A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Alexander Kerensky

  His fatal error: trying to keep Russia in the war.

  On Wednesday, March 7, Nicholas raised the hopes of every reasonable member of the government by abruptly announcing that on the following day he would go to the Duma and declare his intention to appoint a new cabinet. That same evening, however, he made a second announcement—that he was leaving immediately for army headquarters, that there would be no visit to the Duma, that he was, in short, breaking his promise. Within hours he was gone from the capital. It is likely that he departed both at the insistence of his wife, who thought Nicholas was being intolerably weak if he so much as acknowledged the existence of the Duma, and to escape from her constant instructions and appeals. He had no particular need to be at army headquarters, with the Eastern Front still locked in winter. That may be precisely why he went—to escape from everything. He was perhaps in a depression, perhaps simply resigned. As soon as he was gone, events began to unfold rapidly.

  On Thursday street demonstrations in Petrograd turned as before into riots and looting. Cossack troops, the cavalry traditionally used by the tsars to control unruly or merely disfavored civilian populations, were sent into the streets to restore order. These Cossacks, however, were mainly young, inexperienced, and half-trained; those of their elder brothers who had not by now died in the war were off at the front. Significantly, they did not carry with them the whips with which Cossacks customarily subdued crowds. Instead of attacking the rioters, most of whom were women, they mingled with them and assured them that they were in no danger.

  On Friday the crowds were even larger than before, the rioting more violent. The leaders of the capital’s most radical leftist groups, suddenly bold after years of ferocious repression, called for a general strike.

  On Saturday the crowds and the Cossack horsemen were once again out in force. The latter, ordered to fire on the demonstrators, turned their guns on the police instead. This almost unimaginably shocking turn of events, the end of generations of Cossack loyalty to the regime, sent the cabinet into a panic. Members sent a telegram to the tsar offering their resignations and asking him to return to Petrograd and form a new government. The reply that he sent was magnificently absurd in its irrelevance to the situation: “I order that the disorders in the capital, intolerable during these difficult times of war with Germany and Austria, be ended tomorrow.”

  That tomorrow, Sunday, March 11, was in fact comparatively quiet, the streets almost empty. Before leaving the capital Nicholas had given his newest prime minister, an aged and well-intentioned but ineffectual veteran of the Petrograd bureaucracy, a signed order for the dismissal of the Duma. His instructions had been to hold this document in reserve and use it if necessary. Now it was delivered to the assembly, whose members promptly voted to disregard it. In doing so they effectively joined the revolution.

  On Monday tens of thousands of soldiers joined it as well. Many simply deserted. Others joined the civilians in a fresh outbreak of rioting. The capital’s huge armory was attacked, taken, and pillaged. Thousands of rifles were carried off into every corner of the city and into the hands of every would-be revolutionary. Courthouses and the offices of the secret police were set ablaze. Prisons were broken into, their inmates freed to flee or join the mob.

  On Tuesday, March 13, Tsar Nicholas finally left army headquarters and began the five-hundred-mile rail journey back to Petrograd. His progress was slow. In yet another of his endless acts of well-intentioned foolishness, Nicholas had ordered that his train should follow an indirect route so as not to interfere with the flow of troops and matériel to the front. As he drew closer to the capital, he encountered increasing signs of disorder. Finally, with the imperial train still far from its destination, reports of violence along the line ahead made it clear that further progress would be impossible. The locomotive pulling Nicholas and his entourage was shunted into the railyard of the obscure provincial town of Pskov, where it came to a halt.

  Telegrams arrived from senior military commanders—one came from Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus—telling the tsar that it had become imperative that he surrender the crown. Nicholas seemed unsurprised. He showed concern only for his wife and children, virtually prisoners since the forty-thousand-man garrison at Tsarskoe Selo had joined the rebellion. All five of the royal children were sick with the measles—no trivial disease in 1917. The tsarina, unable to communicate with her husband, at first found it difficult to believe that any of these things were happening. Soon, however, she recovered. She threw herself into the care of her daughters and twelve-year-old son, and into arranging meals and warm quarters on the ground floor of the palace for the two companies of Cossacks that alone remained loyal. After years of almost insanely self-destructive behavior, she began to display the strength and calm acceptance that would support her family through the months of life that remained to them.

  On March 15 two new Russian governments came into existence. One was proclaimed by the Duma, now dominated by the thirty-six-year-old Kerensky, who became minister of justice. Its rival was the Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies, made up, as its name indicated, of representatives of army units and industrial laborers. The two set up operations in the same building and agreed that the tsar must abdicate. Members of the cabinet, instead of resisting, presented themselves to the Duma and, pathetically, asked to be arrested for their own protection. A delegation set out from Petrograd to get Nicholas’s signature on an act of abdication. By the time its train reached the tsar, he had made up his mind to sign. On one point, however, he refused to cooperate. Asked to pass the crown to his son, he insisted not only on abdicating himself but on doing so on behalf of the boy as well. He understood that the delicate Alexis, his life in almost constant jeopardy because of his hemophilia, would if made tsar be handed over to the care of strangers. This, Nicholas declared, was out of the question.

  And so the crown passed to Nicholas’s younger brother Michael, a feckless individual who years before had made himself the black sheep of the Romanovs by secretly marrying a twice-divorced commoner with whom he had already had a son. But the new Tsar Michael II, fearing for his life as revolution and chaos spread, abdicated almost immediately. He declared his willingness to resume the crown later, but only if it were offered to him by an assembly of the people’s elected representatives. With that, the Romanov dynasty ended. The Duma’s provisional government declared its determination to continue the war until victory was achieved. The former Tsar Nicholas, displaying no bitterness, supported the government in this respect without reservation. In a farewell message to the troops, he said that “whoever now dreams of peace, whoever desires it…betrays…the land of his fathers.”

  The end of the tsarist regime was soon known to the world. Paris and London, and also those members of the U.S. government who were eager to join the war, received it with something like jubilation. Alliance with the Russian autocracy had from the start been an embarrassment for the French and the British, one that complicated their efforts to depict the war as a conflict between democracy and dictatorship. Now, apparently, Russia too was becoming a democracy—and one no less eager to continue the war than the tsar had been. The Entente was being purified.

  In Russia itself the news was tragic for many, a cause of celebration for many more. “God in heaven, it’s like a miracle of miracles, it all happened so quickly,” a soldier serving as a clerk in a field hospital recorded in his diary. “Such joy, such anxiety that I can’t get on with the work. I want to convince all the doubters that these developments are good news and that things will get better for us now. Good Lord, it’s so great that Tsar Nicholas and the autocracy no longer exist! Down with all that rubbish, down with all that is old, wicked and loathsome. This is the dawn of a great new Russia, happy and joyful. We soldiers are free men, we are all equal, we are all citizens of Great Russia now!…The police are being arrested, their weapons are taken away from them. Please God let it be like this forever.”


  The tsar’s abdication came six weeks after Germany’s announcement that it was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. It immediately made clear just how great a mistake that announcement had been, and that Germany’s political system had broken down almost as completely as Russia’s. That system, by putting virtually all authority in the hands of a tiny elite with little connection to the nation as a whole, had been creaking badly even before the war. In the best of times it was superficially tidier than Britain’s parliamentary monarchy and the French republic with its innumerable changes of government. But even under strong and brilliant leadership (a rare commodity in a political culture as stunted as imperial Germany’s), the German system operated in a kind of splendid isolation, with no mechanism for adapting and renewing itself in response to trouble. When its leadership fell as far short of strength and brilliance as it did after Bismarck, it had few outside resources to draw on. Under pressure of war its isolation became pitiable rather than splendid. Thus the Germany of 1917: a civil government unable to control or even compete with the army’s high command, and a military inept in politics and diplomacy and blind to its own ineptness. And thus the emergence, more by default than by anyone’s design, of a dictatorship led by a man, Erich Ludendorff, who though one of the outstanding generals of German history was devoid of political gifts, experience, or skills.

  This dictatorship was quick to produce political disasters equal in magnitude to Ludendorff’s military achievements. The first came in October. Like those that followed, it had its roots in Ludendorff’s fixation on strengthening the German war machine by every possible means, and in his consequent embrace of what would come to be called “war socialism”—the subordination of every available human being and every particle of the economy to the imperatives of the war. Manpower was in short supply not only in the army but on the home front, and even before Ludendorff’s rise to supreme power some thousands of Belgian industrial workers had been forcibly transferred to the factories of Germany. The factory owners wanted more, and almost as soon as he arrived in the west, Ludendorff decided to satisfy them. He set a quota of two hundred thousand transfers. Bethmann, other members of the government, and even the general in command in Belgium all dissented, saying that the program could have little impact on industrial output but would be a propaganda fiasco, a boon for the Entente in its tireless campaign to portray Germany as nothing better than an outlaw nation.

  These arguments were swept aside. Late in October Belgian industries that were not contributing directly to the war effort were shut down and mass deportations began. In three months more than sixty thousand Belgians, many of them in bad health, were herded onto cattle cars and transported to Germany under brutal conditions. Ultimately the entire program proved to be as useless as its opponents had warned and had to be brought to an end. By that time, however, it had done terminal damage to Germany’s international reputation, ending any possibility that the American public might respond other than with revulsion to the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.

  A second great blunder came soon afterward. Early in November Germany announced that it intended to create a new Kingdom of Poland out of an unspecified portion of the territories from which the Russians had been expelled in 1915. Like the Belgian deportations, this idea had not originated with Ludendorff, but he had seized upon it and forced it on the government in spite of the reservations of Bethmann Hollweg and others. The underlying hope was that the Poles would be so grateful for the gift of a nation of their own after generations of partition and occupation that they would eagerly fight on the side of the Central Powers. The originators of the plan, in selling it to Ludendorff, held out the vision of quickly recruiting five divisions of Polish soldiers—a million men eventually—to fight against the Russians. Desperate for manpower, incapable of listening to those who knew far more than he about the psychology of the Polish people, Ludendorff lunged at this mirage.

  The idea was doomed from the start. Long experience of tsarist rule had taught Poland’s rural peasantry to hate the very idea of military service. And the promised “kingdom” was far too vague, too obviously false, to tempt anyone to die in the service of Germany. It was not to be created until after the war’s end, and its hereditary ruler would be a German rather than a Slavic prince. It was to include only part of the former Russian Poland, other parts of which were to be annexed by Austria or Germany. Some of it was to be not Polish at all but territory stripped from Russia proper. Its army was to be under German command, and the kingdom was to be barred from entering into treaties without German approval.

  It was an absurdity, and it produced predictable results. In all of Poland only a few thousand men answered the call to arms, barely enough to make up a few battalions which would be disbanded before the war’s end without ever seeing active service. What mattered far more—what turned the episode into a disaster—was the impact on Russia. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1916 Bethmann Hollweg had been sending out feelers to Petrograd, exploring the possibility of a separate peace. The response had been ambiguous—Tsar Nicholas had no interest—but not hopelessly negative. This was the period of Boris Stürmer’s tenure as prime minister and foreign minister in Petrograd. (Significantly, he was able to hold on to both offices despite being so anti-British and pro-German as to be frequently accused of treason. The Russian court had always included a pro-German faction, and that faction was still in place after two years of war.) But the loss of Poland had been a grievous blow to Russian pride and a profoundly disturbing threat to what the Petrograd government saw as its security needs in Europe. The announcement of a make-believe Polish state amounted to a declaration that Poland could never again belong to Russia. It ended any possibility of a separate peace between Germany and the government of the tsar—a peace that Germany urgently needed. By provoking resentment in every part of Russian society, it ensured that when revolution came and the provisional government succeeded to power, it too would be determined to continue the war. In the longer term, by weakening the provisional government and opening a path to power for the Bolsheviks, it would have even more disastrous consequences for Russia than for Germany. But Ludendorff would misplay that card too.

  It has to be said, in fairness to Ludendorff, that his intrusions into diplomacy and politics and even industrial management appear to have been motivated less by a desire to aggrandize himself than by a determination to win the war and by frustration with the inertia and incompetence of the German governing system. “All this is really no business of mine but something must be done,” he lamented to Crown Prince Wilhelm. “And if I don’t do it nothing will be done.”

  The greatest blunder was Germany’s handling of its relations with the United States during the first three months of 1917. It began with the decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, but that set in motion a whole series of subsequent mistakes that proved to have terrible consequences. Those mistakes culminated in an American declaration of war that more competent German leadership might very well have averted.

  At the center of the story stands Arthur Zimmermann, who had become head of the German foreign ministry at the end of 1916 after Hindenburg and Ludendorff purged Gottlieb von Jagow for being too inclined to side with Bethmann. Zimmermann was neither inexperienced nor inordinately self-serving; before the war he had declined the foreign ministry because he didn’t want to have to deal with the Reichstag and the other chronic headaches that went with the job. A man of considerable charm, he was enjoyed by everyone who knew him, including the American ambassador in Berlin, who was otherwise no admirer of Germany or the Germans. But he was also one of those men capable of believing that they know everything about subjects of which they actually have no useful experience. Years before the war, upon returning to Germany from the Far East, Zimmermann had crossed the United States by train, spending a few days in San Francisco and New York along the way. Ever afterward he had postured as an authority on all things American, and too many G
ermans who had never been across the Atlantic accepted his pronouncements. Such Germans were all too willing to ignore the cabled warnings of their own ambassador to the United States, the intelligent and capable Count Johann von Bernstorff, who had been in Washington for eight years and understood that the nation that had fought the American Civil War was not to be trifled with.

  Arthur Zimmermann

  Author of history’s most costly telegram.

  In the weeks between the decision to lift restrictions on U-boat operations and the public disclosure of that decision, Zimmermann cast about for ways to exploit it to Germany’s advantage. He devised a plan, a scheme for winning new allies—Mexico and Japan, of all the improbable candidates—while at the same time entangling the United States in a war on the North American continent. He began the execution of this scheme by addressing a message to the German ambassador in Mexico City: