That was not to say that World War I didn’t yield magnificent heroes with compelling stories such as York and Edwards. Like Iwo Jima flag raiser Ira Hayes, who would never come to terms with his fame, Charles Whittlesey, the unlikely hero of the “Lost Battalion,” struggled with the ghosts of the Argonne, finally committing suicide by jumping overboard on a fruit liner headed for Havana, leaving behind eight notes. “I’m a misfit by nature and by training,” he wrote, “and there’s an end of it.”148
Most people were not interested in misfits after the war, even those who had recently been heroes. Veterans in American cinema and fiction were invisible—one exception was The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor, about a businessman who goes to fight in France and loses a leg. Other movies that depicted war dealt with fliers, including Wings (1927), The Dawn Patrol (1930), and Hell’s Angels (1930). York and Whittlesey were celebrities (and Whittlesey played himself in a 1919 film, The Lost Battalion), but York’s story was not told on film until 1941, when it was as much a World War II propaganda film as it was an homage to the hero.
Europe’s Myths and Malaise
If American veterans were reabsorbed into society with little fanfare, a different mood descended in Europe. England, deeply affected by the body counts of World War I, having lost 750,000 British and 250,000 colonial troops, bought into the myth that “the First World War had been futile; that it had been fought for nothing.”149 France sank to levels of depression and denial about the Western Front (the French even banned the word “Verdun” from schoolbooks temporarily, so great was the slaughter of the Republic’s youth). No sooner had the guns fallen silent than eulogies were written and publicized, not merely for the dead but for national self-confidence and moral certitude.
Britain’s grief was expressed through the “lost generation” interpretation—the belief that the brightest minds of Oxford and Cambridge had fallen in the trenches (as indeed, thousands had—with more than 37,000 British officers dead on the Western Front). As British historian Paul Johnson pointed out, a bevy of postwar writers and poets, “obsessed with death, futility, and waste,” always unheroic and replete with the moral that national goals were meaningless, cultivated the lost generation myth. Well into the 1980s, the BBC’s Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) continued to portray the British experience in World War I as an “unmitigated disaster.” As late as 1996, the most quoted British figures of the First World War were not generals or statesmen, but the “War Poets” such as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, and Siegfried Sassoon.150 Many, including Brooke, Owen, Edward Thomas, and Charles Sorley, died before war’s end.
In fact, the British casualty numbers were “commensurate with the scale of Britain’s role in the fighting and the issues at stake, while the losses assumed by enemies and allies were even greater.”151 Nor was there evidence of any unusual disenchantment or disillusionment with the war effort among British soldiers. Nonetheless, it would not be totally inaccurate to say that France never regained its national strength after losing entire age groups, and Britain national confidence was so severely damaged that it rapidly declined into a “nanny” state after the Second World War completed what the First World War began. Germany, too, was not unaffected, and after the last hurrah of World War II, fell into a pacifism from which it has not yet recovered. All of the warring European nations began to experience declining birth rates; by the end of the twentieth century, many observers openly discussed the end of a Caucasian, Christian Europe in the ensuing century.
The facts of the war did not alter perceptions, and most people felt that Britain’s military leadership had been incompetent, if not criminal. After the war, British films, including The Dawn Patrol (1938) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), depicted officers shipping off untrained pilots on virtual suicide missions. An Italian-born Canadian, Humphrey Cobb, who had served in the Canadian Army in World War I, penned a haunting novel, Paths of Glory, which follows a mutiny against a French general who sends his men on a suicidal frontal assault on a German trench in the Western Front. (Mutinies in the French Army occurred on a substantial scale after the failed Nivelle Offensive in 1917, so the plot was grounded in reality.) When the attack fails, the general attempts to shift blame for the disaster by executing three randomly selected soldiers. Despite the injustice, the men were found guilty at trial and executed for the sins of the division. Cobb’s book met with minor success until 1957, when director Stanley Kubrick adapted it to the screen in a powerful drama starring Kirk Douglas.
The carnage on the Western Front was certainly unprecedented, but despite many assumptions, this did not result from the introduction of better technology and advanced firepower alone. This, of course, had been Ivan Bloch’s reasoning for why war would be avoided in the first place, namely that the cost would be too great due to more lethal weapons. Rather, World War I’s shocking casualty rolls owed much to the repeated and egregious misreading of military history over the previous half century. Europeans’ horror at the bloodletting now swung them in the opposite direction, as Progressives and Socialists attempted to guarantee that human disagreements or misunderstandings would never again have to be settled by violence. As a utopian ideal, it was misguided. As a policy for the postwar world, it was dangerous and self-defeating. Combined with American do-gooder Progressivism, Europe’s recoil from national security enforced by sound military practices virtually ensured that World War I would in fact not be the “great” war and that its murderous education would require yet more lessons. One of those lessons was already unfolding in Russia, whose Revolution had taken it out of World War I, but which had only begun to show itself as the natural end point of Progressivism by 1919.
Progressivism’s Red Metamorphosis
An old European saying holds that “Russia is never as strong as she looks, and Russia is never as weak as she looks.” Certainly World War I confirmed this—the vast Russian manpower pool that had terrified von Schlieffen and other German planners had proven ineffective and often incompetent. The Czar’s government, unable to balance “guns and butter,” left itself open to anger and hostility from starving cities, conscripted soldiers, and abandoned families. Although the Czar’s secret police, the Okhrana, never came close to approximating the terror inflicted by later Soviet organs such as the NKVD, it nevertheless struck fear in the breast of every Russian and provided ample fodder for the writings of political dissidents.
Bolshevism, a Marxist political subcurrent throughout Europe before the war, concerned almost all European governments, but most possessed sufficiently developed political systems to address social concerns through the existing machinery of the state. Not so with Russia, a truly backward nation by European standards. It had largely missed the Renaissance and to some extent the Enlightenment. Its “educational standards were woeful, legal norms went unheeded, and poverty was awesome.”152 Prewar reforms had alleviated some suffering, but they were too little, too late. Czar Nicholas II, whose wife, Alexandra, had come under the influence of the mystic priest Rasputin, had lost the confidence of the nobility and landlords. Russia’s entrance into the war resulted from its solidarity with Serbia, but also involved the misapprehension that Germany certainly would not dare fight on two fronts. Early defeat at Tannenberg meant that Russia had become embroiled in a long and fatal war. Food was drained out of the countryside to support the troops, en route often getting stuck in cities where corrupt officials hoarded or resold it. Land reforms undertaken prior to August 1914 had scarcely made a dent in Russia’s inequality, and on the eve of war there were still well over 123 million landless peasants, bednyaks (poor peasants) and batraks (seasonal workers), along with some 40 million landed peasants, serednyaks (middle-income peasants) and kulaks (high-income peasants). That left a few million actual “proletariat” in urban factories and a handful of educated elites precariously perched on top.
Any program that offered what would become the Bolshevik slogan, “Bread, peace, land,” was certa
in to gain widespread support. The question was never if there was to be change—only how quickly it would come and whether or not it could be managed. Lenin provided the answer to that question, as well as the catalyst the Bolshevik minority needed to gain the crest of the wave of anger and unrest.
A disagreeable little man with perpetually angry eyes, a peasant cap, and, later, a goatee, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov took the name “Lenin” from the Lena River in Siberia. The son of an Orthodox Christian mother, a schoolteacher, and a public school bureaucrat father who longed for democracy, Lenin absorbed little from his parents. Indeed, the Ulyanovs raised a viper’s nest of radicals: one brother, Aleksandr, plotted to assassinate Czar Alexander III with a bomb and was hanged; a sister, Anna, was exiled to the village of Kokushkino for antigovernment activism. Vladimir himself became radicalized at Kazan State University, but rejected anarchism as he sought direction for his anger. He found it when he was expelled from Kazan State for participating in student protests, then enrolling at the University of St. Petersburg, where he absorbed Marx’s teachings. Like Marx, he immersed himself in books, political tracts, and official statistics; like Marx, he never toured a factory—let alone worked in one. From the 1890s to 1924, “there was little change in his basic thinking,” and Lenin could “live for years in a locality—be it London, Zurich or Moscow—and fail to draw the conclusions about his surroundings that came easily to others without his hardened prejudices.”153
Contrary to modern popular perceptions, Lenin was a poor public speaker and a dense writer. Only a few well-informed theoreticians had ever read his works. Punctilious to the point of obsession in his daily regimen, Lenin’s pursuit of control in his personal existence may have reflected his inability to control his health. Incapacitated by serious illnesses, including ulcers, migraine headaches, heart attacks, and a recurring affliction called “St. Anthony’s fire”—a nervous inflammation characterized by severe and sharp pains in the limbs—Lenin was absent at decisive moments in the rise of communism in Russia due not only to self-imposed exile to escape prosecution and prison but also disease.154
Absorbing the inherent violence of Marxism, with its refusal to tolerate any dissent at all, and its atheism (which reinforced the violent tendencies), Lenin was nevertheless unfaithful to the doctrine. He easily adopted bourgeois values, readily admitting that only European civilization mattered. He read the classics, abandoned his wife, and took a sophisticated French mistress. In the process he not only personally embraced bourgeois values but substituted the bourgeoisie as a class for the proletariat as the vehicle of revolutionary upheaval. It was a monumental paradigm shift that laid the groundwork for investing subsequent intelligentsia with the authority to demand social change—something that would have been impossible if Marx’s proletariat had remained the dominant revolutionary class. Until Lenin, the appeal of Marxism was that it had represented the physical laborer, the industrial worker, whose difficult life elicited sympathy and admiration from elites (though elites rarely wished to engage in physical work). After Lenin, the rhetoric of the “common man” and the language of the “oppressed masses” was retained by Communists for propaganda purposes, but the educated classes—particularly those with excess time on their hands—became the real agents of the revolution. Their knowledge of human behavior, psychology, sociology, and economics under the canopy of new “scientific” approaches to these subjects had already propelled the Western Progressives to victory. Now, scientific knowledge became one more arrow in the quiver of Bolshevism to slay class enemies. Science was a tool to be used for political ends, not simply a source of human understanding.
As writer and historian Barbara Tuchman observed:
Revolution appealed more to intellectuals who had no doubt of their capacity to manage society than it did to the working class…. Organized Socialism…was a movement not of, but on behalf of, the working class…. Although it spoke for the worker and made his wants articulate, goals and doctrine were set, and thought, energy and leadership largely supplied by, intellectuals. The working class was both client and ultimately, in its mass strength, the necessary instrument of the overthrow of capitalism…. The working class was no more of a piece than any other class. Socialist doctrine, however, required it to be an entity with a working-class mind, working-class voice, working-class will, working-class purpose. In fact, these were not easily ascertainable. The Socialist [and Marxist] idealized them and to be idealized is to be overestimated.155
Lenin himself is proof positive of the correctness of Tuchman’s analysis. Yet his drastic inversion of Marxist doctrine did not demonstrate the mind of a clear thinker—quite the contrary, his notebooks reeked of contradictions. For a decade Lenin, by adhering to Marxist principles of what “should” happen, had been consistently and stupendously wrong. Virtually every major event took him by surprise, from the aborted 1905 revolt to the arrival of war to the utter failure of an “international” (that is, a global Communist movement) to arise. (In this he would be in the company of Marx, who also seemed perpetually wrong in his predictions.) Lenin was surprised at the ouster of Nicholas, surprised by Aleksandr Kerensky’s gullibility in releasing political prisoners, and surprised by the continuation of the war. His inability to predict events correctly, or to apply the lessons either of history or of Marxist theory, was exceeded only by his keen talent for action and manipulation once events erupted.
One final break by Lenin from Marxist theory came in his insistence that “vanguard elites,” led by individuals, had to direct the revolution. Marx, on the other hand, had argued that the masses would spontaneously arise. Lenin’s theoretical redefinition reinforced his practical efforts to crush all internal opposition by any means necessary. It was only this adoption of violence and the use of any tactic to achieve his ends that differentiated Lenin from the Progressive Wilson and his later followers in the United States who were building an elite-based Progressive/Bolshevist state on behalf of the working class. Wilson and his Progressive successors faced another problem that Lenin didn’t—namely that in the United States the middle (bourgeois) class needed first to be reduced to proletarian status before a revolution could succeed.
Lenin’s close confidants recognized his oppressive direction early. Leon Trotsky saw the terror coming a decade before it arrived, but the inevitability soon became apparent to all: murder, mass terror, shooting, killing, exterminating, jailing—these all appeared as common terms for use against his “enemies list,” the schoolteachers, priests, nuns, Whites, kulaks, wreckers, traitors, or any other label he could affix to those who disagreed with him in any way. Sooner or later, almost every Communist insider of the Revolution ended up on the enemies list. Georgy Plekhanov, a faithful Marx popularizer and cofounder of Communist groups in Switzerland, soon found himself on the opposite side of Lenin, whom he viewed as a dictator. Plekhanov was fortunate enough to die of tuberculosis before Lenin could consign him to a firing squad.
Yet many stuck with him, recognizing in Lenin the single-minded focus on obtaining power that would result in the success of their cause. His opponents saw this obsessive drive in him as well. One labeled him a “political Jesuit,” another, the anti-Bolshevik Fyodor Dan, lamented about the absence of a Lenin on his side: “there’s no such person [as Lenin] who is so preoccupied twenty-four hours a day with revolution, who thinks no other thoughts except those about revolution and who even dreams in his sleep about revolution.”156
Lenin’s will to power, and the elevation of the individual leader as the embodiment of the revolution, enabled him to accomplish much. With only twenty thousand core followers, he would conquer a nation of 160 million. In his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? he laid out the means by which he would seize power: he would organize and radicalize the elites, who, in turn, would agitate the proletariat into revolution. He said nothing about the peasants—who, in fact, would be the backbone of the revolution while the factory workers resisted.
Lenin had no interest in de
mocracy, or process, or rights. Violence itself constituted the ultimate scoreboard, and he cared nothing for how a program or idea would be received by the people. Not just the masses, but the rulers, too, were insignificant gnats to be swept away—only the Bolshevik state could remain. Having determined that the revolution could come through the elites, he turned on them as soon as the violence started, shifting back to the Marxist claim that the bourgeoisie was now the enemy. Attempting to find consistency in Lenin’s words or deeds was thus a fool’s errand, especially so when his objective was power. That is why he could just as easily flip-flop on the war (one minute it was despicable, the next it was useful) as he could on prices later when he employed the very mechanisms of the free market he detested. Since the working class was not bolshevized, he easily switched gears to making the peasants the revolutionary arm. Who cared what Marx wrote? What mattered was moving forward to a Bolshevik state, not how one got there. As he told author Maxim Gorky, the party needed to “beat [the people] over the head, beat them mercilessly even though we, as an ideal, are against any coercion of people. [It’s] a hellishly difficult necessity.”157 A useful intellectual exercise is to compare the predominance of the term “exterminate” in Lenin’s vocabulary with that of “liberty” in the writings of the American Founders: the former never appeared in the works of the Founders, while Lenin never used the latter, even by accident.
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