1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Only one of the Allies managed to avoid the debt trap Wilson and McAdoo had set for them: Russia. It would do this not just by dropping out of the war before everyone else did, but also by, in effect, dropping out of the community of nations. The revolution that had come to that unhappy country would, as we’ll soon see, have many unexpected twists and turns. In the end, Lenin would lead Russia into the abyss, but arguably, Woodrow Wilson helped lead it to the precipice, and doomed its democratic revolution to frustration and failure while that revolution was still less than eight weeks old.

  This is not what Wilson had intended, of course. Robert Lansing had written to Wilson that it was not enough just to recognize the new government in Petrograd. Some words of encouragement from the American president would send the right message: Stay the democratic course, stay the course of war with Germany. Help is on the way.23

  Yet that was exactly the problem.

  PETROGRAD

  ON THE SAME day that Wilson’s Cabinet recommended war against Germany, March 20, the president had issued his official recognition of the new Duma-based government that had replaced Czar Nicholas. In his April 2 address, he embraced the Russian Revolution as America’s revolution as well, part of the “wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks.”

  But fear haunted London, Paris, Rome, and eventually Washington. If, for whatever reasons, a confused and disrupted Russia decided to cut its losses on the international scene and opt out of the war, the result could be disastrous: the release of dozens of German divisions from the war on the Eastern Front to weigh in on the Western Front.

  The men who had risen to the surface in both the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet in the early phase of the revolution—Pavel Miliukov; Alexander Kerensky; Nikolai Chkheidze; and Chkheidze’s fellow Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli, a Georgian who was the party’s main foreign policy spokesman—were still committed to keeping Russia in the war, but not for the reasons that had animated Czar Nicholas II. “The time has come to take the decision on war and peace into one’s own hands,” members of the Ispolkom had declared on March 28, in a document loftily entitled “An Appeal to the Peoples of the World.”24 Their goal was not taking control of Constantinople and the Black Sea, or acting as the protector of Serbia and other Slavic nations and peoples. It was simply to secure what another generation would call peace with honor: not to surrender to Germany, but to stand tall until Berlin was willing to say, “Let’s talk.”

  In a strange way, Russia’s new government faced a problem that was the obverse of Wilson’s. The U.S. president wanted to figure out how to reshape the world for the better by entering the war he had hitherto tried to avoid. Kerensky and his colleagues needed to decide how to reshape Russia for the better by staying in a war when every political instinct said they should leave it—and when staying the course might mean a huge foreign relations bonus, including financial and material aid from America.

  Yet how to stay the course when the nation was in chaos and when public support for the war was ebbing away, among civilians and in the Russian army? And how to do so while also reopening the door to the negotiated peace proposed by Germany in December (and to Wilson’s peace note of December)—a door that the czarist regime had firmly shut in order to prevent Russia’s collapse? That was the delicate balancing act that the new government in Petrograd was now forced to carry out in the tense weeks following the abdication of the czar, thanks to Wilson’s hesitations. The alternative was catastrophe, although no one quite grasped it entirely at the time.

  No one, that is, except Lenin, who could sense weakness and disaster as a barracuda senses blood in the water.

  The Provisional Government had made two fatal blunders that would weaken its ability to control events in Russia, or to sustain the war effort. The first was its so-called Order No. 1, which it promulgated on March 14 without consulting the Duma. Its aim was to address the grievances that soldiers in the Petrograd garrison had about their treatment by their officers—grievances, they told the Provisional Government and Ispolkom, that had driven them into mutiny. The order was addressed to the “Garrison of the Petrograd Military District,” but everyone who read it immediately assumed it applied to all army units, even those at the front.25

  The first article called for the creation of representative soldiers’ committees (or soviets) in every military unit, down to the company level. The second allowed every company in the Russian army to send a representative to the Petrograd Soviet. The other articles ordered officers not to use their honorific titles and not to address soldiers in an offensive manner; took control over all military equipment, including artillery pieces and machine guns, away from officers and gave it to the soldiers’ soviets; and gave off-duty soldiers the same rights as Russian civilians, which meant they didn’t have to salute their officers or even (by implication) obey them.

  If anything was designed to overthrow all discipline in the Russian army and deprive it of the means of maintaining order in the country, this was it. As one sailor said when a debate ensued over what Order No. 1 actually meant, “We understood it straight: disarm the officers.”26 Even worse, it also gave the Petrograd Soviet the power to overrule the Provisional Government on military matters. The goal of Order No. 1 was to appease mutinous soldiers and sailors, to make them feel that they were now part of the political process. The actual result was to turn the Russian army into an armed mob that the Provisional Government could neither depend upon nor control.

  The second blunder was adopted soon after Order No. 1. It was the Provisional Government’s decision to abolish the czarist provincial bureaucracy and, even more critically, the Russian gendarmerie and the Department of Police. At one stroke, it eliminated the organs of government that represented and enforced law and order across the country. Again, the goal was to overthrow the law enforcement agencies, including the hated Okhrana, that had come to represent tyranny and oppression to millions of Russians. But it also meant that only two weeks after the revolution, Russia had no police force—and no way to enforce laws made by the government in the rest of the country. No wonder that, on March 22, Duma member Alexander Guchkov could telegraph General Alekseev:

  The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which controls the most essential strands of actual power . . . One can assert bluntly that the Provisional Government exists only as long as it is permitted to do so by the Soviet.27

  In other words, the Provisional Government had allowed a major shift of power to the Petrograd Soviet, which was itself a chaotic nonstop debating society that had thousands of members and followed no agenda. This in turn meant that the real power was in the hands of the Soviet’s political committee, Ispolkom, whose members were becoming more and more at odds with the men in the Provisional Government and the Duma. By the beginning of April, it had become clear: whoever controlled Ispolkom controlled the fate of Russia, starting with the capital.

  All the same, none of this worried the man who was emerging as the leading figure in the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky. His prestige in the Ispolkom remained undimmed. He was convinced that, despite some mistakes, the revolution had been a success. For all the turmoil and chaos, it had been relatively bloodless. Total casualties were fewer than 1,500, with only 169 deaths. Many of these were of army and navy officers lynched by their soldiers and sailors; the mass shootings of protesters that many had feared (or hoped for) had never happened.28

  Kerensky also saw the transition of power from Nicholas II to the Provisional Government as more than an unqualified success. “What happened I can only describe as a miracle,” he wrote later. “Amidst the chaos and darkness of the collapse of Czarism, there rose the bright sun of liberty to shine on a country broken with suffering.”29

  Nor did he feel any bitterness toward the former autocrat. In the first week in April, he h
ad an unexpected encounter with the deposed czar and his family at Tsarskoye. He saw a “small man in uniform” and recognized him at once. “I quickly went up to Nicholas II, held out my hand with a smile, and said abruptly, ‘Kerensky’ . . . He shook my hand firmly, smiled, seemed encouraged and led me at once to his family.” Kerensky then realized he was not “the outcast, the inhuman monster, the deliberate murderer I used to imagine. I began to realize that there was a human side to him.”

  Yet “authority, like everything else, [the czar] held too cheap,” Kerensky mused. “He was altogether weary of it.”30 But that authority was now in the hands of men who were not weary, who were ready to use it to make a better, more progressive Russia—and to revive Russia’s standing in the world, and with its Allies. “Those who have lived through” the revolution, Kerensky wrote, “as I did, feeling the sudden load of responsibility for the destinies of the State descend on their shoulders, will never forget it to their dying day.”31

  Everything depended now on what America, and its president, Woodrow Wilson, decided to do next.

  In April, representatives from Britain and France had come to Petrograd to meet with the new government. Their goal was to convince Russia to stay in the war. They found the government firmly set against any separate peace with Germany, but it did urge the British and French representatives, both leading socialists, to reassess the Entente’s war aims. A negotiated peace would allow the new government to avoid having to fight a war to the finish: a war that many Russians no longer had faith in and, to put it bluntly, the Provisional Government was not sure it had the means to sustain. Both representatives, Arthur Henderson and Albert Thomas, went home deeply worried about the future of Russia’s democratic revolution, and its ability to stay in the war.32 By the same token, Kerensky and the Provisional Government were left deeply worried that London and Paris didn’t care whether the new Russian government survived, as long as it didn’t open separate negotiations with Germany.

  This left America and Wilson as their last hope. Wilson knew the democrats in Petrograd faced almost insuperable challenges. He also knew that the Russians, “in setting up their new government and working out domestic reforms,” might reach a point where they found “the war an intolerable evil and would desire to get out of it on any reasonable terms.”

  Yet Wilson was now also inalterably convinced that Germany’s imperialist ambitions could be broken only through force. And as long as Germany’s record of militarism went unpunished, so would France’s and Britain’s.33 Therefore, when the Provisional Government adopted on April 4 what came to be called the Petrograd formula for ending the war—“self-determination, no annexations, no indemnities” (a formula that bore an eerie resemblance to Wilson’s earlier “peace without victory”)—it was Wilson who now spoke for the Entente as well as the United States in a warning message to the Russian people on May 22. His message had fateful consequences for the future of the Russian Revolution.

  In it, Wilson highlighted the continuing German menace to civilization. Berlin sat at the center of “a net of intrigue directed against nothing less than the peace and liberty of the world,” he declared. “The meshes of that intrigue must be broken, but cannot unless wrongs already done are undone,” meaning the freeing of Belgium and withdrawal from France.

  “The day has come to conquer or submit,” Wilson declared. “If we stand together, victory is certain and the liberty which victory will secure. We can afford then to be generous, but we cannot afford then or now to be weak.”34

  When Wilson’s address was released, its impact in London and Paris was very different from that in Petrograd. The American president’s recent visitor, British foreign minister Balfour, was pleased that Wilson’s words “counteract effects which some of his earlier pronouncements have apparently had in Russia,” particularly his now troublesome January 22 “Peace Without Victory” speech.35 Lloyd George likewise breathed a sigh of relief.

  By contrast, in Petrograd, the effect was stunned disappointment. Still, there was no going back now. Pro-Entente foreign minister Miliukov had just been forced to step down, and Alexander Kerensky had taken his place. Kerensky himself had doubts about how long the Russian army could stand to remain active and in the field. In a heart-wrenching address on May 14, he had told his audience he was sorry he had not died two months earlier, when it seemed Russia had a bright new future to look forward to. As affairs are going now, he said gloomily, “it will be impossible to save the country. Perhaps the time is near when we will have to tell you that we can no longer give you the amount of bread you expect or other supplies on which you have a right to count. The process of the change from slavery to freedom is not going on properly. We have tasted freedom and are slightly intoxicated. What we need is sobriety and discipline.”

  For that reason, Kerensky made an anguished plea to Russia’s soldiery: “There is no such thing as a ‘Russian front,’ there is only one general allied front. We are marching toward peace and I should not be in the ranks of the Provisional Government if the ending of the war were not the aim of the whole Provisional Government; but if we are going to propose new war aims we must see we are respected by friend as well as by foe . . . The fate of the country is in your hands, and it is in most extreme danger. History must be able to say of us, ‘They died, but they were never slaves.’ ”36

  Fine words, but there was another man now in Petrograd who had a very different idea of how to go forward, and how to bring the war to an end. He was Lenin, and even as his closest advisers thought that his plans for having the Bolshevik Party seize the government were delusional at best and potentially suicidal at worst, Lenin himself had no doubt he was on the right path to power.

  THE NIGHT THEY arrived in Petrograd, Lenin and Nadya had no idea where they were going to stay. One of Lenin’s sisters, however, was living with her husband in a small apartment at 48 Broad Street, northeast of the city center. The couple made their way there, and for the next three months this would be their home: in a crowded apartment—another sister, Maria, also lived in the flat—in a shabby tenement, where Lenin would write speeches and articles (more than fifty for Pravda in May alone) and plan the revolution, the real Russian Revolution, that he sensed was coming.

  Lenin believed with all his powerful emotional and intellectual convictions that what had taken place in March in Petrograd was no revolution at all, merely the substitution of one faction of the ruling class for another. What was needed now was a revolution like the one he had pointed out in his April Theses: a “proletarian class revolution” that would sweep Russia’s elites and bourgeoisie into the gutter of history and then ignite a similar upheaval around the world. Like Wilson, Lenin in the spring of 1917 was thinking in global, not national, terms. That was one of the limitations of Socialist Revolutionaries such as Kerensky and Mensheviks such as Chkheidze, he felt: they were still thinking about how to change Russia, how to use the war to bolster Russia’s standing. Lenin was thinking about how to change the world, and how to use ending the war to trigger a world revolution.

  As for those, including those in his own party, who argued that Russia’s working classes were simply too few and too isolated to set off the sweeping changes he envisaged, Lenin scoffed at their ignorance. There was another, much simpler tool at hand for achieving the same thing—the government’s own peace formula had even mentioned it. This was “self-determination.” That, Lenin declared confidently, was where the Bolshevik Party should plant its revolutionary hopes and stake its insurrectionary plans.

  That term again, self-determination—but in Lenin’s hands it took on a sense very different from, and much darker than, its meaning in Wilson’s or even in the hands of the Allies who had first brought it up and put it on the geopolitical table. For Wilson, “self-determination” was the fulcrum of progressive change, the means of achieving democracy and freedom for dozens of nationalities and millions of people.

  For the French and British, “self-determination”
had been a rhetorical device to grab Wilson’s attention and convince him that they were on his side—but also a possible crowbar for pulling apart the empires of their opponents, the Turks and the Austro-Hungarians.

  For Lenin, “self-determination” was a clarion call not for democracy and freedom but for revolt and bloodshed that would rock the capitalist imperialist order down to its foundations. While other Marxists looked at the Easter Rebellion in Ireland the previous year (which had cost who knew how many lives and destroyed the heart of Dublin) as an exercise in atavistic futility, Lenin saw it as exactly the sort of revolt he and the Bolsheviks should be looking to achieve. “To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe . . . with all their prejudices . . . is to repudiate social revolution.”

  The Bolsheviks “would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat’s great war of Liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilize every popular movement,” whether it was outside Russia, as in Ireland, or inside Russia, where the Poles, Georgians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and other subject nationalities were champing at the bit to achieve their independence, now that the Russian Empire seemed teetering on the brink of chaos.37

  A war of all against all—that was what Lenin ultimately wanted to emerge after the end of the war Russia was currently waging. “He wanted this peace only because he hoped that it would unleash an even more encompassing international class war,” as historian Adam Tooze has written—a class war that would eventually sweep the globe.38

  Lenin’s apocalyptic revolutionary vision, however, was too much even for committed Bolsheviks. One of them wrote, “Lenin’s program is sheer insurrectionism, which will lead us into the pit of anarchy. These are the tactics of the universal apostle of destruction.” Menshevik leader Chkheidze, when he learned of Lenin’s agenda and realized there was no ground for a reconciliation of Mensheviks and Bolsheviks as some had hoped, simply said with a shrug, “Lenin will remain a solitary figure outside the revolution.”39