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

by Adam Tooze

Russia’s democratic revolutionaries thus faced precisely the dilemma that Wilson had been struggling with only a few weeks earlier – how to end the war in a way that would offer no encouragement to triumphalism but inflict no stinging defeat on either side.

On 4 April, the day the US Senate voted for war with Germany, the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet laid down a peace formula with three key demands: self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities. The Russian Army would remain in the field until assured of a peace on those terms, a peace without selfish victory, but a peace that would bring honour to the revolution precisely by denouncing the Tsar and by placing Russia at the forefront of world ‘democracy’.

Defence of the revolution was a posture around which Kerensky and Tsereteli hoped to rally all the ‘live forces’ in Russian politics: Marxists, agrarian Social Revolutionaries and liberals. The Bolsheviks barely figured in the discussion.

The Bolsheviks on the spot were an undistinguished group who were tempted to fall in with the Soviet majority. Lenin did not return to Petrograd until the night of 16 April, when in his famous ‘April theses’ he immediately announced his hostility to any agreement between the revolutionary Soviet and the inherited authority of the Provisional Government.

Democratic Russia would not surrender to Imperial Germany. But Lenin’s opprobrium notwithstanding, it was revolutionary too. To advocate peace in the spring of 1917 was not to advocate the pre-war status quo, but to call for the political transformation of Europe.

Given the sacrifices already made by all sides by 1917, a ‘peace without victory’ could only be contemplated by a government willing to break with the past.

Ill-timed German aggression had tipped Wilson onto their side. But if the Russian revolution had started a few months earlier, if Germany had postponed its decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare until the spring, or if Wilson had been able to stay out of the war until May, what might have been the result?

It is these unfathomable counterfactuals that give such vast significance to the near coincidence between the Russian revolution and the American entry into the war. But even with Wilson on the side of the Entente, the Russian revolution sent shockwaves through both sides.

On the Eastern Front there had been no serious fighting since the overthrow of the Tsar. Whilst they waited to see whether a separate peace could be arranged with the revolutionary government, the Germans held off from any offensive. Within Germany, the Russian revolution had shaken popular resolve to continue the struggle.

Defending Germany against the aggression of autocratic Tsarism had been the main motive for the Social Democratic Party to support the war. With the Russian revolutionaries renouncing any annexationist intentions, that was now thrown into doubt.

These tremors within the political fabric of the Central Powers were all the more significant because they coincided with the spectacular failure of the Entente’s latest bid for military victory. On 18 April 1917, after softening up operations by the British, the French Army once more crashed into the German line. But despite the optimism radiated by their youthful new commander General Nivelle, the attack failed.

by May 1917 a wave of discontent had engulfed the British Isles. In the House of Commons 32 Liberal and Labour MPs voted demonstratively in favour of a motion calling for peace on the basis of the Petrograd formula.15 Meanwhile, industrial districts of Britain were wracked by what was by far the most serious bout of industrial unrest seen since the start of the war.16 Hundreds of thousands of skilled engineering workers ignored the instructions of the official trade unions and laid down their tools.

Fearful of a popular backlash, the House of Windsor let it be known that the homeless Romanovs were not welcome at Buckingham Palace. As George V confided to a confidant, there was too much ‘democracy in the air’.17

Between February and June 1917 the Germans sank over 2.9 million tons of shipping. To maintain its own imports, Britain cut back the allocation of tonnage to Italy and France. Struggling to contain the collapse in morale, Paris was forced to prioritize food imports over the needs of armaments production.

On 22 August 1917 food stocks had reached such a low ebb in Turin, the heart of Italy’s war economy, that shops were closed for all but a few hours per day. Whilst strikers closed the railway network, crowds led by anarcho-syndicalist agitators looted, attacked police stations, and torched two churches. The army cordoned off the city. Eight hundred rioters were arrested and an uneasy calm was restored, but not before 50 workers and 3 soldiers had been killed.

In January 1917 the navy had promised that Britain would be starving before the year was out. By the summer it was clear that despite the losses they were inflicting, Germany simply did not have enough submarines to overcome the merchant fleet that the Entente was able to mobilize from every corner of the earth.

The outlines of this coalition had been visible since the 1912 Reichstag election, when the three parties that had once been the antagonists of Bismarck gained almost two-thirds of the popular vote. The Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and progressive Liberals now formed a standing committee to press their demands for democratization at home and a negotiated, non-annexationist peace.

on 19 July the Reichstag voted by a large majority to approve a peace note. This called for a ‘peace of understanding’ and the ‘permanent reconciliation of peoples’, which could not be based on ‘forced territorial acquisition’ or ‘political, economic or financial oppression’. They called for a new and equitable international order based on the liberal principles of free trade, the freedom of the seas, and the establishment of an ‘international judicial organization’. Though the Reichstag majority avoided any direct echo of either Petrograd’s or Wilson’s language, there was no mistaking their general concordance. The Russians, Erzberger hoped, would be won over ‘in a matter of weeks’.

Pressure from within the Entente itself, both from above and below, would achieve what Wilson could not. It would force London and Paris to negotiate, allowing Russia to escape the choice between an odious separate peace and fighting the war to an imperialist finish.

In the hope of warding off the Bolsheviks, they agreed to persuade their comrades at home to attend the international socialist conference that Petrograd had called to meet in Stockholm on 1 July.23 The French Socialists duly withdrew their ministers from the French cabinet. But, after General Pétain had restored order to the Western Front by court-martialling several thousand French mutineers, Paris was not about to risk further pacifist contamination. The passports of the French Socialists were summarily cancelled and Lloyd George’s government promptly followed suit. The effect was to split the British labour movement, between the pro-war majority and a vocal oppositional minority that now stretched beyond the ranks of the Independent Labour Party.

Even following America’s entry into the war, the revolutionary defensists still counted on Wilson for support. And Wilson fully appreciated their dilemma. He regarded the secret Entente agreements of 1915 and 1916 in which Imperial Russia was entangled as odious. He knew, as he put it to a British confidant, that the Russians ‘in setting up their new government and working out domestic reforms’ might arrive at the point at which they found ‘the war an intolerable evil and would desire to get to an end of it on any reasonable terms’.

If Wilson had been able to throw the weight of the United States behind Petrograd’s call for peace, the effect might have been dramatic. But the headlong aggression of Germany in the spring of 1917 appears to have convinced Wilson that so long as Imperial Germany remained a threat, there was no prospect of calming the militarist impulse in Britain and France.

Having been forced to opt for war, Wilson was not about to lose control of the politics of peace. When the Russian government made its official appeal for the Entente to revise their war aims, London and Paris were only too happy to let Wilson be the first to reply. On 22 May the American President issued a response to the Russian people in which he began by reaffirming the deadly menace posed by Imperial Germany. The apparent willingness of the Kaiser’s government to accept reform was designed ‘only to preserve the power they have set up in Germany . . . and their private projects of power all the way from Berlin to Baghdad and beyond’.

In the summer of 1917 the greatest threat to the British war effort were not the U-boats, nor the threat of a Soviet in Leeds, but the very real possibility of default on the loans contracted in Wall Street since 1915.

In the last days of June, Britain came within hours of insolvency.29 But with the US as a co-belligerent, there was no longer any real risk of disaster.

The preparatory barrage for what was to become infamous as the Passchendaele offensive began on 17 July. Over a two-week period over 3,000 British guns delivered 4.238 million rounds onto the German trenches. At an estimated cost of $100 million this storm of steel was a further demonstration of the potency of the transatlantic war effort.

For Russia’s democratic revolutionaries this show of belligerence was a disaster. If neither London nor Washington would countenance this talk of peace, this left Petrograd with two options. The Petrograd Soviet might have embraced the risky course of entering into separate peace talks with Germany. In July, if it had not already been otherwise committed, it could have seized on the Reichstag peace resolution, and challenged the rest of the Entente to respond.

in Russia neither the Provisional Government nor the majority in the Soviets could bring themselves to take a first step toward Germany. To usher in the new revolutionary era by suing for a separate peace would be a fundamental betrayal. Russian democracy could have no future in isolation.

Lenin was making waves with his violent hostility to any compromise between the forces of the revolution and the hangovers from Tsarist-era liberalism and parliamentary conservatism that still clung to ministerial positions in the Provisional Government. His slogan was ‘all power to the soviets’.

Woof

Self-determination and no annexations might sound like progressive principles, but why should a revolutionary accept the endorsement of the pre-war status quo implied by ‘no annexations’?33 The only truly revolutionary formula was unqualified support for ‘self-determination’. Whereas liberals and reformist progressives shrank from such a formula because of the violence and inter-ethnic conflict it could easily stir up, Lenin espoused the slogan precisely because he expected it to unleash a whirlwind.

Whereas more orthodox Marxists dismissed Sinn Fein as suicidal putschists who lacked substantial working-class backing, for Lenin they were a vital pointer to the revolutionary future:

Goddamn Lenin was a dickhead

Lenin demanded an immediate revolutionary peace. But, as anyone familiar with his writings would soon realize, this slogan was easily misunderstood. Lenin wanted urgently to halt the all-consuming, imperialist World War that was threatening to extinguish any hope of historical progress. But he wanted this peace only because he hoped that it would unleash an even more encompassing international class war – the ‘proletariat’s great war of Liberation’.

A revolutionary peace concluded by an all-Soviet Russian regime would cause an uprising of the German proletariat.

Yeah howd that work out

Petrograd might simply have adopted a defensive posture. The Germans certainly showed little sign of wishing to take military advantage of Russia’s disorder. In the hope that the Russians would come round to a separate peace Ludendorff refrained from any offensive operations in the East.

the prospect of hunkering down in the ragged trench lines to hold out for another season of indecisive campaigning went fundamentally against the spirit of revolutionary Petrograd. There was a serious risk that if the army was left inactive throughout the summer, the Provisional Government would lose whatever capacity it still had to counteract Bolshevik subversion. The signs that the British were already discounting Russia as a military force were deeply ominous.

Like Wilson, Russia’s democratic revolutionaries were forced to gamble that they could alter the course of the war from within. To force the rest of the Entente to take seriously Russian democracy’s appeals for a negotiated peace, in May 1917 Kerensky, Tsereteli and their colleagues set themselves frantically to rebuilding the army as a fighting force. They were not unrealistic enough to imagine that they might defeat Germany. But if Russia could deliver the kind of blow against Austria that Brusilov had pulled off in 1916, the Entente would surely have to listen.

Thanks to its own mobilization efforts and the now abundant Allied supply line, the Russian Army of the early summer of 1917 was better equipped than at any previous point in the war. The question was whether its soldiers would fight.

It was the revolutionary democrats of February 1917, not Lenin and Trotsky, who first introduced political commissars to the Russian Army, to deliver the slogans of the revolutionary war effort. In his memoirs Kerensky describes the breathless moment on 1 July 1917 as the barrage lifted ahead of the fateful assault: ‘Suddenly there was a deathly hush: it was zero hour. For a second we were gripped by a terrible fear that the soldiers might refuse to fight. Then we saw the first lines of infantry, with their rifles at the ready, charging toward the frontlines of German trenches.’

where Bolshevik subversion was most serious, in front of the Germans in the north, the majority of the troops refused orders and remained in their trenches. On 18 July, with the Russians off balance, Germany counter-attacked.

At the very moment, on 19 July 1917, that Erzberger introduced the peace resolution in the Reichstag, the premise on which he made his challenge to the Kaiser’s regime was overturned. The U-boats might have failed, but in the East, the German Army was poised to win the war. Within hours of the German assault, the Russian defences collapsed and a rout ensued. Whilst the British got bogged down in the terrible slaughter of Flanders, on 3 September 1917 the Kaiser’s army marched triumphantly into Riga, once the capital of the Teutonic knights.

Within days of their entry into Latvia, Hindenburg and Ludendorff began shuffling seven of their crack Baltic divisions thousands of kilometres to the south, to positions on a tightly concentrated sector surrounding the Italian town of Caporetto.39 On 24 October, German shock troops crashed through the Italian lines. Swinging south towards Venice, they unhinged an entire segment of the front line.

With the Germans and Austrians advancing on Venice, 400,000 civilians fled in terror. Italy survived the crisis. A government of national unity took office in Rome. French and British reinforcements poured in. The Austro-German advance was halted on the Piave river line. But in Germany militarism had gained a new lease on life. The summertime parliamentary onrush of Erzberger, the SPD and the Reichstag majority was halted. Hundreds of thousands of enraged nationalists flocked into the newly formed German Homeland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei), determined to prevent the traitorous democrats from sabotaging the final push for victory.

In Russia, the impact of the failure of Kerensky’s democratic war effort was even more dramatic. The advocates of revolutionary defensism were humiliated. The peasant soldiers, many of whom had reluctantly steeled themselves for one last offensive, now abandoned the cause en masse.

The uprising was not put down until the following day. The revolution was now openly and violently divided against itself. Despite their profound commitment to democratic freedoms, the Petrograd Soviet had no option but to order the mass arrest of the Bolshevik leadership.

Fatally, however, the Provisional Government did not disarm the rebellious garrison units that formed the real base of Bolshevik strength, nor were they willing to decapitate the Bolshevik organization. The death penalty remained taboo.

Having survived an attack from the left wing, the main danger to Russian democracy was now from the right. With Brusilov’s reputation in tatters, the obvious Bonapartist pretender was General Kornilov, who Kerensky had approved as commander-in-chief.42 After weeks of open conspiracy, on 8 September 1917 Kornilov mounted his coup, only to find himself foiled by precisely the same force that had doomed the summer offensive. The mass of the army was no longer willing to take orders for decisive action.

It is commonly said that it was a dangerous power vacuum that opened the door to Lenin in the autumn of 1917. But what really defined the situation and compelled Lenin and Trotsky to act was the prospect that the Constituent Assembly would soon fill that vacuum with a potent source of democratic authority.

As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, the Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of universal suffrage, including the bourgeoisie as well as workers and peasants, could never be anything more than a cloak for bourgeois power.

Fucking typical

To ensure that there was no repeat, Trotsky planned to launch a pre-emptive coup, overthrowing the remnants of the Provisional Government and installing an all-socialist government in Petrograd, thus facing Lenin’s critics with a fait accompli. On the evening of 6 November, one day before the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was due to meet, Red Guards occupied every key point in the city. After a largely unopposed seizure of power, at 10.40 p.m. on the evening of 7 November (25 October old style) Lenin felt confident enough to allow the All-Russian Congress to convene. It promptly overturned the prevailing majority of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and voted in a new Central Executive Committee dominated by Lenin and his comrades.

The elections duly went ahead in the last week of November (Table 2). Too frequently overlooked, they deserve to stand, not only as a monument to the political capacities of the Russian people, but as a milestone in the history of twentieth-century democracy. At least 44 million Russians cast a vote. To date it was the largest expression of popular will in history. Almost three times as many Russians voted in November 1917 as Americans had done in the 1916 presidential election. Not until the 1940s was any Western election to outdo this spectacular event. Turnout ran at just short of 60 per cent. Participation was somewhat higher in the ‘backward’ countryside than in the cities. There was little or no evidence of fraud. The Russian electorate cast their ballots in a manner that clearly reflected both the basic structure of Russian society and the course of national political events since February 1917.