Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  At the town hall, after the speeches and ceremonies were complete, the archduke decided to alter his itinerary in order to visit the bomb victims in the hospital. Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb member of Young Bosnia and one of those who had not acted that day, had tried to recover by taking up a position on Sarajevo’s Franz Josef Street near Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen, hoping to catch Franz Ferdinand on the rest of his tour. The archduke’s driver, unfamiliar with the new plan to go to the hospital, made a wrong turn toward Franz Josef Street, heard shouts of reprimand, and began to back up, but stalled the car—some five feet from Princip. Six of Princip’s eight siblings had died in infancy, and he himself was consumptive, a wisp of a human being. He had dreamed of becoming a poet. Suddenly point-blank with history, he took out his pistol and shot the Austrian heir, conspicuous in a helmet topped with green feathers, as well as his wife (intending to strike the governor). Both died nearly instantly.

  Serbia had just fought two Balkans wars, losing at least 40,000 dead, and the last thing the country needed was another war. But after the Young Bosnia terrorists, all Austro-Hungarian subjects, were captured, some testified that they had been secretly armed and trained by Serbia’s military intelligence, a rogue actor in that rogue state.20 Serbia’s prime minister had not been an initiator of the assassination plot, but he did not repudiate it, and he proved unable to tamp down Serbia’s domestic euphoria, which intensified the fury in Vienna. “The large area in front of the War Ministry was packed,” wrote Lev Trotsky, who was living in Viennese exile and working as a correspondent for a newspaper in Kiev. “And this was not ‘the public,’ but the real people, in their worn-out boots, with fingers gnarled. . . . They waved yellow and black flags in the air, sang patriotic songs, someone shouted ‘All Serbs must die!’”21 If in response to the “Sarajevo outrage” Kaiser Franz Josef did nothing, that could encourage future acts of political terror. But what level of response? The Habsburgs had almost lost their state in 1740 and again in 1848–49; in 1914 they faced a dilemma unlike anything even the multinational Russian empire faced: of Austria-Hungary’s eleven major nations, only five were more or less exclusively within the realm; in the case of the other six, a majority lived outside the empire’s boundaries.22 Austrian ruling circles decided to smash Serbia, even at the great risk of provoking a pan-European war, in effect risking suicide from fear of death.

  A Viennese envoy visited Berlin on July 5 to solicit Germany’s backing for a reckoning with Serbia, and returned with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “full support.” There was still the matter of consent from the leaders in Budapest, the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. On July 23, after internal discussion with Hungarian leaders (who came on board by July 9), as well as intense military preparations, Vienna cabled an ultimatum to Belgrade listing ten demands, including assent to a joint investigatory commission to be supervised on Serbian soil by Austrian officials. Except for the latter stipulation—an infringement on its sovereignty—and one other, Serbia’s government accepted the demands, with conditions. Even now, Kaiser Franz Josef could have pursued a face-saving climbdown. “Almost no genius,” wrote the great historian Jacob Burckhardt of Europe’s greatest family, the Habsburgs, “but goodwill, seriousness, deliberateness; endurance and equanimity in misfortune.”23 No longer: with a sense that the monarchy was in perhaps fatal decline and running out of time, Vienna, on July 28, declared war—for the first time in history—by telegraph.24

  A wider conflict did not ensue automatically. Escalation—or not—lay principally in the hands of two men, cousins by blood and marriage, “Willy” and “Nicky.” Wilhelm II had a low opinion of Nicholas II, telling Britain’s foreign secretary at Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901 that the tsar was “only fit to live in a country home and grow turnips.”25 The kaiser had no insight into Russian grand strategy. Nicholas II, for his part, temporized, observing that “war would be disastrous for the world, and once it had broken out would be difficult to stop.”26 During the first half of 1914, more strikes had rocked St. Petersburg and other parts of the empire, like the Baku oil fields, than at any time since 1905, and in July 1914 workers became particularly menacing, partly out of desperation in the face of repression. The Duma, before its early June summer recess, was rejecting significant parts of the government budget, including funds for the interior ministry tasked with the domestic repressions. As for Russian military might, Russia’s allies France and Britain overestimated it, while Germany and Austria-Hungary underestimated it—but not as much as the Russians themselves did.27 What is more, Russia and Serbia did not even have a formal alliance, and Cousin Nicky would never go to war out of some supposed Pan-Slavic romantic nonsense.28 Russian officials instructed the Serbs to respond reasonably to Austria. Nonetheless, the bottom line was that Russia would not allow German power to humiliate Serbia because of the repercussions for Russia’s reputation, especially following Russia’s inability to prevent Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina back in 1908.29 Nicholas II was determined to deter Austria-Hungary, which had begun mobilization, for the sake of Russia, not Serbia.

  The German leadership in late July momentarily reconsidered, in an eleventh-hour initiative, but Austria-Hungary rejected the peace feeler idea—and Germany acceded. Had Wilhelm II backed off and curbed his dependent Austro-Hungarian ally, Nicholas II would have backed down as well. Instead, facing the belligerence of his cousin, domestic pressure from elites to stand tall, and unrest at home, the tsar ordered, then rescinded, and finally ordered again, on July 31, a full mobilization.30

  Russia was no innocent victim, however. The perpetual machinations to have the tsar abolish the Duma, or downgrade it to a mere consultative body, had heated up. In effect, the decision for war was Nicholas II’s sideways coup against the Duma he despised. War would allow his reclamation of an unmediated mystical union between tsar and people (a prolongation of the Romanov tercentenary of the year before). The tsar did suffer genuine pangs of conscience over the innocent subjects who would be sent to their deaths, but he also felt tremendous emotional release from the distasteful political compromising and encroachments on the autocratic ideal. Nicholas II also fantasized about a domestic patriotic upsurge, “like what occurred during the great war of 1812.”31 Conveying such delusions, a provincial newspaper wrote about the war that “there are no longer political parties, disputes, no Government, no opposition, there is just a united Russian people, readying to fight for months or years to the very last drop of blood.”32 There it was, the grand illusion: the hesitant, dubious war to uphold Russia’s international prestige was imagined as a domestic political triumph—throngs kneeling before their tsar on Palace Square. Visions took flight of further imperial aggrandizement as well: a once-in-a-century opportunity to seize the Turkish Straits and the Armenian regions of Ottoman Anatolia; annex the Polish- and Ukrainian-speaking territories of Austria; and expand into Persia, Chinese Turkestan, and Outer Mongolia.33

  Nicholas II was not alone in suddenly inverting the traditional link in Russia between war and revolution—no longer causative but somehow preventative.34 In Berlin, too, insecurities fed fantasies of foreign expansion and domestic political consolidation. Germany’s two-front vulnerability had produced a defense scheme to conquer the continent. Known to history as the Schlieffen Plan, for the general Count Alfred von Schlieffen (1833–1913), and originally conceived partly as a bold way to lobby for more war resources, the scheme, reworked by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, had come to entail wheeling huge armies through Belgium into France in a giant arc, while also readying to smash Russia. Germany could, it was hoped, overcome numerical disadvantage by tactical surprise, mobility, and superior training.35 The German general staff, in bouts of pessimism, expressed fewer illusions about a short war than sometimes recognized, but could not admit that war had ceased to be an effective policy instrument—to them, war still promised a decisive resolution of multiple state problems, and the civilians did not
disagree. Thus, Germany would violate Belgian neutrality in order to support Austria against Russia, with the larger aim of avoiding losing the arms race to Russia, which also meant war with Britain.36

  Less well known is the fact that the British Admiralty, the equivalent of the German general staff, had been planning to fight a war by precipitating the rapid collapse of Germany’s financial system, thereby paralyzing its economy and its military’s ability to wage war—the formula of a quick victory, at supposedly very low cost, and the British equivalent of the Schlieffen scheme. The Admiralty’s plan for Germany’s demise was worked out in a committee on trading with the enemy headed by Hamilton “Ham” Cuffe (1848–1934), known as Lord Desart. It not only extended war far beyond military considerations but presupposed massive state intervention in the laissez-faire market economy. The Admiralty sought control over the wartime movements of British-flagged merchant ships and the private cargoes they carried, censorship over all cable networks, and supervision over the financial activities of the City of London. Because Britain had the greatest navy and wielded a near monopoly over the global trading system’s infrastructure, the Admiralty fantasized that it could somehow manage the effects of the chaos on Britain’s own economy. All of this contravened international law. The British cabinet had endorsed the Admiralty’s plan in 1912, and even predelegated the authority to enact it when hostilities broke out. The internal war debate in Britain took place over whether Britain could avoid also becoming entangled in strictly military actions (sending troops to the continent) while denying Germany access to shipping, communications, and credit.37

  Britain and Germany almost pulled back from the brink. Wilhelm II did not give the full go-ahead for war until told that Russia had mobilized.38 The kaiser signed the mobilization order on August 1, 1914, at 5:00 p.m., but a mere twenty-three minutes later, a telegram arrived from the German ambassador in London. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, “has just called me upon the telephone,” wrote the German ambassador, “and asked me whether I thought I could give an assurance that in the event of France remaining neutral in a war between Russia and Germany we should not attack the French.”39 Was this a parallel to Pyotr Durnovó’s (unheeded) advice to Nicholas II to keep out of the Anglo-German quarrel: namely, an expression of London’s dream of escaping war by directing German might eastward, against Russia? Details out of London were sketchy. The conversation between Grey and the German ambassador had lasted a mere six minutes. But the telegram seemed to have broached the core question that would drive world politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century and would become the main dilemma of Stalin’s regime—whither German power?

  To an elated German kaiser, the August 1 telegram from London seemed a godsend: the splintering of the Triple Entente, and one less front. Grey seemed to be proposing that Britain and even France could remain neutral in Germany’s support for Austria against Serbia and thus in Germany’s quarrel with Russia. A nearly apoplectic von Moltke protested the great security risk and chaos involved in halting Germany’s precision war plan and (somehow) shifting entire armies from west to east—“Your majesty, it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised”40—but when a follow-up telegram arrived seeming to confirm British neutrality if Germany attacked only Russia, Wilhelm II ordered champagne. The kaiser also cabled King George V, another cousin, to give his word that German troops, although continuing to mobilize in the west (for protection), would not cross the French frontier. It looked like a deal. But that very same night, the British king sent a stupendous reply. Drafted by Grey, it called the conversations between Grey and the German ambassador a “misunderstanding.”41 Was it British treachery? No, just stupidity. Paris would never acquiesce in a German annihilation of Russia because that would drastically alter the balance of power on the continent to France’s detriment, and in any case France had formal treaty obligations to Russia. Grey—who deemed Germany a battleship without a rudder but was himself acting inexplicably—belatedly specified that for Berlin a deal to avert war required that Germany had to hold back from attacking Russia, too. A livid Wilhelm II ordered a relieved von Moltke to resume the occupation of Belgium. His revised “Schlieffen Plan” was on.42

  Germany declared war against Russia and France; Britain declared war against Germany.43 German officials managed through clever propaganda to make the German war order appear a necessary response to the “aggression” of Russia, which had mobilized first.44 (Stalin would later come to share the general conclusion, fatefully, that any mobilization, even in deterrence or self-defense, led inexorably to war.)45

  Lord Desart’s plan was on as well, at least initially, even though financial groups, the department of trade, and other interests had vehemently opposed this grand strategy. But July 1914 had brought a stunning financial panic from a loss of confidence: London banks began calling short-term loans and disgorging their immense holdings of bills of exchange, freezing the London market; interest rates jumped. In New York, European investors dumped American securities and demanded payment in gold. Fear of war pushed insurance rates so high, however, that gold stopped being shipped even though the global financial system was based upon the metal. “Before a single shot had been fired, and before any destruction of wealth, the whole world-fabric of credit had dissolved,” a managing director of the firm Lazard Brothers would observe in fall 1914. “The Stock Exchange was closed; the discount market dead; . . . commerce at a standstill throughout the world; currency scarce; the bank of England’s resources highly strained.” The United States, which was neutral, would not tolerate closing down the global economic system by Britain in its quarrel with Germany. The British government would soon back off attempting to collapse the German economy in toto and would instead improvise a piecemeal effort at economic blockade. It would fail. The transoceanic flow to Germany of goods and raw materials financed by British banks and carried on British ships would increase.46 Meanwhile, Britain had sent a land army to the continent.

  World war looks inexorable. Over decades, imperial German ruling circles had lacked elementary circumspection about their newfound might; imperialist Britain lacked the visionary, skillful leadership needed to accept and thereby temper Germany’s power. Elements in Serbia plotted murder with disregard for the consequences. Austria-Hungary, bereft of its heir, opted for an existential showdown. German ruling circles looked to shore up their one ally, a beleaguered Austria, while being fundamentally insecure about an inability to win the arm’s race against the great powers on either side of Germany, especially with the growing military prowess of a weak Russia, and therefore developed a defensive plan that entailed the conquest of Europe.47 Russia risked everything, not over a dubious pan-Slavic interest in Serbia, but over what a failure to defend Serbia would do to Russia’s prestige.48 And, finally, Britain and Germany tried but failed to collude in a last-minute bilateral deal at Russia’s expense. (The thought would persist.) As if all that was not sufficient cause, it was summertime: Chief of Staff von Moltke was on a four-week holiday at Karlsbad until July 25, his second extended spa visit that summer for liver disease; German grand admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was at a spa in Switzerland; the chief of the Austro-Hungarian staff, Field Marshal Baron Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, was in the Alps with his mistress; both the German and Austrian war ministers were on holiday as well.49 Additional structural factors—an overestimation of the military offensive—also weighed heavily in the march toward Armageddon.50 But if St. Petersburg had possessed irrefutable proof of Serbian intelligence’s complicity in the archduke’s assassination, the tsar’s honor might have been offended to the point that he refused standing up militarily for Belgrade.51 If Princip had quit and gone home after he and his accomplices botched the assassination, or the archduke’s driver had known the revised plan to visit the hospital, world war might have been averted. Be that as it may, launching a war always comes down to decision makers, even when those decision makers are
themselves the products, as much as the arbiters, of armed state structures. Across Europe in 1914, with few exceptions—a shrewd Pyotr Durnovó, a bumbling Edward Grey—politicians, military men, and particularly rulers hankered after territory and standing and believed (or hoped) that war would solve all manner of their international and domestic problems, reinvigorating their rule, at what each believed was, for them, a favorable moment.52 In other words, when contingencies such as the wrong turn of a driver on a Sarajevo street confronted a tiny handful of men with the question of world war or peace, they hesitated yet chose war, for the sake, in varying combinations, of state prestige, state aggrandizement, and regime revitalization.53

  THE SUMMONS TO LENIN

  The conflict of August 1914 escalated into a world war partly because of the expectation that states were vulnerable to conquest, but it was protracted because of the circumstance that they were not.54 Already by late fall 1914 the Great War had become a stalemate: Britain, and to a lesser extent Russia, had foiled Germany’s attempted preemptive conquest of France. From that point—and every day thereafter—the further choice, for all belligerents, could not have been starker: Negotiate an end to the stalemate, admitting that millions of soldiers had been hurled to futile deaths; or continue searching for an elusive decisive blow while dispatching millions more. Each belligerent chose the latter course. To put the matter another way, if the decision for war was, in the first instance, Austria-Hungary’s, then Germany’s, then Russia’s, then Britain’s, the decision to prolong the agony was everyone’s. Belligerent states ran out of money yet they persisted in the fight. During fifty-two months of war, the rulers of the world’s most educated and technologically advanced countries would mobilize 65 million men. Up to 9 million were killed, more than 20 million wounded, and nearly 8 million taken prisoner or missing—in all, 37 million casualties.55