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Episode 10.84: The End of the Old World

With the treaty of Brest-Litovsk securing their eastern front and ensuring vital supplies from the Ukrainian breadbasket, Germany threw everything it had into one final offensive push on the western front in the spring of 1918. They believed this final push was the only way to win a war they were clearly on the verge of losing. But by the summer of 1918, this last great push stalled out, and the Allies spent the final hundred days of World War I pushing the Germans back through a series of rolling defeats. By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers finally burst like rotten pumpkins and collapsed into a messy heap. The Bulgarians signed an armistice on September 29th, the Ottomans, on October 30. The Austro-Hungarian Empire signed their armistice on November 3rd, and then finally, the German signed on November 11th, 1918. This is the famous 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month that ended World War I.

By the time these armistices were signed though, the internal cohesion of the Central Powers was already shattered. The autumn of 1918 was the graveyard of the old world. World War I had already taken down the Roman[ov] dynasty and the Russian Empire, and it now claimed its imperial counterpart. I neglected to mention this at the time, but old Emperor Fronz Yosef, who had been put on the Austrian throne as a teenager during the neo-absolutist reconsolidation following the Revolution of 1848, died in November, 1916 at the age of 86, after 68 years on the throne. His grand nephew Charles succeeded him just long enough to oversee the disillusion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the Allies having made national self-determination for the people living under the dominion of the Central Powers one of their principle tenets of any post-war peace, the nationalities living in those dominion started taking matters into their own hands. They started fulfilling the dreams first conceived during the heady days of 1848. On October 28, Czechoslovakia was proclaimed, on October 29, the state of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs was proclaimed, on its way to union with the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro to create the kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was proclaimed on December 1st. On November 6th, Poles declared the Republic of Poland in Krakow, putting an independent Poland back on the map for the first time since the great partitions. The West Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed on November 1st, 1918, with the intention of staying free of the Republic of Poland, and then uniting with their cousins over in Ukraine. On October 28, the 31st, the Hungarian staged what is called the Aster Revolution, breaking the 1867 dual monarchy compromise with the Austrians on their way to declaring an independent Hungarian People’s Republic on November 16th. Meanwhile, on November the 11th, just a few days earlier, Emperor Charles the First renounced his right to take part in matters of state, and though he studiously avoided the word abdication because he refused to recognize any aggregation of his sovereignty, this renunciation effectively ended 700 years of Habsburg rule. The following day, the Republic of German Austria was proclaimed. The Austro-Hungarian empire is over. The last remnants of the holy Roman Empire are over. That world is done.

Meanwhile, up in Germany, revolts at home and mutinies in the military, most especially in the navy, combined to form the German Revolution of 1918, leading to the proclamation of a republic to replace the monarchy on November 9th. Now, I’m not going to dwell too much on the details here, because we’re going to talk a lot more about it next week, but just to be clear where we are at, the abdication of the kaiser was announced on November the ninth and then confirmed by dear Willie in a written statement on November 28th. This advocation ended the 500 year long reign of the house of Hohenzollern. The armistice signed on November the 11th then acknowledged significant territorial renunciations by the Germans, both in the west and the east. Most importantly for us, it meant the renunciation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and giving back all the things that have been given to them by Lenin’s government back in March. And Lenin’s government, which had only given away so much because there was a gun to their head, eagerly renounced the treaty on their end on November the 13th. So as humiliating as the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was, it wasn’t as catastrophic as it appeared to be at the time, because it was only legally in effect for eight months, and it is now a dead letter.

From the perspective of the Communist leadership in Moscow, all of this appeared very much to be the pieces of historical necessity falling into place. One of the key pillars of Bolshevik ideology was that Russia was merely one facet — and, frankly, a peripheral one at that — that was guaranteed to erupt from the murder/suicide pack of the Imperial powers that we call World War I. Now Lenin and Trotsky’s wing of the party had held the line against the Left Communists and Left SRs, who never wanted to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the first place, and just go fight a revolutionary war, because Lenin and Trotsky considered a revolutionary war fought against the German army to be pure folly. But now that the Central Powers have collapsed, they started to change their tune a little bit. On November the third, Trotsky told the Executive Committee of the Soviet, “a crisis is maturing already in Germany and throughout central Europe.” He said, “perhaps tomorrow the working class of Germany will ask you for help, and you will create not a million strong army, you will create an army of 2 million, since your task will have doubled, tripled.” That same day Lenin wrote his own letter to the Executive Committee saying, “We decided to have an army of one million men by spring. We now need an army of 3 million men. We can have it and we shall have it.” Their revolutionary ideology was absolutely founded on the notion that the Western powers needed to be overthrown in their own socialist revolutions, and especially Germany, which was richer, more advanced economically, technologically, and politically. That that socialist revolution in the west would be the thing that backstopped and guaranteed the socialist revolution in Russia. The historical task of the revolutionaries in Russia was to simply hold the fort long enough for all of that to happen, and to do everything in their power to make sure that it happened, because they needed their proletarian comrades in the west to take possession of the great engines of capitalist imperialism and turn them, not against trying to eradicate the Russian Revolution, but to eradicate the last vestiges of capitalist imperialism.

On November 6th, the Sixth All-Russian Congress of Soviets convened in Moscow, and the next day they symbolically marked the one-year anniversary of the October Revolution. Here, Lenin unveiled a statue of Marx and Engels that would now stand in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and was physical proof of the fact that this was a worldwide revolution involving all the proletarian forces of Europe, not just a parochial Russian affair. The crowd sang La Marseillaise, and the Internationale. The next day Lenin addressed the Congress and said, “We have never been so near to international proletarian revolution as we are now.” And indeed, with revolution breaking out in Germany, that seemed exactly like what was going on. Certainly all Russian foreign policy up to this point, wherever they had embassies had been about fomenting such a revolution, especially in Berlin. You didn’t have to listen very hard to hear the death rattle of the old world. All across central and eastern Europe, new independent nations were declaring themselves, and many of those leaders were aligned with left wing socialist views. But Lenin also warned his comrades that it was not all revolutionary sunshine and socialist roses. That the defeat of the Central Powers was also an extremely hazardous time.

He said, “Our situation has never been so dangerous as it is now. The imperialists were busy among themselves, but now one of the groups has been wiped out by the group of the English, the French, and the Americans. They consider their main task to be to smother Bolshevism, to smother its main center, the Russian Soviet Republic.”

Now, as we will see, this is massively overstating the case. But also as we talked about last week, I think Lenin and the gang had good reasons to believe that this was true. The big new threat was that the withdrawal of the Central Powers meant that both the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea would now be wide open to further Allied intervention, especially down in the south where they would have a direct line to supplying, arming, funding, and maybe even providing foreign reinforcements for the volunteer army and the Cossacks. The ascendant Allies, riding high on their victory, would not tolerate communism in Russia. That the French were landing forces in Odessa and Sevastopol by the end of November was proof enough of this.

But the withdrawal of the Central Powers was also a great opportunity for the Communists, especially in all those areas that they had given up in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk: the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine. All of them had been invaded and occupied by the armies of the Central Powers, so there was about to be a major military and political vacuum opening up that Lenin’s government was keen to fill. So, for example, we take the Baltic states, and if you Google things like Estonian War of Independence, Latvian War of Independence and Lithuanian War of Independence, they all start right here in November 1918. In these Baltic states, the new German government pledged to move out, and the Communist government in Moscow prepared to move in. Now this can be read cynically, as simply Russians recreating the Russian Empire by another name, without any need to reference their professed ideologies. But it can also be read idealistically, as the Communist in Moscow believing that, with world socialist revolution on the march, that they must not let these areas fall into the hands of nationalist groups who were so often dominated by moderate reformist socialists, or liberal bourgeois types, or even worse, reactionary landowners. Whichever you believed, Moscow believed it was the Red Army’s job to ensure that the right kind of socialists, aligned with the right kind of revolutionary doctrines, grabbed the reins of power in the Baltic states. So in November and December, the Red Army crossed the lines formerly demarcated by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and that’s what started all of these various wars of independence, and the results were a very mixed bag. Estonia and Lithuania both put up considerable resistance to the Red Army, while in Latvia, the very visible presence of the Latvian riflemen at the forefront of the Red Army meant that it didn’t feel quite so much like a foreign invasion. In all cases, though, Moscow’s goal was to set up local Soviet socialist republics — SSRs — that would align with the Russian Communist Party. That this period marks the beginning of various wars of independence is maybe a hint that enthusiasm to being dominated by Russian Communists from Moscow is not exactly widespread.

Down in Ukraine, things would prove to be even more chaotic and contested as it was the largest and most important of all of the various states the Central Powers were pulling out of, and obviously the Communist government in Moscow would very much like all of that Ukrainian grain to help relieve the pressure of food shortages in all areas controlled by the Communists. Now going into November 1918, Ukraine was still governed by the hetman, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, who had staged a coup against the Ukrainian Rada back in April. But the hetman was obviously a German client, entirely dependent on the military forces of the Central Powers, and when they collapsed his days were numbered. So the same clique of socialist leaning Ukrainian nationalists, who formed the Rada came back in force, and they had more popular support than Skoropadskyi. On December 14th, they took Kiev, drove the hetman out, and re-declared their Ukrainian People’s Republic.

But though they were more popular than the hetman, that wasn’t really saying a ton, and the political legitimacy of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was very shaky, especially with Moscow backing a Communist party of the Ukraine aiming to drive them out and establish a Ukrainian SSR. And more than anything, this opens up several years which are marked by incredibly complicated factional fighting between various groups: nationalists, socialists, communists, and foreign incursions from both Russia and the Allied Powers. The most interesting of these factions obviously being the anarchist group led by Nestor Makhno, and don’t worry all you Nestor Makhno fan boys and fan girls out there, we’ll talk all about your boy in due time.

But while the fallout from the end of World War I was obviously the biggest thing going in November and December 1918, there were also really momentous things happening out in Siberia that would have a major impact on the course of the Russian Civil War, and would seem to further prove that the Allies were hell bent on destroying the Communists. Now, last week we talked about how the red Army had regrouped and advanced towards the Volga, and then the first week of October, they captured Samarra, and sent the SR leaders from that self-declared government to the Constituent Assembly, the Komuch, fleeing east through the Urals and out into Siberia. Many of them headed for the city of Omsk, where a collection of right-wing military officers had conscripted about 38,000 peasants into an army that flew the green and white flag of Siberia. Now by this time, the leaders in Samarra and Omsk had already reached a tentative political alliance in September. Both sides recognized that the Constituent Assembly would still be considered the ultimate sovereign authority, and once it was reconstituted, it would settle all post-revolution and post civil war political affairs. They agreed that the Constituent Assembly would in fact be considered officially back in session if a quorum of 250 delegates were ever assembled in the same place at the same time. In the meantime, they would merge their efforts, and agreed to form a five man directory government that would be based safely in Omsk, which was far from the frontline of the civil war against the Communists, and had plenty of military protection surrounding it. This directory was made up of five men: two SRs, two liberals, and a SR leaning general who was named commander-in-chief of their combined armed forces.

But the SRs of the Komuch believed that the end goal here would be reconvening the Constituent Assembly and bringing something like democratic socialism to Russia. The military officers in Omsk, meanwhile, believed the only way to save Russia was by a military dictatorship, full-stop.

So, because the two sides did not at all agree on where this was going, the compromised directory government was a complete non-entity. It had no money, no supporters, no administrative bureaucracy, no fighting forces, and in fact, practically, nobody even knew it existed. So to say that the directory lasted eight weeks, quote unquote in power would be stretching the meaning of the word power to its absolute breaking point. After Red Army advances on the Volga led many SR political leaders to regroup in the relative safety of Omsk, the city became a hotbed of factional jockeying between the SRs on the one hand and the military officers on the other. Neither group had any faith either in the directory government or each other. Each side suspected the other of planning to overthrow the directory at the earliest opportunity, and they were both right… but the military officers were able to strike first. On November 17, armed Cossacks broke into a meeting of the SRs in Omsk, and arrested several of their leaders, including the two SR directors. The pretext for this raid was that the SRs were planning to overthrow the directory, which the military officers then used as a pretext to overthrow the directory.

On the morning of November 18, the Director’s Council of Ministers gave its blessing to invite one Admiral Alexander Kolchak to become what they grandiosely dubbed the Supreme Ruler of Russia, with pretensions to being the sovereign head of state to the whole of Russia, not just this little military outfit in Siberia. Kolchak accepted, so I guess we better talk about Alexander Kolchak.

Alexander Kolchak was a young admiral. He was just 44 years old when he became the Supreme Ruler of Russia, so he was in the prime of his life, not some doddering old figurehead. He had spent his life in the navy, and first earned public notoriety for his participation in a somewhat ill-fated polar expedition of exploration and scientific investigation from 1900 to 1902. He served in the early stages of the Russo-Japanese War, and he was wounded and taken prisoner at the Siege of Port Arthur. We fast forward to World War I and we find him commanding Naval forces in the Gulf of Riga, where he was promoted to vice admiral in August, 1916, making him the youngest vice admiral in the fleet. When the February Revolution hit, Kolchak was vocally opposed to the democratization of the military, and conservative groups made the young vice admiral a hero… and hinted that he made a suitable candidate for a military dictatorship that would be able to restore dignity, honor, and order to the Russian Empire. Prime minister Kerensky caught wind of this and sent Kolchak on a mission to the United States to get him out of the country as quickly as possible.

So Kolchak was not present for any of the drama surrounding, for example, the Kornilov Affair, which one gets the feeling he very much would have supported. When the October Revolution hit, Kolchak was returning from the United States via Japan, and when he got the news, he went and knocked on the door of the British embassy, and pledged himself to do whatever he could to bring Russia back into the war on the side of the Allies to continue to fight against the Germans, up to and including resigning from the Russian navy and serving in the British army as a private. The following year, with the Allies taking over control of Vladivostok, Kolchak reentered Russia, and was on his way to join the volunteer army, and so it was simply happenstance that he was in Omsk in November 1918 when military coup plotters made their move and needed somebody to hand power to.

Alexander Kolchak’s name was well known in Russia — he was a senior military officer, and his anti-Communist credentials were unimpeachable. He also enjoyed strong contacts among both the British and the Americans, whose supplies would be vital to any forthcoming military campaign. Kolchak’s connection to the British in particular made it very easy to see the coup in Omsk — and all subsequent developments in Siberia — as being the work of Allied puppet masters. Kolchak himself did not appear to have any great political ambitions beyond simply driving the Bolsheviks from power — he was no Napoleon Bonaparte. And so the incident is called Kolchak’s coup, he was probably not even informed of the details beforehand, and only accepted the offer of power out of a sense of patriotic duty. His own personal political ambitions were quite limited, and Kolchak was viewed by almost everyone around him as a political cipher who could be manipulated into pursuing the aims of the advisers closest to him, most of whom turned out to be young, right-leaning Kadets. So in the proclamation accepting power, he said, “my chief aims are the organization of a fighting force, the overthrow of Bolshevism, and the establishment of law and order, so that the Russian people may be able to choose a form of government in accordance with its desires and to realize the high ideas of liberty and freedom.”

This, it was agreed by everyone, was nice and vague.

But that did not mean that Kolchak was an unwilling agent of the White movement or the Allies, nor that he was a passive figurehead, nor that he had any interest in being soft towards the perceived enemies of Russia, which included, in his mind, socialists of all stripes. And so his elevation to power came with terrible consequences for the SRs. And whatever one says about the draconian Red Terror, we can invariably say very similar things about draconian White Terrors. On December the third, the Supreme Ruler of Russia issued a decree that said, “In order to preserve the system and rule of the Supreme Ruler, articles of the criminal code of Imperial Russia were revised. Articles 99 and100 of which established capital punishment for assassination attempts on the Supreme Ruler, and for attempting to overthrow his government.”

This verbiage could be applied to practically any perceived threat at any time, and was the basis of summary executions, wherever Kolchak’s forces went. Oh yeah, these guys, they were plotting to overthrow your government. Blam blam blam. Reigns of terror and summary executions and arbitrary arrests were perpetrated by all sides in the Russian Civil War.

Now there was actually a very real uprising by the SRs in Omsk, but like all SR uprisings, it petered out pretty quickly, and as a result, Kolchak’s forces made hundreds of arrests and doled out pretty indiscriminate executions, including 20 SR delegates who had been elected to the Constituent Assembly, which meant subtracting 20 delegates from the alleged goal of trying to reconvene the Constituent Assembly, which — spoiler alert — that’s not ever going to happen.

Kolchak’s new army then got off to a pretty good start in December 1918. They advanced towards the northern provincial capital of Perm, and threw back a pretty demoralized Red Army unit. There were heavy casualties on both sides, but on Christmas Day 1918, Kolchak’s army captured Perm, which the Communists would then always refer to as the Perm Catastrophe, which exposed major problems inside their nascent Red Army, as they had started with a force somewhere north of 30,000, and wound up with a force down around 10,000. But due to local conditions, the state of the Siberian armed forces, and the fact that they really couldn’t do anything if they didn’t simultaneously advance through the center, Kolchak called a halt to this northern advance on January the sixth; this was so he could concentrate on a push in the center, that would hopefully see them go through the Urals to the Volga, then line up with the Volunteer Army and the Cossacks in the south, whereupon they would all march off together to liberate Moscow from the Communists.

As Admiral Kolchak’s forces gathered strength in the east, down in the south, his allies, the Volunteer Army and the Cossacks, were doing the same. Now since the summer, the Whites in the south had been growing, and the Communist central Committee believed that, especially after the end of World War I, that the southern front was the most dangerous front. The opening of the Black Sea ports to Allied navies meant that they were about to face the possibility of the white armies becoming an unstoppable juggernaut armed to the teeth. For the rest of 1918, for example, Commissar of War Trotsky spent most of his time down on the southern front.

Now fulfilling absolutely no one’s expectations, the Volunteer Army — and in fact, the entire White movement in the south — was now led by General Anton Denikin. While they initially coalesced after the October Revolution, the White armies were led by well-known and charismatic leaders like General Kornilov, and the Cossack general Kaledin. But they were both now dead. Politically, the Whites were led by the venerable General Alekseyev, and indeed the Volunteer Army was initially better known as Alekseyev’s army, but his health started failing over the summer, and he died of heart failure on October the eighth 1918, which meant that without anybody predicting it or intending, it all political and military authority of the White movement fell into the hands of General Denikin, who was more surprised than anybody to find himself holding it.

General Denikin was not precisely the wrong man for the job, but he wasn’t exactly the right man for the job either. He took over a White coalition that was absolutely teaming with divergent interests, and overseeing a population that wasn’t super stoked about what the Reds were offering, and desperately needed some assurances that the Whites weren’t going to be even worse. Denikin responded to this need for subtle delicacy and savvy public relations by retreating into a laser focus on strictly military concerns. He left politics to a few civilian hangers on, who he mostly tried to ignore, but who did helpfully draft a constitution that played lip service to civil rights and political freedom while giving unlimited power to General Denikin to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted.

As a career military officer, Denikin had a certain disdain for politicians, and he tried to be as nonpolitical as possible. And he retreated into the belief that all the political stuff would be solved once the military war was over. But this military war was a civil war, and the civil war was happening in the midst of a wider social revolution. So politics were not just unavoidable, they were a vital key to victory, which Denikin neglected at his peril. He tended to be surrounded by people who came from the gentry classes, who assumed as a matter of course that the shameful uncompensated dispossession of the landowning classes would be reversed wherever the White armies held power. That wasn’t politics, that was just morality and justice. And so wherever the White army showed up, officials attached to the Volunteer Army would work to restore the property of those who had been dispossessed. This meant that in a conflict where the hearts and minds of the people were very much in play, the Whites did very little to win them over. General Denikin himself, to his credit, later acknowledged that this was a major mistake, and he said of the reactionary officials going around trying to undo the revolution in land, “In terms of their psychology and worldview, their customs and their habits, they were so far removed and alienated from the changes that had taken place in the country that they had no idea how to act in the new revolutionary era. For them, it was a question of returning to the past, and they tried to restore the past, both in form and spirit.”

Far too much had happened for that to be the path to victory. If the Whites were going to win the civil war, they were going to have to embrace something like a forward-looking policy, and far too many of them were too intent on looking backward.

The group of leaders around Denikin also didn’t make many friends among non-Russians, the Cossacks being the most immediately important of these as they formed much of the rank and file and cavalry of the Volunteer Army. But also, we’re talking about other nationalities who might have joined them in a broad anti-Red coalition. The White officers in the Volunteer Army were almost to a man committed Russian patriots, fighting to restore the power and dignity of Russia. Now to their credit, they weren’t clamoring to bring back the tsar, but they did want to bring back the old Russian Empire, so they did not so much as hint at anything resembling autonomy for the various nationality groups who were presently out there declaring independence. The Whites might’ve made good common cause with those nationalities against Red Army incursions, but those White officers were temperamentally even more inclined to support such a Russian invasion of old Russian Empire territory as the Communists were. They weren’t even interested in offering political autonomy to the Cossacks, their most important ally, which meant that while they were all fighting on the same side, they were never really together fighting on the same side. These political mistakes would ensure the White movement remained a fractious coalition at cross-purposes with itself, and enjoying very little popular support.

I think partly the hope and expectation on General Denikin was that the civil war was not going to last very long, that it would in fact, be over quite soon. The White leaders believed exactly the same thing that the Communist leaders did: namely that the Allies were about to start pumping supplies and guns to the White armies. Now I don’t want to underestimate allied support for the Whites — they absolutely did pump spies and guns to the White armies — but with the benefit of hindsight, we know that the Allied interventions into Russia were never going to be as wholehearted as any of the Russians expected. In the winter of 1918 and 1919, the Allies had far bigger issues on their plate. The civil war in Russia was just not a high priority. Now it is the case that there were small groups out there in France and in Britain and the United States — people like Winston Churchill, for example — who really were pushing for an immediate all out attack on Bolshevism. But they were in the minority. At least as many British, French, and American leaders liked and supported the idea of the Soviet socialist republics as they appeared in 1917 and 1918. Certainly they much preferred the socialist Reds to the reactionary Whites, who no doubt intended to restore barbarous absolutism. Mostly though, both the general populations and ruling classes of Britain and France and the United States just did not have Russia very high on their list of interests. Everyone was sick of war, sick of fighting, sick of being trapped in destructive quagmires. The unrestrained jubilation that marked the end of World War I. Meant that it was going to be very tough to say, oh yeah, glad the war with Germany is over, now we’re going to go plunge into the middle of the Russian civil war.

So as we go forward, we are never going to see the Allies make the kind of major commitments both sides of the Russian civil war expected them to make. The expeditionary forces they landed in 1918 around the periphery tended to just stay put and not grow. There were some naval blockades, definitely major shipments of munitions, lots of shipments of munitions, but the Allies were not in fact hell bent on destroying Bolshevism, and they were absolutely ready to cut the cord if it looked like destroying Bolshevism was going to require them to get sucked even deeper into the Russian civil war. But next week, we are going to leave the Russian civil war off to one side, and usher in 1919, not in Russia, but in Germany. Because as Lenin said, this was as close as they would ever be to worldwide proletarian revolution. And we need to understand why that worldwide proletarian revolution didn’t happen the way the Russian Communists hoped and expected. Because the fact that it didn’t manifest is going to have far reaching consequences for their entire ideological program.

So next week, we’re headed to Berlin for the beginning, middle and end of the Spartacus uprising.