1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  LONDON AND JERUSALEM

  THE FATE OF the war and, with it, of the world increasingly hinged on what happened in two capitals, one in Russia and the other in the United States. Yet before 1917 was out, one of the old powers managed to make one last contribution to the birth of the new world disorder—although largely as a result of Wilson’s inaction on the issue.

  The issue at stake was the fate of the Turkish Empire, the weakest and least populous of the Central powers, and the most polyglot and heterogeneous of all. Eighteen million Turks, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, and Armenians practicing fifteen different religions lived jammed together—in some places, like Jerusalem and Damascus, living together in the same city—as subjects of an empire stretching from the most eastern tip of Europe to the border of Iran and the southernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula on the Red Sea. This was the shrunken remnant of an Ottoman territory that just thirty years earlier had extended across much of the Balkans and North Africa, and an empire that most diplomats had long designated as “the sick man of Europe.”

  By 1914, that empire was barely on life support. Germany’s alliance with Turkey that year had been an afterthought by Berlin, done on the fly in the opening months of the war as a way to discomfit the British in the eastern Mediterranean—and with the Gallipoli debacle, a useful diversion of British and French resources in the second year of war.

  The Allies had taken Turkey much more seriously. A series of secret treaties had divided up Turkish territory among the Entente powers, in the likely event that the pressure of modern war collapsed Ottoman rule—the same treaties Leon Trotsky had exposed to the world.44 Yet while the French waited for the spoils of their eventual victory in the Middle East, the British took a more active role. A British army moved into Mesopotamia, where the fighting went badly against them at first but then improved; a British agent named T. E. Lawrence co-opted the revolt against Ottoman rule begun by Arab Bedouin tribes and, in July 1917, captured the Turkish fortress at Aqaba, on the Red Sea—winning worldwide celebrity as Lawrence of Arabia.

  Nonetheless, there was a feeling in Whitehall that something else had to be done to speed the collapse of the Turkish war effort, something that would coincide with the new emphasis on national self-determination—something, indeed, that would appeal to Woodrow Wilson’s altruistic side but that would also forestall Lenin’s abandonment of any Russian claims to Constantinople and the Black Sea straits, which would have made Britain’s takeover of the Turkish Middle East look like unilateral imperialism.

  What the Foreign Office found was the Zionist cause. Since 1914, Jewish Zionist nationalists had been urging both the United States and Britain to act as their protector.45 Then the war brought a sudden change of allegiance. The Zionist movement, headquartered in Germany, declared itself neutral. Jewish communities in the United States and in the rest of Europe were delighted when German armies drove the czar’s troops out of western Poland, promising an end to a regime of brutal pogroms. Even the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk seemed to promise a new era of liberation for Polish as well as Russian Jews under a German dispensation.

  It was to head off this pro-German Jewish sentiment that, in August 1917, the British Foreign Office asked a group of Zionist intellectuals living in London and led by Chaim Weizmann to draft a declaration in support of a Jewish national home in Palestine, a strategically crucial part of the Turkish Empire.

  There were other reasons to endorse Jewish nationalism besides undermining Turkish rule. The members of the British Cabinet thought they could read the influence of American Jews on their national politics, including Jewish support for Woodrow Wilson, who was sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Winning over American Jews, the Cabinet believed, would help bring Wilson along in the war effort—just as winning over Russian Jews would weaken their support for the Bolshevik government.

  It was a complicated political calculation, which Wilson almost upset that August when he proved uninterested in supporting the push for a Jewish homeland. The British Cabinet pulled back; it was not until October that the issue came up again, with Foreign Secretary Balfour penning a brief declaration announcing Britain’s support for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. The Cabinet approved, and on November 2, 1917, the declaration was forwarded to Lord Rothschild, the presumed leader of Anglo Jewry, for his approval.46

  Then, on December 9, events on the ground took a hand in forcing a British decision. A British army marched into Jerusalem, ending Muslim control of the city for the first time since the Crusades. This also signaled the demise of Turkish rule in the Middle East. What would take its place? The Balfour Declaration, which had been largely aspirational, was now positioned to become reality. Lloyd George, with his biblical upbringing, was stirred by the capture of Jerusalem by British general Edmund Allenby—the man who had earlier taken Vimy Ridge. “The capture of Jerusalem has made a most profound impression throughout the world,” Lloyd George told a jubilant House of Commons on December 20. “Mesopotamia and Palestine, which have been the cradle and the shrine of civilization, will remain [so] for many ages to come.”47

  The fall of Jerusalem meant nothing to the Germans, but to the Turkish government it was nothing less than catastrophe. The ruler in Constantinople had been exposed as impotent to resist the forces of the modern world; the end of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Turkey were already appearing on the horizon. At the same time, it opened a new chapter in the history of British rule in the Near East, one that would be marked not by triumph but by constant pain and tribulation.

  As for the eastern Mediterranean, a way of life that had prevailed under Muslim rulers for more than a thousand years—with a brief interruption during the Crusades—was coming to an end. Now instead of living side by side in subjection to a distant imperial government, Arab and Jew would begin to seek their own destinies as peoples in the new age of national self-determination—destinies that more and more brought them into conflict.

  Taken together, the Balfour Declaration and the collapse of Ottoman rule marked the beginning of an entirely new Middle East, the one we are still living with today. They are the last two events of 1917 that contributed directly to the new world disorder Lenin and Wilson were setting in motion.

  13

  1918: WAR AND PEACE AND WAR AGAIN

  Our only choice now is civil war . . . Long live civil war!

  —LEON TROTSKY, APRIL 1918

  PETROGRAD, JANUARY–MARCH

  T HE SOVIET REGIME has acted in the way all revolutionary proletariats should act; it has made a clean break with bourgeois justice, which is an instrument of the oppressive classes.” This was Lenin speaking to a workers’ assembly in Petrograd in early January 1918. This was a self-confident Lenin who now bestrode the stage, gesticulating and glancing fiercely from left to right as the workers stared, hanging on his every word.

  Lenin had good reason to feel confident. Barely two months after seizing power, the Bolsheviks now controlled most of the north and center of Russia as far as mid-Volga, in addition to cities farther south, such as Baku, in the Caucasus—the heart of Russia’s oil industry, still one of the largest in the world—and Tashkent, in central Asia.1

  The possibility that former prime minister Kerensky might rally Russian resistance to the new regime had evaporated almost overnight. The only people to take up arms against Lenin’s government were a tiny force of three thousand volunteers under the command of Generals Kornilov and Alekseev, in Cossack territory along the Don. (The Cossacks were freeholder farmers, and rightly feared that the Bolsheviks would strip them of their landholdings.)

  Nonetheless, large stretches of rural Russia were still outside Lenin’s control. Those areas were crucial to the Bolsheviks’ promise of bread for Russia’s hungry urban masses. Likewise, sections of Russian urban society, ranging from offices and factories to schools and universities, still eluded Lenin’s increasingly totalitarian grasp. Bringing both those groups to heel, eliminating any possible alternativ
e to Bolshevik rule: that would be Lenin’s agenda now.

  “Soldiers and workers must understand that no one will help them unless they help themselves,” Lenin continued, his head and eyes darting from one side of the crowd to the other. “If the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to anything . . . For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they deserve—a bullet in the head—we will not get anywhere at all!”2 Trotsky had delivered a similar warning to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets back on December 14, 1917: “In less than a month, terror is going to take extremely violent forms, just as it did during the French Revolution.” A bullet in the head; a “revolutionary terror of the masses”—both Lenin and Trotsky would make those promises come horrifyingly true.

  Years later, apologists for Lenin and Trotsky would insist that the terrible things that would happen to Communist Russia (the gulags, the Great Purge, the Great Famine) were really all the fault of Comrade Joseph Stalin. If Lenin or Trotsky had been able to stay in charge, goes the argument, things would have turned out differently.

  In fact, it was Lenin and Trotsky who set up the totalitarian apparatus Stalin would use to impose his one-man rule—and they knew exactly what it would be used to do. They, not Stalin, were the architects of the Red Terror, and the “war communism” that followed. It was Lenin, not Stalin, who turned his utopian dream of a new Communist global order into a living nightmare.

  One of his tools for accomplishing this goal was the Cheka, under Felix (Feliks) Dzerzhinsky. Lenin knew perfectly well that with the Cheka, he had spawned the Bolshevik version of the Okhrana, the czarist secret police. As he told his secretary, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, he needed to find “our own Fouquier-Tinville, to combat the counterrevolutionary rabble”—referring to Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, the dreaded head of the French police during the Reign of Terror. He had no doubts about the man he chose to head it. “It’s Feliks who spent the most time behind bars of the czarist prisons” of all the Bolsheviks, Lenin had said with a grim smile, “and who had the most contact with the Okhrana. He knows what he’s doing!”

  So he did—in his first speech as head of the “commission,” Dzerzhinsky spelled out his agenda for the war against counterrevolution: “Do not imagine, comrades, that I am simply looking for a revolutionary form of justice. We have no concern about justice at this hour! We are at war, on the front where the enemy is advancing, and the fight is to the death.”3

  All this at a time when the Bolsheviks faced no meaningful opposition. Nonetheless, the combination of orchestrated street violence and vigilante justice by Red Guards, beginning in January 1918, in which individuals branded as “bourgeois” or “saboteurs” were summarily shot or beaten to death, and the deployment of Dzerzhinsky’s “hard men without pity” to root out suspected counterrevolutionaries (meaning anyone who resisted or even doubted the Bolshevik program) defined the future contours of Soviet revolutionary terror.

  Yet the single most important, immediate step for eliminating any alternative to Lenin’s regime was breaking the Constituent Assembly. The Assembly was slated to meet at long last on January 18, 1918. The Bolshevik campaign against Russia’s first truly representative institution went all the way back to the elections in November 1917 when, on the opening day of the Petrograd election, armed mobs smashed the editorial offices of the conservative Kadet newspaper, and the Constitutional Democratic Party found itself outlawed and its leading members described by Lenin as “leaders of the civil war against the Revolution.”4

  Then, on the day after Christmas 1917, Lenin had published a crucial article in Pravda entitled “Theses on the Constituent Assembly.” It was, as historian Richard Pipes puts it, “a death sentence on the Assembly.” Lenin made it clear that anyone who still supported the Constituent Assembly “signifies betrayal of the cause of the proletariat and a transition to the point of view of the bourgeoisie.” In short, support of the Constituent Assembly was tantamount to treason.

  Yet there were still those who had the courage to press ahead—even though, on the eve of its convocation, the Central Executive Committee officially adopted a resolution by Comrade Zinoviev that the slogan “All power to the Constituent Assembly” actually meant “Down with the Soviets.” The day the meeting opened, two hundred deputies threaded their way through a dense row of hostile Red Guards, Bolshevik-led soldiers, and demonstrators to the Tauride Palace, where “the entire square of Tauride Palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, field kitchens . . . Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell-mell.”5

  Meanwhile, Lenin himself appeared at the head of a military column, as if the 463 deputies and their families posed a physical threat to the government. In fact, Lenin personally supervised what happened over the next nine hours. Despite their puny numbers and the massive propaganda campaign being waged against them, he knew the members of the Constituent Assembly represented the most serious political challenge yet to the legitimacy of his regime—especially since the Bolsheviks had endorsed it themselves just before their coup. He was “excited and pale as a corpse,” his secretary remembered. “In this extreme white paleness of his face and neck, his head appeared even larger, his eyes were distended and aflame, burning with a steady fire.”6

  Deputies were frisked and searched before being allowed to enter the Tauride. It was not until the streets around the palace were cleared of any pro–Constituent Assembly demonstrators and the Bolsheviks were firmly in control that Lenin permitted the Assembly to begin. Four hundred sixty-three deputies, of whom 136 were Bolsheviks, officially opened proceedings in the first steps toward creating a constitution for the Russian republic.

  Within minutes, the Bolsheviks gutted the entire program with a simple but brilliant act of subterfuge. A Bolshevik-sponsored resolution to renounce the Constituent Assembly’s legislative powers was voted upon and defeated, with every Bolshevik deputy voting in favor. The Bolsheviks then staged a walkout, making it appear that Lenin’s warning had been correct: the Assembly was a counterrevolutionary scheme to snatch power away from the soviets and their official representatives, the Central Executive Committee and Lenin.

  With the Bolsheviks gone, the deputies at least could get some business done. They elected Viktor Chernov, the Socialist Revolutionary leader, as their president. Despite continuing Red intimidation and catcalls, with Lenin himself glowering down from the balcony, one deputy after another spoke about his hope of resurrecting the liberal-democratic process that had been derailed since November 1917 and warned that if the Bolsheviks destroyed the Constituent Assembly, the result would almost certainly be civil war.

  The deputies voted for an egalitarian land reform plan, the dream of agrarian reformers for more than a century. Then, as the doors closed that evening, Viktor Chernov solemnly proclaimed the birth of the “Russian Democratic Federated Republic.”

  Those doors would never reopen. Instead, the next morning, armed Red Guards kept them locked as Pravda denounced Chernov and the other deputies in banner headlines: “THE HIRELINGS OF BANKERS, CAPITALISTS, AND LANDLORDS” and “SLAVES OF THE AMERICAN DOLLAR.” That same morning, the Central Executive Committee issued its own resolution permanently dissolving the Constituent Assembly.7

  The last hope for a government of the Russian people, by the Russian people, and for the Russian people was dead. It was killed as much by the indifference of Wilson and the Allies as by the machinations of Lenin and his supporters. Lenin, for one, was elated, and relieved. To have attended even one meeting of the Constituent Assembly, he wrote afterward, was like being in a nightmare. “It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odor of the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty . . . phrases, to hear Chernov and Tsereteli, was simply intolerable.” Even worse, “It was as though history had accidentally . . . turned its clock back, and January 1918 became May or June 1917!”8

  It was not the past but the future that Lenin w
as looking toward, and there, the company of corpses would soon be real enough. On the twenty-first, he summoned the Third Congress of Soviets, this one even tamer than the last—94 percent of the seats were reserved for the Bolsheviks and their Left Socialist Revolutionary allies—which duly proclaimed that the official government was now “the Federation of Soviet Republics,” and Russia itself the “Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.” Trotsky and Lenin both made it clear that the new nation had been born on the bones of the Constituent Assembly.

  “We have trodden underfoot the principles of Democracy for the sake of the loftier principles of Social Revolution,” Trotsky said. “We are against oppression, but we will not yield our power without a ruthless struggle.”

  Lenin was grimmer and more forthright. “Yes, we are oppressors,” he said. Just how true that was, the Russian people would soon find out.9

  Yet, even now, Lenin sensed that his position was still precarious. The cities were still starving; transportation and communications were largely broken down, except for what the government could confiscate for itself. The next month, February, brought a fresh emergency. On the eleventh, the Germans, fed up with the stalled discussions at Brest-Litovsk, resumed their offensive. Lenin’s regime officially declared the nation in danger and announced that “all enemy agents, speculators, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, and German spies will be shot on sight”—the official beginning of the Red Terror. That week also saw the creation of the Red Army to defend the regime, with Trotsky named as its commander in chief.