A CORNUCOPIA OF REVOLUTIONS

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32352, 18 July 1970, Page 4

A CORNUCOPIA OF REVOLUTIONS

1919: Bed Mirage. By David Mitchell. 346 pp. Bibliography anti Index. “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations,” wrote Edmund Burke nearly 200 years ago when reflecting on the early excesses of the French Revolution. Burke wouid have watched the year 1919 unfold, with a high tide of revolutionary fervour from Bavaria to Siberia, with wonder and dismay as he saw the experiments with political systems in the name of “liberty.” Not so David Mitchell. He is delighted by the panorama of peoples exercising a brief freedom which he presents in this attractive volume; he has little sympathy for the solid citizens of Western Europe and North America, or the sombre statesmen gathered at Versailles, who sought to have the libertarian “rot” contained while they remade the world which bad fallen to their lot as victors in the First World War. Whether the revolutionaries are striking steel workers in Pennsylvania or Cossack anarchists in the Ukraine, Mr Mitchell is firmly on their side, though not uncritically so. His concern is less with what the successful revolutionaries did with their liberty, shortlived though it usually was, than with the situations in which they arose. He has a connoisseur’s delight that they

appeared a: all to confound the pompous old men at Versailles, and to prove that the “war within the war,” the class war beloved of socialist theory, had not been buried along with the millions of dead in the war between nations. Mr Mitchell has done his research well. He ifes an eye for an arresting detail, an enviable capacity to cut confidently through the complex thickets of Balkan politics or to reduce a chaotic few months in Munich to a few trim sentences. At times his enthusiasm carries him away. He dwells a little too often on the more lurid events, real and imagined, which accompanied some of the uprisings he describes. The arbitrary time limit —one year—which he sets himself imposes unfortunate limitations and sometimes he must spill awkwardly beyond 1919 to complete his narrative. But this cornucopia of revolutions, great and small, should delight his readers, whatever their political persuasion. Perhaps Mr Mitchell’s greatest value is to redeem some unsuccessful uprisings of 1919 from obscurity or opprobrium. Many of them suffered a “bad press” at the time because of the fear they engendered in Britain and the United States when the success of the Russian Revolution was becoming evident and a “red tide” appeared to be sweeping westward. In this book Bela Kun’s Hungary and the Bavarian

attempts to create idealistically free and happy societies—only to go down before the forces of reaction personified in men like Clemenceau and Smuts. It is all a little too good to be true, but Mr Mitchell’s enthusiasm can be forgiven. There is a balance here which needed to be redressed. It is probably no intention of the author’s that the most attractive rebels in his gallery are not men of the Left at all. Gabriele d’Annunzio in Fiume and Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine did not attempt to go forward to a new proletarian “Golden Age” of communism, but back to the myths of a past dream—the feudal city state for the one, the anarchic life of the peasant on the steppes for the other. D’Annunzio was more a showman than a revolutionary, and he wilted quickly enough in the face of real opposition. But Makhno was one of the greatest guerrilla fighters of history; he struggled on long after his most successful year in 1919 when he simultaneously fought off the Russian White and Red Armies; his memory lingers still, a rallying point even under communism for Ukrainian opposition to Russian imperialism. However, it is the Bolsheviks in various guises who claim most of Mr Mitchell’s ample stage. There is a lesson here for the would-be revolutionaries of the latter part of this century. These men and women of 1919 have a dignity and a sense of purpose hardly evident today. Their enemies are starvation and brutal repression; their driving force is desperation and an inspiring hope. There is glory in their failures because they fought as well as they knew how for such great causes. The mirage most of them found has become more substantial in the intervening 50 years; many of their objectives have been attained more gradually. They must have felt a bitter sorrow had they lived to see the sad mewlings of the pampered children who today, in the West at least, would claim to be following in their footsteps in the name of revolution.