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

by Adam Tooze

As Trotsky had hoped, Chancellor Hertling and Foreign Secretary Kühlmann argued strongly against any resumption of hostilities.27 The home front would be profoundly disillusioned by any fresh bloodletting in the East. Surely every available man was needed in the West.

What haunted the Emperor was the prospect of Britain and America taking advantage of the power vacuum in the East. ‘Russia organized in Anglo-Saxon hands is great danger . . . Bolsheviki must be disposed of. On this the following suggestion . . . we should give aid to Estonia. The Baltic must appeal for help against robbers. We will then provide assistance (analogue to Turkey in Armenia). 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.

In the Kaiser’s mind, it seems that Wilson’s conciliatory remarks toward the Bolsheviks in his 14 Points address had conjured up the fantasy of a world Jewish conspiracy with its tentacles in both Washington and Petrograd. After this outburst, the discussion was adjourned to allow the Kaiser to take a restorative stroll.

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’.

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.34 Overarching the increasing radicalism of Ludendorff’s vision was not just the assumption of hostility toward the Jews and the need to erase the revolutionary threat posed by Bolshevism, but the assumption that the present war would not be the last. His increasingly excessive demands were driven by the vision that the current war was a preliminary to an even larger all-out confrontation with the Western Powers that would occupy generations to come.

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 leadership of the Bolshevik Party was deeply split. The only common denominator was the ever more draconian demand for revolutionary discipline and mobilization.

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. All able-bodied members of the bourgeoisie were declared liable for conscription into forced labour battalions.37 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 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.

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. Bukharin, Karl Radek and Alex-ander Kollontai had formed a breakaway faction known as the Left Communists, dedicated to resisting Lenin’s ‘obscene’ peace.

Once more Lenin assailed the Left Communists for their irrational, romantic vision of history. Their posture was that of the ‘aristocrat who, dying in a beautiful pose, sword in hand, said: “Peace is disgraceful, war is honourable.”’ By contrast, Lenin cast himself as the voice of the people, arguing from the ‘point of view of . . . every sober-minded peasant and worker’ who knew that such a peace was merely a moment for ‘gathering forces’.

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.42

It was to impose that leadership that Lenin demanded a series of important changes to clarify the party’s position and to set it determinedly on its revolutionary path. The traditional title of Social Democracy, still proudly born by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was clearly no longer appropriate. Having dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Soviet regime must break openly with the ‘standards of “general” (i.e. bourgeois) democracy’.

The party’s title would henceforth reflect that proud heritage. 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”.’

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’. He promised that if they could only gain time for reconstruction the Soviet regime would ‘arise anew from enslavement to independence . . .’. The motion for ratification was carried by the huge Bolshevik majority.

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.

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.’

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.

Through skilful diversionary tactics and by concentrating almost half the German Army on the British sector, on 21 March 1918 Ludendorff managed to raise the odds in his favour at the point of attack to 2.6:1. Beginning at 4.40 a.m., 11,000 guns and mortars delivered a devastating five-hour barrage against the British front line around St Quentin, followed by a concentrated thrust by 76 divisions across a 50-kilometre front.49 Winston Churchill, who witnessed the attack, described it as ‘the greatest onslaught in the history of the world’.50 Never had so much manpower or firepower been concentrated on a single battlefield. By nightfall the leading German assault teams had penetrated to a depth of 10 kilometres. At Amiens it seemed that the Kaiser’s army might split the Western Front in two.

And though he did not say so, the Kaiser clearly meant to exact the same tribute from Germany’s parliamentarians as well. The impetus of the progressive Reichstag majority had been halted. But 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.

When the liberal Prince Max von Baden asked the general to explain the outlook if Germany were not to achieve decisive success, Ludendorff replied simply ‘well then, Germany will perish’.53 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.

The imperialists themselves had lost control of the war. The survival of the Soviet regime itself was the best evidence for this. To Lenin it was obvious that the capitalist powers must have an overriding common interest in the destruction of his regime. What prevented them from cooperating to snuff out the Russian revolution was the force-field of imperial rivalries. In the East, Japan was held in check by the United States. In the West, the life-and-death struggle between Britain and Germany prevented either from moving against Petrograd. At any moment, all the forces of imperialism might coalesce and turn against the Soviet regime. But just as suddenly, imperialist rivalry in some far-flung part of the world might trigger a new feud amongst them.

The course of history that Marxist theory had ‘naturally’ imagined ‘as straight, and which we must imagine as straight in order to see the beginning, the continuation and the end’, was ‘in real life . . . never . . . straight’. It was ‘incredibly involved’. Huge ‘zig zags’ and ‘gigantic’, complex ‘turns’ were unleashed as millions of people began the agonizing process of making their own history under conditions far from their own choosing.3 Not economics but violence was the defining feature of this epoch. In Russia, a civil war had already begun that was ‘interwoven with a whole series of wars’.

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 political resilience to withstand the stresses of this moment. To survive, the Soviet Union must accept a peace at any price with whomever held power in Germany. This was a painful compromise, as Lenin himself freely admitted. 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.

Back in December 1917, Britain and France had already begun discussing intervention to restore an Eastern Front against Germany. But they could ill afford to move significant forces from the West, and as the German offensive began in the spring their situation became truly desperate. Instead they urged Japan to take the initiative.

Goto was deeply unsettled not so much by the Soviet regime as by the enthusiastic global response to Wilson’s 14 Points. ‘If we probe the real intentions of the USA further,’ Goto insisted, ‘it embraces what I call moralistic aggression. It is, in other words, none other than a great hypocritical monster clothed in justice and humanity.’ 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.8 But the majority of the cabinet did not share Goto’s aggressive vision.

Within days of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Japanese ambassador to China proposed a far-reaching military agreement. 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.

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. Hara did not oppose Japanese military intervention in Siberia.

How would America decide? As the struggle over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty swung one way and then the other, there was a powerful faction in Washington led by Secretary of State Lansing who saw Bolshevism in precisely the terms that Lenin imagined – as a natural ideological enemy of the US that must be stamped out.

‘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. ‘Are we going to make the world safe for this Russian democracy,’ Bullitt demanded, ‘by allowing the allies to place Terauchi in Irkutsk, while Ludendorff establishes himself in Petrograd?’16 On 4 March 1918, Bullitt’s arguments prevailed. The President swung back firmly against any Allied intervention.

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. In the north at Murmansk in the second week of March a small detachment of British troops was landed to protect Allied stores against seizure by the advancing German Army.19 But at the Congress of Soviets Leninist rigour prevailed. There could be no compromise with a liberal hypocrite like Wilson.

On 19 March, at the insistence of Hara, the interventionists in Tokyo were once more overruled. Nothing would be done without America’s explicit approval.20 When an over-eager Japanese naval unit made an impromptu landing in Vladivostok, it was immediately countermanded by Tokyo.

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.

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.

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. With the Turkish Army advancing north, this was more than the Georgians could refuse. On 26 May they broke ranks, abandoned the Transcaucasian Siem and declared full independence. 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. ‘Our people want to save what they can. You too, are obligated to seek an avenue for agreement with the Turks. There is no other way.’

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. Turkish artillery was within easy range of the makeshift capital of Erevan. 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.29 As one German military representative on the spot reported to Berlin, the Turks were clearly intending to ‘starve the entire Armenian nation’.30 Meanwhile, in the relative safety of Tiflis, the German flag was raised alongside that of Georgia.

This, however, was music of the far-distant future. The immediate prize of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was supposed to have been the establishment of Ukraine as a substantial client state and economic partner of the Central Powers.32 Having occupied the agrarian heartland in the spring advance, the Germans by early May 1918 had added the Donets industrial region to their zone of occupation.

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.

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. For the Rada to have presided over the restoration of the great estates for the sake of its German protectors would have discredited it completely. For the Germans themselves to reverse the agrarian revolution by force would have required hundreds of thousands of troops from the Western Front that Ludendorff could ill afford.

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. Within days, the German military decided against diplomacy. 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.

The real power-holders in Germany seemed to have lost interest in the project of creating a viable Ukrainian nation state. Instead, they appeared to be readying Kiev as the launching pad for a conservative reconquest of all of Russia.

The civil war ended on 15 May, but the killing did not. 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.40 In the spring of 1918, Finland became the stage for the first of a series of savage counter-revolutionary campaigns that were to open a new chapter in twentieth-century political violence.

On 14 May Lenin proposed that the German imperialists should be offered a comprehensive plan of economic cooperation.44 By way of justification he offered what was surely the weirdest of his many modifications of orthodox Marxism. 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. To overcome the split between the political conditions for socialism, realized in Russia, and the economic conditions, realized in Germany, the shell of the treaty must be filled with a substantial economic alliance.

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. As Lenin had hoped, Krupp and Deutsche Bank were licking their lips. But on sober inspection the dish was less appetizing than promised. 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. Reconstruction would have to begin by restarting Russia’s own blast furnaces, which by the summer of 1918 had been largely blown out.

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 20 April 1918 Robins cabled the American ambassador, urging that a decision be made. Unless Washington planned to offer Lenin ‘organized opposition’, he insisted that there must be ‘organized cooperation’. As Robins telegraphed to America’s reluctant ambassador, the stakes could not be higher. Russia’s reconstruction was the ‘largest economic and cultural enterprise remaining in the world’.47 The question was whether this would take place ‘under either German or American supervision and support’.

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. ‘Only America,’ Lenin insisted, ‘can become that country.’

manganese and platinum as well as animal hides and furs. But on his return to Washington, Robins found no audience. President Wilson dismissed his emissary as someone ‘in whom I have no confidence whatever’.49 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.

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. Germany’s strategic aim must be to keep Ukraine independent and the Tsarist Empire divided, even if this meant tolerating the Bolsheviks in Petrograd. ‘It may seem strange for conservative and militarist Germany to support a socialist government in another country. But our interests dictate that we should do everything to prevent an imminent restoration of Russian unity. A unified Russia was bound to be pro-Entente.’

Fed by Erzberger’s contacts in Kiev, the liberal Vossische Zeitung published eyewitness reports of the scandalous events surrounding Skoropadskyi’s coup. German soldiers had stormed the Rada, a sovereign national parliament with which only a few weeks earlier the Reichstag had ratified a solemn treaty. A revolver had been pointed at the head of the Ukrainian president, the venerable historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Members of the Rada had been subjected to humiliating body searches. Cabinet ministers were arrested by German troopers. The newly minted Hetman was a reactionary Cossack. With such high-handed brutality Germany had forfeited any chance of establishing a legitimate and productive hegemony in the East.

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.