The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  To the Russian Socialists, the obduracy of London and Paris came as little surprise. What was more disappointing was the attitude of Washington.24 Even following America’s entry into the war, the revolutionary defensists still counted on Wilson for support. And Wilson fully appreciated their dilemma. He regarded the secret Entente agreements of 1915 and 1916 in which Imperial Russia was entangled as odious. He knew, as he put it to a British confidant, that the Russians ‘in setting up their new government and working out domestic reforms’ might arrive at the point at which they found ‘the war an intolerable evil and would desire to get to an end of it on any reasonable terms’. When the Petrograd Soviet issued its formula for peace that so obviously echoed Wilson’s own ‘peace without victory’ appeal, it caused real embarrassment in Washington.25 If Wilson had been able to throw the weight of the United States behind Petrograd’s call for peace, the effect might have been dramatic. But the headlong aggression of Germany in the spring of 1917 appears to have convinced Wilson that so long as Imperial Germany remained a threat, there was no prospect of calming the militarist impulse in Britain and France.26 Germany and thus the old world as a whole could be tamed only through force. To ensure that this pacification did not become another imperialist war of conquest, America must have leadership of the war effort. It was one thing for the President of the United States to arbitrate a world settlement, it was quite another to allow the Russian revolutionaries to dictate the pace of peace politics. Nothing good could come of an undisciplined socialist peace conference in Stockholm in which America had no substantial voice. Having been forced to opt for war, Wilson was not about to lose control of the politics of peace. When the Russian government made its official appeal for the Entente to revise their war aims, London and Paris were only too happy to let Wilson be the first to reply. On 22 May the American President issued a response to the Russian people in which he began by reaffirming the deadly menace posed by Imperial Germany. The apparent willingness of the Kaiser’s government to accept reform was designed ‘only to preserve the power they have set up in Germany . . . and their private projects of power all the way from Berlin to Baghdad and beyond’. Berlin remained at the centre of ‘a net of intrigue directed against nothing less than the peace and liberty of the world. The meshes of that intrigue must be broken, but cannot unless wrongs already done are undone. . .’27 A lasting peace could not simply reinstate the status quo ante ‘out of which this iniquitous war issued . . . that status must be altered in such a fashion as to prevent any such hideous thing from ever happening again’. The vital precondition was that Germany must be defeated first. And there must be no hesitation ‘... we may never be able to unite or show conquering force again in the great cause of human liberty. The day has come to conquer or submit . . . If we stand together, victory is certain and the liberty which victory will secure. We can afford then to be generous, but we cannot afford then or now to be weak . . .’ This resonant language of Republican militancy, so at odds with Wilson’s stance of only a few months earlier, pleased London and Paris enormously. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, remarked gleefully that Wilson’s volte-face had been necessary to ‘counteract [the] effect which some of his earlier [pacifist] pronouncements have apparently had in Russia’.28

  With France and Russia on the point of exhaustion, it was Britain that led the effort to re-energize the war and for this, American assistance was indispensable. In the summer of 1917 the greatest threat to the British war effort were not the U-boats, nor the threat of a Soviet in Leeds, but the very real possibility of default on the loans contracted in Wall Street since 1915. In this regard the American declaration of war provided immediate relief. Already by the end of April, Washington had provided Britain with an unprecedented official advance of $250 million, pending congressional approval of as much as $3 billion in loans. As it turned out, Congress took longer than expected, which only served to highlight the state of complete dependence into which the Entente had slipped. In the last days of June, Britain came within hours of insolvency.29 But with the US as a co-belligerent, there was no longer any real risk of disaster. The Entente had moved from its precarious reliance on the vagaries of the private capital market, to the new ground of openly political government-to-government lending. It was this backing that allowed Britain’s Field Marshal Haig to begin preparing a huge new offensive drive. The preparatory barrage for what was to become infamous as the Passchendaele offensive began on 17 July. Over a two-week period over 3,000 British guns delivered 4.238 million rounds onto the German trenches. At an estimated cost of $100 million this storm of steel was a further demonstration of the potency of the transatlantic war effort.30 In military terms the assault aimed to sweep the Germans from their toehold on the Flanders coastline. But the offensive’s rationale was eminently political. Passchendaele was an expression of the British government’s grim determination to silence once and for all the talk of peace without victory.31

  For Russia’s democratic revolutionaries this show of belligerence was a disaster. If neither London nor Washington would countenance this talk of peace, this left Petrograd with two options. The Petrograd Soviet might have embraced the risky course of entering into separate peace talks with Germany. In July, if it had not already been otherwise committed, it could have seized on the Reichstag peace resolution, and challenged the rest of the Entente to respond. Despite his distaste both for the Germans and the Russian socialists, could Wilson really have refused such an appeal? What would have been the impact in Britain and France? In the House of Commons, the Independent Labour Party was demanding a positive response to the Reichstag note. The discontent of the workforce was undeniable.32 But in Russia neither the Provisional Government nor the majority in the Soviets could bring themselves to take a first step toward Germany. To usher in the new revolutionary era by suing for a separate peace would be a fundamental betrayal. Russian democracy could have no future in isolation.

  Was there a more radical alternative? On the left wing of the revolution the Bolsheviks were a growing force. Lenin was making waves with his violent hostility to any compromise between the forces of the revolution and the hangovers from Tsarist-era liberalism and parliamentary conservatism that still clung to ministerial positions in the Provisional Government. His slogan was ‘all power to the soviets’. Only with power securely in the hands of the revolution would it be possible to formulate a clear choice between a truly democratic peace and a revolutionary continuation of the war. For Lenin, the Petrograd Soviet’s peace formula was not enough. Self-determination and no annexations might sound like progressive principles, but why should a revolutionary accept the endorsement of the pre-war status quo implied by ‘no annexations’?33 The only truly revolutionary formula was unqualified support for ‘self-determination’. Whereas liberals and reformist progressives shrank from such a formula because of the violence and inter-ethnic conflict it could easily stir up, Lenin espoused the slogan precisely because he expected it to unleash a whirlwind. The harbinger of the future, as far as Lenin was concerned, was the uprising that had taken place a year earlier in Dublin. On Easter Monday 1916, 1,200 Sinn Fein volunteers had taken on the British Army in a sacrificial act, which as we shall see was to turn Irish politics on its head and set the stage for the open struggle for independence. Whereas more orthodox Marxists dismissed Sinn Fein as suicidal putschists who lacked substantial working-class backing, for Lenin they were a vital pointer to the revolutionary future: ‘To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices . . . to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution . . .’ Anyone, who expected a ‘“pure” social revolution’, made only by the working class, would ‘never live to see it . . . We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat’s great war of Liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement . . .’34 Len
in demanded an immediate revolutionary peace. But, as anyone familiar with his writings would soon realize, this slogan was easily misunderstood. Lenin wanted urgently to halt the all-consuming, imperialist World War that was threatening to extinguish any hope of historical progress. But he wanted this peace only because he hoped that it would unleash an even more encompassing international class war – the ‘proletariat’s great war of Liberation’. A revolutionary peace concluded by an all-Soviet Russian regime would cause an uprising of the German proletariat. That liberals and Mensheviks shrank from such a course, fearing that it would unleash civil war in Russia, was precisely what marked it for Lenin as the correct revolutionary line. He was no pacifist. His aim was to turn meaningless imperialist slaughter into historically progressive class war. But what even Lenin did not dare to advocate in the summer of 1917 was a separate peace, a peace at any price with the Kaiser’s regime.35

  Barring that, what was the alternative? Petrograd might simply have adopted a defensive posture. The Germans certainly showed little sign of wishing to take military advantage of Russia’s disorder. In the hope that the Russians would come round to a separate peace Ludendorff refrained from any offensive operations in the East. When the first high-level American mission headed by Elihu Root visited Petrograd in June 1917, it too recommended inaction. So long as Russia remained loyal to the Entente, America was willing to provide aid. On 16 May the US Treasury agreed to provide the Provisional Government with an immediate loan of $100 million. Supplies were piled high at Vladivostok, if only they could be moved along Russia’s disintegrating railway system. To address this bottleneck Wilson authorized the immediate despatch of a technical railway mission to restore the capacity of the Trans-Siberian railway. In July the railway commission authorized the procurement in the US of 2,500 locomotives and 40,000 wagons.36 Perhaps it was not yet too late to stabilize Russian democracy as part of a joint war effort against Germany.

  But the prospect of hunkering down in the ragged trench lines to hold out for another season of indecisive campaigning went fundamentally against the spirit of revolutionary Petrograd. There was a serious risk that if the army was left inactive throughout the summer, the Provisional Government would lose whatever capacity it still had to counteract Bolshevik subversion. The signs that the British were already discounting Russia as a military force were deeply ominous. Whatever Petrograd did, they had to bring the Entente along with them, but what leverage could they exercise if they were no longer an active participant in the war? Like Wilson, Russia’s democratic revolutionaries were forced to gamble that they could alter the course of the war from within. To force the rest of the Entente to take seriously Russian democracy’s appeals for a negotiated peace, in May 1917 Kerensky, Tsereteli and their colleagues set themselves frantically to rebuilding the army as a fighting force. They were not unrealistic enough to imagine that they might defeat Germany. But if Russia could deliver the kind of blow against Austria that Brusilov had pulled off in 1916, the Entente would surely have to listen. It was an extraordinary wager that reveals, not the timidity, but the desperate ambition of the February revolution.37

  III

  Certainly Russia was not suffering from any shortage of materiel. Thanks to its own mobilization efforts and the now abundant Allied supply line, the Russian Army of the early summer of 1917 was better equipped than at any previous point in the war. The question was whether its soldiers would fight. In May and June, Kerensky, Brusilov and a hand-picked group of political commissars waged a desperate struggle to rouse the Russian Army from its apathy and to counteract the increasingly pervasive influence of Bolshevik agitators preaching Lenin’s heretic gospel. It was the revolutionary democrats of February 1917, not Lenin and Trotsky, who first introduced political commissars to the Russian Army, to deliver the slogans of the revolutionary war effort. In his memoirs Kerensky describes the breathless moment on 1 July 1917 as the barrage lifted ahead of the fateful assault: ‘Suddenly there was a deathly hush: it was zero hour. For a second we were gripped by a terrible fear that the soldiers might refuse to fight. Then we saw the first lines of infantry, with their rifles at the ready, charging toward the frontlines of German trenches.’38 The army advanced. In the south, under the dynamic command of the young war hero, Lavr Kornilov, they made inroads against the shaky Habsburg forces. But where Bolshevik subversion was most serious, in front of the Germans in the north, the majority of the troops refused orders and remained in their trenches. On 18 July, with the Russians off balance, Germany counter-attacked.

  The result was to pivot not just Russian but German history as well. At the very moment, on 19 July 1917, that Erzberger introduced the peace resolution in the Reichstag, the premise on which he made his challenge to the Kaiser’s regime was overturned. The U-boats might have failed, but in the East, the German Army was poised to win the war. Within hours of the German assault, the Russian defences collapsed and a rout ensued. Whilst the British got bogged down in the terrible slaughter of Flanders, on 3 September 1917 the Kaiser’s army marched triumphantly into Riga, once the capital of the Teutonic knights. In a mirror image of events in the autumn of 1916, when the Entente had seemed close to victory, this time it was the prospect of German triumph that obliterated the possibility of a negotiated peace. Within days of their entry into Latvia, Hindenburg and Ludendorff began shuffling seven of their crack Baltic divisions thousands of kilometres to the south, to positions on a tightly concentrated sector surrounding the Italian town of Caporetto.39 On 24 October, German shock troops crashed through the Italian lines. Swinging south towards Venice, they unhinged an entire segment of the front line.40 Within a matter of days the Italian Army suffered 340,000 casualties, of whom 300,000 were taken prisoner. A further 350,000 soldiers retreated in disarray. With the Germans and Austrians advancing on Venice, 400,000 civilians fled in terror. Italy survived the crisis. A government of national unity took office in Rome. French and British reinforcements poured in. The Austro-German advance was halted on the Piave river line. But in Germany militarism had gained a new lease on life. The summertime parliamentary onrush of Erzberger, the SPD and the Reichstag majority was halted. Hundreds of thousands of enraged nationalists flocked into the newly formed German Homeland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei), determined to prevent the traitorous democrats from sabotaging the final push for victory.41

  In Russia, the impact of the failure of Kerensky’s democratic war effort was even more dramatic. The advocates of revolutionary defensism were humiliated. The peasant soldiers, many of whom had reluctantly steeled themselves for one last offensive, now abandoned the cause en masse. On 17 July, as the tide on the battlefield was about to turn, radicalized military units in the garrisons around Petrograd marched on the centre of the city to put an immediate end to the war. They acted seemingly without orders from Bolshevik headquarters, but as the demonstrations escalated, Lenin and the party leadership threw themselves behind the rebellion. The uprising was not put down until the following day. The revolution was now openly and violently divided against itself. Despite their profound commitment to democratic freedoms, the Petrograd Soviet had no option but to order the mass arrest of the Bolshevik leadership. It was the first time that any such measures had been used since the overthrow of the Tsar. Fatally, however, the Provisional Government did not disarm the rebellious garrison units that formed the real base of Bolshevik strength, nor were they willing to decapitate the Bolshevik organization. The death penalty remained taboo.

  Table 2. The Biggest Event in Democratic History: The Outcome of the Russian Constituent Assembly Election, November 1917

  millions

  % tabulated votes

  Socialist Revolutionaries (agrarian)

  15.9

  38

  SD Bolshevik

  9.8<
br />
  24

  SD Menshevik

  1.4

  3

  minor socialist

  0.5

  1

  Constitutional Democrats, Kadets (liberal)

  2.0

  5

  other non-socialist parties

  1.3

  3

  Ukrainian (mainly SR)

  4.9

  12

  Islamic parties

  0.9

  2

  other nationalities

  1.7

  4

  unclassified

  3.4

  8

  41.8

  100

  Having survived an attack from the left wing, the main danger to Russian democracy was now from the right. With Brusilov’s reputation in tatters, the obvious Bonapartist pretender was General Kornilov, who Kerensky had approved as commander-in-chief.42 After weeks of open conspiracy, on 8 September 1917 Kornilov mounted his coup, only to find himself foiled by precisely the same force that had doomed the summer offensive. The mass of the army was no longer willing to take orders for decisive action. Kornilov was arrested. But who was to govern? Kerensky, who had launched the disastrous offensive and appeared to have colluded with Kornilov, was utterly discredited. Tsereteli and the Mensheviks on the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet were struggling for legitimacy. They could not resist calls for the release from prison of notorious Bolshevik agitators, such as Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai. The last resort was the Constituent Assembly. Due to tactical manoeuvrings and the formidable difficulties of staging a general election in a country the size of Russia at a time of war and civil disorder, the date for the Constituent Assembly elections had been repeatedly put back. In August it was irrevocably fixed for 25 November. It is commonly said that it was a dangerous power vacuum that opened the door to Lenin in the autumn of 1917. But what really defined the situation and compelled Lenin and Trotsky to act was the prospect that the Constituent Assembly would soon fill that vacuum with a potent source of democratic authority. On 23 October, during a conspiratorial meeting in Petrograd, Lenin blurted out: ‘Now was the moment for seizing power, or never . . . it is senseless to wait for the Constituent Assembly that will obviously not be on our side . . .’43