History Summery

CHAPTER ONE

The Age of Total War

Lines of grey muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, Flounders in mud. 0 Jesus, make it stop!

- Siegfried Sassoon ( 1947, p. 71)

It may be thought better, in view of the allegations of 'barbarity' of air attacks, to preserve appearances by formulating milder rules and by still nominally confining bombardment to targets which are strictly military in character . . . to avoid emphasizing the truth that air warfare has made such restrictions obsolete and impossible. It may be some time until another war occurs and meanwhile the public may become educated as to the meaning of air power.

- Rules as to Bombardment by Aircraft, 192 1 (Townshend, 1986, p. 161)

(Sarajevo, 1946.) Here as in Belgrade, I see in the streets a consider­ able number of young women whose hair is greying, or completely grey. Their faces are tormented, but still young, while the form of their bodies betrays their youth even more clearly. It seems to me that I see how the hand of this last war has passed over the heads of these frail beings . . .

This sight cannot be preserved for the future; these heads will soon become even greyer and disappear. That is a pity. Nothing could speak more clearly to future generations about our times than these youthful grey heads, from which the nonchalance of youth has been stolen.

Let them at least have a memorial in this little note.

- Signs by the Roadside (Andric, 1992, p. 50)

22 The Age of Catastrophe

I

'The lamps are going out all over Europe,' said Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, as he watched the lights of Whitehall on the night when Britain and Germany went to war in 1914. 'We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' In Vienna the great satirist Karl Kraus prepared to document and denounce that war in an extraordinary reportage-drama of 792 pages to which he gave the title The Last Days of Humanity. Both saw the world war as the end of a world, and they were not alone. It was not the end of humanity, although there were moments, in the course of the thirty-one years of world conflict between the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 and the uncondi­ tional surrender of Japan on 14 August 1945 - four days after the explosion of the first nuclear bomb - when the end of a considerable proportion of the human race did not look far off. There were surely times when the god or gods, whom pious humans believed to have created the world and all in it, might have been expected to regret having done so.

Mankind survived. Nevertheless, the great edifice of nineteenth­ century civilization crumpled in the flames of world war, as its pillars collapsed. There is no understanding the Short Twentieth Century without it. It was marked by war. It lived and thought in terms of world war, even when the guns were silent and the bombs were not exploding. Its history and, more specifically, the history of its initial age of break­ down and catastrophe, must begin with that of the thirty-one years' world war.

For those who had grown up before 1914 the contrast was so dramatic that many of them - including the generation of this historian's parents, or, at any rate, its central European members, refused to see any continuity with the past. 'Peace' meant 'before 1914': after that came something that no longer deserved the name. This was understandable. In 1914 there had been no major war for a century, that is to say, a war in which all, or even a majority of, major powers had been involved, the major players in the international game at that time being the six European 'great powers' (Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Prus­ sia - after 1871 enlarged into Germany - and, after it was unified, Italy), the USA and Japan. There had been only one brief war in which more than two of the major powers had been in battle, the Crimean War (1854-56) between Russian on one side, Britain and France on the other. Moreover, most wars involving major powers at all had been compara­ tively quick. Much the longest of them was not an international conflict

The Age of Total War 23

but a civil war within the USA (1861-65). The length of war was measured in months or even (like the 1866 war between Prussia and Austria) in weeks. Between 187 1 and 1914 there had been no wars in Europe at all in which the armies of major powers crossed any hostile frontier, although in the Far East Japan fought, and beat, Russia in 1904-5, thus hastening the Russian revolution.

There had been no world wars at all. In the eighteenth century France and Britain had contended in a series of wars whose battlefields ranged from India through Europe to North America, and across the world's oceans. Between 1815 and 1914 no major power fought another outside its immediate region, although aggressive expeditions of imperial or would-be imperial powers against weaker overseas enemies were, of course, common. Most of these were spectacularly one-sided fights, such as the US wars against Mexico ( 1 846-48) and Spain ( 1 898) and the various campaigns to extend the British and French colonial empires, although the worm turned once or twice, as when the French had to withdraw from Mexico in the 1860s, the Italians from Ethiopia in 1896. Even the most formidable opponents of modern states, their arsenals increasingly filled with an overwhelmingly superior technology of death, could only hope, at best, to postpone the inevitable retreat. Such exotic conflicts were the stuff of adventure literature or the reports of that mid­ nineteenth-century innovation the war correspondent, rather than matters of direct relevance to most inhabitants of the states which waged and won them.

All this changed in 19 14. The First World War involved all major powers and indeed all European states except Spain, the Netherlands, the three Scandinavian countries and Switzerland. What is more, troops from the world overseas were, often for the first time, sent to fight and work outside their own regions. Canadians fought in France, Australians and New Zealanders forged their national consciousness on a peninsula in the Aegean - 'Gallipoli' became their national myth - and, more significantly, the United States rejected George Washington's warning against 'Euro­ pean entanglements' and sent its men to fight there, thus determining the shape of twentieth-century history. Indians were sent to Europe and the Middle East, Chinese labour battalions came to the West, Africans fought in the French army. Though military action outside Europe was not very significant, except in the Middle East, the naval war was once again global: its first battle was fought in 1914 off the Falkland Islands, its decisive campaigns, by German submarines and Allied convoys, on and under the seas of the North and mid-Atlantic.

That the Second World War was literally global hardly needs to be

24 The Age ofCatastrophe

demonstrated. Virtually all independent states of the world were involved, willingly or unwillingly, although the republics of Latin America partici­ pated only in the most nominal manner. The colonies of imperial powers had no choice in the matter. Except for the future Irish Republic, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Turkey and Spain in Europe, and possi­ bly Afghanistan outside Europe, virtually the whole globe was belligerent or occupied or both. As for the battlefields, the names of Melanesian islands and of settlements in the North African deserts, in Burma and the Philippines became as familiar to newspaper readers and radio listeners - and this was quintessentially the war of the radio news bulletins - as the names of Arctic and Caucasian battles, of Normandy, Stalingrad and Kursk. The Second World War was a lesson in world geography.

Local, regional or global, the wars of the twentieth century were to be on an altogether vaster scale than anything previously experienced. Among seventy-four international wars between 1816 and 1965, which American specialists, who like to do that kind of thing, have ranked by the number of people they killed, the top four occurred in the twentieth century: the two world wars, the Japanese war against China in 1937-39, and the Korean war. They killed upwards of one million persons in battle. The largest documented international war of the post-Napoleonic nineteenth century, that between Prussia/Germany and France in 1870-- 71 , killed perhaps 1 50,000, an order of magnitude roughly comparable to the deaths in the Chaco war of 1932-35 between Bolivia (pop. c. 3 million) and Paraguay (pop. c. 1 .4 million). In short, 1914 opens the age of massacre (Singer, 1972, pp. 66, 131).

There is not space in this book to discuss the origins of the First World War, which the present author has tried to sketch in The Age of Empire. It began as an essentially European war between the triple alliance of France, Britain and Russia on one side, the so-called 'central powers' of Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other, Serbia and Belgium being immediately drawn in by the Austrian attack on one (which actually set off the war) and the German attack on the other (which was part of the German strategic war plan). Turkey and Bulgaria soon joined the central powers, while on the other side the Triple Alliance gradually built up into a very large coalition. Italy was bribed in; Greece, Rumania and (much more nominally) Portugal were also in­ volved. More to the point, Japan joined in almost immediately in order to take over German positions in the Far East and Western Pacific, but took no interest in anything outside its own region, and - more significantly - the USA entered in 1917. In fact, its intervention was to be decisive.

The Age of Total War 25

The Germans, then as in the Second World War, were faced with a possible war on two fronts, quite apart from the Balkans into which they were drawn by their alliance with Austria-Hungary. (However, since three of the four Central Powers were in that region - Turkey and Bulgaria as well as Austria - the strategic problem there was not so urgent.) The German plan was to knock out France quickly in the West and then move with equal rapidity to knock out Russia in the East, before the Tsar's empire could bring the full weight of its enormous military manpower into effective action. Then, as later, Germany planned for a lightning campaign (what would in the Second World War be called a blitzkrieg) because it had to. The plan almost succeeded, but not quite. The German army advanced into France, among other places through neutral Belgium, and was only halted a few dozen miles east of Paris on the river Marne five to six weeks after war had been declared. (In 1940 the plan was to succeed.) They then withdraw a little, and both sides - the French now supplemented by what remained of the Belgians and by a British land force which was soon to grow enormously - improvised parallel lines of defensive trenches and fortifications which soon stretched without a break from the Channel coast in Flanders to the Swiss frontier, leaving a good deal of eastern France and Belgium in German occupation. They did not shift significantly for the next three­ and-a-half years.

This was the 'Western Front', which became a machine for massacre such as had probably never before been seen in the history of warfare. Millions of men faced each other across the sandbagged parapets of the trenches under which they lived like, and with, rats and lice. From time to time their generals would seek to break out of the deadlock. Days, even weeks of unceasing artillery bombardment - what a German writer later called 'hurricanes of steel' (Ernst Junger, 1921) - were to 'soften up' the enemy and drive him underground, until at the right moment waves of men climbed over the parapet, usually protected by coils and webs of barbed wire, into 'no-man's land', a chaos of waterlogged shell-craters, ruined tree-stumps, mud and abandoned corpses, to advance into the machine-guns that mowed them down. As they knew they would. The attempt of the Germans to break through at Verdun in 1916 (February­ July) was a battle of two millions, with one million casualties. It failed. The British offensive on the Somme, designed to force the Germans to break off the Verdun offensive cost Britain 420,000 dead - 60,000 on the first day of the attack. It is not surprising that in the memory of the British and the French, .who fought most of the First World War on the western front, it remained the 'Great War', more terrible and traumatic

26 The Age of Catastrophe

in memory than the Second World War. The French lost almost 20 per cent of their men of military age, and if we include the prisoners of war, the wounded and the permanently disabled and disfigured - those 'gueules cassis' ('smashed faces') which became so vivid a part of the after-image of the war - not much more than one in three French soliders came through the war without harm. The chances of the five million or so British soldiers surviving the war unharmed were just about evens. The British lost a generation - half a million men under the age of thirty (Winter, 1 986 p. 83) - notably among their upper classes, whose young men, destined as gentlemen to be officers who set an example, marched into battle at the head of their men and were consequently mown down first. One quarter of the Oxford and Cambridge students under the age of twenty-five who served in the British army in 1914 were killed (Winter, 1986, p. 98). The Germans, though the number of their dead was even greater than the French, lost only a smaller proportion of their much larger military age-groups - 1 3 per cent. Even the apparently modest losses of the USA ( 1 16,000, against the 1 .6 millions of French, the almost 800,000 of British, the 1 .8 millions of Germans) actually demonstrate the murderous nature of the Western front, the only one where they fought. For while the USA lost between 2.5 and 3 times as many in the Second World War as in the First, the Amercian forces in 19 17-18 were in action for barely a year-and-a-half, compared to the three-and-a-half years of the Second World War, and on only a single narrow sector and not world-wide.

The horrors of warfare on the Western Front were to have even darker consequences. The experience itself naturally helped to brutalize both warfare and politics: if one could be conducted without counting the human or any other costs, why not the other? Most men who served in the First World War - overwhelmingly as conscripts - came out of it as convinced haters of war. However, those ex-soldiers who had passed through this kind of war without being turned against it sometimes drew from the shared experience of living with death and courage a sense of incommunicable and savage superiority, not least to women and those who had not fought, which was to fill the early ranks of the post-war ultra-right. Adolf Hitler was only one of such men for whom having been a frontsoldat was the formative experience of their lives. However, the opposite reaction had equally negative consequences. Mter the war it became quite evident to politicians, at least in democratic countries, that bloodbaths like 19 14-18 would no longer be tolerated by the voters. The post-1918 strategy of Britain and France, like the post-Vietnam strategy of the USA, was based on this assumption. In the short run this helped

The Age of Total War 27

the Germans to win the Second World War in the West in 1940 against a France committed to crouch behind its incomplete fortifications and, once these had been breached, simply unwilling to fight on; and a Britain desperate to avoid committing itself to the sort of massive land war that had decimated its people in 1914-18. In the longer run democratic governments failed to resist the temptation of saving their own citizens' , lives by treating those of enemy countries as totally expendable. The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was not justified as indispensable for victory, which was by then absolutely certain, but as a means of saving American soldiers' lives. But perhaps the thought that it would prevent America's ally the USSR from establishing a claim to a major part in Japan's defeat was not absent from the minds of the US government either.

While the Western Front settled into bloody stalemate, the Eastern Front remained in movement. The Germans pulverised a clumsy Russian invasion force at the battle of Tannen berg in the first month of war and thereafter, with the intermittently effective help of the Austrians, pushed Russia out of Poland. In spite of occasional Russian counter-offensives, it was clear that the Central Powers had the upper hand, and Russia was fighting a defensive rearguard action against the German advance. In the Balkans the Central powers were in control, in spite of an uneven military performance by the rocky Habsburg empire. The local belligerents, Serbia and Rumania, incidentally, suffered by far the greatest proportional military losses. The Allies, in spite of occupying Greece, made no headway until the collapse of the Central Powers after the summer of 1918. The plan by Italy to open another front against Austria-Hungary in the Alps failed, mainly because many Italian soldiers saw no reason to fight for the government of a state they did not consider theirs, and whose language few of them could speak. After a major military debacle at Caporetto in 1917, which left a literary memory in Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, the Italians had even to be stiffened by transfers from other Allied armies. Meanwhile France, Britain and Ger­ many bled each other to death on the Western Front, Russia was increasingly destabilized by the war she was patently losing, and the Austro-Hungarian empire increasingly tottered towards its break-up, which its local nationalist movements longed for, and to which the Allied foreign ministries resigned themselves without enthusiasm, rightly fore­ seeing an unstable Europe.

How to break the stalemate on the Western Front was the crucial problem for both sides, for without victory in the West neither could win the war, all the more so since the naval war was also deadlocked. Except

28 The Age of Catastrophe

for some isolated raiders, the Allies controlled the oceans, but the British and German battle-fleets faced and immobilized each other on the North Sea. Their only attempt to engage in battle ( 1916) ended indecisively, but since it confined the German fleet to its bases, on balance it was to the Allies' advantage.

Both sides tried to do it by technology. The Germans - always strong in chemistry - brought poison gas onto the battlefield, where it proved both barbarous and ineffective, leaving behind the only genuine case of government humanitarian revulsion against a means of conducting war­ fare, the Geneva Convention of 1925, by which the world pledged itself not to use chemical warfare. And indeed, though all governments contin­ ued to prepare for it and expected the enemy to use it, it was not used by either side in the Second World War though humanitarian feelings did not prevent the Italians from gassing colonial people. ( The steep decline in the values of civilization after the Second World War eventually brought poison gas back. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s Iraq, then enthusiastically supported by the Western states, used it freely against both soldiers and civilians.) The British pioneered the caterpillared armoured vehicle, still known by its then code-name of tank, but their far from impressive generals had not yet discovered how to use it. Both sides used the new and still frail airplanes, as well as (by Germany) the curious cigar-shaped helium-filled airships, experimenting with aerial bombard­ ment, fortunately not to much effect. Air warfare also came into its own, notably as a means of terrorizing civilians, in the Second World War.

The only technological weapon which had a major effect on warfare in 1914-18 was the submarine, for both sides, unable to defeat each other's soldiers, resorted to starving the other's civilians. Since all Britain's supplies were seaborne, it seemed feasible to strangle the British Isles by increasingly ruthless submarine warfare against shipping. The campaign came close to success in 1917, before effective ways to counter it were found, but it did more than anything else to draw the USA into the war. The British, in turn, did their best to blockade supplies to Germany, i.e. to starve both the German war economy and the German population. They were more effective than they ought to have been, since, as we shall see, the German war economy was not run with the efficiency and rationality on which the Germans prided themselves. Unlike the German military machine, which, in the First as in the Second World War, was strikingly superior to any other. This sheer superiority of the German army as a military force might just have proved decisive, had the Allies not been able to call on the practically unlimited resources of the USA from 1917. As it was, Germany, even hobbled by the alliance with

The Age of Total War 29

Austria, secured total victory in the East, driving Russia out of the war, into revolution and out of a large part of her European territories in 1917-18. Shortly after imposing the penal peace ofBrest-Litowsk (March 1918) the German army, now free to concentrate in the West, actually broke through the Western Front and advanced on Paris again. Thanks to the flood of American reinforcements and equipment, the Allies recovered, but for a while it looked a close thing. However, it was the last throw of an exhausted Germany, which knew itself to be close to defeat. Once the Allies began to advance in the summer of 1918, the end was only a few weeks away. The Central Powers not only admitted defeat but collapsed. Revolution swept across central and south-eastern Europe in the autumn of 1918, as it had swept across Russia in 1917 (see next chapter). No old government was left standing between the borders of France and the Sea of Japan. Even the belligerents on the victorious side were shaken, although it is difficult to believe that Britain and France would not have survived even defeat as stable political entities; but not Italy. Certainly none of the defeated countries escaped revolution.

If one of the great ministers or diplomats of the past - the ones on whom aspiring members of their countries' foreign services were still told to model themselves, a Talleyrand or a Bismarck - had risen from their graves to observe the First World War, they would certainly have wondered why sensible statemen had not decided to settle the war by some compromise before it destroyed the world of 1914. We must also wonder. Most non-revolutionary and non-ideological wars of the past had not been waged as struggles to death or total exhaustion. In 1914 ideology was certainly not what divided the belligerents, except insofar as the war had to be fought on both sides by mobilizing public opinion, i.e. by claiming some profound challenge to accepted national values, such as Russian barbarism against German culture, French and British democracy against German absolutism, or the like. Moreover there were statesmen who recommended some kind of compromise settlement even outside Russia and Austria-Hungary which lobbied their Allies in this sense with increasing desperation as defeat drew near. Why, then, was the First World War waged by the leading powers on both sides as a zero­ sum game, i.e. as a war which could only be totally won or totally lost?

The reason was that this war, unlike earlier wars, which were typically waged for limited and specifiable objects, was waged for unlimited ends. In the Age of Empire, politics and economics had fused. International political rivalry was modelled on economic growth and competition, but the characteristic feature of this was precisely that it had no limit. 'The

30 The Age of Catastrophe

"natural frontiers" of Standard Oil, the Deutsche Bank or the De Beers Diamond Corporation were at the end of the universe, or rather at the limits of their capacity to expand.' (Hobsbawm, 1987, p. 318.) More concretely, for the two main contestants, Germany and Britain, the sky had to be the limit, since Germany wanted a global political and maritime position like that now occupied by Britain, and which therefore would automatically relegate an already declining Britain to inferior status. It was either/or. For France, then as later, the stakes were less global but equally urgent: to compensate for its increasing, and apparently inevitable, demographic and economic inferiority to Germany. Here also the issue was the future of France as a great power. In both cases compromise would merely have meant postponement. Germany itself, one might have supposed, could wait until its growing size and superiority established the position German governments felt to be their country's due, which would happen sooner or later. Indeed, the dominant position of a twice defeated Germany with no claims to independent military power in Europe was more unchallenged in the early 1990s than the claims of militarist Germany ever were before 1945. Yet that is because Britain and France, as we shall see, were forced after the Second World War, however reluctantly, to accept their relegation to second-rank status, just as Federal Germany, with all its economic strength, recognized that in the post-1945 world supremacy as a single state was, and would have to remain, beyond its power. In the 1900s, at the peak of the imperial and imperialist era, both the German claim to unique global status ('The German spirit will regenerate the world', as the phrase went) and the resistance of Britain and France, still undeniable 'great powers' in a Euro-centred world, were as yet intact. On paper no doubt compromise was possible on this or that point of the almost megalomaniac 'war aims' which both sides formulated as soon as war had broken out, but in practice the only war aim that counted was total victory: what in the Second World War came to be called 'unconditional surrender'.

It was an absurd and self-defeating aim which ruined both victors and vanquished. It drove the defeated into revolution, and the victors into bankruptcy and physical exhaustion. In 1940 France was overrun by inferior German forces with ridiculous ease and speed, and accepted subordination to Hitler without hesitation, because the country had almost bled to death in 19 1 4-18. Britain was never thC? same again after 1918 because the country had ruined its economy by waging a war substantially beyond its resources. Moreover, total victory, ratified by a �nal, dictated peace, ruined what little chances there were of restoring something even faintly like a stable, liberal, bourgeois Europe, as the

The Age of Total War 3 1

economist John Maynard Keynes immediately recognized. I f Germany was not reintegrated into the European economy, i.e. if the country's economic weight within that economy was not recognized and accepted, there could be no stability. But this was the last consideration in the minds of those who had fought to eliminate Germany.

The peace-settlement, imposed by the major surviving victorious powers (USA, Britain, France, Italy) and usually, if inaccurately, known as the Treaty of Versailles,• was dominated by five considerations. The most immediate was the breakdown of so many regimes in Europe, and the emergence in Russia of an alternative revolutionary Bolshevik regime dedicated to universal subversion, and a magnet for revolutionary forces everywhere else (see chapter 2). Second, there was the need to control Germany which had, after all, almost defeated the entire Allied coalition singlehanded. For obvious reasons this was, and has ever since remained, the major concern of France. Third, the map of Europe had to be re­ divided and re-drawn, both to weaken Germany and to fill the large empty spaces left in Europe and the Middle East by the simultaneous defeat and collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The main claimants to the succession, at least in Europe, were various nationalist movements which the victors tended to encourage insofar as they were adequately anti-Bolshevik. In fact, in Europe the basic principle of re-ordering the map was to create ethnic-linguistic nation states, according to the belief that nations had the 'right to self-determination'. President Wilson of the USA, whose opinions were seen as expressing those of the power without whom the war would have been lost, was passionately committed to this belief, which was (and is) more easily held by those far from the ethnic and linguistic realities of the regions which were to be divided into neat nation-states. The attempt was a disaster, as can still be seen in the Europe of the 1 990s. The national conflicts tearing the continent apart in the 1990s were the old chickens of Versailles once again coming home to roost. t The remapping of the Middle East was

• Technically the Treaty of Versailles only made peace with Germany. Various parks and royal chateaux in the neighbourhood of Paris gave their names to the other treaties: Saint Germain, with Austria; Trianon with Hungary; Sevres with Turkey; Neuilly with Bulgaria.

t The Yugoslav civil war, the secessionist agitation in Slovakia, the secession of the Baltic states from the former USSR, the conflicts between Hungarians and Rumanians over Transylvania, the separatism of Moldova (Moldavia, formerly Bessarabia), and for that matter Transcaucasian nationalism, are among the explosive problems which either did not exist or could not have existed before 1914.

32 The Age of Catastrophe

along conventional imperialist lines - division between Britain and France - except for Palestine, where the British government, anxious for international Jewish support during the war, had incautiously and ambiguously promised to establish 'a national home' for the Jews. This was to be another problematic and unforgotten relic of the First World War.

The fourth set of considerations were those of domestic politics within the victor countries - which meant, in practice, Britain, France and the USA - and frictions between them. The most important consequence of such internal politicking was that the US Congress refused to ratify a peace settlement largely written by or for its President, and the USA consequently withdrew from it, with far-reaching results.

Finally, the victor powers desperately searched for the kind of peace settlement which would make impossible another war like the one that had just devastated the world, and whose after-effects were all around them. They failed in the most spectacular manner. Within twenty years the world was once again at war.

Making the world safe from Bolshevism and re-mapping Europe overlapped, since the most immediate way to deal with revolutionary Russia, if by any chance it survived - this was by no means certain in 1919 - was to isolate it behind a 'quarantine belt' (cordon sanitaire, in the contemporary language of diplomacy) of anti-communist states. Since the territory of these was largely or wholly carved out of the formerly Russian lands, their hostility to Moscow could be guaranteed. Going from north to south, these were: Finland, an autonomous region that had been allowed to secede by Lenin; three new little Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), for which there was no historical precedent; Poland, restored to independent statehood after 1 20 years, and an enor­ mously enlarged Rumania, its size doubled by accessions from the Hungarian and Austrian parts of the Habsburg empire and ex-Russian Bessarabia. Most of these territories had actually been detached from Russia by Germany and, but for the Bolshevik Revolution, would cer­ tainly have been returned to that state. The attempt to continue this isolation belt into the Caucasus, failed, essentially because revolutionary Russia came to terms with non-communist but revolutionary Turkey, which had no fondness for the British and French imperialists. Hence the briefly independent Armenian and Georgian states, set up after Brest Litowsk, and attempts under the British to detach oil-rich Azerbaijan, did not survive the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War of 1918-20 and the Soviet-Turkish treaty of 192 1 . In short, in the East the Allies accepted the frontiers imposed by Germany on revolutionary Russia,

The Age of Total War 33

insofar as these were not made inoperative by forces beyond their control.

This still left large parts, mainly of formerly Austro-Hungarian Europe, to be re-mapped. Austria and Hungary were reduced to German and Magyar rumps, Serbia was expanded into a large new Yugoslavia by a merger with the (formerly Austrian) Slovenia and the (formerly Hungar­ ian) Croatia, as well as with the formerly independent small tribal kingdom of herdsmen and raiders, Montenegro, a bleak mass of mountains whose inhabitants reacted to the unprecedented loss of independence by converting en masse to communism, which, they felt, appreciated the heroic virtue. It was also associated with orthodox Russia, whose faith the unconquered men of the Black Mountain had defended against the Turkish unbelievers for so many centuries. A new Czechoslovakia was also formed by joining the former industrial core of the Habsburg empire, the Czech lands, to the areas of Slovak and Ruthenian country people once belonging to Hungary. Rumania was enlarged into a multi­ national conglomerate, while Poland and Italy also benefited. There was absolutely no historical precedent for or logic in the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak combinations, which were constructs of a nationalist ideo­ logy which believed in both the force of common ethnicity and the undesirability of excessively small nation-states. All the southern slavs ( = Yugoslavs) belonged to one state, as did the western slavs of the Czech and Slovak lands. As might have been expected, these shotgun political marriages did not prove very finn. Incidentally, except for rump Austria and rump Hungary, shorn of most - but in practice not entirely of all - their minorities, the new succession states, whether carved out of Russia or the Habsburg Empire, were no less multinational than their predecessors.

A penal peace, justified by the argument that the state was uniquely responsible for the war and all its consequences (the 'war guilt' clause) was imposed on Germany to keep her permanently enfeebled. This was achieved not so much by territorial losses, though Alsace-Lorraine went back to France, a substantial region in the east to a restored Poland (the 'Polish Corridor' which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany), and some lesser adjustments to the German borders; ':"lither it was to be ensured by depriving Germany of an effective navy and any air force; limiting its army to 100,000 men; imposing theoretically indefinite 'repara­ tions' (payments for the costs of the war incurred by the victors); by the military occupation of part of western Germany; and, not least, by depriving Germany of all her former overseas colonies. (These were redistributed among the British and their dominions, the French and, to

34 The Age of Catastrophe

a lesser extent, the Japanese, but, in deference to the growing unpopularity of imperialism, they were no longer called 'colonies' but 'mandates' to ensure the progress of backward peoples, handed over by humanity to imperial powers who would not dream of exploiting them for any other purpose.) Except for the territorial clauses, nothing was left of the Treaty of Versailles by the middle 1930s.

As for the mechanism for preventing another world war, it was evident that the consortium of European 'great powers' which had been supposed to secure this before 1914 had utterly broken down. The alternative, urged on hard-nosed European politicos by President Wilson with all the liberal fervour of a Princeton political scientist, was to set up an all­ embracing 'League of Nations' (i.e. independent states) which would settle problems peacefully and democratically before they had got out of hand, preferably by public negotiation ('open covenants openly arrived at'), for the war had also made the habitual and sensible processes of international negotiation suspect as 'secret diplomacy'. This was largely a reaction against the secret treaties arranged among the Allies during the war, in which they carved up post-war Europe and the Middle East with a startling lack of concern for the wishes, or even the interests, of the inhabitants of these regions. The Bolsheviks, discovering these sensitive documents in the Tsarist archives, had promptly published them for the world to read, and an exercise of damage limitation was therefore called for. The League of Nations was indeed set up as part of the peace settlement, and proved an almost total failure, except as an institution for collecting statistics. It did, however, in its early days, settle one or two minor disputes which did not put world peace at much risk, such as that between Finland and Sweden over the Aland Islands. • The refusal of the USA to join the League of Nations deprived it of any real meanmg.

It is not necessary to go into the details of interwar history to see that the Versailles settlement could not possibly be the basis of a stable peace. It was doomed from the start, and another war was therefore practically certain. As we have already noted, the USA almost immediately con­ tracted out, and in a world no longer Euro-centred and Euro-determined,

• The Aland Islands, situated between Finland and Sweden, and part of Finland, were and are inhabited exclusively by a Swedish-speaking population, whereas the

newly independent Finland was aggressively commited to the dominance of the

Finnish language. As an alternative to secession to nearby Sweden, the League

devised a scheme which guaranteed the exclusive use of Swedish on the islands, and

safeguarded them against unwanted immigration from the Finnish mainland.

The Age of Total War 35

no settlement not underwritten by what was now a major world power could hold. As we shall see, this was true of the world's economic affairs as well as of its politics. Two major European, and indeed world, powers, were temporarily not only eliminated from the international game, but assumed not to exist as independent players - Germany and Soviet Russia. As soon as either or both these r�ntered the scene, a peace settlement based on Britain and France alone - for Italy also remained dissatisfied - could not last. And, sooner or later Germany, or Russia, or both, would inevitably reappear as major players.

What little chance the peace had, was torpedoed by the refusal of the victor powers to reintegrate the losers. It is true that the total repression of Germany and the total outlawing of Soviet Russia soon proved impossible, but adjustment to reality was slow and reluctant. The French, in particular, only abandoned the hope of keeping Germany feeble and impotent unwillingly. (The British were not haunted by the memory of defeat and invasion.) As for the USSR, the victor states would have preferred it not to exist, and, having backed the armies of counter­ revolution in the Russian Civil War, and sent military forces to support them, showed no enthusiasm about recognizing its survival. Their businessmen even dismissed the offers of the most far-reaching conces­ sions to foreign investors made by Lenin, desperate for any way to re­ start an economy almost destroyed by war, revolution and civil war. Soviet Russia was forced into developing in isolation, even though for political purposes the two outlaw states of Europe, Soviet Russia and Germany, drew together in the early 1920s.

Perhaps the next war might have been avoided, or at least postponed, if the pre-war economy had been restored again as a global system of prosperous growth and expansion. However, after a few years in the middle 1920s when it seemed to have put the war and post-war disrup­ tions behind it, the world economy plunged into the greatest and most dramatic crisis it had known since the industrial revolution (see chapter 3). And this then brought to power, both in Germany and in Japan, the political forces of militarism and the extreme right committed to a deliberate break with the status quo by confrontation, if necessary military, rather than by gradually negotiated change. From then on a new world war was not only predictable, but routinely predicted. Those who became adults in the 1930s expected it. The image of fleets of airplanes dropping bombs on cities and of nightmare figures in gasmasks tapping their way like blind people through the fog of poison gas, haunted my generation: prophetically in one case, mistakenly in the other.

CHAPTER Two

The World Revolution

At the same time [Bukharin] added, 'I do think we have entered upon a period of revolution which may last fifty years before the revolution is at last victorious in all Europe and finally in all the world.'

- Arthur Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia in !9!9(Ransome, 1919, p. 54)

How terrible to read Shelley's poem (not to mention the Egyptian peasant songs of 3,000 years ago), denouncing oppression and exploitation. Will they be read in a future still filled with oppression and exploitation, and will people say: 'Even in those days . . . '

- Bertolt Brecht on reading Shelley's 'The Masque of Anarchy' in 1938 (Brecht, 1964)

Since the French Revolution there has arisen in Europe a Russian revolution, and this has once again taught the world that even the strongest of invaders can be repelled, once the fate of the Fatherland is truly entrusted to the poor, the humble, the proletarians, the labouring people.

From the wall newspaper of the !9 Brig at a Eusebio Giambone of the Italian Partisans, 1944 (Pavone, 1991 , p. 406)

Revolution was the child of twentieth-century war: specifically the Rus­ sian revolution of 1917 which created the Soviet Union, transformed into a superpower by the second phase of the Thirty-one Years' War, but, more generally, revolution as a global constant in the century's history. War alone does not necessarily lead to crisis, breakdown and revolution in belligerent countries. In fact, before 1914 the opposite assumption h�ld the field, at least about established regimens with traditional legitimacy. Napoleon I had complained bitterly that the Emperor

The World Revolution 55

of Austria could happily survive a hundred lost battles, as the king of Prussia survived military disaster and the loss of half his lands, whereas he himself, child of the French revolution, would be at risk after a single defeat. Yet the strains of twentieth-century total war on the states and peoples involved in it were so overwhelming and unprecedented that they were almost bound to stretch both to their limits, and, as like as not, to breaking-point. Only the USA came out of the world wars very much as it had gone into them, only rather stronger. For all others the end of wars meant upheaval.

It seemed obvious that the old world was doomed. The old society, the old economy, the old political systems had, as the Chinese phrase put it, 'lost the mandate of heaven'. Humanity was waiting for an alternative. Such as alternative was familiar in 1914. Socialist parties, resting on the support of the expanding working classes of their countries and inspired by a belief in the historic inevitability of their victory, represented this alternative in most countries of Europe (see Age of Empire, chapter 5). It looked as though only a signal was needed for the peoples to rise, to replace capitalism by socialism, and thus to transform the meaningless sufferings of world war into something more positive: the bloody birth-pains and convulsions of a new world. The Russian Revolution or, more precisely, the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, set out to give the world this signal. It therefore became an event as central to the history of this century as the French revolution of 1789 was to the nineteenth. Indeed, it is not an accident that the history of the Short Twentieth Century, as defined in this book, virtually coincides with the lifetime of the state born of the October revolution.

However, the October revolution had far more profound and global repercussions than its ancestor. For, if the ideas of the French revolution have, as is now evident, outlasted Bolshevism, the practical consequences of 1917 were far greater and more lasting than those of 1789. The October revolution produced by far the most formidable organized revolutionary movement i,n modem history. Its global expansion has no parallel since the conquests of Islam in its first century. A mere thirty to forty years after Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from the 'Ten Days That Shook the World' (Reed, 1919), and Lenin's organizational model, the Communist Party. Most of them followed the USSR in a second wave of revolutions which emerged from the second phase of the long world war of 1914-45. The present chapter is about this

56 The Age of Catastrophe

two-part revolution, although it naturally concentrates on the original and formative revolution of 1917 and the special house-style it imposed on its successors.

In any case, it largely dominated these.

I

For a large part of the Short Twentieth Century, Soviet communism claimed to be an alternative and superior system to capitalism, and one destined by history to triumph over it. For much of this period even many of those who rejected its claims to superiority were far from convinced that it might not triumph. And - with the significant exception of the years from 1933 to 1945 (see chapter 5), the international politics of the entire Short Twentieth Century since the October revolution can best be understood as a secular struggle by the forces of the old order against social revolution, believed to be embodied in, allied with, or dependent on the fortunes of the Soviet Union and international communism.

As the Short Twentieth Century advanced, this image of world politics as a duel between the forces of two rival social systems (each, after 1945, mobilized behind a superpower wielding weapons of global destruction), became increasingly unrealistic. By the 1980s it had as little relevance to international politics as the Crusades. Yet we can understand how it came into being. For, more completely and uncompromisingly even than the French revolution in its Jacobin days, the October revolution saw itself less as a national than as an ecumenical event. It was made not to bring freedom and socialism to Russia, but to bring about the world proletarian revolution. In the minds of Lenin and his comrades, the victory of Bolshevism in Russia was primarily a battle in the campaign to win the victory of Bolshevism on a wider global scale, and barely justifiable except as such.

That Tsarist Russia was ripe for revolution, richly deserved a revolu­ tion, and indeed that such a revolution would certainly overthrow Tsarism, had been accepted by every sensible observer of the world scene since the 1870s (see Age of Empire, chapter 12). After 1905--6, when Tsarism had actually been brought to its knees by revolution, nobody seriously doubted it. There are some historians who, in retrospect, argue that Tsarist Russia, but for the accident of the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, would have evolved into a flourishing liberal-capital­ ist industrial society, and was on the way to doing so, but one would need a microscope to detect prophesies to this effect made before 1914.

The World Revolution 57

Indeed, the Tsarist regime had barely recovered from the 1905 revolution when, indecisive and incompetent as always, it found itself once again lashed by a rapidly rising wave of social discontent. But for the solid loyalty of the army, police and civil service in the last months before the outbreak of war, the country seemed once again on the verge of an eruption. Indeed, as in so many of the belligerent countries, mass enthusiasm and patriotism after the outbreak of war defused the political situation - though, in the case of Russia, not for long. By 1915 the problems of the Tsar's government once again seemed insurmountable. Nothing seemed less surprising and unexpected than the revolution of March 1917* which overthrew the Russian monarchy and which was universally hailed by all Western political opinion other than the most rock-ribbed traditionalist reactionaries.

And yet, with the exception of those romantics who saw a straight road leading from the collective practices of the Russian village community to a socialist future, it was equally taken for granted by all that a Russian revolution could not and would not be socialist. The conditions for such a transformation were simply not present in a peasant country that was a by-word for poverty, ignorance and backwardness and where the indus­ trial proletariat, Marx's predestined gravedigger of capitalism, was only a minuscule, though strategically localized, minority. The Russian Marxist revolutionaries themselves shared this view. Taken by itself, the over­ throw of Tsarism and the landlord system would, and could only be expected to, produce a 'bourgeois revolution'. The class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat (which, according to Marx, could have only one outcome), would then continue under the new political conditions. Of course, Russia did not exist in isolation, and a revolution in that enormous country, stretching from the borders of Japan to those of Germany, and whose government was one of the handful of 'great powers' that dominated the world situation, could not but have major international consequences. Karl Marx himself, at the end of his life, had hoped that a Russian revolution might act as a sort of detonator, setting off the proletarian revolution in the industrially more developed Western

• Since Russia still operated by the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar adopted everywhere else in the Christian or Western­

ized world, the February revolution actually occurred in March, the October

revolution on 7 November. It was the October revolution which reformed the Russian calendar, as it reformed Russian orthography, thus demonstrating the

profundity of its impact. For it is well known that such small changes usually require

socio-political earthquakes to bring them about. The most lasting and universal

consequence of the French revolution is the metric system.

58 The Age of Catastrophe

countries, where the conditions for a proletarian socialist revolution were present. As we shall see, towards the end of the First World War, it looked as though this was exactly what was going to happen.

There was only one complication. If Russia was not ready for the Marxists' proletarian socialist revolution, it was not ready for their liberal 'bourgeois revolution' either. Even those who wished to achieve no more than this, had to find a way of doing so which did not rely on the small and feeble forces of the Russian Liberal middle class, a tiny minority population lacking both moral standing, public support and an institu­ tional tradition of representative government into which it could fit. The Kadets, the party of bourgeois liberalism, had less than 2.5 per cent of the deputies in the freely elected (and soon dissolved) Constitutional Assembly of 1917-18. Either a bourgeois-liberal Russia had to be won by the rising of peasants and workers who did not know or care what it was, under the leadership of revolutionary parties who wanted something else, or, and this was more likely, the forces making the revolution would go beyond its bourgeois-liberal stage to a more radical one ('permanent revolution', to use the phrase adopted by Marx and revived during the 1905 Revolution by the young Trotsky). In 1917 Lenin, whose hopes had not gone much beyond a bourgeois-democratic Russia in 1905, also concluded from the start that the liberal horse was not a runner in the Russian revolutionary race. This was a realistic assessment. However, in 1917 it was as clear to him as to all other Russian and non-Russian Marxists that the conditions for a socialist revolution were simply not present in Russia. For Marxist revolutionaries in Russia, their revolution had to spread elsewhere.

But nothing seemed more likely than that it would, because the Great War ended in widespread political breakdown and revolutionary crisis, particularly in the defeated belligerent states. In 1918 all the four rulers of the defeated powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bul­ garia) lost their thrones, plus the Tsar of Russia, defeated by Germany, who had already gone in 1917. Moreover, social unrest, amounting almost to revolution in Italy, shook even the European belligerents on the winning side.

As we have seen, the societies of belligerent Europe began to buckle under the extraordinary pressures of mass war. The initial surge of patriotism that had followed the outbreak of war had subsided. By 1916 war-weariness was turning into sullen and silent hostility to an apparently endless and indecisive slaughter that nobody seemed willing to end. While the adversaries of the war in 1914 had felt helpless and isolated, by 1916 they could feel that they spoke for the majority. How

The World Revolution 59

dramatically the situation had changed was demonstrated when, on 28 October 1916, Friedrich Adler, son of the leader and founder of the Austrian socialist party, deliberately and in cold blood assassinated the Austrian prime minister, Count Sti.irgkh, in a Vienna cafe - this was the age of innocence before the security men - as a public gesture against the war.

Anti-war sentiment naturally raised the political profile of the socialists, who increasingly reverted to their movements' pre-1914 opposition to war. Indeed, some parties (e.g. in Russia, Serbia and Britain - the Independent Labour Party) never ceased to oppose it, and, even where socialist parties supported the war, its most vocal enemies were to be found in their ranks. • At the same time, and in all major belligerent countries, the organized labour movement in the vast armaments indus­ tries, became a centre of both industrial and anti-war militancy. The lower-echelon union activists in these factories, skilled men in a strong bargaining position ('shop stewards' in Britain; 'Betriebsobleute' in Ger­ many) became by-words for radicalism. The artificers and mechanics in the new high-tech navies, little different from floating factories, moved in the same direction. Both in Russia and in Germany the chief naval bases (Kronstadt, Kiel) were to become major centres of revolution, and later a French naval mutiny in the Black Sea was to halt French military intervention against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20. Rebellion against the war thus acquired both focus and agency. No wonder the Austro-Hungarian censors, monitoring the correspondence of their troops, began to note a change in tone. 'If only the good Lord would bring us peace' turned into 'We've had enough' or even 'They say the socialists are going to make peace.'

It is, therefore, no surprise that, once again according to the Habsburg censors, the Russian revolution was the first political event since the outbreak of the war to echo in the letters even of peasants' and workers' wives. And no surprise that, especially after the October revolution brought Lenin's Bolsheviks to power, the desires for peace and social revolution merged: a third of the sample of censored letters between November 1917 and March 1918 expected to get peace from Russia, a third from revolution, and another 20 per cent from a combination of both. That a Russian revolution would have major international repercussions was always clear: even the first one, in 1905--6, had shaken

• In 1917 an important Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) formally split on this issue from the majority of the Socialists (SPD) which

continued to support the war.

60 The Age of Catastrophe

the surviVlng ancient empires of its time, from Austria-Hungary via Turkey and Persia to China (see The Age of Empire, chapter 12). By 1917 all Europe had become a pile of social explosives ready for ignition.

II

Russia, ripe for social revolution, war-weary and on the verge of defeat, was the first of the regimes of central and eastern Europe to collapse under the stresses and strains of the First World War. The explosion was expected, though nobody could predict the timing and occasion of the detonation. A few weeks before the February revolution, Lenin in his Swiss exile had still wondered whether he would live to see it. In fact, the Tsar's rule collapsed when a demonstration of working-class women (on the socialist movement's customary 'Women's Day' - 8 March) combined with an industrial lock-out in the notoriously militant Putilov metalworks to produce a general strike and an invasion of the centre of the capital across the frozen river, essentially to demand bread. The fragility of the regime was revealed when the Tsar's troops, even the always loyal Cossacks, hesitated, then refused to attack the crowds and began to fraternize with them. When, after four chaotic days, they mutinied, the Tsar abdicated, to be replaced by a liberal 'provisional. government', not without some sympathy or even assistance from Russia's Western allies, who were afraid that the desperate Tsar's regime might pull out of the war and sign a separate peace with Germany. Four spontaneous and leaderless days on the street put an end to an Empire. • More than this: so ready was Russia for social revolution that the masses of Petrograd immediately treated the fall of the Tsar as the proclamation of universal freedom, equality and direct democracy. Lenin's extraordinary achieve­ ment was to transform this uncontrollable anarchic popular surge into Bolshevik power.

So, instead of a liberal and constitutional Western-oriented Russia ready and willing to fight the Germans, what emerged was a revolution­ ary vacuum: a powerless 'provisional government' on one side, and, on the other, a multitude of grassroots 'councils' (Soviets) springing up

• The human cost, larger than the October revolution but relatively modest: 53 officers, 602 soldiers, 73 policemen and 587 citizens injured, wounded or kiUed. (W.H. Chamberlin, 1965, vol. I, p. 85).

The World Revolution 61

spontaneously everywhere like mushrooms after the rains.• These actually held power, or at least veto-power, locally, but they had no idea what to do with it or what could or ought be done. The various revolutionary parties and organizations - Bolshevik and Menshevik Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries, and numerous lesser factions of the Left, emerging from illegality - attempted to establish themselves in these assemblies, to coordinate them and to convert them to their policies, though initially only Lenin saw them as the alternative to the government ('All power to the Soviets'). However, it is clear that, when the Tsar fell, relatively few among the Russian people knew what the revolutionary party labels represented or, if they knew, could distinguish between their rival appeals. What they knew was that they no longer accepted authority - not even the authority of revolutionaries who claimed to know better than they.

The basic demand of the city poor was for bread, and, of the workers among them, for better wages and shorter hours. The basic demand of the 80 per cent of Russians who lived by agriculture, was, as always, for land. Both agreed that they wanted an end to the war, though the mass of peasant-soldiers who formed the army was at first not against fighting as such but against harsh discipline and the mistreatment of other ranks. These slogans, 'Bread, Peace, Land' won rapidly growing support for those who propagated them, notably Lenin's Bolsheviks, who grew from a small troop of a few thousands in March 1917 to a quarter of a million members by the early summer of that year. Contrary to the Cold War mythology, which saw Lenin essentially as an organizer of coups, the only real asset he and the Bolsheviks had was the ability to recognize what the masses wanted; to, as it were, lead by knowing how to follow. When, for instance, he recognized that, contrary to the socialist pro­ gramme, the peasants wanted a division of the land into family farms, he did not hesitate for a moment to commit the Bolsheviks to this form of economic individualism.

Conversely, the Provisional Government and its supporters failed to recognize their inability to get Russia to obey its laws and decrees. When businessmen and managers tried to re-establish labour discipline, they merely radicalized the workers. When the Provisional Government in­ sisted on launching the army into another military offensive in June 1917,

• Such 'councils', presumably rooted in the experience of Russian self-governing village communities, emerged as political entities among factory workers during the 1905 revolution. Since assemblies of directly elected delegates were familiar to organized workers everywhere, and appealed to their built-in sense of democracy, the term 'Soviet', sometimes bu.t not always translated into the local languages (councils; riite) had a strong international appeal.

62 The Age of Catastrophe

the army had had enough, and the peasant-soldiers went home to their villages to take part in dividing the land with their kin. Revolution spread along the lines of the railways that carried them back. The time was not yet ripe for an immediate fall of the Provisional Government, but from the summer on radicalization accelerated both in the army and in the main cities, increasingly to the benefit of the Bolsheviks. The peasantry gave overwhelming support to the heirs of the Narodniks (see Age of Capital, chapter 9), the Social Revolutionaries, though these devel­ oped a more radical left wing which drew closer to the Bolsheviks, and briefly joined them in government after the October revolution.

As the Bolsheviks - then essentially a workers' party - found itself the majority in the major Russian cities, and especially in the capital, Petrograd and in Moscow, and gained ground rapidly in the army, the Provisional Government's existence became increasingly shadowy; especi­ ally when it had to appeal to the revolutionary forces in the capital to defeat an attempted counter-revolutionary coup by a monarchist general in August. The radicalized groundswell of their followers pushed the Bolsheviks inevitably towards the seizure of power. In fact, when the moment came, power had not so much to be seized as to be picked up. It has been said that more people were injured in the making of Eisenstein's great film October ( 1 927) than had been hurt during the actual taking of the Winter Palace on 7 November 1917. The Provisional Government, with no one left to defend it, merely dissolved into thin air.

From the moment that the fall of the Provisional Govenment became certain, to the present, the October revolution has been drenched in polemics. Most of them are misleading. The real issue is not whether, as anticommunist historians have argued, it was a putsch or coup by the fundamentally antidemocratic Lenin, but who or what should or could follow the fall of the Provisional Government. From early September Lenin tried to convince the hesitant elements in his party not only that power might easily escape them if not seized by planned action during the, possibly short, time when it was within their grasp, but - perhaps with equal urgency - to answer the question 'Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?' if they did seize it. What, indeed, could anybody do who tried to govern the volcanic eruption of revolutionary Russia? No party, other than Lenin's Bolsheviks, was prepared to envisage this responsibility on its own - and Lenin's pamphlet suggests that not all Bolsheviks were as determined as he. Given the favourable political situation in Petrograd, Moscow and the northern armies, the purely short-term case for seizing power now, rather than waiting further on events, was indeed difficult to answer. The military counter-revolution had only begun. A desperate

The World Revolution 63

government, rather than gtvmg way to the Soviet, might surrender Petrograd to the German army, already on the northern border of what is now Estonia, i.e. a few miles from the capital. Moreover, Lenin rarely hesitated to look the darkest facts in the face. If the Bolsheviks failed to seize the moment, 'a wave of real anarchy may become stronger than we are'. In the last analysis Lenin's argument could not but convince his party. If a revolutionary party did not seize power when the moment and the masses called for it, how did it differ from a non-revolutionary one?

It was the longer-term prospect that was problematic, even supposing that the power seized in Petrograd and Moscow could be extended to the rest of Russia and maintained there against anarchy and counter-revolu­ tion. Lenin's own programme of committing the new Soviet (i.e. primarily Bolshevik Party) government to the 'socialist transformation of the Rus­ sian Republic' was essentially a gamble on the conversion of the Russian Revolution into the world, or at least the European, revolution. Who - he said so often enough - could imagine that the victory of socialism 'can come about . . . except by the complete destruction of the Russian and European bourgeoisie?' In the meanwhile the primary, indeed the only, duty of the Bolsheviks was to hold on. The new regime did little about socialism except to declare that this was its object, to take over the banks and to declare 'workers' control' over the existing managements, i.e., to put the official stamp on what they had been doing anyway since the revolution, while urging them to keep production going. It had nothing further to tell them. •

The new regime did hold on. It survived a penal peace imposed by Germany at Brest-Litowsk, some months before the Germans were themselves defeated, and which detached Poland, the Baltic provinces, Ukraine and substantial parts of south and west Russia as well as, de facto, Transcaucasia (Ukraine and Transcaucasia were recovered). The Allies saw no reason to be more generous to the centre of world subversion. Various counter-revolutionary (' White') armies and regimes rose against the Soviets, financed by the Allies, who sent British, French, American, Japanese, Polish, Serb, Greek and Rumanian troops on to Russian soil. At the worst moments of the brutal and chaotic 1918--20 Civil War, Soviet Russia was reduced to a landlocked hulk of territory in North and Central Russia somewhere between the Ural region and the

• 'I said to them: do aU you want to do, take all you want, we shall support you, but take care of production, see that production is useful. Take up useful work, you will make mistakes, but you will learn.' (Lenin: Report on the Activities of the Council of People's Commissars, 1 1/24 January 1918, Lenin, 1970, p. 551.)

64 The Age of Catastrophe

present Baltic States, but for the tiny exposed finger of Leningrad, pointing at the Gulf of Finland. The only major assets the new regime possessed, as it improvised an eventually victorious Red army out of nothing, was the incompetence and division of the quarrelling 'White' forces, their capacity to antagonize the Great Russian peasantry, and the well-founded suspicion among the Western powers that their mutinous soldiers and sailors could not be safely ordered to fight the Bolsheviks. By late 1920 the Bolsheviks had won.

So, against expectations, Soviet Russia survived. The Bolsheviks main­ tained, indeed extended, their power not only (as Lenin noted with pride and relief after two months and fifteen days) longer than the Paris Commune of 187 1 , but through years of unbroken crisis and catastrophe, German conquest and a penal peace, regional breakaways, counter-revolu­ tion, civil war, foreign armed intervention, hunger and economic collapse. It could have no strategy or perspective beyond choosing, day by day, between the decisions needed for immediate survival and the ones which risked immediate disaster. Who could afford to consider the possible long-term consequences for the revolution of decisions which had to be taken now, or else there would be an end to the revolution and no further consequences to consider? One by one the necessary steps were taken. When the new Soviet Republic emerged from its agony, they were found to have led in a direction far removed from the one in the mind of Lenin at the Finland Station.

Still, the revolution survived. It did so for three major reasons: First, it possessed a uniquely powerful, virtually a state-building, instrument in the 600,000-strong centralized and disciplined Communist Party. What­ ever its role before the revolution, this organizational model, tirelessly propagated and defended by Lenin since 1902, came into its own after it. Virtually all revolutionary regimes of the Short Twentieth Century were to adopt some variant of it. Second, it was quite evidently the only government able and willing to hold Russia together as a state, and therefore enjoyed considerable support from otherwise politically hostile patriotic Russians such as the officers without whom the new Red army could not have been built. For these, as for the retrospective historian, the choice in 1917-18 lay not between a liberal-democratic or a non­ liberal Russia, but between Russia and the disintegration which was the fate of the other archaic and defeated empires, namely Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Unlike these, the Bolshevik revolution preserved most of the multinational territorial unity of the old Tsarist state at least for another seventy-four years. The third reason was that the revolution had allowed the peasantry to take the land. When it came to the point, the bulk of the

The World Revolution 65

Great Russian peasants - core of the state as well as of its new army - thought their chances of keeping it were better under the Reds than if the gentry returned. This gave the Bolsheviks a decisive advantage in the civil war of 1918--20. As it turned out, the Russian peasants were too optimistic.

III

The world revolution, which justified Lenin's decision to commit Russia to socialism, did not take place, and with it Soviet Russia was committed to a generation of impoverished and backward isolation. The options for its future development were determined, or at least narrowly circum­ scribed (see chapters 13 and 16). Yet a wave of revolution swept across the globe in the two years after October, and the hopes of the embattled Bolsheviks did not seem unrealistic. ' Volker hOrt die Signale' ('Peoples, hear the signals') was the first line of the refrain of the Internationale in German. The signals came, loud and clear, from Petrograd and, after their capital had been transferred to a safer location in 1918, Moscow;• they were heard wherever labour and socialist movements operated, irrespective of their ideology, and even beyond. 'Soviets' were formed by the tobacco workers in Cuba where few knew where Russia was. The years from 1917-19 in Spain came to be known as 'the Bolshevik biennium', though the local left was passionately anarchist, i.e. politically at the opposite pole from Lenin. Revolutionary student movements erupted in Peking (Beijing) in 1919 and COrdoba (Argentina) in 1918, soon to spread across Latin America and to generate local revolutionary marxist leaders and parties. The Indian nationalist militant M.N. Roy immediately fell under its spell in Mexico, where the local revolution, entering its most radical phase in 1917, naturally recognized its affinity with revolutionary Russia: Marx and Lenin became its icons, together with Moctezuma, Emiliano Zapata and assorted labouring Indians, and can still be seen on the great murals of its official artists. Within a few

• The capital city of Tsarist Russia was St Petersburg, which sounded too German in the First World "'ar and was therefore changed to Petrograd. After Lenin's death it became Leningrad ( 1924), and during the fall of the USSR it returned to its original name. The Soviet Union (followed by its more slavish satellites) was unusually given to political toponymy, often complicated by the twists and turns of party fortunes. Thus Tsaritsyn on the-Volga became Stalingrad, scene of an epic battle of the Second World War, but, after Stalin's death, Volgograd. At the time of writing it still had that name.

66 The Age of Catastrophe

months Roy was in Moscow to play a major role in forming the new Communist International's policy for colonial liberation. Partly through resident Dutch socialists like Henk Sneevliet, the October revolution immediately made its mark on the Indonesian national liberation move­ ment's main mass organization, Sarekat Islam. 'This action of the Russian people', wrote a provincial Turkish paper, 'someday in the future will tum into a sun and illuminate all humanity'. In the distant interior of Australia, tough (and largely Irish Catholic) sheep-shearers, with no discernible interest in political theory, cheered the Soviets as a workers' state. In the USA the Finns, long the most strongly socialist of immigrant communities, converted to communism en masse, filling the bleak mining settlements of Minnesota with meetings 'where the mentioning of the name of Lenin made the heart throb . . . In mystic silence, almost in religious ecstasy, did we admire everything that came from Russia' (Koivisto, 1983). In short, the October revolution was universally recognized as a world-shaking event.

Even many of those who saw the revolution at close quarters, a process less conducive to religious ecstasy, were converted, from prisoners-of-war who returned to their countries as convinced Bolsheviks and future communist leaders of their countries, like the Croat mechanic Josef Broz (Tito), to visiting journalists like the Manchester Guardian's Arthur Ransome, not a notably political figure, best known for putting his passion for sailing into enchanting children's books. An even less Bolshe­ vik figure, the Czech writer Jaroslav Ha5ek - future author of that masterpiece. The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk - found himself, for the first time in his life, the militant of a cause and, it is claimed, even more astonishingly, sober. He took part in the civil war as a Red army commissar, after which he returned to his more familiar role as a Prague anarcho-bohemian and drunk, on the grounds that post-revolutionary Soviet Russia wasn't his style. But the revolution had been.

However, the events of Russia inspired not only revolutionaries but, more important, revolutions. In January 1918, within weeks of the taking of the Winter Palace, and while the Bolsheviks desperately tried to negotiate peace at all costs with the advancing German army a wave of mass_ political strikes and anti-war demonstrations swept through central Europe, starting in Vienna, spreading via Budapest and the Czech regions to Germany, and culminating in the revolt of the Austro-Hungar­ ian navy's sailors in the Adriatic. As the last doubts about the defeat of the Central Powers disappeared, their armies finally broke. In September the Bulgarian peasant soldiers went home, proclaimed a Republic and marched on Sofia, though they were still disarmed with German help. In

The World Revolution 67

October the Habsburg monarchy fell apart after the last lost battles on. the Italian front. Various new nation-states were proclaimed in the (justified) hope that the victorious Allies would prefer them to the dangers of Bolshevik revolution. And indeed, the first Western reaction to the Bolsheviks' appeal to the peoples to make peace - and their publication of the secret treaties in which the Allies had carved up Europe among themselves - had been President Wilson's Fourteen Points, which played the nationalist card against Lenin's international appeal. A zone of small nation-states was to form a sort of quarantine belt against the Red virus. In early November mutinous sailors and soldiers spread the German revolution from the naval base of Kiel throughout the country. A Republic was proclaimed and the emperor retired to the Netherlands, to be replaced by a social-democratic ex-saddler as the head of state.

The revolution, which thus swept away all regimes from Vladivostok to the Rhine, was a revolt against the war and, for the most part, the achievement of peace defused much of the explosive it contained. Its social content was in any case vague, except among the peasant soldiers of the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman Empires and the lesser states of south-eastern Europe, and their families. There it consisted of four items: land, and suspicion of cities, or strangers (especially Jews) and or governments. This made peasants revolutionary but not Bolshevik in. large parts of central and eastern Europe, though not in Germany (except for some of Bavaria), Austria, and parts of Poland. They had to be conciliated by a measure of land reform even in some conservative, indeed counter-revolutionary countries like Rumania and Finland. On the other hand, where they constituted the majority of the population, they practically guaranteed that socialists, let alone Bolshevik ones, would not win democratic general elections. This did not necessarily make peasant bastions of political conservatism, but it fatally handicapped democratic socialists; or else - as in Soviet Russia - pressed them into abolishing electoral democracy. For this reason the ,Bolsheviks, having demanded a Constituent Assembly (a familiar revolutionary tradition since 1789) dissolved it as soon as it met, a few weeks after October. An.d the establishment of new small nation-states along Wilsonian lines, though far from eliminating national conflicts in the zone of revolutions, also diminished the scope for Bolshevik revolution. That, indeed, had been the intention of the Allied peacemakers.

On the other hand, the impact of the Russian revolution on the European upheavals of 1918-19 was so patent, that there could hardly be much room in. Moscow for scepticism about the prospect of a spreading

68 The Age of Catastrophe

revolution of the world proletariat. To the historian - even to some local revolutionaries - it seemed clear that imperial Germany was a state of considerable social and political stability, with a strong, but essentially moderate working-class movement, which would certainly not have experi­ enced anything like armed revolution but for the war. Unlike Tsarist Russia or ramshackle Austria-Hungary; unlike Turkey, the proverbial 'sick man of Europe'; unlike the wild, gun-toting inhabitants of the mountains of the continent's south-east, who were capable of anything, it was not a country where upheavals were to be expected. And, indeed, compared to the genuinely revolutionary situations in defeated Russia and Austria-Hungary, the bulk of German revolutionary soldiers, sailors and workers remained as moderate and law-abiding as the, possibly apocryphal, jokes of Russian revolutionaries had always made them out to be ('Where there is a notice forbidding the public to step on the grass, German insurrectionaries will naturally walk only on the paths' ).

Yet this was the country where the revolutionary sailors carried the banner of the Soviets through the country, where the executive of a Berlin workers' and soldiers' soviet appointed a socialist government of Germany, where February and October seemed to be one, as effective power in the capital already appeared to be in the hands of radical socialists from the moment the emperor abdicated. This was an illusion, due to the total, but temporary, paralysis of the old army, state and power-structure under the double shock of utter defeat and revolution. After a few days the republicanised old regime was soon back in the saddle again, and no longer seriously troubled by the socialists, who even failed to gain a majority at the first elections, though these were held a few weeks after the revolution. • They were even less troubled by the newly improvised Communist Party, whose leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were quickly murdered by free-lance army gunmen.

Nevertheless, the German revolution of 1918 confirmed the hopes of the Russian Bolsheviks, all the more because a shortlived Socialist republic was actually proclaimed in Bavaria in 1918, and, in the spring of 1919, after the assassination of its leader, a brief Soviet Republic was set up in Munich, the capital of German art, intellectual counter-culture and (politically less subversive) of beer. It overlapped with another and more serious attempt to carry Bolshevism westwards, the Hungarian Soviet

• The moderate majority social-democrats gained just under 38 per cent of the vote - their all-time high - the revolutionary Independent Social Democrats about 7.5 per cent of the vote.

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Republic of March-July 1919.• Both were, of course, suppressed with the expected brutality. Moreover, disappointment with the Social Demo­ crats rapidly radicalized German workers, many of whom transferred their loyalties to the Independent Socialists, and after 1920, to the Communist Party, which therefore became the largest such party outside Soviet Russia. Could not a German October revolution be expected after all? Even though 1919, the peak year of Western social unrest, had brought defeat to the only attempts to spread the Bolshevik revolution; even though the revolutionary wave was rapidly and visibly subsiding in 1920, the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow did not abandon the hope of German revolution until late in 1923.

On the contrary. It was in 1920 that the Bolsheviks committed themselves to what in retrospect seems a major error, the permanent division of the international labour movement. They did so by structuring their new international communist movement on the pattern of the Leninist vanguard party of an elite of fulltime 'professional revolutionar­ ies'. The October revolution, as we have seen, had won wide sympathies in the international socialist movements, virtually all of which emerged from the world war both radicalized and enormously strengthened. With rare exceptions the socialist and labour parties contained largt( bodies of opinion that favoured joining the new Third or Communist International, which the Bolsheviks founded to replace the Second International (1889-1914), discredited and broken by the world war it had failed to resist.t Indeed, several, such as the Socialist Parties of France, Italy, Austria and Norway, and the Independent Socialists of Germany actually voted to do so, leaving the unreconstructed opponents of Bolshevism in a minority. Yet what Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted was not an inter­ national movement of socialist sympathisers with the October revolution, but a corps of utterly committed and disciplined activists, a sort of global striking-force for revolutionary conquest. Parties unwilling to adopt the Leninist structure were refused admittance to or expelled from the new International, which could only be weakened by accepting such fifth columns of opportunism and reformism, not to mention what Marx had once called 'parliamentary cretinism'. In the imminent battle there could be a place only for soldiers.

• Its defeat spread a diaspora of political and intellectal refugees across the world, some of them with unexpected future careers, like the film-tycoon Sir Alexander Korda and the actor Bela Lugosi, best known as the star of the original horror film Dracula.

t The so-ailed First International was Karl Marx's own International Working­ men's Association of 1864-72.

70 The Age of Catastrophe

The argument made sense on only one condition: that the world revolution was still in progress, and its battles were in immediate prospect. Yet while the European situation was far from stabilized, it was clear in 1920 that Bolshevik revolution was not on the agenda in the West, though it was also clear that in Russia the Bolsheviks were permanently established. No doubt, as the International met there seemed to be a chance that the Red Army, victorious in the Civil War, and now sweeping towards Warsaw, would spread the revolution westwards by armed force, as the by-product of a brief Russo-Polish War, provoked by the territorial ambitions of Poland. Restored to statehood after a century­ and-a-half of non-existence, Poland now demanded its eighteenth century frontiers. These lay deep in Belorussia, Lithuania and the Ukraine. The Soviet advance, which has left a marvellous literary monument in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry, was hailed by an unusually wide assortment of contemporaries ranging from the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, later the elegist of the Habsburgs, to Mustafa Kemal, the future leader of Turkey. Yet the Polish workers failed to rise, and the Red army was turned back at the gates of Warsaw. Henceforth, in spite of appearances, all was to be quiet on the western front. Admittedly, the prospects of the revolution moved East into Asia, to which Lenin had always paid considerable attention. Indeed, from 1920 to 1927 the hopes of world revolution seemed to rest on the Chinese revolution, advancing under the Kuomintang, then the party of national liberation, whose leader Sun Yat­ sen (1866-1925) welcomed both the Soviet model, Soviet military assist­ ance and the new Chinese Communist Party as part of his movement. The Kuomintang-Communist alliance was to sweep north from its bases in South China in the great offensive of 1925-27, bringing most of China once again under the control of a single government for the first time since the fall of the Empire in 191 1 , before the leading Kuomintang general, Chiang Kai-shek, turned on the communists and slaughtered them. Yet even before this proof that even the East was not yet ripe for October, the promise of Asia could not conceal the failure of revolution in the West.

By 1921 this was undeniable. The revolution was in retreat in Soviet Russia, though politically Bolshevik power was unassailable (see p. 379). It was off the agenda in the West. The Third Congress of the Comintern recognized this without quite admitting it by calling for a 'united front' with the very socialists whom the Second had expelled from the army of revolutionary progress. Just what this meant was to divide the revolutionaries for the next generations. However, in any case it was too late. The movement was permanently split, the majority ofleft socialists, individuals and parties

The World Revolution 71

drifted back into the social-democratic movement, overwhelmingly led by anti-communist moderates. The new communist parties remained minori­ ties of the European Left, and generally - with a few exceptions such as Germany, France or Finland - rather small, if impassioned minorities. Their situation was not to change until the 1930s (see chapter 5).

I V

Yet the years of upheaval left behind not only a single, huge but backward country now governed by communists and committed to the building of an alternative society to capitalism, but also a government, a disciplined international movement, and, perhaps equally important, a generation of revolutionaries committed to the vision of world revolution under the flag raised in October and under the leadership of the move­ ment which, inevitably, had its headquarters in Moscow. (For several years it had been hoped soon to transfer it to Berlin, and German, not Russian, remained the official language of the International between the wars.) The movement may not have known quite how the world revolution was to advance after stabilisation in Europe and defeat in Asia, and the communists' scattered attempts at independent armed insurrection (Bul­ garia and Germany in 1923, Indonesia in 1926, China in 1927 and - late and anomalous - Brazil in 1935) were disasters. Still, as the Great Slump and the rise of Hitler were soon to prove, the state of the world between the wars was hardly such as to discourage apocalyptic expectations (see chapters 3 to 5). This does not explain the sudden switch of the Comintern into the rhetorical mode of ultra-revolutionism and sectarian leftism between 1928 and 1934 since, whatever the rhetoric, in practice the movement neither expected nor prepared for taking power anywhere. The change, which proved politically calamitous, is rather to be explained by the internal politics of the Soviet Communist Party, as Stalin took control of it, and perhaps also as an attempt to compensate for the increasingly evident divergence between the interests of the USSR, as a state which inevitably had to coexist with other states - it began to win international recognition as a regime from 1920 - and the movement whose aim was to subvert and overthrow all other governments.

In the end the state interests of the Soviet Union prevailed over the world revolutionary interests of the Communist International, which Stalin reduced to an instrument of Soviet state policy under the strict control of the Soviet Communist Party, purging, dissolving and reforming its components at will. World revolution belonged to the rhetoric of the

72 The Age of Catastrophe

past, and indeed any revolution was tolerable only if a) it did not conflict with Soviet state interest and b) could be brought under direct Soviet control. Western governments who saw the advance of communist regimes after 1944 essentially as an extension of Soviet power certainly read Stalin's intentions correctly; but so did the unreconstructed revolutionar­ ies who bitterly blamed Moscow for not wanting communists to take power and discouraged every attempt to do so, even those which proved successful, as in Yugoslavia and China (see chapter 5).

Nevertheless, until the end Soviet Russia remained, even in the eyes of many self-serving and corrupt members of its nomenklatura, something more than just another great power. Universal emancipation, the construc­ tion of a better alternative to capitalist society was, after all, its fundamental reason for existence. Why else should hard-faced Moscow bureaucrats have continued to finance and arm the guerrillas of the communist-allied African National Congress whose chances of overthrow­ ing the apartheid system of South Africa seemed and were minimal for decades? (Curiously enough the Chinese Communist regime, though it criticised the USSR for betraying revolutionary movements after the break between the two countries, has no comparable record of practical support for Third World liberation movements.) Humanity, the USSR had learned long since, would not be transformed by Moscow-inspired world revolution. In the long twilight of the Brezhnev years even Nikita Khrushchev's sincerely held conviction that socialism would 'bury' capital­ ism by dint of its economic superiority faded away. It- may well be that the terminal erosion of this belief in the system's universal vocation explains why, in the end, it disintegrated without resistance (see chapter 16).

None of these hesitations troubled the first generation of those inspired by the shining light of October to devote their lives to the world revolution. Like the early Christians, most pre-1914 socialists were believers in the great apocalyptic change which would abolish all that was evil and bring about a society without unhappiness, oppression, inequality and injustice. Marxism offered the hope of the millennium the guarantee of science and historic inevitability; the October revolution now offered the proof that the great change had begun.

The total number of these soldiers in the necessarily ruthless and disciplined army of human emancipation was perhaps no larger than a few tens of thousands; the number of the professionals of the international movement, 'changing countries more often than pairs of shoes' as Bertolt Brecht put it in a poem written in their honour, was perhaps no more than a few hundreds in all. They must not be confused with what the

The World Revolution 73

Italians, in the days of their million-strong Communist Party, called 'the communist people', the millions of supporters and rank-and-file members for whom the dream of a new and good society was also real, though in practice theirs was no more than the old socialist movement's daily activism, and whose commitment was in any case one of class and community rather than of personal dedication. Yet though their numbers were small, the twentieth century cannot be understood without them.

Without the Leninist 'party of a new type' of 'professional revolution­ aries' of which they were the cadres, it is inconceivable that in barely more than thirty years after October, one third of the human race would have found itself living under Communist regimes. What their faith, and their unqualified loyalty to the headquarters of world revolu­ tion in Moscow, gave communists was the ability to see themselves (sociologically speaking) as parts of a universal church, not a sect. Moscow-oriented communist parties lost leaders by secession and purge, but until the heart had gone out of the movement after 1956 they did not split, unlike the fragmenting groups of the Marxist dissi­ dents who followed Trotsky and the even more fissiparous 'Marxist­ Leninist' conventicles of post-1960 Maoism. However small - and when Mussolini was overthrown in Italy in 1943 the Italian Communist Party consisted of about 5,000 mep and women, mosdy emerging from jail or exile - they were what the Bolsheviks had been in February 1917, the nucleus of an army of millions, potential rulers of a people and a state.

For this generation, especially those who had, however young, lived through the years of upheaval, revolution was what happened in their lifetimes; the days of capitalism were inevitably numbered. Contemporary history was the antechamber of ultimate victory for those who lived to see it, which would include only some soldiers of the revolution ('the dead on leave of absence' as the Russian communist Levine put it shordy before being executed by those who overthrew the Munich Soviet of 1919). If bourgeois society itself had so much reason to doubt its future, why should they be confident of its survival? Their own lives demonstrated its reality.

Let us take the case of two young Germans temporarily linked as lovers, who were mobilized for life by the Bavarian Soviet revolution of 1919: Olga Benario, daughter of a prosperous Munich lawyer, and Otto Braun, a school-teacher. Olga was to find herself organizing revolution in the western hemisphere, attached and eventually married to Luis Carlos Prestes, the leader of a long insurrectionary march through the Brazilian backwoods who had talked Moscow into backing a rising in Brazil in

74 The Age of Catastrophe

1935. The rising failed, and Olga was delivered by the Brazilian govern­ ment to Hitler's Germany, where she eventually died in a concentration camp. Meanwhile Otto, more successfully, set out to revolutionize the East as Comintem military expert in China and, as it turned out, the only non-Chinese to take part in the famous 'Long March' of the Chinese communists before returning to Moscow and eventually to the GDR. (The experience left him sceptical of Mao.) When, except in the first half of the twentieth century, could two intertwined lives have taken these shapes?

So, in the generation after 1917, Bolshevism absorbed all other social­ revolutionary traditions, or pushed them on to the margin of radical movements. Before 1914 anarchism had been far more of a driving ideology of revolutionary activists than Marxism over large parts of the world. Marx, outside Eastern Europe, was seen rather as the guru of mass parties whose inevitable, but not explosive, advance to victory he had demonstrated. By the 1930s anarchism had ceased to exist as a significant political force outside Spain, even in Latin America, where the black-and-red had traditionally inspired more militants than the red flag. (Even in Spain the Civil War was to destroy anarchism, whereas it made the fortunes of the communists, hitherto relatively insignificant.) Indeed, such social-revolutionary groups as existed outside Moscow-communism henceforth took Lenin and the October revolution as their point of reference, and were almost invariably headed or inspired by some dissi­ dent or expelled figure from the Comintern, which engaged in an increasingly ruthless hunt for heretics, as Joseph Stalin established, and later clamped, his grip on the Soviet Communist Party and the Inter­ national. Few of these dissident Bolshevik centres amounted to much politically. By far the most prestigious and famous of the heretics, the exiled Leon Trotsky - co-leader of the October revolution and architect of the Red army - utterly failed in his practical endeavours. His 'Fourth International' intended to compete with the Stalinized Third Inter­ national, was virtually invisible. When he was assassinated by order of Stalin in his Mexican exile in 1940, his political significance was negligible.

In short, to be a social revolutionary increasingly meant to be a follower of Lenin and the October revolution, and increasingly a member or supporter of some Moscow-aligned Communist party; all the more so when, after the triumph of Hitler in Germany, these parties adopted the policies of anti-fascist union which allowed them to emerge from sectarian isolation and to win mass support among both workers and intellectuals (see chapter 5). The young who thirsted to overthrow capitalism became

The World Revolution 75

orthodox communists, and identified their cause with the Moscow-centred international movement; and Marxism, restored by October as the ideo­ logy of revolutionary change, now meant the Marxism of Moscow's Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, which was now the global centre for the dissemination of the great classic texts. Nobody else within sight offered both to interpret the world and to change it, or looked better able to do so. This was to remain the case until after 1956, when the disintegration of both Stalinist orthodoxy in the U SSR and of the Moscow-centred international communist movement brought the hitherto marginalized thinkers, traditions and organizations of left heterodoxy into the public sphere. Even so, they still lived under the gigantic shadow of October. Though anyone with the slightest knowledge of ideological history could recognize the spirit of Bakunin, or even Nechaev, rather than Marx in the student radicals of 1968 and after, it led to no significant revival of anarchist theory or movements. On the contrary, 1968 produced an enormous intellectual vogue for Marxism in theory - generally in versions which would have surprised Marx - and for a variety of 'Marxist­ Leninist' sects and groups, united by the rejection of Moscow and the old communist parties as insufficiendy revolutionary and Leninist.

Paradoxically, this virtually complete take-over of the social-revolution­ ary tradition occurred at a moment when the Comintern had plainly aban­ doned the original revolutionary strategies of 1917-23, or, rather, envis­ aged strategies for the transfer of power quite different from those of 1917 (see chapter 5). From 1935 on, the literature of the critical left was filled with accusations that Moscow's movements missed, rejected, nay betrayed the opportunities for revolution, because Moscow did not want it any more. Until the proudly 'monolithic' Soviet-centred move­ ment began to break up from within, these arguments had little effect. So long as the communist movement retained its unity, cohesion and its striking immunity to fission, it was, for most of the world's believers in then need for global revolution, the only game in town. Moreover, who could possibly deny that the countries which broke with capitalism in the second great wave of world social revolution, from 1944 to 1949, did so under the auspices of the orthodox, Soviet-oriented communist parties? Not until after 1956 did the revolutionary-minded have a real choice between several such movements with some real claim to political or insurrectionary effectiveness. Even these - various brands of Trotskyism, Maoism and groups inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959 (see chapter I S) - were still more or less Leninist in derivation. The old communist parties still remained much the largest groups on the far left, but by this time the heart had gone out of the old communist movement.

76 The Age of Catastrophe

v

The force of the movements for world revolution lay in the communist form of organization, Lenin's 'party of a new type', a formidable innova­ tion of twentieth-century social engineering, comparable to the invention of Christian monastic and other orders in the Middle Ages. It gave even small organizations disproportionate effectiveness, because the party could command extraordinary devotion and self-sacrifice from its members, more than military discipline and cohesiveness, and a total concentration on carrying out party decisions at all costs. This impressed even hostile observers profoundly. And yet, the relation between the 'vanguard party' model and the great revolutions it had been designed to make, and occasionally succeeded in making, was far from clear, although nothing was more evident than that the model came into its own after successful revolutions, or during wars. For the Leninist parties were essentially constructed as elites (vanguards) of leaders or rather, before revolutions had been won, 'counter-elites', and social revolutions, as 1917 showed, depend on what happens among the masses and in situations which neither elites nor counter-elites can fully control. As it happens, the Leninist model actually had considerable appeal for young members of the old elites, especially in the Third World, who joined such parties in disproportionate numbers, in spite of these parties' heroic, and relatively successful, efforts to promote true proletarians. The major expansion of Brazilian communism in the 1930s rested on the conversion of young intellectuals from families of the land-owning oligarchy and junior army officers (Martins Rodrigues, 1984, pp. 390--97).

On the other hand the feelings of the actual 'masses' (sometimes including the active supporters of the 'vanguards') was often at odds with their leaders' ideas, especially in times of genuine mass insurrection. Thus the rebellion of the Spanish generals against the Popular Front government in July 1936 immediately released social revolution in large regions of Spain. That the militants, especially the anarchist ones, should proceed to collectivise the means of production, was not surprising, though the Communist Party and the central government later opposed and where possible reversed this transformation, and its pros and cons continue to be discussed in the political and historical literature. However, the event also released the greatest of all the waves of iconoclasm and anticlerical homicide, since this form of activity first became part of Spanish popular agitations in 1835, when Barcelona citizens had reacted to an unsatisfactory bullfight by burning a number of churches. About seven thousand clerical persons - i.e. 12-13 per cent of the country's

The World Revolution 77

priests and monks, though only a negligible proportion of its nuns -were killed, while in a single diocese of Catalonia (Gerona) over six thousand images were destroyed (Hugh Thomas, 1977, pp. 270-71; M. Delgado, 1992, p. 56).

Two things are clear about this terrifying episode: it was denounced by the leaders or spokesmen of the Spanish revolutionary left, passionate anticlericals though they were, including the notoriously priest-hating anarchists; and for those who perpetrated it, as well as for many of those who watched it, this more than anything else, was what the revolution really meant: the reversal of the order of society and its values, not just for a brief symbolic moment, but for ever (M. Delgado, 1992, pp. 52-53). It was all very well for leaders to insist, as they always did, that the capitalist and not the priest was the principal enemy: in their bones the masses felt differently. (Whether popular politics in a less macho society than the Iberian would have been as murderously iconoclastic is a counterfactual question, but one on which serious research about women's attitudes might nevertheless throw some light.)

As it happens, the kind of revolution which sees the structure of political order and authority suddenly evaporate, leaving the man (and, so far as she was allowed, the woman) on the street to their own devices, proved to be rare in the twentieth century. Even the closest other example of a sudden collapse of established regimes, the Iranian revolu­ tion of 1979, was not quite so unstructured, in spite of the extraordinary unanimity of the Teheran mobilization of the masses against the Shah, much of which must have been spontaneous. Thanks to the structures of Iranian clericalism the new regime was already present in the ruin of the old, though it would not take its complete shape for a little while (see chapter 15).

In fact, the typical post-October revolution of the short Twentieth Century, leaving aside some localized explosions, was to be either initiated by an (almost always military) coup, capturing the capital, or as the final outcome of a lengthy and mostly rural armed struggle. Since junior officers - much more rarely non-commissioned officers - of radical and Left-wing sympathies were common in poor and backward countries, where the military life provided attractive career prospects for able and educated young men without family connections and wealth, such initia­ tives were typically found in countries like Egypt (the Free Officer revolution of 1952), and other countries in the Middle East (Iraq 1958, Syria at various times since the 1950s, and Libya in 1969). Military men are part of the fabric of Latin American revolutionary history, although they have rarely, or for very long, taken over national power for clearly

78 The Age of Catastrophe

Left-wing causes. On the other hand, to most observers' surprise, in 1974 a military putsch by young officers disillusioned with and radicalized by long colonial rearguard wars, overthrew the oldest Right-wing regime then operating in the world: the 'revolution of carnations in Portugal'. The alliance between them, a strong Communist Party emerging from underground, and various radical Marxist groups, was soon divided and by-passed, to the relief of the European Community, which Portugal joined soon after.

The social structure, ideological traditions and political functions of the armed forces in developed countries made military men with political interests in these countries choose the right. Coups in alliance with communists, or even socialists, were not in their line. Admittedly in the liberation movements of the French Empire former soldiers of the native forces raised by France in its colonies - they had rarely been officers - came to play a prominent part (notably in Algeria). Their experience in and after the Second World War had been unsatisfactory, not only because of the usual discrimination, but also because the largely colonial soldiers in the forces of de Gaulle's Free France were, like the largely non-Gallic members of the armed resistance within France, quickly pushed into the shadows.

The Free French armies in the official victory parades after liberation were a great deal 'whiter' than the ones which had actually won the Gaullist battle honours. Nevertheless, on the whole the colonial armies of imperial powers, even when actually officered by natives of the colony, remained loyal, or rather unpolitical, even if we allow for the fifty thousand or so Indian soldiers who joined the Indian National Aimy under the Japanese (M. Echenberg, 1992, pp. 141-45; M. Barghava and A. Singh Gill, 1988, p. 10; T. R. Sareen, 1988, pp. 20-21).

VI

The road to revolution through long guerrilla war was discovered rather late by twentieth-century social revolutionaries; perhaps this was because historically this form of essentially rural activity had been overwhelmingly associated with movements of archaic ideologies easily confused by sceptical city observers with conservatism, or even with reaction and counter-revolution. After all, the powerful guerrilla wars of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic period had been invariably directed against and never for France and the cause of its revolution. The very word 'guerrilla' did not form part of Marxist vocabulary until after the Cuban

The World Revolution 79

revolution of 1959. The Bolsheviks, who had waged irregular as well as regular warfare during the Civil War, used the term 'partisan', which became standard in Soviet-inspired resistance movements during the Second World War. In retrospect it is surprising that guerrilla action played next to no part in the Spanish Civil War, though there should have been plenty of scope for it in republican areas occupied by the Franco forces. In fact, the communists organized some quite significant guerrilla nuclei from outside after the Second World War. Before the First World War it was simply not part of the tool-kit of the prospective makers of revolutions.

Except in China, where the new strategy was pioneered by some (but by no means all) communist leaders - after the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek turned on its former communist allies in 1927, and after the spectacular failure of communist insurrection in the cities (Canton, 1927). Mao Tse-tung, the chief champion of the new strategy - which was eventually to make him the leader of Communist China - not only recognized that, after more than fifteen years of revolution, large regions of China were outside the effective control of any central administration, but, as a devoted admirer of The Water Margin, the great classical novel of Chinese social banditry, that guerrilla tactics were a traditional part of Chinese social conflict. Indeed, no classically educated Chinese would miss the similarity between the establishment of Mao's first free guerrilla zone in the Kiangsi mountains in 1927, and the mountain fortress of the Water Margin heroes, whom the young Mao had called upon his fellow­ students to imitate in 1917. (Schram, 1966, pp. 43--44).

The Chinese strategy, however heroic and inspiring, seemed unsuited to countries with functioning modern internal communications and govern­ ments in the habit of administering all their territory, however remote and physically difficult. As it happened, it did not prove successful in the short run even in China, where the national government, after several military campaigns, forced the communists in 1934 to give up their free soviet territories in the main regions of the country and to retreat, by means of the legendary Long March, to a remote and thinly-populated outlying border region of the north-west.

After the Brazilian rebel lieutenants like Luis Carlos Prestes moved from backwoods trekking to communism in the late 1920s, no Left-wing groups of importance chose the guerrilla road elsewhere, unless we count General CC:sar Augusto Sandino's fight against the American marines in Nicaragua (1927-33), which was to inspire the Sandinista revolution fifty years later. (Still, rather implausibly, the Communist International tried to present Larnpiao, the celebrated Brazilian social

80 The Age of Catastrophe

bandit and hero of a thousand chap-books, in this light.) Mao himself did not become the guiding star of revolutionaries until after the Cuban Revolution.

However, the Second World War produced a more immediate and general incentive to take the guerrilla road to revolution: the need to resist the occupation of most of continental Europe, including large parts of the European Soviet Union, by the armies of Hitler Germany and its allies. Resistance, and especially armed resistance, developed on a substan­ tial scale after Hitler's attack on the USSR mobilized the various communist movements. When the German army was finally defeated, with varying contributions from the local resistance movements (see chapter 5), the regimes of occupied or fascist Europe disintegrated, and social-revolutionary regimes under communist control took over, or at­ tempted to take over, in several countries where the armed resistance had been most effective (Yugoslavia, Albania and - but for the British, and eventually US-backed military support - Greece). They could probably also have taken over, though not for long, in Italy north of the Apennines, but, for reasons still debated on what remains of the revolu­ tionary left, they did not try. The communist regimes which were established in East and South-east Asia after 1945 (in China, part of Korea and French Indochina) should also be regarded as children of wartime resistance; for even in China the massive advance of Mao's Red armies towards power only began after the Japanese army set out to take over the main body of China in 1937. The second wave of world social revolution emerged out of the Second World War, as the first had emerged out of the First - though in an utterly different way. This time it was the waging of war and not the revulsion against it which brought revolution to power.

The nature and policies of the new revolutionary regimes is considered elsewhere (see chapters 5 and 13). Here we are concerned with the process of revolution itself. The revolutions of the mid-century, which came at the victorious end of long wars, differed from the classical 1789 or 'October' scenario, or even from the slow-motion break-up of old regimes like imperial China and Porfirian Mexico (see Age of Empire, chapter 12) in two ways. First - and in this they resemble the result of successful military coups - there was no real doubt about who had made the revolution or exercised power: the political group(s) associated with the victorious armed forces of the U S SR, since Germany, Japan and Italy would not have been defeated only by Resistance forces - not even in China. (The victorious Western armies were of course opposed to communist-dominated regimes.) There was no interregnum or power

The World Revolution 81

vacuum. Conversely, the only situations when strong Resistance forces failed to take over quickly after the collapse of the Axis powers, was where the Western Allies maintained a foothold in liberated countries (South Korea, Vietnam) or where the internal anti-Axis forces were themselves divided, as in China. There the communists after 1945 had still to establish themselves against a corrupt and rapidly weakening, but co-belligerent Kuomintang government; observed by a notably unenthusi­ astic USSR.

Second, the guerrilla road to power inevitably led out of the towns and industrial centres where the traditional force of socialist labour movements lay, and into the rural hinterland. More precisely, since guerrilla war is most easily maintained in bush, mountains, forests and on similar terrains, into sparsely-peopled territory remote from the main populations. In Mao's words, the countryside would surround the city before conquering it. In European resistance terms, urban insurrection - the rising of Paris in the summer of 1944; of Milan in the spring of 1945 - had to wait until the war was virtually over, at least in their region. What happened to Warsaw in 1944 was the penalty of premature city risings: they have only one shot in their magazine, though a big one. In short, for most of the population, even of a revolutionary country, the guerrilla road to revolu­ tion meant waiting for long periods for change to come from somewhere else without being able to do much. The actual effective resistance fighters, including all their infrastructure, were, inevitably, a fairly small minority.

On their territory, of course, the guerrillas could not function without mass backing; not least because in lengthy conflicts their forces would have to be largely recruited locally: thus (as in China) parties of industrial workers and intellectuals might be quietly transformed into armies of former peasants. Yet their relation to the masses was inevitably not as simple as is suggested by Mao's phrase about the guerrilla fish swimming in the people's water. In typical guerrilla country almost any harried group of outlaws which behaved itself, by local standards, was apt to enjoy widespread sympathy against invading foreign soldiers, or for that matter any agents of national government. However, the deep-rooted divisions within the countryside also meant that winning friends auto­ matically risked acquiring enemies. The Chinese Communists who estab­ lished their rural soviet areas in 1927-28 found, to their unjustified surprise, that converting one clan-dominated village helped to establish a network of 'red villages' based on connected clans, but also involved them in war against their traditional enemies, who formed a similar network of 'black villages'. 'In some cases', they complained, 'the class

82 The Age ofCatastrophe

struggle was transformed into the fight of one village against another. There are cases when our troops had to besiege and destroy entire villages' (Rate-China, 1973, pp. 45--46 ). Successful guerrilla revolutionaries learned how to navigate such treacherous waters, but - as Milovan Djilas'

memoir of the Yugoslav Partisan war makes clear, liberation was far more complex than a simple unanimous uprising of an oppressed people against foreign conquerors.

VII

These were not reflections likely to tarnish the satisfaction of communists who now found themselves at the head of all governments between the river Elbe and the China Seas. The world revolution, which had inspired

them, had visibly advanced. Instead of a single, weak and isolated U SSR, something like a dozen states had emerged, or were emerging, from the second great wave of global revolution, headed by one of the two powers in the world which deserved the name (the term superpower is recorded as early as 1944). Nor was the impetus of global revolution

exhausted, for the decolonization of the old imperialist overseas posses­ sions was still in full progress. Could it not be expected to lead to further advances of the cause of communism? Did not the international bourgeoi­ sie itself fear for the future of what remained of capitalism, at least in Europe? Did not the French industrialist relatives of the young historian Le Roy Ladurie ask themselves, as they rebuilt their factories, whether in the end nationalization, or quite simply the Red Army, would not provide a final solution for their problems: sentiments which, he was to recall as an elderly conservative, confirmed his decision to join the French Communist Party in 1949? (Le Roy Ladurie, 1982, p. 37.) Did not a U S Undersecretary of Commerce tell President Truman's adminis­ tration in March 1947 that most European countries were standing on the very brink and may be pushed over at any time; others are gravely threatened? (Loth, 1988, p. 137.)

Such was the state of mind of the men and women who came out of

illegality, battle and resistance, jail, concentration camp, or exile, to take

over the responsibility for the future of countries, most of which lay in ruins. Perhaps some of them observed that, once again, capitalism had proved far easier to overthrow where it was weak or barely existed, than in its heartlands. And yet, could anyone deny that the world had shifted dramatically to the left? If the new communist rulers or co-rulers of their transformed states worried about anything immediately after the war, it

The World Revolution 83

was not about the future of socialism. It was about how to rebuild impoverished, exhausted and ruined countries, amid sometimes hostile populations, and about the danger of a war launched by the capitalist powers against the socialist camp before the rebuilding had made it safe.

Paradoxically, the same fears haunted the sleep of Western politicians and ideologists. As we shall see, the Cold War which settled on the world after the second wave of world revolution was a contest of nightmares. Whether the fears of either East or West were justified, they were part of the era of world revolution born in October 1917. But that era itself was about to end, though it took another forty years before it was possible to write its epitaph.

Nevertheless it has changed the world, though not in the way that Lenin, and those who were inspired by the October Revolution, expected. Outside the Western hemisphere, the fingers of two hands are enough to count the few states of the world that have not gone through some combination of revolution, civil war, resistance to and liberation from foreign occupation, or the prophylactic decolonisation by empires doomed in an era of world revolution. (Britain, Sweden, Switzerland and perhaps Iceland are the only European cases.) Even in the western hemisphere, omitting the many violent changes of government always locally described

as 'revolutions', major social revolutions - in Mexico, in Bolivia, the

Cuban revolution and its successors - have transformed the Latin American scene.

The actual revolutions made in the name of communism have ex­ hausted themselves, although it is too early for funeral orations about

them, so long as the Chinese, one fifth of the human race, continue to live in a country governed by a Communist Party. Yet it is obvious that a return to the world of the ancien regimes of those countries is as impossible as it was in France after the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, or, for that matter, as the return of ex-colonies to pre-colonial life has proved to be. Even where the experience of communism has been reversed, the present of the ex-communist countries, and presumably their future, bear, and will continue to bear, the specific marks of the counter-revolu­ tion which replaced the revolution. There is no way in which the Soviet

era can be written out of Russian or world history, as though it had not been. There is no way in which St Petersburg can return to 1914.

However, the indirect consequences of the era of upheaval after 1917 have been as profound as the direct consequences. The years after the Russian revolution opened the process of colonial emancipation and decolonisation and introduced both the politics of savage counter-revolu­ tion (in the form of fascism and other such movements - see chapter 4)

84 The Age of Catastrophe

and the politics of social-democracy to Europe. It is often forgotten, that until 1917 all labour and socialist parties (outside somewhat peripheral Australasia) chose to be in permanent opposition until the moment for socialism had come. The first (non-Pacific) social-democratic govern­ ments or coalition governments were formed in 1917-19 (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Australia, Belgium), to be followed, within a few years, by Britain, Denmark and Norway. We tend to forget that the very moderation of such parties was largely a reaction to Bolshevism, as was the readiness of the old political system to integrate them.

In short, the history of the Short Twentieth Century cannot be understood without the Russian revolution and its direct and indirect effects. Not least because it proved to be the saviour of liberal capitalism, both by enabling the West to win the Second World War against Hitler's Germany and by providing the incentive for capitalism to reform itself and - paradoxically - through the Soviet Union's apparent immunity to the Great Depression, the incentive to abandon the belief in free market orthodoxy. As we shall see in the next chapter.