1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Still, the key to securing the regime was a final peace with Germany. And here everything hinged on what was happening in Brest-Litovsk.

  It was not until March 3, after two and a half months of negotiation, that a final treaty was signed between Russia and the Central powers. For any Russian patriot, its terms were catastrophic. At one stroke of a pen, the treaty stripped away the Romanov dynasty’s western conquests for the last two hundred years. The Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine—all gone. A new map of eastern Europe had taken shape, one that bears a striking resemblance to the present map.

  What had taken so long? At first, the talks at Brest-Litovsk had gone remarkably well. Both sides, for example, had agreed to uphold the original Petrograd formula for peace (self-determination, no annexations, no indemnities) that had underpinned the armistice. Then, on Christmas Day, they issued a joint communiqué announcing a further agreement on the withdrawal of all forces from contested regions in Russia. It really did seem to signal an end to hostilities in the east. Huge crowds began to assemble in the streets of Vienna in anticipation.10

  Statesmen and diplomats in Paris, London, and Washington felt the same anticipation, but with a sense of dread rather than hope. Having Russia in the war had been a disappointment, even a burden, to its Allies, but it was better than having to face all Germany’s armed might. Even Wilson’s praise of the Bolsheviks’ peace efforts in his Fourteen Points speech was based on his expectation that he could dissuade them from signing a separate peace by offering them a fair and just comprehensive one.

  In January, however, things began to stall. The Russians assumed that by the Christmas agreement, Germany had agreed to pull out from all parts of the former Russian Empire, including the Baltics and Ukraine. The Germans had no such intention. In their mind, Lenin’s December 15 declaration giving those regions the right of self-determination meant that these territories no longer belonged to Russia. Besides, the Germans worried that if the Bolsheviks realized the true extent of the territories they were surrendering (representing one-quarter of Russia’s population and one-third of its agricultural base), they would disavow the entire process, and any agreement would be a dead letter.

  This was particularly true for the Ukraine. Its rich grain-producing lands would be essential for the Bolsheviks to feed Russia’s hungry masses, and its industries produced 75 percent of Russia’s iron and 60 percent of its steel. That would be just as vital for any postwar recovery, collectivized or not. A government based in Kiev that was independent of Petrograd could well spell the end of Lenin’s promised bread, and of the future of the Russian economy. At the same time, a Kiev-based government dependent on Germany and German arms for survival could easily supply the same needs for the German Reich.

  Visionaries in Berlin and at the bargaining table could see the outline of a future German hegemony extending across eastern Europe and the Baltic, with tame governments headquartered in Kiev, Warsaw, Riga, and the other national capitals providing Germany with food, cheap labor, Baltic naval bases, and opportunities for German colonial settlement.11

  A later generation in Germany would have a term for this vision: Lebensraum. And so, at the negotiating table at Brest-Litovsk a dream of German eastern domination, even an eastern empire, took shape, one that an Austrian-born corporal currently serving in the army would turn into a race-based vision of his own when he became chancellor just fifteen years later—and which he, Adolf Hitler, would generate a new world war to achieve.

  For the time being, however, the Germans’ plans were frustrated by the Russians’ refusal to sign the final document. That refusal solidified at the end of January with the arrival of a new chief negotiator, Leon Trotsky.

  Trotsky stalled day after day by launching philosophical discussions with the German negotiators. He hectored them with arguments about the origins of political power; what did “the will of the people” really mean? At one point, he said that the violence the Bolshevik regime was applying to its opponents was no different from the violence that capitalist governments used to oppress their working class in order to stay in power. It was the kind of specious moral equivalence that intellectuals would use when comparing the Soviet Union with its democratic foes for the next seven decades.12 “The violence is supported by millions of workers and peasants and that is directed against a minority which seeks to keep the people in servitude, this violence is a holy and historically progressive violence.”

  The Kaiser himself wrote in the margin of the transcript of the discussion, “For us the opposite!”13

  Yet Trotsky was doing more than conducting a seminar on Marxist dialectic. He was waiting for the workers’ revolution to take hold in Germany and Austria; then there would be no need to sign a peace treaty. And indeed, a wave of strikes did hit Vienna and then Germany in January—but then they died away. Finally, on February 10, with Lenin’s approval, Trotsky played his last card: the Russian government would cease fighting but would sign no treaty. “No war, no peace.” The Germans lost all patience and declared the armistice over. German troops resumed their march eastward. Now there really was nothing between them and the capital except open space.

  A frustrated Trotsky returned to Petrograd, where the government was preparing to evacuate to Moscow as the German army moved ever closer. Most of the Central Committee members wanted to stand and fight, but there was no Russian army anymore to fight. “They have voted with their feet by running away,” Lenin said sardonically.14 The government was in worse shape than Kerensky’s when faced with the same situation. In sheer desperation, Trotsky turned to Russia’s erstwhile allies, the Entente powers. What could they do to help Russia stand against the Germans?

  That startling request put London and Paris in a very tough spot. Neither they nor Washington had recognized the Bolshevik government, and they weren’t about to recognize it. They had plenty to be sore about. On February 3, the Central Executive Committee, at Lenin’s urging, had repudiated the entirety of Russia’s foreign debt, from both the war and before the war: almost nine billion dollars, of which nearly four billion had been formally guaranteed by the French and British governments. An apoplectic London denounced the move as unprecedented, an attack on “the very foundations of international law.” Lenin shrugged it off as money owed by one capitalist government to others, a debt that had been “long since redeemed” by the blood of the Russian people.15

  Nonetheless, the Allies were willing at least to consider helping out the Bolsheviks at the last minute. The problem was that they had no troops to send; they needed every soldier to meet the massive German offensive in the west that they knew was coming. When they offered to send Japanese troops, who were close by and could land at Vladivostok, Trotsky and Lenin recoiled as if the Allies had offered to sell them Liberty Bonds. The prospect of the Japanese occupying Vladivostok and maritime Siberia was, if anything, even worse than the thought of being overrun by the Germans.

  There was no alternative, Lenin realized, but peace at any price. Bolshevik delegates returned to Brest-Litovsk and signed the formal treaty without even reading it. Lenin still had a fight on his hands, though—first, with his fellow Bolsheviks and, then, in the Third Congress of Soviets. On March 7, 1918, he forced the treaty through a deeply reluctant Congress of the Bolshevik Party. Russia had never lost a war before; even now, there were Bolsheviks who were not willing to start a precedent. (One of them, interestingly, was Trotsky, who abstained from the final vote.)

  “The revolution is not a pleasure trip!” Lenin bellowed. “The path of revolution leads over thorns and briars. Wade up to the knees in filth, if need be, crawling on our bellies through dirt and dung to communism, then in this fight we will win.” He had made this speech on February 23, when the Bolshevik Committee had to accede to new German demands at Brest-Litovsk. But the same arguments applied now, even as German planes were dropping bombs on Petrograd.16

  On March 14, the government moved the capital to Moscow, where it remains today. From the Kr
emlin, Lenin used all the leverage at his disposal to jam the treaty through the Russian Congress of Soviets. He called on Russia “to size up in full, to the very bottom, the abyss of defeat, partition, enslavement, and humiliation into which we have been thrown”—in other words, by the czarist and then the Provisional Government. Once reconstruction was complete, he argued, Russia would “arise anew from enslavement to independence.” In the meantime, ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the only option.

  The Bolsheviks voted yes, not surprisingly, but the Left Socialist Revolutionaries voted strongly no, while Left Communists (another far-left splinter group) abstained and walked out. The battle lines of a future civil war were drawn over Brest-Litovsk. These were not simply Bolshevik Reds versus Czarist Whites, but Russian patriots versus those whom they saw as traitors to Mother Russia and cat’s-paws of Prussian militarism, namely Lenin and his Bolsheviks.

  Now the diplomatic ball passed into the Germans’ court. On March 17, a delegation of German landowners from Latvia formally asked the Kaiser to become their archduke. The unveiling of a future German Empire in the east had begun. Five days later, the Reichstag reluctantly signed on to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty—reluctantly because the advocates of a larger, comprehensive peace saw prospects for such a peace vanishing with a bilateral treaty with Russia. Conservatives were pleased. Gustav Stresemann said scornfully, “I do not believe in Wilson’s universal League of Nations; I believe that after the conclusion of peace [with Russia] it will burst like a soap bubble.”17 Just six months later, he would have reason to regret that statement. In the meantime, on March 22, the Reichstag approved the treaty, while the entire Social Democratic Party, once keen supporters of Germany’s war effort, abstained.

  Not that it mattered. On the day before, March 21, the greatest offensive of the war had begun.

  PARIS AND NORTHEAST FRANCE, MARCH 21–JULY 15

  ON THE TWENTY-FIRST, the predawn sky lit up over a fifty-mile front as six thousand German guns, the biggest artillery concentration of the entire war, poured out a bombardment of shrapnel, high explosives, and chemical weapons. The early morning mist turned green with phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas.

  A young German lieutenant remembered the moment when his men waited to attack. “The decisive battle, the last charge, was here,” Ernst Jünger would write. “Here the fate of nations would be decided, what was at stake was the fate of the world. I sensed the weight of the hour, and I think everyone felt the individual in them dissolve, and fear depart.”18

  Then, at 9:40 precisely, seventy-six German divisions, many of them fresh from victory over Russia on the Eastern Front, erupted from their trenches and poured out toward the Allied lines between La Bassée, France, in the south of the front, and Diksmuide, Belgium, in the north, where the British Fifth Army had only twenty-eight divisions. Only an hour after the attack began, the Germans had opened a chasm almost twelve miles wide in the British lines; by noon, they had reached the Fifth Army’s main battle line, where opposition was fierce but increasingly desperate. That afternoon, resistance all but collapsed. In a single day, the war in the west had taken a dangerous new turn.19

  This was a very different kind of offensive from its many predecessors. The tens of thousands of German soldiers going over the top had all been trained in the quick-infiltration tactics pioneered the year before by young officers such as Erwin Rommel and regularized, in a pamphlet published on New Year’s Day 1918 with the title The Attack in Position Warfare, by a captain on Ludendorff’s staff named Hermann Geyer. Backed by artillery-fire control perfected on the Eastern Front and interdiction from the air by hundreds of planes at a time—another first for the German army—the German infantrymen practiced a new kind of tactic, one of fast infiltration followed by teams of more heavily equipped troops bringing up light artillery to hold and extend each break in the enemy lines. The infantrymen also had a new name, Stosstruppen, or “Stormtroopers,” the fighting men of the future.

  Behind them was also a massive mobilization effort, which Ludendorff had code-named “the Amerika program.” The idea was to turn out as many airplanes, machine guns, tanks, and artillery pieces and shells as possible, and to move men and equipment from the Eastern Front to the Western—all in order to hit the Allies before the American industrial production behemoth could counterbalance German strength in equipment and numbers. In the end, Ludendorff was wrong. America’s industrial mobilization was running too slowly to affect the outcome of the war. When U.S. Army captain Eddie Rickenbacker made his first solo flight over German lines that March, he would be flying a French, not an American, plane. Still, the presence of the United States in the strategic balance was already affecting how not just the Allies thought about how to fight a major land war but the enemy as well.20

  Over the next four days, Germany’s Stormtroopers opened a hole forty miles wide and forty miles deep. The swift advance was pushing the British to the brink of collapse, and with them, the entire Allied cause. An emergency meeting was held at Doullens, near Amiens—once the anchor of the Allied rear but now only twenty miles from the German spearhead. It was attended by France’s president and prime minister and leading British and French generals. When the conversation paused, the participants could hear the German guns in the distance.21 To some at the table, the rumble must have sounded like the crack of doom. It was the worst crisis France and Britain had faced since the initial German attack in 1914.

  This time, however, the Allies had the Americans with them. There were not the droves of men, ammunition, and equipment they had counted on when Woodrow Wilson sent the United States into war almost a year earlier, but there were a quarter million fresh American troops, with more on the way. By the end of April, there would be nearly half a million22—not enough to turn the war around, perhaps, but enough to help Foch, Pétain, and Haig stem the German tide and, when the opportunity came, begin to reverse it.

  In fact, the German tide was already ebbing. For Ludendorff’s men, the same old problem had reasserted itself. An army on the attack, no matter how successful, depended on a single axis of advance. An army on the defensive could quickly move troops from a variety of points to stem any breakthrough. Now this happened again. By April 10, the Germans had forced the British to evacuate Messines, the scene of Britain’s great success in June 1917. On April 11, they took Armentières. British general Douglas Haig gave a special order to his beleaguered men: “There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.”23

  Yet two days later, a relieved Ferdinand Foch told Haig that the German offensive had spent itself. Foch was right. Exhaustion had set in among the German ranks; discipline was breaking down as starving soldiers scrambled for food and other supplies. As April ended, the entire offensive had stalled.

  Then Ludendorff regrouped, recovered, and, on May 27, launched the last massive offensive of the war. That day, fourteen German divisions broke through on the Aisne River, where the Nivelle Offensive had failed a year earlier, and advanced ten miles in one day, the biggest single move since the frantic days of August 1914. By June, Paris was being threatened. A massive German gun nicknamed Big Bertha rained shells on the helpless populace from a distance of twenty-three miles. If Paris fell, Allied commanders knew, the war would be all but over.

  But once again, Ludendorff’s offensive ran out of steam. The French commander in chief, Ferdinand Foch, was able to commit his reserves, including the Americans. Pershing had hoped that he would be able to operate American forces independently, as the British army had done. But the crisis left him and Wilson no choice but to submit the American Expeditionary Force to Foch’s command. Very soon, far from cracking the front wide open, the Germans found they had put themselves into a cul-de-sac. Once the front stabilized, it would simply be a matter of the Allies closing the bag around an
exhausted and disorganized German army.

  So, Ludendorff and the German High Command braced themselves for one final big push with no fewer than fifty-two divisions. It was to take place to the north and west of Reims, the burial place of French kings since Clovis. They sprang the attack on July 15. This time, the Allied command knew it was coming, and had American divisions in the line to blunt the spearhead. German gains were minimal. When French and British forces moved forward to try to snap off the salient, the Germans sullenly pulled back across the Marne. Paris was safe, and now, for the very first time, the Allies under Ferdinand Foch could put together a joint strategy to break the German army once and for all.

  Before they could, though, all attention had swiveled eastward, to a remote corner of Siberia where the future of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the future of Central Europe, was suddenly in doubt.

  VLADIVOSTOK AND WASHINGTON, APRIL–JULY

  IT WAS ALEXANDER Kerensky’s final blow to the Bolshevik regime—an unexpected blow but one that brought Lenin’s regime to the very brink of collapse. In August 1917, in order to shore up Russia’s sagging front, Kerensky had allowed Czech nationalist activist Tomáš Masaryk to raise a volunteer army drawing on prisoners of war from the ethnic minorities of Austria-Hungary who wanted freedom from the Habsburg monarchy. The result was the Czech Legion, a 47,000-strong force made up of Czechs and Slovaks. In September they were rushed to fight the Germans at the front, where they served with matchless courage and determination.

  Then came the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The Bolshevik regime had no more use for the Czech Legion and took steps to repatriate them. This made the Czech legionnaires uneasy. The Bolshevik threat to take away their weapons, leaving them defenseless in a foreign land, was bad enough. But now they were to be grouped together with all the other Austrian POWs (many of whom saw the Czech Legion as traitors) for shipment back to Austria-Hungary.