1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  For Lenin, of course, that didn’t matter because, in his mind, there still hadn’t been a revolution. That spring, however, he did learn to temper his message slightly, and focused on the immediate goal of ending the war for Russia: “Peace, land, and bread” would become the Bolshevik slogan, with peace first and foremost, and Lenin would use it to gain control first of his party and then, he hoped, not of Russia itself—that was pointless at this juncture—but of the real center of power, the Ispolkom, which led the Petrograd Soviet.

  The turning point in the first case came on April 24, when the Bolshevik Party met at the Kschessinska Mansion in Petrograd, where Lenin made sure his allies were elected to key positions and where skeptics about his April Theses were voted out. Most doubters about Lenin’s views had deserted the party by then, anyway. On the desirability of a socialist dictatorship, on the “agrarian question” (i.e., confiscating all land in Russia and giving it to the peasants), on the “national question,” and on ignoring the usual Marxist stages of historical evolution and going straight to a proletarian dictatorship, Lenin won by large majorities. The party was his personal property once again.

  Over the next month and a half, Lenin became a man on fire. He spoke at every meeting that would have him; he wrote articles for Pravda on every conceivable topic; he harangued every crowd of soldiers, sailors, or passersby who would stop to listen. Everywhere, he preached the same message: Ruin is imminent. Catastrophe is on the way. Capitalism is bringing every country, including Russia, to the brink of destruction. The only possible salvation is revolution and the transition of all state power into the hands of the revolutionary class. As Lenin’s biographer Service notes, “ruin, catastrophe, and destruction ran like a red thread through his vocabulary.”40 By his constant hammering, day after day, Lenin began to make an impression on those milling through the streets of Petrograd who wondered whether the revolution they had carried out in March was going to make their world better or worse. So far, with bread still in short supply, with law and order collapsing because there was no police force, and with the same dismal, dreary news from the front, of soldiers with no rifles, no ammunition, and no hope—Pravda and other Bolshevik media liked to heighten the bad news coming from the fighting—it looked as though worse was winning.

  That suited Lenin. He was finally in his element. As he confided to Nadya one day in the apartment at 48 Broad, he had found himself at last. He and Nadya had also reached a decision, made the very night they first arrived. This would be the end of the years of exile, the end of the wandering. At last they were in Russia to stay, to make a revolution. As it happened, they were wrong, but their determination lingered far beyond anyone else’s ability to cast them a different fortune.

  For, despite Lenin’s success at regaining control of the Bolshevik movement, and in building on the budding popular following, revolution seemed as far away as ever.

  And despite Woodrow Wilson’s May 22 pronouncement, America and the Allies were far from abandoning Russia. On May 16, the U.S. Treasury gave the Provisional Government an immediate loan of one hundred million dollars, an almost unimaginable windfall. When Wilson learned that tons of foodstuffs were waiting at the port of Vladivostok to be shipped to Russia’s starving cities, he at once sent a mission of American engineers and railroad technicians to figure out how to get those supplies moving across Russia’s crumbling Trans-Siberian Railway. In July, the U.S. Railroad Administration, in charge of all America’s railroads during wartime, even authorized the sending of no fewer than 2,500 locomotives and 40,000 freight cars to Russia.41

  Meanwhile, Kerensky and his colleagues were throwing themselves into one last effort to rebuild the Russian army. To a sensible man, time might have seemed to be running out for staging a major revolution. But Lenin was not a sensible man; he was a single-minded, dedicated man, ever fiercer and more fanatical in his conviction that time and history were on his side.

  Besides, by now he had a man who, at critical moments in the coming months, would provide the means of moving events to the revolutionary tipping point.

  His name was Leon Trotsky.

  9

  SUMMER OF DISCONTENT

  I tell you heads must roll, blood must flow.

  —LEON TROTSKY, JULY 1917

  LONDON

  IF ANYTHING DEMONSTRATED that Europe’s Great Powers no longer controlled their own world war, and that the war was now controlled by two outsiders, Wilson and Lenin, it was the unprecedented events of June through August 1917. It was then that the global balance of power began to shift away from Europe and toward other, farther shores.

  The wave of disruption and discontent that swept across that summer struck London and Paris first. Ironically, it coincided with an event that seemed to promise hope that the war was finally taking a positive turn. This was the arrival of General Pershing in Paris in June 1917, to a tumultuous reception. He was embraced with enthusiasm that offered a foretaste of what would overtake Wilson when he reached Paris a year and a half later. As Pershing passed by, it was not unusual to see people kneeling in the street weeping. Then, on July 4, Independence Day, people shouted their approval, American and French flags waving, as elements of the American First Division paraded down the Champs-Élysées. Pershing’s promise, “Lafayette, we are here”—actually said by an aide, not Pershing himself—seemed a harbinger of a fresh new start.

  But that was it. As July progressed, it became clear the Americans weren’t coming—at least not for a long stretch. London and Paris had expected 175,000 American troops to arrive by the end of July. Instead, there were not even 17,000.1 In declaring war, Wilson had not paid enough attention to how he was going to raise the men to fight overseas, let alone get them there. Now his inattention was putting enormous pressure on his new allies. The French army was virtually comatose after its wave of mutinies; it was incapable of returning to the offensive, perhaps even of defending its own lines. That meant Britain and its commander in chief, Sir Douglas Haig, would have to step up.

  In Whitehall circles, especially with Prime Minister Lloyd George, Haig’s reputation was at a low ebb. Along with Joffre, he was the general who seemed most to embody a military mind-set that combined strategic failure with needless slaughter. That certainly was Lloyd George’s view in the early summer of 1917. Haig had led the British army to two colossal failures in two years, at the Somme and then in the Nivelle Offensive, with heavy losses. The prime minister would have preferred to remove Haig altogether, but that was politically impossible. Haig still had the confidence of others in the War Cabinet, including Lord Curzon and Gen. Jan Smuts, the extraordinary South African philosopher and statesman who always seemed ready to defer to the wisdom of British generals even though he himself had decisively beaten them a few years earlier, in the Boer War.2

  Besides, Haig had announced that he now had a new plan, one that would succeed where the Nivelle Offensive had failed, and that would decisively shift the balance of the war in the Allies’ favor before the Americans came. In addition to the diminishing but still potent threat of German submarines, Lloyd George and the Cabinet had another distraction to deal with. In the summer of 1917, London was under regular attack from the air by German bombers—the first sustained strategic bombing campaign from airplanes in history—and unless the bombers could be stopped or contained, the prime minister worried that the attacks would spread panic and disorder throughout the capital like nothing else in the war.

  It was true that, since 1915, London had seen sporadic German attacks by zeppelin airships, as had Paris. Even St. Petersburg had been threatened in December 1916—although the weather proved too cold, and the zeppelins never left the ground. Yet the damage, and casualties, from the great, slow-moving dirigibles had been negligible. The Germans also paid a heavy price, as their hydrogen-filled zeppelins made relatively easy targets for British pursuit planes armed with incendiary ammunition, and heavy weather or unfavorable winds forced them to miss their targets altogether and
even to crash and burn without dropping a single bomb.

  The Gotha IV biplane bomber, which first went into service in February 1917, was an entirely different order of war machine. Forty feet long, with a seventy-eight-foot wingspan and a crew of three, and powered by two 260-hp Mercedes DIV engines, the Gotha resembled an enormous bird of prey, a black-green pterodactyl of the skies that, at eighty-three miles per hour, traveled at almost twice the speed of the zeppelins. Each Gotha was armed with eleven hundred pounds of bombs—far less than the great zeppelins could carry, but the Gotha could also deliver that payload with deadly accuracy, as its very first raids on England showed.

  The first came on May 25, when a flight of Gotha IV bombers dropped sixty bombs on a Canadian military camp and on Folkestone, a port town on the English Channel. Ninety-five people were killed and 195 wounded, while all the attackers got away.

  Then, on June 13, came the first Gotha attack on London, which caused more casualties than all the zeppelin raids put together. It began at 11:30 a.m., and within two minutes the German planes had dropped seventy bombs on a one-mile radius around Liverpool Street Station. The Royal Albert Dock and Southwark were also hit, as were other parts of the city. The raid killed 162 and left 432 injured. The dead included 18 children, who died when a bomb hit a school in Poplar, in the Docklands. The modern age of strategic bombing, which would pass through London to Guernica and Rotterdam down to Dresden and Hiroshima, began that day in June 1917.

  There was another devastating attack on July 7, which was also the last daylight raid on London, as British air defenses began to gear up to protect the city. The Germans then shifted to nighttime raids, an eerie (though smaller-scale) forerunner of the Blitz that Londoners would experience in 1940.

  All through the following September and October, residents could hear the bombers roar overhead in the night, scattering bombs throughout the city while people scrambled into the Underground and their basements for shelter. “At the slightest rumor of approaching aeroplanes,” Lloyd George would write in his memoirs, “tubes and tunnels were packed with panic-stricken men, women, and children. Every clear night the commons around London were black with refugees from the threatened metropolis.”3

  The panic was fed by the worst wave of labor unrest Britain had seen since the beginning of the war—much of it fueled, as it happened, by events in Russia. Thirty-two Liberal and Labour MPs voted on a resolution calling for peace negotiations based on the Petrograd formula. Lloyd George warned his Cabinet about the looming threat of a British soviet unless something were done to contain the unrest. Even the king himself worried about the growing threat with “too much democracy in the air,” and in June, he made a drastic decision that would seal the fate of the Russian czar and his family (see chapter 13).

  In short, the pressure was mounting for that swift “knockout blow” against the Germans that Lloyd George had been promising since becoming prime minister; patiently waiting for the Americans was no longer an option. That meant reining in his impatience with Haig and listening to the commander in chief’s plan.

  From where Haig was sitting, the best place for that knockout blow was in the north, up along the Ypres Salient, where British troops had halted the initial German advance in 1914 but which still stuck out into the Allied lines like a malignant blister west of Lille and into northern France. Haig’s idea was to push through the salient and move up into Belgium, where he could capture Ostend, just thirty miles from his planned breakthrough point. Taking Ostend would shut down German submarine operations there. It would also allow Haig to sever the enemy’s main railway links with Germany and roll up his flank from the north.

  There were several problems with this plan. The first was that the Belgians had broken the dikes and let in the sea north of the German lines, so this flank was protected by impassable sheets of seawater. The second was that Ostend and neighboring Zeebrugge were not the main bases for German U-boats; Germany’s own ports were. A major ground offensive would do far less to halt the existing German submarine threat than the convoys were already doing, and might even consume valuable resources better spent shoring up the Western Front until the Americans finally arrived.

  That, at least, was the Frenchmen’s argument when they learned of Haig’s plan. Commander in chief Pétain did want the British to distract German attention away from his vulnerable army, but with small-scale diversionary operations, not a massive Somme-like attack that might leave British forces as demoralized as his own. The rising star of the French command, Gen. Ferdinand Foch, also warned that the muddy terrain along the Ypres Salient would require a plodding “duck’s march,” and Pétain added that one could not fight both the Germans and the mud—Boche et boue in French.4

  Yet Lloyd George felt himself not in a strong enough position to say no. Haig had been planning such an offensive since January 1916; the other British generals, including the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, refused to come up with any better ideas. On June 19–21 came the showdown at Whitehall, with Haig on one side of the table and Lloyd George on the other. One by one, Haig shot down Lloyd George’s doubts, objections, and alternative suggestions, including sending the troops who would be used in the attack at Ypres to Italy to reinforce Italian plans for a new offensive. In the end, Haig said that “it is necessary for us to go on engaging the enemy” and that he was confident he could at least secure his first objective (the town of Ypres, now shattered beyond recognition by three years of constant war) in the first attack and then “achieve great results” before the year was out. Besides, Haig had just scored an unexpected success on the battlefield, which gave his plan both credibility and increased urgency.5

  The place was the Messines Ridge, a one-hundred-fifty-foot-high promontory south of the Ypres Salient from which the Germans were able to watch everything going on behind British lines. For two years the British commander in the sector, Gen. Sir Herbert Plumer, had dug a series of deep mines under the ridge and filled them with explosives—hundreds of thousands of tons’ worth. On June 7 at 3:10 in the morning, the British turned the detonator. The explosion was so large that Lloyd George heard it from his bedroom at Number 10. In an instant, the entire geographic feature known as the Messines Ridge vanished. British troops moved up and occupied the sector with almost no losses. It was an amazing success. Still, two years’ preparation to move two miles made Berlin look farther away than ever.6

  Besides, Haig could now argue that with the loss of Messines, the Germans would not be able to observe his preparations in front of the Ypres Salient as they had before. So, Lloyd George gave way, as politicians generally did on both sides when met by the arguments of confident generals. Along the Ypres Salient—where the regular British army had met its death in 1914, and where the Germans first used poison gas in 1915—preparations began for the mightiest British offensive of all, and it was the last time the fate of the war, and of the world, was in the hands of western European powers alone.

  BERLIN

  AT ALMOST THE same time, the summer’s discontent was seeping into Germany’s leading cities and into the Reichstag. Germany’s chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, found himself besieged from both the left and the right. Before the summer was out, he would be shoved from office and Germany would be headed in a direction that would culminate sixteen years later in the ascent to power of another German chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

  The winter of 1916–17 had been the most brutal of the war for Germany, and not only because of the cold weather. The German people had stoically endured war and blockade, and sacrificed more than two million of their sons since the first German soldier stepped across the Belgian border, in a hope for victory that had gone unfulfilled. Now they were running out of patience as well as food.

  Food rationing had gone into effect across Germany in 1915. As 1917 began, rations were now cut to less than one thousand calories a day, less than a third of what the average German ate in 1914.7 Families were living almost entirely
on potatoes, bread, and milk—infants and children under the age of two were limited to one quarter liter of milk a day. The government had paid for the war largely by printing money, which meant that the price of everything, including food, soared on the wings of inflation. Eggs—only two were allowed per week—cost thirty pfennig apiece, compared with eight pfennig in 1914. The black market soared. Those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, participate in it suffered constant deprivation, even as they waited for the telegram informing them that a husband or another brother or son had been killed at the front.

  The president of police of Greater Berlin warned the minister of the interior that the public was mired in a sense of “despondency as well as fear for the future.” In 1917, even the potatoes began to run out. From New Year’s Day until the end of March, Kiel, a port city with 220,000 residents and a major naval and industrial center, had to go without a single potato.8 The food question, the police official warned, had come to dominate every other aspect of life. “One fears the fourth winter of the war.”

  Over the spring, the despondency had reached the factories. On March 27, the workers in two major shipyards in potato-less Kiel went on strike; they were soon joined by striking workers from other facilities in Kiel. When authorities tried to send one hundred of the striking workers to the front as punishment, the Ministry of the Interior vetoed the plan—it worried that the punitive action would only spread the unrest. Nonetheless, more strikes followed in other German factories and cities, while food riots struck in cities such as Cologne, Dortmund, and even Berlin. At the beginning of July, the Reichstag met to vote on the next round of war credits. The government’s critics were ready and waiting.