1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  As for the assassin, she was soon caught, and faced a five-hour interrogation by the Cheka. It turned out her name was Fanya (“Fannie”) Kaplan and she was an anarchist. Ironically, she had served a long sentence in Siberia before the war for trying to kill a czarist official. In her mind, Lenin represented the same kind of tyranny. “I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor,” she told her interrogators. “By living long he postpones the idea of socialism for decades to come.” She expressed sympathy for the People’s Army of Komuch, a thirty-strong force of anti-Bolshevik troops allied with the Czech Legion, and said she supported an alliance with Britain and France against the Germans. But she also swore that she’d acted alone, without accomplices, and she refused to say where she’d gotten the gun.15

  On September 3, she was taken out to a courtyard adjoining the Kremlin and unceremoniously shot.

  All at once, the failed assassination attempt made even Lenin’s closest followers begin to see him in a new, almost messianic light: as the intrepid leader miraculously spared death to carry forward the revolution. “It was Fannie Kaplan’s shots,” writes historian Richard Pipes, “that opened the floodgates of Leninist hagiography . . . It was as if God Himself intended Lenin to live and his cause to triumph.” The references to God were not accidental. Zinoviev began to describe Lenin as “apostle of world Communism” and “leader by the grace of God.”16 In fact, that September marked the start of a Lenin cult of personality that would spread with religious fervor and imagery for the next four years, and culminate in Lenin’s immortal enshrinement in a tomb on Red Square.

  As for the still-living Lenin, doctors advised him to take rest and quiet away from Moscow. They found a mansion near Gorky, where he spent September recuperating, reading, and writing. The literary fruit of his convalescence was Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, a tedious diatribe against an obscure German Marxist theorist that contains only one memorable phrase: “Dictatorship is the power relying upon force unbound by any laws.”17 That was precisely the kind of unbridled dictatorship of the proletariat Lenin intended to impose on the rest of Russia from that point on.

  He returned to Moscow on October 27, and attended his first meeting of the Central Committee two days later. The long-term impact of the assassination attempt was to unleash a mass purge of enemies of the revolution, real and imagined, later to be known as the Red Terror. For the time being, however, Lenin’s most urgent concern was dealing with the White insurgency before it could destroy him and the Soviet regime.

  Like Wilson, Lenin knew he was no war leader. As with Wilson, his strength lay in inspiring speeches, a grand utopian vision, and a ruthless brushing aside of objections or of those who opposed him, a power struggle in which any scruple gave way to expediency. Therefore, the devising of a military strategy and organizing an army were tasks he was happy to leave to Trotsky. In the course of the war that followed, even in its darkest hours, when Moscow itself might fall, he never visited the troops at the front or sat with his generals to learn how they were going to prevent the regime from collapsing.

  Instead, he remained focused on the political organization of the Bolshevik, now Soviet, regime. One of the steps was to split the Central Executive Committee into two subcommittees: the Organizational Bureau, or Orgburo; and the Political Bureau, known forever after as the Politburo. Set up in January 1919, the Politburo became the true wielder of power in the new Soviet state. All the other committees and organizations, including the Central Committee, now danced to the commands of the Politburo and its most powerful figure, who was unchallengeably Lenin.18

  Yet Lenin’s chief political strategy in those crucial winter months of 1918–19 was to wait—wait for the world revolution to catch up with events in Russia; wait for the inevitable workers’ revolts to smash the Western imperialists and consign his enemies to the ash heap of history, as Marx himself would have put it.

  He did not have to wait long. On New Year’s Day 1919, two German Marxist organizers, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, formed the first German Communist Party, and on January 5, they attempted to seize control of Berlin by force. For ten days, the German capital was convulsed by fighting in the streets, as German troops had to blast their way into the Reich Chancellery.19

  Then, as suddenly as it started, the Communist revolt was stamped out, and Liebknecht and Luxemburg were brutally killed. A week later, Germans went to the polls to cast their vote for a new Constituent Assembly. Eighty-three percent of German adults, men and women, cast their votes—but not for revolution. They threw their support behind the Social Democratic Party, now the standard-bearer of German liberal democracy. Germany’s right wing, heirs to Bismarck and Bethmann-Hollweg, netted barely 15 percent.20 The new German republic’s course was set toward constitutional democracy. Unlike in Russia, no German Lenin arose to grab the political controls and drag the nation down the Communist path, and no Trotsky to turn revolutionary rhetoric into military action.

  Instead, communism in Marx’s homeland died an ignoble and unceremonious death. There would be a brief flicker of the Leninist spirit in March, when extremists seized control of Munich and announced a Soviet Republic, and a bigger one in Hungary that month, when a former Hungarian POW of the Russians turned Communist organizer named Béla Kun grabbed precarious power in Budapest. Kun raised his own Red Army and set off to spread the revolution into neighboring Romania; he even hoped eventually to link up with Trotsky’s Red Army. Kun’s terror squads, nicknamed “Lenin’s boys,” roamed the streets of Budapest murdering anyone identified as a counterrevolutionary, while Kun ordered the arrest of five thousand Hungarian Jews as symbols of capitalism, confiscated their property, and threw them out of Hungary.

  Then the Béla Kun nightmare soon came to an abrupt end. Romanian troops soundly crushed Kun’s forces in July, and he fled the Hungarian capital on August 1.

  His Soviet Republic had lasted exactly 133 days. German authorities had restored order in Munich long before, so even though Lenin had enough hope to call the first Communist International in Moscow that March, to oversee the coming world workers’ revolution, after a few shots, Kun’s revolution died with barely a whimper.21

  If the Bolshevik regime was going to survive, then, it was going to have to rely on its own resources. By June 1919, those resources looked precariously slim. In the first two months of the year, White forces had driven the Red Army out of Latvia and Estonia. On March 13, Admiral Kolchak’s forces retook Ufa and pushed steadily westward, until the Red Army, under its ablest commander, Gen. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, checked its advance and recaptured most of the lost territory.

  More serious was the White drive up from the south, under General Denikin, whose soldiers expelled Red troops from the Crimea and Odessa region. By mid-June, the Whites were in control of Kharkov, Belgorod, and Tsaritsyn. On June 20, Denikin began preparing his troops for the final, decisive assault on Moscow.22

  Lenin could feel the fate of his regime, and his own grand vision, teetering in the balance. He sent a desperate, furious note to the Revolutionary-Military Soviet, which was preparing an offensive against Kolchak’s army from its base in, of all places, Lenin’s hometown, Simbirsk. “If we don’t conquer the Urals by winter,” it read, “I consider the death of the Revolution inevitable.”23

  There were many that summer who would have agreed. As for Lenin’s hopes for a new world order based on his revolutionary Mparxist vision, these had clearly faded if not disappeared. If any new world order was going to arise, it looked like it would have to do so in Paris.

  PARIS

  THE GREETING WILSON received the moment he stepped off the USS George Washington and onto French soil did much to restore his mood. At the anchorage at Brest, virtually the entire population of the city had turned out to shower flowers in the American president’s path. On the train ride from Brest to Paris, through the Brittany countryside, the entire route was lined by men, women, and children raising their hats and caps in salute as
the train passed.24

  In Paris, the reception, as one longtime American resident put it, was “the most remarkable demonstration of enthusiasm and affection on the part of the Parisians that I have ever heard of, let alone seen”—far more than the rapturous welcome Pershing and the first elements of the AEF had received. To Frenchmen and millions of other Europeans, Wilson was more than their savior in the war. He was the messiah who would give them and the rest of the world a new peaceful order. The reception was the same in London when Wilson made a state visit a few days later; and in Italy during the first week in January. Everything reinforced Wilson’s view that this was his moment to lead the peoples of the world, like Moses, to a new Promised Land.

  As he told the assembled guests at a magnificent dinner at London’s Guildhall, the Allied soldiers had “fought to do away with an old order and to establish a new one” without “that unstable thing which we used to call the ‘balance of power.’ ” He added that “the men who have fought in this war . . . were determined that this sort of thing should end now and forever.” He told American soldiers when he addressed them shortly after arriving, “This being a people’s war . . . it must be a people’s peace.”25

  Yet what precisely did that mean? If there were no balance of power, what would take its place? That’s what the hundreds of experts traveling with him on the George Washington had wanted to know. It came as a surprise to some of them to learn that, for their great leader, the contours of this new order, of the coming Promised Land, were still vague in his mind.

  It was the young diplomat William Bullitt (who, as it happened, had just returned from Russia, where he had been a keen advocate of cooperation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks) who suggested to Wilson that “he ought to call together the members of the Inquiry and other important people on board and explain to [them] the spirit in which he was approaching the conference.” Wilson seemed surprised; the idea of informing his own staff of his plans had never occurred to him. He had not brought his Cabinet into his plans to declare war; why should his entourage for the Peace Conference be any different? Still, he gave way. Midway across the Atlantic, he and his inner circle sat down for an hour on shipboard. One astonished member of the group stated later that it was the first time they had heard in any detail his ideas for arranging the peace of the world.26

  What they heard was not particularly impressive.

  For example, Wilson was not very clear what he meant by self-determination. Did it mean democratic self-government? Could any people who decided to declare themselves a nation-state be said to be exercising the right of self-determination? Did it refer to “a race, a territorial area, or a community?” Lansing wanted to know. Wilson was maddeningly vague. He apologized, saying that his ideas “weren’t very good but he thought them better than anything else he had heard.”

  He added, “You tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it.” They had thought it was supposed to be the other way around, but said nothing.

  One thing in Wilson’s mind was clear: “[T]he men whom we were about to deal with did not represent their own people.” That was an astonishing thing to say about Lloyd George and Clemenceau, both of whom owed their office to their nations’ voters, or even about the representatives from countries such as Japan and China. But with a new, luminous future about to unfold, Wilson saw all his fellow leaders as men representing an obsolete past. His worry was how to argue his case with old-fashioned statesmen like these. “What means, Mr. Seymour,” Wilson said, addressing Charles Seymour, chief of the Austro-Hungarian Division of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, “can be utilized to bring pressure upon these people in the interests of justice?” No one in the stateroom seemed to have a clear answer, least of all Wilson.27

  Wilson did have a moment of self-doubt. “If it doesn’t work right,” he said, “the world will raise hell.” If that happened, he added with a sheepish smile, he intended to go off and hide, maybe in a remote spot such as Guam.28 With reporters on board afterward, however, the president was more confident, even cocky. He told them he would tell the other Allies that “we are gathered together, not as the masters of anyone, but as representatives of a new world met together to determine the greatest peace of all time.” Once they realized he was serious, he said, “I think we can come to an agreement promptly.”29

  All the same, the day they landed, Wilson sensed the stakes involved. “If we do not heed the mandates of mankind,” he told the assembled throng of reporters, “we shall make ourselves the most conspicuous and deserved failures in the history of the world.”30 With that, he went off to do combat with his imagined adversaries, including his own Allied leaders.

  The conference convened at 3:15 p.m. on January 18, 1919, in a plenary session hosted by French president Poincaré. After one speech after another, when the first day’s meeting adjourned, French politician Jules Cambon turned to one of the British delegates, Ian Malcolm. “You know what’s going to result from this conference?” Cambon said. “Une improvisation.” Nicolson, who was listening, wrote angrily in his diary, “Cynical old man.”31

  Cambon turned out to be right. It may have been the most disorganized peace conference ever. Wilson had prepared no agenda, no order of priorities, no system of agreement. Proceedings were supposed to be conducted by the Council of Ten—two delegates from each Great Power: Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Very quickly, however, the Council of Ten got shoved aside to make room for the Big Four: Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Italian prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, and Wilson. They had no time or inclination to focus on any specific agenda. Each of their meetings for the next four months—the Big Four also formed the Supreme War Council, which still had to make key decisions for the Allies at a time when the war was still officially on, armistice or no armistice—jumped from one topic to another, almost at random, as secretaries wrote furiously to keep track of major decisions that often affected the future of millions of people, even tens of millions, at home and in the far corners of the world.

  The four men were distracted, were overworked, and found very little in common. They also weren’t together as a foursome very often. Wilson had to return to the United States to preside over the reopening of Congress. Lloyd George returned often to London to oversee political crises there, traveling by boat and train, which usually took an entire day. Orlando was also sometimes obliged to go home. On February 19, an ultranationalist, Émile Cottin, shot Clemenceau, leaving him severely wounded. That took him out of action for several weeks, when some of the Supreme War Council’s most important decisions were being made—including decisions on Russia.32

  All the same there was more common ground among the four Allied leaders than Wilson perhaps cared to admit. There is no doubt that Wilson stood apart from the others in his idealistic approach to world politics and his rejection of “outdated” concepts such as the balance of power. Clemenceau, for one, wasn’t buying it. “There is an old system of alliances called the Balance of Power,” he told the Chamber of Deputies the day after Wilson gave a speech in London about the importance of the future League of Nations. “[T]his system of alliances, which I do not renounce, will be my guiding thought at the Peace Conference.” The deputies stood and cheered. They and Clemenceau, like Lloyd George and his British constituents, had been through too much to put their faith in a handful of high sentiments and a world organization that didn’t yet exist.33

  Clemenceau found Wilson astonishingly ignorant of Europe and Europeans, and of how very different the world they inhabited was from his study at the White House or his lecture hall at Princeton. “He believed you could do everything by formulas and fourteen points. God Himself was content with ten commandments,” the French statesman concluded sardonically. Clemenceau once remarked, “I find myself between Jesus Christ on the one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other.”34 “Bonaparte” was a reference to Lloyd George; everyone knew who Clemenceau was comparing to Jesus Christ.

  I
n the end, “I don’t think he is a bad man,” Clemenceau would sometimes say of Wilson, “but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good.”35 It was a judgment with which an increasingly disillusioned Harold Macmillan and other acolytes of “Wilsonism” were coming to share, as their hopes for their hero to lead the Peace Conference to a bright, shining, new world order, began to unravel.

  Later, the debacle that arose from the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles with Germany would be blamed on leaders other than Wilson. John Maynard Keynes, for example, in his highly influential Economic Consequences of the Peace, would paint a compelling picture of sophisticated and unscrupulous European leaders beguiling and manipulating a gullible and naive President Wilson. Wilson’s American admirers, such as biographer Ray Stannard Baker, would extend that picture into a black-and-white photograph with an evil, corrupt Europe on one side and a high-minded but innocent Woodrow Wilson (and America) on the other.

  In fact, both Clemenceau and Lloyd George were far more sympathetic to Wilson’s position than the history books suggest. Clemenceau, for one, was certainly a believer in an old-fashioned balance of power—and was committed above all to breaking Germany’s ability ever again to make war or threaten France. But he also sincerely believed that France’s future was in cooperation with its Anglo-Saxon allies the United States and the United Kingdom. He told the Chamber of Deputies in December 1918, “For this Entente, I shall make every sacrifice.”36 He had lived in the United States, spoke fluent English, and had an American wife. He (far more than Wilson) was a deep admirer of Abraham Lincoln, in whose army he had almost served during the Civil War. But he was also prepared to face reality.

  “Please do not misunderstand me,” he once told Wilson. “We too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.”37 Being tough with the Germans made Clemenceau the great villain to those who criticized the Versailles Treaty. But he sacrificed much to get the agreement past his countrymen, who wanted far more. At least one of them had been prepared to kill him for it. If any single leader gave Wilson the treaty he wanted to take back with him to the United States, it was Clemenceau.