1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  The loss of Alsace and Lorraine was in fact the least of it. The treaty, comprising 15 parts and 440 articles, committed Germany to an army of a maximum of 100,000 men; it prohibited Germany from ever having a navy or an air force—and certainly from having any submarines.

  The treaty moved Germany’s western frontier sharply eastward, with an Allied occupation of the Rhineland and of the Rhine bridgeheads, and sliced away large sections of territory on its eastern border to give to Poland. In all, Germany lost 13 percent of its territory, and one out of every ten Germans now belonged to another country. These losses hardly justified the German foreign minister’s bitter riposte that the treaty could be summed up in four words: “Germany renounces its existence.” But it was a shock to a country that thought it had preserved itself by agreeing to end the war and embrace Wilsonism. Instead, the war, and the memory of how it ended, would be there to haunt Germany for a generation to come.53

  This was because the treaty also imposed on Germany an admission of sole guilt for having caused the war—it was the only combatant forced to admit guilt at all. There was also a clause imposing major financial reparations, for amounts as yet unspecified. Nonetheless, by signing the treaty, Germany would be admitting its liability for those reparations whatever the final amount.

  The conferees gave the German delegates two weeks to read and sign. To encourage them to cooperate, in the five months since the armistice, Britain’s naval blockade had remained in force, keeping German shop shelves bare and German children’s stomachs rumbling. At first, the German delegates’ instinct was not to sign, blockade or no blockade. But that would mean a renewal of the war when the armistice expired in June. It was true that Germany was in a stronger position in May 1919 than it had been when the armistice was signed the prior November. Large chunks of the Allied armies had been demobilized and sent home, including the bulk of American troops. The possibility of resuming the war might cause a backlash from war-weary publics in the United States as well as in Britain and France. But when Germany’s new leaders asked whether German armies could retake the field, Ludendorff’s successor, General Groener, said no. There was no alternative; Germany had to sign the treaty, however humiliating and discouraging for the future it was.54

  The one person Germany could have appealed to was Woodrow Wilson, but his mind was closed to any compromise. There were many in Paris, such as Harold Nicolson, who saw the treaty as a stark betrayal of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the supposed bedrock of Wilsonism and the new order to come. Yet when General Smuts and even Lloyd George asked Wilson to reconsider, to revise the treaty so Germany could sign it in good conscience, he brusquely brushed them away.

  “We ought not to be sentimental,” he told them. “Personally I do not want to soften the terms for Germany. I think that it is a good thing for the world and for Germany that the terms should be hard, so that Germany may now know what an unjust war means.”

  Then he lashed out at his critics with real fury. “The time to consider all these questions was when we were writing the treaty . . . It makes me a little tired of people to come and say now that they are afraid the Germans won’t sign, and their fear is based upon things that they insisted upon at the time of the writing of the treaty; that makes me very sick!”55

  This was a new, more frightening Woodrow Wilson: angry, petulant, nearing the end of his tether. So, the critics backed off. On June 28, as scheduled, the Germans came back to the Hall of Mirrors to sign.

  Harold Nicolson was there to watch the ceremony. The Hall of Mirrors was jammed with humanity, but “the silence is terrifying,” he recorded in his diary. The Germans “keep their eyes from those two thousand staring eyes, fixed upon the ceiling. They are deathly pale.” After the documents were signed, “we kept our seats while the Germans were conducted like prisoners from the dock, their eyes still fixed upon some distant point on the horizon.” That night, after the celebrations throughout Paris, Nicolson went to bed “sick of life.”56

  He was also thoroughly sick of Wilson. Many were. The U.S. president’s consent to the Versailles Treaty did more to damage his reputation among his fellow liberals than anything else he did that crucial year. It also sowed the seeds for a bitterness among Germans that would ripen into the political movement that led to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

  MEANWHILE, THE RUSSIAN Civil War was reaching its climax.

  September 1, 1919, was the high-tide mark of the White advance. The White armies had momentum, but they were overextended. Most important, they were critically low on supplies and ammunition, thanks to the Allies. Allied support for the White cause had all but evaporated. Once a final peace loomed with Germany, the one power everyone feared, the original rationale behind intervention in Russia faded. Only a handful of Western politicians, such as Winston Churchill, saw what was coming. They urged converting Wilson’s equivocal interventionist strategy into an all-out thrust into the Bolshevik regime. Clemenceau, man of the left though he was, agreed. But he was helpless to turn the Supreme War Council into a crusade against Lenin.

  Churchill knew that Wilson was not his only chief impediment to an all-out Allied war against the Soviet regime. The desire to avoid another general conflict, on the heels of the world’s worst, was general. The Allies failed to understand how momentum from a victory from one war can carry over to another—if it is pressed home in time. Nonetheless, in February 1919, a hopeful Churchill stopped in Paris to put his case to the Allied delegates, but Lloyd George said no.57 Instead, the Allies began a steady pullback, even when the anti-Bolshevik Whites seemed on the verge of success. The rationale for withdrawal took on added weight that fall, with the excuse that Allied troops should not get trapped by the Siberian winter.

  The Whites had also lost the war for hearts and minds. Wherever they drove out the Reds, the locals welcomed them with open arms. But the Russian populace soon learned that Kolchak’s and Denikin’s soldiers could be as brutal and as mercenary as the Reds—perhaps because they were just as hungry. Deserted by the Allies, divided by their respective leaders’ ambitions, and reckless about building popular support, the Whites were in the losing corner in this war. Only mistakes by the Reds could save their cause, and there were few such mistakes after the summer of 1919.

  In fact, Lenin reinforced the ruthless approach he had taken when the fighting broke out—what would be called war communism. It was buttressed by two major measures: The first, in May 1918, gave extraordinary powers to the People’s Commissariat for Food to requisition any and all foodstuffs the regime required, regardless from whom and for what purpose. The second measure, which passed the Central Committee on June 11, 1918, replaced the rural soviets that had been the formal basis of the Bolshevik regime with select peasant committees that were more obedient to the regime and more willing to take drastic action to provide the food the government required, even with increasing force and brutality.58

  The reaction to the two draconian laws was immediate and intense. There were 245 peasant uprisings in 1918 within Bolshevik-controlled territory, and 99 in the first seven months of 1919. Agricultural output in Russia fell to roughly half that of 1913. The specter of widespread famine now haunted the nation, yet the fighting was only intensifying.59

  September saw the last White offensive, along the Tobol front. On October 14, the Reds launched a decisive counterattack, while White forces fell back. Five days later, Trotsky rebuffed the most serious challenge to the regime, directed at Petrograd and coming from Estonia. Gen. Nikolai Yudenich led two hundred thousand men and six British tanks into the attack, and on October 19, they were in the outskirts of the former capital.

  Trotsky himself took personal charge of the defenses—“We will not give up Petrograd!” was his slogan—saying that he would “defend Petrograd to the last ounce of blood,” while funneling Red reinforcements until they outnumbered Yudenich’s troops three to one. Comrade Stalin was also there, using masses of Petrograd civilians to act as human shields to prevent Whi
te soldiers from firing on Red troops.60 Sensing defeat, Yudenich’s men fell back in the direction of Estonia. Petrograd had been saved, Trotsky was a national hero, and the Red cause had its first decisive success.

  The second came on October 24, when Tukhachevsky crushed Gen. Konstantin Mamontov’s forces in a large-scale, brutal battle. The remainder of October and November saw one Red victory after another, as the White cause approached its final doom.

  Fighting would go on into 1920, but the main issue had been decided. Lenin had won the Russian Civil War, and his enemies, despite Western backing, had lost. Weighing the reasons for the Bolshevik success, Britain’s last general on the spot and former victor at Arras, Sir Henry Rawlinson, put it baldly: “They know what they want and are working hard to get it.” That, in fact, summed up Lenin’s entire career. It was a ruthless commitment he had communicated to all his followers since the revolution began, and the result was that Russia was finally theirs.

  The cost was staggering. The civil war Lenin had invited left more than one million dead, at least half a million from the Red Terror alone. Social order had broken down throughout the country; famine stared Russia in the face. An internal Cheka memo of December 1919 noted, “The food crisis has gone from bad to worse, and the working masses are starving. They no longer have the physical strength necessary to continue working, and more and more often they are absent simply as a result of the combining effects of cold and hunger.”61

  Still, Lenin could be satisfied. His power over Russia, or what was left of it after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, was now unquestioned. His political rivals on the right had long since been defeated, arrested, or, like Kerensky, driven into exile. The Socialist Revolutionaries were on the run, as were the Mensheviks. Their roundups, arrests, and trials would begin the next year. The turn of the Bolsheviks’ only ally in the civil war, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, would come next.

  Meanwhile, the Cheka, under the loyal Dzerzhinsky, had now infiltrated itself into every aspect of Russian life. The secret functionaries who made up “the iron fist of the proletariat” would grow to a quarter of a million by 1921. Their raison d’être was stated with arrogant bluntness by Dzerzhinsky’s lieutenant in the Ukraine, Martin I. Latsis:

  We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is—to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.* 62

  Latsis’s and Dzerzhinsky’s chief tool (and Lenin’s) for crushing out Russia’s bourgeois class was the Red Army bullet and the Cheka concentration camp, the direct ancestor of Stalin’s gulag. After the laws of 1918, it was steadily mushrooming into a fixture of Soviet life. Within two years, its unwilling population of counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs, and other class enemies would swell by the tens of thousands—and the camps would spread across the bleak landscape of Siberia year by year.

  Even more important from the point of view of continuity of the regime, Lenin had no serious rivals within the Bolshevik elite, not even the hero of the civil war, Leon Trotsky. On the contrary, ever since Fannie Kaplan’s poorly directed bullets missed their mark, Lenin had become a sacrosanct, Christlike figure of deliverance. What Wilson aspired to be, to be hailed as the savior of his people and the light of humanity, Lenin had already achieved, but through unbelievable brutality and ruthlessness, and in a broken, starving country.

  It was a fate that other, later Communist leaders would know, from Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Kim Il-Sung. Lenin at least had the ruthless honesty to acknowledge the truth about what had happened and what would come next. In a statement in 1919, he posed the present and future in no uncertain terms: “We recognize neither freedom, nor equality, nor labor democracy if they are opposed to the interests of the emancipation of labor from the oppression of capital,” meaning opposed to the Communist Party. Later, he would even insist that “revolutionary violence” was necessary “against the faltering and unrestrained elements of the toiling masses themselves.”63 Thanks to the Cheka and Trotsky’s victorious Red Army, he also had the means to enforce it.

  This above all separated Lenin and Wilson. The Russian at least was willing to confront what realizing his dream would cost him, his people, and the world. Wilson never was. Lenin’s grasp of the hideous truth enabled him to gain a level of power no despot in modern history had ever enjoyed.

  Deceived by his ideals, Wilson never grasped that truth. That ultimately redeems his legacy, even today. Yet it also means that, confronted by one of history’s greatest monstrosities, Wilson led the West in throwing away its one great chance to prevent it.

  15

  LAST ACT

  We cannot turn back . . . The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.

  —WOODROW WILSON, JULY 10, 1919

  WILSON AND HIS entourage celebrated the Fourth of July on the voyage home. To the others, he seemed tired; Edith had to struggle to get him to go for walks on the deck. The strain of the last six months was visible; she and the president’s staff could see the effects of his hypertension in his face and body, and noticed his constant need for breaks.1

  Yet his mood was upbeat. Arriving at Hoboken, he was greeted by enormous crowds both at the dock and as he made his way to City Hall in New York for a meeting with the mayor. He boarded the train for Washington that afternoon and got into Union Station at midnight. There he found a similar crowd of well-wishers. It was a revived, confident Woodrow Wilson who walked down the aisle of the Senate two days later, with Senate majority leader Henry Cabot Lodge at his side.

  Yet he was in for the fight of his life.

  He had had a foretaste of what was coming when he returned briefly to Washington from Paris in March, to open the new Congress. On February 23 he had arrived in Boston, where he addressed a rally of seven thousand supporters and spoke passionately of the American soldiers he had met in France. They had, he said, “a religious fervor. They were not like any of the other soldiers. They had a vision; they had a dream, they turned the whole tide of battle; and it never came back.”2 None of this was strictly true. There were plenty of American soldiers who had fought because they had to, and who would come home with anything but religious fervor—except for a fervent wish never to go to war again. If anyone had a religious, almost millennialist vision of what the war had meant and what the future must be, it was certainly Wilson—and he was determined to turn the tide of battle on one remaining issue, the centerpiece of his Fourteen Points: the League of Nations.

  The statement laying out the organization and the principles of the League, known in appropriately Presbyterian terms as the League Covenant, was itself a product entirely of Wilson’s vision, if not much else. The first draft he presented to the conference in Paris had been heavy on aspirations and light on details. The British and the French had offered their own ideas. Clemenceau, Foch, and the French leadership foresaw a League that would guarantee peace through armed force, especially against Germany, by means of a system of standing military arrangements that largely maintained the wartime alliance. It bore a close resemblance to today’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.3

  The British had prepared a carefully organized memorandum (far more than Wilson had done) composed by two quasi-pacifists, Walter Phillimore and Robert Cecil (Lord Cecil), son of the great prime minister Lord Salisbury. Cecil had none of his father’s grasp of realpolitik but plenty of his own evangelical sanctimony, which grafted well onto Wilson’s. He saw a League that would rely entirely on consultation, discussion, and moral force to rein in aggression by any of its members. He felt horror at the thought of using physical or military force. “Without the hope that [the League] was to establish a better international system, I should be a pacifist.”4

  Wilson was willing to borrow many, if not most, of Cecil’s and Phillimore�
��s ideas. The first full draft of the Covenant was ready on February 13. Its broad outlines are familiar from today’s United Nations. There would be a General Assembly made up of all member nations, and an Executive Council where the Big Five (the Big Four plus Japan) would hold a slight majority—the ancestor of the United Nations Security Council. There was a provision for League-armed forces, but no compulsory arbitration or provisions for forced disarmament. All League members were sworn to respect one another’s independence and territorial boundaries—an echo of one of the Fourteen Points. Most decisions by the General Assembly would have to be unanimous, in order to prevent the Great Powers from being swamped by the lesser ones.

  The Covenant also set up a court of international justice; contained provisions against slavery and arms trafficking; and set up an International Labor Organization—all music to the ears of Progressives and humanitarians everywhere. Wilson was also delighted that the Covenant had come to exactly twenty-six articles, twice thirteen—thirteen being his personal lucky number.5

  That, however, was not the primary reason he fought off any and all attempts to amend the Covenant, such as Japan’s racial equality clause or French efforts to include a clause regarding military force against recalcitrant members. When the Covenant passed in a plenary session on February 14, he announced, “Many terrible things have come out of this war, but some very beautiful things have come out of it,” including his League. He was determined that the Republican majority he would meet with in Congress should have no opportunities to alter or deface the Covenant that he and the Peace Conference had finally arrived at.6