by Adam Tooze
On 29 July 1918 Lenin gave the party’s Central Committee a truly drastic appraisal of the situation. Encircled by a ‘forged chain’ of Anglo-French imperialism, Russia had been ‘sucked back into the war’. The fate of the revolution now depended ‘entirely upon who will carry off the victory . . . the entire question of the continued existence of the USSR . . . has been reduced to this military question’.30 When pressed by the British representative Bruce Lockhart as to whether this amounted to a declaration of war against the Entente, Lenin was evasive. But behind the scenes the Bolsheviks had made their choice. Following through the logic of the policy adopted since May, Lenin was clasping the Germans ever closer. On 1 August with Lenin’s personal approval Chicherin approached Mirbach’s successor as ambassador, the prominent nationalist politician Karl Helfferich, to ask Germany to intervene with military force to stabilize the Murmansk front, where the British were establishing an anti-Soviet base.31 A day later, having confirmed that this extraordinary request did indeed come from the Kremlin, Helfferich forwarded the message to Berlin. First Lenin had moved to tighten relations with Germany. That had made it impossible for Woodrow Wilson to continue to resist the call for intervention. Now, the intervention that Wilson had been forced to approve triggered Lenin into inviting Germany to transform the uncomfortable modus vivendi of Brest into active military cooperation. As Rosa Luxemburg, the great tribune of the German radical left and long-time critic of Lenin, was to put it, in one of her most devastatingly perceptive attacks, this was ‘the final stage’ of the ‘path of thorns’ that the Russian revolution had been forced to travel towards ‘an alliance between the Bolsheviks and Germany’.32
Ludendorff, not surprisingly, leapt at the chance of directing German and Finnish forces against the British in northern Russia. To scare the Reichstag into line, General Hoffmann was peddling dark visions of an encircling Entente position that would run from Murmansk by way of the Volga to Baku and Baghdad.33 But Ludendorff had his limits. ‘A military alliance and a fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Bolsheviks, I consider out of the question for our Army.’34 German intervention must go hand in hand with a political reorganization of Russia. This would start with the German occupation of Petrograd and Kronstadt. Given the prevailing anarchy in Russia, Ludendorff thought that six divisions would be enough to give military backing to a new, popular Russian regime. By mid-August the Germans were in top-secret staff talks with the Finns and Russian experts about what was now dubbed Operation Capstone (Schlussstein). Some 50,000 troops were moving to advanced positions ready for an assault that was to sweep by way of Petrograd towards the British positions at Murmansk.35
Lenin’s regime was teetering on the edge of a complete capitulation to Germany. And this impression was only reinforced when on 27 August 1918 the two sides finalized the Supplementary Treaty to Brest-Litovsk. In exchange for German protection, the Soviet regime offered indemnities not included in the original Brest Treaty to the sum of 6 billion marks ($1.46 billion). The Governorates of Livonia and Estonia were formally removed from Russian territory, consolidating German hegemony in the Baltic. The Communists also agreed to recognize the independence of Georgia, Germany’s protectorate in the Caucasus, and to supply at least 25 per cent of the oil from Baku to the Central Powers once Azerbaijan was back in Soviet hands.36 Under the terms of the treaty, Germany and Finland agreed to abstain from any assault on Petrograd in exchange for a guarantee that the Bolsheviks would see to it that all the Entente forces were driven out of Soviet territory. In the event that the Soviet regime was unable to make good on this obligation, secret clauses provided for German and Finnish intervention.
The trigger for Operation Capstone was built into the treaty. Crucially, however, the German Foreign Office made sure that any Finnish-German deployment must be at the explicit invitation of the Soviet side. It was up to the Communists to surrender Petrograd to Ludendorff. Of course, Lenin was in no position to enforce any such conditions. The Red Guards could have offered no more than token resistance to a concerted German-Finnish attack. It was the civilian authorities in Berlin who served as the real check. Already in early August the Foreign Office extracted from Ludendorff a promise that he would act only within the terms of the Supplementary Treaty.37 It was this restraint that saved Lenin’s regime from a military entanglement with Imperial Germany, which, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, would have meant the ‘moral bankruptcy’, if not the outright destruction, of the revolution. The formal authorization for the occupation of Petrograd never came. Instead the German Foreign Office, over protests from Ludendorff, agreed to supply 200,000 rifles, 500 million rounds of ammunition and 70,000 tons of coal so the Soviets might defend themselves.38
But the willingness of the German civilian authorities to hold the line on the fragile legal ground of Brest had not yet faced its sternest test. Sensing the growing vulnerability of the Bolshevik regime, the terrorist teams of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries raised the stakes. Three days after the Supplementary Treaty to Brest was initialled, on 30 August, Lenin was in an industrial suburb of Moscow delivering the new and drastic slogan that had replaced his promises of peace – ‘Victory or death!’ As he left the Mekhelnson armaments works, he was hit in the neck and shoulder by an assassin’s bullets. In a simultaneous attack the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky was killed. The policy of repression that had been gathering force since July was now transformed into the open proclamation of the ‘Red Terror’. In Petrograd alone 500 political prisoners were shot on the spot. Thousands more were to follow. Hostages were taken across the country. Anyone suspected of counter- revolutionary activity was liable to arrest and detention in one of the growing network of prison camps. At the end of July, Lenin had refused British representative Lockhart a formal declaration of war. Now on 1 September 1918 the British Embassy was stormed and hostages were taken. A military attaché was killed. Henceforth Soviet Russia was to be governed as a ‘military camp’. A revolutionary military council headed by Trotsky took over much of the business of the party’s Central Committee.39
The ruthless bloodshed of the Red Terror added dramatic impetus to those in Germany calling for a decisive anti-Bolshevik intervention. The Reichstag majority opposed ratifying the Supplementary Treaty that was bound to unite Russia in patriotic opposition to Germany and the Bolsheviks.40 Sensing that he might yet get his chance, Ludendorff put the troops preparing for Operation Capstone on maximum readiness. Additional air units were moved from the West. On 8 September 1918 a team of German and Finnish military engineers began exploring the transport routes around Petrograd in the direction of Murmansk. How long the Foreign Office could have upheld its opposition to Ludendorff’s aggression is far from certain. Coming hard on the heels of the supplementary agreement to Brest, the Red Terror placed the German Foreign Service in a truly invidious position. The embassy, which had moved from Moscow back to Petrograd, found itself at the centre of what one of the horrified diplomats described as a ‘St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’. The desperate Russian bourgeoisie, many of whom looked to the Germans for protection, discovered that they had been ‘sold to the devil’ for the paltry sum of 6 billion marks.41
When Erzberger criticized the Supplementary Treaty to Brest in conversation with liberal Vice-Chancellor Payer, Payer admitted that the Reich’s government was so uncertain of its position that it no longer planned to submit the text of the treaty to the Reichstag for ratification. Foreign Secretary Hintze would sign it and apply retrospectively for an indemnity for this breach of the constitution.42 Mirbach’s outspoken replacement, the nationalist Karl Helfferich, was not satisfied with such makeshifts. On 30 August he resigned in protest, denouncing the apologetic stance of the German government. The defenders of the Brest Treaty in Berlin were perpetrating a ‘systematic misrepresentation’ of a regime that ‘in its excesses was barely exceeded by the Jacobins’. Helfferich would not stand for the ‘ostensible treatment’ of Lenin’s regime as a government on the
same footing as that of Germany. He could not be party to the effort to ‘solidarize, or at least to give the appearance of solidarizing with the regime . . .’. For the Reich’s government to condone Bolshevik violence was disastrous not only for Russia. It would undermine morale on the German home front.43 But despite Helfferich’s protest, the Foreign Office clung to the Brest Treaty as a ‘kind of protection’, as one Reichstag deputy put it, ‘against the German military’.44 The alternative of allowing Ludendorff a free hand in the East, to wage the kind of counter-revolutionary campaign recently witnessed in Finland, was simply too awful to contemplate. Germany’s demoralized diplomats were instructed to avoid any public statements against the Bolsheviks and to intercede against acts of terror only when German citizens were at risk.
On 24 September 1918, in the sorry culmination of Germany’s bankrupt policy, Foreign Secretary Hintze deliberately misled the Reichstag with regard to events in Russia. Responding to questions about the terror being perpetrated by a government with which Germany was now in what amounted to an alliance, Hintze replied ‘in Greater Russia the cauldron of revolution continues to boil . . . certainly acts of terror are committed; but that they are going on on the scale reported in the press is most unlikely . . .’. The Foreign Office had made ‘specific enquiries and have been officially informed, that the reported figures (of executions) are on the whole greatly exaggerated’.45 Confronted with daily evidence of violence, the German consul in Petrograd could only bite his tongue. As Hintze himself later admitted, his deliberate obfuscation of the true character of the Bolshevik regime could be justified only by reference to ‘higher political concerns’.
IV
The politics of intervention in the summer of 1918 are indicative of quite how seriously the liberal cause had derailed since the moment in July 1917 when the Petrograd Soviet’s democratic peace offensive came so agonizingly close to coinciding with the Reichstag’s peace resolution. By May 1918 progressives in Germany and the United States found themselves clinging to a bad peace with an increasingly odious Soviet regime as the only way to prevent a further escalation of violence. Lenin for his part, whilst insisting that he was playing one imperialist power off against the others, in fact slid ever further across the line that separated a regrettable separate peace from a truly discreditable alliance with German imperialism. As for Ludendorff, he wanted nothing more than to crush the Soviet regime to death. But he was prevented from acting by the German government and the Reichstag majority, which had no love for either the Bolsheviks or the arbitrary rule of the German military in the East, yet saw Brest as the best way to contain a further escalation.
Given this confused situation, it is hardly surprising that it was the advocates of intervention in London, Paris and Washington who had the better of the argument. Lenin’s ever more transparent alignment with Germany allowed them to establish a clear political and strategic position. The Bolshevik regime, odious in its own right, was allied with German militarism and autocracy. Interventions by Japanese, American, British and French forces, combined with local Russian support, would strike against both enemies. It was an intervention, as Lloyd George and Lansing insisted, in which strategic imperatives and the pursuit of democracy were inseparable. The war fused the two together, and if the war in the West had continued much longer it is hard to see how the Bolshevik regime could have survived. There was plenty of Japanese manpower available for deployment and the Japanese military knew how to seize their moment. Overriding the hesitancy of the parliamentary politicians, by November they had poured 72,000 troops into Siberia.46 What halted that escalation, what saved the Bolsheviks from an open capitulation to Ludendorff that would have robbed them of any historic legitimacy, was the suddenness of Germany’s defeat in the West.47 This not only prevented the realization of Operation Capstone, but it also took the wind out of the sails of Allied intervention almost as soon as it began.
TWO
Winning a Democratic Victory
9
Energizing the Entente
Between 21 March and 15 July 1918 five waves of German attacks hurled themselves against the Allied lines in northern France. By early June the Germans seemed once more to have Paris within their reach. Frantic preparations were made to evacuate the government to Bordeaux. But on 18 July the French counter-attacked and in a matter of days the momentum shifted decisively. The Kaiser’s exhausted and hungry army reeled back towards the borders of the Reich. By September, Canadian, British, South African and Australian forces had driven decisively through the Hindenburg line. It was a spectacular military victory and it was won by the Entente.1 The key defensive battles of the spring and early summer were fought by the British and French virtually unaided. America’s military effort during the Allied counter-offensive was more significant, but General John Pershing’s army required many more months of combat experience to mature into a war-winning force. America made its truly decisive contribution in the sphere of economic mobilization. But as the war in the East demonstrated, neither the military nor the economic effort would have mattered if the Entente Powers had not maintained their political coherence. Russia was disintegrating into civil war. The Habsburg and Ottoman empires were tottering. By the summer of 1918, the future of the imperial regime in Germany was more and more openly questioned. When Germans came to analyse and explain their own defeat, it was above all around this political factor that their thoughts circled. It was the flip-side of the notorious ‘stab in the back’ legend. They attributed an enormous influence to Allied propaganda and to the demagogic genius of Lloyd George and Clemenceau. What Germany had lacked was a populist, democratic ‘Führer’.2 But potent as the charisma of Lloyd George and Clemenceau no doubt was, to focus on their personalities would be to understate the forces in play.
The crises that shook both the French and Italian war efforts in 1917 were profound. The French mutiny and the Italian collapse at Caporetto were on a par with anything suffered by Tsarist Russia prior to the revolution. Both France and Italy responded with repression in the first instance. Thousands of French mutineers were court-martialled, an exemplary few were executed. In Italy the reprisals following the disaster at Caporetto were wholesale. It is possible in both cases, indeed it has become commonplace in recent historical writing, to trace forward from these moments of crisis to the escalation of political violence, war and further trauma that befell both countries over the coming decade.3 It was the extraordinary effort required to carry the war through 1917 and to its conclusion that led to the radical polarizations, extreme rhetoric, and the personal animosities and passions that motivated both the first onrush of extremism in the immediate aftermath of the war and its second coming in the 1930s.4 In Italy the lingering fury at the humiliating collapse in November 1917 echoed through the machismo of Mussolini’s Fascist movement.5 But by itself this does not explain Mussolini’s ascent to power, let alone the overthrow of the French Third Republic. To draw a straight line from the crisis of 1917 to the fascism and collaboration in the Europe of 1940 does no justice to the success achieved by the Entente war effort. In the Entente’s survival and eventual victory in November 1918 coercion and censorship certainly played a role. The Entente Powers were also richer, and better located strategically. But their political survival was also owed to the fact that they had deep reserves of popular support to draw on and that their political class managed to respond to the crisis of the war in a way that the Central Powers did not, by promising a further widening of democracy at home and greater enfranchisement in the colonial sphere.
I
Between March and November 1917 the French war effort staggered through a profound crisis. Following Woodrow Wilson’s appeal for a peace without victory and the Petrograd peace initiative, the Socialist Party abandoned the government and the cross-party Union Sacrée collapsed. Three cabinets fell in short succession. By the autumn it seemed that France might be drifting toward a peace on whatever terms could be obtained fr
om Germany. With democracy in Russia fighting for its life, there were voices in London and Washington that favoured sacrificing France’s obstinate demand for the return of Alsace-Lorraine to achieve a quick settlement. But a majority of the French public were still determined to continue the war. On 16 November 1917 the period of uncertainty was brought to an abrupt end when Clemenceau took office as Prime Minister and announced his new priorities: ‘total war [guerre integrale] . . . war, nothing but war’.6
After his return from America in 1870, Clemenceau had made his mark in 1871 as one of the radical deputies who refused to ratify the peace with Bismarck and voted instead for a fight to the finish. But as a militant patriot he had no desire to narrow the political base of the Republic. The Socialists demonized his role in breaking the first major wave of syndicalist strikes in 1906, which he considered a menace to the Republic. But Clemenceau himself was never anything other than a man of the left. In 1917 he courted Socialists as cabinet members.7 But the party held him at arm’s length. Albert Thomas, the reformist labour leader, recently returned from Petrograd, harboured his own prime ministerial ambitions. In the end, despite continued harassment in the Chamber of Deputies, Clemenceau took two Socialists into his government not as cabinet members but as commissioners. Meanwhile, the trade union leadership, with whom Clemenceau entertained workman-like relations, were given the clear signal that rather than making appeals for peace, they should vent the frustration of their members in demands for wage increases. For Clemenceau inflation was a small price to pay for a united national war effort. To silence talk of peace yet further, Clemenceau hurled accusations of defeatism and worse at a wide range of potential challengers from the left.