Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

But revolutions are also signs of decay and breakdown, the cracking of one ruling system and the untidy formation of another.

High politics is, of course, shaped by social forces, by the actions and aspirations of the broad masses, but politics is not reducible to the social.

A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can—depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices—institutionalize the gravest injustices.

As a rule, a regime perishes not because of the strength of its enemies but because of the uselessness of its defenders.

Wilhelm II—known as All Highest Warlord—had declined to renew Bismarck’s so-called German-Russian Reinsurance Treaty, thereby unwittingly spurring Russian reconciliation with France, and raising the prospect for Germany of a two-front war.

Then there was the kaiser’s naval program. As of 1913, Britain accounted for 15 percent of international trade, but Germany came in second at 13 percent, and in this increasingly interdependent world of global trade, especially of vital food imports, Germany had every right to build a navy.6 But Wilhelm II and his entourage had unleashed a sixty-battleship fantasy for the North Sea.7 This had spurred Britain’s reconciliation with France—despite a near Franco-British war in 1898 over colonies—and even with autocratic Russia.

It took two to tango, however, and the “sun-never-sets” global position that Great Britain sought to defend was itself aggressive. Britain had reluctantly ceded naval hegemony in the Western hemisphere to the rising United States and in the Far East to upstart Japan, at least temporarily. (Even then, spending on the Royal Navy consumed one quarter of state revenue.)

1/4 of the British State Budget went to the Royal Navy.

Many viewed Russia, because of its European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern geography, as the only potential global rival to Britain’s global empire.

But the clash of interests was strong as well, and unlike in the cases of the United States and Japan, Britain was not inclined to accommodate German power.

Alliances by themselves never cause war; calculation and miscalculation do.

British miscalculations were of longer standing. Britain offered the promise of global order, a Pax Britannica, without the desire or wherewithal to enforce it,

“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable,” the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote.

Bismarck called such decisions rolling “the iron dice.”

Here, as the Ottoman empire contracted, the other big land empires—Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany—ground up against one another like tectonic plates, which is how the fault line of tiny Serbia precipitated a world war and, on the eastern front, a revolution in the Russian empire.

Austrian ruling circles decided to smash Serbia, even at the great risk of provoking a pan-European war, in effect risking suicide from fear of death.

During the first half of 1914, more strikes had rocked St. Petersburg and other parts of the empire, like the Baku oil fields, than at any time since 1905, and in July 1914 workers became particularly menacing, partly out of desperation in the face of repression.

As for Russian military might, Russia’s allies France and Britain overestimated it, while Germany and Austria-Hungary underestimated it—but not as much as the Russians themselves did.

Austria. Nonetheless, the bottom line was that Russia would not allow German power to humiliate Serbia because of the repercussions for Russia’s reputation, especially following Russia’s inability to prevent Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina back in 1908.29 Nicholas II was determined to deter Austria-Hungary, which had begun mobilization, for the sake of Russia, not Serbia.

Instead, facing the belligerence of his cousin, domestic pressure from elites to stand tall, and unrest at home, the tsar ordered, then rescinded, and finally ordered again, on July 31, a full mobilization.

Russia was no innocent victim, however. The perpetual machinations to have the tsar abolish the Duma, or downgrade it to a mere consultative body, had heated up. In effect, the decision for war was Nicholas II’s sideways coup against the Duma he despised.

Visions took flight of further imperial aggrandizement as well: a once-in-a-century opportunity to seize the Turkish Straits and the Armenian regions of Ottoman Anatolia; annex the Polish- and Ukrainian-speaking territories of Austria; and expand into Persia, Chinese Turkestan, and Outer Mongolia.

Germany’s two-front vulnerability had produced a defense scheme to conquer the continent.

The German general staff, in bouts of pessimism, expressed fewer illusions about a short war than sometimes recognized, but could not admit that war had ceased to be an effective policy instrument—to them, war still promised a decisive resolution of multiple state problems, and the civilians did not disagree.

Less well known is the fact that the British Admiralty, the equivalent of the German general staff, had been planning to fight a war by precipitating the rapid collapse of Germany’s financial system, thereby paralyzing its economy and its military’s ability to wage war—the formula of a quick victory, at supposedly very low cost, and the British equivalent of the Schlieffen scheme.

The Admiralty sought control over the wartime movements of British-flagged merchant ships and the private cargoes they carried, censorship over all cable networks, and supervision over the financial activities of the City of London.

The conversation between Grey and the German ambassador had lasted a mere six minutes. But the telegram seemed to have broached the core question that would drive world politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century and would become the main dilemma of Stalin’s regime—whither German power?

Drafted by Grey, it called the conversations between Grey and the German ambassador a “misunderstanding.”41 Was it British treachery? No, just stupidity. Paris would never acquiesce in a German annihilation of Russia because that would drastically alter the balance of power on the continent to France’s detriment, and in any case France had formal treaty obligations to Russia.

World war looks inexorable. Over decades, imperial German ruling circles had lacked elementary circumspection about their newfound might; imperialist Britain lacked the visionary, skillful leadership needed to accept and thereby temper Germany’s power.

Be that as it may, launching a war always comes down to decision makers, even when those decision makers are themselves the products, as much as the arbiters, of armed state structures.

politicians, military men, and particularly rulers hankered after territory and standing and believed (or hoped) that war would solve all manner of their international and domestic problems, reinvigorating their rule, at what each believed was, for them, a favorable moment.

In other words, when contingencies such as the wrong turn of a driver on a Sarajevo street confronted a tiny handful of men with the question of world war or peace, they hesitated yet chose war, for the sake, in varying combinations, of ...

For two years, the British had mostly allowed the French and Russians to absorb the brunt of Germany’s blows.

death—the British countered with an offensive on the Somme farther west in France. At least 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another 40,000 wounded during the first twenty-four hours.

This was the greatest loss of life—working class and aristocrat—in British military history.

On the western front overall, 8 million of 10 million battlefield deaths were caused not by “industrial killing” but by long established technologies: small arms and artillery.

(Of all the belligerents, the Russian army suffered the worst from the chlorine and mustard gas because of insufficient masks.)

The war itself, not the subsequent bungled Peace of Versailles, caused the terrible repercussions for decades. “This war is trivial, for all its vastness,” explained Bertrand Russell, a logician at Cambridge University and the grandson of a British prime minister. “No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . The English and the French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta.”

But whereas European rulers and generals knowingly sent millions to their deaths for God knows what, Lenin could assert that he was willing to sacrifice millions for what now, thanks to the imperialist war, looked more than ever like a just cause: peace and social justice.

But this was the thing about the Great War: even in countries that practiced rule of law, politicians and generals used their own citizens no better, and often worse, than they had their colonial subjects.

The British commander at the Somme, General Sir Douglas Haig, demonstrated no concern for human life, neither the enemy’s nor that of his own men. “Three years of war and the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause,”

Civilians died en masse, too. No large European city was laid waste—mostly, the Great War was fought in villages and fields—but state “security” now meant the destruction of the enemy culturally, as the Germans had demonstrated from the outset in Belgium: libraries, cathedrals, and the civilians who embodied the enemy nation were made targets of bombing and deliberate starvation.70 “This is not war,” a wounded Indian soldier wrote home from the carnage of France in 1915, “it is the ending of the world.”

None of the top Bolsheviks saw action at the front. Lenin and Trotsky were in comfortable foreign exile.

In many cases, he poses new questions where for me there are none any more. In that sense he is fresher than me. Do not think that I put him above myself. No, I’m superior [krupnee], and he himself realizes this. . . . We wagered and played a game of chess, I checkmated him, then we parted late at night.

84 But just as the war killed or wounded nearly the entire 1914 officer corps, it chewed through conscripts.

And yet, the relative limits in Russian numbers indicated limits to the tsarist regime’s reach over the vast empire. Russia could not manage to take full advantage of what had so terrified the German high command: namely, the gigantic population.

The Communists later could though

Russia’s conservatives, meanwhile, sought to counter the Progressive Bloc with a Conservative Bloc, but in August 1915 the rightists lost one of their foremost leaders, Pyotr Durnovó, who suffered a fit of apoplexy, fell into a coma, and died.

Even more important than that loss, Nicholas II continued to discourage rightist political parties organizing on his behalf as attempts to “interfere” in his autocratic prerogatives.

Later, Trotsky would observe that a debilitated autocracy got the enfeebled autocrat it deserved.

At the same time, the tsar imagined he could inspire the troops, and the people more broadly, by naming himself frontline supreme commander.

Nearly everyone in Russia’s establishment who was high enough to do so advised against the move. That included eight of the tsar’s own twelve ministers in writing—two more concurred orally—who feared that the monarch and monarchy could now be directly tarnished by a sagging war effort.