by Adam Tooze
But the narrative of failure, whether Marxist-Leninist or Wilsonian, should not blind us to the forces that did work their way through the crisis. If there was no revolution, there was no comprehensive counter-revolution either. Though they did not conform to either the Leninist or the Wilsonian script, very powerful forces of change had been unleashed by the war. If the outcome was more conservative than the adherents of Wilson and Lenin hoped for, what must be acknowledged is the ambiguous influence these self-proclaimed champions of progress had in helping to bring about that disappointing result.
I
In November 1918, as he recovered from the near-fatal wound inflicted by his enraged assassin, Lenin, far from thinking himself on the revolutionary offensive, was in a state of deep anxiety. Though he was delighted to see the spread of the revolution from its Russian beginnings to a world movement, it was for him a moment of unprecedented danger. Since seizing power Lenin had imagined himself balancing Imperial Germany against the overwhelming power of the Entente. Now the German counterweight was gone. As Lenin commented, ‘when Germany is being torn apart by the revolutionary movement at home, the British and French imperialists consider themselves masters of the world’.7 The intervention in Russia that had begun in July 1918 would surely intensify. As to the German revolution itself, Lenin was just as cautious as he had been about the February revolution in Russia. The patriotic German Socialists who had taken power in November were no better than the ‘liberal imperialists’ of the Entente. The precipitate withdrawal of German troops from Ukraine allowed Bolshevik forces to seize control of Kiev. Trotsky was rapidly mobilizing hundreds of thousands of men in the newly formed Red Army. But the challenge faced by Lenin and Trotsky was enormous. With or without the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, great swaths of what had once been the Tsarist Empire had declared independence. Japanese, American, British and French troops held bridgeheads stretching from the far north to the Crimea and Siberia. Substantial counter-revolutionary armies were gathering on every side – General Yevgeny Miller’s forces in the north behind a British screen at Archangel; Nikolai Yudenich’s army in the Baltic, collaborating with the Finns, the Germans and Estonians; Anton Denikin’s Volunteer Army in the south with Cossack and Anglo-French support; Alexander Kolchak’s army in the east, which took over the positions held by the Czech Legion in Siberia.8 Far from looming over western Europe, there had not been a time in two centuries when Russian power seemed so reduced and hemmed in.
There were voices amongst the Entente who, as Lenin imagined, wanted to destroy the Soviet regime completely. For Winston Churchill, soon to take over as Secretary of State for War, the Bolshevik menace had to be eradicated. As he telegraphed in January 1919, ‘What sort of Peace shd [sic] we have, if all of Europe and Asia from Warsaw to Vladivostok were under the sway of Lenin?’9 On 29 December 1918 France had announced a comprehensive blockade designed to weaken the Soviet regime fatally. But if the politics of revolutionary internationalism were hemmed in, so too were the politics of counter-revolution.10 The intervention in July had been triggered not, as Lenin imagined, by hostility toward the Bolsheviks, but by his apparent determination to throw his regime into the hands of Imperial Germany. Rather than uniting capitalist imperialism against the Communist regime, it was Germany’s surrender that saved the Soviet government. The Armistice not only spared Lenin the odium of an ever closer alliance with Ludendorff. It also took the impetus out of the intervention almost before it began. Furthermore, with the Germans on the retreat, it was now the White, anti-Bolshevik forces, not the Bolsheviks, who appeared to patriotic Russians as the lackeys of foreign power.
When the governments of the major powers convened at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris on 16 January 1919 to discuss the Russian situation, Lloyd George made clear his position.11 He did not doubt that the Bolsheviks were at least as ‘dangerous to civilization’ as the militarists of Germany. A case could be made for their outright destruction. But given the growing strength of the Red Army, that was no longer a minor undertaking. It would require an invasion by at least 400,000 men. Amidst the universal desire for demobilization, no one in the room was willing to commit the necessary resources. To end the war with Germany only to begin an all-out assault on Russia would stir up outrage in the West. As Lloyd George commented to the British war cabinet: ‘Our citizen army will go anywhere for Liberty, but they could not be convinced’, whatever the Prime Minister himself believed, ‘that the suppression of Bolshevism was a war for liberty.’12 The 10,000 sailors of the French navy sent to the Crimea had already mutinied.13 The Entente could continue the policy of blockade. But, Lloyd George went on, there were 150 million civilians in Russia. The policy of blockade was not a ‘health cordon, it was a death cordon’. And it would not be the Bolsheviks who died, but those Russians whom the Entente wanted to help. That left only one alternative: to negotiate. But with whom and under what circumstances?
Lloyd George favoured summoning all the warring Russian parties to Paris ‘to appear before’ America and the great powers of the Entente ‘somewhat in the way that the Roman Empire summoned chiefs of outlying tributary states . . .’. But the staunchly anti-Bolshevik French would hear nothing of it. They would ‘make no contract with crime’.14 Nor would they abandon their anti-Bolshevik allies in Russia. France had more to lose in Russia than any other power. Eventually, agreement was reached on the proposal to invite all the Russian parties to a conference quarantined on the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara. Georges Clemenceau agreed only to avoid a break with Britain and America.
On the Soviet side the idea of negotiating with Wilson and the Entente reopened the wounds of Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky opposed any talks. The Red Army fought on, regardless of the calls for a ceasefire. But Lenin signalled that he was willing to talk. The collapse of the planned conference was therefore blamed on the Whites who, with the encouragement from hardliners in London and Paris, refused the invitation to parlay. This reopened the door to the interventionists. Between 14 and 17 February 1919, with Lloyd George absent from Paris, Churchill attempted to gain American backing for a military solution. But both Wilson and Lloyd George refused. Instead, Wilson dispatched one of his most radical advisors, William Bullitt, to Russia. He held intensive conversations with Georgy Chicherin and Lenin, but by the time Bullitt returned to the West in late March, the conference was too preoccupied with the German peace to want to address the hugely controversial issue of Russia. Meanwhile, Lloyd George retreated into arguing that if Russians were as profoundly anti-Bolshevik as was often claimed, they ought to put paid to Lenin themselves. Woodrow Wilson too preferred to let the Russians fight it out. By May the worst fear of revolutionary contagion had passed.
The pressure either to come to terms with or to eliminate the Soviet threat altogether would have been more serious if there had been a real risk of a new Russo-German alliance. But over the winter of 1918–19, Lenin was far more interested in conciliating the Entente than he was in cultivating relations with Germany’s new republic, and the feeling was amply reciprocated. The war had spoken its verdict. Whatever the far-flung fantasies of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, the centre of power lay in the West, not the East.15 Neither of the two wings of German socialism, the SPD and the USPD, was friendly to the dictatorship in Russia. Lenin’s regime and the chaos unfolding in Russia were distasteful reminders of the miscarriage of German policy in the East. It was no surprise that Germany’s new republic moved rapidly to close the Soviet embassy in Berlin and to wave aside the offer of Russian grain deliveries. Nor was it a coincidence that the two most direct political challenges to the Soviet regime both came from within the left in Germany. On the far left Rosa Luxemburg called for an uprising of the German working class that would unleash a genuine Marxist revolution, putting Lenin’s top-down dictatorship in the shade.16 From the centre ground Karl Kautsky, long the pope of the SPD’s orthodox Marxism, denounced the Soviet Terror and called for socialists to acknowledge t
heir stake in the institutions of parliamentary democracy.17
Establishing Germany’s own democracy was the first order of the day.18 The SPD and their friends in the Reichstag majority wanted to push as soon as possible toward elections to a Constituent Assembly, the date being set for the third week of January 1919. But for the USPD and the small minority even further to the left, this threatened the entire revolution. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, ‘To resort to the National Assembly today is consciously or unconsciously to turn the revolution back to the historical stage of bourgeois revolutions’ – it was to hand the revolution back to its enemies.19 Holding Germany’s elections in January would freeze the new status quo. If Germany was to have a true revolutionary moment, it must not re-enact the French revolution of 1789, but move forward immediately to a Soviet system, the promise of the future. To Luxemburg’s horror, when Germany’s Congress of Soviets met in Berlin in December 1918 the vast majority of the delegates voted for democratization. They wanted socialization of heavy industry and thoroughgoing reform of the army. But above all they wanted the Constituent Assembly. With this endorsement the SPD pressed ahead to hold elections in the third week of January. And to make doubly sure, they consolidated their position with two ‘understandings’. One was between trade unions and employers, to preserve the functioning of Germany’s economy.20 The other was between the provisional government and the remnants of the army command. On a charitable reading, what united these understandings was the determination to ensure that there would be no descent into ‘Bolshevik conditions’ in Germany, no chaos or civil war.21 What the SPD feared was a second instalment of the disorder that had swept through Germany in the week before 9 November 1918.
This fear was, as it turned out, not entirely misplaced. But it was precisely the clumsy efforts by the government to assert control that brought on the chaos. When revolutionary soldiers’ units in Berlin refused to vacate the centre of the city and demanded their pay, the result, over the Christmas and New Year holiday, was serious street fighting in the German capital. Meanwhile, with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the lead, the Spartakist faction coalesced on 1 January 1919 with other ultra-left groups to form the German Communist Party (KPD). It would take the lead where both the MSPD and the USPD were failing. When the dismissal of the mutinous left-leaning police president of Berlin triggered huge street demonstrations on 5 January, this tiny group decided, against the vote of Luxemburg, that the time had come for action. Small and weakly armed squads of Communists and sympathizers from the USPD set up barricades and occupied the offices of the SPD’s newspapers, an open act of defiance in the centre of the capital. How would the provisional government respond? When Gustav Noske, the Peoples’ Commissioner for Military Affairs, demanded that the uprising be put down, Friedrich Ebert as head of the SPD retorted that he should ‘do it himself!’ To which Noske, according to his own memoirs, responded: ‘So be it! Someone has got to be the bloodhound!’22 After mediation failed, on the morning of Saturday 11 January, regular army troops under Noske’s command blasted their way through the barricades to the Reich Chancellery. There Ebert made an appearance, thanking the troops for their part in enabling the National Assembly to go ahead despite the resistance of an irresponsible minority, who had courted civil war. Fifty-three leading members of the revolutionary committee were taken prisoner, put on trial, and eventually acquitted in the summer of 1919. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the most hated figures on the far left, were not so fortunate. They were seized on 15 January, bludgeoned, and shot to death. It was this murder, not the violence of the uprising, in which perhaps as many as 200 people died, that tarnished the image of Noske’s politics of order. This was not republican discipline. It was counter-revolutionary barbarity licensed by the SPD. The news of the murders sent a wave of horror through the ranks of the party. There were calls for the government to resign. But Noske’s response was hard-boiled: ‘War is War.’23
The violent clashes were a disaster for the German far left. But they were not a prelude to a military dictatorship. A week after the suppression of the Spartakist uprising on 19 January 1919, 30 million men and women, over 83 per cent of Germany’s adult population, cast their votes for the Constituent Assembly. It was by far the most impressive democratic display anywhere in the Western world in the aftermath of World War I. Three million more Germans voted than in the US presidential election of 1920, though Germany’s population was 61 million versus the 107 million of the United States. The SPD topped the poll with 38 per cent of the vote. For a society as internally divided as Germany this was remarkable. It was more than any party had ever won in German history. It was more than Hitler was to garner at the peak of his electoral popularity in 1932. No party would exceed this share of the vote until the triumphs of Konrad Adenauer at the height of the post-war economic miracle in the 1950s. But it was far short of a majority and the SPD’s putative partners in a government of socialist unity, the far left USPD, added only 7.6 per cent. By this point, thanks to the violence in Berlin, a coalition between the SPD and the USPD was out of the question in any case. They had taken up opposite sides in an unequal civil war.
Although the vote of January 1919 was a vote against a socialist republic, it was not a vote for reaction. In setting its face against the socialist adventurism of the far left, the SPD affirmed its commitment to the strategy it had pursued since the summer of 1917. Together with the Catholic Centre Party and Progressive Liberals, the SPD would form a democratic majority so substantial that it could marginalize both the extreme left and the extreme right. In the last pre-war election, in 1912, the three parties of the Reichstag majority – the SPD, Centre Party and Progressive Liberals – had won two-thirds of the vote. On 19 January 1919 together they commanded a massive 76 per cent of the vote. The German electorate had delivered a resounding majority not for socialist revolution but for democratization and the diplomacy that had achieved such a remarkably favourable armistice. The right wing, including the Bismarckian National Liberals of Gustav Stresemann’s ilk, was reduced to less than 15 per cent of the vote. Spurred on by this dramatic result, the majority parties set about drafting a capacious republican constitution that would incorporate both liberal freedoms and the basic demands of social democracy. With the ranks solidified they braced themselves to face the peace.
Table 6. War, Inflation and Labour Militancy, 1914–21: The Number of Strikes
II
Back in 1871, after crushing the Paris Commune a republic had imposed itself with force against the demand for socialist revolution. In 1919 the same violent verdict was delivered in Germany. What implications did this have for European socialism and its role in post-war reconstruction? Two weeks after the German elections, on 3 February, both the SPD and the USPD dispatched delegates to the first post-war conference of the Second Socialist International, in Berne.24 As the successor to the pre-war International, it was attended by 26 national parties. It was the first time since 1914 that German and Austrian delegates confronted their former comrades from the French Socialist Party and the British Labour movement. Through a display of refound unity, the organizers hoped to rally support for a politics of democratic transformation that refused the violence of the Bolsheviks. They also hoped to add their weight to President Wilson’s efforts to craft a ‘democratic peace’. As he embarked on several weeks of tours through the capitals of the Entente in December 1918, Wilson had made clear that he welcomed the support of the European left. On his arrival in France it was the Socialist Party that took the lead in welcoming the President. When on 27 December he was hosted at Buckingham Palace he appeared in pointedly plain attire and struck a resolutely Cromwellian pose. His message was blunt: ‘You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English
is our common language . . . no, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests.’25 Wilson made no secret of the fact that, as far as he was concerned, the community of values was embodied far more in the opposition Labour Party than Lloyd George’s coalition.
It was no coincidence therefore that the British Labour movement was amongst the leading forces behind the Wilsonian agenda of the Berne conference.26 But the conference itself, far from mobilizing an imposing wave of opinion, was a shambles. What became painfully apparent were the multiple fault lines running through European socialism, which threatened to reduce it either to civil war, as in Germany, or to a state of near paralysis. The Italian Socialists were the only party to have come through the war united around a radical agenda. But that meant they refused to attend the Berne conference. They would have no truck with an assembly of ‘national chauvinists’, most of whom had betrayed the cause of internationalism by supporting their national war efforts. Instead, the Italian Socialists became one of the first western European parties to take up Lenin’s invitation to join the new Third International, the Communist International or Comintern, which held its first sparsely attended meeting in Moscow on 19 March 1919. The French Socialist Party also managed to preserve its organizational unity, but, as its performance at the Berne conference was to reveal, only at the expense of complete ideological and practical incoherence.
At the opening session, the right wing of the French socialist delegation, the so-called ‘patriotic’ socialists, who had served in French governments until the crisis of 1917, monopolized the meeting by demanding to recap the fateful events in July 1914. Where had their German comrades been when it counted? Given the rancour left by the war, this was predictable. But it was fundamentally at odds with the Wilsonian internationalism officially professed by the organizers with their rhetoric of a ‘peace of equals’, or the stance of Ramsay MacDonald of the British Independent Labour Party, who blamed the Franco-Russian alliance as much as the Germans for the outbreak of war. The two days of bludgeoning debate between the right wing of the French socialists and the majority SPD came close to derailing the entire conference. The SPD were happy to condemn the folly of the Kaiser, but only as one imperialist among others. What did the German socialists have to apologize for? Should they have surrendered in August 1914 to Franco-Russian imperialism, or to the threat of starvation by the British? They came to Berne as a party that had overthrown the Kaiser and made a revolution. Why should they humble themselves before French comrades who had done nothing to break with their own country’s imperialist past? If the French wanted to settle the Alsace-Lorraine question on democratic grounds, let there be a plebiscite. But the patriotic wing of the French socialist delegation would not hear of it. As Wilson himself had acknowledged, Alsace-Lorraine was not a question of self-determination, but simply of restorative justice.27