The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  With Vienna entering its third year of slow starvation, the optimistic Christmas Day announcement from Brest had raised great hopes. When, over the following days, it emerged that thanks to the clumsy rapacity of the ‘Prussian militarists’, the Austrian population might starve for months to come, the reaction was immediate. On 14 January, Vienna was swept by enormous mass strikes.36 Ottokar, Count Czernin, the Austrian representative at Brest, was forced to threaten Kühlmann that soon it would be Vienna not the Bolsheviks who were looking for a separate peace. But Kühlmann was boxed in. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were oblivious to the disastrous political consequences of their aggression. When the Kaiser agreed with the Brest negotiating team to redraw Germany’s eastern boundary in such a way as to minimize the number of undesirable new Polish inhabitants in the Reich, Ludendorff and Hindenburg threatened to resign. On 8 January 1918, when the majority parties met to discuss the possibility of a new Reichstag resolution to reaffirm Germany’s commitment to the principles of a liberal peace, Erzberger commented that they now had a double threat to deal with. Germany’s workers were threatening to strike, but if the Kaiser’s generals were not granted a military dictatorship, they too seemed ready to rebel.37

  And yet, the tensions in Berlin were as nothing compared to the situation in Petrograd. In January 1918, as the illusion of a cheap peace evaporated, the Bolsheviks were finally forced to face the seriousness of their situation. In 1917 the much maligned revolutionary defensists had refused to contemplate separate peace talks with Germany, precisely because they had foreseen the dilemma that Lenin and Trotsky now found themselves in. To refuse to come to terms with Germany risked a disastrous invasion. But if they accepted a humiliating peace they would have to brace themselves for civil war. The Bolsheviks, as always, comforted themselves with the thought that Germany would soon erupt in revolution. Trotsky responded by raising the stakes and issuing a radical peace appeal to the world, challenging the Entente to apply self-determination to Ireland and Egypt.38 The news from Vienna was certainly encouraging. But Lenin had come to a sober conclusion.39 Knowing the condition of the Russian units stationed in front of Petrograd, he rejected the idea of a revolutionary war of resistance as a pipe dream. The Soviet regime would have to make a separate peace, however ruinous the terms. This would be disowned by the Left SRs. It would be rejected by leading Bolsheviks such as Nikolai Bukharin and Trotsky as well. Whatever the attitude of the rank-and-file soldiery, amongst the revolutionary leadership peace at any price was never a popular slogan.

  Anxious to exploit the dilemma now facing the Bolsheviks, American and Entente representatives in Petrograd began to wonder whether Germany’s aggression might not offer a chance to reconstruct a ‘democratic war’ alliance. Trotsky certainly seemed amenable. In the last days of 1917, Edgar Sisson, Wilson’s personal emissary in Russia, cabled Washington that: ‘Obvious, of course, to you that disclosure German trickery against Russia in peace negotiations promises to immensely open up our opportunities for publicity and helpfulness . . . If the President will restate anti-imperialist war aims and democratic peace requirements of America, I can get it fed into Germany in great quantities . . . and can utilize Russian version potently in army and everywhere.’40 As if in answer, on 8 January Wilson issued what was soon to become his most famous wartime declaration – the 14 Points. They were to echo down the twentieth century as a manifesto of international liberalism, supposedly heralding American backing for self-determination, democracy and a League of Nations. They are often described as America’s opening salvo in the great ideological contest of the century. But this interpretation has more to do with the stark polarities of the later Cold War than the realities of 1918. What Wilson was trying to do in January 1918 was to untangle a confusion that since 1917 had become nearly complete.41 In the course of the last year he himself had been forced to abandon his own ‘peace without victory’ formula, thereby forcing Russia’s democrats to fight a war they could only lose. Lenin and Trotsky, the chief beneficiaries of that disaster, were negotiating on the basis of the peace formula proposed by their despised democratic opponents. Meanwhile, the Reichstag majority and its vision of a peace based on self-determination had been made to seem like a mere smokescreen for the true intentions of German militarism. The initiative was thus handed back to the Entente and to Wilson. The 14 Points with which the President responded to this contorted situation were no radical manifesto. Neither of the two key terms usually ascribed to Wilsonian internationalism – democracy and self-determination – appear anywhere in the text.42 What Wilson was attempting to do was respond to the disastrous situation created over the last 12 months by the derailment of his policy first for peace and then for war. He did so in terms that reflected not his radicalism, but his conservative evolutionary liberalism.

  Five of the 14 Points restated the liberal vision of a new system of international politics to which Wilson had been committed since May 1916. There must be an end to secret diplomacy. Instead, there must be ‘open covenants of peace openly arrived at’ (Point 1), freedom of the seas (Point 2), the removal of barriers to the free and equal movement of trade (Point 3), disarmament (Point 4). The fourteenth point called for what would soon be known as the League of Nations, ‘a general association of nations . . . under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’ (Point 14). But this international framework did not promise or require from its members any particular type of domestic constitution. Nowhere in the 14 Points does Wilson mention democracy as a norm. Rather he stressed the freedom of nations to choose their own form of government. This, however, was not stated in terms of an emphatic act of self-determination. The phrase ‘self-determination’ appears nowhere either in the 14 Points or in the speech with which Wilson delivered them to Congress on 8 January 1918. In January of that year it was the Bolsheviks and Lloyd George who tossed this explosive concept into the international arena. Wilson would not adopt it until later in the spring.43

  With regard to the colonial question, what concerned Wilson were not the rights of the oppressed people so much as the violence of inter-imperialist competition. Point 5 called for the claims of the rival powers to be settled not by war, but by ‘a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment’.44 As far as the subordinate populations themselves were concerned, Wilson called simply for the ‘observance of the principle that in determining all questions of sovereignty . . . the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’. Quite apart from the fact that the claims of the colonial powers were thereby given no less weight than those of the subordinate populations, it was significant that Wilson spoke here of the interests, not the voice, of those populations. This was entirely compatible with a deeply paternalistic view of colonial government.

  The significance of this choice of words becomes clear when it is contrasted with what Wilson had to say about the territorial question at issue in the European war. Here too he invoked not an absolute right to self-determination but the gradated view of the capacity for self-government that was typical of conservative nineteenth-century liberalism. At one end of the scale he called for Belgium to be evacuated and restored (Point 7), ‘without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations’. Alsace-Lorraine was to be returned and any occupied French territory was to be ‘freed’ from German domination (Point 8). Italy’s boundaries were to be adjusted ‘along clearly recognizable lines of nationality’ (Point 9). But with regard to the peoples of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires (Point 12), the Balkans (Point 11) and Poland (Point 13), the tone was more paternalistic. They would need ‘friendly counsel’ and ‘international guarantees’. What this foreign oversight would guarantee was not ‘self-determination’ but ‘security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous developmen
t’. This is the muted sociobiological vocabulary typical of Wilson’s world view. There was no ‘French’ radicalism in the 14 Points.

  It was near the halfway stage of his manifesto (Point 6) that Wilson addressed the situation in Russia. Given the events since November 1917, one might have expected him to be at pains to draw a sharp distinction between the Russian people and the Bolshevik regime that had violently usurped the right to represent them. Secretary of State Lansing in private memoranda to Wilson was demanding that America should denounce Lenin’s regime ‘as a despotic oligarchy as menacing to liberty as any absolute monarchy on earth’.45 But no such distinction was made in the 14 Points. On the contrary, Wilson extended to the Bolsheviks praise of a kind he had never offered to the Provisional Government. Whereas in May 1917 Wilson had lined up with the Entente in lecturing Alexander Kerensky and Irakli Tsereteli on the need to continue the war, he now characterized the Bolshevik delegation, who were about to agree a separate peace, as ‘sincere and in earnest’. The spokesmen of the Russian people, the Bolsheviks, were speaking, Wilson opined, in the ‘true spirit of modern democracy’, stating Russia’s ‘conception of what is right, of what is humane and honorable for them to accept . . . with frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy, which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind . . . whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace.’ Echoing the Bolshevik negotiating position at Brest, Wilson called for the peace to begin with the withdrawal of all foreign forces, so as to allow Russia the ‘unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy’. What is striking about this formulation was precisely Wilson’s unproblematic use of the term ‘Russia’ and ‘national policy’ with regard to an empire that was in the process of violent decomposition.46 At the moment when the 14 Points began to circulate around the world, nationalist movements in Ukraine, the Baltic and Finland were dissociating themselves from the Soviet regime to which Wilson was giving such fulsome praise.47 And yet so overwhelmingly favourable were his comments directed towards Petrograd that one New York columnist leapt to the conclusion that Washington was about to extend official recognition to Lenin’s government. This was premature. But it was certainly a more plausible reading of the 14 Points than the later interpretation, which saw Wilson’s statement as the opening salvo in the first phase of the Cold War.

  As for Germany, throughout the tumultuous summer of 1917 Wilson had stuck to the position to which he had swung around in April. The Reichstag majority were not to be trusted. Their reformist professions and their peace resolutions were a cover for German imperialism. This was the same basis on which Wilson had rejected the advances of the revolutionary defensists from Petrograd and had boycotted the Stockholm process. Now, belatedly, in January 1918, in presenting his 14 Points to Congress, the President did acknowledge that there was a struggle going on within German politics between ‘the more liberal statesmen of Germany and Austria’ and the ‘military leaders who have no thought but to keep what they have got’. On the outcome of that struggle, he declared, ‘the peace of the world’ would depend.48 Wilson seems to have hoped that his 14 Points once adopted by the Austrian and German opposition might have opened the door to general peace talks. But he was too late. If he had been willing to contemplate general negotiations in the summer of 1917, it might have radically altered the complexion of politics in both Russia and Germany. We can only imagine how Russia’s struggling Provisional Government might have acted if they had dreamt in June or July that a bid for an immediate peace would receive the kind of praise that Wilson was now showering on Trotsky. With America only just having entered the war and the democratic enthusiasm in Russia at full spate, the political pressure such a peace move would have exerted on London and Paris would have been immense. But by early 1918 the balance of power in Germany had shifted against the Reichstag majority and the Entente were more adamant than ever. Whatever the propaganda success of the 14 Points, they could not be used to negotiate with Germany in the shadow of Brest-Litovsk.49 As a result, in January 1918 it was the Bolsheviks to whom Wilson brought relief. Their propagandists saw to it that the Russian text of Wilson’s declaration was plastered all over Petrograd. Lenin had it telegraphed to Trotsky as a token of his triumphant success in pitting the imperialists against each other.50

  6

  Making a Brutal Peace

  Two days after President Wilson had issued his bland proclamation of support for the ‘Russian’ people, on 10 January 1918 the representatives of independent Ukraine arrived at Brest-Litovsk to make their own peace claim. This changed the political complexion of the talks. In the first weeks of negotiations there had been general agreement on the Petrograd formula. Self-determination was the order of the day. The indignation unleashed by the revelation of what Foreign Secretary Kühlmann intended this to mean cast Germany in a bad light. But the territories at issue in the first round of talks were the Baltic states. Though they were the prized demands of German annexationists, they were, in the final analysis, small fry and in any case already under the uncontested control of the Kaiser’s armies. From a safe distance, the Soviets could denounce the hypocrisy of German imperialism. They were not forced to show their own hand. The Wilsonian rendition of the Bolsheviks as sincere and earnest advocates of a democratic peace victimized by German imperialism remained credible. Ukraine was a problem on a different scale. It was a strategic asset of the first rank, the disposition of which would decide the future of Russian power and shape of the new order in the East. As 1918 began, Ukraine was controlled neither by the Germans nor by the Bolsheviks. Here, their rival visions of a new order would clash directly and the full complexity of the moral and political balance would become apparent.

  I

  It is tempting to say that in Ukraine during the winter of 1917–18 there was a power vacuum, except that to speak in such terms is to prejudge the issue. After the overthrow of the Tsar, in Kiev, as in the rest of Russia, a revolutionary authority had established itself. Unlike in Petrograd the revolutionaries in Ukraine had immediately set up a rudimentary parliamentary forum, the Rada. In this assembly the parties inclined to nationalism, led by the local brand of agrarian Social Revolutionaries, had a clear majority. But no significant voices made a claim to independence. The Ukrainian revolutionaries were anxious to play their part in the ‘triumph of justice . . .’ in Russia. After all, where else ‘in the world was there such a broad, democratic, all-embracing order? Where was there such unlimited freedom of speech, of assembly, or organization as in the new, great revolutionary state.’1 Over the summer of 1917 the liberals in the Provisional Government had stalled Kiev’s demands for real autonomy.2 But the politicians of Ukraine awaited the Constituent Assembly, which would surely decide in favour of a federal constitution. It was the breakdown of legitimate authority in Petrograd that forced Kiev into a declaration first of national autonomy and then in December 1917 of outright independence. Whatever its differences might have been with the Provisional Government, the Rada could not accept the Bolsheviks’ claim to speak on its behalf. The Central Powers were only too happy to agree. They promptly extended an invitation to Kiev to join the talks at Brest.

  For the Bolsheviks this raised a terrifying prospect. In the pre-war years, Ukraine had accounted for one-fifth of total world exports of grain, a share twice that of the United States. Petrograd and Moscow needed that grain as much as did Vienna and Berlin. Ukraine was no less vital to Russia’s future as an industrial power. The region produced all of Russia’s coking coal, 73 per cent of its iron and 60 per cent of its steel. Ukraine’s manganese was exported to all the blast furnaces of Europe.3 If an independent government established itself in Kiev this would be a huge blow to the Soviet regime.
Furthermore, unlike the baronial assemblies that were providing the Germans with a fig leaf of legitimacy in the Baltic and Poland, the Rada could not be dismissed as a creature of foreign power. At Brest, the Bolsheviks had so far managed to present themselves as the champions of national liberation against German aggression. But already in December as the first exchanges between the Soviet authorities and Kiev deteriorated into hostility, the all-important qualification to Lenin and Stalin’s endorsement of self-determination became apparent. The Bolsheviks approved self-determination, but only insofar as it was the ‘revolutionary masses’ who were in control. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian Rada was nothing more than an assembly of property owners serviced by their Menshevik and Social Revolutionary lackeys. By early 1918 the Bolshevik agitator Karl Radek was inciting the Petrograd population, ‘if you want food . . . cry “death to the Rada!”’. By ‘its Judas-like treachery’ in accepting the invitation of the Central Powers, the Ukrainian parliament had ‘dug its grave’.4 As the Ukrainian delegation arrived in Brest, a hand-picked anti-Rada Bolshevik government was directing a ragtag army of mercenaries against Kiev. After the shadow-boxing over the Baltic, the real stakes in the Eastern peace were about to become clear.