by Adam Tooze
Though permanent constitutional change awaited the Constituent Assembly, there was an overwhelming and immediate consensus about certain features of the new order. Freedom was the watchword of the revolution. The death penalty was abolished. All restrictions on assembly and free speech were lifted. The civil equality of Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities was proclaimed. Feminist demonstrators loudly and successfully demanded that women, as well as men, must elect the Constituent Assembly. Order number one of the Petrograd Soviet granted to the rank and file of the Russian Army the same catalogue of rights now enjoyed by other citizens. Brutal corporal punishment was outlawed. Even desertion was no longer punishable by death. Soldiers were granted the full freedom of political discussion and organization. In a breath-taking reversal, Russia, formerly the autocratic bugbear of Europe, was remaking itself as the freest, most democratic country on earth.3 The question was: What implications did this great victory for democracy have for the war?
I
To men like Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State, this was the moment of truth.4 Since 1916 he had been the most influential advocate within the administration of the cause of the Entente. Britain and France’s reliance on the armies of the Tsarist autocracy had been the biggest obstacle to his championing of the cause of the ‘democratic Entente’. Now, as Lansing put it to his cabinet colleagues, ‘the revolution in Russia . . . had removed the one objection to affirming that the European war was a war between democracy and absolutism’.5 And in his declaration of war, Wilson himself welcomed the ‘wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia’. The foreign autocracy that had ruled Russia had been ‘shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world . . .’6 London and Paris were swept with enthusiasm for a democratic Russia. Georges Clemenceau shared Lansing’s excitement about the prospects for a transatlantic democratic coalition. In the spring of 1917 he welcomed the coincidence of America’s declaration of war and the overthrow of the Tsar in terms that were nothing short of ecstatic: ‘the supreme interest of the general ideas with which President Wilson sought to justify his actions’, in declaring war, ‘is that the Russian Revolution and the American Revolution complement each other in a miraculous way, in defining once and for all the moral stakes in the conflict. All the great peoples of democracy . . . have taken that place in the battle that was destined for them. They work for the triumph not of one alone, but of all.’7 Russia’s democratic revolution would re-energize the war effort, not end it.
And these hopes were not entirely misplaced. In the spring of 1917 the Russian revolution was first and foremost a patriotic event. Of all the scurrilous rumours spread about the Tsar and Tsarina, by far the most damaging were those alleging treacherous contacts with their cousins in Germany. How else was one to explain the Tsar’s obstinate refusal to embrace the uplifting spirit of reform and mobilization that had swept Russian liberals and even many Russian socialists to his side in August 1914? On the Northern Front Russia’s armies had suffered heavy defeats at the hands of the Germans. But not everything had gone wrong in Russia’s war. In 1915 its armies had thrashed the Turks. In the summer of 1916 General Brusilov’s devastating offensive had crippled the Austrians and tipped Romania onto the side of the Entente. It was the failure to make good those victories that turned draft riots, agrarian protest and strikes into a political revolution. With the Tsar out of the way, there could be no talk of surrender. Anyone who insulted the revolutionary patriotism of the great, grey-coated mass of peasant soldiers, who dominated every assembly in Petrograd, ran the risk of lynching.8 Revolutionary honour and the sacrifice of millions of dead were at stake. Furthermore the strategists in the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet had to consider the wider consequences. If Russia entered into separate negotiations with Imperial Germany, the Allies would surely retaliate by cutting off the flow of credit from London, Paris and New York. A peace in the East would allow the Germans to concentrate all their forces on winning a crushing victory in the West. Then they would turn back against Russia.
But if capitulation was not an option, nor could the revolution continue the Tsar’s war. The men who dominated the early phase of the revolution – figures such as Alexander Kerensky, the Labourite social democrat shuttling between the Provisional Government and the Soviet, or Irakli Tsereteli, the charismatic Georgian Menshevik internationalist who led foreign policy discussion in the Petrograd Soviet – had no desire to continue the war for the conquest of imperialist objectives such as the Dardanelles. What the revolution needed was a peace with honour, a peace without defeat. Furthermore, if this was not to be a separate peace Kerensky and Tsereteli needed to bring the rest of the Entente along. Russia’s democratic revolutionaries thus faced precisely the dilemma that Wilson had been struggling with only a few weeks earlier – how to end the war in a way that would offer no encouragement to triumphalism but inflict no stinging defeat on either side. Furthermore, Russia’s revolutionaries were aware of this parallel. Though it had been directed primarily to London and Paris, the significance of Wilson’s challenge to the Entente over the winter of 1916–17 had not been lost on the Russians. As stated by Nikolai Sukhanov, one of Tsereteli’s Menshevik colleagues in the Soviet, the first demand of the Soviet in 1917 should be to revoke the belligerent answer that the Entente had given to Wilson’s Peace Note of December 1916.9 On 4 April, the day the US Senate voted for war with Germany, the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet laid down a peace formula with three key demands: self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities. The Russian Army would remain in the field until assured of a peace on those terms, a peace without selfish victory, but a peace that would bring honour to the revolution precisely by denouncing the Tsar and by placing Russia at the forefront of world ‘democracy’.
Within days the ‘Petrograd formula’ had been adopted by the Provisional Government. In May its pro-Entente Foreign Minister, the liberal Pavel Miliukov, was removed at the behest of the Soviet, for his adherence to traditional, ‘annexationist’ war aims.10 The Soviet’s policy of ‘revolutionary defensism’ was one not of dogmatic socialist dictatorship but of compromise. Defence of the revolution was a posture around which Kerensky and Tsereteli hoped to rally all the ‘live forces’ in Russian politics: Marxists, agrarian Social Revolutionaries and liberals. The Bolsheviks barely figured in the discussion. Lenin was waiting in exile for his transport to be organized by the Kaiser’s secret service. The Bolsheviks on the spot were an undistinguished group who were tempted to fall in with the Soviet majority. Lenin did not return to Petrograd until the night of 16 April, when in his famous ‘April theses’ he immediately announced his hostility to any agreement between the revolutionary Soviet and the inherited authority of the Provisional Government.11 Any compromise was a betrayal of the revolution.
Over the coming year Lenin was to do his violent best to ensure that Tsereteli and Kerensky were swept into the dustbin of history. But their position should be taken seriously. Revolutionary defensism was a patriotic strategy. Democratic Russia would not surrender to Imperial Germany. But Lenin’s opprobrium notwithstanding, it was revolutionary too. To advocate peace in the spring of 1917 was not to advocate the pre-war status quo, but to call for the political transformation of Europe. It was the Petrograd Soviet that loudly proclaimed what had been left tacit in Wilson’s Senate address. Given the sacrifices already made by all sides by 1917, a ‘peace without victory’ could only be contemplated by a government willing to break with the past. It implied the utter futility of the most costly war in history. It required governments willing to dissociate themselves, like Wilson, from the question of war guilt and to criticize imperialism on all sides. Only such a government could accept a peace without victory as something other than a humiliation. It was precisely for that reason that the political class of Britai
n and France had so doggedly resisted Wilson’s call. They could not accept his moral equivocation. They understood that they had no place in his vision of the political future. Ill-timed German aggression had tipped Wilson onto their side. But if the Russian revolution had started a few months earlier, if Germany had postponed its decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare until the spring, or if Wilson had been able to stay out of the war until May, what might have been the result? Could the war have continued? Might democracy in Russia have been saved? As the departing German ambassador to Washington Count Bernstorff noted in agonized retrospect: If Germany over the winter of 1916–17 had ‘accepted Wilson’s mediation, the whole of American influence in Russia would have been exercised in favour of peace, and not, as events ultimately proved, against’ Germany. ‘Out of Wilson’s and Kerensky’s Peace programme’, Germany could surely have rescued a peace offering all that ‘we regarded as necessary’.12 It is these unfathomable counterfactuals that give such vast significance to the near coincidence between the Russian revolution and the American entry into the war. But even with Wilson on the side of the Entente, the Russian revolution sent shockwaves through both sides. It came close over the summer of 1917 to bringing the war to an end with something like a ‘peace without victory’.13 It was a bitter irony that it was America’s entry into the war that did more than anything else to put paid to that possibility. The consequences for Europe and for Russia in particular would be momentous.
II
After the terrible third winter of the war, the energy that had carried the combatants through 1916 was ebbing away. On the Eastern Front there had been no serious fighting since the overthrow of the Tsar. Whilst they waited to see whether a separate peace could be arranged with the revolutionary government, the Germans held off from any offensive. Within Germany, the Russian revolution had shaken popular resolve to continue the struggle. Defending Germany against the aggression of autocratic Tsarism had been the main motive for the Social Democratic Party to support the war. With the Russian revolutionaries renouncing any annexationist intentions, that was now thrown into doubt. On 8 April 1917 at the insistence of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who was desperate to hold the SPD behind his government, the Kaiser issued his Easter proclamation, promising immediate constitutional reform in Prussia at the end of the war. One-man-one-vote would replace the three-tier-class voting system that had hitherto excluded the left from the Prussian state parliament that controlled two-thirds of Germany. But it was too little too late. In mid-April 1917 the SPD, the great mother-ship of European socialism, split.14 The more radical left wing gathered within the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), demanding an immediate peace on the terms now being offered by the revolutionary Soviet in Petrograd, a resolution enthusiastically endorsed by 300,000 striking workers in the great industrial centres of Berlin and Leipzig. The Majority SPD (MSPD) continued to give their support to the national war effort, but they insisted more urgently than ever that it must remain a defensive struggle. Through neutrals and with the indulgence of the Reich government they took the lead in opening negotiations with their socialist comrades in Russia.
These tremors within the political fabric of the Central Powers were all the more significant because they coincided with the spectacular failure of the Entente’s latest bid for military victory. On 18 April 1917, after softening up operations by the British, the French Army once more crashed into the German line. But despite the optimism radiated by their youthful new commander General Nivelle, the attack failed. The German lines held and French morale drained away. On 4 May the first units in the French Army refused orders. Within days, mutiny had spread to dozens of divisions. Whilst the ruthless General Pétain struggled to restore order, the French Army was paralysed. Paris did its best to cover up the crisis and there was no corresponding reaction in the British trenches. But by May 1917 a wave of discontent had engulfed the British Isles. In the House of Commons 32 Liberal and Labour MPs voted demonstratively in favour of a motion calling for peace on the basis of the Petrograd formula.15 Meanwhile, industrial districts of Britain were wracked by what was by far the most serious bout of industrial unrest seen since the start of the war.16 Hundreds of thousands of skilled engineering workers ignored the instructions of the official trade unions and laid down their tools. In early June, Lloyd George, rather than celebrating the prospect of a great democratic crusade, was scaring the cabinet with talk of a British Soviet. Fearful of a popular backlash, the House of Windsor let it be known that the homeless Romanovs were not welcome at Buckingham Palace. As George V confided to a confidant, there was too much ‘democracy in the air’.17
The mounting sense of paralysis gripping the Entente was heightened by the impact of the U-boat blockade. Between February and June 1917 the Germans sank over 2.9 million tons of shipping. To maintain its own imports, Britain cut back the allocation of tonnage to Italy and France. Struggling to contain the collapse in morale, Paris was forced to prioritize food imports over the needs of armaments production.18 In Italy, which was even more dependent on foreign supplies, the situation was truly critical. By the early summer of 1917 Italian coal deliveries were running at half the required level.19 On 22 August 1917 food stocks had reached such a low ebb in Turin, the heart of Italy’s war economy, that shops were closed for all but a few hours per day. Whilst strikers closed the railway network, crowds led by anarcho-syndicalist agitators looted, attacked police stations, and torched two churches. The army cordoned off the city. Eight hundred rioters were arrested and an uneasy calm was restored, but not before 50 workers and 3 soldiers had been killed.
However, despite the impact they were having on the Entente, as far as Berlin was concerned, the U-boats were a deep disappointment. In January 1917 the navy had promised that Britain would be starving before the year was out. By the summer it was clear that despite the losses they were inflicting, Germany simply did not have enough submarines to overcome the merchant fleet that the Entente was able to mobilize from every corner of the earth. The dawning realization of this defeat completed the profound political reorientation in Germany. With both wings of the SPD now more vociferous than ever in their calls for peace, in early July 1917 they were joined by spokesmen both for the populist wing of the Catholic Centre Party and the progressive Liberals. The outlines of this coalition had been visible since the 1912 Reichstag election, when the three parties that had once been the antagonists of Bismarck gained almost two-thirds of the popular vote. The Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and progressive Liberals now formed a standing committee to press their demands for democratization at home and a negotiated, non-annexationist peace.20 On 6 July the Reichstag majority found its voice when Matthias Erzberger, the leading spokesman of the left wing of the Centre Party, who in 1914 had been amongst the most boisterous advocates of expansive war aims, made a dramatic call for Germany to face the consequences of the failure of the U-boat campaign. Germany must seek a negotiated peace.21 Bethmann Hollweg scrambled to contain the crisis by extracting from the Kaiser another promise of democratization in Prussia after the war. But it was not enough. The Chancellor had failed to resist the disastrous escalation of the U-boat war and must now pay the political price. He was dismissed and on 19 July the Reichstag voted by a large majority to approve a peace note. This called for a ‘peace of understanding’ and the ‘permanent reconciliation of peoples’, which could not be based on ‘forced territorial acquisition’ or ‘political, economic or financial oppression’. They called for a new and equitable international order based on the liberal principles of free trade, the freedom of the seas, and the establishment of an ‘international judicial organization’. Though the Reichstag majority avoided any direct echo of either Petrograd’s or Wilson’s language, there was no mistaking their general concordance. The Russians, Erzberger hoped, would be won over ‘in a matter of weeks’.22
Peace without victory was no longer merely a slogan or wishful thinking. Given the exhaustion of
all the European combatants, by the summer of 1917 it seemed increasingly a fact. And in early May the Russian revolutionaries looked poised to take advantage. The Provisional Government had been recognized by the United States and the Entente. Given the huge sacrifices it had made, Russia as a loyal member of the alliance was within its rights to ask for the question of war aims to be reopened. Meanwhile, the Petrograd Soviet, as an unofficial body, was free to pursue a parallel campaign of international solidarity and peace propaganda. Pressure from within the Entente itself, both from above and below, would achieve what Wilson could not. It would force London and Paris to negotiate, allowing Russia to escape the choice between an odious separate peace and fighting the war to an imperialist finish. In April 1917 British and French delegations, headed by leading figures in their respective Labour and Socialist parties, travelled to Petrograd charged by their governments with the mission of convincing the Russians to stay in the war. They found the revolutionary defensists set firmly against a separate peace with Germany, but insistent that the Entente must reconsider its war aims. Both Arthur Henderson and Albert Thomas, leading pro-war socialists in Britain and France respectively, were deeply concerned about the possible derailment of the democratic revolution in Russia. In the hope of warding off the Bolsheviks, they agreed to persuade their comrades at home to attend the international socialist conference that Petrograd had called to meet in Stockholm on 1 July.23 The French Socialists duly withdrew their ministers from the French cabinet. But, after General Pétain had restored order to the Western Front by court-martialling several thousand French mutineers, Paris was not about to risk further pacifist contamination. The passports of the French Socialists were summarily cancelled and Lloyd George’s government promptly followed suit. The effect was to split the British labour movement, between the pro-war majority and a vocal oppositional minority that now stretched beyond the ranks of the Independent Labour Party.
