The First World War

by John Keegan

  THE WAR IN THE EAST CONTINUES

  Despite the weight of Germany’s military preoccupation with preparation for the coming offensive in the west, its political concerns for the future remained concentrated in the east, where national sentiment was less self-assured and independent identities weaker. Germany correctly calculated that its opportunity to impose subordinate relationships on the peoples who had only just escaped from domination by the old Russian empire was altogether more promising. The Baltic peoples—Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian—had retained their sense of association with the German-speaking lands for centuries; much of the land-owning class was German by origin. Finland, though it had enjoyed a degree of autonomy inside the Tsarist empire, was anxious to regain full independence and ready to accept German help to do so. Lenin’s early policy was to allow the non-Russian peoples of the empire to secede if they chose, while encouraging the local left, with the support of any remaining Russian soldiers, to stage pro-Soviet revolutions. In the Baltic lands, already under German occupation as a result of the successful offensives of 1916–17, revolution was swiftly put down and semi-independent pro-German regimes were established, though not without protest in Lithuania, which sought but failed to achieve full sovereignty.13 In Finland, where power in parliament, an institution of the old Tsarist constitution, was fairly evenly divided between left and right, the issue of what relationship with Germany the country should establish provoked civil war. The right had been pro-German throughout the European conflict and an all-Finnish volunteer unit, the 27th Jäger Battalion, had fought with the German army on the Baltic front since 1916. The right’s readiness to form a German alliance, after independence was declared in December 1917, provoked the left into forming a worker militia of its own; in January 1918 fighting broke out, the left seizing Helsinki, the capital, the right retiring into the northern provinces. The Germans sent arms, 70,000 rifles, 150 machine guns and twelve field guns, all of Russian origin; also from Russia came the commander who was to lead the right-wing forces, Gustav Mannerheim, a Baltic nobleman and ex-Tsarist officer, of formidable personal and military capacities.

  Mannerheim had been commissioned into the Chevalier Guards, grandest of the Tsar’s cavalry regiments, and had served under Brusilov in the Model Cavalry Squadron; his career testified to his outstanding qualities. The war had brought him command of the VI Cavalry Corps, which he succeeded in keeping intact while the rest of the imperial army disintegrated after the failure of the Kerensky offensive.14 After the October Revolution, he decided, however, that he must transfer his loyalty to his homeland; he made his way to Finland and secured appointment as the Commander-in-Chief of the anti-Bolshevik army. The Petrograd Bolsheviks had, under German pressure, recognised the independence of Finland on 31 December 1918; but four days later, Stalin had persuaded the Petrograd Soviet to alter the terms on which independence was granted and then offered the Finnish socialists Russian help to establish “socialist power.” Its basis was already present on Finnish soil in the form of Russian units not yet repatriated, and in the Finnish Red Guards. While Mannerheim consolidated his base in the western region of Ostrobothnia, the left took possession of the industrial towns.

  During January and February 1918, both sides prepared for the offensive. The Reds had about 90,000 men at their disposal, Mannerheim only 40,000.15 His troops, however, were under the command of professional officers and stiffened by cadres of the 27th Jägers. The Red forces lacked trained leadership. Moreover, while Germany was preparing to send an experienced expeditionary force, largely comprising General von der Goltz’s Baltic Division, to the Finns’ assistance, Lenin was increasingly nervous of taking any action that would provoke a German landing in an area adjacent to the revolution’s centre at Petrograd, where the military force at his disposal was scarcely adequate to protect the Bolshevik leadership from its enemies, let alone repel an organised foreign expeditionary force. After the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which formally ended war between Russia and Germany, the Soviet actually began withdrawing what troops it had left in Finland, though it continued surreptitiously to support and supply the native Red forces.

  Mannerheim seized the opportunity to push forward. The leader of the Finnish nationalists, Svinhufvud, was too pro-German for his taste, prepared to acquiesce in the German plan to make his country an economic and political dependency of the German empire for the sake of comfort, while he, as he would shortly proclaim, wanted no “part of another empire but … a great, free, independent Finland.”16 In early March the Red advance into Mannerheim’s area of control in Ostrobothnia petered out and he went over to the offensive. His enemy, though controlling the capital, was menaced by another nationalist force to the rear, operating on the isthmus of Karelia between the Baltic and Lake Ladoga, through which the Red lines of communication led to Petrograd. Mannerheim’s plan was to organise a concentric advance which would simultaneously cut those lines of communication and squeeze the Reds between two convergent attacks.

  Before he could consummate his plan, von der Goltz’s Baltic Division, which had been detained on the southern Baltic coast by ice, appeared at the port of Hangö, formerly the Tsarist navy’s forward base, and advanced on Helsinki, which it entered on 13 April. On 6 April, however, Mannerheim had taken Tampere, the Reds’ main stronghold in the south, a victory which allowed him to transfer forces south-eastward towards Karelia. At his approach, the remaining Red forces beat a hasty retreat across the border into Russia and on 2 May all resistance to Mannerheim’s armies came to an end. Finland was free, both of a foreign imperialism and of the foreign ideology which had succeeded it. It was not, however, yet independent. The Germans had extracted a high price for their support and for their intervention. The treaty signed between the two countries on 2 March gave Germany rights of free trade with Finland but not Finland with Germany, and bound Finland not to make any foreign alliance without German consent.17 The Svinhufvud government was content to accept diplomatic and economic client status, even a German prince as regent of a restored Grand Duchy, if that would guarantee German protection against the threat of renewed social revolution or Russian aggression.18 Mannerheim was not. His fervent nationalism and justified pride in his army’s victory stiffened his resolve to submit to no foreign authority; moreover, his firm belief that Germany could not win the world war caused him to reject any policy identifying Finland with its strategic interests. On 30 May he resigned his command and retired to Sweden, from which he would return at the war’s end to negotiate an honourable settlement of his country’s differences with the victors.

  Finland, though compromised by the German alliance, had had a swift and comparatively painless exit from the chaos of Russian collapse. Total casualties in the war numbered 30,000 and, though that was a large figure in a population of three million, it would pale into insignificance, relatively as well as absolutely, beside the terrible toll of the civil war which was beginning to spread throughout Russia proper.19 That war would last until 1921 and take the lives, directly or indirectly, of at least seven million and perhaps ten million people, five times as many as had been killed in the fighting of 1914–17.20

  There need have been no civil war in Russia had the Bolsheviks not thrown away the advantages they had gained in the first months of revolution, advantages lost by mismanagement of their diplomacy and through a hopelessly unrealistic confidence placed in the power of the revolutionary impulse to undermine the “capitalist” states from below. Between November 1917 and March 1918 the Bolsheviks had won a great internal victory in most of the seventy-five provinces and regions into which the old Tsarist empire had been divided. During the so-called “railway” (eshelonaia) war, picked bands of armed revolutionaries had fanned out from Petrograd down the empire’s railway system to make contact with the 900 Soviets that had replaced the official organs of administration in Russia’s cities and towns and to put down the resistance of groups opposed to the October Revolution. The Russian railways, dur
ing this brief but brilliant revolutionary episode, worked for Lenin as the German railways had not for Moltke in 1914. Decisive force had been delivered to key points in the nick of time, and a succession of crucial local successes had been achieved that, in sum, brought revolutionary triumph.

  Then, with Russia in their hands, the Bolsheviks had prevaricated with the Germans over the terms of the peace settlement that would have confirmed their victory. Brest-Litovsk was a harsh peace. It required the Bolsheviks to accept that Russian Poland and most of the Baltic lands should cease to be part of Russia proper, that Russian troops should be withdrawn from Finland and Transcaucasia and that peace should be made with the nationalists of the Ukraine, who had declared their independence.21 Since Poland and the Baltic lands had already been lost to Russia, Finland was about to fall to Mannerheim’s nationalists, and Bolshevik power in the Ukraine and Transcaucasia was everywhere fragile and in places non-existent, the harshness of the Brest-Litovsk terms lay in the letter of the treaty rather than in fact. The Bolsheviks might well have signed without damage to their objective circumstances, making the mental reservation that the seceding territories could be reintegrated when Germany’s fortunes worsened and theirs improved. The Bolsheviks were, however, possessed by the illusion that the menace of world revolution, which they had made a reality in their homeland, threatened all “imperialist” powers and that, by defying the Germans to do their worst, they would provoke Germany’s workers to rise against their masters in solidarity with the Bolshevik cause.

  Their illusions were fed by a wave of strikes that broke out in Germany on 28 January 1918, involving a million industrial workers, whose leaders called for “peace without annexations,” the core policy of the Bolsheviks, and in some towns set up workers’ councils.22 The strikes, however, were rapidly put down; moreover, as with similar strikes in France during 1917, the impetus came not from revolutionary enthusiasm but from weariness with the war and its hardships, psychological as well as material. Their effect on the Bolshevik leadership was nevertheless calamitous. While Lenin, with his usual hardheadedness, urged caution, in effect arguing that the time offered by accepting Germany’s terms must be used to strengthen the revolution’s hand against enemies within and without, Trotsky, now Commissar for Foreign Affairs, succumbed to a romantic ideological urge and carried with him the majority in the Bolshevik Central Committee. To challenge the Germans to do their worst, a worst which would bring down the wrath of world revolution on the imperialists’ heads, first in Germany itself, then elsewhere in the capitalist lands, there was to be “neither peace nor war.”23 Russia would not sign; neither would it fight. In earnest of this extraordinary decision, an abdication of material power in expectation of a spiritual engulfment of the revolution’s enemies, the total demobilisation of the Russian army was announced on 29 January.24 At Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky continued to fence with the Germans for another ten days. Then, on 9 February, the Germans made a separate peace with the Ukraine, simultaneously issuing to the Bolsheviks an ultimatum requiring them to sign the treaty by the following day or else acquiesce in the termination of the armistice of the previous December and the occupation by the German army, together with Austrian and Turkish contingents, of the territories scheduled at Brest-Litovsk for separation from old Russia.

  In the next eleven days, the Germans swept forward to what the ultimatum had called “the designated line.”25 Operation Faustschlag overwhelmed the Bolshevik forces in White Russia (Belarus), in the western Ukraine, in the Crimea, in the industrial Donetz basin and eventually, on 8 May, on the Don. In less than two months, 130,000 square miles of territory, an area the size of France, containing Russia’s best agricultural land, many of its raw materials and much of its industry, had been appropriated by the enemy. “It is the most comical war I have ever known,” wrote General Max Hoffmann, who had served Hindenburg as Chief of Staff at Tannenberg. “We put a handful of infantrymen with machine guns and one gun on to a train and rush them off to the next station; they take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops and so on. This proceeding has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.” It was the novelty of lightning victory, dreamed of by Schlieffen, not achieved by any German army since the beginning of the war.

  Lightning victories, experience tells, store up evil consequences, usually for the victors. Operation Thunderbolt had consequences but, to add to the many inequities produced by the Russian revolution, the evil was suffered not by the Germans but by the defeated Bolsheviks. The results of their defeat were threefold. First, a number of Russia’s minorities seized the opportunity offered to throw off control by Petrograd and establish their own governments. Second, the failure of the Bolsheviks to resist the German irruption, followed by their precipitate agreement to sign a dictated peace, confirmed the Western Allies—France and Britain, but also the United States and Japan—in their tentative resolve to establish a military presence on Russian soil, with the purpose of subjecting the German forces of occupation to a continued military threat. Finally, the collapse of Bolshevik armed force, such as it was, provided the opponents of revolution inside Russia with the circumstances in which they could stage a counter-revolution that swiftly became a civil war.

  Finland had been the first of the “nationalities” to strike for its freedom. The ethnic Romanians of the provinces of Bessarabia and Moldavia were next; with the remnant of the Romanian army close at hand, they declared a Moldavian People’s Republic in January 1918, which in April became part of Romania proper. Despite the presence of a sizeable Russian minority, it would remain Romanian until 1940. In Transcaucasia, which had fallen under Tsarist rule only during the nineteenth century, ethnic Russians were altogether fewer, being for the most part town-dwellers, railway workers, government officials or soldiers.26 The dominant nationalities, Christian Georgians and Armenians, Muslim and Turkic-speaking Azeris, were granted the right to make their own arrangements for self-government by the Petrograd Bolsheviks in November 1917 and in April 1918 declared a Federative Democratic Republic.27

  Federation lasted only a month, brought to an end by the revival of historic hostilities between the three ethnicities. The independence of Armenia and Azerbaijan would last, however, until 1920, when the Bolsheviks decided to go back on their concession of political freedoms, that of Georgia until 1921. In the interim, all three independent states had been drawn into the culminating stage of the Great War by the intervention, direct or indirect, of the major combatants.

  Transcaucasia and Transcaspia, to its south-east, might have remained backwaters had not both contained resources of the greatest strategic value—Caucasian oil, refined at the port of Baku on the Caspian Sea, the cotton crop of Turkestan in Transcaspia—and been served by railways that allowed their extraction. Under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Bolshevik Russia was obliged to supply a proportion of both to Germany. The Bolsheviks naturally wanted some for themselves. So did the Turks, who also cherished ambitions of incorporating the Turkic-speaking Transcaspians into the Ottoman empire. In the spring of 1918, the German forces positioned in the eastern Ukraine and Donetz basin by Operation Thunderbolt began to push columns eastward towards Baku; so did the Turks across their Caucasian border. At the same time, the British, from their imperial base in India and from the sphere of influence established in southern Persia by great-power agreement with Tsarist Russia in 1907, advanced their own troops into the region.28

  In the early stages of the Great War, British-Indian forces had fortified their presence in the region by creating the so-called East Persian Cordon with the object of interdicting efforts by German, Austrian and Turkish agents to foment trouble on the Indian empire’s North-West Frontier through Afghanistan. The Indian 28th Cavalry had been transferred for extended duty to the East Persian Cordon,29 while a local force, the South Persian Rifles, had been raised to patrol the border of Indian Baluchistan with the Persian empire.30 At word of the German-Turkish advance towards Transcaucasia and Trans
caspia in the spring of 1918, the British presence had been reinforced. A column of British armoured cars under General Dunsterville (“Dunsterforce”) had been started forward from Mesopotamia to the Caspian, with Baku as its objective, in January. It was followed in June by a force of Indian troops, commanded by General Malleson, which crossed the North-West Frontier to establish a base in the Persian city of Meshed, south of the Caspian, with the object of preventing German or Turkish penetration of Russian Central Asia.

  These were tiny forces in a vast area, but the “Great Game” played by the British and Russians for influence over Central Asia since the early nineteenth century had never involved more than a handful of men on either side. With the incorporation during the 1880s of the Central Asian khanates and emirates into the Russian empire, Britain’s opportunity to play tribal politics had been curtailed. It was extinguished altogether, as was Russia’s in the opposite direction, by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 “defining their respective interests in relation to Afghanistan, Persia and Tibet.”31 Revolution revived the Great Game all over again, and multiplied the number of players. To the local tribal leaders who, at Lenin’s subsequently regretted encouragement, had established agencies of self-government and organised a Central Caspian Directorate, were added bodies of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war, 35,000 in number, whose services as soldiers were eagerly solicited by all parties, though those still ready to fight inclined towards the Bolsheviks. The others included the Bolsheviks themselves, based on Astrakhan at the head of the Caspian Sea and at Tashkent on the Central Asian Railway, and the German and Turkish armies which, from their respective bases in the eastern Ukraine and the Caucasus, pushed forward soldiers and diplomatic missions, towards Baku and beyond. Finally there were British, with Dunsterville—schoolmate of Rudyard Kipling and the subject of his Stalky stories—who was principally concerned to deny Baku’s oil to both the Germans and the Turks and to assist Malleson in interdicting Turkey’s access to the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia, its use of the Central Asian Railway and its desire to incite trouble inside Afghanistan on India’s North-West Frontier.