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

by Edmond Taylor

He was the owner of a Munich publishing firm that at first did quite well — later it proved a failure — but he had a far more ambitious project in mind: founding a great Marxist daily, to be published in three languages. To do that he would obviously have to be fabulously rich, and since the revolution could not wait, he had to get rich quickly.

Parvus

With Trotsky, Parvus co-edited an enormously successful left-wing daily in St. Petersburg and he probably inspired many of the revolutionary tactics applied by the Soviet. In the intervals of his conspiratorial activity Parvus found time to continue his career as a big-time international playboy. The Czar’s police when they finally arrested him were baffled to discover a book of fifty theater tickets in his pocket. They assumed it was in preparation for some kind of outrage: in reality it was just for a little party that Parvus was giving. Parvus shared a spell of prison and then of Siberian exile with Trotsky, and like him finally escaped to the West. In the summer of 1907 he joined the Trotskys for a hiking trip in Saxony.

The special section of the German foreign office set up under Dr. Diego Bergen (who later served both the Weimar Republic and Hitler as German Ambassador to the Vatican) to co-ordinate political warfare operations against Russia provided Parvus with a German passport and an initial fund of some $250,000 to draw on. (He was soon asking for $5,000,000,) It was decided that he would make his headquarters in Copenhagen under cover of establishing and directing a scholarly institute. Before going there Parvus visited Switzerland and talked with a number of Russian emigres, including Lenin, The latter treated him with some suspicion — in part, according to certain sources because he looked on Parvus as a political rival — but did not refuse all co-operation. In fact, Lenin encouraged one of his friends to accept the paid job on the staff of Copenhagen “institute” that Parvus offered him.

When Nicholas left Moghilev on March 21, escorted by three special envoys from Petrograd, it was with the understanding — arrived at somewhat vaguely between the General Staff and the Provisional Government — that he would live in discreet retirement at Tsarskoe Selo until arrangements could be made for the entire Imperial Family to sail for England, via Murmansk. Military honors were accorded Nicholas as he entrained, but at almost the same moment, General L. G. Kornilov, the new commander of the Petrograd district, presented himself to Alexandra at Tsarskoe Selo with the words, “Your Majesty, it is my heavy duty to inform you of the decision of the Provisional Government You are henceforth to consider yourself under arrest.”

The official prisoners, or detainees, were Nicholas, Alexandra, their oldest daughter Olga, a tall well-built girl of twenty-two, Tatiana, twenty, Marie, eighteen, Anastasia, sixteen, and Alexis, thirteen, the former Czarevitch, a high-spirited and rather unruly boy.

The decision to put the former Imperial Family under arrest had been taken on March 20, upon the recommendation of Kerensky as Minister of Justice; originally it was conceived as a temporary measure. Like most acts of the Provisional Government, it was inspired by contradictory motivations. One was a wholely sincere desire to assure the safety of the former sovereigns. Kerensky was determined not “to play the role of a Russian Marat,” as he heatedly told a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet which was clamoring for Nicholas’ head; a counterproposal to hold the ex-Czar pending eventual trial before an “impartial tribune” seemed the best way to undercut extremist agitation for more summary justice. There is some reason, however, for suspecting that the pressure on the Provisional Government from the left, while real enough, was not yet irresistible, and that there was a weightier, quite different reason for signing the order of arrest that was to prove the death warrant of the Romanovs. “While the mass of workers and peasants were indifferent to the foreign policies of the Czar and his government,” Kerensky later testified, “the intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and some of the higher-ranking officer-class thought they detected in the foreign and domestic policies of the Czar, and more particularly in the intrigues of the Czarina, a definite tendency to lead the country to its ruin for the sole purpose of concluding a separate peace and an alliance with Germany.”

The man on whom the Romanovs pinned their hopes was a glib and personable young adventurer named Boris Soloviev, an army lieutenant formerly attached to the staff of a rather left-wing general; he also happened to be the posthumous son-in-law (if the term can be used) of Gregory Rasputin. It was only in October 1917 that Soloviev married the starets’ daughter Matrona, who was then living in Tobolsk; a few days later, thanks to his family connection with the late Man of God, he established contact with the ex-Czarina and her husband. Soloviev represented himself to them as the accredited agent of a mysterious monarchist underground called the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk and explained that he had been sent to Siberia to organize their rescue. He had, of course, no difficulty in convincing the Romanovs that their salvation was at hand, and he easily persuaded them to have no dealings with any other monarchist groups that might try to come to their aid, lest such contacts jeopardize the plans of the Brotherhood.

A scout sent independently to western Siberia by a Petrograd group which included Anna Vyrubova came back with the news that Rasputin’s son-in-law had assumed sole responsibility for rescuing the Imperial Family. On hearing the magic name, Anna urged all her fellow conspirators to avoid any interference with Soloviev’s network and to confine their activity to raising funds for it. In so doing, she inadvertently helped to doom her exiled friends. The emissary of still another monarchist organization who reached Tiumen was warned off. by Soloviev and gave up the attempt to establish direct contact with the captives in Tobolsk.

When the Constituent Assembly met on January 18, 1918, and a Bolshevik resolution supported by the dissident Social-Revolutionaries, was rejected, Lenin ordered the meeting hall to be occupied by Red Guards and locked out the delegates. That was the end of Russian democracy. “The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly means the complete and open repudiation of the democratic idea in favor of the dictatorship concept,” Lenin declared with his customary brutal frankness. From that time all overt opposition to the new despotism would be considered as counterrevolutionary.

True communism

Cheka. “Do not believe that I am concerned with formal justice,” warned the first head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the strange Polish fanatic who was to be the Grand Inquisitor of the Bolshevik regime. “... I demand the forging of the revolutionary sword that will annihilate all counter-revolutionaries!”

Instead of nationalizing privately owned land in accordance with orthodox Bolshevik doctrine, Lenin had promulgated a decree simply authorizing the village committees to seize and distribute it among the peasants — which they had already started doing without authorization before the Bolsheviks came in.

The Russian people learned of the ex-Czar’s execution through a brief official press release from Moscow on July 19 announcing that “sentence of death had been passed on Nicholas Romanov and carried out” by the Ekaterinburg Soviet. It is now admitted, even in the USSR, that in reality it was Lenin himself who ordered the execution, while another member of the central government, Jacob Sverdlov, was responsible for co-ordinating the details with the local authorities in Ekaterinburg. Nothing was ever said officially about the killing of the Czarina and the Romanov children.

The new ambassador had arrived with a staff of three hundred. His first official act was to hoist the hammer and sickle over the embassy; he refused to present his credentials personally to the Kaiser, and on the list of the guests invited to his first dinner party were the names of two left-wing German socialists serving prison terms for sedition and treason: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The Soviet Embassy soon became a headquarters for the Independent Socialists and other revolutionaries who later formed Germany’s first Communist Party.

Adolph Joffe

Their influence both on the civilian population and on the exhausted troops fighting off the final Allied onslaughts in the West was disastrous. Under the spell of such slogans as “Peace and Bread,” whole units gave themselves up to the Allies without resistance in August 1918 and retreating troops jeeringly called reservists coming up to relieve them “strikebreakers.” War weariness, subversion, and treason, however, did not of themselves bring about the German collapse in November 1918. Only when Germany had been militarily defeated in the field, only when the High Command publicly proclaimed defeat by suing for an armistice, did the exhausted population, so worn out by four years of privation and a diet of nauseous ersatz foods that workers fainted in the factories, lose faith both in victory and authority.

Returning POWs from russia

Prince Max, a cousin of the Kaiser’s, a grandson of Czar Nicholas I and next in succession to the throne of the Grand Duchy of Baden, was an urbane man with well-tempered liberal ideas. On October 4 his government, which was for the first time in German history composed of responsible ministers and included such Socialist leaders as Philip Scheidemann and Gustav Bauer, appealed to President Wilson for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points — via the Swiss government — thus informing the German people and the world at large that Germany had lost the war.

What stood in the way of peace? On October 14, a note of President Wilson gave them the answer, by drawing attention to one of his conditions: “The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world.” That this meant the German monarchy first became clear to big business; the Kaiser’s abdication would buy a better peace, it was felt Wilhelm’s abdication was soon the subject of conversations and arguments everywhere, in government offices, drawing rooms, political meetings, streetcars. Everywhere but in the press, where every mention of it was censured. At the rallies of the extreme left, cries of “Down with the Kaiser” became as loud as the cries for peace.

When the revolution erupted the Bavarian King, Ludwig, the sedate, burgher-like descendant of the magnificent Ludwig I — Lola Montez’s admirer — and of the mad Ludwig II, was walking with his daughters in the English Garden, a long narrow park which extended its well-kept lawns, artificial lakes, cascades, gazebos, and kiosks to the north of the Royal Residence, on the opposite side of town from the Theresienwiese. He was accosted by one of his subjects who respectfully but urgently advised him to go back to his palace. There he learned from his ministers that a republic had been proclaimed. He and his family packed some hand baggage and left the city by automobile, unaccompanied and unmolested. They took up abode in Berchtesgaden, and on November 13 Ludwig formally abdicated, releasing all Bavarian officials and soldiers from their oath of allegiance. Thus the Wittelsbach dynasty became the first to capitulate to the new order in Germany. As Kurt Eisner said: “The Wittelsbachs ruled over Bavaria for seven hundred years. I got rid of them in seven hours with seven men.”

Both the Chancellor and Ebert, who knew the German’s attachment to monarchic institutions, were doing their best to save the dynasty by sacrificing its figurehead. But the Kaiser was not co-operative. In despair, Prince Max, who had been ill with influenza for nearly two weeks (the terrible pandemic of so-called Spanish influenza was then raging throughout Europe) sent in his resignation. It was refused, and the plea for abdication simply ignored. Appeals to Marshal Hindenburg were equally unsuccessful; the old soldier could not even contemplate any action against the sovereign to whom he had sworn unconditional fidelity.

On the evening of November 8, however, the Kaiser stall had not grasped the implications of the drama at Compiegne. Earlier in the day he had ordered a plan to be drawn up for the restoration of order in the country by the army. He had never varied in his belief that the army, whose military oath included unconditional obedience to the Kaiser’s commands, stood as a shield between revolution and the dynasty, and the Supreme Command had, so far, not seen fit to disillusion him. As Wilhelm saw it, it was the army’s duty to obey him and his duty to take the head of the operation: he had said so to Prince Max, who had kept him on the phone for nearly half an hour with a heart-to-heart appeal “as a relative and a German prince” to consent to immediate abdication. Once again, in the face of the Kaiser’s refusal, the Chancellor had begged to be allowed to resign. But Wilhelm would not let him off the hook. “You asked for the armistice,” he said sarcastically, using the familiar thou. “You stay and see it through!”

Wilhelm stood silent for a few minutes, and then finally took his last decision as Kaiser: He would abdicate as Emperor, but not as King of Prussia. The armistice terms must be accepted. Hindenburg was to take over supreme command of the army.

“Some say the Emperor should have gone to some regiment at the front, hurled himself with it upon the enemy and sought death in one last attack,” the ex-Kaiser notes in his memoirs. “That would not only have rendered impossible the armistice ... but would also have meant the useless sacrifice of the lives of many soldiers.” Wilhelm also records his feeling that a Heldentod (“hero’s death”) at the front would have been a violation of Christian principles incompatible with his honorary position as first bishop of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Presumably their ex-master’s views were known to the conferees at the Hotel Britannique, and in any case by the afternoon of November 9 Groener’s idea — which might conceivably have saved the monarchy if carried out in time — was no longer practical. It was equally impossible for Wilhelm to return home for a last stand against the revolution. The roads back to Germany were blocked by the Reds.

While merciful oblivion came to the aged Commander-in-Chief, his Quartermaster General settled down to a night’s work. The dynastic question had been solved with relative ease. Groener may not have agreed with the German socialist who said, “Wilhelm’s greatest service to his country in thirty-one years of reign was to leave it,” but it was a relief to be able to turn one’s attention to serious problems. The most urgent one was to bring the German army home in good order, and to save Germany from a Bolshevist revolution. The Allied armistice terms had been transmitted to Spa from Rhetondes on that day. They called for the evacuation by the German army of Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine within fifteen days, for the occupation by the Allies of the left bank of the Rhine, and for the delivery into the victor’s hands of practically all the nation’s armaments.

In a purely formal sense, the 250-year reign of the Hohenzollern dynasty did not come to an end until November 28, 1918, when Wilhelm, safe in exile, signed an official act of abdication both as Prussian King and as German Emperor. (The Crown Prince renounced his rights to the two thrones on December 1.) As we have seen, however, responsibility for the fate of some 60,000,000 war-exhausted Germans — and for accepting the hard armistice conditions of their victorious enemies — had already shifted to the new men in Berlin. It was they who had to pick up the pieces.

announced the good tidings to the Allied armistice representative at Rethondes, and the final talks got under way. (Up to that moment Erzberger had no way of telling whether or not he represented a German authority empowered to accept the Allied terms. The French were even more confused about what was happening in Berlin, and at one point Erzberger had to explain that a telegram ending with the words, THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR SCHLUSS, did not indicate the emergence of a new revolutionary leader in the German capital since “schluss” was merely German telegraphese for “stop.”) Three hours and five minutes later the armistice agreement ending the greatest war in human history up to that time was formally signed.

Karl was, in fact, a sworn enemy to every form of violence, legal or otherwise; he considered it un-Christian. Once when he was talking in a relaxed mood with Count Tamas von Erdody, a childhood friend, and a member of his military staff, the latter playfully boasted about how perfectly he could imitate the Imperial signature. Karl laughed good-humoredly, but then his face suddenly turned grave and with more than his usual earnestness he begged Erdody never to use his unorthodox talent to sign a death warrant in the Emperor’s name. On another occasion, in connection with the secret mission of the Bourbon-Parma princes, Erdody reported having been obliged to knock a spy downstairs. “Oh, I hope the poor fellow did not break his neck,” the Emperor exclaimed Late one night in February 1918, while Karl was traveling to Budapest, a telegram reached the Imperial train begging clemency for four mutineers who were to be shot in the morning. The head of Karl’s military cabinet did not see fit to disturb his master’s sleep for such trivialities and the execution took place as scheduled. When the Emperor woke up and learned about the telegram he was furious at his aide. “You should have called me,” he said sternly. “I am a man like any other.” All too frequently, Karl’s efforts to inject Christian idealism into politics failed for lack of resolution. He was easily discouraged, and also far too easily swayed by his entourage, though he was neither as weak as the Czar nor as unstable as...

Ruler of austria-hungary

In October seven German divisions were sent to reinforce the Austrians on the Isonzo front. It was felt in Berlin that a spectacular victory would be the best cure for Austrian despondency. The rout of the hated Italians at Caporetto — the background for one of the dramatic episodes in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms — did help to raise Austrian morale, but it also tied Vienna more firmly to Berlin’s apron strings. When in October the German government proclaimed, “Germany will never, no never, make any concessions on the subject of the Alsace-Lorraine,” Austria’s Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, echoed obediently, “We fight for Alsace-Lorraine just as the Germans fight for Trieste.”

The Emperor of Austria stood exposed to the world as a liar. In those days Europe, even in its death throes, was not hardened to such violations of the gentleman’s code. Ambassadors prevaricated as a matter of course. Premiers falsified, and, like Bethmann-Holliveg, sometimes treated solemn covenants as scraps of paper. Monarchs themselves quibbled and cheated on occasion. But they did not put their signatures to a formal lie — least of all in writing to a brother monarch.

In July 1918 a Czech deputy declared to the House: “We regard Austria as a centuries’ old crime against humanity ... It is our highest national duty to betray Austria whenever and wherever we can. We shall hate Austria, we shall fight against her, and God willing, we shall in the end smash her to pieces.” On October 1 another Czech deputy, Stanek, declared that although his people had not shed a drop of blood willingly for the Central Powers, they had gladly made every sacrifice to bring about the imminent Allied victory. “The day of judgment is at hand,” he shouted. His voice was covered by applause from some benches, shouts from others, the banging of desk lids. Cries of “Treason” from the German Austrians were encountered with a volley of briefcases and inkpots from the nationalities.

On October 4, the Austrian government had joined the Germans in appealing to President Wilson for an armistice, based on the Fourteen Points, and on October 6, without waiting for an answer, the Emperor Karl in a last ineffectual effort to preserve some role for the dynasty in the new scheme of things issued a manifesto reorganizing the non-Hungarian part of the monarchy into a federal state with complete self-government for the subject nationalities. The clause excepting the Hungarian territories from the reform had been forced on the Emperor by the Hungarian Prime Minister with the usual threats to cut off food supplies in case of non-compliance, and it effectively invalidated whatever effect the Manifesto might have had on the dissident nationalities and on President Wilson’s hoped-for good will.

President Wilson’s answer to the Emperor’s peace plea was received on October 21. It was described by the new Foreign Minister, Count Burian, as “a bombshell which rent the frame of the monarchy apart.” The Fourteen Points had demanded no more than the ‘freest opportunity of autonomous development” for the minorities, a demand which had been met by the Emperor’s Manifesto. But in his latest note the American President, who, in the meantime had recognized the Czechoslovak National Council as a de facto government, stated that he was no longer at liberty to accept a mere autonomy for the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav peoples as a basis for peace. He insisted that they, and not he, “shall be the judges of what action on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Government will satisfy their aspirations.” This note, and the rapidly approaching armies of General Franchet d’Esperey precipitated the chain reaction of revolutions which now separated the monarchy into its component parts and swept away the supranational imperial authority and its bureaucracy.

On December 4 the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, thereafter known as Yugoslavia, was proclaimed under the regency of Prince Alexander, later King Alexander I. The union of the South Slavs under Serbian leadership, for which the conspirators of Sarajevo had plotted and died, was thus achieved. Princip, Cabrinovic, and Grabez, whose age had saved them from execution at the time, had all succumbed to tuberculosis and died in prison during the war. Their bodies were brought back to Sarajevo in 1920 and buried in the local cemetery alongside the bodies of their accomplices who had paid with their lives after the trial. The two schoolboys sentenced to prison terms were released after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy.

Most Poles regarded the Germans and the Russians as their real oppressors; there was little animosity toward Austria. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the Russian Revolution, the Polish deputies in the Reichsrat shifted to the opposition. On October 15 they informed the House that they now no longer considered themselves subjects of the Dual Monarchy, but citizens of the reborn Poland. The pianist, Ignace Paderewski, heading the 6migr6 Polish National Committee in Paris, proved to be as able a propagandist for Poland in the United States as Masaryk had been for Czechoslovakia, and it was largely due to him that Wilson’s Thirteenth Point demanded the creation after the war of an independent Poland with free access to the sea. At the end of October Austrian troops began withdrawing from Galicia.

And the ones to mutiny first were not the regiments of industrial workers, or those incorporating prisoners released by the Russians, but the stanchest, smartest, most dashing of the imperial troops: the Hungarians. Two days after the start of the Allied offensive, the commander of the Hungarian divisions reported that as a regiment had paraded before him with the usual precision, one man stepped from the ranks, saluted smartly, and informed him that the unit would refuse to take up its positions. When orders were given for the man’s arrest, the regiment called out as if with one voice, “We won’t allow it,” still standing at attention. Questioned separately the men swore that they would fight on to their last breath — but on their own borders.

All the subsequent misfortunes of Europe did not stem from the Treaty of Versailles, as it became fashionable for a while to maintain, but Versailles was only the first of the postwar settlements (the last one, the Treaty of Lausanne, was not signed until July 1923) and apart from the formal diplomatic instruments there were the day-to-day administrative or strategic decisions, sometimes irreparable ones, taken by the Allied representatives in Paris, sitting as a kind of soviet of victors.

To a much greater degree than is generally realized, 1919 was a kind of dress rehearsal for 1945; there was even an ambitious — and nearly successful — attempt by Lenin to use the bayonets of the Red Army, as Stalin was to do a generation later, for imposing Bolshevism throughout Eastern and Central Europe. In final analysis much of the turmoil in Europe during the era of the peace settlements was simply the Russian civil war moving west.

Peaceful communists!

Tukhachevski, who was later to be one of Stalin’s most prominent victims, was the author of a new strategic doctrine: Revolution from without, in other words using the Red Army to carry Communism across Europe as Napoleon’s armies had carried the principles of the French Revolution. The war with Poland gave him a chance to try out his theory; the ease with which he shattered the Polish armies, and the speed of his advance into Poland seemed to demonstrate its validity. With French guidance and material help, the Poles at last succeeded in stopping the Russian offensive on the Vistula, before Warsaw, on August 14, 1920. The date deserves to be remembered in the West. “If Poland had been Sovietized,” Lenin later declared, “the whole international system established by the victory over Germany would have crumbled. France would have had no buffer to protect Germany from Soviet Russia.” The buffer that Lenin had in mind was, of course, a pro-Western and anti-Communist Poland.

Sir Harold Nicolson has superbly recaptured the dawn mood of the earlier era in his Peacemaking (written in 1919), the best human document on the Conference, and one of the great political confessions of our times.

“At Vienna again, they had believed in the doctrine of ‘compensations’ ... We believed in nationalism, we believed in the self determination of peoples. ‘Peoples and provinces’, so ran the four Principles of our Prophet [Woodrow Wilson], shall not be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were but chattels or pawns in the game ... “Nor was this all. We were journeying to Paris, not merely to liquidate the war, but to found a new order in Europe. We were preparing not peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission ...”

If there was one position upon which idealists and cynics, experts and laymen, winners and losers tended to agree, it was to blame all of Europe’s sufferings and disasters upon the fallen despotisms. War had been the sinister fruit of autocratic tyranny, injustice, and corruption. The Peace of Paris was to be at once the triumph and the validation of democratic internationalism.

The President, disregarding the warnings of his soundest advisers, had insisted on personally heading the United States delegation. He had arrived in December and before the opening of the Conference had made a triumphant tour of the Allied capitals in the West. Everywhere enormous crowds had turned out to cheer him. His leadership of the Conference at first seemed unchallenged. In addition to the prestige of the Nobel Prize for Peace, awarded him in 1919, he had the strongest army in the world (because it was the only untired one), the food that starving Europe needed, the gold which could save it from bankruptcy. He also had the Faith.

Misplaced faith in a one world government

If there was any serious weakness in the theoretical premises of Wilsonisrn as set forth in the Fourteen Points and in the Four Principles, it lay in their slightly naive faith in “open diplomacy” and in their implicit assumption that the chief vice of the Old World diplomacy had been its secrecy, rather than its irresponsibility.

That no one would keep

As Colonel House put it: “when the President stepped down from his lofty pedestal and wrangled with the representatives of other states upon equal terms, he became as common clay.” Lloyd George, who felt closer to Wilson than any of the leading Allied statesmen did, and Winston Churchill, who could not stand him, have recorded similarly ambivalent judgments of his personality. “Wilson,” Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs of the conference, “was the most clear-cut specimen of duality that I have ever met. The two human beings of which he was constituted never merged or mixed ... The gold was sterling and the clay was honest marl, and they were both visible to the naked eye. He was the most extraordinary compound I have ever encountered of the noble visionary, the implacable and unscrupulous partisan, the exalted idealist and the man of rather petty personal rancours.”

To Churchill it was the Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast between Wilson as an international idealist and Wilson as a Democratic party boss that was the most striking, and most fatal. “His [Wilson’s] gaze,” Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, “was fixed with equal earnestness upon the destiny of mankind and the fortunes of his party candidates. Peace and goodwill among all nations abroad, but no truck with the Republican party at home. That was his ticket and that was his ruin, and the ruin of much else as well.”

Whatever his faults as an international statesman, the American President was one of the great political prophets of our century, or of any century; his dream was as transcendent in its way as Lenin’s. Wilson envisaged the League as something fairly close to a real world government one of his “Five Particulars” concerning it goes so far as to forbid all alliances, or even economic combinations among its members — and no doubt he reasoned that its authority would be adequate to protect the legitimate interests of the new minorities that the peacemakers were so recklessly bringing into being.

His idea never worked.