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

by Adam Tooze

But, by the same token, Japan now faced the consequences that America wished to avoid. Japan had taken sides in a civil war and its involvement was escalating the conflict. Japan’s Chinese allies were engaged in a high-stakes wager. They were gambling that the resources Japan would place at their disposal would be sufficient to overcome the opposition that that support aroused.

Shortly after the declaration of war on Germany in August 1917, Duan explained to ambassador Reinsch that his first aim was to ‘make the military organization in China national and unified, so that the peace of the country shall not at all times be upset by local military commanders’.

Flush with Japanese funds, in October 1917 Duan launched the first of the North-South campaigns for military unification that were to convulse the country for the next ten years.

At the end of 1917, six years after the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty, there were signs that Washington was finally about to put some financial muscle behind its strategy in Asia. Lansing proposed that $50 million would be provided for military reconstruction and the development of the Southern railway network. A further $100 million would help to stabilize the Chinese currency. The funds were be raised by an international bankers’ consortium with Wall Street taking the lead.46 Wilson approved the scheme and the War Department was keen on the idea of moving an army of 100,000 Chinese soldiers to France. But no money ever flowed.

In the spring of 1917 America’s entry into the war had seemed to many to herald a transnational crusade for liberal republicanism. But by the end of 1917 the hope that Washington had either the capacity or the will to orchestrate such a sweeping campaign had already been shaken.

the experience of Russia suggests, there was a more general failure on the part of Washington over the summer of 1917 to take up the challenge of managing the kind of global democratic campaign that Wilson had seemed to promise. In China and Russia, where revolutionary republican projects were immediately at stake, there was a bewildering mismatch between political rhetoric and the effective deployment of resources.

There is a pattern here. In truth, despite the appearance Wilson created of speaking to them directly, China, Russia and Germany were objects of his strategy. They were not his real interlocutors. Transformation in such alien places was no doubt welcome, but it was at best a long-term process and one from which America should keep its distance. Wilson’s public rhetoric, his diplomacy and strategy were not directed to them, but to containing the dangerous association he had been forced to enter into with the British Empire, the rampaging Japanese, and the vindictive and unpredictable French, an association all the more dangerous because the Machiavellian imperialists of the old world had so many powerful and self-interested friends in America itself, in Congress and on Wall Street. It was Wilson’s determination to preserve the upper hand over this network of forces closer to home, not the uncertain prospects for progress in faraway places in Asia or Europe, that dominated every other consideration.

That such a peace would mean a large loss of territory for Russia was hardly surprising. As Lenin himself had forcefully argued, if the principle of self-determination was taken seriously it trumped any claim to preserve the territorial status quo.4 By what right could the Bolsheviks, who were violently consolidating their coup in Petrograd, claim the territories conquered by the Tsar? By Lenin’s own estimates more than half the populations of eastern Europe were oppressed nationalities.5 As draconian as the final treaty was from a Russian point of view, only a very small portion of the territory removed from Russia was directly annexed by Germany. Instead, Brest gave birth to the precursors to the Baltic states in their modern form, an independent Ukraine and a Transcaucasian Republic.

In January 1918, in response to the German-Bolshevik talks at Brest, both Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson felt obliged to make powerful statements of the liberal world order they envisioned for the post-war period. Of the two statements it was Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points manifesto that would echo around the world. But far from challenging Lenin and Trotsky, as Cold War legend would have it, Wilson chose to conciliate them. In the process, by portraying Lenin and Trotsky as potential partners in a democratic peace and a unitary ‘Russian people’ as the victim of German aggression, Wilson helped to consolidate the black legend of Brest. Meanwhile, as democrats in Berlin and Vienna looked on in horror, Bolshevik revolutionary tactics combined with the most aggressive impulses of German militarism to eviscerate any attempt to create a legitimate order in the East.

Certainly, Lenin in the first weeks of his new regime did not dare to say out loud that his policy might amount to accepting a separate peace on any terms the Germans would offer. Nor did the Central Powers demand this sacrifice. In acquiescing to an armistice, Germany agreed to negotiate on whatever version of the Petrograd peace formula the Bolsheviks could square with their conscience. Furthermore, Germany did not demand that Russia formally break ranks with the Entente. Instead, Russia and Germany issued a joint declaration, inviting all the other combatants to join the talks.

Germany had set out on a road to ‘parliamentarization’. But would these first steps be enough to quiet popular unrest? And, if they did satisfy the left, might that provoke a backlash from the right? Since August 1917 the ultra-nationalist Homeland Party (Vaterlandspartei) had been mobilizing the right wing of German politics to fight the war to a victorious finish; if this required an open military dictatorship, so much the better.

But what now concerned the leaders of the Reichstag majority was the prospect that a dogged rearguard action by the German right wing would stall any further reform and provoke a radicalization on their exposed left flank. In the autumn of 1917 support for the breakaway anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was clearly surging. There could no longer be any doubt that the most vocal section of the German working class, perhaps a majority, were demanding a negotiated peace, an end to martial law, democratization in Prussia and an immediate improvement in food rations.

Germany’s food situation in the coming winter was truly alarming. As Friedrich Ebert, one of the most energetic leaders of the majority Social Democrats, spelled out to his colleagues in the Reichstag on 20 December 1917, ‘in April and May we will be faced with a void. So nothing but shortened bread rations to 110 grams per day. That is impossible.’10 With Russia suing for an armistice, the fabled granary of the Ukraine beckoned in the East. But to gain access to those desperately needed supplies, short of wholesale occupation, Germany and Austria needed a trade deal. Whereas the Bolsheviks could be satisfied with an armistice, it was the Central Powers who needed a substantive peace settlement as quickly as possible.

On 6 December the Prussian conservatives made their stand. Defying public appeals for a bold gesture of enlightened reform by the Kaiser himself, the Prussian House of Lords voted down the proposal for manhood suffrage.

Proles’?13 For the German right, the line was clear. Democratization was a prelude to capitulation. More sophisticated exponents of German strategy could see other possibilities. For men such as Matthias Erzberger, or Bethmann Hollweg’s close collaborator Kurt Riezler, democratization at home was the only possible basis on which Germany could pursue a great-power policy capable of matching that of Britain and the United States.

But even with the limited powers conceded to the Reichstag by the Bismarckian constitution, accommodating the Polish minority had presented worrying problems. If one contemplated Germany’s future as a democratized Volksstaat, or people’s state, how were large territories to be incorporated whose populations were linguistically, culturally and religiously alien?

On the extreme right, pan-German ideologues might imagine a future in which Germans lorded it over a million-strong helot class. The radical leader of the pan-Germans, Heinrich Class, was even willing to contemplate mass clearances of native populations to create land in the East ‘free of people’. Such fantasies were encouraged in 1917 by the flight of a large part of the pre-war population.

The methods that Turkey had used to dispose of its Armenian population were no secret to the German political class. But most viewed the Turkish example with revulsion. Even diehard conservatives dismissed pan-German talk of enslaving the Belgian population and clearing the East as dangerous and impractical.18 During the debate over the peace resolution in July 1917 Erzberger announced to a cheering Reichstag that it would be far cheaper to provide insane-asylum beds for the pan-Germans than it would be to indulge their imperialist delusions.

To Foreign Secretary Kühlmann the Brest-Litovsk negotiations thus seemed to offer an opportunity to found a new order in the East not merely on Germany’s undoubted military dominance, but on the emphatic embrace of a new principle of legitimacy. Germany would secure power on a continental scale not through annexation, but through the formation of an economic and military bloc of smaller eastern European states under German protection. The autonomous Polish entity carved by Germany and Austria out of Russian territory in the autumn of 1916 was a start. While in economic and military terms the new Poland would be bound tightly and irrevocably to Germany, in the social and cultural sphere it would be given the freedom ‘to express itself nationally’.24 As Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had put it in 1916, ‘the times are no longer for annexation, but rather for the cuddling up [sic] of smaller state-entities to the great powers, to mutual benefit’.

On Christmas Day the Central Powers and the Bolshevik negotiators issued a communiqué announcing their agreement on the basic principles of a peace of no annexations and a withdrawal of occupying forces, a formula to which they still hoped the Entente might adhere.

In fact, the German negotiators never had any intention of leaving it up to Lenin and Stalin to extend their idea of self-determination throughout the pre-war territory of the Russian Empire. As far as Kühlmann was concerned, following their liberation from the oppressive rule of the Tsar, the populations of Poland, Lithuania and Courland had made a de facto declaration of independence. They no longer belonged to Russia and did not fall under the terms of the Christmas Day agreement regarding troop withdrawal. Under German protection these nationalities had exercised their right to opt out of the civil war that Lenin was openly advocating.35

Kühlmann had entangled his opposite numbers in a web. But it was woven as much of Bolshevik self-deception as of German deceit. In taking the first dangerous steps towards a separate peace, it suited Lenin and Trotsky only too well to present the negotiations as an unexpected triumph. But the jubilation on the Soviet side following the apparently generous Christmas Day agreement was such that the leadership of the German delegation began to worry that, once the Bolsheviks were forced to confront the true nature of the agreement, the shock would derail the entire peace process.

The territories to which the Christmas Day agreement applied, the territories from which the German Army would progressively withdraw and to which the principle of self-determination would then be applied, were not the border regions occupied by Germany since 1915, but those further to the north and east, including Estonia and segments of Belorussia and Ukraine that had been occupied only in the final phase of the German advance. The result was a public relations disaster that permanently discredited the Brest-Litovsk peace. The ‘deceit’ of German imperialism was revealed.

On 8 January 1918, when the majority parties met to discuss the possibility of a new Reichstag resolution to reaffirm Germany’s commitment to the principles of a liberal peace, Erzberger commented that they now had a double threat to deal with. Germany’s workers were threatening to strike, but if the Kaiser’s generals were not granted a military dictatorship, they too seemed ready to rebel.37

In 1917 the much maligned revolutionary defensists had refused to contemplate separate peace talks with Germany, precisely because they had foreseen the dilemma that Lenin and Trotsky now found themselves in. To refuse to come to terms with Germany risked a disastrous invasion. But if they accepted a humiliating peace they would have to brace themselves for civil war. The Bolsheviks, as always, comforted themselves with the thought that Germany would soon erupt in revolution. Trotsky responded by raising the stakes and issuing a radical peace appeal to the world, challenging the Entente to apply self-determination to Ireland and Egypt.38 The news from Vienna was certainly encouraging. But Lenin had come to a sober conclusion.39 Knowing the condition of the Russian units stationed in front of Petrograd, he rejected the idea of a revolutionary war of resistance as a pipe dream. The Soviet regime would have to make a separate peace, however ruinous the terms.

Meanwhile, the Reichstag majority and its vision of a peace based on self-determination had been made to seem like a mere smokescreen for the true intentions of German militarism. The initiative was thus handed back to the Entente and to Wilson. The 14 Points with which the President responded to this contorted situation were no radical manifesto. Neither of the two key terms usually ascribed to Wilsonian internationalism – democracy and self-determination – appear anywhere in the text.42 What Wilson was attempting to do was respond to the disastrous situation created over the last 12 months by the derailment of his policy first for peace and then for war. He did so in terms that reflected not his radicalism, but his conservative evolutionary liberalism.

Nowhere in the 14 Points does Wilson mention democracy as a norm. Rather he stressed the freedom of nations to choose their own form of government. This, however, was not stated in terms of an emphatic act of self-determination. The phrase ‘self-determination’ appears nowhere either in the 14 Points or in the speech with which Wilson delivered them to Congress on 8 January 1918.

With regard to the colonial question, what concerned Wilson were not the rights of the oppressed people so much as the violence of inter-imperialist competition. Point 5 called for the claims of the rival powers to be settled not by war, but by ‘a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment’.44 As far as the subordinate populations themselves were concerned, Wilson called simply for the ‘observance of the principle that in determining all questions of sovereignty . . . the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’.

it was significant that Wilson spoke here of the interests, not the voice, of those populations.

The significance of this choice of words becomes clear when it is contrasted with what Wilson had to say about the territorial question at issue in the European war. Here too he invoked not an absolute right to self-determination but the gradated view of the capacity for self-government that was typical of conservative nineteenth-century liberalism.

Echoing the Bolshevik negotiating position at Brest, Wilson called for the peace to begin with the withdrawal of all foreign forces, so as to allow Russia the ‘unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy’. What is striking about this formulation was precisely Wilson’s unproblematic use of the term ‘Russia’ and ‘national policy’ with regard to an empire that was in the process of violent decomposition.

As for Germany, throughout the tumultuous summer of 1917 Wilson had stuck to the position to which he had swung around in April. The Reichstag majority were not to be trusted. Their reformist professions and their peace resolutions were a cover for German imperialism.

The Wilsonian rendition of the Bolsheviks as sincere and earnest advocates of a democratic peace victimized by German imperialism remained credible. Ukraine was a problem on a different scale. It was a strategic asset of the first rank, the disposition of which would decide the future of Russian power and shape of the new order in the East. As 1918 began, Ukraine was controlled neither by the Germans nor by the Bolsheviks. Here, their rival visions of a new order would clash directly and the full complexity of the moral and political balance would become apparent.

After the overthrow of the Tsar, in Kiev, as in the rest of Russia, a revolutionary authority had established itself. Unlike in Petrograd the revolutionaries in Ukraine had immediately set up a rudimentary parliamentary forum, the Rada. In this assembly the parties inclined to nationalism, led by the local brand of agrarian Social Revolutionaries, had a clear majority. But no significant voices made a claim to independence. The Ukrainian revolutionaries were anxious to play their part in the ‘triumph of justice . . .’ in Russia.

Over the summer of 1917 the liberals in the Provisional Government had stalled Kiev’s demands for real autonomy.2 But the politicians of Ukraine awaited the Constituent Assembly, which would surely decide in favour of a federal constitution. It was the breakdown of legitimate authority in Petrograd that forced Kiev into a declaration first of national autonomy and then in December 1917 of outright independence.

For the Bolsheviks this raised a terrifying prospect. In the pre-war years, Ukraine had accounted for one-fifth of total world exports of grain, a share twice that of the United States. Petrograd and Moscow needed that grain as much as did Vienna and Berlin. Ukraine was no less vital to Russia’s future as an industrial power. The region produced all of Russia’s coking coal, 73 per cent of its iron and 60 per cent of its steel. Ukraine’s manganese was exported to all the blast furnaces of Europe.3 If an independent government established itself in Kiev this would be a huge blow to the Soviet regime.

The Bolsheviks approved self-determination, but only insofar as it was the ‘revolutionary masses’ who were in control. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian Rada was nothing more than an assembly of property owners serviced by their Menshevik and Social Revolutionary lackeys.

The Bolsheviks were already attacking the national Constituent Assembly of Ukraine. If the Germans were to evacuate the Baltic, the same would happen there. But Trotsky was unabashed. His retort was a classic dose of Marxist state theory: ‘... the General is completely right when he says that our government is founded on power. All history has known only such governments. So long as society consists of warring classes the power of the government will rest on strength and will assert its domination through force.’ What the Germans were objecting to in Bolshevism was ‘the fact that we do not lock up the strikers, but the capitalists who lock out the workers, the fact that we do not shoot the peasants who raise their claim to the land, but that we arrest the large landowners and officers who want to shoot the peasants . . .’ And, Trotsky went on, the ‘violence’ that Bolshevism applied, ‘the violence that is supported by millions of workers and peasants and that is directed against a minority which seeks to keep the people in servitude; this violence is a holy and historically progressive force.’

On the morning of 18 January, the negotiations were halted to allow Trotsky to return to Petrograd with a map showing the full extent of Germany’s demands. But the first item on the Bolsheviks’ agenda that day was not the peace, but the final liquidation of the democratic revolution in Russia. The date of 18 January 1918 had been set for the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly. As Trotsky was haggling with the Germans in Brest, heavily armed Red Guards were sweeping anti-Bolshevik protestors from the streets of the Russian capital, killing several dozen.

Outside, Red Guard cannons were trained on the Assembly building. Inside, the majority faced the continuous, raucous barracking of the Bolshevik faction, with Lenin and the rest glaring down from the balcony.

Pravda’s headlines denounced Chernov and Tsereteli as ‘The hirelings of bankers, capitalists, and landlords . . . slaves of the American dollar.’12 Lenin offered a chilling obituary for parliamentary politics. Under the title ‘People from Another World’, he described the anguish he felt at having to attend even one meeting of the Constituent Assembly.13 It was for him the experience of a nightmare. ‘It is as though history had accidentally . . . turned its clock back, and January 1918 became May or June 1917!’ To be plunged from the ‘real’, ‘lively’ activity of the Soviet of workers and soldiers into the world of the Constituent Assembly, was to be plunged into a ‘world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations, of promises and more promises based . . . on conciliation with the capitalists’. ‘It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odour of the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty “social” . . . phrases, to hear Chernov and Tsereteli, was simply intolerable.’

Furthermore, nothing was more likely to isolate that dictatorship from Russia’s allies in the Entente than the decision, anticipated in London and Paris since December 1917, and finalized by the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee on 3 February 1918, to repudiate Russia’s massive foreign debts: $4.92 billion piled up in the pre-war era, $3.9 billion since the start of the war, the latter sum formally guaranteed by the British and French governments. The Soviet government’s refusal to accept responsibility for the liabilities of its predecessor was, as London protested, a challenge to the ‘very foundations of international law’. The Bolsheviks responded that the loans to the Tsar’s government were part of an imperialist web designed to make Russia the servant of Western capitalism. The Russian people had ‘long since redeemed’ anything they owed, with ‘a sea of blood and mountains of corpses’. Henceforth the issue of debt repudiation would pose a fundamental obstacle to any rapprochement between the Soviet regime and the Western Powers. Lenin and Trotsky had burned their boats.

In the East the Germans might have military predominance, but in the wider war time was not on their side. To capitalize on their victory over Russia, Ludendorff and Hindenburg were now planning a massive effort in the West. Given the timetable for what must surely be Germany’s final offensive, the High Command urgently needed to settle the situation in Russia.

The massive strikes that swept Austria in January 1918 culminated in a mutiny of the Austrian fleet in the Adriatic.15 In Germany too, tensions were rising to an unbearable pitch. On 28 January, a week after the protests in Vienna had ebbed away, the factory cities of Germany were swept by an unprecedented wave of industrial action. The strikers’ demands were openly political – a reasonable peace with Russia and domestic political reform, an end to martial law and the abolition of Prussia’s three-tiered electoral system.

Troops loyal to the Soviet had just captured Kiev. With the Rada government in flight, the territory actually represented by their articulate young representatives at Brest was little larger than the conference room in which they were currently sitting. This was true enough. But, as should have been obvious, if it came down to a simple trial of strength, it was General Hoffmann, not Trotsky, who held by far the strongest cards. Confident of their ability to create a fait accompli, the Central Powers ignored Trotsky’s threats and ended the session by formally recognizing the Rada delegation.

The Austrians, however, needed more than this. Given their utterly depleted state, they required not only a formal treaty with a vestigial Ukrainian government, but a workable grain-delivery contract. With Bolshevik forces occupying much of northern Ukraine, Count Czernin could not abandon his efforts to reach an agreement with Trotsky. This meant that they had to return to the question of the Baltic states and establish ground rules for what was actually meant by self-determination.

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. ‘Russia could bow to force, but not to sophistry. He would never . . . admit German possession of the occupied territories under the cloak of self-determination, but let the Germans come out brazenly with their demands . . . and he would yield, appealing to world opinion against an act of brutal brigandage’.

As the German radical Karl Liebknecht wrote from prison, from the point of view of the revolution the result of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was ‘not nil, even if it’ resulted in a ‘peace of forced capitulation’. Thanks to Trotsky ‘Brest-Litovsk has become a revolutionary tribunal whose decrees are heard far and wide . . . it has exposed German avidity, its cunning lies and hypocrisy’. But it had exposed not only General Hoffmann and Ludendorff. 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.

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. Counting not on revolution in Germany, but on the ability of the Reichstag majority to prevent a resumption of fighting, 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.24

Everything now depended on the response of the Germans. Following Trotsky’s startling declaration, the Bolshevik delegation was delighted to see their relentless tormentor General Hoffmann reduced to spluttering expostulation. 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.26 Trotsky had gambled that the moderate forces in Germany would be strong enough to hold back the militarists. And 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.