A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  Clemenceau was above all a hater, and in all the world what he most hated was Germany. He was the last survivor of the National Assembly that in 1871 had protested against the harsh peace terms Germany had imposed upon a vanquished France. He had never given up. It had always been his view that France should concentrate on building up her strength against Germany, and therefore that diverting strength into colonial adventures was a mistake. Thus the senators and deputies who aimed at annexing Syria and Palestine to France saw in him their chief enemy.

  Between 1881 and 1885, over Clemenceau’s protests, France had led the way in new colonial expansion. On a pretext, the French first invaded and conquered Tunisia in North Africa, and then the states that became Indochina in Asia. Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German leader, supported and indeed encouraged such French ventures. On 27 November 1884, Clemenceau told the French Chamber of Deputies that “Bismarck is a dangerous enemy, but even more dangerous perhaps as a friend; he showed us Tunis, placing us in conflict with England.”18

  In Parliament and in his journal, La Justice, Clemenceau denounced the acquisition of colonies as a financial and military burden, a distraction from the problem of the German frontier, and a clever German-inspired move that Berlin hoped would drive France into quarrels with Britain. In opposing the policy, he exposed the financial corruption that accompanied French colonial politics. La Justice’s suggestion of sinister manipulations in the Tunisia affair were not far off the mark: there were speculations in real estate, railway concessions, and submarine cable telegraph concessions, whatever their relation might have been to the formulation of government policy. The financial corruption surrounding the adventure in Indochina was even more lurid. Clemenceau’s accusations and exposures destroyed reputations and brought down governments. He became known as “the wrecker” even before he became known as “the tiger.”

  Of French parliamentary life at the time, Winston Churchill later wrote, “The life of the French Chamber, hectic, fierce, poisonous, flowed through a succession of scandals and swindles, of exposures, of perjuries, and murders, of plottings and intriguings, of personal ambitions and revenges, of crooking and double-crossing, which find their modern parallel only in the underworld of Chicago.”19 Clemenceau strode through it all in a murderous rage. In an age when it was still the custom to settle quarrels on the field of honor, he was a feared duellist. A speaker in the Chamber taunted the other members by saying of Clemenceau that “he has three things you fear: his sword, his pistol, and his tongue.”20

  For fear of him the French government in 1882 hesitated to join in the occupation of Egypt, with the result that Britain took Egypt entirely for herself. His opposition to colonial expansion could easily be portrayed—and was portrayed—as benefiting the British Empire. That was the line his opponents took when he became vulnerable to political attack. They produced a forgery to prove that he had sold out to Britain. Hecklers were hired to follow him around shouting “Aoh yes,” and free copies of a newspaper were circulated containing a cartoon showing him juggling with sacks of pounds sterling.21 In 1892 one leading British politician wrote to another that “A Frenchman was here yesterday who told me an extraordinary cock and bull which is apparently believed in Paris where they will believe anything…It is to the effect that Clemenceau’s paper La Justice which is said to be losing money is financed from England on behalf of Germany and England.”22 In 1893 he was defeated for re-election and was driven out of parliamentary life for a decade.

  This was the man whom a despairing France turned to in the darkest moment of 1917, and who soon imposed his will upon the government of his nation. Like Lloyd George, he became a sort of war dictator, incarnating a driving determination to fight on until Germany was totally crushed. Like Lloyd George, too, he happened to bring to office a special view about policy in the Middle East.

  As premier, he continued to have no territorial goals for France outside of Europe. Of the traditional French claim to Syria, reflected in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Clemenceau said that if Lloyd George could get France the right to install a protectorate regime there he would not refuse it, “as it would please some reactionaries,” but that he himself attached no importance to it.23

  The fortunes of war and politics had brought into power in their respective countries the first British Prime Minister who wanted to acquire territory in the Middle East and the only French politician who did not want to do so.

  30

  THE OVERTHROW OF THE CZAR

  I

  It was an improbable chain of circumstances that led France to rally behind a leader who was opposed to French imperialism in the Middle East, and an even odder chain of circumstances that led Russia in the same month to fall under the sway of a leader who also claimed to oppose Russian imperialism in the region.

  If one thing seemed clear by the beginning of 1917, it was that Russia held the edge in the Middle Eastern war against Turkey. Enver’s catastrophic defeat in early 1915 on the Caucasus front was followed by a successful Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia in 1916. The Russians had strengthened their strategic position by winning mastery of the Black Sea and by constructing railroad lines from the Caucasus toward their new front line in eastern Turkey. The Grand Duke Nicholas, the Russian commander, planned to mount a new offensive as soon as the railroad lines were completed. According to a German staff officer attached to the Ottoman armed forces, the grand duke’s offensive would “have led to a complete victory and perhaps driven Turkey out of the war in the summer of 1917.”1

  Yet years later, Lloyd George told the House of Commons that “the collapse of Russia was almost entirely due” to the Ottoman Empire.2 The basis of Lloyd George’s opinion was that by closing off most of Russia’s imports and exports, the Young Turk masters of Constantinople had deprived her of armaments and revenues. Those who disagree with Lloyd George’s assessment are able to argue that even if the Constantinople trade route had remained open, wartime Russia, with her peasant farmers away in the army, produced less than the normal amount of food and so had less to export, and her Allies had little ammunition to send her. But either observation points to the paradoxical truth that Russia’s military successes on the Caucasus front were in a sense irrelevant: the real war had become an economic and social survival contest.

  The industrialist Walter Rathenau in Germany was the pioneer in understanding this. In 1914 he organized a Division of Raw Materials for a skeptical Ministry of War in Berlin. He was given a secretary and one small room at the back of the ministry. By the end of 1918 it was the largest unit in the ministry; it had spread over several blocks of buildings and almost overshadowed the rest.3 In Rathenau’s prescient vision, warfare was undergoing its industrial revolution, becoming a matter of financing, moving, and supplying on a gigantic scale, and therefore required central allocation, planning, and control over the whole economy.

  Lloyd George in his pragmatic way learned to see things much the same way. He brought war socialism to the hitherto individualistic British economy. When he started the Ministry of Munitions in a requisitioned hotel, he had no staff at all. By the end of the war, the ministry had 65,000 employees and it exercised control over three million workers.4 In industry after industry, supplies were requisitioned and allocated. New workers, including large numbers of women, were brought into the labor force.

  In Russia, as in Germany and Britain, the violent and rapid social changes that accompanied this wartime industrial revolution tugged at the structure of society, straining pillars and supports never designed to carry a great weight. There were displacements in morals, politics, employment patterns, investment patterns, family structure, personal habits, and language. Some idea of the magnitude of the changes may be suggested by the length of the Carnegie Endowment’s postwar survey of the economic and social changes that had occurred in twenty-one countries: it ran to 150 volumes. The British series alone ran to 24 volumes.

  Of the principal European belligerents in the First World
War, Czarist Russia proved the least able to cope with these challenges for it was weak in the elements of infrastructure—transportation systems, communication systems, engineering industries, and capital markets—that make a modern economy resilient and adaptable. More than anything else, however, Russia’s failure was a failure of leadership.

  The consequences of the Turkish stranglehold on the Dardanelles underscored the lack of patriotism in some elements of the governing classes and the lack of competence in others. There was no excuse for the terrible shortages that developed in 1916 and 1917. Russia was a country naturally rich in agriculture: the peasantry made up 80 percent of the population, and cereals alone constituted half of her exports.5 With the export trade cut off at Constantinople, all the food formerly sent out of the country was available to be consumed at home; and though there was a fall in the production of agricultural estates caused by the loss of labor to the army, more than enough food was produced to feed the country.6 The shortages resulted instead from disruption of transportation and distribution, due in part to bottlenecks and breakdowns, but due also to deliberate maneuvers: speculation, profiteering, and hoarding.

  The Czar’s government recklessly ignored the need to crack down on the profiteers who accentuated the consequences of Turkey’s stranglehold on Russia’s trade route to the West. Widespread industrial strikes and the onset of financial chaos failed to move the government to act. By 1917 current interest and sinking fund payments due on its public debt were greater than the total revenues of the state in 1916, a national insolvency with which the government dealt by printing paper money, so that prices during wartime years rose by 1,000 percent.7

  An obvious way out of the crisis was to bring the war to an end. In 1915 the Ottoman Empire and Germany had offered Russia right of passage through the Dardanelles if she would abandon the Allies. Throughout 1916 Germany continued to sound out the possibility of concluding a separate peace with Russia. Many of the soundings took place in neutral Sweden. The stumbling block, some have said, was the Czar’s unwillingness to relinquish his grip on Poland.8 However, the Russian Minister to Sweden explained to the Germans that in his “personal opinion” Russia would have to continue in the war on the Allied side until she received the “key to the Black Sea”: which is to say, Constantinople and the Dardanelles.9 On the field of battle the Czar’s hungry and tattered soldiery were struggling for survival, but his response to the German overtures shows that Nicholas II continued to give priority to his imperial ambitions—above all, perhaps, to the conquest of the long-sought-for Dardanelles.

  II

  The history of the Russian revolutions of 1917, which is still being written and which remains timelessly relevant to the world’s condition, falls outside the scope of the present study. One aspect of that history, however, is of concern here and will be pursued in the following pages: the plot to promote the fortunes of the then-unknown Lenin that was hatched in the Ottoman Empire.

  In the disastrous course of Russia’s participation in the European war, those in control of Russia’s government, finance, and industry demonstrated that their interests diverged from those of the population at large. At the leftward fringe of the outlawed revolutionary underground, an obscure and isolated figure had said as much—though for theoretical reasons of his own—from the moment the war began. During the war he lived, studied, and wrote in penniless exile in Zurich, Switzerland. He was in his mid-forties and was not yet famous beyond police and revolutionary circles.

  Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who in 1901 had adopted the pseudonym of Lenin, was a former attorney who had devoted his life to Marxist theory and factional disputes. Stocky, muscular, with the hunched shoulders of a fighter, he was a brilliant but abrasive and intolerant man who fearlessly followed the juggernaut of his logic wherever it might lead. At the outset of the war he was shocked to see his socialist colleagues flock to the support of their respective countries. Lenin’s theory led him to stand alone in opposition to the war and therefore in opposition to his country. It set him apart from the others. Even his own political faction, the Bolsheviks, did not fully understand his views on the war.

  At the beginning of September 1914, he drafted his Seven Theses on the War, in which he wrote that: “From the point of view of the laboring class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its army, which oppresses Poland, the Ukraine, and a number of other peoples of Russia.” In his Theses he repeatedly denounced the empire exercised by the Russians over the other peoples ruled by the Czar.10 He was a Russian; but it was his duty, as he saw it, to aim at Russia’s defeat and at the dismemberment of the Russian Empire.

  In Constantinople at the time there lived a former colleague of Lenin’s, a fellow leader of the Socialist Second International, who had arrived at similar conclusions. Alexander Israel Helphand, who had adopted the underground pseudonym of “Parvus,” was a Russian Jew whose professed political objective was the destruction of the Czarist Empire.11 Where Lenin was merely indifferent to the prospect of a German victory, Helphand was positively enthusiastic about it. As it happened, Helphand possessed the money and political contacts that enabled him to pursue his pro-German inclinations.

  Of the same generation as Lenin (Helphand was born in 1869, Lenin in 1870), Parvus had been one of the other intellectually commanding figures on the left wing of the revolutionary socialist movement. Leaving Russia for Germany in the early 1890s, he had made his name as a theorist and journalist fighting alongside the Polish-born German Jewess Rosa Luxemburg for a pure revolutionary position. In the early years of the twentieth century, he had become the mentor of Leon Trotsky, and in 1905 he had originated what was to become Trotsky’s theory of the “permanent revolution.” Returning to Russia, Parvus was banished to Siberia, but soon escaped to western Europe.

  But there was another side to Helphand/Parvus, which showed itself only gradually: he was a shady promoter who, from the point of view of his fellow-idealists, did suspiciously well for himself. He had set up publishing ventures that were meant to serve the revolutionary cause but seemed to serve his personal interests even better. Lenin and his Bolshevik faction had good reason for believing that in 1904 Parvus had embezzled perhaps 130,000 marks* (roughly 30,000 dollars) in literary royalties that the writer Maxim Gorky had contributed to the Social Democratic Party. They confronted him with it and the explanations that he offered were unconvincing.

  Abandoning publishing and revolutionary activities, he had turned full-time to a variety of businesses, moving on via Vienna to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, where he became interested in the Young Turkey movement and began dealing in corn and other commodities. By 1912 he had established close contact with Young Turk government officials, with whose aid he obtained contracts to provide supplies for the Ottoman armies in the Balkan Wars.

  When the First World War broke out in Europe, Helphand published an article in the Turkish press advising the Ottoman government that its interests would be served by a German victory. He also helped foment pro-German feeling in the Balkan countries. When the Ottoman Empire entered the war, he helped the Porte obtain vital supplies of grain and railroad parts, though of course at a profit to himself; he also advised the government on various aspects of mobilizing its economy for the war effort. Destroying the government of Russia was his goal, and his home in Constantinople became a meeting place for plotters against the Czar.

  Through his contacts, Helphand managed to arrange an interview with the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He met von Wangenheim on 7 January 1915, and told him that “The interests of the German government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.”12 Von Wangenheim cabled a report of the meeting to the German Foreign Office two days later, in which he reported that Helphand had told him “that the Russian Democrats could achieve their aim only by the total destruction of Czarism and the division of Russia into smaller states.”13 Helphand proposed tha
t Germany should help him unite the revolutionaries behind a program of subverting the Russian Empire.

  At a high level, the German government evinced interest in his proposal. At the end of February 1915 Helphand went to Berlin to meet with officials at the Foreign Ministry. They asked him to recapitulate his proposal in writing; in response, on 9 March, he submitted a memorandum to them embodying a vast plan for the subversion of Czarist Russia by encouraging socialist revolutionaries and nationalists. He told the Germans about Lenin and his Bolshevik faction, reported that Lenin and some of his followers were in Switzerland, and singled them out as especially worth German support. Thus Helphand discovered and identified Lenin for the Germans.

  The German leaders agreed to adopt Helphand’s proposals and at the end of March gave him an initial payment of a million marks (equal at that time to roughly 240,000 dollars in U.S. currency) to begin the work of attempting to unify the various revolutionary groups.

  His initial overtures to his former comrades were rebuffed. In Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg did not even give him an opportunity to speak: she showed him to the door. Lev Davidovich Bronstein, who called himself Trotsky, admitted that Parvus had once been an important figure, a friend and teacher, but concluded that in 1914 he had changed, and that he was now “politically deceased.”14 The attitude of Parvus’s former socialist-revolutionary colleagues was described by one of them who said they regarded him as “a Russian informer, a scoundrel, a confidence trickster,…and now a Turkish agent and speculator.”15

  In the spring he made his most important approach. He went to Zurich and set up court at the luxurious Baur au Lac Hôtel. There he lived ostentatiously, drinking a bottle of champagne each morning at breakfast, smoking cigars of enormous size, and surrounding himself with showy women.16 He also began spreading money around among the poorer exiles, persuading them that he had become the paymaster of the revolution.