A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  The war was the bloodiest yet in human history, with about ten million dead – 1.8 million in Germany, 1.7 million in Russia, 1.4 million in France, 1.3 million in Austria-Hungary, 740,000 in Britain and 615,000 in Italy. France lost one in five males of fighting age, Germany one in eight. Over 23 million shells were fired during the five-month Battle of Verdun – two million men took part, and half of them were killed. Yet neither side made any gains. One million died in the four-month Battle of the Somme in 1916, with Britain losing 20,000 men on the first day.

  The war also caused extreme dislocation in society as a whole. By 1915 and 1916 all the contending powers realised they were involved in a total war. The outcome depended on directing all national resources towards the battlefront, virtually regardless of the effects on living standards. Industries producing consumer goods had to be turned over to producing munitions. Substitutes had to be found for foodstuffs and raw materials previously imported from enemy countries or subject to naval blockades. Workers had to be shifted from industry to industry, and a fresh supply of labour power found to replace those sent to the front. Agricultural workers had to be drafted into armies, even if it caused acute food shortages – in Germany the winter of 1917 became known as the ‘turnip winter’, as the vegetable replaced most other foods. The diet of the average German worker provided only 1,313 calories a day, a third below the level needed for long-term survival, and there were some 750,000 deaths through malnutrition. 47 Everywhere governments could only finance their military expenditures by printing money. Shortages of food and basic goods led to escalating prices and increased grumbling among the mass of the population.

  It became clear to generals and politicians alike that success in the war depended on the state taking control of much of the economy, regardless of the ‘free market’ economic orthodoxy. There was a sharp escalation in the trend towards the integration of monopolised industry and the state, which was already visible in some countries before the war. By 1917 a British war cabinet report acknowledged that state control had extended ‘until it covered not only national activities directly affecting the war effort, but every section of industry’. 48 By the end of the war the government purchased about 90 per cent of all imports, marketed more than 80 per cent of food consumed at home, and controlled most prices. 49 In Germany Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff exercised a virtual dictatorship over much of the economy in the later stages of the war, working through the bosses of the great monopoly trusts. 50

  Both the generals and the industrialists could see that acquiring territory would increase the economic resources at their disposal. There was a general redefinition of war aims to include not just grabbing or defending colonies in Asia or Africa, but also seizing areas, particularly industrial or semi-industrial areas, in Europe. For Germany this meant annexing the iron ore–producing regions of French Lorraine, establishing German control over Belgium, central Europe and Romania, and building a German sphere of influence in Turkey and the Middle East around the Berlin–Baghdad railway. 51 For France it meant reconquering Alsace-Lorraine and establishing some sort of control over the Rhineland region of Germany. For Russia it meant the annexation of Istanbul (promised in a secret treaty by Britain). Just as individual capitalists looked to expand their capital through economic competition, groups of capitalists tied together by national states looked to expand their capital through military competition and warfare. Imperialism was no longer just about colonies, although they remained important. It was now a total system in which no one capitalism could survive without trying to expand at the expense of others – a system whose logic was total militarisation and total war, regardless of the social dislocation this caused.

  The dislocation had momentous effects on the working class, the traditional petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. There were sudden and sometimes catastrophic falls in living standards. In Germany by 1917, men’s ‘real’ wages had fallen by more than one-fifth in war industries and by almost half in civilian industries. 52 Old methods of defending pay and conditions disappeared as trade union leaders threw their weight behind the war effort and opposed all strikes, and harsh penalties were introduced for anyone who broke the ‘truce’. In Britain strike leaders faced imprisonment under the Defence of the Realm Act; in Germany alleged agitators were conscripted en masse to the front.

  There was also enormous dislocation in the patterns of working-class life. Half of working-class men were plucked out of their old jobs and communities to be dispatched to the front and replaced at work by a vast influx of women. In Germany the number of women in industrial enterprises with more than ten employees rose by half to just over two million. 53 In Britain the number of women in munitions factories alone rose to 800,000. 54 Capitalism’s drive to war was breaking apart the stereotypical family which the system had tried so hard to impose. In the long term this would spread the attitudes previously characteristic of groups such as textile workers to much wider layers of working-class women, giving them a new sense of equality with men. But the immediate effect was to double the burden which they had to cope with. They had somehow to juggle long hours in a factory with bringing up children on their own. It was often as much as they could do to keep body and soul together.

  Hardship, confusion, disorientation and an inability to defend traditional ways of working and living – such were the conditions in working-class localities in the first years of the war. As living standards fell, working hours were extended, conditions in the factories grew more dangerous, and the number of strikes dropped sharply. But by 1915 and 1916 the desperation was also breeding resistance. There were spontaneous protests in working-class communities which were suffering – mainly from the women in those communities. The great rent strike in Glasgow in 1915 or the local protests over food shortages in many German towns in the winters of 1916 and 1917 were typical. There were also growing numbers of strikes among the male workers who had been least hit by the pressure to join the armed forces – the skilled metal workers, who were regarded as essential to the war effort. Their networks of union activists – the shop stewards in cities like Glasgow, Sheffield, Berlin, Budapest and Vienna – remained intact. As the hardship increased, the two sorts of protest began to connect both with one another and with a certain questioning of the war. The leaders of the strikes were often socialists who opposed the war, even if many of the strikers still felt they had to support ‘their own side’.

  Meanwhile, the millions of men at the various fronts were undergoing experiences for which nothing in life had prepared them. They soon discovered that the war was not a pleasant jaunt to Berlin or Paris, or some great adventure. It was mud, boredom, bad food and the horror of death all around them. For the working-class or peasant conscripts of ‘the poor bloody infantry’, it also involved the knowledge that life was very different for the generals and staff officers, with good food and wine, comfortable billets and conscripted men to wait on them. This did not lead to automatic rebellion. Many of the conscripts came from backgrounds with no tradition of resistance to orders from above. Habits of deference and obedience hammered into their heads since early childhood could lead to men doggedly accepting their fate, and treating it as just another boring and distasteful job they had to do – especially since any act of resistance would be met with the full weight of military ‘justice’. ‘The strange look on all faces’ of the men waiting to go back to the front, noted the British officer and war poet Wilfred Owen, ‘was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s’. 55

  Yet the possibility of rebellion was always there. The generals noted with horror what happened on Christmas Day 1914, when British and German soldiers climbed out of the trenches to fraternise with each other. British officers were ordered to shoot on sight any German soldier who emerged to fraternise during Christmas 1916. 56 Such precautions could not stop the sudden explosion of huge mutinies. The first great eruption on the Western Fr
ont was in France in April 1917. An estimated 68 divisions, half the French army, refused to return to the front after an offensive which had cost 250,000 lives. A combination of concessions and repression – the imposition of 500 death sentences and 49 actual executions – restored discipline, but only after some units had raised the red flag and sung the revolutionary anthem, the ‘Internationale’. Mutinies elsewhere in the west were not on the same scale as among the French. But 1917 also saw mutinies involving some 50,000 soldiers in Italy, and five days of bloody rebellion by up to 100,000 soldiers in the British base camp at Étaples, near Boulogne. The British generals ended the rebellion by making concessions and then executed its leaders, keeping the whole affair secret. 57

  The mutinies were part of a growing mood of confusion and dissatisfaction across Europe. It was by no means confined to industrial workers. It also affected many of the middle class who held junior officer rank in the armies. Some sense of it is found in the work of the British war poets, and in disillusioned post-war writings such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front , Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms , Barbusse’s Under Fire , or Myrivilis’s Life in the Tomb . Such feelings could lead people to identify with the revolutionary left, as happened to the German playwright Ernst Toller. But it could also lead to forms of right-wing nationalism which blamed the collapse of hope in the war on corruption, betrayal and the influence of ‘alien’ forces.

  Finally, war dragged the vast numbers of peasants conscripted into the French, Italian, Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies out of their isolated villages and into the turmoil and horror of mechanised warfare. In an era before modern mass communications had penetrated most of the European countryside, the peasant conscripts were subject to experiences and ideas they had never come across before. Many were forced to accept some label of national identity for the first time as they found themselves speaking local dialects in the midst of multinational armies. As they attempted to make sense of what was happening they could be pulled in contradictory directions – influenced by priests practising traditional rites, middle-class nationalists speaking similar dialects to themselves, or workers alongside them in the trenches putting socialist arguments and giving some coherence to old resentments against the rich.

  Such were the feelings of a vast, bewildered, bitter mass of armed men in the trenches and barracks as the European states tore at each other’s flesh.

  February 1917

  ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution,’ the exiled Lenin told a meeting of young German-speaking workers in Zurich in January 1917. He said this after arguing that revolution was, nonetheless, inevitable. ‘Europe is pregnant with revolution,’ he said. ‘The coming years in Europe, precisely because of the predatory war, will lead to popular uprisings under the leadership of the proletariat’. 58

  The first rising occurred just six weeks later in Petrograd, 59 capital of the Russian Empire. The tsar, whose power seemed unchallengeable on the morning of 23 February, 60 abdicated on the morning of 2 March. By November a revolutionary government headed by Lenin was running the country.

  No one expected a revolution on 23 February. The day was celebrated by socialists as International Working Women’s Day – a tradition established in 1910 following a call from the German socialist women’s leader Clara Zetkin. The underground socialist groups in Petrograd marked it with leaflets, speeches and meetings, but none called for strikes, fearing that the time was not ripe for militant action. 61 But the bitterness at bread shortages among women textile workers, many with husbands in the army, was such that they went on strike anyway and marched through the factory areas. A worker from the Nobel engineering factory later recounted:

  We could hear women’s voices: ‘Down with the high prices!’ ‘Down with hunger!’ ‘Bread for the workers’ … Masses of women workers in a militant frame of mind filled the lane. Those who caught sight of us began to wave their arms, shouting, ‘Come out!’ ‘Stop work!’ Snowballs flew through the windows. We decided to join the revolution. 62

  The next day the movement had grown to involve half the city’s 400,000 workers, with processions from the factories to the city centre, and the slogans had changed from ‘Bread!’ to ‘Down with the autocracy’, and ‘Down with the war.’ Armed police attacked the protests and the government tried to use the many thousands of troops in the city’s barracks, waiting to go to the front, to break them up. But on the fourth day of strikes and demonstrations a wave of mutinies swept through the barracks. Masses of workers and soldiers intermingled and swept through the city’s streets with guns and red flags, arresting police and government officials. Regiments sent by train to restore order went over to the revolution on entering the city. A desperate attempt to return to the city by the tsar was thwarted by railway workers. Similar movements swept Moscow and other Russian cities. The tsar’s generals told him there was no chance of maintaining order anywhere unless he abdicated.

  What was to replace the tsar? Two parallel bodies emerged to take on government functions, operating alongside each other from different wings of the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. On the one hand, there was the official opposition within tsarism, the bourgeois politicians of the old state Duma, chosen by a class-based electoral system which gave the overwhelming majority of seats to the propertied classes. On the other, there were workers’ delegates, drawn together in a workers’ council, or soviet, modelled on that of 1905. The key question was which of these rival bodies would take power into its hands. In February those in the Duma were able to form a provisional government with the acquiescence of the soviets. In October the soviet majority was to form a government of its own.

  The key figures in the Duma had been critical collaborators with tsarism since the outbreak of the war, working with it to organise the war industries and profiting accordingly, but resentful at the domination of a corrupt court clique around the tsarina and her recently assassinated favourite, Rasputin. They had wanted minor reforms within the tsarist system, certainly not its overthrow. As one of their leading figures, Rodzianko, later told:

  The moderate parties not only did not desire a revolution, but were simply afraid of it. In particular the Party of People’s Freedom, the ‘Kadets’, as a party standing on the left wing of the moderate group, and therefore having more than the rest a point of contact with the revolutionary parties of the country, was more worried by the advancing catastrophe than all the rest. 63

  In the English, American and French revolutions, and again in 1848, large sections of the propertied classes had turned against the upheavals as they took a radical twist. But they had played some initiating role in the movements. In Russia in 1917 their fear of the industrial workers stopped them doing even this. As the Menshevik historian of the revolution, Sukhanov, wrote, ‘Our bourgeoisie, unlike the others, betrayed the people not the day after the overturn but even before the overturn took place’. 64

  Leaders of the Duma like Rodzianko and Miliukov were negotiating to reform the monarchy right up until the very moment of the tsar’s abdication. Yet they nominated the government that replaced him – a government led by a Prince L’vov and dominated by major landowners and industrialists. It contained just one figure with any revolutionary credentials at all, a lawyer who had made his name defending political prisoners, Kerensky.

  The workers’ delegates of the soviet met initially because of the need to establish some coordination between the activities of different sections of workers. Once rebel regiments sent their delegates to join the workers’ assembly, it became the focus of the whole revolutionary movement. Its elected executive had to take in hand much of the actual running of the city: providing food supplies to the mutinying soldiers; overseeing the arrest of the old police and officials; arranging for each factory to send one in ten of its workers to a militia to maintain revolutionary order; establishing a newspaper which would let people know what was happening at a time when the whole press was st
rike-bound. Groups of workers and soldiers would turn to the soviet for instructions – and all the time soviets which had sprung up elsewhere in the country were affiliating to the Petrograd soviet. In effect it became the government of the revolution. But it was a government which refused to take formal power and waited for the Duma leaders to do so.

  The workers’ delegates in the soviet were to a greater or lesser extent influenced by the underground socialist parties. Wartime repression had all but destroyed their organisational structures, but the impact of their ideas and the standing of their imprisoned, exiled or underground leaders remained. However, these parties did not use their influence in the first days of the revolution to argue against the soviet accepting a government chosen by the Duma leaders. The Marxist parties, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, disagreed repeatedly over tactics. In 1905 the Mensheviks had followed a policy of waiting for the bourgeoisie to take the initiative, whereas the Bolsheviks had insisted workers had to push the bourgeois revolution forward. During the war many Mensheviks had argued for the defence of Russia against Germany and Austria, while Bolsheviks and ‘internationalist’ Mensheviks had opposed any support for the war. But they agreed on the character of the coming revolution – it was to be a bourgeois revolution.

  This led the first leading Bolshevik figures to arrive in Petrograd, Stalin and Molotov, to accept the bourgeois provisional government chosen by the Duma. From this it also followed that they could no longer call for an immediate end to the war, since it was no longer a war waged on behalf of tsarism but a war of ‘revolutionary defence’. The only well-known revolutionary to have characterised the revolution differently, to insist it could be a proletarian revolution, had been Leon Trotsky. But he was in exile in America in February and had no party of his own, belonging instead to a loose socialist grouping standing between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.