war Europe. The British foreign minister, Lord Curzon, had already declared: ‘The Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil.’158 Batum was captured by twenty thousand British soldiers at Christmas in 1918 after the withdrawal of the Turkish Ottomans. And engineers immediately set to work upgrading and repairing the pumping stations along the pipeline. The occupation was unpopular with the local inhabitants. At the same time, regional ethnic groups were constantly coming into conflict with one another as they fought for their own sovereignty, and from the north, the Bolsheviks were steadily pressing forward, driving great streams of refugees before them. When the British saw the game wasn’t worth the candle, the project was abandoned, and the navy shipped out the last soldiers in summer 1920. Batum was handed over to the Turks led by Kemal Atatürk, who quickly presented the region to the Bolsheviks, after securing guarantees for the safety of the local Muslims.
My seven-rouble stamp belongs to this group. It is probably genuine, even though stamps from Batum have been extensively forged over the years. Its authenticity is indicated by the fact that the third and fourth branches from the left form a clear V, whereas they are usually parallel in forgeries. [1919: Local ‘aloe tree’ issue. Confiscated by the British and overprinted] Those of us who are less concerned with time than place will probably always be intrigued by a thought experiment involving a chance meeting between Hamsun, Stalin, Nansen and Quisling – over a meal of boiled sturgeon and vodka at the station restaurant, for example. From a purely political standpoint, they would have had little to fight about, but it is easy to imagine some pretty in-depth discussions about the management of whiskers and moustaches, with Quisling as an impartial moderator. Knut Hamsun (1903): Æventyrland. Oplevet og drømt I Kaukasien Fridtjof Nansen (1927): Gjennom Armenia Erik Linklater (1941): The Man on my Back There is something South American about life in Batum. People come into the hotel dining room dressed in modern clothing and silk dresses and jewellery KNUT HAMSUN
Sponge Cake with Hitler To celebrate the National Socialists’ victory in the Free State of Danzig’s parliamentary elections in 1933, Hitler issues an invitation to an afternoon of coffee and cakes at his Reich Chancellery in Berlin: ‘They were literally coffee and cakes, “just like mother”, Streuselkuchen and Napfkuchen (German teacake specialities). And Hitler was the Hausfrau. He was in a gay mood, and almost amiable.’159 Hermann Rauschning was contented. He was a landowner in Danzig and had just been elected president of the free state’s senate. Now at last they would bring some order to the situation in the little country, which he felt had long been neglected. The Free State of Danzig lay in the fertile delta either side of the river Vistula, later the Wisła. Apart from smaller hilly areas in the west, it consisted entirely of first-class agricultural land, flat and easy to cultivate. This, combined with its strategic location right in the far southeast of the Baltic Sea, had made it coveted and disputed territory over the centuries. And its bustling harbour town – christened Giotheschants, Gidanie, Gdancyk, Danczik, Dantzig, Gdánsk or Danzig depending on who was in charge – was the jewel in the crown. The Prussians had ruled since the Middle Ages, except for a brief interlude under Napoleon from 1809 to 1814. In 1871, the area was incorporated into the newly formed German Empire. After the Germans lost the First World War, The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that Danzig should be established as a free state under the protection of the League of Nations. Poland was behind this move. After winning back its independence in 1918, it was keen to have its own trade corridor out to the Baltic Sea, free of German influence. And it wanted to have full control over the railway links and harbours. Ninety-five per cent of the 350,000 inhabitants were German and, naturally enough, opposed the project, but they failed to gain support for the idea of a plebiscite of the kind conducted in Allenstein a little further southeast. When the free state was established in 1920, all those who would not accept their new nationality had to abandon the area and their properties within two years. Most of them stayed, but they protested vociferously when it became clear that the Poles would also have a military transport depot on Westerplatte, a little peninsula outside the city of Danzig. The Poles would also be allowed to run their own post office, where all post was franked with Polish stamps overprinted with the text Gdánsk, the Polish rendering of Danzig. My specimen is from 1926, and shows a Spanish galleon in full sail, an overprint on Polish stamps from the previous year. This can be seen as a slightly infantile dig at a fairly similar stamp issued by the national postal system in Danzig in 1921. Admittedly, it doesn’t portray a galleon, but a more modest vessel – a Hansa cog. Here, too, we can sense a political game. The League of Nations had firmly opposed the term ‘The Free Hansa City of Danzig’. It didn’t want to stir up associations with Danzig’s golden age of extensive industrialization, shipbuilding and trade links deep within Eastern Europe. The Hansa cog was an unambiguous symbol of those times. The stamp with the Hansa cog is postmarked Langefuhr, a small suburb of Danzig. It lies just west of the city and is an upper-bourgeois district. This is where the author Günter Grass grows up, in a spacious apartment in a four-storey dressed stone building. His parents run a grocery shop on the ground floor. Several of books begin with childhood experiences in the arable land, which is criss-crossed by canals and drenched in marshy soil. In The Tin Drum, the narrator Oskar is taken by his mother on trips to the mud banks by the sea. He struts along, light-footed, in his sailor coat with golden anchor buttons – hand in his mother’s, too inquisitive and boisterous for his mother to dare loosen her grip. On one of these trips, they meet an elderly man in a longshoreman’s cap and quilted jacket who is fishing for eels with a horse’s head. The eels come squirming out of every orifice beneath the shining black mane. ‘Take a little look!’ he grunted now and then. “Let’s just see!” He wrenched open the horse’s mouth with the help of his rubber boot and forced a stick between the jaws, so that the great yellow horse teeth seemed to be laughing. And when the docker – you could see now that his head was bald and egg-shaped – reached into the horse’s gullet with both hands and pulled out two at once, at least as thick as his arm and just as long, my mama’s jaw dropped – she spewed her whole breakfast, clumps of egg white with yolk trailing threads among lumps of bread in a gush off coffee and milk.160 It was the early 1930s and the Nazis had been making their presence felt in German politics for several years now. In January 1933, Hitler was elected Chancellor of the Reich and immediately launched a campaign to strengthen the anti-Polish forces in Danzig. This enabled Hermann Rauschning and the Nazis to win the local parliamentary elections later the same year. Under the slogan ‘Back to the Reich’, they followed up with systematic harassment of all Poles, who now accounted for more than twenty per cent of the free state’s population. The Jewish population, which numbered more than ten thousand, was persecuted, too. And Danzig was also involved in Kristallnacht on the night of 9 to 10 November 1938. Many people fled in fear. In 1938, the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded that Danzig be returned to Germany. The USA, France and England rejected this in no uncertain terms. They sided with Poland, which was threatening an armed invasion if Germany tried its luck. On 1 September 1939 the Second World War starts when German troops cross the border into Danzig. They meet no resistance from the local population, but the small Polish force on Westernplatte puts up a fight. The Polish post office further inside the town also resists during a fifteen-hour siege. The entire thing is reduced to ashes, stamps and all. The Germans immediately set about arresting more than 4,500 Poles, beheading the main leaders. Later, the Jewish inhabitants are also arrested, and campaigns are launched to sterilize Polish women. [1926: stamp with a Spanish galleon from the Polish post office. Overprint on a Polish stamp from 1925. 1921: Stamp with a Hansa cog, issued by Danzig’s national postal system.] The former president of the senate, Hermann Rauschning, has long since repudiated Hitler and fled to the USA. He despairs as he sees his worst nightmare come true: ‘Here, one man is leading a whole age ad absurdum.… The “beast from the abyss” has been let loose.’161 Günter Grass joins the Hitler youth: ‘Christened, vaccinated, confirmed, schooled./ I played with bomb fragments./ And I grew up between the Holy Spirit and the portrait of Hitler.’162 Later, he fought as an SS soldier on the Eastern Front. During the war, Danzig is bombed to bits and occupied by Russian forces on 30 March 1945. Under the Potsdam Treaty signed a couple of months later, the area is incorporated into Poland and the city of Danzig is renamed Gdánsk for good. All remaining Germans are deported and replaced with Poles who move in from the southeast. Hermann Rauschning (1939): Hitler Speaks Günter Grass (2009): The Tin Drum Die Blechtrommel (1979): Script Günter Grass, directed by Volker Schlöndorff The docker – you could see now that his head was bald and egg-shaped – reached into the horse’s gullet with both hands and pulled out two at once, at least as thick as his arm and just as long
Utopians on the Tundra It is late at night in 1921 in the city of Perm in the Urals. Many of the sledges outside the station building are already white with heavy sleet. Two people hurry across the slippery platform, both in brown fur hats, heavy fur coats and galoshes. First comes a stocky man, gesticulating a little. A slender woman follows, somewhat reluctantly. The locomotive has already worked up a full head of steam – it’s the Trans-Siberian Railway’s extra train to the newly established Far Eastern Republic, in transit from Moscow. Expected arrival in the capital of Chita: one week later. The above is a rough summary of a scene change in Boris Pasternak’s semi-documentary novel Doctor Zhivago.163 Larisa Feodorovna, Lara, has moved to the Urals to escape the chaos of the revolution in Moscow without obtaining the necessary permits. She is caught out but is saved at the last minute by the lawyer, Komarovsky, who smuggles her further east. Despite the apparent heroism of this feat, the lawyer is actually an unscrupulous rogue acting in his own interests. In part, he wants Lara for himself and in part he is, in fact, working for the Bolshevik regime, which has sneaked him in as justice minister in the newly established republic there in the east. Komarovsky was modelled on Mstislav Petrovich Golovachev, who served in real life as assistant foreign minister of the Far Eastern Republic.164 The Far Eastern Republic first saw the light of day in April 1920. It was initially limited to an area just east of Lake Baikal, and stretched across a sub-arctic climate zone, from tundra and steppes in the north to the mountainous areas towards Mongolia in the south. For several hundred years, the region had been dominated by Mongolian nomads and different tribes of Turkish extraction, along with the occasional Chinese trader. Russian Cossacks founded what would later become the capital of Chita at the end of the 1600s. But it remained an insignificant garrison town until the beginning of the 19th century, when the Tsar used it as a place of exile for political opponents and criminals from Europe. Even though the buildings were laid out over tight grid of streets and squares, the town gave an impression of chaos matched in few other places. In style and format, it went off in all directions – from imposing public buildings in classical Greek style to Russian wedding-cake romanticism and tremendous numbers of small timber huts – all piled up randomly against each other without any overarching plan. The Far Eastern Republic was apparently the work of a group of socialists who were much more democratically inclined than the communist Bolsheviks. They claimed to be adherents of libertarian socialism, and Prince Piotr Kropotkin was among their sources of inspiration. His political programme was formulated in his 1892 book, The Conquest of Bread, in which he sketched out a social model that involved neither central state nor private profiteers. In the Far Eastern Republic, free elections and universal suffrage were soon declared. All indications were that these ideals would be pursued and that this was an independent country ruled by its own people. In fact, the whole thing was a fraud staged by the Bolshevik government in Moscow.
It was also hoped that the democratic veneer of the new country might pacify the rest of the world. But not one country was taken in, and no recognition was forthcoming. The British activist, pacifist and philosopher Bertrand Russell had a great deal of sympathy for the new republic. And it was mutual. When he was lying on his sickbed in Peking in 1921, he received constant dispatches of champagne from the leaders in Chita – in one case, personally delivered by the official emissary and future foreign minister, Ignatius Yourin. ‘One of the kindest men I ever met,’ wrote Russell in a letter in June 1921,165 which pretty much establishes that the leaders of the Far Eastern Republic didn’t know they were the victims of a plot either. If they did have any suspicions, these were overshadowed by the fact that they were fundamentally a bunch of naïve and well-meaning idealists. Japan withdrew its forces the autumn after the Far Eastern Republic was formed. The borders went with them, so that the country soon stretched as far as the Pacific Ocean and the port of Vladivostok, taking in more than 3.5 million inhabitants. And stamps were issued, initially using unsold stocks from the times of the Tsar, which were collected up and stamped with overprints. Gradually, these were supplemented with four stamps that were newly designed but offered no aesthetic improvements. My stamp belongs to this group and, at first glance, it has a fairly old-fashioned appearance, remarkably like the stamps the Whites used in South Russia a couple of years earlier. On closer examination, though, the central coat of arms turns out to be formed of an anchor crossed over a pickaxe, against a background of a ripe wheat sheaf: quite different from the symbolism of the lance-bearing knight in South Russia. We can sense a message of peace and brotherhood. On the surrounding wreath appear the Cyrillic letters Д, в and Р, short for Дальневосто́чная Респу́блика, the Russian rendering of Far Eastern Republic.
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