by Adam Tooze
In early April, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, the German occupation commander, issued a decree requiring compulsory cultivation of all land. However, the Field Marshal acted without the approval of the Rada and the deputies refused to ratify the decree. Within days, the German military decided against diplomacy. In a coup d’état they ousted the Ukrainian National Assembly and installed a so-called Hetmanate under the Tsarist cavalry officer Pyotr Skoropadskyi.37 Only six weeks after the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, under the pressure of economic necessity, the German military had unilaterally abandoned any residual claim to be acting as the protector of the legitimate cause of self-determination. Skoropadskyi spoke virtually no Ukrainian and filled his cabinet with conservative Russian nationalists. The real power-holders in Germany seemed to have lost interest in the project of creating a viable Ukrainian nation state. Instead, they appeared to be readying Kiev as the launching pad for a conservative reconquest of all of Russia.
If these threats from the south were not menacing enough, by May Lenin’s regime faced an even more direct attack from the north. Along with the other Baltic states, Finland had declared independence from Russia in December 1917. In line with Lenin’s nationalities policy, Petrograd had given its blessing. But at the same time it directed local Bolsheviks with strong trade union support to seize control of Helsinki. By the last week of January, Finland was plunged into civil war. In early March 1918 as German troops marched into Ukraine, the Kaiser and Ludendorff settled on a plan for a joint German-Finnish force that would first wipe out the Finnish Bolsheviks before continuing the march south towards Petrograd. Icy weather delayed the arrival of General von der Goltz’s German expeditionary force until early April. But when they joined up with the Finnish White Guards of General Mannerheim they made up for lost time.38 By 14 April, after heavy fighting, they had cleared Helsinki of Red Guards. As a token of German appreciation, von der Goltz disbursed food aid to the cheering burghers of the city.39 The civil war ended on 15 May, but the killing did not. Following a reprisal shooting of White prisoners of war by Red Guards, the Finnish-German combat group unleashed a ‘White terror’ that by early May had claimed the lives of more than 8,000 leftists. At least 11,000 more would die of famine and disease in prison camps.40 In the spring of 1918, Finland became the stage for the first of a series of savage counter-revolutionary campaigns that were to open a new chapter in twentieth-century political violence.
In the first week of May 1918, with the terror in full swing, Mannerheim and his German auxiliaries pushed menacingly towards the Russian fortress of Ino guarding the northern gateway to Petrograd. To the Soviets it seemed as though the Kaiser and his entourage had thought better of the compromise they had settled for at Brest. Why after all should Germany allow itself to be constrained by a mere treaty, one furthermore that the Soviets themselves had dismissed as nothing more than a scrap of paper? If Lenin’s strategy of balancing between the imperialist powers was to work, he would have to go beyond merely ratifying Brest. After signing the treaty he had tacked away from the Germans, encouraging Trotsky to cultivate close contacts with the emissaries of the Entente and the United States in Petrograd and Moscow.41 Now in early May he embarked on a second desperate gamble. If the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was no longer enough to satisfy German imperialism, Lenin would put more flesh on the bare bones of the peace.
On 6 May he called a night meeting of the party’s Central Committee and demanded that his Comrades, who had agreed to the Brest treaty with such reluctance, must now swallow further concessions.42 Anticipating opposition from the left wing of his party, Lenin returned to the attack, pouring acid contempt on the ‘childishness’ of the Left Communists. As Lenin insisted with characteristic impatience, ‘nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order’, had ‘ever expected’ the course of historical development by itself ‘to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply’.43 But even by his standards the new turn in policy was dizzying. On 14 May Lenin proposed that the German imperialists should be offered a comprehensive plan of economic cooperation.44 By way of justification he offered what was surely the weirdest of his many modifications of orthodox Marxism. The need for a close alliance between the Russian revolution and Imperial Germany, he argued, arose out of the twisted logic of history itself. History had by 1918 ‘taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth . . . to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side, like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism’. Brought together by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Soviet Russia and Imperial Germany were those twin chickens. To overcome the split between the political conditions for socialism, realized in Russia, and the economic conditions, realized in Germany, the shell of the treaty must be filled with a substantial economic alliance. Lenin promised his colleagues that Germany’s legendary wartime economic organization, established by the electrical engineering magnate Walther Rathenau, was ‘the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism’. Through an economic and political alliance this organizational and technical potential would be harnessed to the political radicalism of the Bolsheviks.45
Nor was Lenin wrong to count on the cupidity of the Germans. The Berlin Foreign Ministry, with its distinctly economistic vision of German policy, seized eagerly on his proposal, calling together a standing committee of industrialists, bankers and politicians to consider the possibility of taking financial and technical control of Russia. As Lenin had hoped, Krupp and Deutsche Bank were licking their lips. But on sober inspection the dish was less appetizing than promised. Though Russia presented spectacular long-term opportunities, to take advantage of them would require huge investments that could be financed only with difficulty in wartime. Nor could the millions of tons of steel required for reconstruction come from Germany. Reconstruction would have to begin by restarting Russia’s own blast furnaces, which by the summer of 1918 had been largely blown out.46
Lenin was not so naive as to underestimate these difficulties. Nor was it consistent with his strategy of ‘balancing’ to make such an offer only to the Germans. Russia’s debts to Britain and France were already too large to make them promising targets for Lenin’s manipulative tactics. But America’s representatives in Moscow, above all the ubiquitous Colonel Robins, were fascinated by the prospects. On 20 April 1918 Robins cabled the American ambassador, urging that a decision be made. Unless Washington planned to offer Lenin ‘organized opposition’, he insisted that there must be ‘organized cooperation’. As Robins telegraphed to America’s reluctant ambassador, the stakes could not be higher. Russia’s reconstruction was the ‘largest economic and cultural enterprise remaining in the world’.47 The question was whether this would take place ‘under either German or American supervision and support’.
On 14 May, the same day that he put forward his dramatic plan for an embrace of German imperialism, Lenin provided the departing Colonel Robins with a prospectus for future economic cooperation with the United States. As Lenin acknowledged, for many years to come Germany would be too preoccupied with its own post-war recovery to be able to return to its pre-war role as Russia’s main industrial supplier. ‘Only America,’ Lenin insisted, ‘can become that country.’48 Russia urgently needed railway equipment, farm machinery, electrical generators and mining equipment. There were huge construction projects across Russia. In exchange Russia would be able to offer annual exports of at least 3 billion gold roubles of oil, manganese and platinum as well as animal hides and furs. But on his return to Washington, Robins found no audience. President Wilson dismissed his emissary as someone ‘in whom I have no confidence whatever’.49 Lenin’s effort at balancing had broken down. His dramatic lurch towards the Germans had tilted the balance on the Allied side decisively in favour of Robins’s first option: organized opposition.
In truth, Lenin’s efforts at balancing after May 1918 w
ere misguided in a more fundamental sense. The idea that he could buy off German aggression through economic concessions was a figment of his ideological imagination. What limited Ludendorff’s aggression was not Soviet diplomacy but the demands on German military resources made by the Western Front and the reassertion within Germany of a precarious political equilibrium. Since 1917, the Reichstag majority had been arguing for a durable and profitable peace in the East. In February 1918, following Trotsky’s bizarre abandonment of the negotiations, they had lost the battle to prevent the resumption of hostilities. But, once the Reichstag had solemnly ratified the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March, for the Kaiser and the military leadership to have simply ignored it and to have overturned the Soviet regime would have been an affront of historic proportions to the German parliament. Furthermore, what would have been the strategic rationale for such aggression? As Foreign Secretary Kühlmann pointed out, however odious the Bolsheviks might be, ‘armed intervention against the revolution does not, as such, belong to the tasks of German policy’.50 Speaking to the Reichstag Foreign Affairs Committee on 22 May, Kühlmann made clear that he had serious doubts about using the Skoropadskyi regime in Ukraine to launch an authoritarian restoration in Russia. Germany’s strategic aim must be to keep Ukraine independent and the Tsarist Empire divided, even if this meant tolerating the Bolsheviks in Petrograd. ‘It may seem strange for conservative and militarist Germany to support a socialist government in another country. But our interests dictate that we should do everything to prevent an imminent restoration of Russian unity. A unified Russia was bound to be pro-Entente.’51 Nor did Kühlmann endorse Ludendorff’s thrust into the Caucasus. He described the Caspian naval adventure simply as ‘flaming madness’.52
The fact that Kühlmann was willing to speak in such frank terms to a committee of the Reichstag was indicative of the divisions within Germany opened up by the bruising peace-making process at Brest. In February 1918 the Foreign Secretary had privately shared his dismay with Vice-Chancellor Payer. By May the authoritarian behaviour of the German military in the East was so overt as to demand a public response. On 8 May Matthias Erzberger launched another of his sensational attacks on the Wilhelmine establishment, denouncing the high-handed behaviour of the German Army in the Ukraine. Fed by Erzberger’s contacts in Kiev, the liberal Vossische Zeitung published eyewitness reports of the scandalous events surrounding Skoropadskyi’s coup. German soldiers had stormed the Rada, a sovereign national parliament with which only a few weeks earlier the Reichstag had ratified a solemn treaty. A revolver had been pointed at the head of the Ukrainian president, the venerable historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Members of the Rada had been subjected to humiliating body searches. Cabinet ministers were arrested by German troopers. The newly minted Hetman was a reactionary Cossack. With such high-handed brutality Germany had forfeited any chance of establishing a legitimate and productive hegemony in the East. ‘A German soldier can no longer show himself unarmed in Kiev. . . .’, Erzberger lamented, ‘... the railway men and workmen are planning a general strike . . . the peasants would not deliver any grain, and bloodshed must be reckoned with in the event of requisitioning’.53 Instead of the 1 million tons promised under the peace treaty, the Ukraine delivered no more than 173,000 tons to the Central Powers in 1918.54 But it was not bread alone that was at stake. The question that concerned Erzberger and his colleagues in the Reichstag majority was who controlled the Reich.55 In future Erzberger demanded all measures in the East should be subject to the approval of Germany’s civilian government. There must be a complete ban on military interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine and the Baltic states, to which Germany had extended formal recognition.56
Predictably, nationalist members of the Reichstag greeted Erzberger’s intervention with outrage. Gustav Stresemann, the leading voice amongst the nationalist liberals, insisted that Erzberger’s proposed civilian control must be rejected since it would undermine the German government and would serve as ‘confirmation of (President) Wilson's point that Germany was a military autocracy, with which the Entente powers were unable to negotiate’.57 Those speaking for the motion could only agree, but drew the opposite conclusion. The authoritarian threat was real and it had to be stopped. Despite encouraging news from the Western Front, Ludendorff and Hindenburg knew that they could not act in complete disregard of the civilian authorities in the Reich. On 18 May after an urgent intercession by Chancellor Hertling, Ludendorff agreed to halt the Finno-German march on Petrograd.58 As in Japan, civilian political control asserted itself as a basic safety catch against the more radical fantasies of the German imperialists. Despite its odious reputation and fragile legitimacy, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty served as the main line of defence against a further radicalization of the war. Ironically, the chief beneficiaries of this precarious equilibrium were the Bolsheviks. Whether it could hold would depend on the escalation unleashed by the aggression of both sides.
8
Intervention
On 16 May 1918, in a brief lull between the German attacks in the West, a British general staff memorandum envisioned a truly apocalyptic scenario. Assuming that Hindenburg and Ludendorff, courtesy of Lenin, were able to press-gang 2 million men from the Russian provinces, the Central Powers would be able to continue the war at least until the end of 1919. Germany, the British staffers speculated, would come to resemble ‘the conditions of the ancient Roman empire, with legionnaires fighting on her frontiers and slaves working at home, both recruited from subject races’. Unlike the Western Powers, the ‘hunnish’ Germans were ‘not hampered . . . by any standards of Christianity . . . the Germans are frankly pagan and opportunist, and will not hesitate to employ any such methods that may be necessary for their purpose. Starvation and flogging, backed by machine-guns, soon produce the required effect in a community of illiterates with centuries of serfdom behind them.’1 Six weeks later, at the height of the final German offensive in the West, the British government informed America that ‘unless Allied intervention is undertaken in Siberia forthwith’, Germany would impose its hegemony over all of Russia. In that case, even with a full-scale commitment by America, the Entente would ‘have no chance of being ultimately victorious’ and would run a ‘serious risk of defeat in the meantime’.2
It was not, as Lenin imagined, the revolutionary threat posed by Communism that brought down upon his regime the intervention by the Entente, Japan and the United States. The scenario that haunted the Allies and impelled them to action was a ghostly premonition of the future. But what was on their mind was not the spectre of revolution or an anticipation of the Cold War, but a foretaste of the summer of 1941 when the military triumphs of the Wehrmacht threatened to extend Hitler’s slave empire throughout Eurasia. The prospect that terrified the British and the French in 1918 was not the spectre of Communism as such, but the threat that under Lenin, Russia would become an auxiliary of German imperialism. It was Lenin’s lopsided policy of balancing culminating in his lurch towards Germany in May 1918 that made the push for intervention irresistible.
I
Lenin’s desperate determination to solidify the Brest-Litovsk Treaty came as a shock to those representatives of the Entente still in Russia, who since the winter had been working frantically to maintain relations between the two sides. Reversing his previous advocacy of cooperation with the Bolsheviks, Bruce Lockhart, Britain’s chief representative, now advised London that with Lenin in command, Russia would never escape the German grip. The Entente must launch a massive military intervention, if necessary even without the cooperation of Russian anti-Bolsheviks. But there was no difficulty on that score. On 26 May the Socialist Revolutionaries, the party with the strongest claim to a popular majority in both Russia and Ukraine, declared their support for armed foreign intervention. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries would not consort with the Entente, but were in open opposition. During the Tsarist period they had been pioneers in the bloody art of political terrorism. On 30 May, claiming to ha
ve evidence that hit squads were active in the capital, Lenin declared martial law. After a wave of arrests, all representatives of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were expelled from the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.3