The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Višegrad was only one of many multi-ethnic towns rent asunder by the Great War. In Andrić’s words, it merely ‘provided a small but eloquent example of the first symptoms of a contagion which would in time become European and then spread to the entire world’. The Western Front had revealed a new level of industrialization in warfare – had seen the introduction of machines of death comparable in their lethal effectiveness with those Wells had imagined in The War of the Worlds. But the Eastern Front had seen an equally important transformation in warfare. There the death throes of the old Central and East European empires had dissolved the old boundaries between combatant and civilian. This kind of war proved much easier to start than to stop.

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  Graves of Nations

  On the whole, great multinational empires are an institution of the past, of a time when material force was held high and the principle of nationality had not yet been recognized, because democracy had not been recognized.

  Thomas Masaryk, 1918

  Great was the year and terrible the year of Our Lord 1918, but the year 1919 was even more terrible.

  Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

  THE RED PLAGUE

  The peace that followed the First World War was the continuation of war by other means. The Bolsheviks proclaimed an end to hostilities, only to plunge the Russian Empire into a barbaric civil war. The Western statesmen drafted peace treaties – one for each of the defeated Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey) – each of which was a casus belli in its own right. Nor, as Keynes predicted in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, did ‘vengeance… limp’. As it turned out, Keynes was only half right. He expected that the financial burdens imposed under the Treaty of Versailles would be the principal bone of post-war contention; the European ‘civil war’ would come, he wrote, ‘if we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe… if we take the view that for at least a generation to come Germany cannot be trusted with even a modicum of prosperity… that year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled’. The causes of the Second World War in Europe were not economic, however; at least, not in the sense Keynes had in mind. They were territorial – or, to be more precise, they arose from the conflict between territorial arrangements based on the principle of ‘self-determination’ and the realities of ethnically mixed patterns of settlement. Keynes also expected that the first reaction against the peace treaties would come from Germany. In fact it came from Turkey, though what happened there foreshadowed much that the Germans would later do.

  The road to civil war began in Petrograd, as the Russian capital had been renamed during the war as a sop to national sentiment (‘Sankt Peterburg’ had too German a ring to it). Nicholas II, a pious, puritanical man of limited intellectual capacity, came to regard ruling Russia as one long test of inner strength. He worked himself hard, as if determined to prove the veracity of his claim that he was ‘the crowned worker’. ‘I do the work of three men,’ he had declared. ‘Let everyone learn to do the work of at least two.’ Unfortunately the two other jobs he relished doing – rather more, it would appear, than that of Tsar – were those of secretary and gardener. While conditions at the front deteriorated, he doggedly ploughed through routine correspondence, pausing only to sweep the snow from his own paths. His German-born wife, the Empress Alexandra, did not help, having embraced her own caricature version of Orthodoxy and autocracy. ‘Ah my Love,’ she wrote to him (in English, as in all their correspondence), ‘when at last will you thump with your hand upon the table & scream at [your ministers] when they act wrongly[?] – one does not fear you – & one must… Oh, my Boy, make one tremble before you – to love you is not enough… Be Peter the G., John [Ivan] the Terrible, Emp. Paul – crush them all under you – now don’t you laugh, naughty one.’ It was hopeless. To the last, Nicholas declined to ‘bellow at the people left right & centre’. On December 16, 1916, the royal couple’s charismatic and corrupt holy man Rasputin was murdered by the Tsar’s own cousin, Grand Duke Dmitry, aided and abetted by the effete Prince Felix Yusupov and a right-wing politician named V. M. Purishkevich, in the belief that the monk was exerting a malign influence on the Tsar and on Russian foreign policy. But things did not improve. Deserted by his own generals in what amounted to a mutiny in early March 1917, Nicholas agreed to abdicate, complaining bitterly of ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’. Neither he nor his wife ever understood the revolution that was now unfolding. Indeed, Alexandra’s comment on its outbreak deserves wider celebrity as one of the great mis-diagnoses of history: ‘It’s a hooligan movement, young boys & girls running about & screaming that they have no bread, only to excite –… if it were cold they wld. probably stay in doors.’

  The Provisional Government that took the Tsar’s place aimed to establish a republic with a liberal constitution and parliamentary institutions. Its prospects were far from bad. However, the determination of its leaders to keep the war going and to postpone decisions on the burning question of land reform until after a Constituent Assembly had been elected created a window of opportunity for more extreme elements. The Bolsheviks had in fact been taken by surprise by the revolution. ‘It’s staggering!’ exclaimed Lenin when he heard the news in Zurich. ‘Such a surprise! Just imagine! We must get home, but how?’ The German High Command answered that question, providing him not only with a railway ticket to Petrograd but also, through two shady intermediaries named Parvus and Ganetsky, with funds to subvert the new government. Instead of having him and his associates arrested, as they richly deserved to be, the Provisional Government dithered. On August 27, egged on by conservative critics of the new regime, the Supreme Commander of the Russian Army, General Lavr Kornilov, launched an abortive military coup. The unintended effect was to boost support for the Bolsheviks within the soviets, which had sprung up as a kind of parallel government not only in Petrograd (as in 1905) but in other cities too. Two months later, on October 24, 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a coup d’etat of their own. At the time, it did not seem like a world-shaking event. Indeed, more people were hurt in Sergei Eisenstein’s subsequent re-enactment for his film October. Hardly anyone expected the new regime to last.

  The Bolsheviks promised their supporters ‘Peace, Land, Bread’ and ‘Power to the Soviets’. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation. At Brest-Litovsk, in the sprawling brick fortress that guards the River Bug, the German High Command demanded sweeping cessions of territory from a motley Bolshevik delegation (to keep up revolutionary appearances, a token peasant named Roman Stashkov had been picked up en route). Trotsky, who was in charge of Bolshevik foreign policy during the negotiations, played for time, defiantly if somewhat opaquely proclaiming ‘neither peace nor war’. His hope was that if the negotiations could be spun out for long enough, world revolution might supervene. The Germans simply advanced into the Baltic provinces, Poland and the Ukraine. There was almost no resistance from the demoralized Russian forces. Indeed, for a moment it seemed as if the Germans might even take Petrograd, and the Bolshevik leadership was forced hastily to remove themselves to Moscow, henceforth their capital. When Trotsky finally yielded to Lenin’s argument for capitulation – after stormy debates that led the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to quit the revolutionary government – the Bolsheviks had to sign away a third of the pre-war Russian Empire’s agricultural land and population, more than half of her industry and nearly 90 per cent of her coalmines. Poland, Finland, Lithuania and the Ukraine became independent, though under German tutelage. The war in the East was the war the Germans won. The money they had used to send Lenin back to Russia had, it seemed, paid a handsome return.

  Yet the Russian Revolution proved to be not the end of the war, merely its mutation. After Germany’s eastern triumph was rendered null and void by her defeat in the West, the war in the East changed into a terrible civil war, in many ways as costly in human life as the conventional war between empires that preceded it. Two epidemics swept the world
in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships. By June it had reached India, Australia and New Zealand. Two months later, a second wave struck all but simultaneously in Boston, Massachusetts, Brest in France and Freetown in Sierra Leone. At least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the ‘Spanish Lady’. Strikingly, the global peak of mortality was in October and November 1918. The Germans had been prepared to combat lice-borne typhus, which was an especially serious threat on the Eastern Front; indeed they devoted considerable resources to eradicating it when they occupied cities like Białystok. They were as surprised as anyone by this unlooked-for menace from the West. There is reason to believe that this was a factor in the collapse of the German army in those months (see Figure 5.1).

  The other epidemic was Bolshevism, which for a time seemed almost as contagious and ultimately proved as lethal as the influenza. With the end of the war, Soviet-style governments were proclaimed in Budapest, Munich and Hamburg. The red flag was even raised above Glasgow City Chambers. Lenin dreamed of a ‘Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia’. Trotsky declared that ‘the road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal’. Even distant Buenos Aires was rocked by strikes and street fighting.

  In Russia itself, however, the Bolsheviks’ authority was non-existent outside the big cities. Against them were arrayed three counterrevolutionary or ‘White’ armies led by experienced Tsarist generals: Anton Denikin’s Volunteers, an army of many officers and few men which had started life on the banks of the Don, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s force in Siberia and General Nikolai Yudenich’s in the north-west. Moreover, the Whites had foreign support. The Czech Legion had been formed by Czech and Slovak nationalists to fight on the Russian side against Austria-Hungary and at the outbreak of the Revolution numbered around 35,000 men. Determined to continue their fight for independence, the Legion’s commanders decided to travel eastwards, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, with a view to crossing the Pacific, North America and the Atlantic and rejoining the fray on the Western Front. They took around 15,000 men with them. When the Bolsheviks at Chelyabinsk sought to disarm them the Czechs fought back. They then joined forces with the Socialist Revolutionaries in Samara, helping them to establish a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (known as the Komuch) as a rival government to Lenin’s. Between May and June, the Czechs swept eastwards, capturing Novo-Nikolaevsk, Penza, Syzran, Tomsk, Omsk, Samara and finally Vladivostok. Meanwhile, Russia’s former allies sent

  Figure 5.1 German soldiers reporting sick, August 1914-July 1918

  expeditionary forces, whose primary aim was to keep Russia in the war. The British landed troops at Archangel and Murmansk, as well as at Vladivostok; the French sent men to Odessa, the Americans to Vladivostok. The Allies also supplied the White armies with weapons and other supplies. The Japanese seized the opportunity to march across the Amur River from Manchuria. Meanwhile, the cities that were supposed to be the headquarters of the Revolution emptied as factories closed and supplies of food and fuel dried up. When Denikin called on all the White forces to converge on Moscow in July 1918, it seemed more than likely that the Bolshevik regime would be overthrown.

  On August 6, 1918, White forces in combination with the renegade Czech Legion captured Kazan. The Bolshevik 5th Army was haemor-rhaging deserters. Ufa had fallen; so too had Simbirsk, Lenin’s own birthplace. Another step back along the Volga would bring the forces of counter-revolution to the gates of Nizhny-Novgorod, opening the road to Moscow. Having resigned his post as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in favour of Military Affairs, Trotsky now had the daunting task of stiffening the Red Army’s resolve. He was, as we have seen, by training a journalist not a general. Yet the goatee-bearded intellectual with his pince-nez had seen enough of war in the Balkans and on the Western Front to know that without discipline an army was doomed. It was Trotsky who insisted on the need for conscription, realizing that volunteers would not suffice. It was Trotsky who brought in the former Tsarist NCOs and officers – many of them hitherto languishing in jail – whose experience was to be vital in taking on the Whites.

  Trotsky had two advantages. Firstly, the Bolsheviks controlled the central railway hubs, from which he could deploy forces at speed. Indeed, it was from his own specially designed armoured railway carriage that he himself directed operations, travelling some 100,000 miles in the course of the war. Secondly, though the Bolsheviks lacked experience of war, they did have experience of terrorism; like the Serbian nationalists, they too had employed assassination as a tactic in the pre-war years. It was to terror, in the name of martial law, that Trotsky now turned.

  When he arrived at Kazan, the first thing he did was to uncouple the engine from his train; a signal to his troops that he had no intention of retreating. He then brought twenty-seven deserters to nearby Syvashsk, on the banks of the Volga, and had them shot. The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was the choice he offered: possible death in the front or certain death in the rear. ‘We must put an end once and for all’, he sneered with a characteristically caustic turn of phrase, ‘to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ Units that refused to fight were to be decimated. It was a turning point in the Russian civil war – and an ominous sign of how the Bolsheviks would behave if they won it. In the bitter fighting for the bridge over the Volga at Kazan, Trotsky’s tactics made that outcome significantly more likely. The bridge was saved, and on September 10 the city itself was retaken. Two days later Simbirsk also fell to the Reds. The White advance faltered as they found themselves challenged not only by a rapidly growing Red Army, but also by recalcitrant Ukrainians and Chechens to their rear. The Czechs were weary of fighting; the Legion disintegrated as it was driven back to Samara and then beyond the Urals. The Komuch fell apart, leaving Kolchak to proclaim himself ‘Supreme Ruler’ – of what was not clear. By the end of November Denikin had lost Voronezh and Kastornoe.

  The end of the war on the Western Front was well timed for the Bolsheviks. It undermined the legitimacy of the foreign powers’ intervention, especially as they now had left-wing outbreaks of their own to deal with. Only the Japanese showed any inclination to maintain an armed presence on Russian soil, and they were content to stake out new territorial claims in the Far East and leave the rest of Russia to its fate. To be sure, the Bolsheviks controlled only a small part of the former Tsarist Empire. The German withdrawal from the Ukraine had created a vacuum of power to the west, a state of affairs memorably described in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard. Chaos reigned as rival forces of nationalists, peasant Greens, Whites and Bolsheviks vied for control of the countryside and dwindling stocks of grain. In south-eastern Ukraine, a hard-drinking anarchist peasant named Nestor ‘Batko’ Makhno led a 15,000-strong peasant army against all comers: Germans, nationalists, Whites, Reds. The Don Cossacks were supportive of the Whites but reluctant to venture far from their homes; their dilemmas are at the core of Mikhail Sholo-khov’s Quiet Flows the Don, the tragic central character of which, Grigory Melekhov, fights successively for the Whites, the Reds and nationalist guerrillas. There was a Siberian separatist army, too, marching under a green and white flag. It was briefly allied to a ‘Provisional All-Russian Government’, which had its offices in a railway carriage in Omsk. The area east of Lake Baikal was in the hands of a renegade warlord named Grigorii Sem
enov. Above all, there was recurrent resistance to Bolshevik rule by peasants.* The real civil war was not just between Whites and Reds; it also between Reds and Greens, country-dwellers who rejected the Bolshevik vision of a dictatorship of the urban proletariat and took up arms to fend off arbitrary grain seizures.

  Nevertheless, from November 1918 onwards the tide of the civil war ran the Bolsheviks’ way. By April 1919 Kolchak’s forces had been beaten and by July Perm was back in Bolshevik hands, followed by Omsk itself in November. Denikin enjoyed some success in the Ukraine in the summer of 1919 but had lost Kiev by the end of the year. Yudenich’s attempt to capture Petrograd had also failed, thanks in large measure to Trotsky’s rallying of the city’s defenders, who drove the defeated White army back into Estonia, whence they had come. General Peter Wràngel’s Caucasian Army had captured Tsar-itsyn that June, but by January 1920 it was clear that the war was effectively over. The Allies cut off their aid to the Whites. One by one the generals fled or, like Kolchak, were captured and executed. By the summer of 1920 Lenin felt confident enough to export the Revolution westwards, ordering the Red Army to march on Warsaw and confidently talking of the need to ‘sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too’. Only their decisive defeat by the Polish army on the banks of the River Vistula halted the spread of the Bolshevik epidemic.