A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  At the end of May he sought out Lenin at the restaurant where the Bolshevik theorist usually was to be found, went over to the table where Lenin and his associates were lunching, spoke to them, and accompanied them back to Lenin’s apartment. Helphand explained his mission. Lenin, having listened to his presentation, accused him of having turned into a German “chauvinist,” and ordered him to leave and never come back.17

  Yet a friend of Lenin’s left with Helphand to start putting the plan of subversion into effect. Their base of operation was to be Stockholm. Through his friend, Lenin was able to learn of developments as they occurred. Moreover, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party accepted money from Helphand via a Polish and a Russian Social Democrat; Lenin later denied this, but his correspondence shows that his denials were untrue.18

  The business in which Helphand ostensibly engaged was a trading firm, whose activities in fact enriched him enormously. Secretly he organized subversion and published a revolutionary newspaper, which the German government financed. The publication was not a great success. He attempted to organize a general strike in Russia, even without the aid of Lenin and the others. It was a much greater success; he did not achieve a general strike, but brought as many as 45,000 protesters into the streets of Petrograd (as St Petersburg, the Russian capital, had been called since 1914).

  But Helphand had focused the German government’s attention on the particular importance of Lenin as a disruptive force and, through other agents, the Germans arranged to watch over the Bolshevik theorist and to lend him additional money when he needed it without his necessarily having to acknowledge the source of the funds.

  Thus Helphand, the Constantinople-based intimate of the Young Turks, had brought into play a strange new weapon with which Turkey’s ally Germany could attempt to bring their common Russian foe crashing down.

  III

  Petrograd was a long distance away from the granary of the south, and its population suffered from food shortages and soaring food prices throughout 1916 and 1917. During that time strikes and protests became a way of life: including those inspired by Helphand, between mid-1915 and February 1917, there were 1,163 strikes.19 Over half of these were politically rather than economically motivated, which showed that the revolt against the regime had begun to transcend the issue of shortages.

  On 8 March 1917 a demonstration took place in celebration of International Women’s Day. Housewives, protesting against food shortages, joined the demonstration; so did many of the roughly 90,000 workers then on strike in about fifty factories. The next day there were about 200,000 on strike, and the day afterward the strike became general. Two days later four regiments of soldiers joined the populace, strengthening the demonstrators against the increasingly helpless police. The army mutiny proved decisive, only because effective government had long since vanished. The governor of the city ordered proclamations of martial law to be put up, but there was no glue to hold the posters on the walls.20

  On 15 March Czar Nicholas II abdicated, effective from the following day, in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. The following day the Grand Duke Michael declined to accept the throne, and Russia became a republic governed by a Provisional Government originally led by Prince G. E. Lvov and later by Alexander Kerensky.

  Politicians of all shades of opinion were surprised to find that what the population of Petrograd had pushed against was an open door. As a leading historian of these events has written, “The revolutionary parties played no direct part in the making of the revolution. They did not expect it…”21 Were the events in Petrograd instead the fruition of the conspiracy conceived by Parvus, the associate of the Young Turks? Helphand and the German General Staff, through their agents and their gold, did play a role in inciting Russians to strike and to rebel, though surely not to the extent suspected by British Intelligence. At first it was not even clear whether the overthrow of the Czar could help them to achieve their goal—which was to defeat Russia. At the time all political parties, including the Bolsheviks, were in favor of prosecuting the war; now that they no longer had a government they detested, as Russian patriots they wanted to defeat their enemies, the Germans and Turks.

  But, as Helphand alone understood, Lenin was of a different persuasion—and was beside himself with frustration. He was in Zurich, cut off from participation in the great events in Russia; and his followers in Petrograd misunderstood what he wanted them to do. Helphand had anticipated the Bolshevik theorist’s reaction. Without asking Lenin, Helphand went ahead to make arrangements with the German General Staff to have a railroad train placed at Lenin’s disposal to take him and his closest political associate, Gregori Zinoviev, back to Petrograd. When he then issued the invitation to Lenin, the latter warily refused and attempted instead to make arrangements that did not involve Helphand. He also posed conditions: between twenty and sixty Russian exiles should be allowed on the train, without regard to their views about the war, and the train should enjoy extraterritorial rights. The German Minister in Berne cabled the German Foreign Office that Lenin and Zinoviev “believed that they had, in this way, insured themselves against being compromised in Russia.”22 The German government understood and agreed. In April of 1917 Lenin was sent in his sealed train on his way to Russia.

  From the moment that he arrived at the Finland station in Petrograd, with typically acerbic greetings to those who met him, Lenin set about positioning his Bolshevik faction—as Helphand had expected—as the only political group in Russia that advocated ending the war immediately. His followers had believed that they should support their country now that it had a republican government of the political left. They had fallen, according to Lenin, into error. In his view, the war demonstrated that capitalism had entered into its imperialist stage, which he regarded as its final stage; it therefore was the right time for socialist parties throughout Europe to launch revolutions. It was not the time to wage international war, especially in alliance with governments such as those of France and Britain that ought to be overthrown.

  In the autumn of 1917, when Lenin—with the aid of additional financial subsidies from Germany—seized power in Petrograd and made himself dictator of what remained of the shattered Russian state, he moved immediately to take his country out of the war. In March 1918 he accepted defeat by agreeing to a peace treaty that met Germany’s terms. It appeared that Helphand had served his friends in Constantinople and Berlin well; as he had foretold, backing Lenin had helped to drive Russia out of the war.

  IV

  British observers of the Russian revolutions in 1917 were struck by the apparent conjunction of Bolsheviks, Germans, and Jews. Many of the Bolshevik leaders were of Jewish origin. So was Helphand, who had brought them German money and support—and who had come from Constantinople and was an intimate of the Young Turks. The Young Turks—according to the doctrine long held by British officials—were controlled by Jewish Freemasons who had brought the Ottoman Empire into alliance with Germany. It was a long-standing British belief that Jews and Germans were intimately related. It all seemed to fit.

  John Buchan, the popular novelist of imperialism, who had been Milner’s Private Secretary in South Africa and who, on Milner’s recommendation, later became director of information services for Lloyd George’s government, expressed this view in the first chapter of his classic novel of suspense, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915):

  Away behind all the governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people…[T]hat explained a lot…things that happened in the Balkan War, how one state suddenly came out on top, why alliances were made and broken, why certain men disappeared, and where the sinews of war came from. The aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and Germany at loggerheads…[T]he Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell…[T]his is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere…with an eye like a rattlesnake…[H]e is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the empire of the Tsar. />
  Thus the Bolsheviks came to be viewed, not as Russians or even as ideological extremists, but as enemy secret agents called into existence by Germans doing the work of Jews who were devoted to the vengeful destruction of Russia. In 1917 and for many years afterward British officials continued to believe that the Bolsheviks were not principals in their own right, with their own agenda and their own objectives, but were mere employees of the German General Staff who took their orders from Jews and Prussians in Berlin.

  The possibility that Russia might collapse had been Britain’s nightmare ever since September 1914, just as it had been the dream of Enver Pasha—a dream which inspired him to bring the Ottoman Empire into the war on the side of the Central Powers. The Bolshevik Revolution had turned the one’s nightmare and the other’s dream into reality. Scholars still differ in their accounts of how it came about, but without question Russia’s leaving the war in 1917 was a severe blow to Britain and her allies, and an enormous victory not only for Germany but also for Ottoman Turkey.

  V

  During the Gallipoli adventure, Winston Churchill had said, “This is one of the great campaigns in history. Think what Constantinople is to the East. It is more than London, Paris, and Berlin all rolled into one are to the West. Think how it has dominated the East. Think what its fall will mean.”23

  Yet its capture—which had seemed imminent to Churchill in March 1915—continued to prove elusive. After the Allies’ failure to win through to Constantinople in 1915, it was the turn of the Russians, who scored successes in Turkish Armenia in 1916 and were poised to march toward Constantinople in 1917. Then came the revolutions in Petrograd, and the Russian armies on Turkish soil, believing the war was coming to an end, gave up all thought of launching an attack.

  By then the Turks were too exhausted to exploit the situation by launching an attack of their own on the Russians. But their opponents were exhausted too; sufficiently so to consider giving up such ambitious goals as winning Constantinople. In 1917 Milner, and perhaps Lloyd George, flirted with the idea of coming to an understanding with Germany, in which the Russian Empire rather than the Ottoman Empire could be partitioned as the spoils of victory.24

  Against all odds, the Ottoman Empire had held its own. The governments that had brought the Allied Great Powers into the war against Turkey—the Asquith government in Britain, the René Viviani government in France, and the Czar and his minister Sazanov in Russia—had all been overthrown. In some measure it was Turkey’s successful defense of the Dardanelles that was responsible for bringing them down. Though at first it had seemed a madly reckless act of Enver and Talaat to bring the tottering Ottoman Empire into the war, they had brought it off; they had lost some territory but they also seemed poised to gain some, and at the end of 1917 they were more powerful than ever within the Sublime Porte. They no longer felt the need to cloak themselves in the respectability of Prince Said Halim and finally allowed him to resign as Grand Vizier. The self made party boss Talaat Bey boldly took the title into his own unaristocratic hands.

  Yet for Talaat and Enver the road ahead was perilous. Though the threat from Russia was removed, the threat from Britain was renewed. Their enemy, the new Prime Minister of Britain, was a dynamo and a war leader of genius. Though Lloyd George was willing to explore the possibility of a compromise peace with the Young Turks, he was a fighter—and his heart was in the fight to destroy Turkey’s empire.

  PART VI

  NEW WORLDS AND PROMISED LANDS

  31

  THE NEW WORLD

  I

  In 1916–17, the shadow of the United States first fell over Lloyd George’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

  By the last quarter of 1916, the Allies had become dependent upon the United States not merely for supplies but for financing. They were running out of money, and the economist John Maynard Keynes, speaking for the British Treasury, warned the Cabinet that by the end of the year “the American executive and the American public will be in a position to dictate to this country.”1 President Woodrow Wilson underlined the point by interfering with a J. P. Morgan financing for Britain in December 1916—demonstrating that he could destroy the market for Allied loans in the United States and thereby drive Britain and France into insolvency.2

  The Allies were unsure of Wilson’s intentions. In fact he was opposed to their imperialist ambitions and intended to thwart them. “England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have,” he noted, and he proposed to “force them to our way of thinking.”3 The conflict between his goals and theirs—in the Middle East as elsewhere—was to shape the politics of the years that followed. The entry of Wilson’s America onto the world stage therefore opened up dangers as well as opportunities for Lloyd George.

  As a public figure, Wilson was not easy for them to understand. The grandson of a pastor and the son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson had studied law and government, became a professor, then President of Princeton University, Governor of New Jersey, and finally President of the United States. Yet in character, thought, and temperament, he was not so much a lawyer, a scholar, or a politician as he was, like his father and grandfather, a theologian.4 He aimed at converting or—failing that—defeating rather than appeasing. A politician takes professional pride in achieving compromises, but Wilson—who did not wish to appear a politician—prided himself on avoiding them.

  A man of high mind, character, and principles, he often saw moral issues in a controversy when others did not; he frequently inspired others to share his vision. He was, and still remains, a controversial figure: prim and bespectacled, the aloof and scholarly President, whose features appeared finely ascetic to his admirers, appeared priggish and self-righteous to others. He was a complex and forbidding figure.

  The Allies at times misinterpreted the President’s words and actions as a show put on for purposes of domestic politics, and failed to appreciate the sincerity of his desire to keep the United States out of the world war—and to keep them out of the new colonies they planned to establish for themselves in such areas as the Middle East. Thus they misunderstood Wilson’s attempt to mediate an end to the war—a mission that he undertook at the request of the German Chancellor at the end of 1916.

  Bethmann Hollweg, the civilian Chancellor of Germany, who for months had desired a negotiated settlement, forwarded a note to the United States on 12 December 1916, expressing a willingness to talk peace. Bethmann, for reasons of domestic politics, was unable to make the note more specific; but Wilson went ahead to issue a peace note of his own on 18 December, asking the Allies to define their war goals in the hope of narrowing the differences between the two sides.

  Lloyd George had just become Prime Minister, and he and the French believed that Wilson was really asking for a program on the basis of which he could bring the United States into the war—which is what Secretary of State Robert Lansing allowed them to understand. Lansing, who was pro-intervention, in fact was undercutting the President’s peace policy by suggesting to the Allies the terms of their reply. The Allies obliged; they defined their goals in sweeping terms, among them—“The liberation of the peoples who now live beneath the murderous tyranny of the Turks, and the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved itself radically alien to Western civilization.”5 This was not a peace proposal but a war cry; clearly the Ottoman Empire would not negotiate a compromise peace on the basis of it. It was contrary to what the President had sought, and it is not clear how he would have proceeded if Germany had not suddenly pushed him into the arms of the Allies.

  II

  Bethmann lost all control of his government in early 1917. The new Chief of the General Staff, Paul von Hindenburg, and his animating military genius, Erich Ludendorff, believed that the war could be won speedily and that compromise was unnecessary. German policy was dictated by the military leaders, who assured the Kaiser in January 1917 that unrestricted submarine warfare could force the British into submission within six months,
and that American intervention in the war, if it came, would come too late.

  The German submarine campaign, exacerbated by the notorious Zimmerman telegram,* pushed the United States toward a declaration of war, though substantial numbers of Americans resisted the logic of events and remained adamantly opposed to involvement in the war. Swept against his will into the Allied camp, the President faced the challenge of uniting his country behind him.

  The President’s political problem—which was about to play a role in shaping his goals in the Middle East and elsewhere—was that he was the leader of a minority party. In 1912 he had won the presidency only because the majority party—the Republicans—had split in two, with some voting for William Howard Taft’s Regulars and others for Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressives; and in 1916 he had been re-elected only with the support of the Progressives in the normally Republican Middle and Far West. To carry the country behind his candidates and his program in future elections he would need to hold the same swing voting groups that had thrown the 1916 race to him: the big-city Irish Catholics who were anti-British and the mainly Republican, Middle Western German-Americans (many of them born in Germany) who were pro-German. How was he to bring the United States into the Allied camp without alienating these groups?

  Yet the U-boats left him no choice: on 17 March 1917, German submarines sank three American merchant vessels. On 20 March the President met with his Cabinet to solicit advice. He listened to the views of his Cabinet and said little, although he remarked on the “apparent apathy of the Middle West”6 as a problem to be overcome. He did not tell the Cabinet whether he had made up his mind what to do.