That is one part of this book. The other part involves pointing out that Lenin and Wilson were stalked by two other men who are generally seen as their political rivals: Republican leader of the U.S. Senate Henry Cabot Lodge and prime minister of the Russian Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky. By and large, history has not been kind to them. Lodge is often caricatured as a die-hard isolationist for opposing, and then defeating, Wilson’s effort to make the United States a charter member of the League of Nations. Historians of the Russian Revolution, even those deeply unsympathetic to Lenin, are usually harsh about Kerensky, whom Lenin overthrew that fateful November and who then fled into exile and historical oblivion.
Keeping Lodge and Kerensky in view in this story, I believe, helps to cast events, and Lenin and Wilson, in a new light. As we will see, Lodge and Kerensky were both refreshingly free of the utopian fantasies of their more famous rivals. Both saw what was happening in the world in 1917 through a lens as urgent as but also more realistic than Wilson’s or Lenin’s. Unlike the two revolutionary dreamers, Lodge and Kerensky saw the value of more traditional ways of thinking about politics, alliances, and humanity’s hopes for the future—and the future of their own countries.
For example, as we will see, the issues swirling around America’s membership in the League of Nations were far more complicated than previous historians sometimes acknowledge—and blame for the League’s defeat lies far more with Wilson than with Lodge. At the same time, while there is no doubt that Kerensky underestimated the Leninist threat until it was too late, and that his commitment to keep Russia in the war on the side of the Allies opened the door to disaster, he, unlike Lenin, was a believer in the Western and very bourgeois ideals of democracy, representative government, and the rule of law. As readers will learn, his one great desire was to make Russia a full partner with the other liberal democracies that were fighting Germany, including the United States—then and into the future. There can be no doubt that if Kerensky had somehow prevailed over Lenin during those fateful forty-eight hours in Petrograd in November 1917, instead of the other way around, Russia would never have known the Great Purge or the Great Famine—nor would China have undergone the Great Leap Forward.
Likewise, if Wilson had listened to Henry Cabot Lodge regarding the League of Nations, instead of fighting him literally to the brink of death, it can be argued that there would have been no Mussolini or Hitler or Second World War—possibly not even a Great Depression.
In the event, however, it was Lenin and Wilson who prevailed, not Lodge or Kerensky. As a result, America and Russia would never be the same; neither would the world. There is a lot to regret about the world the two men unleashed with their reckless idealism, a world of totalitarian states, of murderous wars of liberation, of national and ideological insurgencies, of terrorism and genocide. The English historian Alan (A. J. P.) Taylor once pointed out in an essay on the German statesman Otto von Bismarck, a figure whom both Lenin and Wilson loathed as a symbol of everything that was corrupt and evil about the old world order they set out to overthrow, that “Bismarck fought ‘necessary’ wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight ‘just’ wars and kill millions.”2 That unhappy contrast is, to a great degree, the legacy of Lenin and Wilson and what they started in 1917.
And yet, it seems unfair to compare the pair too closely by emphasizing their similarities and ignoring or downplaying their differences. At the end of the day, Wilson’s utopian dream, impractical and ignorant of reality though it was, summed up a vision of human beings joining together in peace and bringing an end to violence in international and human affairs. “I sometimes think,” Wilson once said, “that . . . no people ever went to war with another people”; only governments did.3 He may have been wrong, but he was wrong for high-minded reasons.
Lenin’s dream, by contrast, was of one class of human beings obliterating the other classes, and using violence to perpetuate the power of a ruling revolutionary elite. It sprang not from lofty idealism but from boundless cynicism, summed up in Lenin’s famous dictum “The only interesting question in life is ‘Who, whom?’ ” In other words, who exploits whom? In Lenin’s worldview, everything that happens in history is the result of one class (or race or gender) taking advantage of another. Homo homini lupus est. It’s the rationale of the Marxist-Leninist and Islamic terrorists alike—who share more than their respective admirers like to admit.
In any case, the final argument of this book is that this fundamental difference in outlook has left its imprint on Wilson’s and Lenin’s respective legacies, right down to today. It marked the character of the two world superpowers they spawned and of the influence they both exercised in the two global conflicts to come, World War II and the Cold War.
It was also A. J. P. Taylor who said that the historian’s inevitable task is to decide whether something that happened in history was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. From that perspective, we have to say Woodrow Wilson and the emergence of the United States as a global power represent a good thing; Lenin and the emergence of the Soviet Union, a very bad thing. From a global perspective, the one would emerge as the defender and protector of human freedom (an ideal not so different from what Wilson had hoped), the other as the enslaver of peoples and annihilator of freedom (again, a reality not very different from the one Lenin imposed on his native Russia).
Finally, a personal note. When I was a boy, more than forty years after he was driven from power in Russia, I met Alexander Kerensky. He was a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and my father was studying philosophy at Stanford. From time to time, Kerensky and my father would share lunch on the lawn of the quad, and the day I came along, Kerensky (I am told) pointed to me, age three, and said to my father in his thick Russian accent, “You and I will not live to see the end of communism. But he will.”
Kerensky’s prediction was a trifle inaccurate. My father is still alive. Yet, in the end, Kerensky was right because Wilson’s creation overcame Lenin’s—at the price of the new world disorder we still live with today.
If there is any single lesson to be drawn from this book, it is that utopian dreamers in power tend to breed disaster. But not always, and not forever.
1
THE GERMAN NOTE
The great questions of the day will be settled not by speeches or majority decisions but by iron and blood.
—OTTO VON BISMARCK
BERLIN, DECEMBER 1916
GERMAN CHANCELLOR THEOBALD von Bethmann-Hollweg was in a better mood than at any time since the world’s bloodiest war began. At last he had a plan he thought could turn the war in his favor. By taking advantage of Germany’s recent good fortune on the battlefield, in the waning weeks of 1916 he might have a way to get at least one of its enemies to the peace table. He knew he was making a gamble, but after two and a half years of unimaginable bloodshed and destruction, success would shorten the odds of something even less imaginable: Germany’s losing.
After two and a half years of the greatest war the world had ever witnessed, the conflict had come up with no winners, German or Allied. The swift victory Germany’s generals had promised in 1914 had not panned out. The strategy of driving through neutral Belgium and into France, a plan devised by the chief (now dead) of the German General Staff, had failed to deliver on what it had been created to do: knock France out of the war before the Russians could fully mobilize. Worse, it had drawn an even more formidable opponent into the conflict on France’s side, namely, Great Britain. Britain and its far-flung empire had been able to put nearly three million men side by side with France’s four million. Germany’s army of fewer than three million on the Western Front found itself waging an increasingly desperate titanic struggle along a line running through the heart of eastern France from the Swiss border to the English Channel—not to mention having to fight an entire other war in the east, against Russia, where its ally, Austria-Hungary, had proved more a hindrance than a help.
Those two and a half years of
unrelenting bloodshed had cost Germany more than 1.75 million casualties.
The worst had come that past April, when a major German offensive hinged on the French fortress at Verdun. Hundreds of thousands of men from both sides were drawn into a battle of attrition on a scale so immense that neither Germany nor France (nor even its ally Great Britain) could ever look on the war, or even the nature of war itself, the same way again. One hundred fifteen divisions, nearly a million and a half men, had been crammed together in a death embrace along a front scarcely five miles wide.1 Six weeks into the battle, Bethmann-Hollweg had remarked to a friend, “After such dramatic events history knows no status quo.” Two and a half months later, when the battle that produced nearly three hundred thousand German casualties ended in a bitter stalemate, Bethmann-Hollweg was not the only politician in Germany to wonder if Germany would ever be able to recover.
Then had come the British offensive along the Somme River in July, when Germany faced an onslaught of men and steel that dwarfed even the scale of battle at Verdun. Before the last British attack sputtered out on November 13, more than 420,000 British and 450,000 Germans had been killed or wounded—again, with no victory for either side in sight.
The Germans had staved off defeat, just barely. But farther east had come fresh disasters. The first was the Russian offensive in June, through the Carpathian Mountains, as the Russian army at last found a general, Aleksei Brusilov, with the skills to engineer victory after two years of disappointment and failure. The so-called Brusilov Offensive finally shattered Austria-Hungary’s will to fight. The Russians took more than a quarter million prisoners: Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and other Slavs who owed loyalty to a Habsburg monarchy that had ruled them for nearly five hundred years but who had finally decided it was better to live than to die for an emperor they had never met in a war they didn’t want.
With painful difficulty, the Germans had managed to prevent a complete collapse. With the skill and professionalism that were the hallmarks of the German army, they regained the ground lost to Brusilov, while inflicting a million Russian casualties. Now, however, they would have to hold the line in the east without even the halfhearted help of their Austrian ally. By the fall of 1916, the alliance of so-called Central powers at the start of the war, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, had been reduced to one Central power alone, Germany. (Italy had allowed itself to be bribed by Britain and France, first, to stay out of the war in 1914 and, then, to come in on the Allied side the following year.) It would now have to conduct all-out war on two fronts at once. While the Russians were hardly as formidable an opponent as the British and French, there was a genuine fear that if one more front opened up, it would be the tipping point.
Then that moment came, at the worst possible time. On August 27, just as the Brusilov Offensive was in full flood and the British were battering away along the Somme, neutral Romania suddenly entered the war on the Entente’s side. The crack this opened in Germany’s exposed southern flank was so large and unexpected that Bethmann-Hollweg was driven to something close to despair. In the Bundesrat, he called the situation “the most serious yet since the first days of the conflict,” and he warned, “Everything now depends on Rumania.”2 Even the Kaiser lost his nerve and began telling everyone that the war was all but lost.3
In the event, there was no need for worry. The German general on the spot, Erich von Falkenhayn, quickly rallied German forces and turned the tables on the Romanians. With help from Germany’s eastern allies Bulgaria and Turkey, the campaign was run so successfully that on December 6, the German army, with Field Marshal August von Mackensen at its head on a white charger, entered Bucharest as the Romanian government fled. Meanwhile, a German counterattack had checkmated the Brusilov Offensive, as the Russians stopped advancing and began retreating. It was at this moment, with Romania crushed, German armies on the move into Russia’s Baltic provinces, and an exhausted calm on the Western Front, that the German chancellor decided he would offer to negotiate a peace with the Allies.
There had been whispers before about ending the war with a negotiated settlement, but no leader or head of state of any of the combatants had ever extended any formal offer—that is, until now. Bethmann-Hollweg’s strategy sprang from more than a desire to end the bloodshed, however. It was born out of cunning and desperation. It tells us at least as much about those pushing for continuing the war on the German side as it does about those, such as the chancellor, who believed that if the war went on any longer, Germany would not survive.
The cunning part was Bethmann-Hollweg’s hope that a peace move could somehow detach one of the Entente powers, France, Britain, or Russia, from the other two in order to arrive at a separate peace. Russia seemed the most likely candidate: in fact, Bethmann-Hollweg had already sent up a trial balloon in St. Petersburg’s direction earlier that autumn, offering to pull German forces back to their 1914 borders. The czar’s government was on the brink of responding, too, when the German chief of the General Staff, Erich Ludendorff, wrecked the whole plan. He was not ready to give up the territories he had conquered for Germany since the outbreak of war.
He had a different plan for driving Russia out of the war. It was to promise Poles living in the Russian Empire an independent nation of their own: a Polish dream since the Napoleonic Wars. Ludendorff confidently predicted that the gesture would bring hundreds of thousands of Poles rallying to the German banner to win independence for their homeland from Russia. Once again, a skeptical Bethmann-Hollweg yielded to the general, and in November, the German government made the pledge, as a Polish state was carved out by German hands from a map of Russia.
The pledge proved a disaster. Instead of the fifteen Polish divisions Ludendorff confidently predicted, Germany netted only fourteen hundred volunteers. (It turned out Poles didn’t trust German promises any more than they believed Russian ones.) Support for Polish independence also killed any hope of a separate peace with the czar, but it did leave two curious legacies. The first was that, at the start of 1917, German soldiers on the Eastern Front found themselves in the position of ostensibly fighting for the independence of Poland, a strange anomaly that would grow a lot stranger from the perspective of events twenty-odd years later.4
The second legacy, and one far more significant, was that without realizing it, the Germans had stumbled on the issue that would soon engulf all the combatants, including Germany: the problem of nationalist aspirations for peoples living under the rule of others. No one had coined the term national self-determination yet, but by pledging that victory in this war would mean freedom for a people governed by another people, Germany had thrown open the door to a wholesale remaking of the map of Europe, indeed of the world, regardless of which side won or lost.
IN THE LAST days of 1916, these lofty issues were far from the chancellor’s mind. He was focused on more immediate matters. As things stood that winter, Germany’s options for winning were fading fast. The war (and the demands it made for men and matériel) had been a disaster for what once was Europe’s most dynamic economy. Without the iron- and coal-rich French territories Germany had captured in the first months of the war, it was unlikely the country could have survived this long, let alone sustained a two-front war. The reason for the growing desperation was the Allied blockade, imposed in the opening months of the war and maintained by the most powerful oceangoing force in the world, the Royal Navy.
In the Great War, Britain was never able to impose the kind of “close” blockade it had used against opponents since the Napoleonic Wars. Mines, submarines, and advances in coastal artillery made intercepting ships at the mouths of German harbors, as Horatio Nelson would have done, impossible. Besides, neutral nations, particularly the United States, that persisted in trading with both sides in the conflict would not have stood for it. So, Britain’s blockade of Germany was maintained at a distance. German ships were at once seized at sea; neutral vessels were treated more gingerly. Royal Navy ships would stop them and then escort
them to a British port, where their cargo was checked for war matériel, sometimes with rudimentary X-ray machines. Any matériel found would be confiscated; the neutral vessel was then free to return to sea.
A neutral merchant captain could even get a permit from the nearest British consulate stating that his cargo contained nothing to help the German war effort—in effect, a free pass through the blockade.5 Even so, neutral nations, especially the Americans, resented the entire process, and without a doubt, a blockade done this way was bound to leak like an old rowboat.
Still, it was enough. Germans didn’t anticipate the blockade in time, and failed to stockpile essential goods, especially the raw materials needed to keep an army of five million men fed, clothed, and armed. The result was that, inch by inch, the German economy was slowly strangled by the blockade. By the winter of 1916, German civilians were starving, even starving to death. Unless the war ended very soon, Germany faced catastrophe even if not a single Allied soldier advanced another step.
The blockade had another aspect, one even more disastrous for Germany. The naval forces that were able to keep goods and supplies from reaching Germany were also making sure such goods and supplies reached Great Britain, and then France. And if merchants in the world’s biggest economy, America, complained about the blockade when it came to doing business with Germany, they certainly couldn’t complain about the booming business they were doing with Britain, as ships loaded with wheat, cotton, oil, semifinished products, gunpowder, explosives, and, above all, ammunition landed almost around the clock in British ports. Indeed, if any one factor had kept the Entente nations able not only to fight the war but also to mount one massive offensive after another, it was America’s contribution to their war effort, even though the United States remained neutral.
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