1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  The criticism came from an unexpected source. Matthias Erzberger, a Center Party stalwart, was one of the most enthusiastic “hawks” when the war broke out, and a keen supporter of unrestricted submarine warfare. On July 6, however, he rose to his feet and gave a speech that sank a dagger deep into the heart of the government. He declared that hopes for “a submarine victory” were an illusion. Instead of Britain’s being starved into submission in six months, as the generals had promised, it was Germany that was starving.

  It was time to face reality, Erzberger declared. “We must prepare a platform which will make peace possible this year.” He sat down amid applause and shouts of support.9

  The effect of Erzberger’s speech was to shatter the political coalition that had stayed the course since the war began. Words like his might have been expected from a Social Democratic deputy, but coming from a center-right figure such as Erzberger, they carried weight and even urgency that they would have lacked if they came from someone on the left side of the political aisle.10 Twenty-four hours after he spoke, a coalition committee of Center Party, Progressive, and Social Democratic deputies launched a joint resolution calling for peace and an end to the war “without annexations or indemnities”—in effect, and with no sense of irony, the Petrograd formula.

  Erzberger’s “ambush,” as Bethmann-Hollweg put it, sighted the chancellor in the political crosshairs. He scrambled to correct the damage by trying to get the Kaiser to agree to a fresh round of democratization after the war. However, the Kaiser and Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew right away who was really to blame for the crisis: Bethmann-Hollweg. It was he who had sent the Allies the original peace note that got all this started; it was he who had halfheartedly endorsed the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. (Ironically, it was his approval of this same measure that had made him persona non grata among the Reichstag’s doves.)

  On July 12, Hindenburg told the Kaiser he considered Bethmann-Hollweg no longer fit for office. Both he and Ludendorff, he said, felt that the chancellor’s “gloomy views” regarding his appeasement of the German left would eventually turn Germany into a “republic,” just like the one taking root in Russia. Hindenburg added, “We [meaning he and Ludendorff] will not go along with that”—and so they handed the Kaiser their resignations.11

  In the end, there was only one resignation Kaiser Wilhelm was going to accept, and that was his chancellor’s. Bethmann-Hollweg was thoroughly hated and despised by his Kaiser and the military command; he also had no credibility left among their opponents. On July 9, he rose in the Reichstag to announce, “My position does not matter . . . I myself am convinced of my own limitations . . . I am considered weak because I seek to end the war. A leading statesman can receive support neither from the Left nor the Right in Germany.” He quit on July 13, a day celebrated equally by those on the left and the right. On July 19, even as British guns were being wheeled out to begin the bombardment of the Ypres Salient, the Reichstag voted by a large margin to approve a peace note calling for a “permanent reconciliation of all peoples” and a new, more equitable international order based on free trade, freedom of the seas, and the creation of an “international judicial organization.” No one mentioned a “league of nations,” but the echoes of Wilson’s “Peace Without Victory” speech of January were unmistakable. His goal six months earlier, peace without victory, was now the goal of the German Reichstag as well.12

  But it was too late. A future German chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, had risen on July 9 to call for Bethmann-Hollweg to quit, because “no one is more poorly equipped to conduct peace negotiations, both with America and Russia.”13 In fact, Wilson had already moved on; his high-minded call for war on April 2 had rendered his equally high-minded earlier position totally irrelevant. Just as his commitment to war, total war, had doomed the original Petrograd formula and, with it, the future of Russian democracy, so now it doomed any chance of a peace with Germany before the final hammer blow fell.

  Besides, the resolution went nowhere. If German doves imagined this was a victory, they were mistaken. The Kaiser quickly passed the chancellorship over to a political nonentity, Georg Michaelis, who had been commissioner of food supply since 1917. All that Wilhelm II knew about him was that “he’s supposed to be short, a midget.”14 Michaelis swiftly buried the Reichstag’s peace resolution; he knew his job now was to listen to and obey the real master of Germany: not the Kaiser but Erich Ludendorff.

  Ludendorff’s main effort now was to fully implement the “commitment to total war” made the previous year as part of the Hindenburg Program. That meant complete mobilization of all the resources of the German economy for the war effort, and victory. Even disabled and maimed veterans returning from the front, he reasoned, should learn to hold down jobs in munitions factories and shipyards. The goal had been to double Germany’s wartime output by August 1917. Germany’s iron, steel, and coal industries were already firmly under the control of the German army. As 1917 wore on, the clamps grew even tighter.

  Later claims that the Hindenburg Program, when implemented, doubled or even tripled war production of certain critical items such as gunpowder and artillery pieces were largely propaganda.15 Still, it created the illusion (useful later to rulers in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) that large-scale coercive centralization could achieve powerful economies of scale, that a command economy could dramatically increase output without any loss of efficiency or opportunity costs, and with enough public benefits in terms of output to more than compensate for the inconvenient “collateral damage” that such a system does to human beings.

  That damage was palpable, and not just to German citizens caught in total war’s industrial meshes. The Auxiliary Service Law of December 1916 was supposed to put to work in Germany’s war economy all males between the ages of seventeen and sixty not serving in the armed forces and not employed in agriculture, and to sharply curtail the ability of Germans to change or leave jobs.16 But with no fewer than thirteen million German men now in uniform, there simply weren’t enough hands to tend to all the machines or to work on all the assembly lines. The workforce had to be supplemented with a large rise (of more than 75 percent) in women’s labor participation, not all of it voluntary, and a sharp rise in child labor.

  More than a quarter million children age fourteen and fifteen were put to work in the factories, while the remaining deficit had to be made up with foreign workers, most of them dragged in from Germany’s occupied territories. Tens of thousands of Belgians, Poles, Frenchmen, and Balts were deported to work in German industry, while more than four hundred thousand POWs were put to work in the agricultural fields of the Reich. It was a chilling prelude to what would happen in the next war, when Germany’s insatiable demand for war production would turn nearly all Central Europe into a vast slave labor camp.

  It was also not good for the situation at the front. That July, at a time when they were most sorely needed, almost two million men had to be released from military duty to return to factories, mines, and farms. In the end, concludes historian Holger Herwig, “the attempted mobilization of the nation for ‘total war’ was well beyond the means of the Wilhelmian state.”17

  But the administrative and ideological legacy of what Ludendorff had attempted to do remained. On September 2, the anniversary of Germany’s great victory in the Franco-Prussian War, retired grand admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the original architect of all-out submarine warfare, announced the creation of the German Fatherland Party, which took a strong stand against the Reichstag’s peace resolution and against any alternative to total victory. “Deutschland Erwache! [Germany, awake!]” Tirpitz proclaimed. “Your hour of destiny has arrived!” The result was an explosion of patriotic sentiment on the German right. Within six months, the German Fatherland Party had more than 1.25 million enrolled members, and its legacy would extend far beyond the war. Tirpitz’s “Deutschland Erwache!” would go on to become the slogan on Nazi Party banners. Likewise, General Hindenburg’
s maxim, “The entire German people should live only in the service of the Fatherland,” would be the motto, and epitaph, of a Germany that sprang into being over the summer of 1917 and only finally died in 1945 in a graveyard of ashes.

  At the time, of course, it could have been argued that if Germany had any remaining chance of winning this war, there was not a moment to lose. On August 2, mutiny broke out among the sailors on four navy battleships in a harbor near Wilhelmshaven. Although the mutiny was quickly suppressed—two of the mutineers were immediately executed, and three others were given lengthy prison sentences18—it was a warning of what might happen if victory, or peace, did not come soon. In addition, a month earlier, Germany had had to face another unexpected threat.

  Almost out of nowhere, the Russians were on the move again, with Alexander Kerensky at their head.

  PETROGRAD

  KERENSKY WAS LEADING not as a general in the field but as the Provisional Government’s new minister of war. Earlier that summer, he had emerged as the revolution’s political powerhouse, and the last hope for the war in the east. Kerensky sensed that the survival of what he called “the freest democratic republic in Europe”—which had embraced equal rights for women, including the right to vote; abolished capital punishment and punishment by exile; and established full liberty of conscience and separation of church and state—now depended entirely on a strong and unified army.19 That in turn meant resuming the initiative on the battlefield once more, to galvanize the troops and nation but also to demonstrate to the other Allies, including America, that Russia could still be counted on—even though many in and outside the government worried that Russia might not be able to count on the Allies.

  That May and June, Kerensky threw himself into the job with the same energy and emotional dedication that he applied to everything. He replaced his top general and toured the front tirelessly, meeting common soldiers and giving one rousing patriotic speech after another. His appearance had the desired effect. “Crowds gathered for hours to catch a glimpse of him,” an eyewitness recorded. “His path was everywhere strewn with flowers. Soldiers ran for miles after his motor car, trying to shake his hand or kiss the hem of his garment.”20 When he returned to Petrograd, the crowds were equally large, and audiences shouted themselves hoarse.

  Another eyewitness said of him, “[W]hen he stretches his hands out to you . . . you feel that he touches you, grasps you with those hands, and irresistibly draws you to himself.”21 The Russian Revolution had at last found its Garibaldi, almost its Napoleon—someone on whom the fate of the entire nation now seemed to rest.

  Kerensky’s preparations weren’t limited to the cult of personality, however. He also reinforced military discipline, trying to counter much of the laxness and insubordination that the earlier Order No. 1 had unleashed inside the ranks. He even reimposed the death penalty for military offenses, a step for which he would be much blamed later on. He fought hard to counteract defeatist propaganda from German and Bolshevik sources—he was just beginning to get the sense that they were in fact one and the same22—but his main achievement was to restore some belief that the Russian army could once again be an effective instrument of war, and now also the spearhead of Russian democracy.

  By June 29, everything was ready. There was a two-day preliminary bombardment, and then Russian troops, led by one of the ablest commanders in the army, pushed toward Lemberg, which had been the principal target of the Brusilov Offensive in 1916.23 For two days, everything went well, and as patriotic emotion surged in the Congress of Soviets, even Lenin did not dare oppose motions in support of what history has come to call the Kerensky Offensive.

  Then things fell apart. After their initial successes, the soldiers decided they had done enough; their officers could not get them to resume the advance. On July 19, the Germans came to the rescue of their Austro-Hungarian allies, as they had so many times before, and counterattacked. In no time, discipline in the Russian ranks collapsed. Thousands of soldiers began streaming for the rear; others stayed behind to loot and rape. Thousands of others simply laid down their rifles and quit. Even the otherwise demoralized Austrians were able to take the offensive, and pushed the crumbling Russian front as far as the River Zbruch, on the Romanian border—while the advancing Germans shifted their attention north, toward the Baltic coast and the port of Riga, Latvia’s capital, only three hundred fifty miles from Petrograd.

  It was not just that the Kerensky Offensive collapsed, and with it, Kerensky’s reputation as savior of Russia. The death knell of the Russian army, and even Russia itself, had been sounded—unless some way could be found to halt the advancing Germans in their tracks.

  It was at this moment that Lenin decided to overthrow the Provisional Government.

  Or did he? A hundred years later, the historical record remains murky. If Lenin did order the insurrection that would become known as the July Days, he carefully airbrushed away that fact later. Certainly, everyone involved, including Lenin, would later deny that he had anything to do with it. Yet it seems incredible that a party as centralized and disciplined as the Bolshevik Party could have taken such bold, decisive action—that is, seizing upon a major governmental crisis to stage a coup d’état—without the knowledge and approval, not to mention the direct orders, of its iron-willed leader. In any case, if it’s not entirely certain that Lenin was directly behind the move, it is clear who was its chief instigator: Lenin’s newest close associate, Leon Trotsky.

  Born in 1879 to a Jewish farming family in southern Ukraine, Leon Trotsky (originally Lev or Leiba Bronstein) first met Lenin in 1902 and had always been largely sympathetic to his radical views on how to bring about revolution in Russia. Yet it would be a mistake to think of Trotsky as Lenin’s disciple, let alone his heir apparent. In July 1917, Trotsky was not even officially a Bolshevik. Before the war, the two had seriously split over Lenin’s doctrine of democratic centralism, which Trotsky believed (prophetically, as it turned out) would end up handing over too much control to one man, a dictator who could act in the name of the proletariat with no checks on his power.

  He also differed from Lenin in having had firsthand experience of the one country that most symbolized capitalism at its highest pitch—namely, America. Trotsky’s fierce opposition to the war had driven him from his safe haven in France to Spain, from which he had then escaped to New York, where he could write, speak, and organize more or less freely without being stalked by the Russian secret police. For three months, from January through March 1917, he and his wife, Alexandra, lived in “the monster known as New York,” as Trotsky later described it, in an apartment at 1522 Vyse Avenue, just off 175th Street in the Bronx.

  While Trotsky spoke almost no English, he edited the Russian-language socialist paper Novy Mir and wrote for the Yiddish-language Forverts. Although he traveled to Philadelphia and other cities on the East Coast, giving speeches that helped to pay for the apartment, and though the country intrigued him, his ignorance of America remained abysmal. It is probably not true that he once opened a public meeting with the words “Workers and peasants of Brooklyn!” but he did firmly believe that the only reason revolution had not come to America was that the American Socialists (who, at the time, had two members in Congress and controlled one hundred fifty newspapers, and whose presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, scored 6 percent of the national vote in the 1912 election) were too weak and infected by bourgeois values.

  Trotsky was particularly adamant in saying that it would be a mistake for America to join the Allies in the war. When, after the release of the Zimmermann telegram, some Socialist Party politicians came out in support of going to war against Germany, Trotsky’s contempt and rage were palpable. He insisted that socialists and workers should engage in “mass action” to prevent this—a forlorn hope. So, when the news of the czar’s fall reached him, surprising him as much as it had surprised Lenin, he made feverish plans to head back home.

  His brief glimpse of America continued to intrigue, and troub
le, him. The night he left, he told an audience at the Harlem River Park Casino, “Keep on organizing until you are able to overthrow this damned, rotten, capitalistic government of this country.”24 Yet, even after he set sail from New York on March 27, he left “with the feeling of a man who has had only a glimpse into the foundry in which the fate of man is to be forged.” Even more than Lenin, Trotsky saw that the United States represented the future that most threatened their own Marxist vision of the future.25

  When he arrived back in Russia on May 4, he still resisted formally joining the Bolshevik ranks.26 Once he had acquainted himself with the centers of power in revolutionary Petrograd, however, he realized that joining forces with Lenin’s Bolshevik Party would give him two advantages. The first was a press organ, the newspaper Pravda, where he could publish a seemingly endless stream of revolutionary articles and op-eds. Trotsky was a far better writer and speaker than Lenin, and felt a compulsive need to write down every thought he had, in language as vivid and vituperative as possible. The second advantage of partnership with the Bolsheviks was at last being in a band of fellow revolutionaries who were willing to take direct, decisive action to bring down the existing order, something that Lenin, for all his inflammatory rhetoric and violent apocalyptic vision, was largely unable to do (how unable, we will soon find out).

  Now, with the collapse of the last Russian offensive, Trotsky saw a chance for the Bolsheviks, and him, to seize control of events.

  It started on July 15, when the Bolsheviks organized a concert for the men of the First Machine Gun Regiment at Petrograd’s Narodni Dom (or “House of the People”). The soldiers had just learned that they were about to be dispatched to the front. Trotsky and his fellow Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev figured this was a good moment to spread their propaganda to the troops, and encourage disaffection. Trotsky was scheduled to speak, as were Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Lenin. None but Trotsky showed up, the others probably fearing arrest.