The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Trotsky refused to be entrapped in such constructive talk. Whatever concessions the desperate Austrians were offering, in the hands of his imperialist antagonists, Trotsky insisted, the principle of self-determination could never be anything more than an ideological snare. As to the peace, he was no fool. Trotsky understood that the Germans could take what they wanted. Given this reality, what concerned him was not what the Germans took, but how they took it.

Even more important for Trotsky, as for Liebknecht, was ‘the annihilating verdict’ that the peace would pass on the reformist illusions of Germany’s democratic majority.19 As in Russia, there must be no compromise, no hypocrisy, no possibility of a democratic peace short of total revolution.

On 10 February the Central Powers announced to the Russian delegation that they had signed a separate peace with Ukraine, which the Soviet delegation must recognize. The treaty with Ukraine provided Berlin and Vienna with the right to purchase the entire grain surplus. But the Ukraine was neither to be starved nor robbed. Nor would the Central Powers be permitted to buy grain on credit. It was to be paid for by deliveries of industrial goods.

Having invited a trial of strength, the Bolsheviks now faced a critical decision. To the conventionally minded there were only two choices. Overwhelmingly the most popular option in Petrograd and Moscow, if not on the front line amongst the troops themselves, was to refuse the German terms and to relaunch the war. No Russian government had ever surrendered. The revolution should not be the first.

Lenin now openly demanded a peace at any price. Trotsky had seen too much of Russia’s dilapidated Northern Front not to appreciate the force of Lenin’s point. But unlike Lenin, Trotsky thought that there might be a third position between Bukharin’s revolutionary war and Lenin’s ruinous peace.

Trotsky proposed simply to end the talks by announcing that Russia was unilaterally abandoning the war. On 22 January, after Lenin’s appeal for an immediate settlement was rejected by the Executive Committee of the party, Trotsky narrowly won its backing for his daring new strategy. Rather than recognizing the treaty with Ukraine, on 10 February Trotsky broke off the negotiations declaring: ‘No peace. No war.’ In Petrograd, there was an euphoric reaction. If Trotsky had not delivered ‘peace without victory’ – the great hope of 1917 – he had, at least, secured an end to the fighting without the explicit acknowledgement of defeat.

The idea of unilaterally and one-sidedly suspending a war was simply ‘unheard of . . . unheard of’.25 As Kühlmann’s legal experts confirmed, in three thousand years of international law there had been only one single precedent of a Greek city state during the classical period refusing both to continue fighting and to make peace.

if something like Trotsky’s strategy had been attempted in the summer of 1917, when the momentum had been on the side of the Reichstag majority, perhaps a stand-pat strategy of ‘No peace. No war’ could have been made to stick.

in February 1918 Trotsky overestimated the strength of the progressive coalition in Germany, which his own negotiating tactics had done so much to undermine.

Ludendorff, seconded by General Hoffmann, was adamant. If Trotsky would not talk, the German military would create facts. There was no need for long-winded discussions let alone any further consultation with the German parliament. As far as the Kaiser was concerned, the mere mention of the Reichstag was enough to trigger an outburst that was profoundly symptomatic of the crisis-ridden atmosphere pervading Germany.

What haunted the Emperor was the prospect of Britain and America taking advantage of the power vacuum in the East.

Form a Baltic gendarmerie that will restore order . . . policing action, but not war.’30 The atrocities perpetrated by the ‘special police’ units of the Young Turks were well known in Germany. So the import of these remarks is chilling.

The ‘Russian people’, he opined, had been ‘delivered to the vengeance of the Jews, they [Bolsheviki] are in touch with all the Jews of the world. Freemasonry too . . .’.31 A second record of the same meeting added a wider dimension of conspiracy. ‘Wilson,’ the Kaiser declaimed, ‘has proclaimed the removal of the Hohenzollern as a war aim and is now supporting the Bolsheviki, along with the entire international Jewry – Grand Orient Lodge.’

Woof

The ‘great contradictions and profound abysses within the life of the German state’ revealed by the Kaiser’s outburst had left him ‘deeply shaken’. Kühlmann replied that he ‘had been a long time acquainted with these abysses. But it was impossible for a statesman entrusted with matters of life and death, even in utter frankness to give the leading parliamentarians a clear view and to present to them the difficulties with which they had to struggle step by step.’

In truth, the Kaiser’s anti-Semitic flare-up on 13 February was no one-off. Over the winter of 1917–18 he had come increasingly under the influence of extremist nationalist propaganda and his daily notes to his subordinates were now commonly laced with diatribes against ‘Jewish subversives’.

Even more seriously, in the weeks before the Bad Homburg conference Ludendorff had finally confronted the question of what to do with the large Polish and Jewish populations in the Polish territory he was determined to annex. His solution was taken from the pages of pan-German fantasy. As many as 2 million people would be uprooted from their homes, with particular care being taken to ensure that the large and politically dangerous Jewish population was neutralized. Ludendorff hoped that they might be ‘caused to emigrate’ to the United States.

By early March, Kiev was in German hands. Trotsky’s gamble had spectacularly backfired. Bourgeois circles in Petrograd were eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Kaiser’s troops, whilst the Social Revolutionaries with their dangerous proclivity for assassination railed at Lenin’s betrayal of the revolution.

The only common denominator was the ever more draconian demand for revolutionary discipline and mobilization. On 14 February the Red Army was called into being and Trotsky put himself at the head of the mobilization.36 On 21 February all of Russia was placed under the terrible dictate of a new revolutionary decree, which threatened all saboteurs and collaborators with summary execution.

Faced with the unstoppable German advance, after two days of debate Lenin persuaded the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the peace terms that had been on offer at Brest at the beginning of February.38 But this was no longer enough. The Germans now demanded a completely free hand in determining the mode of self-determination in those territories under their control and an immediate peace between the Soviet regime and Ukraine.

On 23 February the Bolshevik Committee met once again, but even Lenin’s threat of resignation was not enough to carry a majority. His motion to accept the increased German demands was passed only after Trotsky, who was serving as chair, abstained.

Like the soldiers of World War I, who had had to set aside their heroic visions of war, he insisted that revolutionaries must come to terms with a new, disenchanted vision of historical progress: ‘The revolution is not a pleasure trip! The path of revolution leads over thorns and briars. Wade up to the knees in filth, if need be, crawling on our bellies through dirt and dung to communism, then in this fight we will win. .

You first douchebag

On 26 February, having received news of the Bolshevik surrender, the Germans halted within a few days’ march of the Soviet capital. Four days later, running a gauntlet of hostility from the local Russian population, the grizzled old Bolshevik Grigori Sokolnikov returned to Brest-Litovsk ready to accept whatever terms were offered. Embarrassed by how far things had degenerated since their first relatively cordial meetings, the German and Austrian diplomats had hoped to soften the brutality of the proceedings by setting up a series of subcommittees, in which they would spin out technical discussions of the peace terms.

Lenin’s decision to buy time by means of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was certainly the severest test to which the internal party discipline of the Bolsheviks was ever subjected. Though the imminent threat of German invasion had secured the majority that Lenin needed, a furious debate now raged over ratification.

Lenin carried the party majority, but the Left Communists were unreconciled and Trotsky continued to abstain. To console themselves for accepting Lenin’s odious peace, the delegates rallied around a resolution promising the ‘most energetic, mercilessly decisive and draconian measures to raise the self-discipline and discipline of the workers and peasants of Russia’, to prepare them for the ‘liberationist, patriotic socialist war’ that would drive out the German oppressors.

Whereas liberals hypocritically talked of universal human rights, a properly Communist regime must make clear that ‘liberties and democracy’ were ‘not for all, but for the working and exploited masses, to emancipate them from exploitation . . . The exploiters should expect only “ruthless suppression”.’

Of course

Having abandoned Petrograd, the Congress met in Moscow – the 1,232 delegates, 795 Bolsheviks, 283 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, 25 Socialist Revolutionaries of the Centre and no more than 32 Mensheviks.43 On 14 March, Lenin delivered an impassioned oration in which he called upon Russia to ‘size up in full, to the very bottom, the abyss of defeat, partition, enslavement, and humiliation into which we have been thrown’, all the better to steel the will for ‘liberation’.

The Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the negotiations for which had begun under the sign of the Petrograd Soviet’s democratic peace formula, had become the driving force behind Lenin’s one-party dictatorship.

The mirror image of that brutal process unfolded simultaneously in Germany. On 17 March 1918, Berlin played host to a ghostly ceremony in which a delegation of German gentry from Courland, Latvia, formally petitioned the Kaiser to assume the mantle of Archduke.44 The Baltic was to become a playground of neo-feudalism.

Gustav Stresemann, who since 1916 had been amongst the foremost advocates of unrestricted U-boat warfare, now declared that in the East the German Army had demonstrated that ‘the right of self-determination does not apply! I do not believe in Wilson’s universal League of Nations; I believe that after the conclusion of peace it will burst like a soap-bubble.’

by the spring of 1918 not even a victorious peace of stupendous dimensions could restore the national unity that had launched the German war effort in August 1914. The USPD denounced Brest as a Peace of Violation (Vergewaltigungsfrieden). For the SPD, the once loyal Eduard David spoke fiercely against the short-sightedness of the Kaiser’s government. Germany had gambled away a unique opportunity to found a lasting new order in eastern Europe.

Though the reduction of Russian power was a huge gain for Germany, the peace in the East had not brought an end to the war. Instead, victory in the East had become the platform for a last bid for victory in the West.

Since the previous autumn Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been gathering their forces for an offensive. Over the winter, the German armies on the Western Front were increased from 147 to 191 divisions whilst those on the Eastern Front were stripped from 85 to 47. For the first time since 1914 the Germans in the West would not be outnumbered.

His Imperial Majesty was in a buoyant mood, announcing to his entourage that ‘when an English parliamentarian comes pleading for peace, he will first have to bow down before the Imperial standard, because what was at stake was a victory of monarchy over democracy’.

by the same token, it was now clear that the imperial government was waging war against the will of a large part, perhaps a majority, of the German people. The cost was appalling. On the first day of what was to prove the Kaiser’s last battle, Germany suffered 40,000 killed and wounded, its heaviest casualties of the entire war.

Kaiser Wilhelm had failed to make a legitimate peace in the East and had failed to carry through a constructive reform of the Bismarckian constitution. The fate of the Emperor and his regime was now hanging on the verdict of the battle.

On the evening of 14 May 1918, Lenin addressed the Central Executive Committee of the All Russian Congress of Soviets. The terms that he chose to describe the international situation were both drastic and uncharacteristically surreal.

To Lenin it was obvious that the capitalist powers must have an overriding common interest in the destruction of his regime.

Or like any dictator you're just a paranoid asshole

True revolutionaries must face the possibility that if the imperialist war continued unchecked, it might lead to the total annihilation of civilization and an end to the possibility of any kind of progress.

As Lenin insisted with characteristic clarity, if this struggle was as unpredictable as he claimed, it unhinged any linear notion of historical development, which normally served Marxist revolutionaries as their warrant.

How convenient

In Russia, a civil war had already begun that was ‘interwoven with a whole series of wars’. The Soviet regime must brace itself for ‘a whole era of . . . imperialist wars, civil wars inside countries, the intermingling of the two, national wars liberating the nationalities oppressed by the imperialists and by various combinations of imperialist powers . . . This epoch, an epoch of gigantic cataclysms, of mass decisions forcibly imposed by war, of crises, has begun . . . and it is only the beginning.’

So in other words SSDD. Fuck off.

Bolshevism’s victory was an expression of history’s lack of logic, an island-oasis, a surreal slip of Minerva’s tongue.

Lenin’s vision of imperialist war as inferno has echoed down from World War I to the present day, in broad-brush critiques of modern civilization that continue to command an influential audience. But he himself was far too politically minded to tarry very long with such dark vistas.

In 1918 his vision of the Soviet regime as an island-oasis amidst a raging storm of imperial competition was the basis for his claim to dictatorship. It took a unique type of historical insight and politic...

But all the greater was the credit claimed for Lenin when his tactics paid off, the Soviet Union survived, and Germany went down to defeat.6 What this triumphalist narrative ignores is how fundamentally Lenin misread the political logic of the war and how close that misreading brought his regime to extinction.

and as the German offensive began in the spring their situation became truly desperate. Instead they urged Japan to take the initiative. And there were certainly expansionists in Japan who hoped that the Terauchi government would strike.7 In March 1918 as Germany imposed its will at Brest, the fiercely aggressive Interior Minister Goto Shinpei demanded that Japan should seize the opportunity to force its way into Siberia with an army of 1 million men, enough to deter any future attempt by the West to compete with Japan in East Asia.

To counter this expansive ideological attack, nothing less than total mobilization and the suppression of all liberal dissent within Japan was necessary to prepare the nation for leadership in the inevitable ‘world war’ between Asia and the West.

And here we go

Japan would not be strengthened by becoming embroiled at the behest of the British and French in the wastelands of Siberia. Furthermore, any large-scale operation in Russia’s Pacific provinces would have to be squared with the Terauchi government’s strategy of cultivating good relations with Beijing.

Japan would provide a backbone of military expertise and equipment for the Chinese Army. Together, Japan and China would take control of the orphaned Russian railway network in the Far East.9 In December 1917 Nishihara Kamezo, Japan’s financial representative in China, called for a ‘fundamental union’ of Japan and China to ensure ‘eastern self-sufficiency’ and to ‘prevent for all time, the intrusion of European power in the Japan sea’.

Ominous as such talk of a pan-Asian, anti-Western bloc sounded, Goto and his ilk did not have a free hand. As progressives such as Yoshino Sakuzo noted, there was a striking lack of popular support in Japan for military action.

Following the rigged election of 1917, the liberal opposition were in no position to dictate terms. But Hara Takashi’s huge conservative Seiyukai majority exercised its own form of restraint. Hara was unshakeable in his conviction that ‘the future of Japan depends on the close relationship with the US’.13 And his position was all the stronger for the fact that it was shared by the liberal elder statesman Prince Saionji and Baron Makino.