The World полностью

* Another British-trained lawyer, Ali Jinnah, a slim, dapper, whisky-drinking Ismaili in Savile Row suits, was shouted down by Congress and walked out, committing himself to a new Muslim League. Not all Hindus followed Gandhi’s inclusivity: the ideal of Hindutva, Hindu nationalism, was invented by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who had started a violent campaign against the Muslims and for independence; he was arrested in 1910 and imprisoned by the British, later founding the Hindu Mahasabha, initially within Congress. In 1925, he was one of the founders of the paramilitary Hindu RSS organization that wore uniforms, provided protection at rallies and aimed to create a Hindu Rashtra (Nation).

* The new Republican president Warren Harding appointed Teddy Roosevelt’s eldest son, Ted, as assistant naval secretary, the third member of the family to serve there. Ted Roosevelt, who lacked his father’s exuberance but shared his ambitions, was eager to be president too, but his involvement in the Teapot Dome oil scandal ruined his career. He and his sister Alice Longworth resented the rise of cousin Franklin and tried to stop him. Alice was already the grande dame of Republican Washington, a role she would play until the presidency of Nixon. ‘If you can’t say something good about someone,’ she liked to say, ‘sit right here by me.’

* ‘In war, as in prostitution,’ Napoleon supposedly said, ‘amateurs are often better than professionals.’

* After the Germans withdrew, in December 1918, their Ukrainian puppet hetman Skoropadsky was overthrown by a nationalist Directorate named after the French revolutionary government. It was dominated by a socialist journalist and Ukrainian nationalist named Symon Petliura, who took the title great ataman (otaman) and in May 1919 was elected dictatorial head of the Directorate. Ukraine was invaded by the Bolsheviks and the White Russian armies, both keen to re-establish Russian control. Petliura fought both but could scarcely control his subordinates, warlords who launched pogroms against Jews. The Ukrainians were not the only ones killing Jews – Bolshevik Cossacks and White Russians played their part too – but around 65 per cent of the killing was by Ukrainian warlords. Their excuse was that some of the Bolshevik leaders – most prominently Trotsky, a Ukrainian Jew from Kherson – were Jewish. The Bolsheviks tried to stop such killings. On the Ukrainian side, only the anarchist warlord Nestor Makhno, diminutive and brave, who for a while controlled the region between Kharkiv and Donbas, fighting at times the Whites, at other times the Reds, tried seriously to stop them. Around 150,000 Jews were killed, dwarfing the notorious tsarist pogroms and anticipating the Holocaust. Petliura banned the pogroms but did little to punish their perpetrators. He went into exile where he was later assassinated by a Jew as revenge.

* In Hungary, a Bolshevik insurance clerk named Béla Kun seized power, launching a Red Terror, but in November 1919 he was swiftly overthrown by a former ADC to Franz Josef who had in May 1917 won a skirmish against the Italian navy with a tiny Habsburg fleet. After swearing to restore Kaiser Karl in both Vienna and Budapest, Admiral Miklós Horthy, a nobleman who, in command of the National Army, rode into Budapest on a white horse, slaughtered around 6,000 Communists and Jews (‘Stop harassing small Jews,’ he ordered. ‘Kill some big Jews’ – he meant Bolsheviks) and set up a conservative–military dictatorship under himself as regent for a non-existent king. He always said that when he had a problem he asked himself what Franz Josef would have done. But, as he wrote, ‘Concerning the Jewish question, all my life I have been an antisemite.’ He immediately started to negotiate diplomatically to restore lost Hungarian lands – and to repress Hungary’s huge Jewish community through anti-Jewish laws.

* The Soviets managed to conquer three new countries that had not been formal parts of the Romanov empire. In 1920 they reconquered central Asia and seized the independent emirate of Bukhara and the khanate of Khiva – where the Mongol khan Sayid Abdullah, a scion of a dynasty, the Khongirads, was the last member of the Genghis Khan family to rule. The khanate was included in the new Soviet republics Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In the bizarre last act of the civil war, a demented Baltic officer, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who believed he was Genghis reincarnated, seized Mongolia, massacred Jews and Bolsheviks and declared a Buddhist empire, until Russian and Mongolian Bolsheviks attacked his new realm. In August 1921, his invasion of Siberia ended with his capture and execution. Instead of Poland, Mongolia became the first Soviet client state.

* Victor Emmanuel’s father King Umberto, before his assassination by an anarchist in 1900, had advised him: ‘To be a king, all you need to know is how to sign your name, read a newspaper and mount a horse.’