With God, history, and humanity on his side, what chance did his enemies or detractors have? Wilson figured, none.
There was only one possible stumbling block, one he shared with a friend just before his inauguration.
“It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs,” he said with a wry smile, thinking perhaps that of all the spheres of presidential action, that was one about which he knew the least: he had no interest in foreign countries and no travel or other experience overseas.
In fact, that irony of fate would ruthlessly seek him out and make a shambles of his presidency.
THE YEAR OF Wilson’s election also saw the first issue of Pravda, the newspaper that would become the principal mouthpiece of Lenin and of the regime he would eventually create.
The launching of Pravda came after Lenin had experienced a decade of bruising ideological battles with his fellow Russian revolutionaries, battles in which he wound up being the loser more often than the winner. The result was a grim, battle-scarred Lenin, a harder and more ruthless Lenin than the one who had penned What Is to Be Done? The previous Lenin had been primarily an intellectual and polemicist, albeit a peculiarly intense one. Ten years later, he had been transformed into the ringleader for a disciplined band of revolutionaries, terrorists, and underworld criminals akin to Dostoevsky’s The Devils, all waiting for their opportunity to seize power by any means necessary.
Lenin’s first Station of the Cross, as it were, had come in July 1903, with the Social Democratic Labour Party Congress, the gathering of exiled Russian activists from across Europe, who met in Brussels and then in London. Lenin was living in London at the time. Although he and Nadya hated English food, and he could barely speak or read a word of English, Lenin had made their flat in Holford Square a safe haven where he could read and write, and meet with like-minded colleagues, much as Marx had done during his years in London when he was writing Das Kapital. Neither man ever noted the strange irony: although both despised bourgeois capitalism and considered its characteristic constitutional democracy a total sham, it was only in despised capitalist countries such as Britain, Germany, and the United States that they were allowed to live in freedom and to speak, write, and even publish what they wished—London was the home of the editorial offices for Iskra, the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party—even when they preached the destruction of the very society that protected them.
Lenin did not feel much comradeship with socialists of the British variety. Although he struggled to read the writings of their current leading intellectual lights, the economists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, he considered them revolutionary wimps and far too accustomed to the comforts of bourgeois life to be of much use in fomenting the workers’ revolution. One incident particularly disgusted him. On a visit to a church near Holford Square, he and Nadya found a congregation of socialists all praying to God. In Lenin’s mind, true socialism excluded any possibility of belief in a divine being. As he wrote later, “Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness . . . Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions . . . are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God.”32 In Lenin’s view, wherever the idea of God took root, there was the danger of counterrevolutionary reaction and, even more important, of competition with socialism for human beings seeking redemption and ultimate freedom. In short, there can be no “heaven on earth” when there’s still the possibility of a heaven outside it. For Lenin, therefore, one of the most important tasks of his revolutionary regime would be to wipe out any trace of organized religion or religious belief, before it distracted people with a different kind of salvation, the salvation of God.
At the gathering of the Congress of the Socialist International in 1903, however, Lenin’s task was far simpler. First, it was to lead the Russian delegates to reject the incrementalistic views of Eduard Bernstein and his followers, and second, to get them to embrace his declared view that the Social Democratic Labour Party needed to restrict membership to full-time dedicated revolutionaries, and revolutionaries only. The first resolution passed easily; the second proved more difficult. Opposing him was Julius Martov, the former Plekhanov disciple who pushed for a broader-based party with more popular participation. Lenin’s proposal lost 28 to 22; even the fiery young revolutionary Leon Trotsky—who had met Lenin in London the previous year and deeply admired the author of What Is to Be Done?—voted against his revolutionary hero.
Lenin did score one victory, however. By 22 votes to 20, with 2 abstentions, he and his followers secured control over the party’s main political media organ, Iskra. From that point on, Lenin and his followers would dub themselves the party’s Bolsheviks, or “Majority”; Martov and those who had voted against giving Lenin control of Iskra would be known as the Mensheviks, or “Minority.” It was a clever ploy, making Lenin’s faction look like the dominant faction within the party when it had had fewer votes all along.33
In fact, Lenin’s views were not finding much support among Marxists in other countries, either. Poland’s Rosa Luxemburg penned a furious, and prescient, attack on Lenin’s approach to revolution early the following year, in 1904, warning that his belief in entrusting leadership to a dedicated but small revolutionary elite, later known as “democratic centralism,” would inevitably lead to tyranny, or worse. “Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straitjacket,” she wrote.34 The implication of her essay—entitled “Leninism or Marxism?”—was that true socialists had to choose either one or the other ideology. The two were ultimately incompatible. Lenin, of course, disagreed. He saw that entrusting all power over the party to a small elite was the only way to bring revolution to a backward country such as Russia. In any case, he was about to get the chance to test his theory. Less than a year after Luxemburg’s article appeared, the streets of St. Petersburg exploded in the 1905 Revolution.
After the massacre of Bloody Sunday on January 22, 1905, strikes spread across Russia’s cities with the spontaneous appearance of workers’ committees, or soviets (the first time that word entered the political vocabulary). By early November, the czar reluctantly granted a constitution and the establishment of a parliamentary Duma. The crescendo of general strikes finally forced the government into military action: it suppressed all demonstrations and arrested former Narodnik agitators, now dubbed Socialist Revolutionaries, and their Marxist Social Democrat counterparts around the country. The year 1905 proved to be an exercise in frustration and disappointment: it was a year when Lenin saw his opportunity to lead the revolutionary struggle in his home country come and go, and when even his return to Russia to mobilize his followers wasn’t sufficient to prevent failure.
Oddly enough, it was the Mensheviks who wound up with their reputation enhanced by the events of 1905. Martov and his followers had rallied around the strikers and demonstrators in the early days of the revolution, while Lenin and the Bolsheviks had hung back, thinking that the revolution was still too much in the bourgeois stage and that the opportunity to mobilize Russia’s working class had not yet come. Too late, Lenin realized his mistake; he did not manage to get back to Russia until November, when the popular uprisings were winding down and the forces of czarist reaction were beginning to gather momentum. The Bolsheviks became involved in full-scale violence in the streets of Moscow, with Lenin urging his followers to kill policemen and set off bombs. (Lenin himself avoided any street fighting, staying safely in his apartment.)
By the year’s end, it was all over. Lenin remained in Russia, as part of a general amnesty that had been passed by the government, but there was nothing for him to do; Russia seemed set on a very different course. In May 1906, elections were held for the first Duma. Although its franchise was suffocatingly narrow, and although Czar Nicholas and his advisers had made sure that its powers would be almost nil and largely symbolic,
it was still a significant step toward a new, more open, and even democratic Russia. The Mensheviks, too, cashed in on their new reputation in the next Congress, in Stockholm in April, forcing through a resolution reunifying the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. Lenin and his would-be revolutionary elite, now permanently reduced to a powerless minority, had no choice but to submit.35
By now, Lenin had also lost Iskra. His old mentor Plekhanov had reversed his previous support, and editorship of the periodical passed from Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ hands to those of their Menshevik opponents. The Mensheviks also reversed the previous position of the party, advocated by Lenin, of boycotting the Duma elections. Lenin belatedly came around to the same view, but now his fellow Bolsheviks, led by A. A. Bogdanov, turned against him. At the next party Congress, in August 1907, they voted against Lenin, upholding the boycott by a vote of 14 to 1. They even threw him out as their leader at the Congress and put Bogdanov in his place. The irony was that Lenin now had to join forces with the despised Mensheviks to defeat his own Bolsheviks in the final vote to lift the boycott.
By then, though, Lenin had been thoroughly humiliated, and the opportunity for the Social Democratic Labour Party to gain a strong foothold in the present and future Dumas had passed. From now until 1917, socialist-minded leadership in Russia passed to the Socialist Revolutionaries, led by their chief theoretician, Viktor Chernov; and the fiery young lawyer Alexander Kerensky. Those Social Democrats who would take key seats in the Duma were Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks would be nowhere, out of influence and out of favor—Lenin most of all.
After a year and a half of living in fruitless hiding in his home country, at the end of 1907 Lenin headed back into exile, this time in Finland. He now faced a serious rival for Bolshevik leadership in Alexander Bogdanov, and much of the discussion among the frustrated revolutionaries who gathered at Vladimir and Nadya’s dacha outside Helsinki centered on Bogdanov’s ideas and initiatives, not Lenin’s. As 1908 waned, Lenin learned that the czar’s police were again on his trail. He and Nadya fled to safety in Sweden; from there, he wound up returning to Switzerland, to Geneva, where a hostile Plekhanov and his circle still reigned supreme. For Lenin, it seemed the end of the revolutionary road. “I’ve got the feeling that I’ve come here to lie in my grave,” he confessed to Nadya. To a friend, he added, “I know Russia so little. Simbirsk, Kazan, St. Petersburg and that’s about it.”36
Worse was to come. As part of the general easing of government policy from extreme reaction, the czar had appointed a new liberal-minded prime minister, P. A. Stolypin. Stolypin began pushing for serious reforms of Russia’s economy, especially in rural areas, with plans for land reform that would let the peasants own more of the land they worked and tilled, and for the formation of rudimentary institutions of local self-government. Nothing threatened to derail the hopes for violent revolution in Russia more than concrete reforms of its civic, economic, and social institutions along Western lines, and Lenin saw this at once. “If Stolypin’s policy is continued,” he wrote in 1908, “then the agrarian structure of Russia will become completely bourgeois.”37 Such a change would spell the end of Russian feudalism and its autocratic ruling class—and therefore doom any attempt to replace Russia’s czarist autocracy with a Marxist autocracy.
Until Stolypin’s tragic death in September 1911, his agrarian reforms had a profound effect. By 1917, Russian peasants owned nearly 90 percent of the arable land in European Russia.38 If any sector of Russian society was bound to oppose efforts to socialize and collectivize all means of production, it was going to be Russia’s peasants. It was in these years, 1908–12, that one particular follower of Lenin would rise to prominence, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known by his revolutionary name Joseph Stalin. While Trotsky was Lenin’s chief spokesman and intellectual conscience, the former seminary student from Georgia would become his chief muscle—and bank robber.
In these lean years, the Bolsheviks turned to crime to raise the funds they needed to stay alive as a movement, and the man who emerged as the John Dillinger of the Leninist faction was Stalin. “Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our party,” Lenin wrote, “precisely because he is a scoundrel.” Stalin and a henchman of his, named Koma, led a series of raids on local banks. With the booty, Lenin was able to build his own secret stash of funds separate from that controlled by the Social Democratic Labour Party. Even when the party found out and ordered Lenin to stop, he ignored them. In those years, Lenin’s Bolsheviks became a truly criminal organization, not only in the eyes of the czarist police, the Okhrana, but for real: a Marxist mafia with Lenin as its don and godfather, and with the kind of ruthless figures, such as Stalin, who would come in handy in establishing Bolshevik rule by force.
They would need all the help they could get. By 1909, there were only five or six Bolshevik committees operating anywhere in Russia.39 By 1912—the same year Woodrow Wilson was moving steadily toward being elected president of the United States—Lenin was on the verge of being expelled from the Marxist party he had helped to found. The Bolsheviks were, in the words of Robert Conquest, “a small, defeated sect” in a Social Democratic Labour Party whose entire membership in Russia (according to Leon Trotsky’s estimate) numbered perhaps ten thousand. As one of Lenin’s closest associates in those years, Vyacheslav M. Molotov (later Soviet foreign minister), confessed many years later, “The First World War found our [Bolshevik] Party in a very weak state, its organization not connected but scattered, and with a very small membership.”40
The only thing that could save the revolution, Lenin wrote in 1913, would be a war between Austria and Russia. “But it’s scarcely likely that Franz Josef and Nikolasha [Lenin’s nickname for the czar he despised] would grant us this pleasure.”41
Then that was exactly what happened.
All the same, the war that began in 1914 came as a dismaying shock to Lenin, and not just because he was nearly arrested as an enemy alien and then had to flee from Austrian Poland. Nor was it because the Great Powers of Europe were now at one another’s throats. That such a conflict was inevitable would be the thesis he would develop into Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism as armies and navies clashed by night and day.
What shocked Lenin was how quickly socialist parties of every nation—supposedly his brothers in arms in fomenting a workers’ revolution—embraced their countries’ cause as their cause and that of the workers they claimed to speak for. In Germany, Britain, Austria, and France, leftist deputies joined forces with their conservative and right-wing deputies to mobilize for war. When Lenin learned that Germany’s Social Democrats had approved war credits, he refused to believe it, and assumed it was a government lie—until he discovered his mistake.42
For Lenin the Marxist, it was a disillusioning blow. For Lenin the revolutionary and terrorist, however, it confirmed his belief that his was the only possible path to overthrowing the capitalist order, not just in Russia but around the world. As armies, including Russia’s, mobilized in July and August 1914, Lenin still believed that the revolutionary project he had devoted his life to fulfilling was possible.
But how was he going to play the leading role that he believed he was destined to play in bringing about the revolution from his exile fastness in Switzerland? This was the problem that would consume his every waking hour for nearly all of the next three years.
THE COMING OF war in 1914 had dismayed Woodrow Wilson, too, but for very different reasons. The sight of the supposedly civilized world consuming itself in a conflict that threatened “an injury [to] civilization itself which can never be atoned for or repaired,” as he would put it in his December 18, 1916, peace note, was a shocking betrayal of the principles in which he had invested himself. It also came as a shock to see the rash prediction he had made to a friend shortly before his inauguration, about fate forcing him to deal with a crisis in foreign affairs, suddenly come true.
The year and a half since his inauguration had been focused entirely on domestic p
olicy and reforms such as the Revenue Act of 1913, the Federal Reserve Act, and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission. The latter came into being in September 1914, even as French and British armies clashed with the Germans along the Marne. From that point on, the war and, above all, keeping America out of war became the top priority of Wilson’s presidency.
Yet Wilson also faced the same personal, almost existential, problem as Lenin. Like the Russian revolutionary, the American president was convinced that this global conflict had thrust upon him a world-historical role, had given him a personal destiny to fulfill. His reading of Hegel had shown him the inevitable direction of history and his own place in it, just as Marx had shown that direction to Lenin.*
But how were the two men to influence events directly, shape them in the right direction, when both of them were, though for very different reasons, removed from the center of the action? That was the frustrating puzzle that would consume each man for more than two and a half years as Europe consumed itself in war.
Then, in 1917, very unexpectedly, the German General Staff gave both of them their chance.
4
NEUTRALITY AT BAY
The submarines will pursue me to the grave.
—THEOBALD VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG
BERLIN, JANUARY 1917
THE TYPICAL GERMAN submarine at the start of 1917 was a crude instrument for transforming world history. Just over two hundred feet long and barely twelve feet wide, it slept between twenty-five and thirty-five crewmen in a space not much larger than a double-decker city bus. Aft were two diesel-electric motors, which charged batteries that allowed the subs to run silently on the surface at fourteen or fifteen knots, or at less than ten knots when submerged. The charging produced clouds of explosive hydrogen gas, but that was just one of the hazards a U-boat captain had to worry about. If any seawater touched the primitive batteries the boat used to run underwater, it produced deadly chlorine gas that could overwhelm the entire crew in that cramped space.
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