The Deluge
Page 19
This scenario of capitalism in its final stage consuming itself in an orgy of imperialist destruction is one of the hallmarks of Lenin’s political thinking. As Lenin insisted with characteristic clarity, if this struggle was as unpredictable as he claimed, it unhinged any linear notion of historical development, which normally served Marxist revolutionaries as their warrant. The course of history that Marxist theory had ‘naturally’ imagined ‘as straight, and which we must imagine as straight in order to see the beginning, the continuation and the end’, was ‘in real life . . . never . . . straight’. It was ‘incredibly involved’. Huge ‘zig zags’ and ‘gigantic’, complex ‘turns’ were unleashed as millions of people began the agonizing process of making their own history under conditions far from their own choosing.3 Not economics but violence was the defining feature of this epoch. In Russia, a civil war had already begun that was ‘interwoven with a whole series of wars’. The Soviet regime must brace itself for ‘a whole era of . . . imperialist wars, civil wars inside countries, the intermingling of the two, national wars liberating the nationalities oppressed by the imperialists and by various combinations of imperialist powers . . . This epoch, an epoch of gigantic cataclysms, of mass decisions forcibly imposed by war, of crises, has begun . . . and it is only the beginning.’4 In such apocalyptic circumstances, the ordinary political logic of Marxism was inverted. As Lenin put it in a truly astonishing statement to the party at the end of April 1918: ‘If we as a single troop of the world proletariat, as the first troop . . . have moved into the lead, it is not because this troop is better organized . . . it has moved to the first place, because history is not developing rationally.’5 Bolshevism’s victory was an expression of history’s lack of logic, an island-oasis, a surreal slip of Minerva’s tongue.
Lenin’s vision of imperialist war as inferno has echoed down from World War I to the present day, in broad-brush critiques of modern civilization that continue to command an influential audience. But he himself was far too politically minded to tarry very long with such dark vistas. His interpretation of world affairs was at the service of a political strategy. In 1918 his vision of the Soviet regime as an island-oasis amidst a raging storm of imperial competition was the basis for his claim to dictatorship. It took a unique type of historical insight and political resilience to withstand the stresses of this moment. To survive, the Soviet Union must accept a peace at any price with whomever held power in Germany. This was a painful compromise, as Lenin himself freely admitted. But all the greater was the credit claimed for Lenin when his tactics paid off, the Soviet Union survived, and Germany went down to defeat.6 What this triumphalist narrative ignores is how fundamentally Lenin misread the political logic of the war and how close that misreading brought his regime to extinction.
I
Lenin’s separate peace at Brest-Litovsk was bound to antagonize Russia’s former allies in the Entente. Back in December 1917, Britain and France had already begun discussing intervention to restore an Eastern Front against Germany. But they could ill afford to move significant forces from the West, and as the German offensive began in the spring their situation became truly desperate. Instead they urged Japan to take the initiative. And there were certainly expansionists in Japan who hoped that the Terauchi government would strike.7 In March 1918 as Germany imposed its will at Brest, the fiercely aggressive Interior Minister Goto Shinpei demanded that Japan should seize the opportunity to force its way into Siberia with an army of 1 million men, enough to deter any future attempt by the West to compete with Japan in East Asia. Goto was deeply unsettled not so much by the Soviet regime as by the enthusiastic global response to Wilson’s 14 Points. ‘If we probe the real intentions of the USA further,’ Goto insisted, ‘it embraces what I call moralistic aggression. It is, in other words, none other than a great hypocritical monster clothed in justice and humanity.’ To counter this expansive ideological attack, nothing less than total mobilization and the suppression of all liberal dissent within Japan was necessary to prepare the nation for leadership in the inevitable ‘world war’ between Asia and the West.8 But the majority of the cabinet did not share Goto’s aggressive vision. Japan would not be strengthened by becoming embroiled at the behest of the British and French in the wastelands of Siberia. Furthermore, any large-scale operation in Russia’s Pacific provinces would have to be squared with the Terauchi government’s strategy of cultivating good relations with Beijing.
Within days of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Japanese ambassador to China proposed a far-reaching military agreement. Japan would provide a backbone of military expertise and equipment for the Chinese Army. Together, Japan and China would take control of the orphaned Russian railway network in the Far East.9 In December 1917 Nishihara Kamezo, Japan’s financial representative in China, called for a ‘fundamental union’ of Japan and China to ensure ‘eastern self-sufficiency’ and to ‘prevent for all time, the intrusion of European power in the Japan sea’. The elder statesman Yamagata Aritomo called for an alliance so close that Japan and China could act ‘as if one country with different bodies but of the same mind’.10
Ominous as such talk of a pan-Asian, anti-Western bloc sounded, Goto and his ilk did not have a free hand. As progressives such as Yoshino Sakuzo noted, there was a striking lack of popular support in Japan for military action.11 In the Diet, the advocates of aggression faced opposition from the likes of the radical liberal Ozaki Yukio, who seized on Wilson’s 14 Points to highlight the fact that whereas ‘the western allies are trying to destroy militarism, the Terauchi cabinet is trying, at home and abroad, to strengthen and protect it’.12 Following the rigged election of 1917, the liberal opposition were in no position to dictate terms. But Hara Takashi’s huge conservative Seiyukai majority exercised its own form of restraint. Hara was unshakeable in his conviction that ‘the future of Japan depends on the close relationship with the US’.13 And his position was all the stronger for the fact that it was shared by the liberal elder statesman Prince Saionji and Baron Makino.14 They did not rule out the pursuit of Japanese interests in Asia. But they demanded tact. Whereas Goto and Ozaki both conflated the strategic and domestic conflicts between Japan and America, one for conservative the other for liberal ends, Hara worked on the assumption that if Japan were willing to act cooperatively, America was most unlikely to challenge Japan’s domestic order and might well turn a blind eye to its sponsorship of authoritarian militarism in China. Hara did not oppose Japanese military intervention in Siberia. But if the militarists acted without the green light from Washington, he would abandon Terauchi to the mercies of the radicalized opposition.
How would America decide? As the struggle over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty swung one way and then the other, there was a powerful faction in Washington led by Secretary of State Lansing who saw Bolshevism in precisely the terms that Lenin imagined – as a natural ideological enemy of the US that must be stamped out. What was coming ‘to the surface’ in Russia, Lansing presciently observed, was ‘in many ways more to be dreaded than autocracy’.15 Whereas Tsarism had been ‘the despotism of ignorance’, Lenin’s was an ‘intelligent despotism’. Wilson himself was more worried about the Japanese. Panicked by exaggerated French reports that the Japanese were about to act, Wilson on 1 March 1918 signalled his willingness to approve a joint Entente action. But only a day later he reversed this decision under the influence of an urgent memo from William Bullitt, one of his most radical advisors. For Bullitt, what was at stake was the rationale for America’s entry into the war. Wilson had joined the war in the hope of turning the Entente in a more progressive direction. He could not, therefore, hand off moral responsibility for an intervention in Russia.
‘In Russia today,’ Bullitt insisted ‘there are the rudiments of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ The real threat to democracy lay not in Lenin’s Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars), but in the forces of reactionary imperialism that were alive within the Entente
as much as in the Central Powers. ‘Are we going to make the world safe for this Russian democracy,’ Bullitt demanded, ‘by allowing the allies to place Terauchi in Irkutsk, while Ludendorff establishes himself in Petrograd?’16 On 4 March 1918, Bullitt’s arguments prevailed. The President swung back firmly against any Allied intervention.17 Not only did Wilson retract his support for intervention, on the advice of Bullitt and Colonel House he renewed the attempt to enlist the Russian revolution in a democratic alliance against reactionary Germany. Wilson appealed directly to the Congress of Soviets, which was meeting on 12 March to hear Lenin’s arguments for ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Under even more incongruous circumstances than in January, Wilson restated the message of the 14 Points. Ignoring the fact that the Congress of Soviets was standing in for the repressed Constituent Assembly, Wilson expressed ‘every sympathy’ for Russia’s effort to ‘weld herself into a democracy’. He demanded that she be left free of ‘any sinister or selfish influence, which might interfere with such development’. But as House spelled out, what Wilson was actually thinking of went beyond Germany and Brest. ‘My thought is . . . to seize this opportunity to clear up the far eastern situation but without mentioning Japan in any way. What you would say about Russia and against Germany could be made to apply to Japan or any other power seeking to do what we know Germany is attempting.’18
Behind the scenes in March 1918 Trotsky was in virtually daily conversation with Bruce Lockhart and Raymond Robins, the enthusiastic representatives of Britain and the United States, about a rapprochement between the Soviet regime and the Western Powers. In the north at Murmansk in the second week of March a small detachment of British troops was landed to protect Allied stores against seizure by the advancing German Army.19 But at the Congress of Soviets Leninist rigour prevailed. There could be no compromise with a liberal hypocrite like Wilson. The Congress issued a truculent revolutionary riposte that was intended, in the words of Lenin’s devoted follower Alexander Zinoviev, ‘as a slap in the face of the American President’. Whilst Wilson’s message thus fell on deaf ears amongst the Soviets, the hint was not lost on the more perceptive members of the Japanese cabinet. On 19 March, at the insistence of Hara, the interventionists in Tokyo were once more overruled. Nothing would be done without America’s explicit approval.20 When an over-eager Japanese naval unit made an impromptu landing in Vladivostok, it was immediately countermanded by Tokyo. On 23 April, humiliated by his inability to force through a policy of aggressive intervention in Siberia, Foreign Minister Ichiro Motono, the senior hawk in Terauchi’s cabinet, resigned. He was replaced by Goto Shinpei who was, if anything, even more aggressive. But he had no greater room for manoeuvre than his predecessor. As President Wilson put it to the British representative Sir William Wiseman, the ‘US government held the key to the situation . . .’, ‘the Japanese government would not intervene’ without Washington’s ‘sanction’.21 What Wilson did not acknowledge, any more than Lenin, were the forces that gave him that influence – the solid parliamentary majority in Japan who were determined to steer their country away from violent fantasies of oceanic struggles with the West, toward an accommodation with America.22
II
Lenin feared the Japanese but he could do little about them. The Bolshevik grip on eastern Russia was too tenuous to allow a coherent policy to be developed in that region. By the same token, the mounting tide of anti-Bolshevik activity in the Far East did not immediately challenge the Communists’ grip on the core of Russian territory. The cornerstone of Lenin’s survival strategy was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany. But this involved a contradiction. In the process of negotiating the treaty the Bolsheviks had done everything they could to empty it of legitimacy. But how could a treaty that the weaker party so flagrantly disowned have any binding force on the stronger party? The obvious cynicism of the Bolsheviks only encouraged similar attitudes on the German side. Why should Germany not act as the ruthless imperialist that it was being typecast as? And if not Germany, why not its allies?
In the spring of 1917 the German High Command had halted their Turkish allies on the South-Eastern Front. In this period of respite a fledgling Transcaucasian Republic had constituted a makeshift parliament, the Siem, in Tiflis to represent the formerly Russian provinces of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Under the same terms as the Ukrainians they had been invited in December 1917 to join the conference table at Brest. But unlike Ukraine, the revolutionaries of the Caucasus refused the invitation. They would not even sit at the same table as the traitorous Bolsheviks. When the deliberations at Brest broke down, this made them fair game. Mindful of the horrors perpetrated against the Armenians since 1915, the German Foreign Office quickly reiterated to Constantinople that what was needed was a military offensive, not a resumption of the massacre.23 But Berlin’s pleas were in vain.24 When the Soviets scuttled back to the negotiating table at Brest in the first week of March, Turkey demanded not only the border of 1913 but all of the territory taken by the Tsars since the 1870s. With hundreds of thousands of terror-stricken Armenians fleeing before General Enver Pasha’s army, even this was no longer enough. Since the resumption of hostilities, Turkish blood had been spilled. There had been massacres of Muslim villagers too. If the Transcaucasian Republic wanted peace, it would have to purchase it at the price of Armenian territory. On 28 April, with the Germans looking on, the Turks calmly informed the Armenian members of the Transcaucasian delegation that unless their demands were met the genocidal Ittihadist commandos would complete the total annihilation of their people.25
To assert at least some control over their rampaging allies, the Germans despatched General Hans von Seeckt, the future leader of the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr, as an observer on the Caucasus front line. But Seeckt soon became intoxicated by the vistas opened up by the Russian collapse. ‘As I stood on the rails that lead via Tiflis to Baku,’ Seeckt wrote home, ‘my thoughts wanted to go further, beyond the Caspian, through the cotton fields of Turkestan to the Olympian mountains. And if, as I hope, the war will continue for some time, we may yet beat on the doors of India.’26 At the German Foreign Office an excitable official noted that if Germany was able to gain a foothold in the region, ‘even the idea of a land route to China . . . would move from the realm of adventurous fantasy into that of real calculation’.27 But as General Enver Pasha reached out for Azerbaijan and the oil fields of Baku, what concerned Berlin more than China was the risk that pan-Turkic aggression might invite British intervention from Persia. Whilst Armenia was sacrificed to the Turks, Germany would build a base in the region by offering Georgia, with its advantageous coastline on the Black Sea and rich deposits of metal ores, a protectorate. With the Turkish Army advancing north, this was more than the Georgians could refuse. On 26 May they broke ranks, abandoned the Transcaucasian Siem and declared full independence. To the Armenians, the Georgian delegation expressed their regret at the horrible fate that awaited them. But ‘we cannot drown with you,’ the Georgians informed them. ‘Our people want to save what they can. You too, are obligated to seek an avenue for agreement with the Turks. There is no other way.’28
Into a few hundred square miles of barren and mountainous land granted to the Armenian reservation, 600,000 people crowded. Half of them were penniless refugees who had been on the move since 1915. Turkish artillery was within easy range of the makeshift capital of Erevan. With no access to the sea and no railway system, the Turks closed the territory throughout the summer months to ensure that none of the abandoned fields just beyond the reservation’s borders could be harvested.29 As one German military representative on the spot reported to Berlin, the Turks were clearly intending to ‘starve the entire Armenian nation’.30 Meanwhile, in the relative safety of Tiflis, the German flag was raised alongside that of Georgia. General Otto von Lossow, the Kaiser’s representative, signed a provisional agreement providing Germany with rights to Georgian manganese ore and access to the port of Poti. With German troops having occupied
the Crimea and seized much of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, German engineering teams in the Caucasus began inspecting the railway system to establish the viability of Ludendorff’s latest fantasy, which was to freight a light flotilla of the German navy including a dismantled U-boat cross-country to the port of Baku, where they would establish German naval supremacy over the landlocked Caspian Sea.31 From his Caucasus bridgehead Ludendorff mused about launching attacks on Britain’s position in the Persian Gulf.
This, however, was music of the far-distant future. The immediate prize of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was supposed to have been the establishment of Ukraine as a substantial client state and economic partner of the Central Powers.32 Having occupied the agrarian heartland in the spring advance, the Germans by early May 1918 had added the Donets industrial region to their zone of occupation. Already in December 1917 a businessmen’s committee had been formed in Berlin to evaluate the possibilities of German investment in the East. But that was a long-term proposition. The most pressing priority was grain. In 1918 Austria and Germany confidently expected at least 1 million tons from their new ally. But by the end of April it had become clear that ‘exploiting’ the bread basket of the Ukraine would present more problems than these fantasies allowed. If they were to avoid the enormous costs of a full-scale occupation, Austria and Germany needed a cooperative local authority to collaborate with them. Having been driven out of Kiev, only to be restored courtesy of the German Army, the Rada needed a breathing space to re-establish itself. But the scale and urgency of Germany and Austria’s economic demands made this impossible.33
In Ukraine, as in the rest of revolutionary Russia, the only way to secure popular legitimacy was to cede possession of the land to the peasants.34 Over the summer of 1917 a nationwide land grab had redistributed the gentry’s estates. In the Constituent Assembly election, the peasants had voted in their millions for the party that promised a village-based agrarian future, the Social Revolutionaries. The SRs were reliable allies against the Bolsheviks, but their land policy ran directly counter to the interests of the Central Powers. To maximize the surplus available for export, they needed cultivation to be concentrated in large, market-orientated farms. For the Rada to have presided over the restoration of the great estates for the sake of its German protectors would have discredited it completely. For the Germans themselves to reverse the agrarian revolution by force would have required hundreds of thousands of troops from the Western Front that Ludendorff could ill afford. If the Germans had been able to barter desirable manufactured goods in exchange for grain deliveries, this conflict might have been alleviated. Under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Germany had committed itself to trading grain for industrial goods. But under the strain of the war effort, goods for export were in desperately short supply.35 To purchase the grain they needed, the Central Powers resorted to the short-term expedient of simply ordering the Ukrainian National Bank to print whatever currency they required. This gave them purchasing power and avoided requisitioning, but within a matter of months it rendered the currency worthless. As General Hoffmann noted from Kiev: ‘Everyone is rolling in money. Roubles are printed and almost given away . . . the peasants have enough stocks of corn to live on for two or three years, but they will not sell it.’36 Having reached this point, there was no alternative but to resort to coercion.