1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  That did it, as far as Congress was concerned. Fed up, Henry Cabot Lodge and Sen. George Chamberlain put together legislation to take control of the war mobilization effort away from Wilson and hand it to a three-man War Cabinet of distinguished citizens. As the year ended, the battle was on, and Wilson was fighting to keep control of the federal government—and of the war effort he had begun so hopefully (some would say arrogantly) back in April.

  His mood was still defiant, despite the many missteps and failures. When he delivered his annual address to a sullen, resentful Congress, on December 4, 1917, he spoke of the forces of opposition—in his mind, still the equivalent of disloyalty, even treason.

  “I hear the voices of dissent—who does not? I hear the criticism and the clamor of the noisily thoughtless and troublesome. I also see men here and there fling themselves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, indomitable power of the nation . . . They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.”39

  Maybe so, but catastrophic events were unfolding in Russia that would have a profound impact on where Wilson thought the war, now his war, was going. Those events would force him to pivot politically as well as diplomatically and open another unmarked door, one that led to a future even he could not conceive.

  IT WAS NOT as if Wilson had not had ample warning of what was happening, or that it might turn out very badly if he failed to act.

  Soon after the collapse of the Kerensky Offensive, Wilson’s adviser Colonel House had written an urgent note to his friend the president, making it plain that the fate of Russia was now in his hands and no one else’s. House had passed along an August 5 note regarding a visit by the British ambassador in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, with Russian foreign minister Mikhail Tereshchenko. Buchanan found Tereshchenko “despondent” over conditions on the front. The ambassador himself was “entirely at a loss to see how the Russian army is to be kept in existence and to be properly supplied,” let alone to participate in any future offensive against the Germans. Given the coup Lenin and the Bolsheviks had nearly pulled off, it was also becoming clear that the existence of the Russian government itself might be in peril.

  The president faced “one of the great cris[e]s that the world has ever known,” House wrote. The time had come for a bold move toward peace, House proposed. “It is more important . . . that Russia should weld itself into a virile Republic than it is that Germany should be beaten to its knees.” House worried that if the disintegration of Russia continued, Germany might “be able to dominate Russia both politically and economically. Then the clock of progress would indeed be set back.”

  On the other hand, if a constitutional democracy could be “firmly established” in Russia, in House’s view, “German autocracy would be compelled to yield to a representative government within a very few years.” House believed that the Germans “do understand what we mean by representative government, and they are eager for it.” And with democracy, Germany could “return to the brotherhood of nations,” and the world would know lasting peace.

  Therefore, if the United States used its position to press for an immediate peace, with a face-saving mechanism regarding Alsace-Lorraine to placate French feelings, it might be possible to save the Kerensky government and democracy in Russia. The Russian ambassador had told House as much on August 19: “that success or failure in Russia may depend on your answer.” What House was telling his president was that the time was coming when Wilson would have to choose between sustaining the forces for war or sustaining the forces of democracy, including in America. He could no longer do both.

  “The war in America is not popular,” House warned prophetically. “It will become increasingly unpopular as time goes on. If a peace could be made this winter, the United States would be at the apex of power.” House hoped the president “would not lose this great opportunity.” Either way, he knew “that you will meet it with that fine spirit of courage and democracy which has become synonymous with your name.”40

  Here House was mistaken. His president met his proposal instead with the spirit of inflexibility and commitment that went with his being, in Wilson’s own words, the man of “strenuous mind and high ideals” he aspired to be: one who committed himself and the nation to the greatest cause in its history, a cause from which there was no going back. Wilson’s mission now was not saving Russian democracy; it was defeating Germany, the outlaw nation, and pressing the war forward to the conclusion he desired, a great peace conference at which the sources of all the world’s conflicts and wars would finally be resolved.

  If such a mission was unpopular with the American people, so be it. After all, as Wilson had written, a world-historical leader does not listen to popular opinion or the polls. That August, Wilson had already waved away one plea for reviving the idea of peace without victory, from the pope in the Vatican. He was quite content to wave away another, from Petrograd.

  House’s plan died without another sound.

  Yet, in retrospect, we can see that the stakes were higher in the Russian case. Suppose Wilson had been convinced that House was right; suppose he had used America’s financial leverage to force the Allies to the peace table; suppose he had sent a note to Matthias Erzberger and the Reichstag endorsing their resolution on peace negotiations; suppose Kerensky had been able to announce to the Petrograd Soviet that an armistice was pending and the end of the war was in the offing—could that have saved the Russian republic? It’s hard to say. The forces for chaos and disorder were already far advanced in Russia by the end of the summer; a civil war between the Provisional Government and forces determined to put Nicholas II back on the throne was certainly not out of the question. Yet if Wilson had met Kerensky halfway, we can begin to see the outlines of a very different future for Russia, and the world, after 1917—a future where tens of millions of human beings lived to the end of their natural days, instead of dying in civil wars and gulags or by starvation and the firing squad.

  But this is fantasy, not history. In the event, Wilson said no to House’s offer. The war was going ahead as planned. In his April 2 address, Wilson had said that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Four months later, this no longer included Russia. What followed in that country was therefore at least to some degree Wilson’s responsibility—all because of the road to peace not taken.

  11

  RUSSIA ON THE BRINK

  The course of events compels the revolution “to concentrate all its forces of destruction” against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.

  —LENIN, STATE AND REVOLUTION, 1917

  PETROGRAD

  IN THE WEEKS following the Bolsheviks’ failed coup, the new prime minister, Kerensky, focused his attention on protecting the new republic from its enemies. The problem was that he was looking the wrong way.

  Having defeated Lenin and broken the Bolshevik movement, Kerensky was inclined to be generous to his former foes. Trotsky, Kamenev, and the others ensconced in prison faced no trial or consequences, let alone a firing squad. In a few weeks, they would be released. Kerensky’s attitude was pas d’ennemis à gauche (“no enemies to the left”), even for those radical Marxists who had nearly brought Russian democracy crashing to the ground.

  What worried Kerensky was a possible threat from the right, not the left. As he told the Ispolkom on July 26, they must not “with their actions inspire the forces of the counterrevolution,” and “any attempt to restore the Russian monarchic regime will be suppressed in the most decisive, pitiless manner.” The man who in his mind increasingly embodied that threat was not the czar but, rather, the man Kerensky himself had put in charge of the war, Gen. Lavr Kornilov.

  Later, his name would be steeped in the deepest, darkest dye for his role as a leader of the anti-Communist White forces in the Russian Civil War. But in August 1917, there was no one more likely to pull together the Russian army and the c
ollapsing front than Kornilov. Unlike Kerensky—or Lenin or Trotsky, for that matter—Kornilov came from peasant stock; his father was a farmer and soldier, his mother a housekeeper. Kornilov’s courage was legendary; respect from his troops was without question.1 When he accepted command from Kerensky on August 1, the general laid down four conditions. The first was that he owed responsibility to his conscience and the nation. The second was that no one was to interfere with his orders or appointments, not even the all-powerful Petrograd Soviet. The third was that to restore order in the army, he would be free to apply his own disciplinary measures, including the death penalty for disobedience or desertion. The fourth was that the Provisional Government accept without question his recommendations on how to fight the war.

  The very fact that a Russian general was still talking about fighting, let alone winning, the war against Germany and Austria must have been astonishing, possibly even refreshing. Kerensky, however, sensed a challenge to his own authority and prestige. If he had a fatal weakness, it was an unwillingness to share center stage with anyone, even a general who could turn impending defeat into victory—or at least stalemate. But he had no choice: since the Bolsheviks’ failed coup, everything now depended on Kornilov’s bringing the army back on the side of the government. After five days of negotiations, the two struck a deal. But if Kerensky had to choose between his new commander in chief and holding together the socialist coalition that underpinned his premiership, he would have to make the hard choice and push Kornilov out.

  For Lenin, in hiding in Finland, it was a grim August and September. At the end of July, he penned “Lessons of the Revolution,” his postmortem of the failed coup in July. “It is clear that the first phase of our revolution has failed,” he wrote. Yet “[t]he old tyranny is coming back. The death penalty is being introduced for the soldiers at the front”—his reluctant nod to Kornilov’s new order in the Russian army. “Workers’ newspapers are closed down without trial. Bolsheviks are arrested, often without any charge or upon blatantly trumped-up charges”—ignoring the fact that he had left Trotsky, Kamenev, and the others to their fate at the hands of the police while he skipped across the border.2 It was a contrast in fates that those he had abandoned in Petrograd were aware of. Leon Trotsky in his jail cell remarked to a comrade, “Perhaps we made a mistake. We should have tried to take power.” It was a veiled rebuke of Lenin, who had lost his nerve at the last minute while the rest of his conspirators paid the price.3

  So, what did Lenin learn from his experience? Next time, he would have to make sure that the armed forces were either a reliable ally or totally impotent; he would ignore his weaker and less unscrupulous opponents; and he would take steps to ensure that the Russian public that mattered most, the inhabitants of Petrograd, were either fully on board with a revolutionary takeover or at least acquiescent in a full-dress Bolshevik coup.

  As Lenin regained his nerve, State and Revolution evolved from a last will and testament into a guide to future revolutionary strategy, in case the Provisional Government gave him another shot. Its overall theme is that all governments, even those such as the Provisional Government or the future government of Russia that the Constituent Assembly would embody, served only the interests of the bourgeoisie. The issue was not who controlled a government, but how “to smash it,” he said, quoting Marx. “Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made machinery,’ and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.”4

  So, what would take its place? Lenin was insistent that, under the dictatorship of the proletariat—or, to use the new term he would use, communism—the normal institutions of the “parasitic state,” the legacy of bourgeois capitalism, would wither away. Under this new order, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the will of the working class, would rule instead of the organs of the state. Even so, even on the verge of the new, more just and egalitarian order, Lenin foresaw that “in the transition from capitalism to communism, repression is still necessary, but it is already the repression of the exploiters by the majority of the exploited.” That meant “a special machine of repression” would still be needed, even after the abolition of capitalism and all its works.5 A place marker had been laid down in State and Revolution for what would become the Cheka and the KGB, a means to enforce utopia in the teeth of those who might still oppose its noble goals, even after the architects of utopia have taken power.

  That place marker was a measure not just of Lenin’s fanatical devotion to his Marxist revolutionary vision no matter the cost, but also of his desperation after his failed coup. In an earlier essay, he made it clear that “all hopes for the peaceful evolution of the Russian Revolution have disappeared without trace.” All he needed now, he believed, was the chance for a rematch. That must have seemed a bizarre fantasy coming from a man hiding out in obscurity in a Finnish farmhouse. Then, improbably enough, Kerensky and Kornilov gave him that chance.

  It was a busy August in Petrograd. Besides finding a way to halt the relentless German advance through Eastern Galicia toward Riga and the Baltic provinces, the main order of business was preparing the way for elections for the Constituent Assembly, set in August for November 25. When Kerensky called a State Conference in Moscow to rally public opinion, what was supposed to be a display of political unity suddenly fractured. General Kornilov was the other featured personality. When Kerensky appeared, there was polite applause from Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and other parties on the left. When Kornilov made his entrance, a cordon of soldiers literally carried him into the hall on their shoulders as the parties on the right roared and shouted their approval.6

  The battle lines between Kerensky and Kornilov had been drawn. In Kerensky’s mind, then and later, that line was ideological. He saw himself as representing the forces of democracy and progress; Kornilov, the forces of reaction and counterrevolution. (As for the Bolsheviks, they were the “party of the political rabble.”) In his memoirs, Kerensky would refer to the general as “that unsuccessful Russian Napoleon,” the man who had halted the French Revolution in midstream in order to install himself in power.7

  But Kerensky had read his history almost too well. His knowledge of the French Revolution had taught him that the most effective opponents of revolution came from the political right. What the Provisional Government and the future of Russian democracy had to fear most, he believed, was the threat of counterrevolution, led by an authoritarian general such as Kornilov. As self-declared custodian of the revolution, Kerensky saw his job, following the State Congress, as heading Kornilov off at the counterrevolutionary pass. It was a foolish and, in many ways, tragic mistake. By rounding on Kornilov, Russia’s prime minister made an enemy of the one man who could have helped him prevent what was coming.

  On September 3, the Germans marched virtually unopposed into Riga, a little more than three hundred miles from Petrograd. The Kerensky Offensive unwittingly opened the door to a German triumph in the east. Before the Russian army could rally itself to face the enemy, Germany would virtually be at the gates of the capital.

  That was the final straw for Kornilov. Already there was talk of a possible new Bolshevik coup, to coincide with the German offensive.8 Prime Minister Kerensky sent an urgent message, asking if Kornilov would be prepared to send troops to put down a Bolshevik revolt. Kornilov said yes; he had even been approached by officers who told him they had two thousand loyal troops in Petrograd ready to deal with any trouble Lenin and his henchmen might try to stir up. Kornilov, however, was conflicted. On the one hand, Kerensky needed his help and his troops. On the other, Kornilov knew that the prime minister was working behind the scenes to deprive him of any authority over the Petrograd Military District, for fear the general might be planning to seize power. A dangerous and complex game was being played out, one in which Kerensky and Kornilov were both jockeying for ultimate control over the capital. After some initial hesitation, Kornilov decided it was time to cut the political Gordian knot and take power himself in the
name of Russia.

  Yet, on September 8, Kerensky had already made his move. He sprang a trap by telling the press that Kornilov was marching on the capital to topple the Provisional Government.9 Enraged by an accusation he saw as patently, even deliberately false, Kornilov lashed out. He dismissed Kerensky’s charge as “an out-and-out lie” and then issued a call to the public himself: “Russian people! Our great homeland is dying! . . . I[,] General Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, declare to each and all that I personally desire nothing but to save Great Russia. I swear to lead the people through victory over the enemy to the Constituent Assembly, where it will decide its own destiny and choose its new political system.”10

  If this was Kerensky’s plan all along, it worked perfectly. Kornilov’s appeal was a brazen challenge to both the Provisional Government and the Supreme Soviet. Kerensky took the opportunity to order all other military commanders to disregard Kornilov’s orders, which they did. If there was a plot by Kornilov to seize power, it was a singularly small and inept one. There then followed three awkward days when, in order to hold the Russian army together, Kerensky had to keep in supreme command a man whom he had publicly accused of treason, because no one else was willing to take that brutal and thankless job.

  Finally, on September 14, General Alekseev—the man who had convinced Nicholas II to surrender his office—arrived at Mogilev to persuade Kornilov to do the same, and to assume command himself. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Kornilov meekly accepted his arrest—his wife had taken away his revolver for fear he might shoot himself.

  Kornilov’s coup, if ever there was one, was over, but the army had lost its one strong figure not tainted by the failed policies of the past, while Kerensky was now doubly discredited. First, there had been the stupendous failure of the July offensive; now there was the arrest of the commander in chief he himself had appointed.