A Revolution of the Imagination: Dreams of Blood and Power

The Great War caused enormous shifts in the political imagination. What would have just recently been considered fantasy or mere potential, the distant future, suddenly came to exist. The Martians used chemical weapons in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, published in 1897—in the course of World War One, the various countries used 112,000 tons of gas. In 1918 alone, these weapons helped kill and wound 370,000 soldiers.²

Most socialist activists did not believe that capitalism would be overthrown in their lifetimes—perhaps their children or grandchildren would witness it, but for the time being their task was to focus on improving conditions for workers. Meanwhile, a small group of conspirators seized power in the world’s largest country. “In six months’ time, we shall either be swinging from a gallows, or we shall be in power,” Lenin is said to have told Karl Radek in March 1917.³ It seems even the Bolshevik leader was somewhat surprised by the way things played out in the months that followed.

General Hans von Seeckt, the envoy of the German army to the Caucasus, noted: “As I stood on the rails that lead via Tiflis to Baku, my thoughts wanted to go further […] I hope, the war will continue for some time, we may yet beat on the doors of India.”⁴ The collapse of the German Empire, as well as the allied Ottoman Empire, did not kill dreams of “Great Spaces.”⁵ The opportunities the colonies had provided prior to 1914 turned out to be just as possible in Europe, and on an even greater scale, considering the effective state structures on the Old Continent, which could not be compared with the sometimes rudimentary colonial administration. Even the Armenian genocide—one and a half million victims—by the Turks under the passive eye of Wilhelm’s diplomats, could have been a source of inspiration, for the National Socialist movement among others.⁶ “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler asked ironically in September 1939.⁷

The ideals of economic liberalism were also cast into doubt—if a state at war could effectively run its industry, why should it give it up in times of peace? The socialists naively imagined the working class, who had spent years “learning” the principles of managing factories, would “organically” seize them after the revolution; yet for Lenin, the model was more the authoritarianism of the Prussian state than the dream of the prewar Internationale.⁸