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

by Adam Tooze

Whereas Goto and Ozaki both conflated the strategic and domestic conflicts between Japan and America, one for conservative the other for liberal ends, Hara worked on the assumption that if Japan were willing to act cooperatively, America was most unlikely to challenge Japan’s domestic order and might well turn a blind eye to its sponsorship of authoritarian militarism in China.

Wilson himself was more worried about the Japanese. Panicked by exaggerated French reports that the Japanese were about to act, Wilson on 1 March 1918 signalled his willingness to approve a joint Entente action. But only a day later he reversed this decision under the influence of an urgent memo from William Bullitt, one of his most radical advisors.

‘In Russia today,’ Bullitt insisted ‘there are the rudiments of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ The real threat to democracy lay not in Lenin’s Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars), but in the forces of reactionary imperialism that were alive within the Entente as much as in the Central Powers.

Ignoring the fact that the Congress of Soviets was standing in for the repressed Constituent Assembly, Wilson expressed ‘every sympathy’ for Russia’s effort to ‘weld herself into a democracy’.

Behind the scenes in March 1918 Trotsky was in virtually daily conversation with Bruce Lockhart and Raymond Robins, the enthusiastic representatives of Britain and the United States, about a rapprochement between the Soviet regime and the Western Powers.

The Congress issued a truculent revolutionary riposte that was intended, in the words of Lenin’s devoted follower Alexander Zinoviev, ‘as a slap in the face of the American President’. Whilst Wilson’s message thus fell on deaf ears amongst the Soviets, the hint was not lost on the more perceptive members of the Japanese cabinet.

What Wilson did not acknowledge, any more than Lenin, were the forces that gave him that influence – the solid parliamentary majority in Japan who were determined to steer their country away from violent fantasies of oceanic struggles with the West, toward an accommodation with America.22

Lenin feared the Japanese but he could do little about them. The Bolshevik grip on eastern Russia was too tenuous to allow a coherent policy to be developed in that region.

the mounting tide of anti-Bolshevik activity in the Far East did not immediately challenge the Communists’ grip on the core of Russian territory. The cornerstone of Lenin’s survival strategy was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany. But this involved a contradiction. In the process of negotiating the treaty the Bolsheviks had done everything they could to empty it of legitimacy. But how could a treaty that the weaker party so flagrantly disowned have any binding force on the stronger party?

Under the same terms as the Ukrainians they had been invited in December 1917 to join the conference table at Brest. But unlike Ukraine, the revolutionaries of the Caucasus refused the invitation. They would not even sit at the same table as the traitorous Bolsheviks.

When the Soviets scuttled back to the negotiating table at Brest in the first week of March, Turkey demanded not only the border of 1913 but all of the territory taken by the Tsars since the 1870s. With hundreds of thousands of terror-stricken Armenians fleeing before General Enver Pasha’s army, even this was no longer enough. Since the resumption of hostilities, Turkish blood had been spilled. There had been massacres of Muslim villagers too. If the Transcaucasian Republic wanted peace, it would have to purchase it at the price of Armenian territory.

On 28 April, with the Germans looking on, the Turks calmly informed the Armenian members of the Transcaucasian delegation that unless their demands were met the genocidal Ittihadist commandos would complete the total annihilation of their people.

Ugh

To assert at least some control over their rampaging allies, the Germans despatched General Hans von Seeckt, the future leader of the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr, as an observer on the Caucasus front line. But Seeckt soon became intoxicated by the vistas opened up by the Russian collapse.

But as General Enver Pasha reached out for Azerbaijan and the oil fields of Baku, what concerned Berlin more than China was the risk that pan-Turkic aggression might invite British intervention from Persia. Whilst Armenia was sacrificed to the Turks, Germany would build a base in the region by offering Georgia, with its advantageous coastline on the Black Sea and rich deposits of metal ores, a protectorate.

To the Armenians, the Georgian delegation expressed their regret at the horrible fate that awaited them. But ‘we cannot drown with you,’ the Georgians informed them.

Into a few hundred square miles of barren and mountainous land granted to the Armenian reservation, 600,000 people crowded. Half of them were penniless refugees who had been on the move since 1915.

With no access to the sea and no railway system, the Turks closed the territory throughout the summer months to ensure that none of the abandoned fields just beyond the reservation’s borders could be harvested.

German engineering teams in the Caucasus began inspecting the railway system to establish the viability of Ludendorff’s latest fantasy, which was to freight a light flotilla of the German navy including a dismantled U-boat cross-country to the port of Baku, where they would establish German naval supremacy over the landlocked Caspian Sea.

In 1918 Austria and Germany confidently expected at least 1 million tons from their new ally. But by the end of April it had become clear that ‘exploiting’ the bread basket of the Ukraine would present more problems than these fantasies allowed. If they were to avoid the enormous costs of a full-scale occupation, Austria and Germany needed a cooperative local authority to collaborate with them.

In Ukraine, as in the rest of revolutionary Russia, the only way to secure popular legitimacy was to cede possession of the land to the peasants.34 Over the summer of 1917 a nationwide land grab had redistributed the gentry’s estates.

The SRs were reliable allies against the Bolsheviks, but their land policy ran directly counter to the interests of the Central Powers. To maximize the surplus available for export, they needed cultivation to be concentrated in large, market-orientated farms.

If the Germans had been able to barter desirable manufactured goods in exchange for grain deliveries, this conflict might have been alleviated. Under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Germany had committed itself to trading grain for industrial goods. But under the strain of the war effort, goods for export were in desperately short supply.

To purchase the grain they needed, the Central Powers resorted to the short-term expedient of simply ordering the Ukrainian National Bank to print whatever currency they required. This gave them purchasing power and avoided requisitioning, but within a matter of months it rendered the currency worthless.

In early April, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, the German occupation commander, issued a decree requiring compulsory cultivation of all land. However, the Field Marshal acted without the approval of the Rada and the deputies refused to ratify the decree.

In a coup d’état they ousted the Ukrainian National Assembly and installed a so-called Hetmanate under the Tsarist cavalry officer Pyotr Skoropadskyi.37 Only six weeks after the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, under the pressure of economic necessity, the German military had unilaterally abandoned any residual claim to be acting as the protector of the legitimate cause of self-determination.

If these threats from the south were not menacing enough, by May Lenin’s regime faced an even more direct attack from the north. Along with the other Baltic states, Finland had declared independence from Russia in December 1917. In line with Lenin’s nationalities policy, Petrograd had given its blessing. But at the same time it directed local Bolsheviks with strong trade union support to seize control of Helsinki.

Icy weather delayed the arrival of General von der Goltz’s German expeditionary force until early April. But when they joined up with the Finnish White Guards of General Mannerheim they made up for lost time.38 By 14 April, after heavy fighting, they had cleared Helsinki of Red Guards. As a token of German appreciation, von der Goltz disbursed food aid to the cheering burghers of the city.

Following a reprisal shooting of White prisoners of war by Red Guards, the Finnish-German combat group unleashed a ‘White terror’ that by early May had claimed the lives of more than 8,000 leftists. At least 11,000 more would die of famine and disease in prison camps.

If Lenin’s strategy of balancing between the imperialist powers was to work, he would have to go beyond merely ratifying Brest.

As Lenin insisted with characteristic impatience, ‘nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order’, had ‘ever expected’ the course of historical development by itself ‘to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply’.43 But even by his standards the new turn in policy was dizzying.

Lenin proposed that the German imperialists should be offered a comprehensive plan of economic cooperation.

Lolwhat

The need for a close alliance between the Russian revolution and Imperial Germany, he argued, arose out of the twisted logic of history itself. History had by 1918 ‘taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth . . . to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side, like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism’. Brought together by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Soviet Russia and Imperial Germany were those twin chickens.

What?!

Nor was Lenin wrong to count on the cupidity of the Germans. The Berlin Foreign Ministry, with its distinctly economistic vision of German policy, seized eagerly on his proposal, calling together a standing committee of industrialists, bankers and politicians to consider the possibility of taking financial and technical control of Russia.

Though Russia presented spectacular long-term opportunities, to take advantage of them would require huge investments that could be financed only with difficulty in wartime. Nor could the millions of tons of steel required for reconstruction come from Germany.

Lenin was not so naive as to underestimate these difficulties. Nor was it consistent with his strategy of ‘balancing’ to make such an offer only to the Germans. Russia’s debts to Britain and France were already too large to make them promising targets for Lenin’s manipulative tactics. But America’s representatives in Moscow, above all the ubiquitous Colonel Robins, were fascinated by the prospects.

On 14 May, the same day that he put forward his dramatic plan for an embrace of German imperialism, Lenin provided the departing Colonel Robins with a prospectus for future economic cooperation with the United States. As Lenin acknowledged, for many years to come Germany would be too preoccupied with its own post-war recovery to be able to return to its pre-war role as Russia’s main industrial supplier.

Lenin’s effort at balancing had broken down. His dramatic lurch towards the Germans had tilted the balance on the Allied side decisively in favour of Robins’s first option: organized opposition.

Lenin’s efforts at balancing after May 1918 were misguided in a more fundamental sense. The idea that he could buy off German aggression through economic concessions was a figment of his ideological imagination. What limited Ludendorff’s aggression was not Soviet diplomacy but the demands on German military resources made by the Western Front and the reassertion within Germany of a precarious political equilibrium.

once the Reichstag had solemnly ratified the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March, for the Kaiser and the military leadership to have simply ignored it and to have overturned the Soviet regime would have been an affront of historic proportions to the German parliament.

As Foreign Secretary Kühlmann pointed out, however odious the Bolsheviks might be, ‘armed intervention against the revolution does not, as such, belong to the tasks of German policy’.50 Speaking to the Reichstag Foreign Affairs Committee on 22 May, Kühlmann made clear that he had serious doubts about using the Skoropadskyi regime in Ukraine to launch an authoritarian restoration in Russia.

By May the authoritarian behaviour of the German military in the East was so overt as to demand a public response. On 8 May Matthias Erzberger launched another of his sensational attacks on the Wilhelmine establishment, denouncing the high-handed behaviour of the German Army in the Ukraine.

Instead of the 1 million tons promised under the peace treaty, the Ukraine delivered no more than 173,000 tons to the Central Powers in 1918.54 But it was not bread alone that was at stake. The question that concerned Erzberger and his colleagues in the Reichstag majority was who controlled the Reich.

As in Japan, civilian political control asserted itself as a basic safety catch against the more radical fantasies of the German imperialists. Despite its odious reputation and fragile legitimacy, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty served as the main line of defence against a further radicalization of the war.

On 16 May 1918, in a brief lull between the German attacks in the West, a British general staff memorandum envisioned a truly apocalyptic scenario. Assuming that Hindenburg and Ludendorff, courtesy of Lenin, were able to press-gang 2 million men from the Russian provinces, the Central Powers would be able to continue the war at least until the end of 1919.

Starvation and flogging, backed by machine-guns, soon produce the required effect in a community of illiterates with centuries of serfdom behind them.’

The Brits ladies and germs

It was not, as Lenin imagined, the revolutionary threat posed by Communism that brought down upon his regime the intervention by the Entente, Japan and the United States. The scenario that haunted the Allies and impelled them to action was a ghostly premonition of the future. But what was on their mind was not the spectre of revolution or an anticipation of the Cold War, but a foretaste of the summer of 1941 when the military triumphs of the Wehrmacht threatened to extend Hitler’s slave empire throughout Eurasia.

Lenin’s desperate determination to solidify the Brest-Litovsk Treaty came as a shock to those representatives of the Entente still in Russia, who since the winter had been working frantically to maintain relations between the two sides.

On 26 May the Socialist Revolutionaries, the party with the strongest claim to a popular majority in both Russia and Ukraine, declared their support for armed foreign intervention. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries would not consort with the Entente, but were in open opposition.

In Petrograd and Moscow the Bolsheviks were able to retain control. But across the far-flung territory of Russia the Soviet regime was openly challenged. By the spring of 1918 the global linkage of politics and strategy from the Baltic to the Pacific had become almost commonplace. Even so, it must have come as a surprise to find the fate of Siberia hanging on the decision of a Czech professor, who from exile in Washington found himself in command of armies operating on battlefronts stretching from Flanders to Vladivostok.

This disciplined and highly motivated force, 50,000 strong, determined to continue the fight against the Central Powers even a thousand miles from their homes, now menaced both the Bolsheviks and the German forces stretched thinly across southern Russia. When Trotsky issued the order for the Czechs to be disarmed, it was assumed, not surprisingly, that he was acting on German instructions. Armed clashes between the Czechs and Red Guards broke out at railway junctions across Siberia.