The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

There was only one anomaly in the studious middle-class correctness of Lenin’s personal life, but it was a highly significant one: his strange relationship with a French-born woman revolutionary who called herself Inessa Armand.

Krupskaya treated Inessa almost like a younger sister, and after her death spoke of her with a curious mixture of reticence and affection. Nina Gourfinkel, who has written a popular but solidly documented biographical sketch of Lenin, based in part on interviews with one-time members of his entourage in exile, suggests that Inessa was the great love of his life. There was certainly a romantic — and intensely Russian — element in their friendship; Inessa, besides helping Lenin at times with his professional correspondence, lightened his rare off-duty hours by playing Chopin and Beethoven on the piano to him — his favorites were the Kreutzer and the Moonlight sonatas — and they had a common literary enthusiasm.

Lenins wife

The boyeviki, though they also perpetrated some daring robberies in Moscow and even in the capital, were particularly active in the Caucasus where their operations were directed by a sullen pock-marked Georgian, a former theological student named Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who also used the conspiratorial pseudonym Koba, and the pen name Stalin. On occasion Stalin took part in the raids — he also took part in the party congress at Stockholm which had outlawed them — but his field commander was usually a tough, cheerful, cross-eyed incredibly daring young fellow Georgian named Ter Petrossian, alias Kamo, the Jesse James of the Russian revolutionary movement.

Paid by Lenin

Curiously, there was little contemporary criticism among European Socialists of what today seems one of the more questionable episodes in Lenin’s revolutionary career: his move from Paris to Austrian Galicia in 1912. Both in Cracow, where he first settled — with Krupskaya and Inessa Armand — and later in Poronin, in the mountains, he was conveniently near the Russian border. Whether for conferring with overt representatives of the Bolshevik center in Russia — it was legally tolerated after 1907 — or for smuggling in clandestine propaganda and instructions to underground groups, Galicia was a much better base of operations than Paris or Geneva.

There is a strong suspicion, however, that in the service of his dream he deliberately allowed himself to be exploited for a while as a weapon in the Austrian secret-service duel with Russia. To that degree he bears some modest share of responsibility — along with the autocrats and the gun merchants — for World War I.

There was one daily newspaper in Russia that had a single subscriber: the Czar. It was published by the Ministry of the Interior, and it consisted exclusively of information about the activities of the secret police and of the penal administration for political prisoners. The sheet probably contained everything of importance known to the Minister of the Interior himself, but like every other newspaper in Czarist Russia it was heavily censored; some of the police news was not considered fit to print, even in a classified publication for the Emperor’s eyes alone. The censoring was done, of course, by the policemen themselves, that is by the officials — not necessarily at the top level — of the Okhrana, the political secret police.

To make matters worse, because of the long peace, hardly any of the European statesmen or diplomats who gambled away the lives of a generation had personal experience of combat. The aged Francis Joseph remembered the horrors of the blood-soaked field of Solferino, but most of his younger contemporaries, in every European nation, and at every administrative level, were as blind to the human and moral implications of modern war as they were ignorant of its technical imperatives.

“The London season of 1914 had been a disappointing one for me,” writes Margot Asquith, wife of the British Prime Minister, in her Autobiography, “and not an amusing one for Elizabeth [her daughter], and I was anxious that she should have a little fun. I sent her alone on the 25th of July to stay with Mrs. George Keppel, who had taken a house in Holland.”

When the detonator finally went off, on July 23, the statesmen and the diplomats were only slightly less surprised than the novelist Elinor Glyn, then at the height of her slightly scandalous success, who commented with asperity on the bad manners of the Austrian Ambassador in rushing away from a weekend house party in a chateau near Paris at which they were fellow guests. Anthony Glyn relates in his entertaining biography of his famous grandmother that when Fielder, Elinor’s chauffeur, suggested the disappearance of the Ambassador was possibly a sign of impending war, “everyone searched hurriedly in the newspapers to see what he could mean and with whom the war could be.”

A few minutes before seven on that same Saturday evening, the War Ministry in Vienna telephoned the news to Bad Ischl, where the Emperor was staying. Baron Margutti, one of the Imperial aides-de-camp, took it down. Francis Joseph listened with a wooden face while he read it off, then muttered, “Also doch” (literally, “So, after all”), one of those prosaically indefinite bits of familiar German that because they mean so little can signify so much. Reaching for his pince-nez with trembling hands, the old man sat down at his desk to study the text of the message. As he was making unconscious gestures with his hand, as if to push back a nightmare, the Emperor struck a glass bowl. “The jarring sound, as if something had finally broken, I will never forget,” relates Margutti. But Francis Joseph had not yet given up all hope. “Well,” he sighed, collecting himself, “the breaking off of diplomatic relations still does not mean war.” Later in the evening, Berchtold persuaded him to sign an order of limited mobilization. (Serbia had already started to mobilize.) Publication of the Austrian ultimatum, followed by the news of the rupture with Serbia and that of the two mobilizations, launched a shock wave of alarm throughout Europe, but did not lead to immediate panic. Some Europeans, grasping at straws like the aged Francis Joseph, tried to convince themselves that rupture — or even mobilization — did not necessarily mean war. Others felt that war was now inevitable, but expected it t...

The limited-war clique reasoned that it would actually reduce the danger of European complications if Austria-Hungary confronted the world with a military fait accompli in Serbia. Russia would protest and France would growl, but with Germany making it plain to them that she was standing by her ally, they would back down again as they had done in 1909. If worse came to worst, England would remain neutral, while Italy, in accordance with her obligations under the Triple Alliance, and even neutral Rumania, would join the Central Powers. Events soon demonstrated that all the premises underlying the German limited-war policy were false.

Action was called for if peace was to be saved, and Grey, more than any European statesmen then in power, really was attached to peace. It was not easy to act with a divided Cabinet and Parliament, with an uninformed public opinion, and with both allies and potential adversaries chronically addicted to misunderstanding Britain’s attitude. In the circumstances Grey took what he felt was the most vigorous possible action. He called in the German Ambassador, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, spoke to him frankly about his worries, and made a formal plea that Germany use its good offices in Vienna to facilitate acceptance of the Serbian reply at least as a basis for further negotiation. The whole conversation, backed by the announcement in the British press the same day that leave had been canceled in the British Navy the personal initiative of the First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill — constituted the most explicit warning yet given not to count on British neutrality. Prince Lichnowsky, like the alert and conscientious diplomat that he was, immediately grasped its import and relayed it to Berlin with the sense of urgency that the situation called for.

Lichnowsky’s dispatch reached the Wilhelmstrasse at about the same moment as a message from Vienna informing the German government that Austria would declare war on Serbia the next day, or at the latest on July 29, Thereupon Bethmann-Hollweg committed either an incredible blunder, or — as Albertini and some other historians believe — an act of almost equally incredible duplicity. Acting upon instructions from the Kaiser, he forwarded to Vienna Sir Edward Grey’s suggestion about German good offices, but on his own initiative he omitted a key passage in the message he had received from the German Embassy in London which stressed the seriousness of the British warning, and he failed to indicate any official German endorsement of the suggestion; he merely asked for the Austrian views about it.

The gravity of the German Chancellor’s maneuver in sabotaging the British mediation proposal was underscored the next day when the Kaiser received simultaneously the report on his Ambassador’s conversation with the British Foreign Secretary and the text of Serbia’s reply to the Austrian ultimatum. Wilhelm often behaved irresponsibly, but he was neither a fool nor a lunatic. Far better than Bethmann-Hollweg or the Wilhelmstrasse, he grasped immediately the threat to the Austro-German daydream of a localized Balkan war implied by the awakening British concern over the situation. Unaware that for the past three days his Chancellor and Foreign Office had been doing their best to prod their Austrian ally into declaring war on Serbia without delay, Wilhelm set a new course for German policy in his comments on the Serbian note: “A brilliant achievement for a time-limit of only 48 hours! It is more than one could have expected!” A moral coup for Vienna, he thought, but now “all reason for war is gone and Giesl ought to have quietly stayed on in Belgrade! After that I should never have ordered mobilization.” This was a complete change from the swashbuckling marginal notes, calling for the wiping out of the Serb bandits, with which Wilhelm had decorated the dispatches received on board the Hohenzollern. Bulow, who knew him well, writes of him: “Wilhelm II did not want war. He feared it. His bellicose marginal notes prove nothing

On the same fatal July 27, Berchtold had obtained Francis Joseph’s signature to a declaration of war against Serbia. To overcome the eighty-four-year-old Emperor’s lingering doubts, he had sent a telegram to Bad Ischl reporting a completely fictitious Serbian attack upon an Austro-Hungarian border detachment (though whether the Austrian premier deliberately faked the incident to deceive his master has never been established). Thus, on the morning of July 28, when Berchtold received the British Ambassador — at about the same moment the Kaiser in Potsdam was coming to the conclusion that war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia was both unnecessary and dangerous — it was to tell him that it was now unfortunately too late for any attempts at mediation, since His Royal and Imperial Apostolic Majesty had already signed the declaration of war. It was telegraphed to Belgrade shortly before 1 P.M. the same day — the first time in history that war was declared by wire. (After the Austrian Ambassador had left Belgrade, Berchtold was at a loss for a while as to how to serve the declaration of war. Berlin had refused to let the German legation transmit it on the ground that “it might awaken the impression in the public unfamiliar with diplomatic usage that we had hounded Austria-Hungary into war.”)

Vienna, the capital of frivolity and gemutlichkeit, foamed with patriotic hysteria when the official proclamation of the state of war, signed by the Emperor, appeared on the walls of the city. The whole town, an American observer noted, suddenly “went frantic with joy. Total strangers embraced each other ... The nightmare of humiliation, of disdain gulped down like a nauseous drug for ages, was off their breasts.”

The Czar’s telegram came on the heels of a message from London which had rocked, not only the Kaiser, but even Bethmann-Hollweg and the Wilhelmstrasse. “So long as the conflict remains confined to Austria and Russia we can stand aside,” Grey had told the German Ambassador. “But if Germany and France should be involved, then the British government would be forced to make up its mind quickly.” If the Czax had stuck to his refusal not to let Russian mobilization go beyond the limited call-up in the south, peace might have been saved

The solemn warning from Grey on July 29 that had thrown the Wilhelmstrasse into panic, merely plunged Wilhelm II into rage and despair when he read it on the thirtieth. On the margin of the dispatch, opposite the paragraph voicing Grey’s fear that if war broke out it would be “the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen,” the Kaiser scrawled, “That means they are going to attack us” Both Wilhelm and his Chancellor had based their truculent support, or incitement, of Austria on the childish assumption — stemming from the former’s mythological concept of the solidarity of monarchs, and fed by a recent, unguarded luncheon-table remark made by Britain’s George V to the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia — that in case of a Continental war England would stand aside. Wilhelm’s fury broke out in the long footnote he penned at the bottom of his Ambassador’s report: “England shows her hand at the moment when she thinks we are cornered, and in a manner of speaking, done for. The low-down shop-keeping knaves have been trying to take us in with banquets and speeches. The grossest deception is the King’s message to me by Henry ... England alone bears the responsibility for peace or war, not we now.”

rupture with Cousin Willy. Late that night, after drinking a glass of tea and chatting with the Czarina, who was already in bed, he decided to take a bath. He had just lowered himself into the tub when a footman knocked on the door to inform him that there was an urgent personal telegram from his Majesty, the German Kaiser. “I read the telegram, I reread it, I repeated it out loud to myself, but still I did not understand,” Nicholas subsequently related to the French Ambassador. “What, Wilhelm pretends that it is still in my power to avoid war? He implores me not to let my troops cross the border ... Have I gone mad? Has not the Court Minister, my old Fredericks, brought me less than six hours ago the declaration of war handed to Sazonov by the German Ambassador? I returned to the Czarina’s room and read her Wilhelm’s telegram. She wanted to read it herself to believe it, and said, ‘You will not reply to it, will you?’ ‘No indeed.’ ... On leaving the Czarina’s room I felt that all was finished for ever between Wilhelm and myself. I slept soundly.”

The decisive intervention was that of the United States, which declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917 — mainly the consequence of Germany’s desperate attempt to break the tightening stranglehold of the Entente’s naval blockade by unrestricted submarine warfare. With America in, a whole swarm of new belligerents — mostly Platonic rallied to the Allied cause. Honduras — July 1918 — was the last. By that time the planetary coalition against the four Central Powers already totaled 27 nations, counting in Greece, Portugal, Brazil, China, San Marino, and such nominal partners as Liberia, Siam, and Bolivia.

The sixteen active belligerents suffered total casualties — in military personnel alone — of 37,494,186, substantially more than half of the forces mobilized. More than 8,500,000 were killed or died from wounds or disease.

Such officialized atrocities as the cynical German violation of Belgian neutrality, the execution of civilian hostages by the Germans in Belgium and occupied France, the systematic attacks by German submarines on unarmed passenger ships far from the battle zone, and the maintenance of the Allied blockade after the starving German and Austrian people had laid down their arms, were ominous symptoms of an accelerating retreat from civilization.

Resentment of the “slackers” and “profiteers” behind the lines increasingly embittered the outlook of the front-line soldier; his faith both in the civilian leadership that had been unable to avert the catastrophe of general war, and in the military leadership which seemed incapable of winning it, turned into doubt, then into cynical revolt or despair. The myth of the bungling or heartless “brass hat,” ruthlessly throwing away the lives of his men, was born. It was to reach full flower after the war in books and plays like Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson’s What Price Glory? and Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, perhaps the absolute zero in literary nihilism.

Unlike many myths, that of the brass hat as a cheerful mass murderer had a solid foundation in fact. Some generals were more incompetent or more inhuman than others — the Germans were the least inefficient and usually the least wasteful of their men’s lives — but the whole military caste in pre-1914 Europe, like its diplomatic and ruling castes, was neither technically nor emotionally equipped to face the challenge of modern war. It always takes men a long time to adjust to new conditions, and nothing like World War I had ever been seen, or even imagined before.

Naturally, it was the most anachronistic leadership-systems — i.e. the Divine Right autocratic dynasties and their supporting aristocracies — which were the most vulnerable to the blasts of doubt and revolt blowing from the battlefields. A few reigning monarchs — in particular young King Alexander I of Serbia, and Albert I, King of the Belgians — saved the prestige of their dynasties by the way in which they shared the hardships of their subjects, but the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, and the Romanovs, along with other handicaps, lacked the common touch.

Then the Emperor approaches the altar and raises his right hand toward the Bible which is presented to him ... In slow, short tones, stressing each word, he proclaims, ‘Officers of my Guard here present, I salute in you the whole army, and I bless it Solemnly I swear that I shall not conclude peace so long as a single enemy remains on the soil of the fatherland.’” This was word for word the oath that Czar Alexander I swore in 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia. After pronouncing it before the brilliantly and frantically cheering throng of courtiers in the St. Georges Gallery, the Czar stepped out on the balcony overlooking the great square of the Winter Palace, where on that other Sunday — the Bloody Sunday of 1905 — his soldiers had mowed down the ranks of unarmed demonstrators. This time, too, the crowd filled the square — the third largest in Europe — waving flags, banners, icons and portraits of the Czar, but this time sovereign and subjects shared the same solemn exaltation. As the Czar repeated his ancestor’s historic oath, the crowd dropped to its knees and sang the Imperial anthem, God Save the Czar, followed by the lovely hymn, Lord, Save the People and Bless Thine Inheritance, invoking the divine protection in time of war.

At a rally when war began in Russia

political truce which had existed since the beginning of the war between the Czar and the democratic or reformist parties in the Duma. Early in September the leaders of these parties pooled their forces to create the so-called Progressive Bloc — the strongest coherent group in the Duma — on the basis of a common program calling for some mildly liberal reforms and for an intensified war effort. From the constitutional viewpoint there was nothing revolutionary in the program but it asked the Czar to appoint a new council of ministers in which the country could have confidence. If Nicholas had accepted, it would have made the monarchy more popular but at the same time it would have implicitly repudiated the doctrine of absolutism which he felt himself committed to uphold.

The other irremediable blunder of September 1915 was the Czar’s decision to relieve the respected, dependable Grand Duke Nicholas at GHQ and to assume personal command of his armies in the field.

Alexandra had been offering assistance rather freely for some time — “don’t laugh at silly old wifey, but she has ‘trousers’ on,” as she put it in one of her letters — but now she cast aside all discretion. Not content merely to bombard her husband with advice and to influence appointments she began intervening directly in the governance of the country. In one of her letters to Nicholas she even boasted naively that she was the first Empress to receive ministers regularly since Catherine the Great — who usurped her husband’s throne and took his murderer into her bed. Alexandra’s mauve boudoir in Catherine’s old palace at Tsarskoe Selo became the secret command post of the empire.

Failure in marriage led to failure as king

Much to the Czar’s discomfort — not to mention that of the General Staff — Rasputin frequently insisted on being told in advance the exact date on which an offensive was scheduled to be launched. The usual pretext was that he needed the information to pray for victory. Sometimes, however, his curiosity was inspired by more worldly considerations, as illustrates the following excerpt from the testimony of one of his high-level henchmen — A. N, Hvostov, a former Minister of the Interior — before the provisional government’s investigating committee: “Rasputin went to Tsarskoe Selo and Rubinstein [a shady banker who was also suspected of being a German spy] asked him to find out if an offensive was going to take place; he explained to his friends that he needed to know because he was thinking of buying some forest lands in the province of Minsk [at the time occupied by the Germans] and if we are going to launch an offensive in that area their value would go up, so it would be a good investment I learned that Rasputin discharged his mission, and on his return he related what he had said at Tsarskoe Selo.” Rasputin was always handsomely rewarded for the information or other services that he supplied to his profiteering friends, some of whom were almost certainly German agents.

The last of Rasputin’s self-appointed managers was a colorful but sinister rogue named I. F. Manasevich-Manuilov, a former Okhrana operative who had once been sent to Rome to try to organize a Russian spy network in the Vatican, and who had later handled the Okhrana’s slush fund in Paris for a time.

Why would the pope need a spy

To make sure that there was no misunderstanding, Rasputin peremptorily summoned Sturmer to a nocturnal conference at a friend’s house and gave him his orders. “Never allow yourself to interfere with any of Mama’s [Alexandra’s] plans,” he roared at the Czar’s first minister. “Watch your step — and if I drop you, you are finished.”

Sounds like Hillary Clinton today

On the contrary she was eager for a showdown with Parliament; her ultimate goal, shaped for her by Rasputin and Manasevich-Manuilov was to dissolve the Duma, to scrap the Constitution of 1905 and to establish a neoabsolutist regime with some demagogic features. Alexandra does not seem to have taken her husband fully into her confidence, but her general intention is clear from the tone of the letters to him during the month of December 1916: “Now comes your reign of will and iron ... The good is coming, the turn has begun ... We must give a strong country to Baby and dare not be weak for his sake ... draw the reins in tightly which you let loose... Russia loves to feel the whip ... How I wish I could pour my will into your veins ... I suffer over you as over a tender, soft-hearted child... Be the Emperor, be peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, the Emperor Paul — crush them all under you — Now don’t you laugh, naughty one ... Send Lvov [Prince George Lvov, one of the liberal leaders of the Duma] to Siberia ... Milyukov, Guchov and Polivanov also to Siberia.” One letter is signed, “Russia’s mother, blessed by Our Friend.” One of Nicholas’ replies expresses “Tender thanks for the severe written scolding ... your poor little weak-willed hubby.”

What a wimp Russia had as a king

The final one, paradoxically, was the murder of Rasputin on December 29, 1916. All sorts of Russians, from wronged husbands to disinterested patriots, had sound reasons for wanting to kill the starets. The little group of conspirators who finally succeeded in ending his unofficial reign (there had already been several half-hearted plots to do so) was composed of ultra-right-wing monarchists. Their political ideal was essentially the same one professed by their victim: to make Russia safe for autocracy.

Good men

The actual executioner was Prince Felix Yusupov, an orchidaceous young man about court who had married one of the Czar’s nieces. He carried out his gruesome mission with aristocratic amateurishness, and Rasputin’s end in consequence was as grotesquely messy as his whole career had been. Yusupov lured the starets to his home for a midnight drinking bout, served him Madeira spiked with potassium cyanide. While waiting for the poison to take effect Yusupov played the guitar for the man he was murdering. His co-conspirators upstairs steadied their nerves by playing Yankee Doodle over and over again on the phonograph. When it was clear that the cyanide had failed, Yusupov used a revolver. Rasputin fell on his back, seemingly dead. Later, however, he revived and was only finished off — by one of the shaken young prince’s accomplices — after a ghastly scuffle. The blood-spattered corpse was weighted and dropped through a hole in the ice into an arm of the Neva.

Two psychological factors seem to have been decisive in the end. The first was the sense of human brotherhood: the refusal to be an executioner. Most of the soldiers in the Petrograd garrison, even in the Guards’ regiments, were civilians recently put into uniform. Whatever they thought of the Czar, or of the monarchy, or of the army — and they certainly felt little enthusiasm for any of them — they were indignant and aghast at the prospect of being ordered out into the streets again to shoot down other civilians, most of them unarmed and friendly, many of them women or children.

Russian soldiers in dealing with riots in march 1917

The Pharaos were good executioners but there were not enough of them: when morning came and riots resumed the army would have to take over their work. This meant shooting: not firing in the air; shooting to kill.

Here the other factor came into play: the antithetical idealism of private salvation, the prospective deserter’s intuition of his moral duty to dissociate himself from collective disaster. It would be dangerous to refuse obedience, but it might prove no less dangerous to obey. The firing squad was waiting for deserters and mutineers; but the mob had more savage ways of punishing its enemies — as the luckless Pharaos were discovering. It might be beastly to turn against one’s officers; but some of them were beginning to get a beast-look in their eyes.

In the early afternoon of March 12, a mob spearheaded by its military elements, successfully attacked the Arsenal; from then on virtually every revolutionary who wanted a rifle had one. Later the same afternoon the revolutionaries sacked the headquarters of the Okhrana, set the central court buildings on fire, and finally captured the seemingly impregnable island fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, the Czarist Bastille. Various jails were raided and the prisoners released. By the end of the day General Khabalov’s command had dwindled for all practical purposes to about 2000 loyal troops, concentrated around the Winter Palace and the Admiralty.

The incongruous structure with its cupola and marble columns had housed the Imperial Duma, before becoming the general headquarters of the revolution. The Duma itself, or at least its principal members, had joined the rebellion on March 11, by defying an Imperial decree of prorogation. Instead of disbanding, the deputies had on the following day set up a so-called Emergency Committee, chaired by the Duma’s President, the portly, Conservative M. V. Rodzianko, and consisting of the chief Progressive Bloc leaders — Milyukov, Lvov, Guchkov, Basil Shulgin, et al — plus a left-wing maverick, the former Revolutionary Socialist Alexander Kerensky. We are so used to thinking of him as the Kerensky of the Russian Revolution, that we tend to forget he was really its Danton.

The Imperial government still held a redoubt in the administrative heart of the capital; outlying garrisons that theoretically were loyal to the autocracy ringed the city; the Czarina was safe in Tsarskoe Selo (by March 12 she was so busy looking after her children who had all come down with measles that she had little time for suppressing the revolution, but the revolutionists were not aware of this); the Czar was at Headquarters nominally in command of all his armies. It was hard for anyone to realize after only five days of intermittent street turmoil in Petrograd that the iron despotism of the Romanovs was tottering, that its foundations had, in fact, already collapsed.

On arrival at Tsarskoe Selo, General Ivanov found the little town abandoned by its garrison and learned that the Czar’s ministers had been arrested in Petrograd. To try to fight his way into the capital with his understrength battalion would, he concluded, merely lead to useless bloodshed, and so he notified Headquarters. After a rather unsatisfactory consultation with the Czarina, whom he found bewildered by the ingratitude of her husband’s subjects, Ivanov, who like many high-ranking professional soldiers, seemed dutiful but hardly zealous in defending the regime, entrained again with his troops on an aimless ramble among the outer suburbs. For some reason he had not considered it necessary to reinforce the Imperial Family’s guard at the Alexander Palace. The next day the Imperial Escort Regiment, which was responsible for their safety, deserted to the revolution. (The Duma, however, sent delegates to assure their protection.)

As if in retaliation, the Red Ex Com on the same day broadcasts its subsequently famous “Order Number 1” to the armed forces of the nation, proclaiming that in all political matters they were under the authority of the Petrograd Soviet — or of the local soldiers’ committees that were beginning to spring up — and instructing the troops to obey only such orders of the Duma as were not in conflict with those of the Soviet. The order also abolished saluting and laid down the principle that weapons should be in the keeping of the soldiers’ committees instead of in that of the officers. Thus chaos was institutionalized.

The Provisional Government and the Ex Com were agreed that Nicholas must abdicate, but whereas the Ex Com — and the whole Soviet — were determined to abolish the monarchy at once, most of the new ministers originally wanted to save it in some modified form under a different monarch. To this end Milyukov drew up for the Czar’s signature an act of abdication in favor of the 12-year old Czarevitch, with the boy’s uncle, Grand Duke Michael, named as Regent.

“In agreement with the Imperial Duma we have thought it good to abdicate from the throne of the Russian State and to lay down the supreme power,” read the final text of the abdication act as amended by Nicholas. “Not wishing to part with our dear son we hand over our inheritance to our brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, and give him our blessing to mount the throne of the Russian State.” By the time Guchkov and Shulgin got back to Petrograd — on the morning of March 16 — the outcome of their mission was known in the capital. The Soviet was adamant against any attempt to preserve the monarchy and opinion in the Provisional Government was hardening against the idea.

One type of Western morale-building propaganda which proved to be particularly self-defeating and even traumatic in the long view was the abusive appeal to the latent idealism of the masses through slogans such as The War to End War (originally inspired by H. G. Wells) and Make the World Safe for Democracy (derived from President Wilson’s message to Congress of April 2, 1917). No doubt the politicians who thus exploited the hopes of their peoples with these high-sounding but demagogic pledges of a better world were the first victims of their own propaganda; the unending wonder, when we look back upon it, is how intelligent and cultivated men — including a trained historian — could ever have deluded themselves into believing that prolonging the sordid massacre in Europe would make it possible to build a better world.

Twenty years later the scars left on the public mind by this wartime atrocity propaganda — which of course was speedily exposed after the fighting ended — were still so inflamed, that American newspaper correspondents in Europe had the greatest difficulty in persuading their editors to print authenticated reports of authentic Nazi atrocities.

Part of it was anti Jew hatred

Perhaps the final victory of political warfare over diplomatic prudence and flexibility was the so-called Congress of Oppressed Nationalities of Austria-Hungary held in Rome in April 1918. It was attended by delegates of the Czech and Yugoslav national organizations and by representatives of the Polish and Rumanian Transylvanians (Transylvania, most of which was awarded to Rumania after the war, was a border area of mixed population belonging to Hungary). The Congress concluded with the announcement of a “common front” of oppressed peoples, dedicated to the abolition and dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy. Though not an official gathering, the Congress had been organized by the now-powerful anti-Habsburg lobby in the official political warfare services of the Allied governments, and its deliberations were heavily publicized by directive of their domestic propaganda services. (One of the journalists who helped convince public opinion in his country that the Balkanization of the whole Danubian Basin would somehow advance the cause of freedom and civilization, was a talented, splashy young Italian editor named Benito Mussolini, a former firebrand of revolutionary socialism whose conversion to the war to make the world safe for bourgeois democracy had been facilitated by lavish subsidies from the French secret service — an operation which in the light of subsequent history must count among the witch doctors’ more dubious triumphs.)

When the victorious United States Army in 1945 stumbled upon the cache where the secret files of the German Foreign Office had been stored, there were several documents going back to the times of the First World War that our Soviet Allies would have given a great deal to lay their hands on first. One of these items, of outstanding interest to historians was a memorandum dated March 9, 1915, setting forth a comprehensive program for German political warfare against Czarist Russia. The paper included the usual proposals for blowing up bridges and for spreading defeatist propaganda among Russian conscripts; it urged getting in touch with, and giving financial assistance to, most of the socialist opposition and a number of national minority organizations (with the exception of the Zionist Jews, whom the author of the plan considered “incapable of any political action”).

Naturally, for the author of the memorandum was Dr. Alexander Helfand, alias Parvus, whom we last heard of as Trotsky’s right hand in the Petersburg Soviet of 1905. Parvus had his critics, but no one has ever accused him of lacking either scope or originality.

And he wasva russian jew