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

by Adam Tooze

Masaryk would not act without approval from President Wilson, whose position on the question of Czech independence was notoriously ambiguous.

It was not until the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and the even more draconian peace imposed on Romania in May 1918, that Wilson was willing openly to endorse national autonomy for the Czechs and their South Slav brethren.

It was not until early June, with the drastic British strategic appreciations in hand, that Secretary of State Lansing managed to persuade Masaryk that the Czech Army, rather than withdrawing towards Vladivostok, could do a vital service to the Allies by establishing a blocking position along the Trans-Siberian railway.5 Coached by Lansing, Masaryk demanded as his quid pro quo a Wilsonian death sentence on the Habsburg Empire.

The stakes of the intervention in Siberia were growing ever higher. Just as Lansing and Masaryk were bartering the end of the Habsburg dynasty against Czech assistance in Siberia, William Bullitt, Wilson’s radical advisor, was making one last effort to stop the intervention. ‘We are about to make one of the most tragic blunders in the history of mankind,’ Bullitt wrote to Colonel House. The advocates of intervention were typical exponents of imperialism.

On 30 June 1918 Britain and France publicly proclaimed their support for Czech national aspirations, citing as their justification the ‘sentiments and high ideals expressed by President Wilson’.

On 6 July he took the initiative. Without prior consultation with either Japan or Britain, Wilson announced that the Allied intervention would be directed through Siberia and would take the form of two contingents of 7,000 men, supplied by the US and Japan.

After months of dangerous vacillation, Wilson had taken it upon himself unilaterally to fix the terms of the intervention and to do so in a manner which, though bound to provoke the Bolsheviks, was quite insufficient to overthrow them. The inadequate intervention amounted, as Bruce Lockhart would later comment, to a ‘paralytic half-measure, which in the circumstances amounted to a crime’.

As Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff had put it, ‘unless by the end of the war democratic Russia can be reconstituted as an independent military power, it is only a question of time before most of Asia becomes a German colony, and nothing can impede the enemy’s progress towards India, in defence of which the British empire will have to fight at every disadvantage’.

If the British had been able to see inside Ludendorff’s staff offices in the summer of 1918, they would have found ample fuel to feed their fears. Up to the end of June, Chancellor Hertling was able to hold the line established in mid-May, blocking military advances in the East. This position was communicated to the Bolsheviks, enabling them to concentrate their trusty Latvian regiments, fighting as they believed for their independence, against the Czechs, who were fighting for theirs.

Ludendorff’s aim was no longer merely to exercise hegemony over the periphery of the former Tsarist Empire, leaving the Bolsheviks in the rump of Russia to their own ruinous devices. In a mirror image of Lloyd George’s vision of a democratic bastion in Russia, Ludendorff aimed to reconstruct an integral Russian state that thanks to its conservative political make-up could be counted on as a ‘reliable friend and ally . . . that not only poses no danger for Germany’s political future, but which, as far as possible, is politically, militarily and economically dependent on Germany, and provides Germany with a source of economic strength’.

Harnessed to the Reich, Russia would provide the means for Germany to exert its domination throughout Eurasia. It would provide the hinterland for an economically self-sufficient, politically authoritarian ‘world state structure’ (Weltstaatengebilde), capable of competing head on with the ‘pan-American bloc’ (panamerikanischen Block) and the British Empire.

Early contacts with suitable figures amongst the anti-Bolshevik Russians, most notably the Kadet Pavel Miliukov, ousted as Russian Foreign Minister by the Petrograd Soviet in May 1917, led to the conclusion that no self-respecting Russian patriot would ever accept the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, let alone Ludendorff’s even more expansive vision.

Though wave upon wave of attacks had stretched the Allied lines in France near to breaking point, it was obvious that Germany was nearing the end of its strength. Ominously, the Kaiser had greeted the thirtieth year of his rule on 15 June with an apocalyptic speech.

Even at the height of World War I, the safeguards of nineteenth-century constitutionalism continued to function. Less than ten days after the Kaiser had made his apocalyptic address, he was directly contradicted in front of the Reichstag by his Foreign Secretary.

Final and ultimate military victory, as Ludendorff seemed to envision it, was out of the question. How could Germany ever hope to achieve a complete defeat of the United States or the British Empire?

The forces demanding a further escalation of the war were ‘the remnants of the feudal order’ in Europe, of which ‘the strongest and most influential remnant’ was no longer in Russia, but in ‘East Elbia’.21 The following day, compounding the mounting sense of confusion, Hindenburg and Ludendorff held a press conference at which Germany’s military leadership publicly disowned the position of the Reich’s Foreign Secretary.

The Social Democrats had entered into a coalition with the Centre Party and Liberals in the summer of 1917 on the basis of a common peace platform. But not only had the Hertling government taken the collapse of the strike wave in January 1918 as the signal for a punitive programme of wage and ration cuts, it had also completely failed to deliver a foreign policy in conformity with the demands of that platform.

Though neither Ludendorff nor Lenin attributed any inherent significance to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, its formal legality provided Germany’s politicians with the crucial check they needed to restrain the escalating radicalization of the Kaiser’s regime.

On 4 July 1918 the body that was still recognized as the supreme authority in revolutionary Russia, the Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, met in Moscow for the first time since the inauguration of Lenin’s new foreign policy. An unprecedentedly overt campaign of intimidation and election rigging had ensured a solid Bolshevik majority. But it had not silenced the opposition.

Hurling threatening gestures in the direction of the German guests, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries broke into an anti-Leninist chorus of ‘Down with Brest! Down with Mirbach! Down with the lackeys of Germany!’26 Trotsky from the chair did his best to calm the embarrassing scene. But, in the end, he was forced to resort to naked threats. Delegates who engaged in acts of provocation, he warned, would be subject to immediate arrest.

Rather than promoting Soviet power, Lenin’s policy of ever closer accommodation with Berlin was leading to a ‘dictatorship of German imperialism’. Count Mirbach’s presence at the Congress of Soviets, the hallowed assembly of the Russian revolution, was a flagrant admission of this subservience.

The next day they made good on their threats. Assassins posing as Cheka agents entered the German Embassy and shot dead Count Mirbach. The intention was clearly to drive a wedge between Russia and Germany.

The Germans reacted as the Russian opposition had hoped. They demanded further humiliating concessions, including the deployment to Petrograd of a full battalion of 650 German infantry as embassy guards. This threw even Lenin into a rare bout of depression. To agree to such demands would confirm the accusations that the Bolsheviks were reducing Russia to the status of a ‘little oriental state’, where Western embassies could demand the protection of their own legation guards.

Though the Cheka never arrested the individuals responsible for the killing, it was in the summer of 1918, as the struggle over Lenin’s policy toward Germany reached its height, that the terror apparatus of the Soviet state began to take institutional shape.

By early August, Lenin was calling for ‘merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests and White guards’ and the establishment of a more permanent apparatus of ‘concentration camps’ to deal with ‘unreliable elements’. In the ‘life and death struggle’ for the survival of the revolution, Izvestia declaimed, there were ‘no courts of law’ to appeal to, merely the injunction to kill or be killed.

When pressed by the British representative Bruce Lockhart as to whether this amounted to a declaration of war against the Entente, Lenin was evasive. But behind the scenes the Bolsheviks had made their choice. Following through the logic of the policy adopted since May, Lenin was clasping the Germans ever closer.

First Lenin had moved to tighten relations with Germany. That had made it impossible for Woodrow Wilson to continue to resist the call for intervention. Now, the intervention that Wilson had been forced to approve triggered Lenin into inviting Germany to transform the uncomfortable modus vivendi of Brest into active military cooperation.

Ludendorff had his limits. ‘A military alliance and a fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Bolsheviks, I consider out of the question for our Army.’34 German intervention must go hand in hand with a political reorganization of Russia. This would start with the German occupation of Petrograd and Kronstadt. Given the prevailing anarchy in Russia, Ludendorff thought that six divisions would be enough to give military backing to a new, popular Russian regime.

Lenin’s regime was teetering on the edge of a complete capitulation to Germany. And this impression was only reinforced when on 27 August 1918 the two sides finalized the Supplementary Treaty to Brest-Litovsk. In exchange for German protection, the Soviet regime offered indemnities not included in the original Brest Treaty to the sum of 6 billion marks ($1.46 billion).

It was up to the Communists to surrender Petrograd to Ludendorff. Of course, Lenin was in no position to enforce any such conditions. The Red Guards could have offered no more than token resistance to a concerted German-Finnish attack. It was the civilian authorities in Berlin who served as the real check.

It was this restraint that saved Lenin’s regime from a military entanglement with Imperial Germany, which, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, would have meant the ‘moral bankruptcy’, if not the outright destruction, of the revolution.

Sensing the growing vulnerability of the Bolshevik regime, the terrorist teams of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries raised the stakes. Three days after the Supplementary Treaty to Brest was initialled, on 30 August, Lenin was in an industrial suburb of Moscow delivering the new and drastic slogan that had replaced his promises of peace – ‘Victory or death!’ As he left the Mekhelnson armaments works, he was hit in the neck and shoulder by an assassin’s bullets.

The policy of repression that had been gathering force since July was now transformed into the open proclamation of the ‘Red Terror’. In Petrograd alone 500 political prisoners were shot on the spot. Thousands more were to follow. Hostages were taken across the country. Anyone suspected of counter- revolutionary activity was liable to arrest and detention in one of the growing network of prison camps.

At the end of July, Lenin had refused British representative Lockhart a formal declaration of war. Now on 1 September 1918 the British Embassy was stormed and hostages were taken. A military attaché was killed. Hencef...

Coming hard on the heels of the supplementary agreement to Brest, the Red Terror placed the German Foreign Service in a truly invidious position. The embassy, which had moved from Moscow back to Petrograd, found itself at the centre of what one of the horrified diplomats described as a ‘St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’.

despite Helfferich’s protest, the Foreign Office clung to the Brest Treaty as a ‘kind of protection’, as one Reichstag deputy put it, ‘against the German military’.44 The alternative of allowing Ludendorff a free hand in the East, to wage the kind of counter-revolutionary campaign recently witnessed in Finland, was simply too awful to contemplate.

On 24 September 1918, in the sorry culmination of Germany’s bankrupt policy, Foreign Secretary Hintze deliberately misled the Reichstag with regard to events in Russia.

Confronted with daily evidence of violence, the German consul in Petrograd could only bite his tongue. As Hintze himself later admitted, his deliberate obfuscation of the true character of the Bolshevik regime could be justified only by reference to ‘higher political concerns’.

The politics of intervention in the summer of 1918 are indicative of quite how seriously the liberal cause had derailed since the moment in July 1917 when the Petrograd Soviet’s democratic peace offensive came so agonizingly close to coinciding with the Reichstag’s peace resolution.

Lenin for his part, whilst insisting that he was playing one imperialist power off against the others, in fact slid ever further across the line that separated a regrettable separate peace from a truly discreditable alliance with German imperialism.

Given this confused situation, it is hardly surprising that it was the advocates of intervention in London, Paris and Washington who had the better of the argument.

It was an intervention, as Lloyd George and Lansing insisted, in which strategic imperatives and the pursuit of democracy were inseparable. The war fused the two together, and if the war in the West had continued much longer it is hard to see how the Bolshevik regime could have survived.

What halted that escalation, what saved the Bolsheviks from an open capitulation to Ludendorff that would have robbed them of any historic legitimacy, was the suddenness of Germany’s defeat in the West.

Between 21 March and 15 July 1918 five waves of German attacks hurled themselves against the Allied lines in northern France. By early June the Germans seemed once more to have Paris within their reach. Frantic preparations were made to evacuate the government to Bordeaux. But on 18 July the French counter-attacked and in a matter of days the momentum shifted decisively.

By September, Canadian, British, South African and Australian forces had driven decisively through the Hindenburg line. It was a spectacular military victory and it was won by the Entente.

America’s military effort during the Allied counter-offensive was more significant, but General John Pershing’s army required many more months of combat experience to mature into a war-winning force. America made its truly decisive contribution in the sphere of economic mobilization. But as the war in the East demonstrated, neither the military nor the economic effort would have mattered if the Entente Powers had not maintained their political coherence.

When Germans came to analyse and explain their own defeat, it was above all around this political factor that their thoughts circled. It was the flip-side of the notorious ‘stab in the back’ legend. They attributed an enormous influence to Allied propaganda and to the demagogic genius of Lloyd George and Clemenceau. What Germany had lacked was a populist, democratic ‘Führer’.

Oh boy

The French mutiny and the Italian collapse at Caporetto were on a par with anything suffered by Tsarist Russia prior to the revolution. Both France and Italy responded with repression in the first instance.

It was the extraordinary effort required to carry the war through 1917 and to its conclusion that led to the radical polarizations, extreme rhetoric, and the personal animosities and passions that motivated both the first onrush of extremism in the immediate aftermath of the war and its second coming in the 1930s.

To draw a straight line from the crisis of 1917 to the fascism and collaboration in the Europe of 1940 does no justice to the success achieved by the Entente war effort.