1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Berlin realized that Wilson meant what he said. Furthermore, if the United States did choose a side, it wouldn’t choose Germany’s. After a furious debate in Kaiser Wilhelm’s War Cabinet, unrestricted submarine warfare came to an end. Ships were still sunk, but not unless they were in certain clearly demarcated combat zones and only after fair warning. Britain and France still lost vital supplies, and men at sea still died, but the German threat to American shipping was over, and Woodrow Wilson, and America, went back to diplomatic sleep.

  This telegram would wake him up with a jolt, Montgomery and de Grey realized. Resuming unrestricted submarine attacks would be a direct challenge to the American president, the equivalent of throwing a gauntlet at his feet. Would Wilson pick it up? And if he did, could this finally be the tipping point? Could what the British and French governments had been praying for since more than a year ago actually happen: America’s entry in the war on the side of the Allies?

  At this point, an America joining the Allies would be an America coming to the rescue. The death and destruction wrought by two and a half years of war had brought Britain and France to the edge of economic collapse. They had seen their hopes of winning the war vanish in a continuous sea of blood, on battlefields such as Verdun and the Somme. Their ally Russia was even closer to collapse; more than a million and a half discouraged Russian soldiers had deserted in 1916. An America in the war would give the Allies a huge boost in supplies and manpower, and would certainly tip the balance of power in the conflict: Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary were just as close to the end of their respective tethers. On the other hand, America’s remaining neutral could spell disaster for Britain, while a revived German submarine threat could bring Britain to the brink of starvation—and to defeat.

  It was a powerful moment in history, a point of no return. Hence Room 40’s intense interest in the contents of the telegram from Zimmermann. But the message was actually in two parts: the first was for the German ambassador in Washington, and the other part was “to be handed on to the Imperial Minister in Mexico by a safe route.”

  Unlocking all the secrets of that second part would require two weeks of eye-straining labor. But when the men in Room 40 got a first rough glimpse of the message the telegram contained, they realized it completely overshadowed the warning about renewing all-out submarine warfare.

  De Grey scrambled down the corridor to the office of the director of naval intelligence, Adm. William “Blinker” Hall.

  “Do you want to bring America into the war?” de Grey exclaimed.

  “Yes, my boy,” Hall answered. “Why?”

  “I’ve got something here which”—the young man stammered—“well, it’s a rather astonishing message which might do the trick if we could use it.”4

  The Door Mouse was right. If the first part of the telegram from Zimmermann set the detonator, the second set off the explosion that would change the world balance of power forever.

  ZURICH, JANUARY 22, 1917

  HE WAS A small, sturdily built man—“the neck of a bull,” his landlord liked to say. Russian by birth, he was in his forties but already balding, with high cheekbones and what today we might call Asian eyes. He was an unusual sight on the streets of Zurich, the home of discreet bankers and mild German-speaking bourgeois citizens. Having lived outside Russia as an exile for more than a decade, Lenin—Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—spoke very good German, but he hated anything connected with the “bourgeoisie.” In the nineteenth century, that word had become the symbol of everything Karl Marx’s followers, including Lenin, were now dedicating their lives to discrediting and destroying in order to liberate Europe’s working class, dubbed by Marx the “proletariat.”

  Before his death in 1883, Marx had had to limit his mission (that is, consigning Europe’s bourgeoisie and its preferred economic system, capitalism, to the ash heap of history) to print only, in books such as The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. Lenin wanted more than anything else to translate Marx’s theory into direct action. What he had heard that day made him think it might be more than a pipe dream.

  The news had come from his native Russia, and it struck him like a thunderbolt. No fewer than 30,000 industrial workers had gone on strike in Moscow, while another 145,000 workers were on strike in Petrograd, the Russian capital. Workers in Baku, Nizhny Novgorod, Novocherkassk, Voronezh, Kharkov, Rostov-on-Don, the Donbass area, and other cities had joined in the one-day strike to commemorate the antigovernment riots that broke out that same day twelve years before, in 1905, when 500 people were killed. The current strikes were big news; many of them had been organized by friends and comrades of Lenin’s, even while he was stuck in Zurich.

  And he might be stuck there forever, he was thinking as he hurried through the streets of the working-class neighborhood where he and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, were living. Their home there was a one-room apartment they’d sublet from a shoemaker, Titus Kammerer, whose shop was next door. The apartment was dark and dank; there was one table, a sofa, a couple of chairs, and no heating. Lenin had no job; everything had to be paid for from the slender income of his wife’s mother’s legacy. He and Nadezhda had been forced to economize to make ends meet. They hadn’t bought any new clothes since arriving in Zurich; they ate horse meat instead of beef or chicken. Often there was only oatmeal for dinner. When Nadezhda, an indifferent cook, burned the oatmeal, Lenin would say jocularly to their landlady, “We live in grand style, you see. We have roasts every day.”5

  The Kammerers, however, liked their boarders. Titus Kammerer was impressed by Vladimir—“a good man,” the shoemaker told visitors years later—and Frau Kammerer took a liking to Krupskaya, whom she let use her kitchen, as they often prepared meals together. The trust between the two women transcended politics, for Krupskaya was as committed as her husband to Marxism and revolution. But then, it seemed unlikely that anything would disturb the domestic calm in the Kammerer household, since Switzerland seemed far away from the upheavals in Russia that had sent Lenin scrambling back home that evening.

  For nearly thirty years, Russian Marxists had tried to translate Marx’s economic and political principles into revolutionary action in Russia—without success. It mostly got them prison sentences in Siberia, including one for Lenin in 1902–3, or exile in cities such as London, Paris, and Zurich—much better than Siberia, even on a slender pension. Still, it was a grim existence: being a permanent stranger to one’s neighbors, suffering bad relations with fellow exiles, being occasionally spied on by government agents, and above all having no money. Lenin’s mother-in-law used to say, “He’ll kill Nadyusha and himself with that life”—and all for nothing.

  But the coming of war in 1914 had changed everything. As Russia joined its Entente Cordiale partners, France and Britain, in fighting Germany and Austria-Hungary, Lenin sensed that the demands of modern war would stretch Russia’s fragile political system—indeed, stretch all capitalist powers—to the breaking point.

  He was right. Already by 1915, shortages of food and other supplies, after just a year of war, were commonplace in Russia, even for soldiers at the front. By 1916, the government’s capacity simply to feed and supply its population, including its army, had broken down. More than one million Russian soldiers deserted their posts that year. By January 1917, the capital, Petrograd, was facing starvation. There was only a ten-day supply of flour in the city. Meat and other foodstuffs were almost completely gone. People were standing in line for hours, in painfully cold temperatures, hoping for a loaf of bread or two, or a couple of strips of bacon. One of the czar’s own counselors of state, Mikhail Rodzianko, had told Nicholas II himself that unless there were a drastic change in government, the country could face massive upheaval.

  When he heard the news of the strikes in Moscow and elsewhere, Lenin concluded that “the mood of the masses” was “a good one.” He was excited. What better moment for a man whose mission in life was triggering revolution not just in Russia but around the world?

  Th
e next day, Lenin was addressing a circle of young socialists on the lessons of the 1905 Revolution. He spoke of the events of Bloody Sunday; of the series of momentous strikes that nearly brought the government to its knees; and of how, despite the failure of the revolution, it heralded the workers’ revolutions to come. He stressed that the war now engulfing Europe would be what made those revolutions possible. “In Europe, the coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular uprisings under the leadership of the proletariat against the power of finance capital, against the big banks, against the capitalists; and these upheavals cannot end otherwise than with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, with the victory of socialism.”

  He added at the end: “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution,” but he was confident that the young socialists in the audience would “be fortunate enough not only to fight, but also to win, in the coming proletarian revolution.”6

  But how? “Life was astir,” his wife remembered, “but it was all so far away.”7

  Here, both Lenin and his wife were wrong. Not only would he live long enough to be a witness to Marxist revolution and worldwide upheaval, but he would be at the center of them.

  PREFACE

  THIS IS A book about two men who set in motion two momentous events in a single world-shattering year, two men who were very different and yet very much alike. Today we still live in the shadow of (and, in some cases, the rubble from) the events they set in motion that year, and the legacy they both left as they launched the world into a state of perpetual disorder and upheaval—the world we still live with today.

  The year was 1917, and the two men were Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin. In April, Wilson thrust the United States into the greatest war in history up to that time, the First World War. Seven months later, Lenin overthrew a Russian democratic revolution and imposed his own Bolshevik Revolution in its place. Together, these two events changed history in ways that make the world as it existed before 1917 seem strange and alien, and the world afterward very much our world and age, the modern age. It’s an age that’s been shaped as much by what Lenin and Wilson aimed and failed to do as by what they succeeded in doing.

  How did they change history? President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to thrust America into the First World War marked the emergence of the United States as a global hegemonic power—or, rather, put the final stamp on the power that, as this book will show, had been evident for some time. Likewise, Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 triggered the emergence of a world revolutionary movement that would come to be known as communism, led by the Soviet Union.

  Ultimately, Lenin’s and Wilson’s creations would collide head-on in the Cold War. Yet this book is about far more than the origins of the Cold War:1 it is about not only what Wilson and Lenin created that year, but also what was lost in the scramble as both men set out to make the world a better and more perfect place through the power of politics—including lost opportunities for which we still pay a heavy price.

  That is why 1917 marks such a watershed. When this book begins, at the very end of 1916, the world is still one that, say, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson from the eighteenth century or even Louis XIV from the seventeenth century would have found familiar, at least in geopolitical terms (though each would probably have been startled by a map showing a unified Germany or Italy). The fortunes of the world were still in the hands of European Great Powers, including Britain, France, Habsburg Austria, and czarist Russia. Also, those powers were fighting a war that was not much different from the ones Europeans were fighting in Washington’s or the Sun King’s time—bloodier and more destructive, perhaps, but still determined by armies and navies at war, rather than entire societies and economies and ideologies.

  Above all, the world on New Year’s Day 1917 was one still governed by long-standing traditional concepts of power and policy: balance of power; nation-state interests; colonial dominion; and power through legitimacy, either by consent of the governed or by traditional means of kingship and imperial rule.

  These concepts had managed to keep the peace in Europe for almost one hundred years, since 1815. They had also led to the war begun in 1914, one that by 1917 none of the Great Powers of Europe could either win or stop. It was a war that came to symbolize what both Wilson and Lenin saw as a traditional world order mired in corruption and decay beyond redemption. In 1917, they would dedicate themselves as thinkers and political leaders to overturning that corrupt and moribund global order, and to creating a new, more perfect world order in its place.

  And the war would be their springboard for changing it.

  To most of us today, and to most of those who witnessed it, World War One, or the Great War, stands as one of the great tragedies of history, an apocalyptic struggle unrelieved by any hint of redemption or (like its even bloodier counterpart twenty years later) liberation. Wilson and Lenin saw matters very differently. They saw the Great War as the perfect means to their ends, even though neither man was a soldier or had any military experience. In a profound sense, they were not even politicians, let alone statesmen. They were dreamers, intellectuals who had attained positions of power through the impact of their speeches, writings, and ideas alone—in Wilson’s case, by being elected president of the United States; in Lenin’s, by thrusting himself into the leadership of a small but ruthless band of revolutionaries. As we will see, both men were also obsessed with their personal missions to change the world, missions mandated (in their minds) by historical necessity.

  In Lenin’s case, that historical necessity was dictated by the works of his intellectual mentor, Karl Marx. Like Marx, Lenin had spent his life believing that the existing order, capitalism, was doomed by its own internal contradictions; the war that had dragged Russia to the brink of collapse was proof of capitalism’s historical as well as moral bankruptcy. Like Marx, Lenin believed that a new order was poised to take capitalism’s place: a dictatorship of the proletariat and the working class in which humanity’s true destiny would be realized.

  Also like Marx, Lenin believed that direct revolutionary action would be required to overthrow capitalism once and for all and to bury its bourgeois class. But Lenin was convinced that the revolution would start not in an advanced capitalist country such as Great Britain or Germany, as Marx had imagined, but in the least advanced one, where the apparatus of civil and police control that the bourgeoisie imposed on society would be rudimentary or even breaking down—a “failed state,” as we would say today, where a revolutionary elite could run free to realize their Marxist dreams. In Lenin’s mind, that failed state was his native Russia. When he returned to Russia from exile in April 1917, he set himself to starting the revolution that he believed would spread around the world.

  Wilson’s historical mission was more complicated. It, too, sprang from an intellectual mentor—in his case, the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (who, as it happens, was also Karl Marx’s)—but it was as well wrapped up in his vision of America as the symbol of and inspiration for the universal value of human freedom. In contrast to Lenin’s dream of a sweeping violent working-class revolution, Wilson’s dream was a peaceful revolution in which humanity’s universal desire for freedom, for people’s right to govern themselves, to feel safe and secure, and to live without fear of violence or want, would finally be realized for all peoples everywhere. To Lenin, Wilson’s dream seemed hopelessly bourgeois and quasi-religious—which it probably was. To Wilson, Lenin’s seemed an invitation to a nightmare of violence and terror—which it certainly was.

  Yet, as we will see, Wilson shared Lenin’s dogmatic belief in the rightness of his own mission, which brooked no opposition or even criticism. Like Lenin, he saw himself as the one man who could bring redemption to humanity, and make its fondest wishes reality. As he told the World League for Peace in January 1917, “I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or
opportunity to speak their real hearts out.”

  Wilson strongly believed that those freedoms were embodied in the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, but in his mind, they were far more than American ideals. “[T]hey are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

  At first, as readers will learn, Wilson believed he could best achieve that goal by staying out of the Great War then raging in Europe. Three months after his speech to the World League for Peace, he believed he could achieve it only by entering that war.

  On April 2, 1917, Wilson called on Congress to declare war on Germany. Seven months later, Lenin struck at the heart of Russia’s post-czarist Provisional Government and imposed the world’s first one-party state dictatorship. The world would never be the same again, on both counts.

  One mission of this book, therefore, is to show how these two intellectuals and dreamers managed to achieve those two ends and, in the process, overthrow traditional standards of geopolitics and alter forever the distribution of world power. Indeed, the world that both sought to bring into being was one that would be dominated not by laws and institutions, but by ideals and ideologies. The great goal of future foreign policy for both the United States and the eventual Soviet Union would be, not to protect their own national interests as narrowly understood, as almost all nations understood foreign policy before 1917, but to make others see the world as they did. As the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote on the eve of the French Revolution, “[S]ometimes men must be forced to be free.” That was a challenge the French revolutionaries took on, with disastrous results for Europe. It was one Wilson and Lenin both accepted in 1917, with (one is forced to conclude) disastrous results for the entire world.