The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  The climactic confrontation came on 13 February at a conference at the Kaiser’s residence in Bad Homburg. As Trotsky had hoped, Chancellor Hertling and Foreign Secretary Kühlmann argued strongly against any resumption of hostilities.27 The home front would be profoundly disillusioned by any fresh bloodletting in the East. Surely every available man was needed in the West. But Ludendorff, seconded by General Hoffmann, was adamant. If Trotsky would not talk, the German military would create facts. There was no need for long-winded discussions let alone any further consultation with the German parliament. As far as the Kaiser was concerned, the mere mention of the Reichstag was enough to trigger an outburst that was profoundly symptomatic of the crisis-ridden atmosphere pervading Germany. There could be no question of the elected politicians interfering in questions of peace and war, the Kaiser ranted. What was at stake was a struggle of the widest dimensions and Germany must proceed with utter ruthlessness. A few days earlier Bolshevik radio stations had begun broadcasting an appeal for the revolutionary overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty. The Kaiser responded in kind, ‘(W)e must . . . strike the Bolsheviki dead as soon as possible . . .’28 Recalling happier days of big-game hunting, he remarked: ‘Bolsheviki are Tigers, encircle them, shoot them down.’29 What haunted the Emperor was the prospect of Britain and America taking advantage of the power vacuum in the East. ‘Russia organized in Anglo-Saxon hands is great danger . . . Bolsheviki must be disposed of. On this the following suggestion . . . we should give aid to Estonia. The Baltic must appeal for help against robbers. We will then provide assistance (analogue to Turkey in Armenia). Form a Baltic gendarmerie that will restore order . . . policing action, but not war.’30 The atrocities perpetrated by the ‘special police’ units of the Young Turks were well known in Germany. So the import of these remarks is chilling.

  To cap it all, the Kaiser abruptly revealed further insights into the dark forces that he suspected were at work. The ‘Russian people’, he opined, had been ‘delivered to the vengeance of the Jews, they [Bolsheviki] are in touch with all the Jews of the world. Freemasonry too . . .’.31 A second record of the same meeting added a wider dimension of conspiracy. ‘Wilson,’ the Kaiser declaimed, ‘has proclaimed the removal of the Hohenzollern as a war aim and is now supporting the Bolsheviki, along with the entire international Jewry – Grand Orient Lodge.’32 In the Kaiser’s mind, it seems that Wilson’s conciliatory remarks toward the Bolsheviks in his 14 Points address had conjured up the fantasy of a world Jewish conspiracy with its tentacles in both Washington and Petrograd. After this outburst, the discussion was adjourned to allow the Kaiser to take a restorative stroll.

  Over the brunch buffet, Vice-Chancellor Friedrich von Payer, the progressive liberal who acted as the representative of the Reichstag majority in the Reich government, sought solace from Foreign Secretary Kühlmann. According to Kühlmann’s memoirs, von Payer was quite beside himself. ‘He [Payer] said to me that he had thought, through his many years of parliamentary experience, to have some insight into the decisive matters of state. But today’s meeting had opened his eyes for much of which he previously had no idea.’ The ‘great contradictions and profound abysses within the life of the German state’ revealed by the Kaiser’s outburst had left him ‘deeply shaken’. Kühlmann replied that he ‘had been a long time acquainted with these abysses. But it was impossible for a statesman entrusted with matters of life and death, even in utter frankness to give the leading parliamentarians a clear view and to present to them the difficulties with which they had to struggle step by step.’33

  In truth, the Kaiser’s anti-Semitic flare-up on 13 February was no one-off. Over the winter of 1917–18 he had come increasingly under the influence of extremist nationalist propaganda and his daily notes to his subordinates were now commonly laced with diatribes against ‘Jewish subversives’. Even more seriously, in the weeks before the Bad Homburg conference Ludendorff had finally confronted the question of what to do with the large Polish and Jewish populations in the Polish territory he was determined to annex. His solution was taken from the pages of pan-German fantasy. As many as 2 million people would be uprooted from their homes, with particular care being taken to ensure that the large and politically dangerous Jewish population was neutralized. Ludendorff hoped that they might be ‘caused to emigrate’ to the United States.34 Overarching the increasing radicalism of Ludendorff’s vision was not just the assumption of hostility toward the Jews and the need to erase the revolutionary threat posed by Bolshevism, but the assumption that the present war would not be the last. His increasingly excessive demands were driven by the vision that the current war was a preliminary to an even larger all-out confrontation with the Western Powers that would occupy generations to come. In the short term the Bad Homburg conference gave the German militarists the licence they needed. On 18 February the German advance resumed.

  IV

  ‘The whole of Russia,’ General Hoffmann mused in his diary, ‘is no more than a vast heap of maggots – a squalid, swarming mess.’35 His army moved south and eastwards down intact railway lines virtually unopposed. By early March, Kiev was in German hands. Trotsky’s gamble had spectacularly backfired. Bourgeois circles in Petrograd were eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Kaiser’s troops, whilst the Social Revolutionaries with their dangerous proclivity for assassination railed at Lenin’s betrayal of the revolution. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party was deeply split. The only common denominator was the ever more draconian demand for revolutionary discipline and mobilization. On 14 February the Red Army was called into being and Trotsky put himself at the head of the mobilization.36 On 21 February all of Russia was placed under the terrible dictate of a new revolutionary decree, which threatened all saboteurs and collaborators with summary execution. All able-bodied members of the bourgeoisie were declared liable for conscription into forced labour battalions.37 Faced with the unstoppable German advance, after two days of debate Lenin persuaded the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the peace terms that had been on offer at Brest at the beginning of February.38 But this was no longer enough. The Germans now demanded a completely free hand in determining the mode of self-determination in those territories under their control and an immediate peace between the Soviet regime and Ukraine.

  On 23 February the Bolshevik Committee met once again, but even Lenin’s threat of resignation was not enough to carry a majority. His motion to accept the increased German demands was passed only after Trotsky, who was serving as chair, abstained. In the Petrograd Soviet, the inner bastion of the revolution, Lenin faced embittered opposition both from the Social Revolutionaries and the left wing of his own party. But Lenin was relentless. Like the soldiers of World War I, who had had to set aside their heroic visions of war, he insisted that revolutionaries must come to terms with a new, disenchanted vision of historical progress: ‘The revolution is not a pleasure trip! The path of revolution leads over thorns and briars. Wade up to the knees in filth, if need be, crawling on our bellies through dirt and dung to communism, then in this fight we will win. . .’39 By the end of the night Lenin’s motion was carried by the narrow margin of 116 to 85, with 26 abstentions.

  On 26 February, having received news of the Bolshevik surrender, the Germans halted within a few days’ march of the Soviet capital. Four days later, running a gauntlet of hostility from the local Russian population, the grizzled old Bolshevik Grigori Sokolnikov returned to Brest-Litovsk ready to accept whatever terms were offered. Embarrassed by how far things had degenerated since their first relatively cordial meetings, the German and Austrian diplomats had hoped to soften the brutality of the proceedings by setting up a series of subcommittees, in which they would spin out technical discussions of the peace terms. But to their consternation, the Bolshevik delegation refused to go through the motions of giving serious consideration to the treaty text. Any further talk would merely have legitimized a settlement, which, as both sides frankly acknowledged, rested on nothing but force. The
y signed the document as it was placed in front of them and departed.

  Lenin’s decision to buy time by means of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was certainly the severest test to which the internal party discipline of the Bolsheviks was ever subjected. Though the imminent threat of German invasion had secured the majority that Lenin needed, a furious debate now raged over ratification. Bukharin, Karl Radek and Alex-ander Kollontai had formed a breakaway faction known as the Left Communists, dedicated to resisting Lenin’s ‘obscene’ peace. The Seventh National Congress of the Bolshevik Party, held in Petrograd on 7 March whilst German aircraft flew overhead, was a dismal and bitter affair.40 Only 47 voting delegates attended, representing no more than 170,000 party members out of a notional total of 300,000. Once more Lenin assailed the Left Communists for their irrational, romantic vision of history. Their posture was that of the ‘aristocrat who, dying in a beautiful pose, sword in hand, said: “Peace is disgraceful, war is honourable.”’ By contrast, Lenin cast himself as the voice of the people, arguing from the ‘point of view of . . . every sober-minded peasant and worker’ who knew that such a peace was merely a moment for ‘gathering forces’.41 Lenin carried the party majority, but the Left Communists were unreconciled and Trotsky continued to abstain. To console themselves for accepting Lenin’s odious peace, the delegates rallied around a resolution promising the ‘most energetic, mercilessly decisive and draconian measures to raise the self-discipline and discipline of the workers and peasants of Russia’, to prepare them for the ‘liberationist, patriotic socialist war’ that would drive out the German oppressors.42

  In this historic epoch of violence and confusion, Lenin insisted, when the temptation to revolutionary self-immolation was ever present, clear-headedness and rigorous analysis were at a premium. It was to impose that leadership that Lenin demanded a series of important changes to clarify the party’s position and to set it determinedly on its revolutionary path. The traditional title of Social Democracy, still proudly born by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was clearly no longer appropriate. Having dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Soviet regime must break openly with the ‘standards of “general” (i.e. bourgeois) democracy’. Lenin acknowledged only one relevant precursor, the Paris Commune of 1871. The party’s title would henceforth reflect that proud heritage. Whereas liberals hypocritically talked of universal human rights, a properly Communist regime must make clear that ‘liberties and democracy’ were ‘not for all, but for the working and exploited masses, to emancipate them from exploitation . . . The exploiters should expect only “ruthless suppression”.’

  The climax of Lenin’s campaign came at the All Russian Congress of Soviets. Having abandoned Petrograd, the Congress met in Moscow – the 1,232 delegates, 795 Bolsheviks, 283 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, 25 Socialist Revolutionaries of the Centre and no more than 32 Mensheviks.43 On 14 March, Lenin delivered an impassioned oration in which he called upon Russia to ‘size up in full, to the very bottom, the abyss of defeat, partition, enslavement, and humiliation into which we have been thrown’, all the better to steel the will for ‘liberation’. He promised that if they could only gain time for reconstruction the Soviet regime would ‘arise anew from enslavement to independence . . .’. The motion for ratification was carried by the huge Bolshevik majority. But the Left Socialist Revolutionaries voted solidly against it and then resigned from the Council of People’s Commissars in which they had shared power since the November revolution. Of the Left Communists, 115 abstained and refused any further participation in internal party business. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the negotiations for which had begun under the sign of the Petrograd Soviet’s democratic peace formula, had become the driving force behind Lenin’s one-party dictatorship.

  The mirror image of that brutal process unfolded simultaneously in Germany. On 17 March 1918, Berlin played host to a ghostly ceremony in which a delegation of German gentry from Courland, Latvia, formally petitioned the Kaiser to assume the mantle of Archduke.44 The Baltic was to become a playground of neo-feudalism. The following day, more than three and a half months after negotiations had begun at Brest-Litovsk and in a very different political climate, the Reichstag met to debate the ratification of the treaty. Matthias Erzberger tried to rally his partners in the Reichstag majority with an emergency resolution demanding respect for the right of self-determination for Poles, Lithuanians and Latvians. He even attempted to make further approval of war credits conditional on the government’s agreement.45 But there was no denying the triumph of the right. Gustav Stresemann, who since 1916 had been amongst the foremost advocates of unrestricted U-boat warfare, now declared that in the East the German Army had demonstrated that ‘the right of self-determination does not apply! I do not believe in Wilson’s universal League of Nations; I believe that after the conclusion of peace it will burst like a soap-bubble.’46

  But despite this triumphalism, by the spring of 1918 not even a victorious peace of stupendous dimensions could restore the national unity that had launched the German war effort in August 1914. The USPD denounced Brest as a Peace of Violation (Vergewaltigungsfrieden). For the SPD, the once loyal Eduard David spoke fiercely against the short-sightedness of the Kaiser’s government. Germany had gambled away a unique opportunity to found a lasting new order in eastern Europe. ‘The grand perspective of arriving at a friendly neighbourly relationship with all of eastern Europe encompassing both politics and economics has been buried.’47 Though Erzberger has frequently been taken to task for voting in favour of the Brest treaty, his support was strictly conditional. As he stated in preliminary discussions in Reichstag committee: ‘The Eastern peace will not be worth the paper on which it is written, if the right to self-determination of the Poles, Lithuanians and Courlanders is not implemented quickly, loyally and honestly.’48 When it came to the vote on 22 March, the SPD abstained and the USPD voted against the motion. There was nothing like the popular excitement that had accompanied the first news of the Christmas agreement at Brest a few months earlier. Though the reduction of Russian power was a huge gain for Germany, the peace in the East had not brought an end to the war. Instead, victory in the East had become the platform for a last bid for victory in the West.

  V

  Since the previous autumn Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been gathering their forces for an offensive. Over the winter, the German armies on the Western Front were increased from 147 to 191 divisions whilst those on the Eastern Front were stripped from 85 to 47. For the first time since 1914 the Germans in the West would not be outnumbered. Through skilful diversionary tactics and by concentrating almost half the German Army on the British sector, on 21 March 1918 Ludendorff managed to raise the odds in his favour at the point of attack to 2.6:1. Beginning at 4.40 a.m., 11,000 guns and mortars delivered a devastating five-hour barrage against the British front line around St Quentin, followed by a concentrated thrust by 76 divisions across a 50-kilometre front.49 Winston Churchill, who witnessed the attack, described it as ‘the greatest onslaught in the history of the world’.50 Never had so much manpower or firepower been concentrated on a single battlefield. By nightfall the leading German assault teams had penetrated to a depth of 10 kilometres. At Amiens it seemed that the Kaiser’s army might split the Western Front in two.

  On 23 March the Emperor declared a day of national celebration and marked the occasion by unleashing the first barrage from the gargantuan Big Bertha guns against Paris. His Imperial Majesty was in a buoyant mood, announcing to his entourage that ‘when an English parliamentarian comes pleading for peace, he will first have to bow down before the Imperial standard, because what was at stake was a victory of monarchy over democracy’.51 And though he did not say so, the Kaiser clearly meant to exact the same tribute from Germany’s parliamentarians as well. The impetus of the progressive Reichstag majority had been halted. But by the same token, it was now clear that the imperial government was waging war against the will of a large part, perhaps a majority, of the German peo
ple. The cost was appalling. On the first day of what was to prove the Kaiser’s last battle, Germany suffered 40,000 killed and wounded, its heaviest casualties of the entire war. Amongst the dead on the second day was Ludendorff’s own stepson.52 When the liberal Prince Max von Baden asked the general to explain the outlook if Germany were not to achieve decisive success, Ludendorff replied simply ‘well then, Germany will perish’.53 Kaiser Wilhelm had failed to make a legitimate peace in the East and had failed to carry through a constructive reform of the Bismarckian constitution. The fate of the Emperor and his regime was now hanging on the verdict of the battle.

  7

  The World Come Apart

  On the evening of 14 May 1918, Lenin addressed the Central Executive Committee of the All Russian Congress of Soviets. The terms that he chose to describe the international situation were both drastic and uncharacteristically surreal. Socialism in Russia, he declaimed, inhabited an ‘oasis amidst a raging sea of imperial robbery’.1 The imperialists themselves had lost control of the war. The survival of the Soviet regime itself was the best evidence for this. To Lenin it was obvious that the capitalist powers must have an overriding common interest in the destruction of his regime. What prevented them from cooperating to snuff out the Russian revolution was the force-field of imperial rivalries. In the East, Japan was held in check by the United States. In the West, the life-and-death struggle between Britain and Germany prevented either from moving against Petrograd. At any moment, all the forces of imperialism might coalesce and turn against the Soviet regime. But just as suddenly, imperialist rivalry in some far-flung part of the world might trigger a new feud amongst them. True revolutionaries must face the possibility that if the imperialist war continued unchecked, it might lead to the total annihilation of civilization and an end to the possibility of any kind of progress.2