The First World War

by John Keegan

  The drama of the Great War in Central Asia, sensational though it potentially was, had an anti-climactic conclusion. Dunsterville was driven from Baku in September by a Turkish advance, which resulted in a massacre of Baku’s Armenians by their Azeri enemies. Malleson’s penetration of Central Asia was swiftly reversed, but not before the murder of twenty-six Bolshevik commissars, abducted from Baku, also in September, by his Turkic confederates, had provided the Soviet government with the raw material to damn the British as “imperialists” to Central Asians for as long as Russian Communism would last.32 Neither the German nor Turkish interventions in the Caspian region would endure; Germany’s would be ended by its defeat on the Western Front, Turkey’s by the collapse of its imperial system after the armistice of 31 October 1918.

  In the long run, victory in Central Asia went to the Bolsheviks, though their war of second thoughts against the peoples of the Caucasus would last until 1921, and the struggle against the Turkic “Basmachi” insurrectionists in Central Asia, among whom the Young Turk Enver Pasha made a brief but tragic firebrand appearance after the Ottoman defeat, would persist for years after that.33 The Central Asian episode, nevertheless, has its significance, for the British tentatives were elements in a wider scheme of foreign interference in Russian affairs that, besides poisoning relations between the West and the Soviet government for decades to come, also illuminate the diplomacy of the closing stages of the Great War in arresting focus.

  The Western Allies—the French and British but also the Americans and Japanese—all sent troops to Russia during 1918. None, however, despite the version of events later constructed by Soviet historians, did so, initially, with the purpose of reversing the October Revolution. Indeed, the first troops to set foot ashore, a party of 170 British marines, who landed at the north Russian part of Murmansk on 4 March 1918, the day after the Bolsheviks at last signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, arrived with the encouragement of Trotsky, who two days earlier had telegraphed the Murmansk Soviet with instructions to accept “all and any assistance” from the Allies.34 Trotsky and the British had a common interest. Murmansk, which had been developed as a major port of entry for British war supplies to the Russian army between 1914 and 1917, was crammed with weapons and munitions. Following the victory of the anti-Bolshevik Finns in their civil war, both Trotsky and Britain had reason to fear that the Finns and their German allies would advance to seize the material. The White Finns, who also had territorial ambitions in the region, were keen to do so; it was Mannerheim’s disapproval of such a blatant and ill-judged anti-Allied initiative that, among other reasons, had caused him to give up command and retire to Sweden. Trotsky’s particular anxiety was that the Finns, once rearmed, would, with German assistance, march on Petrograd, while the British were alarmed by the prospect of the Germans turning Murmansk into a naval base, north of their mine barriers, from which U-boats could roam the North Atlantic.35

  Trotsky also wanted the store of British weapons for his own Red Army which, following the precipitate dissolution of the old Russian army on 29 January 1918, had effectively been brought into being by a decree creating a Red Army high command on 3 February; a conscription decree would shortly follow.36 The function of the Red Army would be to defend the revolution against its real enemies, whom Trotsky identified, in a speech to the Central Committee in April 1918, not as “our internal class enemies, who are pitiful,” but as “the all-powerful external enemies, who utilise a huge centralised machine for their mass murder and extermination.”37 By “external” enemies he meant those of the British, French and Americans: that is to say the Germans, Austrians and Turks, who were not only established on Russian soil but were actually extending their area of control over Russia’s richest agricultural and resource-yielding regions in the Ukraine, Donetz and Caucasus. Thus, even as late as April 1918, despite the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty which had made a theoretical peace between the Bolsheviks and Russia’s enemies, despite the ideological hostility of the Bolsheviks to the capitalist system that Britain, France and the United States represented, they and the Bolsheviks still retained a common interest, the defeat of the Central Powers.

  Pursuit of the common interest had faltered in November 1917, after the Bolsheviks had proclaimed an armistice and called on the Allies to initiate peace negotiations with the Germans, Austrians and Turks.38 It had been seriously set back in December, when France and Britain had been encouraged by the appearance of anti-Bolshevik resistance within Russia to send representatives to the counter-revolutionaries, in the hope that they would sustain the Russian war effort that Lenin and Trotsky seemed bent on terminating.39 It had been revived in January, to such effect that in February the Bolsheviks were using the Allies’ offer of assistance as an instrument to win better terms from the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. After the German imposition of the treaty, and its ratification won with difficulty by Lenin from the Fourth Soviet Congress on 15 March, it seemed fated for extinction.40 Yet, thanks to the heavy-handedness of German occupation policy in the Ukraine and beyond, it might still have survived, had not haphazard and unforeseen events supervened to set the Bolsheviks and the West irredeemably at odds.

  In the summer of 1918, the Western Allies became inextricably entangled with the Bolsheviks’ Russian enemies. That had not been the Allies’ intention. Calamitous though the October Revolution had been to their cause and repugnant though the Bolshevik programme was to their governments, sufficient realism prevailed in their policy-making to deter them from opening an irreparable breach with the regime that controlled Russia’s capital city and what survived, even in an unfamiliar form, of its administrative system. The Bolsheviks’ domestic enemies, though patriotic, anti-German and supporters of the traditional order, were disorganised, disunited and dispersed around the margins of Russia’s heartland. The most important grouping, known as the Volunteer Army, had actually come into being through the flight in November 1917 of two of the Tsar’s leading generals, Alexeyev, his Chief of Staff, and Kornilov, who had led the August attempt to restore his authority, from their badly guarded prison at Bykhov, near the former supreme headquarters at Mogilev, to the distant Don region in South Russia.41 The Don had been chosen as their destination because it was the homeland of the largest of the Cossack hosts, whose fierce personal loyalty to the Tsar made them seem the most promising confederates in raising the standard of counter-revolution against the Petrograd Bolsheviks. Neither the Don Cossacks, nor those of the more remote Kuban steppe, were, however, sufficiently numerous or well-organised to prove a real threat to Soviet power, as the leaders of the Volunteer Army swiftly found. Don Cossack resistance collapsed in February 1918, under the weight of a Soviet counter-attack, and when Kornilov withdrew the tiny Volunteer Army across the steppe towards the Kuban, disaster ensued. Kornilov was killed by a chance shell and, although he was replaced by the energetic Denikin, the new leader could not find a secure base for his refugee force.42 Only 4,000 strong, it seemed fated in April to disintegrate under Bolshevik pressure and the pitilessness of Russia’s vast space.

  What changed everything—for the Bolsheviks, for their Russian enemies and for the Western Allies—in the unfolding of the struggle for power within Russia was the emergence to importance of a force none of them had taken into account, the body of Czechoslovak prisoners of war released by the November armistice from captivity in the Ukraine. In April they began to make their way out of Russia to join the armies of the Allies in the Western Front. The Ukraine in 1918 was full of prisoners of war, German as well as Austro-Hungarian, but, while the Germans awaited liberation at the hands of the advancing German army, the two largest Austro-Hungarian contingents, Poles and Czechs, were determined not to be repatriated. Their hopes were that, by changing sides, they might advance the liberation of their homelands from imperial rule. The Poles made the mistake of throwing in their lot with the separatist Ukrainians and were overwhelmed in February by the Germans when the Rada, the Ukrainian nationalist committee, sign
ed its own peace at Brest-Litovsk. The cannier Czechs put no trust in the Rada, insisted on being allowed to leave Russia for France via the Trans-Siberian Railway, secured Bolshevik agreement to their demand in March and by May were on their way.43 Their journey pleased neither the British, who had hoped the Czechs would go north to assist in the defence of Murmansk, nor the French, who wanted the Czechs to remain in the Ukraine and fight the Germans. The Czechs, who were in direct contact with the foreign-based leaders of their provisional government, Masaryk and Benes, were adamant. Their objective was the Pacific terminal of the Trans-Siberian at Vladivostok, from which they expected to take ship to France. They intended that nothing should interrupt their transit.

  It was nevertheless interrupted on 14 May 1918 when, at Cheliabinsk in western Siberia, an altercation broke out between the eastward-bound Czechs and some Hungarian prisoners being returned westward to the Habsburg army.44 Two patriotisms were involved: that of the Czechs for an independent Czechoslovakia, that of the Hungarians for their privileged place in the Habsburg system. A Czech was wounded, his Hungarian assailant was lynched and, when the local Bolsheviks intervened to restore order, the Czechs rose in arms to put them down and assert their right to use the Trans-Siberian Railway for their exclusive purposes. As they numbered 40,000, strung out in organised units along the whole length of the railway from the Volga to Vladivostok, suspected correctly that the Bolsheviks desired to disarm them and dismember their organisation, and were under the influence of an aggressively anti-Bolshevik officer, Rudolph Gajda, they were both in a position and soon in a mood to deny the use of the railway to anyone else.45 The loss of the Trans-Siberian was a serious setback to the Bolsheviks, since their seizure and retention of power was railway-based. Worse was to follow. The Czechs, originally neutral between the Bolsheviks and their Russian enemies, embarked on a series of sharp local operations eastward along the railway which had the indirect effect of overturning Soviet power in Siberia; “by midsummer 1918, both Siberia and the Urals [territorially the greater area of Russia] had been lost to the Bolsheviks.”46

  Meanwhile the Western Allies, committed as they were to the extraction of the Czech Corps for service on the Western Front, began to channel direct aid, in the form of money and weapons as well as encouragement, to the Czechs, who found a sudden enthusiasm not to leave Russia before they had dealt the Bolsheviks a death blow. At the same time, the Russian anti-Bolsheviks, including both the forces of a self-proclaimed Supreme Ruler, Admiral Kolchak, in Siberia and the original standard-bearers of revolt in South Russia, the Volunteer Army of Denikin, as well as the Don and Kuban Cossack Hosts, were heartened by the Czech success to return to the fray with renewed confidence. The apparent commonality of cause between them and the Czechs thus came to qualify them for Allied support also. It had not at the outset been the Allies’ intention to make the Bolsheviks their enemies and there were good reasons for their not doing so, the Bolsheviks’ genuine hostility to the Germans, Austrians and Turks, all established as conquerors and predators on historic Russian territory foremost among them. By the late summer of 1918, nevertheless, the Allies found themselves effectively at war with the Bolshevik government in Moscow, supporting counter-revolution in the south and in Siberia, and sustaining intervention forces of their own, British in North Russia, French in the Ukraine, Japanese and American on the Pacific Coast.

  A war entirely subsidiary to the Great War ensued. In North Russia a mixed French-British-American force, under the command of the formidable and physically gigantic British General Ironside—a future Chief of the Imperial General Staff and alleged model for the fictional Richard Hannay of John Buchan’s enormously popular adventure stories—made common cause with the local anti-Bolshevik Social Revolutionaries and pushed out a defensive perimeter 200 miles to the south of the White Sea; at Tulgas on the River Dvina, it sat out the winter of 1918–19, while the Bolsheviks organised forces against it.47 Ironside meanwhile raised a local force of British-officered Russian troops, the Slavo-British Legion, received an Italian reinforcement, accepted the assistance of a Finnish contingent principally interested in annexing Russian territory, an aim from which it had to be deflected, and co-operated generally with the commanders of the British intervention forces in the Baltic. These included military missions to the Baltic-German militias in Latvia and Estonia—the most soldierly men he ever commanded, the future Field Marshal Alexander would say—and to the armies of the emergent states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as Rear Admiral Sir Walter Cowan’s Baltic naval force.48 Cowan’s torpedo boats would, in the summer of 1919, sink two Russian battleships in Kronstadt harbour, the most important units of what remained of the new Soviet state’s navy.49 Meanwhile, in December 1918, the French landed troops in the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Sevastopol, units which included Greek and Polish contingents, attempted to raise local legions of Russians under French officers, established quarrelsome relations with the White forces and fell to fighting, unsuccessfully, against the Reds.50 In the Far East both Japanese and American troops were landed at Vladivostok in August 1918, to consolidate a bridgehead for the evacuation of the Czech corps. A French supreme commander, Janin, next arrived to oversee operations, while the British unshipped large quantities of military stores to supply Admiral Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik army. The Japanese advanced towards Lake Baikal, the Americans stayed put. Both contingents eventually left for home, while the Czechs, whom they had been sent to assist, finally struggled out of Russia in September 1920.51 Allied intervention in the Russian Far East achieved nothing but the confirmation in Soviet eyes of the West’s fundamentally anti-Bolshevik policy.

  The reality of its policy was entirely contrary. On 22 July 1918, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, told the War Cabinet that it was “ ‘none of Britain’s business what sort of government the Russians set up: a republic, a Bolshevik state or a monarchy.’ The indications are that President Wilson shared this view.”52 It was a view that the French for a time shared also; until April, the dominant party in the French General Staff opposed offering support to the anti-Bolsheviks, the “so-called patriotic groups,” on the grounds that they favoured the German forces of occupation for class reasons, while the Bolsheviks, who had been “duped by the Central Powers and [were now] perhaps aware of past errors,” at least promised to continue the struggle.53 France would later repudiate that position, to become the most sternly anti-Bolshevik of all the Allied powers. During the spring of 1918, however, it shared British and American hopes that the Bolsheviks could be used to reconstitute an Eastern Front on which military action would relieve the pressure in the west that threatened Allied defeat. That they also looked to the Czechs to reopen an Eastern offensive, and allowed themselves to be drawn progressively and piecemeal into complicity with the Whites, confuses an issue which Lenin and Stalin were later to represent in terms of outright Allied hostility to the Revolution from the start. In truth, the Allies, desperate for any diversion of German effort from their climactic offensive in France, did not become committedly anti-Bolshevik until the mid-summer of 1918 and then because the signs indicated, correctly, that the Bolsheviks had strayed from their own initially anti-German policy towards one of accepting German indulgence of their survival.

  Until mid-summer the Germans, just as much as the Allies, had been puzzled to know how best to choose between Russia’s warring parties for their own advantage. The army, which feared Red infection at home and the front, wanted the Bolsheviks “liquidated.”54 The Foreign Office, by contrast, though sharing the army’s desire to keep Russia weak, and eventually to dismember it, argued that it was the Bolsheviks who had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, that the “patriotic groups” rejected it and that it was in Germany’s interest, therefore, to support the former at the expense of the latter. On 28 June the Kaiser, required to opt between pro- and anti-Bolshevik policies, accepted a Foreign Office recommendation that the Bolshevik government be assured that neither the German f
orces in the Baltic States nor their Finnish allies would move against Petrograd, which they were in a position to capture with ease, an assurance that permitted Lenin and Trotsky to transfer their only effective military formation, the Latvian Rifles, along the western stretch of the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Urals. There, at Kazan, at the end of July, they attacked the Czech Legion, and so began a counter-offensive that eventually unblocked the railway, pushed the Czechs eastward towards Vladivostok and brought supplies and reinforcements to the Red Armies fighting Kolchak’s and Denikin’s Whites in South Russia and Siberia.55 The counter-offensive was to result in a Bolshevik victory in the civil war, a victory brought about not despite the Allies’ eventual commitment to the Bolsheviks’ enemies but because of Germany’s positive decision to let Bolshevism survive.

  THE CRISIS OF WAR IN THE WEST

  While ignorant armies clashed at large over the vast spaces of the east, the garrisons of the narrow ground of the Western Front pressed closer for battle. The collapse of the Tsar’s armies had re-created the strategic situation on which Schlieffen had predicated his plan for lightning victory over France: a strategic interval in which there would be no threat from Russia, leaving Germany free to bring a numerical superiority to bear on the axis of advance that led to Paris. The superiority was considerable. Having left forty second-rate infantry and three cavalry divisions in the east, to garrison the enormous territories conceded by the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, Ludendorff could deploy 192 divisions in the west, against 178 Allied.56 They included most of the original élite of the army, the Guards, Jägers, Prussians, Swabians and the best of the Bavarians. The XIV Corps, for example, consisted of the 4th Guard Division, the 25th Division, composed of bodyguard regiments of small princely states, the 1st Division, from Prussia, and a wartime division, the 228th Reserve, formed of regiments from Brandenburg and the Prussian heartland.57 All, by the fourth year of the war, contained a high proportion of replacements, and replacements of replacements, among their personnel; some infantry regiments had suffered over a hundred per cent casualties, with individuals alone representing the cadres which had marched to war in 1914. As formations, nevertheless, they retained their esprit de corps, reinforced by the long string of victories won in the east. Only in the west had the German armies not yet overthrown the enemies they had faced; and, in the spring of 1918, the Kaiser’s soldiers had been promised that the coming offensives would complete the record of triumph.