Not at Versailles, but soon after, the allies carved up Turkey, the other complicated empire on the losing side. The Turks kept only Istanbul (the former Constantinople) in Europe, and most of Asia Minor. In the Middle East the oceans of sand that covered unplumbed seas of oil were broken into what would later be the Arab nations.
The biggest problem at Versailles was what to do with Germany. The Germans and their friends had nearly won the biggest war the world had known. The victors saw the Germans as a chronic threat to peace, like the hungry ogre in the castle in old folktales who from time to time drags off a village maiden.
One way to punish and weaken Germany was to lop off chunks of German land. But who should get the confiscated territory? To create a beneficiary, the victors had to improvise. More than a century before, a nation, Poland, had lain on Germany’s eastern flank, but Prussia (Germany), Russia, and Austria-Hungary had divided and swallowed Poland. It had simply vanished from the map. Now the diplomats brought Poland back to life and gave it pieces of the same countries that had once devoured it.
What else to do with Germany? The victors took away its colonies in Africa and the Pacific, returned to France two provinces the Germans had taken fifty years before, and gave to France the use of German coal mines for fifteen years. They also fined the Germans heavily for the damage they had caused. Most important, though, they tried to weaken Germany. They limited its army to 100,000 men, and demanded that it surrender its fleet. (Instead, the German captains sank their ships off Scotland. Scottish children on a tugboat outing chanced to be there, and were thrilled to watch what they believed to be a show put on for them.)
Not surprisingly, the Germans hated to be treated as the losers of the war. They didn’t feel defeated; they had no sense that they had lost the war. After all, they said, when the fighting had stopped they were “undefeated in the field” and willing still to fight. Not only did they not feel beaten, Germans also felt no guilt about starting the war. No one really knew who had caused it — if any single country had — because all the countries kept their diplomatic papers secret. Each side was free to blame the other.
To justify the harshness of the treaty the victors included in it a “war guilt” clause. If the Germans signed the treaty it meant that they “accepted the responsibility” for all the losses that resulted from the war. They also agreed that war had been “imposed” upon the Allies “by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” The Germans found these words infuriating, and an insult to their honor. For that and other reasons, they at first refused to sign the treaty. They signed it only when the Allies threatened to resume the war.
In the years to come an army veteran would rant in front of German crowds about the heavy fine, the confiscated land, the army limit, and the war guilt clause. The humiliation of Versailles cried out for vengeance. As Adolf Hitler shouted, sneered, and threatened, thousands cheered.
Chapter 18
A utopia becomes a nightmare.
OUT OF THE MISERY of the First World War rose communism. And out of the Great Depression of the 1930s rose Nazism, which is the subject of the next chapter. They were both like noxious weeds that thrive amid the litter of a vacant lot, and their story is a grim one. Both promised a better world, even a Utopia, but they delivered something else.
THE MAN WHO planted the seeds of communism was born in 1818, a century before they germinated. Karl Marx grew up in western “Germany” (it wasn’t yet a united country) in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. At this time thousands of young men and women in Europe and North America were moving from the farms to the factory towns, and learning to run the clattering new machines.
Not Marx, however; as a prosperous lawyer’s son he had better prospects. He studied law and philosophy at German universities and mixed with intellectuals, discussing atheism, politics, and reform. Some of these acquaintances were “socialists,” who believed that all the people, not the wealthy only, ought to own the land, the mills, and the engines used in growing food and manufacturing.
In his early twenties Marx edited a radical journal in Paris. When he heard about him, young Friedrich Engels crossed the Channel from England to visit Marx. Engels was the son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer. His father owned a factory in England, and he had sent Friedrich there to learn the business and to run it.
Engels was utterly unlike the solemn Marx. He fenced and hunted, lived with a mistress, and welcomed friends for tea on Sundays. But he had another, intensely serious side. What he had seen in the back streets of the British manufacturing city of Manchester had stunned him. The filthy hovels shocked him, and so did the stunted workers, their hungry families, and the way they sought relief in gin and Jesus.
When Marx and Engels met, they were both in their middle twenties, and both were consumed with the idea of social reform. They talked for ten days and began an alliance that would last for forty years. Engels would bring to the team his indignation about the lot of the working class and his knack for quickly dashing off a sparkling tract. Marx, however, was the senior partner, the philosopher and prophet who drew lessons from the past and prophesied the future.
The two men called themselves “communists” rather than socialists. Communism meant something more drastic. Communists not only understood the oppression of the workers but were ready to carry out a workers’ revolution. Marx and Engels joined a secret group of would-be revolutionaries and reshaped it into what they called the Communist League. The League had tiny subdivisions in London, Paris, and Brussels. The London group asked Marx to write a declaration of principles for them. So in early 1848, with help from Engels, he wrote a short and fiery pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto.
The pamphlet starts with words intended to shock: “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism.” It then explains the Marx and Engels view of history: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” In Europe in the Middle Ages, the rulers were the great landowners, since most people were farmers and the landowners held the chief means of production. But then, says Marx, wealthy men of the rising middle class overthrew the landowners. These victors were “capitalists,” who owned ships, workshops, and enough money to lend to others at interest. In the time he was writing, Marx explains, the descendants of those triumphant capitalists were the powerful owners of banks and factories. They brutalized their workers and lived off their labor as parasites. Governments claimed to serve everyone, but they were really just committees of the middle class for the exploitation of the workers.
At any moment, however, fighting would begin, and the workers, guided by the communists, would have their revolution and overthrow the middle class. (The communists, Marx explained, might include a few enlightened members of the middle class who “cut themselves adrift and join the revolutionary class.” He had in mind no others than Engels and himself.)
Once the revolution had succeeded, the workers (guided by the communists) would themselves be the ruling class, the dictators, for a while. They would confiscate all significant private property, such as land, banks, factories, and machines. After private property was gone, classes, and therefore war between the classes, would disappear. A classless society would emerge. Marx does not explain what life in such a classless world would be like, but it clearly would be better. Schools would be open to all, factories and farms would produce more, and poverty would vanish.
The Manifesto closes with a flourish. Communists, Marx says, “openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. WORKING MEN OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”
The authorities in Belgium, where Marx composed the Manifesto, were arresting radicals, so he went to Paris and then to Germany. There he edited a newspaper until the government closed it down. Marx printed the last edition in red ink (symbol of revolution) and left for England. Fo
r the rest of his life he would live there with his wife, three children, and their German maid, who stayed with them, unpaid, all their years. During one period of six years they lived in just two rooms, eating potatoes and bread. It was mostly Engels’s gifts of money that kept them alive.
In his final decades Marx wrote out his theories of history and economics in a treatise that he named Capital. A volume of it appeared during his lifetime, and Engels edited two others after Marx’s death. Capital would be communism’s Bible. For a hundred years communists all over would study it and argue over every word. However, the fiery little Manifesto held Marx and Engels’s basic message and reached many more readers.
As decades passed, however, the message began to look outdated. Workers did not revolt as Marx and Engels had predicted. On the contrary, in several countries they actually got the vote. As a result of their new influence governments ended the use of child labor, limited the hours of work, and provided public schools for all. Many workers’ wages rose because of the general rise in productivity. If they didn’t, workers organized in unions, and with the threat of strikes they compelled employers to increase their pay.
Marx was well aware of all these changes, and before he died he doubted that worker revolutions would ever occur. But many of his followers, who were known as “Marxists,” disagreed. They argued with Marx and with each other, and for decades they would argue about what Marx had said, and how they ought to bring about the classless society. Marx was arrogant and certain of his views, and he wearied of the wrangling Marxists. He called them “rascals,” “louts,” and “bedbugs,” and disgustedly he said, “All I know is I’m not a Marxist.”
IN SPITE OF Marx’s pessimism, communist revolutions did take place. The first began in 1917.
At that time the Russian empire covered two-fifths of Europe and Asia. It was so big that the United States, China, and India could all have been dropped into it. Europeans liked to call it “a thousand miles of mud,” but it was five times as long as that.
Most Russians were peasants, sometimes called “the dark people.” They lived in ignorance and isolation in shabby villages that dotted Russia’s plains. Many of them worked small farms of their own, while others worked on the estates of landlords, who often lived in mansions in the towns and cities. Russia was still profoundly rural, but it had begun to industrialize. Already cities had their slums and hard-worked, poorly paid workers.
Petrograd (St. Petersburg), which was then the capital, lies in Russia’s northwest corner. Tsar Nicholas II lived there in the Winter Palace or in his summer home outside the city. He was courteous and shy but a despot who was certain that democracy was “senseless and criminal.” Russia had a feeble and conservative parliament that met in Petrograd but only when the tsar permitted.
Inside Russia (and outside, because many were in exile) small networks of radicals burned to lead the workers — and perhaps the peasants — in a revolution. Most of them aimed to oust the tsar and parliament and put the country in the hands of working people. Many of the rebels traced their principles to Marx, who had died about when they were born.
World War I gave the revolutionaries their chance. Germans had crushed the Russian armies and forced them to retreat deep into their own country. Millions of men had died, in part because the tsar and his ministers had grossly mismanaged the war. For example, the aged general who served as war minister had purchased too few machine guns and rapid-fire cannons because he saw them as newfangled weapons that only cowards used.
Late in 1916 the parliament found the courage to protest the government’s bungling. Tsar Nicholas reacted predictably, and dismissed the parliament. As a result, many of its members, who until this time had been loyal to the tsar, concluded that they could save the country only by taking power.
However, it was not the parliament or middle class but working people who sparked an uprising. Because of the war, food in Petrograd was scarce and bellies were empty, but the fumbling government was slow to deal with the food problem. Early in 1917, workers began to strike and march in the streets. For the most part, they had no leaders. Riots broke out, and the crowds shouted “Down with the tsar!” Soldiers were ordered to fire on the rioters but refused to do so.
A revolt was turning into a revolution, but who was going to lead it? Two very different bodies took shape. One was an executive committee of the parliament, made up mostly of moderates who wanted a constitutional government. The other was a fiery Soviet, or council, of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which socialists and communists led. In theory the Soviet was only a local body, whereas the parliamentary committee was national. In fact, however, the Soviet steered the committee. Under pressure from the Soviet, the parliamentary committee set up a provisional government.
Pushed by the Soviet, in March 1917 the provisional government telegraphed the tsar, who was at the war front, and called on him to leave the throne. He tried to return to Petrograd on his special train, but en route he learned that at a station near the capital rebel soldiers blocked the tracks. Clearly the army was starting to back the revolution, fatefully for Russia. For Nicholas all was lost, and in his silk-hung railroad car he signed an act of abdication.
FAR AWAY IN Switzerland news of the revolution reached Vladimir Lenin, a Russian revolutionary. Lenin, like so many other socialists and communists, came from Russia’s slender middle class. His father had been an inspector of schools. However, his eldest brother had been a terrorist, and was hanged for joining a conspiracy to kill Nicholas’s father with a bomb hidden in a book. Lenin also had become a revolutionary and the leader of the Bolsheviks, one of the factions of Russian communists. A fellow Marxist said of Lenin that he thought of revolution all day and dreamed of it at night.
The outbreak of a revolution was the moment he had long awaited. It was urgent for Lenin and other Bolsheviks to return from Switzerland to Russia. But Germany, which was of course at war with Russia, lay across their path. They applied to German officials, who hated revolutionaries but hated the Russian government even more. The officials arranged for Lenin and his friends to ride through Germany in a sealed railway car, as if they were deadly germs. The Germans hoped, of course, that these bacteria would spread the disease of revolution in Russia.
Despite a common misconception, Lenin and his Bolsheviks didn’t bring about the revolution. As we have seen, when they arrived in Petrograd in April 1917, the revolution had already begun. The tsar and his family were prisoners, and the army was melting like the snow that still lay on the fields and streets. The Provisional Government was shakily in charge, and workers’ soviets like the one in Petrograd were forming everywhere. Lenin and his colleagues figured what they had to do. Their task was not to spark rebellion, but, like bandits climbing on a moving train, to seize a revolution that was under way.
Lenin waited half a year. By then the Bolsheviks had won majorities in all the provincial soviets, and he had the backing of the rebel soldiers in Petrograd. Now was the moment to snatch control of the revolution from the middle-of-the-road Provisional Government. To lead the coup Lenin chose the able Leon Trotsky, another middle-class revolutionary, the son of a well-off farmer. (The tsarist government had deported Trotsky during the war. When the revolution began, he had been even farther away than Lenin, in an apartment on 164th Street in New York City.)
On the night of November 6, 1917, Trotsky’s men and some soldiers seized some power points in Petrograd: bridges, the main telegraph office, the central bank, railroad stations, and power plants. The coup was so quick and bloodless that the people of the city had no idea what was happening. The Bolsheviks quickly called into being a “Congress of Soviets,” and it declared the Provisional Government dead. The congress then set up a new government and chose Lenin as its head.
Lenin’s government held an election for a “Constituent Assembly” that was to draw up a constitution for Russia. But his own communist faction, the Bolsheviks, won only a quarter of the delegates. This would n
ever do, since Lenin wanted a one-party government (his party, of course) to run the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He let the assembly meet just once. On the following day he sent armed men to shut it down.
The revolutionary government quickly announced the confiscation of the property of wealthy landowners, with no compensation to the former owners. This wasn’t such a daring move, since peasants had begun to seize landowners’ estates even before November 1917. But now the peasants took over millions of acres that had belonged to the wealthy gentry. Formerly the peasants had been dirt-poor; now at least the dirt was theirs. As in France in 1789, aristocrats began to flee from Russia.
Lenin and his colleagues faced enormous tasks. They had to arrange peace with Germany, and also end a civil war that broke out after the revolution and raged through much of Russia during three bad years. But the communists had an even bigger task. If they wanted to reshape the country, they had to get the Russian people under tight control. Lenin didn’t mind this task; he was quite prepared to shove aside or murder anyone who blocked the path of history. He once declared, “the more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie [the middle class] and clergy we manage to shoot the better.” He was known to attack even other socialists and communists as “ugly scum…blisters…pus.”
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