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

by Adam Tooze

Despite encouraging news from the Western Front, Ludendorff and Hindenburg knew that they could not act in complete disregard of the civilian authorities in the Reich. On 18 May after an urgent intercession by Chancellor Hertling, Ludendorff agreed to halt the Finno-German march on Petrograd.58 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. Ironically, the chief beneficiaries of this precarious equilibrium were the Bolsheviks. Whether it could hold would depend on the escalation unleashed by the aggression of both sides.

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. Germany, the British staffers speculated, would come to resemble ‘the conditions of the ancient Roman empire, with legionnaires fighting on her frontiers and slaves working at home, both recruited from subject races’. Unlike the Western Powers, the ‘hunnish’ Germans were ‘not hampered . . . by any standards of Christianity . . . the Germans are frankly pagan and opportunist, and will not hesitate to employ any such methods that may be necessary for their purpose.

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.

The prospect that terrified the British and the French in 1918 was not the spectre of Communism as such, but the threat that under Lenin, Russia would become an auxiliary of German imperialism.

But there was no difficulty on that score. 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.

On 30 May, claiming to have evidence that hit squads were active in the capital, Lenin declared martial law. After a wave of arrests, all representatives of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were expelled from the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.3

Once more, Wilson’s reluctance to intervene was bringing to the fore the politics of ‘peace without victory’. But with Germany apparently about to establish control over all of western Russia, Wilson could not uphold the position of moral equivalence that this stance implied. 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. Their mission was neither to take the offensive against Germany nor to overthrow the Bolsheviks, but simply to screen a Czech withdrawal to Vladivistok.

Lenin’s recent move toward the Germans had shifted the terms of the debate entirely. Whereas it might once have been possible to oppose intervention on the grounds that it gave encouragement to reactionary forces, now Lloyd George insisted ‘I am interventionist just as much because I am a democrat as because I want to win the war.’ The ‘last thing’ Lloyd George ‘would stand for, would be the encouragement of any kind of repressive regime’ in Russia ‘under whatever guise’.10 Only a democratic Russia would provide a real buffer against the German threat. 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’.

In late June a memo prepared by Ludendorff’s staff, on ‘The Aims of German Policy’ (Ziele der deutschen Politik), made clear the extent to which German military policy had radicalized since Brest. 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’.

The peripheral states of Finland, the Baltic, Poland and Georgia would remain under German protection. The return of Ukraine to Moscow would be bartered against German economic control over Russia as a whole. Harnessed to the Reich, Russia would provide the means for Germany to exert its domination throughout Eurasia.

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.18 Furthermore, as Kühlmann and the Reichstag anxiously pointed out, the German military were alarmingly unclear about how their expansive visions of hegemony in the East were to be reconciled with the demands of the war in the West. 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.

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.20 Germany must realize, Kühlmann insisted, that in light of the ‘incredible magnitude’ to which the war had expanded, it was unrealistic to expect that the country could impose in the West the kind of one-sided peace (Diktatfrieden) that had been possible at Brest. 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 Reich would have to negotiate.

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 war, the military leadership insisted, could still be won by a crushing victory in the West. The issue of the SPD’s daily newspaper, Vorwärts, which had dared to publish Kühlmann’s words, was impounded. Kühlmann’s political career was over. On 9 July 1918, despite having the backing of the Reichstag majority, he was replaced by Paul von Hintze, an unswerving follower of the Kaiser.22 But the domestic opposition to Ludendorff’s imperial fantasies in the East remained solid.

The following day Lenin appeared before the Congress to defend his policy in person. But the rebellious Left Socialist Revolutionaries were not cowed. 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. Undaunted by the howling Leninist majority, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries demanded the renunciation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

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.27 As a concession, the Germans agreed to send the troops to Moscow unarmed and in plain clothes. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks responded with brutal repression.

On the night of 16–17 July all members of the Romanov imperial family were murdered: Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters and son. 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.29 With British forces in the north and Japanese and American forces in the Pacific readying themselves to attack, the civil war that the Bolsheviks had deliberately provoked was threatening to merge with the wider global struggle.

On 29 July 1918 Lenin gave the party’s Central Committee a truly drastic appraisal of the situation. Encircled by a ‘forged chain’ of Anglo-French imperialism, Russia had been ‘sucked back into the war’. The fate of the revolution now depended ‘entirely upon who will carry off the victory . . . the entire question of the continued existence of the USSR . . . has been reduced to this military question’.30 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. As Rosa Luxemburg, the great tribune of the German radical left and long-time critic of Lenin, was to put it, in one of her most devastatingly perceptive attacks, this was ‘the final stage’ of the ‘path of thorns’ that the Russian revolution had been forced to travel towards ‘an alliance between the Bolsheviks and Germany’.

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). The Governorates of Livonia and Estonia were formally removed from Russian territory, consolidating German hegemony in the Baltic. The Communists also agreed to recognize the independence of Georgia, Germany’s protectorate in the Caucasus, and to supply at least 25 per cent of the oil from Baku to the Central Powers once Azerbaijan was back in Soviet hands.

Under the terms of the treaty, Germany and Finland agreed to abstain from any assault on Petrograd in exchange for a guarantee that the Bolsheviks would see to it that all the Entente forces were driven out of Soviet territory. In the event that the Soviet regime was unable to make good on this obligation, secret clauses provided for German and Finnish intervention.

But the willingness of the German civilian authorities to hold the line on the fragile legal ground of Brest had not yet faced its sternest test. 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. In a simultaneous attack the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky was killed. The policy of repression that had been gathering force since July was now transformed into the open proclamation of the ‘Red Terror’.

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. Henceforth Soviet Russia was to be governed as a ‘military camp’. A revolutionary military council headed by Trotsky took over much of the business of the party’s Central Committee.

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’. The desperate Russian bourgeoisie, many of whom looked to the Germans for protection, discovered that they had been ‘sold to the devil’ for the paltry sum of 6 billion marks.41

On 30 August he resigned in protest, denouncing the apologetic stance of the German government. The defenders of the Brest Treaty in Berlin were perpetrating a ‘systematic misrepresentation’ of a regime that ‘in its excesses was barely exceeded by the Jacobins’. Helfferich would not stand for the ‘ostensible treatment’ of Lenin’s regime as a government on the same footing as that of Germany. He could not be party to the effort to ‘solidarize, or at least to give the appearance of solidarizing with the regime . . .’. For the Reich’s government to condone Bolshevik violence was disastrous not only for Russia. It would undermine morale on the German home front.43 But 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’.

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. As for Ludendorff, he wanted nothing more than to crush the Soviet regime to death. But he was prevented from acting by the German government and the Reichstag majority, which had no love for either the Bolsheviks or the arbitrary rule of the German military in the East, yet saw Brest as the best way to contain a further escalation.

The Bolshevik regime, odious in its own right, was allied with German militarism and autocracy. Interventions by Japanese, American, British and French forces, combined with local Russian support, would strike against both enemies. 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.47 This not only prevented the realization of Operation Capstone, but it also took the wind out of the sails of Allied intervention almost as soon as it began.

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’.2 But potent as the charisma of Lloyd George and Clemenceau no doubt was, to focus on their personalities would be to understate the forces in play.

In the Entente’s survival and eventual victory in November 1918 coercion and censorship certainly played a role. The Entente Powers were also richer, and better located strategically. But their political survival was also owed to the fact that they had deep reserves of popular support to draw on and that their political class managed to respond to the crisis of the war in a way that the Central Powers did not, by promising a further widening of democracy at home and greater enfranchisement in the colonial sphere.

With democracy in Russia fighting for its life, there were voices in London and Washington that favoured sacrificing France’s obstinate demand for the return of Alsace-Lorraine to achieve a quick settlement. But a majority of the French public were still determined to continue the war. On 16 November 1917 the period of uncertainty was brought to an abrupt end when Clemenceau took office as Prime Minister and announced his new priorities: ‘total war [guerre integrale] . . . war, nothing but war’.6

To see what damage such vaulting ambition might have done both to French internal politics and its relations with its allies, one need only turn to Italy. Whereas Clemenceau successfully silenced discussion of the post-war order, Italian politics between 1915 and 1919 was torn apart by a clash between different visions of its place in the future international system.

Orlando thus restored a measure of social peace. But the Italian war effort remained under a cloud of political uncertainty due to the manner in which the country had entered the conflict.13 Parliament had not been appraised of the details of the London Treaty, but rumours were enough to suggest that Italy’s political leaders, above all Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, had made their country complicit in an odious example of old world imperialism. On 13 February 1918 these fears were fully confirmed when the full text was read out in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The effect was explosive. There was outrage even on the government benches, as ministers learned for the first time of the discreditable, annexationist demands for which Italy had been fighting.

If only it abandoned its old-fashioned and unrealistic imperialist ambitions, pro-Entente socialists and liberals saw no reason why Italy’s strategic interests could not be made compatible with the new era of self-determination.14 As we have seen, by the spring of 1918 the Entente and the United States were coming around to the view that the Habsburg Empire must be dismantled.15 Just as German progressives had hoped to fashion a liberal hegemony in the East, Italian progressives foresaw a future in which Italy would play the role of promoter and protector of self-determination throughout south-eastern Europe, a vision that harked back to the legendary nineteenth-century Italian patriot and pan-European, Giuseppe Mazzini.

If the contradictions between democracy and empire were becoming a source of political tension by 1917–18, one might have expected Britain to be their most notable victim. And both at home and in the empire, London certainly did face enormous challenges. But in the face of these, it was Britain that drove the Allied war effort into the ghastly fourth year of the war.19 It was Britain that emerged from the conflict with its political system most intact and with the majority of its strategic objectives met.

Between 1906 and 1911 in the Liberal government of Prime Minister Asquith, it had been Lloyd George who had carried the radical flag, taking the fight to the House of Lords and breaking their veto over the budget, pushing through redistributive taxation, introducing a social insurance system and guaranteeing the right of trade unions to free collective bargaining.

Before he became the scourge of conservatism at home, Lloyd George had made his name as a radical anti-imperialist. In 1901, in the midst of the Boer War, speaking to a raucous crowd in Birmingham, the heartland of jingoist nationalism, he had demanded that the empire must free itself of ‘racial arrogance’.

Despite the repeated cycles of promise and disappointment that littered its history, the seemingly contradictory idea of a ‘liberal empire’ was not empty nor, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was it historically moribund. The fact that Lloyd George could initiate dramatic change, in wartime, at the head of a coalition in which most of the key positions were occupied by Tories, is testament to imperial liberalism’s renewed relevance in an age of dramatic global transition.

actually held the balance of power in the House of Commons. Though undeniably a territory of colonial settlement, indeed the origin of British colonialism, Ireland, unlike the rest of the empire, had an integral place in the constitution of the United Kingdom. At Westminster, it was spectacularly over-represented. Of the 670 MPs returned in the last pre-war election, 103 were elected by Irish constituencies, of whom 84 were members of the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party led by John Redmond.22 But any move to Home Rule would provoke violent resistance from the Protestant community that held a solid majority in Ulster, Ireland’s Northern province, and who were fiercely committed to remaining under the direct rule of London.

Despite the open threat of mutiny in August 1914, the Asquith government pushed Home Rule through Parliament, but immediately suspended implementation. The postponement was a sop to the Unionists at the expense of Irish nationalism, but believing that the war was the first test of responsible Home Rule, Redmond threw his party behind the war effort.

was this policy of compromise and delay that opened the door to the radical nationalist minority who had gathered before the war in the Sinn Fein movement. On Monday 24 April 1916, Dublin was laid waste by rifle and artillery fire as extreme Irish nationalists launched a suicidal assault on British power.23 It took a week of bitter fighting to quell the rebellion. London’s embarrassment was compounded by the brutal repression meted out by army commanders on the spot. Though the uprising was crushed, the result, as the insurgents had hoped, was a strategic disaster for British rule. At a stroke they had restored Britain’s fading image as the brutal oppressor and destroyed the credibility of Redmond and the moderates.

In May 1916 the Anglo-Irish agitator and disciple of theosophy Annie Besant began to spread her influence from Madras across India, regaling crowds of tens of thousands in Bombay with rousing tales of the Dublin uprising.24 The radical Hindu leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak revived his fundamentalist wing of Indian nationalism and joined in the clamour for Home Rule. At Allahabad in the spring of 1916, leaders of the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress and the Muslim League issued an unprecedented joint declaration calling for far-reaching constitutional change. This cooperation was consolidated in December at Lucknow when an agreement was reached under which the rights of the Muslim minority would be protected by means of separate electoral colleges.

These inter-communal agreements were profoundly unsettling to the British. Protecting the 80 million Muslims of the subcontinent was one of the fundamental justifications for British rule. If, unlike in Ireland, the majority and minority could make common cause against London, then the end of the Raj might be approaching far faster than anyone had imagined.

It was against the backdrop of this double crisis in India and Ireland that Lloyd George took office in December 1916 determined to widen the po...

As a further concession, in early March 1917 the government of India announced to general applause that it had secured the right to impose a protective tariff on the import of British manufactures of cotton goods, one of the most eagerly anticipated benefits of self-rule. For British liberals this undermined the entire logic of empire. What purpose was there in clinging to far-flung territories, if they were allowed to retreat into economic self-sufficiency? But Lloyd George was relentless. Parliament must give India what it wanted.

But economic and political concessions were no longer enough. By the spring of 1917, it had become clear that London would have to do something unprecedented. It would have to define in solemn and public terms the ultimate goal of its rule in India.

Edwardian Britain, in the pre-war years, had witnessed spectacular struggles over votes for women and some murmurings about a further extension of the working-class franchise. In 1910 not quite two-thirds of the male population was entitled to vote, with disenfranchisement in poor urban districts rising to over 60 per cent.34 After a war that had taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of men from those same districts, this was no longer a sustainable position.

In February 1918, with barely a ripple of public argument, Britain passed the largest franchise reform in its history.

Within a matter of months it agreed a compromise formula on female suffrage that would enfranchise millions of women, but maintain an overall male majority in the electorate. The only issue that was hotly debated in Parliament was the proposal to introduce an element of Proportional Representation. Designed to give a voice to minorities, it was Lloyd George who got this conservative provision dropped. The avoidance of conflict was striking. But it invites a question: What allowed a fundamental process of constitutional change to appear as little more than a procedural adjustment, ‘pre-chewed political baby food’, as one conservative fundamentalist commented?36 Beneath this idealized image of discursive agreement lay something more fundamental: a clear commitment by the leadership of both established parties to secure the legitimacy of the political process by ensuring that the reforms appeared neither as a bribe nor as a concession extracted by coercive threats.

In his retrospective account of the Speaker’s Conference, Lowther himself made a revealing admission. He ‘felt very strongly’ that to ‘renew’ the ‘party and domestic polemics’ over the franchise that had wracked the pre-war era, ‘would bring discredit upon Great Britain in the face of her Dominions and colonies, at the very moment when the nation should be occupied in the consideration of large and novel problems . . . As time went on I became more and more impressed with the soundness of this view, and frequently pressed it upon my colleagues when there seemed to be any danger of a breakdown.’41 To Lowther, as to other British conservatives, resistance to democracy had become an anachronism.

it was former Viceroy and arch-conservative Lord Curzon who proposed a compromise. India should be promised neither self-government nor self-determination, but ‘the fuller realisation of responsible government’. What Curzon wished to imply by stressing responsibility remains mysterious. Perhaps he meant to warn against ‘irresponsible’ Indian opposition.46 He may have wished to restate the familiar British self-justification of protecting India from an upper-caste Hindu tyranny. Whatever Curzon’s intention, the formula allowed Montagu to present the House of Commons on 20 August 1917 with a historic statement. The ultimate objective of the Raj was the ‘increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India under the aegis of the British crown’. In India the moment at which such a tepid pronouncement might have roused real enthusiasm had passed. Nevertheless, the implications were momentous.