Forty-eight years old in 1916, conscientious but weak, Nicholas was trapped by an autocratic mind-set and by traditions running back more than three centuries, to the founder of the Romanov dynasty, Czar Mikhail Romanov. In 1915, Nicholas had dismissed the commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas (who also happened to be his uncle), and assumed command of Russia’s armies himself. Russia’s military disasters continued nonstop, but his new role gave the czar a personal stake, and it became almost a matter of honor for him somehow to see the war to victory.
In his sixteen years as “czar of all the Russias,” he had already overseen two major defeats. The first was a humiliating drubbing at the hands of the Japanese in 1904–5; the second was the revolution of 1905, which had foisted on the supposedly all-powerful czar a representative parliament, or Duma. The Duma’s powers were nugatory; the czar and his inner circle, including his beautiful German wife, Czarina Alexandra, continued to run the country as they saw fit. Yet the Duma remained a forum for political debate and discussion, including consideration of the conduct of the war. Nicholas resented the continuing torrent of criticism, especially from those deputies on the liberal and socialist left, who included a young lawyer and son of an elementary school teacher named Alexander Kerensky. But the czar could not shut down the Duma without setting off a political firestorm that would quickly spill out into the streets, just as it did in 1905. Instead, he kept it and its members at a frosty arm’s length, thus missing the opportunity to bring Russia’s only representative institution (albeit one elected by the tiny minority of Russians who passed the property qualification for voting) into a genuine partnership to sustain the war effort.
Nor were Nicholas, Alexandra, or any of their advisers interested in enlisting the help of Russia’s business and industrial leaders. They, too, were kept at arm’s length; many government officials even considered the Duma’s opposition leaders and Russia’s business class as much a threat as the Germans. From the perspective of the Winter Palace, the government faced two enemies, the Germans and the “enemy on the home front,” namely the Duma. And from his railway carriage in his private train at Mogilev, the army headquarters set up in Belarus more than 480 miles from the capital, Nicholas saw himself waging two fights at once: one against the Germans, the other against the liberal opposition based in the capital.8
During his absence at army headquarters, Nicholas had left his wife, Czarina Alexandra, in charge of the government. This was his second disastrous decision. Alexandra was beautiful, cold, headstrong, deeply superstitious, and profoundly out of touch with reality. Everyone, including Nicholas’s ministers, knew she was incompetent and believed she encouraged Nicholas’s worst reactionary impulses. The fact that she was also a German princess did not help her credibility: indeed, there were whispers (on the streets of Petrograd, more than whispers) that Russia’s series of disasters on the battlefield was no accident, that Alexandra was secretly working hand in glove with the German government.
It was true that she was an aid and comfort to the enemy, but not out of any sympathy with her former homeland. On the contrary, she firmly believed her husband was the spiritual father of Russia, and she had a mystical faith that the Russian people would always follow him (and her) out of a devotion born of tradition and trust, no matter how bad things got. Alexandra’s problem, then, was poor judgment joined with an almost paranoid hatred of anyone who criticized her, her husband, or their intimate friend and confidant, the notorious “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin. Alexandra had turned to him more than a decade earlier, in 1905, when the doctors proved incapable of dealing with her son’s hemophilia. Rasputin, however, through a combination of hypnosis and positive reinforcement, supposedly could deal with it. He became a hated figure at court, as jealous courtiers spread rumors about his increasingly reckless behavior, including wild sexual escapades, but Alexandra and Nicholas had dismissed the stories as malicious gossip.9
Now, with her husband at the front, the czarina turned to the monk for political and personal advice. Most of that advice was worthless, even disastrous. Rasputin inserted himself into decisions regarding food supplies and transport; he handled government loans; at one point, he was even issuing orders regarding military strategy and writing letters to the kings of Serbia and Greece.10
Above all, Rasputin convinced the czar and czarina that, in order for the war to continue, or even for the Russian Empire to survive, no compromise with the forces for liberalization and reform was necessary. Blinded by pride, prejudice, and a misplaced faith in the mystique of the Romanov dynasty, the czar and czarina were steadily driving their regime toward extinction. One Duma member, the conservative Vasili Maklakov, even compared Russia to a runaway automobile on a narrow, steep mountain road, where one single mistake by the driver (i.e., the czar) could send the car into the abyss, killing everyone on board.11
Perhaps so, but in the last days of 1916, only one thought occupied the mind of that driver: Russia must somehow emerge victorious from this two-and-a-half-year war. It was preordained, then, that his response to Bethmann-Hollweg’s note would be negative. “What are the circumstances in which the German proposal was made?” Russian foreign minister Nikolai Pokrovsky told the representatives in the Duma on December 15. “The enemy armies . . . occupy Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro, and part of France, Russia, and Rumania. Who then, with the exception of Germany, could derive any advantage under such conditions by the opening of peace negotiations?”12
The Duma agreed and issued its own resolution opposing the German peace proposal. “It considers that the German proposals are nothing more than a fresh proof of the weakness of the enemy,” it read in part, “a hypocritical act from which the enemy expects no real success, but by which he seeks to throw upon others the responsibility for the war and for what has happened during it.” It concluded: “The Duma considers that the premature peace would not only be a brief period of calm, but would involve the danger of another bloody war and renewed deplorable sacrifices on the part of the [Russian] people.”13
Later, some in the Duma would change their tune regarding the possibility of a “premature peace,” but now, for once, the Duma and the czar were in perfect agreement. Not that the resolution had any influence on Nicholas; nor did it tone down the fierce criticism the government faced from more radical Duma members such as Alexander Kerensky and Nikolai Chkheidze, who now added “Rasputinism” to the list of abuses they wanted eliminated. But on the issue of the war at least, the members of the Duma’s leading parties, the so-called Progressive Bloc, were one with the czar.
Yet Nicholas’s determination to fight on was undergirded by a nagging fear of what might happen if Russia accepted Germany’s peace terms, and if he emerged with anything less than victory. Among the papers on his desk was an explosive memorandum by a former minister of the interior, Pyotr Durnovo. Dated February 1914, five months before Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s assassination, it presciently warned of what might happen if Russia found itself dragged into a general war and lost. In that case, Durnovo wrote, “a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable for Russia.” All sectors of Russian society would blame the government for the defeat. The army’s loyalty would slacken, and it would become “too demoralized to act as a bulwark of law and order.” The masses would rise up and take to the streets; the government’s liberal opposition would be “unable to turn back the waves of uncontrollable popular protest [they had themselves] stirred up.” Russia “will be thrown into total anarchy, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.”14
Here, Durnovo was wrong. There was one man who could foresee the consequences—indeed, who was counting on them. That week in December, he was sitting in his comfortless apartment in Zurich, his brow furrowed as he contemplated from the remoteness of exile the possibilities of the collapse of his country. Lenin saw Nicholas and Alexandra’s headlong rush toward disaster not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity: a chance to trigger a mass revolt by the world’s working
classes against their aristocratic and bourgeois masters; a chance to change Russia, and humanity, forever. “This then is my destiny,” he had written, “of not only fighting but also of winning victory in the forthcoming proletarian revolution,” starting with Russia itself.15
The revolutionary breadth of Lenin’s vision of the future was equaled by that of only one other man in the last days of 1916. He happened to sit in the White House in Washington, DC, where he would match Bethmann-Hollweg’s peace note with one of his own.
WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 1916–JANUARY 1917
“THE WORLD ITSELF seems gone mad,” Woodrow Wilson wrote to his friend Mary Hulbert, on September 6, 1914, the day German and French armies became locked in the Battle of the Marne, and three days after Russian troops sacked and looted the city of Lemberg (today Lviv), in their drive into Austrian Galicia (today part of Poland).16
Not yet two years into office since his election in 1912, Wilson had watched with horrified fascination as the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand led Austria and Serbia into war; which brought Austria into war with Serbia’s ally Russia; which then led Russia into war with Austria’s ally Germany; which led Germany to declare war on Russia’s ally France; which led to the German invasion and Britain’s entry into the war as France’s ally. By the second week in August, all the Great Powers of Europe were locked in war—a war from which Wilson was determined to keep America free.
There were those Americans who felt otherwise. One was former president Theodore Roosevelt, who saw history’s greatest conflict not as a great tragedy but as a great opportunity for the United States to assert its status as a major world power. Roosevelt also had no doubt as to which side the United States should join. “If I had been president,” he wrote to the British ambassador in Washington in October 1914, “I should have acted [against Germany] on the thirtieth or thirty-first of July.”17 But Roosevelt was not president. He was somewhat in disgrace with his own Republican Party; his decision in the 1912 election to form a third, breakaway party, the Bull Moose Party, was what had enabled Wilson to defeat GOP president William Howard Taft and gain the White House.
Roosevelt also worried about what would happen if the Allies lost. “Do you not believe,” he wrote, “that if Germany won this war, smashed the English fleet and destroyed the British Empire, within a year or two she would insist upon taking the dominant position in South and Central America . . . ?” It infuriated him that Woodrow Wilson seemed unable to see things the same way. “I think this administration is the very worst and most disgraceful we have ever known,” he wrote wrathfully to his friend Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Roosevelt was particularly upset at Wilson’s tepid response to the sinking of the Lusitania.18
The former president’s view of what was holding America back was clear: “Thanks to the width of the ocean, our people believe that they have nothing to fear from the present contest, and that they have no responsibility concerning it.” In the hope of changing minds, he even published a book, America and the World War. But in the same letter, TR confessed his impotence to change that view: “If I should advocate all that I myself believe, I would do no good among our people, because they would not follow me.” But Roosevelt also knew the American people had a current president who shared their myopic perspective—namely, Woodrow Wilson.19
Yet, even if Roosevelt’s fears were wrong, there were compelling reasons, economic reasons, for seeing the United States as the natural ally of the Entente powers. Wilson’s own treasury secretary, William McAdoo, saw that clearly as early as 1915, when Britain’s and France’s growing dependence on the United States for essential war materials and foodstuffs was proving a financial bonanza.
“Great Britain is, and always has been, our best customer,” McAdoo wrote to Wilson, who happened also to be his father-in-law. “Since the war began, her purchases and those of her allies, France, Russia, and Italy, have enormously increased . . . The high prices for food products have brought great prosperity to our farmers, while the purchases of war munitions have stimulated industry . . . Great prosperity is coming.”20 Think how much greater prosperity would come, it was easy to conclude, if the United States fed and equipped its armies and navies in the conflict as well.
None of these concerns, however, moved President Wilson. He considered himself, and America, above such petty interests. He was not a pacifist, although antiwar feelings ran deep in his own party and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, was an avowed pacifist. (Even more remarkably, his secretary of war when the German peace note arrived, Newton Baker, was a pacifist, too.) Wilson had just finished a brutal little war with Mexico, and had no fear of flexing America’s muscle where he believed right reinforced might.
For the war in Europe, however, he had his own plan. From the opening shots, Wilson had looked forward to the day when he would appear on the scene as mediator, an impartial party to resolve the disputes between the combatants. That would be impossible if the United States found itself on one side or the other in the conflict. Therefore, keeping America neutral was a matter of not only America’s destiny but Wilson’s as well.
It was about America’s destiny, however, that he publicly spoke whenever the topic of war came up. His feelings on the subject were made clear in a speech at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, on the Fourth of July, only weeks before the war broke out, when he spoke of the holiday as a moment of renewal not only for America but for the world, and of its universal meaning.
“My dream,” he said, “is that, as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America, it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of freedom . . . and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall see that her flag is the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.”21
Going to war would destroy that global providential mission; or so Wilson believed. In short, his desire to stay out of the conflict did not spring from a desire to isolate America from the world; just the opposite. He didn’t want the United States to be only one of the world’s Great Powers, as Roosevelt and his friends did; he wanted it to be the greatest power of all. To enter the war, to dirty its hands like the European powers, would forever sully America’s universal legacy and future.
Instead, Wilson focused his energies and hopes on his role as possible mediator. “God’s Providence had given America this opportunity such as has seldom been vouchsafed any nation, the opportunity to counsel and obtain peace in the world.”22 In order to do so, it was necessary, he repeatedly told his countrymen, that they “exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control,” in order to remain impartial and “truly serviceable for the peace of the world.” America must be “neutral in fact as well as in name . . . impartial in thought as well as action.”
In 1915, the year that fighting on the Western Front was bogging down in stalemate and Russia was suffering its first major setbacks, Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. “Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, ‘You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours . . . Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance?’ ”23
Wilson began offering that counsel in 1915, sending his friend and closest adviser, Col. Edward House, to Europe with offers of mediation that no one accepted, and then again in 1916. In May of the latter year, he told an audience at the Willard Hotel in Washington that he foresaw America’s role in the world as leading a “feasible assembly of nations” that would underwrite any future peace, mentioning an idea that would blossom into his vision of a League of Nations. Regardless of what the future held, though, America’s role as leader still required staying out of any present war.24
But in 1916, two things were steadi
ly upsetting his grand plan. The first was the growing extent of U.S. economic support for the Allied war effort. Wilson and his treasury secretary, McAdoo, were uncomfortably aware of the degree to which the United States, led by Wall Street, was becoming entangled financially in the fate of the Entente. Defeat of France, Britain, and Russia could mean their default on their debts; default by the Entente would almost certainly mean bankruptcy for America’s leading investment firms, not to mention the corporations that depended on the growing transatlantic business between the United States, the Allies, and their chief entrepôt, the port of London.
To Wilson, these considerations mattered less than a far more encompassing one, America’s place in the crosshairs in the war at sea. As early as 1914, Wilson had the premonition that war in Europe would have a profoundly adverse effect on America’s maritime commerce. The negative impact began with the British blockade, which hurt many American companies as well as Germany.
It grew worse with the German submarine threat, and the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 marked a parting of the ways between Wilson and Berlin, and America and Germany. From his mission in Europe, House wrote to Wilson four days afterward, “America . . . must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. Think we can no longer remain neutral.”25 Despite his outrage, Wilson, however, refused to be moved. He believed it important not to react emotionally to the atrocity, as millions of Americans were doing, and restricted his response to several arch paragraphs from his typewriter to the German ambassador. He was pleased his words had the desired effect, and for a time the German submarine threat faded.
By the autumn of 1916, however, as his reelection campaign was reaching its climax, Wilson could sense the Germans were leaning toward resuming unrestricted warfare. He feared that news of fresh ship sinkings and American deaths would rouse the public to an unmanageable emotional state, one that would make staying out of the war impossible. Something had to be done, fast, to head off that possibility, before it ruined America’s destiny.
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