1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  The time will come when your surrendered life will count.

  The time is near, when tyranny falls the people will rise, great and free!41

  The third order of business was choosing a new government, dubbed the Council of People’s Commissars. It was to serve as the new Provisional Government until the Constituent Assembly met. The commissars all had virtually the same posts as the old Provisional Government’s Cabinet, with one significant exception: the new post of chairman (not commissar) for nationality affairs.

  In short order, the Congress elected all Bolsheviks as commissars.

  Lenin was elected chairman. Trotsky took over foreign affairs; internal affairs went to Alexei Rykov, a friend of Kamenev’s and one of the original holdouts against the coup. A trio of lesser names—Antonov-Ovseyenko, Krylenko, and Dybenko—took over the war and navy slots, a sure sign that Lenin and Trotsky would exercise final authority over whatever decisions were made about the army and navy. Labor went to Alexander G. Shliapnikov, and Anatoly V. Lunacharsky became commissar of enlightenment.

  The newest post, chairman for nationality affairs, went to the man who had been largely behind the scenes during the coup of the day before, but who was Lenin’s trusted adviser on all matters relating to Russia’s ethnic minorities, the Georgian former theology student turned bank robber Joseph Stalin.

  That post marked the beginning of Stalin’s rise to power, a rise that would eventually eclipse and obliterate everyone else in the Bolshevik leadership with the exception of Lenin himself. In fact, of the fifteen original members of the Commissars’ Committee, twelve would later be executed or murdered on Stalin’s orders, including Leon Trotsky.

  The delegates in the room were wrong. The tyranny and the bloodshed were just beginning.

  12

  HINGE OF FATES

  The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come.

  —WOODROW WILSON, JANUARY 8, 1918

  CAMBRAI, NOVEMBER 20–NOVEMBER 30

  THAT NOVEMBER, RUSSIA wasn’t the only place witnessing a revolution.

  On September 20, Douglas Haig renewed his offensive along the Ypres Salient. The new man he had put in charge of the operation, Gen. Sir Herbert Plumer, one of the best and most innovative of Britain’s generals, made steady progress through October, until the weather turned again. On November 8, Haig’s chief of staff, Gen. Sir Launcelot Kiggell, paid a visit to the front for the first time. His car became stuck in the mud that Allied troops were trying to advance through, without success. “Good God,” he exclaimed, “did we really send men to fight in that?” Kiggell burst into tears. His driver merely remarked stoically, “It’s worse further up.”1

  The Passchendaele offensive ended that day. British forces had suffered a quarter million casualties, with 53,000 dead. The battle’s lasting monument was not the collapse of the German right flank (although the Germans had suffered horrific losses, especially in the last phase of the campaign), but the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, the largest in the world. It is the dismal monument to a three-year failed strategy for fighting a European land war.2

  That same day, the bigwigs in Rapallo had decided to create an Allied Supreme War Council to coordinate the rest of the war. Gen. Ferdinand Foch would be the chairman. Scholar and iconoclast, Foch had served as a private in the Franco-Prussian War and was France’s foremost advocate of the attack-no-matter-what doctrine that had opened the war in 1914, with disastrous results.

  That failed doctrine, however, had led in 1916 to an abrupt shift in Foch’s thinking. He saw clearly that trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns made conventional offensive strategies—waves of soldiers going over the top behind a steady barrage of artillery shells—obsolete. With Joffre and Nivelle advocating continuing the conventional offensive approach, Foch found his advice disregarded. Yet in the aftermath of the French army mutinies and the dismal failure of Britain’s Passchendaele offensive, Ferdinand Foch was suddenly the right man in the right place at the right hour to take supreme command of both armies.3

  As “generalissimo,” Foch sought a new way of thinking about offensive warfare to overcome the defense’s built-in edge. His moment came on November 20—just as Lenin and the new committee of commissars were trying to consolidate their rule and deciding how to approach Berlin with an offer to end the war.

  The moment came at Cambrai, fifty-five miles south of the Commonwealth graveyard at Passchendaele. On November 20, no fewer than 380 British tanks rolled forward from British lines without a sustained preliminary artillery bombardment. Tanks had been tried in the attacks in Passchendaele, but the thick mud simply bogged them down. The hard, chalky surfaces around Cambrai suited them much better. There was no need to send men ahead to cut the extensive lines of barbed wire while being exposed to machine-gun fire. The tanks simply rolled over the barbed wire without stopping, then rolled over the first German line of trenches, then the next, and then the next. By 9:00 a.m., they had advanced five miles, with columns of infantry following dutifully behind. A hole five miles wide and four miles deep had opened in the German lines—the breakthrough every general since 1914 had dreamed of—all at the cost of fifteen hundred British casualties, and resulting from the capture of ten thousand bewildered Germans and the expending of two hundred artillery pieces.

  This victory for British arms encouraged the government, for the first and only time in the war, to order church bells rung across London.4 The exhilaration, however, was short-lived. The unprecedented breakthrough meant there was no precedent for how to exploit it. Cavalry poured into the gap, including famous Indian army regiments such as Hodson’s Horse, where they faced steady slaughter from German machine guns as Ludendorff sped reinforcements to plug the gap.5

  By November 21, Ludendorff had four divisions holding the line and another five entering the sector. The British tanks were taking hits from German artillery and antitank ammunition—the first of its kind. Meanwhile, German airplanes regularly swooped in to pound and strafe British troops, the first example of air interdiction in warfare. On November 23, the attack stalled. A week later, twenty German divisions counterattacked. The tanks proved unable to provide any effective defense to the swarming, surging German infantry advancing under a combination barrage of high-explosive and gas shells. The British lost almost all the ground they had gained ten days before. Forty-four thousand British troops were dead or wounded, and there were fifty-three thousand German casualties. Another promising offensive had launched, and failed.6

  The failure of Cambrai was deeply disquieting—and not just because the tanks hadn’t made the definitive, decisive stroke their advocates had hoped for. German soldiers whom the British and French had captured included men from the 107th Division, which had recently been fighting in Russia. The Germans were transferring men from the Eastern to the Western Front. If Russia left the war altogether, as its new Bolshevik government was threatening, no fewer than forty new German divisions would be available to tip the balance in the west.7

  The Allies were going to need the Americans even more desperately than before.

  WASHINGTON

  BUT WHERE WERE the Americans?

  Since the summer, Allied planning had assumed there would be one million American soldiers on French soil as 1918 began.8 As November ended, however, the total was still barely 125,000 men, the effective equivalent of ten French or British infantry divisions. That might be a useful reserve, but it was hardly a force prepared to turn the balance on the battlefield. Besides, of those, barely half were ready for combat—and when American troops first went into the line on October 26, in a quiet French sector, their baptism of fire had been a disaster.9 In addition, the Americans had no logistical, supply, or transport organization. The entire American Expeditionary Force had fewer than thirty trucks. Instead, they had to beg, borrow, and, in some cases, steal the vehicles, horses, ammunition, and even guns they needed to maintain themselves as a fighting force.

  Meanwhil
e, President Wilson was largely oblivious to all these problems. His focus was still trying to get the Entente powers to embrace his globalist vision, and to give up on those terms of peace that conformed to their own petty national interests. That was not easy, as Colonel House discovered in a series of discussions with high-level British and French officials that fall. Both London and Paris wanted the dispatch of an American War Mission to Europe; this could help to coordinate U.S. and Allied strategy and the joint development of resources ranging from munitions to merchant shipping. Wilson, however, was strongly opposed to shifting the center of gravity for America’s share of the war from Washington to London and Paris. He was determined to maintain his independence, no matter how much confusion it might cause in the joint war effort—even regarding how and when American forces would be committed into action. It wasn’t until late October that Wilson yielded to the inevitable and allowed House and a team of military and civilian officials to head across the Atlantic to coordinate mobilization plans.10

  They arrived at Plymouth, England, in time to confront two disasters: first, the Italians’ defeat at Caporetto, and then the Bolsheviks’ coup and offer of a separate peace to Germany. House’s meeting with Lloyd George led in turn to two pressing demands from the British prime minister: first, to send as many American troops as possible as soon as possible, and second, to ship the six hundred thousand tons of supplies to Britain that Wilson had promised for that year. Conversations with French officials, including the new prime minister, Clemenceau, reiterated the same points.11 As for Russia, everyone was in despair over how to keep that original member of the Entente committed to fighting on when every signal from the new government in Petrograd indicated the opposite.

  But as the start of the first inter-Allied conference loomed, scheduled for December 1 in Paris, another issue raised its head, one that would be ultimately as important as what to do about Russia, although no one realized it at the time: whether to detach Austria from its German ally and bring it to a separate peace.

  VIENNA

  IN 1917, THE Austro-Hungarian Empire was a great polyglot ant heap of nations, ethnicities, and religions. It was the accretion of five centuries of conquests, marriages, and dynastic alliances. Germans (less than one-quarter of the empire’s population), Hungarians (one-fifth of the population), Czechs, Poles, Ruthenes (or Ukrainians), Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Italians, and Jews—what held them all together was loyalty to the ruling Habsburg dynasty, loyalty that, in many cases, dated back to the fifteenth century. Habsburg rule had survived the Reformation and multiple Turkish invasions; it had survived the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the revolutions of 1848. But it could not survive 1917 and the test of modern war, or the forces of nationalism the war unleashed.

  Austria had started the war in July 1914 in the hope of teaching recalcitrant Serbia a lesson. Instead, Russian and then German mobilization had pulled Austria-Hungary into the greatest war in European history, one for which it was totally unprepared.

  As late as 1903, Austrians spent more on beer and wine than, and as much on tobacco as, the government spent on defense. Austria spent less per capita on the military than either Russia or Italy.12 A massive military buildup followed until 1914, yet Austria still went to war with fewer infantry battalions than it had in 1866 (even though its population was now twice the size) and with some artillery dating back to 1861.

  The lack of preparation, and lack of enthusiasm for war on the part of Austria’s Slavic minorities, made itself felt almost from the start. By 1915, the empire’s armies in the east were in an extended state of collapse; within a year, its armies would require help from German formation in order to stand up to the Russians—or, a year later, the Italians.

  That same year, 1916, Emperor Franz Josef, the man who had held the empire together, died. He had been emperor since 1848, and no inhabitant of Austria-Hungary under the age of seventy could remember any other ruler. Franz Josef once told Theodore Roosevelt, “You see in me the last monarch of the old school.”13 With his death, his nephew Archduke Charles took the throne. Fifty-seven years his junior, Charles was honest, earnest, a man of honor and integrity—and therefore totally unfit to deal with the events that followed.

  The war had broken the empire’s economy. As early as May 1915, the capital, Vienna, saw its first food riots, as housewives attacked and then looted stores. By the autumn, the capital had run out of flour, potatoes, and animal fats.14 From that point on, the specter of starvation stalked a monarchy whose newspapers brought daily reports of fresh disasters from every front. As enthusiasm for war plummeted in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and every other major city in the empire, only Germany’s iron grip on its foundering ally kept Austria in the fight.

  By the spring of 1917, the misery wrought by hunger, inflation, and the breakdown of normal social life was even worse than in Germany, and had reached crisis proportions. That March, it forced Emperor Charles to put out the first secret peace feelers to the Allies, in the hope that peace might save his crumbling empire.

  The first instinct of the French and British was to do nothing. Neither was fighting Austria; on the contrary, they saw its continued collapse as a way to hamper, even cripple, their real foe, Germany, in the way that a wounded comrade carried on his back will burden a soldier trying to fight. Indeed, that was the chief reason they had put self-determination for the peoples of the Habsburg Empire on the list of war ends they had sent to President Wilson on January 10.15

  They also sensed that the death of Franz Josef had loosened whatever ties of loyalty millions of Hungarians, Czechs, and Croats might have felt for the empire—while the misery of war would make them desperate to seize their own destinies as free and independent nations, possibly even as allies of the Entente powers. If Franz Josef had bothered to ask for a separate peace, he might have had a more favorable hearing, but Charles, fearful of German retribution, refused to take a step that did not involve Berlin.

  The conscientious Charles did what he could. In May, he summoned the Reichsrat, the sham parliament once used by his predecessors to forestall nationalist movements in the empire. Now Charles offered generous concessions to those national groups like the Czechs and Slovaks, but they came too late. Everyone sensed the impending doom of the five-hundred-year-old Habsburg monarchy and waited breathlessly for its final collapse.

  Then, after dragging out their answer for several months, London and Paris finally gave Charles a thumbs-down. Now, with no options left but with America and Woodrow Wilson fully involved in the war, Charles decided to take his case to the Idealist-in-Chief, Wilson himself.

  This involved a series of secret soundings, first to the British and then to President Wilson. Some notes went into specific terms for a negotiated peace, including settling the claims to autonomy from Austria-Hungary’s various ethnic nationalities and France’s and Italy’s respective territorial claims against both Austria and Germany.

  Although discussions dragged on into the following year, it was obvious, as December wound down, that these talks were headed nowhere. Since Austria still refused to detach its fortunes from those of Germany, “all plans for peace negotiations with Austria were doomed to failure,” House noted later.16 For the last emperor of the Habsburgs, it meant the doom of his throne as well. Waves of civic disorder and strikes, even in Vienna, were now the norm. Any remaining central imperial authority had collapsed. All it would take for the entire ramshackle empire to fly apart would be one major incident.

  Still, as 1917 ended, it was common knowledge in and out of Austria-Hungary that Habsburg rule over central and southern Europe was coming to an end. But no one could have known that the tipping point would come not in Austria, or Hungary or Bohemia, but in a remote railway station in Siberia, near the Russian village of Chelyabinsk.

  PETROGRAD

  MEANWHILE, LENIN’S REVOLUTION was busy consolidating its grip outside Petrograd.

  It almost didn’t happen in Moscow, largely because
the Bolsheviks there were not as committed to the coup as their Petrograd brethren, and they allowed their main objective, the city’s Kremlin, to fall into the hands of troops still loyal to the government. On November 12 and 13, there was fierce street-to-street fighting, as loyalist and Bolshevik troops slugged it out for control of the fifteenth-century fortress. On November 15, however, Moscow’s mayor and its Committee of Public Safety ordered troops to lay down their arms, and handed over power to the Moscow Soviet’s Revolutionary Committee—which meant the Bolsheviks. From that point on, Moscow would become Lenin’s most secure stronghold after Petrograd.

  Elsewhere in Russia, the Bolshevik seizure of power had an easier time. Most local soviets were already dominated by their Bolshevik members, or had been intimidated into obedience. In some cases, the Bolsheviks formed coalitions with Left Socialist Revolutionary or even Menshevik allies, to proclaim the revolution; in others, they simply expelled any competitors and took over for themselves.17 In this way, city after city came under the sway of Lenin and the Council of People’s Commissars. By late November, they controlled most of Great Russia, the heart of the Russian Empire. Not bad for a political party that numbered only 23,000 members in February 1917; by that November, however, its ranks had swollen to between 600,000 and 700,000.

  Still, in a vast country of more than 100 million inhabitants, its position of power remained precarious, especially with Lenin’s chief rival, Alexander Kerensky, on the loose.

  And where was Kerensky? After leaving the Winter Palace and Petrograd, he had traveled to Pskov, headquarters of the Northern Front. There he had pleaded with troops to accompany him back to Petrograd, to put down the Bolshevik revolt while it was in its infancy. The only troops available, however, flatly refused; as it happened, they were the same men of the Third Cossack Corps whom Kerensky had accused of backing Kornilov’s coup. They hated Kerensky for casting this blot on their honor, which had led their commander to commit suicide. Forced to turn elsewhere for help, Kerensky drove off.18