“If America had not turned her back upon the world ...” The Wilson Day speeches last December were built around this theme: that what “lost the peace” and started Europe on the path to fascism and the Second World War was the fact that America became “isolationist” and rejected Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. The corollary theme is: this time a real world-wide organization of the United Nations will enforce democracy, outlaw war, and sprinkle benevolent pints of milk over a “better world.”
Any attempt to make these post-war aims specific, or to include lesser powers in the discussion, is countered in Washington and London by the cry of: “First let us win the war; then, the peace.” Much as, during the last war, Colonel House strongly advised Wilson against discussion of peace terms among all the Allies:
“If the Allies begin to discuss terms among themselves, they will soon hate one another worse than they do Germany and a situation will soon arise similar to that in the Balkan States after the Turkish War. It seems to me that the only thing to be considered at present is to beat Germany in the quickest way.” [1]
If these words have a familiar ring today, it is because the basic situations are so closely parallel.
The twofold thesis of the apologists for Woodrow Wilson can be fairly condensed as follows:
1. One variant presents the League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty as quite different things, only the Treaty being vicious; another presents Wilson as not really liking the Treaty but believing the League would correct its inequities.
2. If America had accepted its international responsibilities by joining the League, the chaotic and sanguinary consequences of Versailles could have been avoided.
In reality, of course, the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations are inseparable. The League was, and was universally understood to be, the instrumentality for enforcing and administering the Treaty. This is inherent in the fact that the Covenant is merely one of the Treaty’s articles. Wilson, speaking in New York on March 4, 1919, just before returning to Paris to complete the Treaty, particularly insisted on their inextricable fusion, emphasizing that the Covenant was a part of the Treaty, and “not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the covenant that you cannot dissect the covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.” [2]
Far from denying US responsibility for the Treaty, Wilson, in a speech at Seattle, on September 15, 1919, claimed it:
“For the specifications of this treaty were American specifications, and we have got not only to be the architects, drawing up the specifications, but we have got to be the contractors, too.” [3]
Later, he hails “... the Treaty of Versailles. I am proud to speak for it.” [4] Again and again he calls Versailles “a people’s peace.” Dozens of other unequivocal Wilson statements give the lie to the efforts of Wilsonian apologists to separate Covenant from Treaty and whitewash Wilson of responsibility for the latter.
The “isolationist” rejection of the League of Nations by the US people in the “solemn referendum” of the 1920 presidential elections is only a muddy myth. Both candidates, Democratic Cox and Republican Harding, weaseled with mealy-mouthed generalities, the former apologetically for the League, the latter for “an association of nations.” Furthermore Harding accepted the Lodge bloc’s position, which was not, as is often ignorantly alleged, against the League, but for the League with certain reservations. Just as much as to any alleged popular “isolationist” sentiment against a league of nations, the Democratic defeat is attributable to: the electorate’s rejection of Wilson’s party for his plunge into the war immediately after winning his second election on the promise to stay out of it; his domestic anti-labor policies during the war; his intervention against the Soviet Union; and the vicious territorial provisions of the Treaty (quite apart from its League aspect) which wounded or enraged millions of foreign-born in the US – German, Ukrainian, Austrian, Hungarian, Balkan, etc., etc. Indeed, a rereading of Wilson’s late 1919 speeches in favor of the Treaty reveals that he devoted a very large proportion of his arguments to denying that “reparations” were “indemnities,” that the punishment of the German people was too severe, and defending the sell-out of China to Japan in the malodorous Shantung provisions.
But, more significantly, the entire question whether the US “turned its back on the world” is so much nonsense. The basic fact is that, by the time the US electorate had a chance to express any opinion, Wilson, first through Colonel House and the Allied Supreme War Council, then through his own actuation at the Peace Conference, had so completely settled the world’s hash that the consequences were inevitable. The main preoccupations of Wilson, as of the rest of the “Big Four;” were, not so much to “write the peace” as to
1. crush the Soviet Union;
2. head off a socialist revolution in defeated Germany;
3. strangle Soviet Hungary;
4. smash revolution and aid counter-revolution elsewhere;
5. redivide the world according to the demands of the three most powerful imperialisms.
Wilson, as we shall see, often and seriously differed with the others on tactics and methods, but never on these basic aims. Let us take a careful look at what Wilson really did at Versailles.
Wilson as a Naive Idealist
But first it is essential to dissipate another secondary argument: that Wilson was an innocent idealist bamboozled by the wicked European diplomatikers – a myth sedulously fostered especially by Maynard Keynes. Wilson’s own evaluation, made in a speech at Des Moines on September 6, 1919, is first-hand evidence:
“Do not let me leave the impression on your minds that the representatives of America in Paris had to insist and force their principles upon the rest. That is not true. Those principles were accepted before we got over there, and the men I dealt with carried them out in absolute good faith; but they were our own principles ...” [5]
The myth of “idealist” Wilson and the wicked diplomatikers is postulated upon the contention that the Peace Conference was a battle of good and evil, a struggle between Wilson’s Fourteen Points and those secret treaties unsuspected by him whereby the European powers had prepared to re-carve the world. Wilsonian apologists cite his August 19, 1919, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the effect that he learned about the secret treaties “as a whole” only when he reached Paris. But Wilson was here employing a characteristically hypocritical quibble turning on the weasel words “on the whole.” It is now notorious that Arthur Balfour had often discussed the secret treaties with House, who had told Wilson; that in April 1917 Balfour, on a mission to discuss the terms of US entry into the war, conferred with House and Wilson, not only explaining the secret treaties in detail, but carefully going over with the President a map of Europe showing the resultant new frontiers. Those bourgeois apologists who admit Wilson’s guilty knowledge try to explain that there was no essential difference between Wilson’s concept of self-determination of nationalities and the secret treaties. When we see more of Wilson’s “idealism,” we shall find the statement quite true, but in a sinister and cynical sense. The elevated moral tone of these Wilson-Balfour conversations is indicated by the fact that, since a militarily weak democratic regime had in the February revolution replaced militaristic Czarism, neither Balfour nor Wilson saw any further reason to honor on behalf of Russian democracy the treaty commitments made with Czarism. This fact is the more ironic when it is remembered that it was precisely in the attempt to honor Czarist commitments (in the spring offensive, etc.) that the Kerensky regime risked (and lost) its head.
Furthermore, in view of his demagogic opposition to “annexations and indemnities,” it is revealing that Wilson not only accepted the essence of the territorial grabs in the secret treaties, but specifically agreed in advance to the Allied demand for indemnities, re-baptized “reparations.” [6]
Wilson preached the war as a crusade against “Kaiserism,” “militarism,” “Junkerdom,” etc. This is held by some to indicate his naïveté. In reality it indicates his hypocrisy. Just before Wilson had his famous breakdown, his raw and jangling nerves made him blurt some tactless truths. For example, in the St. Louis Coliseum on September 5, 1919, just twenty days before he was carried back to Washington in his private car, his irritation caused him to make a startlingly frank outburst:
“Why, my fellow citizens, is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any child here, who does not know that the seed of wax in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? The real reason that the war we have just finished took place was that Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her, and the reason why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought Germany would get the advantage of them.” [7]
The Fourteen Points themselves, issued on January 8, 1918, on examination prove to have been, not a spontaneous “idealistic” invention, but an imperialist imitation of the propaganda the Soviets were pouring into the warring countries during the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations: Wilson wrote them when Edgar G. Sisson, Petrograd agent of the notorious Creel’s propaganda department, worried by Bolshevism’s progress cabled begging that Wilson “restate anti-imperialist war aims and democratic peace requisites of America ...” And when the reeling German government seized on them at the beginning of October 1918 as basis for an armistice, the “humanitarian” Wilson disingenuously delayed transmission of the German appeal to the Allies until the German front appeared sufficiently crumbled. Events inside Germany, however, jarred Wilson into precipitate action. Says Bemis:
“A frantic constitutional reformation of the German Government did not prevent the proclamation of a socialist republic in Berlin, but it induced President Wilson at least to transmit to the triumphing Allies the German request for an armistice ...” [8]
This, then, was the naive humanitarian who sailed for the Paris Peace Conference. In his stateroom on the George Washington, he made a statement of aims which nicely summarizes both his main preoccupation and his special method. As Dr. Isaiah Bowman, a member of the peace mission, cited Wilson in his notes, the President explained that
“The poison of Bolshevism was accepted because ‘It is a protest against the way in which the world has worked.’ It was to be our purpose at the Peace conference to fight for ‘a new order’ ...”
A “new order.” Even in this, his most famous phrase, history proves the wretched Hitler a plagiarist.
The Peace Conference
The October revolution ended World War I – not in a flash, but brought it to a grinding stop. The news of October produced mutinies and unrest in every army, strikes and demonstrations in every rear. The Allies – working through the Supreme War Council – by armed intervention and subsidization of White armies showed their conviction that they must at any cost destroy the force which threatened to snatch their victory from them by engulfing victors and vanquished alike in socialist revolution. The whole Treaty negotiations took place under the long shadow cast across Europe by the new workers’ state: fear lest it stabilize itself haunted the “peace-makers”; to crush it became their key problem.
The very choice of Paris reflects the fact. Colonel House later admitted:
“Wilson and I agreed that Switzerland was the best place for the Conference. But after reaching Paris, I found that Switzerland was threatened with Bolshevism, and it was decided that it was inadvisable to hold the Conference there.”
Only directly behind the massed bayonets of their own armies did these gentry feel even comparatively secure.
There is plenty of testimony to this fact. Said Ray Stannard Baker:
“The effect of the Russian problem on the Paris Conference was profound: Paris cannot be understood without Moscow. Without ever being represented in Paris at all, the Bolshevik and Bolshevism were powerful elements at every turn. Russia played a more vital part at Paris than Prussia.” [9]
Colonel House bears constant witness to the same fear. He speeded up the process of the Treaty “before, as he termed it, ‘the whole world was to drop into the abyss of Bolshevism’.” [10] And in his diary he wrote on March 22:
“Bolshevism is gaining ground everywhere. Hungary has just succumbed. We are sitting on an open powder magazine and some day a spark may ignite it.” [11]
Herbert Hoover, in the thick of things with his anti-Bolshevik food missions, confirms these judgments. Calmly summarizing US actions two years later, he categorically wrote that “the whole of American policies during the liquidation of the armistice was to contribute everything it could to prevent Europe from going Bolshevik ...” [12]
And on this fundamental point, as we shall observe, the British and French saw eye-to-eye with the Americans.
The Peace Conference opened on January 12, 1919, with plenipotentiaries of 27 nations. But to keep all but the most powerful from influencing decisions, there was immediately set up a Council of Ten. For the really serious skullduggery, even this was too public: the chief imperialisms set up a Council of Four, which won the nickname of the “Big Four” – Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando. Japan made it a “Big Five” when her interests were immediately concerned. After Orlando left in a huff over Fiume, it became the “Big Three.” Meeting confidentially, with only one secretary, these representatives of the world’s greatest remaining imperialisms secretly [13] prepared the “peace” and ruled the very uneasy world.
Although the Bolsheviks, the day after they took power, had called for a conference to make a universal peace without annexations and indemnities, Soviet representatives were of course excluded from the Peace Conference, while Paris was crawling with White Russians. Kerenskian Ambassador to the US Boris Bakhmetiev set up Paris headquarters for them, drawing on the $325,500,000 credits the US had extended Russia under Kerensky. Point VI of Wilson’s Fourteen Points had been:
“The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.”
Within six months Wilson had implemented this homily by sending US troops to invade the Soviet Union. As the Radek-Chicherin note pointed out to Wilson, quoting his hypocritical assurance of “assistance”:
“... in reality this assistance expressed itself in the fact that the Czecho-Slovak troops and soon afterwards your own troops and those of your Allies attempted at Archangel, at Murmansk, in the Far East, to force upon the Russian people the government of the oppressors ...” [14]
The Soviet note went unanswered, unless the answer could be considered the 29th point in the armistice terms, which ordered that “all Russian war vessels of all descriptions seized by Germany are to be handed over to the Allies and the USA.”
At the time the Allied statesmen closeted themselves as the Big Four, they had already taken far-reaching actions against the USSR. Their pre-Armistice measures they had disguised as efforts to reestablish the Eastern Front against Germany, to prevent German seizure of Allied war material in Russian territory, to put down bands of armed German prisoners, to aid the Czechoslovak regiments in Russia to make their way round the world to the Western Front, etc. Hence the armistice and the end of the “German peril” should have meant the end of intervention. Instead, intervention and help to White armies was enormously stepped up. As early as December 12, 1917, the British had armed an anti-Soviet Estonian army. By December 23, the imperialists were ready (they thought) to slice the South Russian cake according to the following secret British-French document revealed by the Soviet government:
“1. The activity directed by France is to be developed north of the Black sea (against the enemy). The activity directed by England is to be developed southeast of the Black Sea (against the Turks). [15]
“2. Whereas General Alexeev at Novo-Cherkask has proposed the execution of a program envisaging the organization of an army intended to operate against the enemy, and where as France has adopted that program and allocated a credit of one hundred millions for this purpose and made Provision for the organization of inter-Allied control, the execution of the program shall be continued until new arrangements are made in concert with England.
“3. With this reservation, the zones of influence assigned to each government shall be as follows:
“The English zone: the Cossack territories, the territory of the Caucasus, Armenia, Georgia, Kurdistan.
“The French zone: Bessarabia, the Ukraine, the Crimea.
“4. The expenses shall be pooled and regulated by a centralizing inter-Allied organ.” [16]
A strictly business deal – and the Allies meant business. A strangling blockade, ever since the Bolsheviks took power, had been starving the Soviet masses, while food and arms poured in generous torrents to all the White armies. By mid-summer 1918, Wilson had allotted $5,000,000 for winter supplies to civilians in Allied-held Russian territory. He sent $5,000,000 (later increased to $8,000,000) to the counterrevolutionary Czechoslovak armies in central Siberia; and saw that they also received a further $5,000,000 from the War Trade Board. By mid-June 1918 the British and French had landed at Murmansk, followed by Americans, and advanced 150 miles toward Leningrad. On August 2, an Allied landing at Archangel overthrew the Soviet, established a bourgeois government, and also pushed south and west, In September 1918 arrived 4,700 US reinforcements. In Siberia, beginning in August 1918, by agreement among the US, Britain, France, Italy and Japan to throw in 7,000 men each, they seized Vladivostok and the railways for thousands of miles inward. (The Japanese, double-crossing their allies, slapped in 73,400 men, supporting Ataman Semenov while the others supported Admiral Kolchak.) The French landed at Odessa on December 17, 1918, having ordered the Germans to stay till just before their arrival, in an attempt to avoid a Bolshevik interregnum. Even earlier, on November 16, the joint British-White Russian (Denikin) fleet had taken Baku, with its flagship flying the US, British, French, and Czarist Russian ensigns. Britain, which finally had some 184,000 troops involved in North Russia alone, maintained crack staffs with most White leaders and poured out munitions without stint; its admitted total costs were over $460,893,000. Japan expended between $291,600,000 and $340,000,000. It must not be forgotten that decisions for these interventions, even those not involving US troops, were made by the Allied Supreme War Council, on which sat Wilson’s alter ego, Colonel House.
“Big” vs. “Little” Interventionists
The purpose, especially after the armistice, was nothing less than the total destruction of the young workers’ state. Wilson in public pronouncements at this point kept up a mealy-mouthed hypocrisy; but Clemenceau, more forthright, wrote in early December to General Franchet d’Esperey whose troops were invading the Ukraine:
“I hereby enclose a letter which presents a general plan for the economic isolation of Bolshevism in Russia with a view to provoking its fall.”
On December 21, he restated by telegram:
“The plan of action of the Allies is to realize simultaneously the economic encirclement of the Bolsheviks and the reorganization of order by Russian elements.”
The use of the word “economic” to describe armies conquering by fire-and sword must be attributed to the celebrated French quality of delicacy. Franchet d’Esperey was under no misapprehensions as to what Clemenceau meant.
Thus it was quite apparent that the Big Four, as they sat down in Paris, were quite in earnest about smashing the Soviet Union. The only differences of opinion concerned: the methods, and the heirs.
They began with a measure everyone could agree on: tightening the starvation blockade. [17] Under Allied pressure, the Scandinavian nations were forced to cut off even the tiny trickle of food they were letting filter into the USSR. The US government, unable formally to share in the blockade, which infringed international juridical rights for which the US had supposedly gone to war with Germany, took the effective parallel measure of refusing export licenses or clearance papers to ships leaving for Soviet-held ports. Allied warships pursued and drove back Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and other neutral vessels heading for Soviet harbors. Meanwhile the quantity of food being poured from the US through the Red Cross and Hoover to all White armies and the territories they had occupied was stepped up. [18] Then the Big Four settled down to business.
Dirty business, and difficult business. Fischer [19], unearthing from an obscure US Senate document the minutes of the first major discussion in the office of French Foreign Minister Pichon on January 16, 1919 among Wilson, Clemenceau and Pichon, Lloyd George and Balfour, and Sonnino, reveals these gentry’s main preoccupation:
“If they proposed to kill Bolshevism by the sword, answered Lloyd George, ‘the armies would mutiny…The mere idea of crushing Bolshevism by a military force is pure madness. Even admitting that it is done, who is to occupy Russia?’
“‘Kolchak and Denikin’ was the ready reply of his opponents. Churchill, Noulens, Foch, and the French and British military still put their trust in the anti-Bolshevik elements of Russia. But Lloyd George, with an instinct that explains much of his political success, already sensed the inferior quality of the Russian White leaders ...
“‘If a military enterprise were started against the Bolshevik,’ he declared, ‘that would make England Bolshevist, and there would be a Soviet in London.’ At the same meeting:
“‘President Wilson stated that he would not be surprised to find that the reason why British and United States troops would not be ready to enter Russia [sic: they had been there six months] to fight the Bolshevik was explained by the fact that the troops were not at all sure that if they put down Bolshevism they would not be bringing about a re-establishment of the ancient order.’
“The soldiers were thinking, and they were tired.”
To Paris from every quarter came news of “self-demobilizations” of armies, civilian rioting, spreading strikes. In every country workers were rising to protest Allied intervention against the Soviet Union:
“‘The Bolshevist danger is very great at, the present moment,’ said Clemenceau, according to the official summary of the Council of Ten’s deliberations at Paris on January 21. 1919. ‘Bolshevism was spreading. It had invaded the Baltic Provinces and Poland, and that very moment they received very bad news regarding its spread to Budapest and Vienna. Italy, also, was in danger. The danger was probably greater there than in France. If Bolshevism, after spreading in Germany, were to traverse Austria and Hungary and so reach Italy, Europe would be faced with a great danger. Therefore, something must be done against Bolshevism.’”
But what, and how?
The Allies were impeded, almost before they started, by the fact that, before they had dispossessed the Soviet people, they were wrangling about the division of the loot. The question of who was going to exploit re-conquered Russia was just as important as that of who was going to control Europe. Wilson had long resisted the joint occupation of Vladivostok and the Pacific Maritime Provinces, not certainly through lack of anti-Sovietism, but through excess of anti-Japanese imperialism: he foresaw that the Oriental rivals of US imperialism would not soon or easily be got out again. Despite their accord cited above, the British and French were already at loggerheads over the South Russia booty. The Japanese hindered Kolchak because he was a tool of the other Allies. The French supported Petlura against the predominantly British Denikin. And the mere mention of Russian petroleum was enough to set all the Allies at one another’s throats.
Nor could they get together on the degree and form of intervention. “As Baron Sonnino has implied, said Wilson at this same meeting, “they were all repelled by Bolshevism and for that reason they had placed armed men in opposition to them.” But – But – they needed only a mere 150,000 sure men to crush the hard-beset Bolsheviks. They had nominal control over armies of millions. But nowhere could they find those 150,000 men.
And with this we come to the real, not the fairy-tale, difference between Wilson and certain of the others. The “big” interventionists, led by the hysterically anti-Soviet Winston Churchill, who substituted for Lloyd George (who had worriedly rushed to England to try to head off a general strike), backed by Noulens and the Allied General Staffs, were for pouring men and munitions and money into the anti-Soviet struggle regardless of cost, even at the risk of European revolution – their theory being that the only way to stop Bolshevism’s spread was to wipe it out instantly at the fountain-head at Moscow. Clemenceau was for as much direct intervention as was not suicidal, plus plenty of aid to the White armies, and the isolation of the “infection” by the creation of a cordon sanitaire of anti-Soviet states around Soviet Russia – Poland and the corridor, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and anything in the way of Caucasian, Armenian, Ukrainian, and Far Eastern puppet-states they could pick up or set up. House and Wilson and (now he realized the gravity of the situation) Lloyd George were opposed to “big” intervention. Why? Because, says House,
“... any invasion of Russian territory would only strengthen the Bolshevists…A nation invariably rises to the defense of its government against a foreign invader.”
They were, of course, more than ready to decimate the entire Russian nation, if they could. But meanwhile, said Lloyd George in effect, we would be hanging from the lampposts in London and Paris.
Wilson’s Individual Policy
Wilson had seen this long before. He was already terrified for Europe and by the time he returned from the Peace Conference he was terrified for America. In a speech at Billings, Montana, on September 11, 1919, he cried:
“I speak of Russia. Have you seen no symptoms of the spread of that sort of chaotic spirit into other countries? If you had been across the sea with me you would know that the dread of every thoughtful man in Europe is that that distemper will spread to their countries…Have you heard nothing of the propaganda of that sort of belief in the United States? That poison is running through all the veins of the world, and we have made the methods of communication throughout the world such that all the veins of the world are open and the poison can circulate. The wireless throws it out upon the air. The cable whispers it underneath the sea. Men talk about it in little groups, men talk about it openly in great groups. There are apostles of Lenin in our own midst.” [20]
Wilson was haunted: day after day, in Kansas City, St. Paul, Bismarck, Coeur d’Alene, Minneapolis and Columbus, he hammered on the subject like a man possessed, pleading for the entry of the US into the League precisely to stop Bolshevism. But, more keenly attuned to popular sentiment, he feared that frontal attacks alone on the growing revolution would bring the whole tottering capitalist edifice crashing in ruins. When, on the Conference’s opening day, Generalissimo Foch had insisted that peace with Germany be made instantly so the Allies might embark on a gigantic anti-Bolshevik crusade, Wilson had demurred. Admitting that Bolshevism was a grave “social and political danger” he averred that “there was great doubt in his mind whether Bolshevism could be checked by arms.” Study of Wilson’s actions demonstrates conclusively that, from the time of the Fourteen Points on, he had a consistent policy: blockade, military intervention, help to White armies and their regions, on the one hand, balanced, on the other, by demagogic liberalism and hypocritical offers of peaceful coexistence with the workers’ state. Wilson never believed his own fairy tale that it was merely “agitators” who produced Bolshevism. Occasionally, as in a Minneapolis speech on September 9, 1919, he stated categorically:
“Blood has been spilled in rivers, the flower of the European nations has been destroyed, and at last the voiceless multitudes of men are awake, and they have made up their minds that rather than have this happen again, if the Governments cannot get together, they will destroy the Government.” [21]
And, five days earlier at Columbus, he described revolutions as the product of “a hot anger that could not be suppressed…Revolutions have come because men know that they have rights and that they are disregarded.” Wilson’s idea was: with one hand to strike every possible blow at the spreading revolution; with the other, to try to seduce the suffering peoples from revolution by the demagogic promises of a genuine solution of their problems within the framework of capitalism. In this he was more a realist than the “realists” like Churchill: his humanitarian liberal front was a surer weapon than tanks (whose simultaneous use he of course did not disdain). But he dialectically complemented precisely those mad-dog interventionists of the Churchill breed in a skillful division of labor: it was the old game of “hard cop, soft cop.”
The Soviet Foreign Commissariat had been indefatigably bombarding, first the Allied government (and Wilson in particular), then the Allied Supreme War Council, and finally the Peace Conference, with pleas for peace, aiming lees at those eminent gentlemen than at their suffering peoples. Wilson, sensitive to popular opinion, and worried by the obvious effects of the Soviet notes, seized on Litvinov’s Peace Appeal of Christmas Eve 1918 to suggest to the other powers that a truce be declared in Russia and all Russian factions send special delegates to the Peace Conference. The French blew up. Bolsheviks in Paris? – why, they would convert France and England to Bolshevism! [22]
But by January 21, 1919, it was becoming obvious even to some of the die-hards that frontal attack alone was insufficient. On the 12th Chicherin had again asked the US to “kindly name a place and time for opening of peace negotiations with our representatives.” So Wilson was commissioned to plan a meeting of all Russian factions, but at a good safe distance from Paris – say an Aegean island, or Prinkipo. Though it was voted to invite Soviet delegates, the invitation was “somehow” never transmitted. Yet of all the “Russian factions,” it was only the Soviet, hearing indirectly of the “invitation,” who rushed to accept it [23]; the Whites refused or ignored it. This did not prevent Wilson later from stating in an official communication to White general Admiral Kolchak that the Prinkipo proposal had “broken down through the refusal of the Soviet Government.” The basic idea of Balfour and Wilson had been that the Soviets would refuse, and that they could then cast the onus on the Bolsheviks. Wilson said the proposal would “bring about a marked reaction against Bolshevism.” When the Soviet proposals arrived, couched, not in windy diplomatic generalities, but in concrete and unhypocritical terms indicating that they knew just what the Allies were after, Lloyd George and Wilson took this frankness as an “insult.”
Wilson tried another device: on February 22nd (taking only Lloyd George into his confidence) he sent to Russia a secret mission under William C. Bullitt. The net idea was the freezing of all territorial divisions among the “Russian factions” as they stood, and the disarming of the Soviet troops, in return for food from the Allies. At the time Wilson sent Bullitt, it looked as though the Red Army was immovable. But by the time he returned, the Whites under Kolchak were driving victoriously to the Volga and ultimately toward Moscow. Whereupon Wilson dropped Bullitt and Lloyd George disowned him.
Kolchak had become the Allies’ White hope. To his armies the US poured immense quantities of Red Cross supplies, railway equipment, and war stores. US Shipping Board ships transported 260,000 rifles to him via Vladivostok. An Anglo-American syndicate (Baring Bros. of London; Kidder, Peabody and Company of Boston; the Guarantee Trust Company and National City Bank of New York) hastened to lend him $38,000,000. But he met the fate of all White hopes: he was soon hurled back, retreating from Trotsky’s Red Army toward the Urals through a “rear” of infuriated peasants.
Even then the Allies did not wholly lose hope. The statesmen at Paris ordered all consuls at Helsingfors, including the US, to support the Finnish government if it assisted Kolchak by a simultaneous attack on Petrograd. At another time, they put heavy pressure on Finland to assist a Yudenich attack on the same city. Under pretense that it was necessary to reinforce their expeditionary force in order to evacuate it safely (though the Reds offered them an armistice for the purpose), the British increased their strength at Murmansk; then, far from evacuating, they made a major drive to effect a junction.
The Soviet acceptance offered to recognize the debts of previous regimes, plus interest in the form of raw materials, to grant mining, lumbering and other concessions, and to discuss annexations of Russian territory by Entente Powers. [24] Implicit in this acceptance was de facto recognition of anti-Soviet Russian regimes. That is how far Lenin and Trotsky were prepared to go to gain a breathing spell with Kolchak.
From Siberia, forces were not withdrawn till April 1920, a year and a half after the armistice, and even then the Japanese stayed on. As tools, the Allies disdained no one, employing not only the commonest bandits like Petlura, but their “enemies”: the Armistice (arranged by House) and the Treaty (Wilson) had authorized the Germans to keep their armies in the Baltic Provinces of Russia, not to be withdrawn till “... the governments of the principal allied and associated Powers shall think suitable, having regard to the internal situation of those territories.” Says Fischer:
“The Ebert Cabinet in Berlin gladly served the Allies in this matter, and though it withdrew part of its tired [read: “infected”?] regular forces, it financed the irregular, volunteer battalions of von der Goltz.”
The memory of world imperialism’s desperate and all-sided efforts to destroy the first workers’ state is still fresh. Yet the bourgeoisie today tries to explain away, or simply to wipe out, this ineradicable memory. It is hard to find words to characterize the brassy cynicism of, for example, the editorial writer of the New York Times Topics of the Times column for March 25, who has the gall to declare, among other falsifications:
“But when in our past relations with Soviet Russia have the people or government of the United States, or for that matter of the Allies, double-crossed the USSR or tried to do so?
“... in a desperate move to reopen an eastern front against Germany, the Allies sent troops to Archangel and Murmansk. A second object was to prevent large stocks of war materials in those ports from falling into German hands. But very soon after, in July, 1918, the tide of war in the west turned in favor of the Allies. Final victory came in November, and the United States and Britain lost all interest in the Russian business ...
“Nothing can be more grotesque than the common notion that in 1918 the Allies intervened in Russia in a wanton attempt to strangle the infant USSR ...” (Our italics.)
It requires more than such airy falsifications of established fact to remove from Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues the historical responsibility for the shambles they made of Europe. The policy they showed toward the young Soviet Union they applied equally, as we shall show in a second article, to the rest of Europe. The measures they were logically compelled to take by their fundamental aim – the repression of the socialist revolution everywhere – dictated the mad map of post-war Europe, fertilized the soil for Mussolini and Hitler, and led undeviatingly to the Second World War in a generation. Once they had done their work at the “peace” conference, no league of capitalist nations or US entry into that league, no series of pacts, no “collective security,” no miracle, could have saved Europe. The only salvation for that shattered and tragic continent was and remains the Socialist United States of Europe. And it was precisely against that solution that the efforts of Wilson and his colleagues were indefatigably directed.
Footnotes
1. Quoted by Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History or the United States, New York 1936, p.611.
2. Published Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, vol.I, p.451. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotations from Wilson’s speeches and documents are taken from this work.
3. Vol.II, p.200.
4. Vol.II, p.385.
5. Vol.II, p.22.
6. See Wilson’s note, Further Armistice Terms, Vol.I, pp.291-2. A not uninteresting sidelight on his true attitude to indemnities is cast on pp.492 et seq. of vol.II where we find that Wilson years later vetoed a Congressional Resolution declaring the war with Germany at an end, precisely because the Resolution did not exact indemnities. And, lest it be supposed that Congress was a less greedy representative of US capitalism than the President, note that in the final settlement Congress “reserved to the US all rights which would have accrued to it by benefit of the Treaty of Versailles or by the European treaties of peace with the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” The US of course demanded, and got, “occupation costs.”
7. Vol.I, p.637.
8. Op. Cit., p.622.
9. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement: Written from his unpublished and personal material, New York, Vol.II, p.64.
10. Rose M. Stein: M-Day, New York 1936, p.128.
11. Ibid.
12. Louis Fischer: The Soviets in World Affairs – a History of Relations between the Soviet Union and the Rest of the World, 1930, p.174. All subsequent references to Fischer are to this two-volume work.
13. Wilson’s real opinions on “open covenants, openly arrived at” – one of his main slogans – win indicated by a most irritated cable he sent on June 7, 1919 to Senator G.M. Hitchcock urging investigation of “possession of text of treaty by unauthorized persons.” See Published Papers, etc., Vol.I, p.608.
14. Fischer, pp.147-8.
15. Note the terminology. On this date, France and England were formally at war with Turkey, whereas with Russia they were at least at peace, if not allies. Yet the Turks are called by name to distinguish them from the “enemy,” who are – the Russians!
16. Fischer, op. cit., p.836.
17. We regret that we cannot, on the subject of the blockade, give our readers the benefit of the really definitive work. In preparation by the famous Hoover War Library for many years, and announced for publication last winter, this work was suddenly found to have become stuck in the bindery, and the publishers, Stanford University, are unable to inform us when it can be persuaded to become unstuck.
18. For a thoroughgoing exposition of the role of food as a weapon during this entire period, see The Imperialist Strategy of Food, by C. Charles, in our January 1943 issue.
19. Fischer, pp.162 et seq.
20. Vol.II, pp.108-109.
21. Vol.II, p.69.
22. Baker, vol.I, p.166.
23. The Soviet acceptance offered to recognize the debts of previous regimes, plus interest in the form of raw materials, to grant mining, lumbering and other concessions, and to discuss annexations of Russian territory by Entente Powers. See Fischer, pp.167-168. Implicit in this acceptance was de facto recognition of anti-Soviet Russian regimes. That is how far Lenin and Trotsky were prepared to go to gain a breathing spell.
24. See Fischer, pp.167-168.
Part 2:
What the Peacemakers did to Europe
Winston Churchill frankly summarized the feelings of the Peace Conference delegates as they took their seats on the revolutionary volcano:
“When the great organizations of this world are strained beyond the breaking Point, their structure often collapses at all points simultaneously…[In Germany] the faithful armies were beaten at the front and demoralized from the rear. The proud, efficient Navy mutinied. Revolution exploded in the most disciplined and docile of states ...
“Such a spectacle appalls mankind; and a knell rang in the ears of the victors, even in their hour of triumph." [1]
The direst tolling of that knell, as we have seen, had reached their ears from the new Soviet Union. But closely rivaling it were the clangorous reverberations that Churchill heard from across the Rhine. Even before the Armistice, the alert Colonel House was alarmed: on October 30, 1918, he cabled Wilson concerning a conversation with Clemenceau:
“I pointed out the danger of bringing about a state of Bolshevism in Germany if the terms of the armistice were made too stiff, and the consequent danger to England, France, and Italy ...” [2]
The German rulers were identically worried. House again reported during the Armistice negotiations:
“I, have just seen Foch who has given me a procès-verbal [of the interview with the German delegates, who]…say that they will be overwhelmed by Bolshevism if we do not help them resist it, and that afterward we shall be invaded by the same plague.” [3]
We have already described [4] how the German workers and soldiers, their courage galvanized by the Soviet October put an end to Kaiserism and made their bid for socialism; and how the leaders of the Social Democratic Party helped the capitalists strangle the German revolution. In that strangulation, the Allies played a major part. The savage Allied interventions against the Soviet Union had already demonstrated to what extent German capitalism could rely on the aid of its erstwhile enemies to smash a workers’ revolt; simultaneously the Social Democratic leaders held the workers back with the cry: “If we made a revolution, the Entente will move in to crush it!” As early as October 18, 1918, a Manifesto of the Executive Committee of the Social Democratic Party had warned that revolution “would only…stimulate the lust of conquest by our enemies” – this being precisely that revolution, beginning November 9, which was to raise these gentry to governmental power. Once in power, of course, they became more reactionary than ever. When the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (Soviets) were discussing the form of government to be created – whether the Soviets should keep the power or turn it over (as they fatally did) to a Constituent Assembly – the Supreme Allied War Council made a sharp declaration that it would not “negotiate with the representatives of any one class” – i.e. with a government of workers’ soviets. The Social Democratic leaders sang the same tune. Thus Scheidemann, at the November 19, 1918, meeting of the Berlin Councils, appealing for the Constituent Assembly, warned that
“The Entente would not recognize a [proletarian] dictatorship nor would it lift the ‘hunger blockade’ for such a government. If Russian aid were invoked by the revolutionists, German unity would collapse and the Entente would occupy Berlin before the Soviets could assist the German proletariat.” [5]
And Cohen-Reuss, on the third day of the National Congress of German Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, threatened:
“The Entente will occupy this city if Germany does not develop order. Bjorn Bjornson has just informed me that the French minister in Christiana has said within the last few days: ‘Things are favorable to us in Berlin; if conditions continue thus, we will be there in four weeks.’” [6]
Today “democratic” bourgeois opinion likes to bluster, “We were too soft with the Germans; we should have marched straight to Berlin.” Big talk – and empty. The real reason the Allies left the strangling of the socialist revolution so largely in the hands of the Social Democrats instead of “marching to Berlin” was not that they were too soft,” but that they were afraid to move. This is admitted by the authoritative Temperley, semi-official British historian of the Peace Conference [7]:
“The German troops had been contaminated with Bolshevist propaganda during the occupation of Russia. It might be equally dangerous for Entente troops to occupy revolutionary Germany.” [Our italics.]
And Churchill confirms this, when he says, concerning those British troops of occupation that were sent into Germany: “Stringent and reiterated orders against ‘Fraternization’ were required.” [8] Churchill should know. He was then supervising the repression of mutinies among the about-to-be-demobilized British troops in England.
Food as a Political Weapon
In sum, Germany presented the Allies with the same problem as Russia, save that in the one the socialist revolution was an accomplished fact, in the other an imminent and nightmarish probability. Among the Allied leaders there was the same unanimous agreement on ends; the same differences of opinion about methods. Should the blockade, for example, be lifted before Germany signed the Versailles Treaty? Temperley admits that
“the fear that complete anarchy might break out unless measures were taken by the Allies led to the insertion in the Armistice Agreement of 11th November 1918 of Article XXVI, which was to the effect that, although the blockade would continue to be maintained in principle, the Allies would permit the provisioning of Germany to the extent that would be considered necessary.” [9]
But although, as Churchill relates, the British occupying authorities began to warn that the blockade was driving the Germans to revolt, the Big Four – Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando – could not make up their minds. The starving German people became pawns in a greedy struggle between the Allied and German bourgeoisie. On December 13, 1918, when the Armistice was extended to January 17, the Allied imperialists, though frightened lest starvation incite Bolshevism, made it a condition for the sending of food into Germany that the Germans turn over merchant shipping. The German capitalists refused, and hunger continued. Not until March 13 was an agreement reached. One of its conditions specified
“that no part of these consignments should be distributed to unemployed persons who by their own fault or choice fail to obtain work.” [10]
Temperley confirms our suspicions of the purpose:
“This clause was inserted mainly with a view to assisting the German Government to check the spread of internal disorders inside Germany ...” [11]
That the clause worked is stated by Lutz:
“It is significant that soon after the first food ship arrived, the political situation made a decided change and since that time has steadily improved…the menace of Bolshevism and the danger of the spread of anarchy from Germany to the Allies were present as long as Germany remained unfed.” [12]
This is no personal theory of Lutz. The semi-official Temperley confirms:
“In point of fact, the situation in Germany was extremely dangerous throughout the winter months and in the early spring of 1919, owing to the sporadic outbreaks of Spartacism all over the country, which threatened to develop into Bolshevism. The British and American policy was to strengthen the hands of the existing German government, and to enable it to restore law and order. It may safely be said that it was largely owing to the efforts of the British Military Authorities and the excellent information they possessed as to the real state of Germany, that food supplies were sent into Germany as early as April – probably just in time to save the country from anarchy and possibly Europe from a serious catastrophe.” [13]
It is hardly necessary to warn the reader that when these pious hypocrites speak of “anarchy,” “catastrophe,” “plague,” etc., they mean the heroic efforts of the German workers to end the murderous anarchy of capitalist war and starvation, and replace it by planned socialism, peace, and plenty. What they mean by “law and order” one figure will suffice to show: in the first nine months of 1919 the Social Democrat Noske’s bloodhounds slaughtered over 15,000 protesting workers, causing Winston Churchill to become positively lyrical over this new German hero. Meanwhile, the Allied blockade caused German infant mortality to treble in the three months following the Armistice.
The Allied and German capitalists stood solidly together against the German workers. During the Ruhr general strike of April 1919, Lutz reveals:
“Announcing the arrival of food shipments from the Allies, the [German] government stated that, acting under instructions from the Allies, it would give nothing to those who continued to strike.” [Our italics.]
This, then, is the factual basis on which has been erected the myth of Allied “humanitarianism” in feeding the defeated enemy.
The Allies were determined to impose as crushing a “peace” as possible. But they feared that to weaken their German imperialist rivals too much would render them too weak to stop a German socialist revolution. The question reached a crisis with Lloyd George’s famous memorandum of March 25, 1919, whose most germane sections deserve quotation:
“The greatest danger that I see in the present situation is that Germany may throw in her lot with Bolshevism and place her resources, her brains, her vast organizing Power at the disposal of the revolutionary fanatics whose dream it is to conquer the world for Bolshevism by force of arms. This danger is no mere chimera. The present government in Germany is weak; it has no prestige; its authority is challenged; it lingers merely because there is no alternative but the Spartacists [communists], and Germany is not ready for Spartacism as yet. But the argument which the Spartacists are using with great effect at this very time is that they alone can save Germany from the intolerable conditions which have been bequeathed her by the war. They offer to free the German people from indebtedness to the Allies and indebtedness to their own richer classes. They offer them complete control of their own affairs and the prospect of a new heaven and earth. It is true that the price will be heavy. There will be two or three years of anarchy, perhaps bloodshed, but at the end the land will remain, the people will remain, the greater part of the houses and the factories will remain, and the railways and the roads will remain, and Germany, having thrown off her burdens, will be able to make a fresh start.
“If Germany goes over to the Spartacists it is inevitable that she should throw in her lot with the Russian Bolsheviks. Once that happens all Eastern Europe will be swept into the orbit of the Bolshevik revolution and within a year we may witness the spectacle of nearly three hundred million people organized into a vast Red army under German instructors and German generals equipped with German cannon and German machine guns and prepared for a renewal of the attack on Western Europe. This is a prospect which no one can face with equanimity. Yet the news which came from Hungary yesterday shows only too clearly that this danger is no fantasy. And what are the reasons alleged for this decision? They are mainly the belief that large numbers of Magyars are to be handed over to the control of others. If we are wise, we shall offer to Germany a peace, which, while just, will be preferable for all sensible men to the alternative of Bolshevism.”
Clemenceau, who was pursuing a bitterly vengeful policy toward Germany, turned the Lloyd George memorandum over to Andre Tardieu for answering, and that frivolous but sinister figure on the 31st flung back a French counter-memo wherein he insists that the so-called “succession states” are the surest method for preventing a successful German revolution:
“Mr. Lloyd George’s Note fears that if the territorial conditions imposed on Germany are too severe, it will give an impetus to Bolshevism. Is it not to be feared that this would be precisely the result of the action suggested?
“The Conference has decided to call to life a certain number of new states. Can it without committing an injustice sacrifice them out of regard for Germany by imposing on them unacceptable frontiers? If these peoples – notably Poland and Bohemia – have so far restricted Bolshevism, they have done so by the development of national spirit. If we do violence to this sentiment, they will become the prey of Bolshevism and the only barrier now existing between Russian Bolshevism will be broken down.
“The result will be…a Confederation of Central and Eastern Europe under the leadership of Bolshevist Germany ...” [14]
Again, as in the case of the Soviet Union, the Allies agreed on aims, differed on methods.
Why Germany Retained Arms
Concerning German disarmament, the Big Four similarly split. Clemenceau and Tardieu were terrified at the continued size of the German military apparatus, which Tardieu estimated was still nearly a million men by the end of 1919. Lloyd George and Wilson, on the other hand, insisted that German capitalism had to have its bloodhounds if a socialist revolution was to be prevented. Germany was limited to a Reichswehr of 100,000 men. But the Reichswehr, though it never fell below 200,000, was deemed insufficient. Temperley later explained:
“The active intervention of the Reichswehr has so far suppressed all revolutionary movements, but it is claimed that, if riots and revolutions took place simultaneously in different districts, the force ordained by the Peace Treaty would not be sufficient to quell disorder, especially if a portion of the troops had to be employed on the eastern frontier to guard against Bolshevist invasion.” [15]
So the Allies allowed German capitalism to form other “special” services. There was, for example, the Sicherheitspolizei (“security police,” now the heart of Hitler’s Gestapo), formed specifically, as Temperley informs us, “in the event of the Reichswehr proving unreliable as the result of political propaganda from the extreme Left.” [16]
There were the Einwohnerwehren and the Zeitfreiwillige (temporary volunteers), which, Temperley openly admits, “were all formed for the maintenance of order and as a guarantee against Spartacist outbreaks.” [17] There was an organization called the
“Technische Nothilfe, or Emergency Technical Corps, for the purpose of intervening when works of vital importance to the general community…are closed down during strikes.” [18]
And there were the various Freikorps – White Guard volunteer units – each more notorious than the other, such as the Division Lettow, the Reinhardt Brigade, the Luettwitz Corps, the Huelsen Free Corps, the Berlin Guard Cavalry Rifle Division, the German Defense Division, the Land Rifle Company, the Potsdam Free Corps – whose anti-labor savagery trained Hitler’s future lieutenants. Temperley is quite frank about the composition of these Freikorps:
“The only reliable force was a voluntary organization of the debris of the Imperial army, by officers who were avowed reactionaries.” [19]
When, at the end of May 1919; Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, presenting the German counter-proposals to the Treaty terms, objected to cutting down arms and armed forces too much because the government needed them for reasons of “internal security,” Tardieu noted: “Some, out of fear of Bolshevism, urged concessions, either in the time limit of execution or on stated figures.” [20] Churchill was busy destroying German arms: “In all 40,000 cannon were blown to pieces,” he writes of his frenzied labors, “and all other military materials destroyed in like proportions.” For, haunted by the nightmare of revolution, the Allies were destroying German arms lest they fall into the hands of a socialist Germany. But, despite the jeremiads of the short-sighted Tardieu, they saw to it that the Reichswehr, Sicherheitspolizei, Einwohnerwehren, Zeitfreiwillige, and the various Freikorps were kept well supplied with arms.
Nor were their fears groundless. Fresh in their memories was the Kiel mutiny of November 2, 1918, which had immediately set up soviets, followed by soviets at Hamburg, Luebeck, Leipzig, and Dresden, and finally throughout Germany. Communist uprisings had occurred in the Rhineland, Westphalia, the Hanseatic cities, Thuringia, Saxony, and numerous East Prussian and Bavarian industrial centers. The Allies had seen with what difficulty the Social Democratic fakers had got the Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils to vote away their soviet power to a bourgeois Constituent Assembly. They had seen Berlin in the hands of the Spartacists. In April short-lived Soviet regimes were set up in Brunswick and Bavaria, and the movement began to spread northward. A Red army was created in Bavaria to face Hoffman and Noske advancing with Prussian troops. The Allies, while supporting the Social Democratic regime, feared it would prove a parallel to Kerensky’s, and hence also threw their weight to the most reactionary capitalists and Junkers. With Germany completely disarmed, the counter-revolutionary killers of the Freikorps could not have ranged through the Reich; an extreme Rightist dictatorship could not have been set up on the ruins of the soviet republic in Bavaria. Hence the Allies had to leave arms in the hands of Hitler’s forerunners.
That the hastily finished peace treaty was not even worse than it was, the German capitalists owed to precisely the revolutionary workers whom they were shooting down. The establishment of the Bavarian Soviet panicked Colonel House, who urged all speed before Germany, and all Europe, exploded: “Better,” he cried, “an unsatisfactory settlement in April than the same sort of settlement in June!” Wilson, too, was frightened by the German events and pushed hard for sufficient leniency so that the German capitalists could put over the treaty on the German masses. Said House:
“If it had not been for Wilson the peace would have been infinitely worse. In fact it would have been so bad that the Germans would have gone home the minute they read it.” [Our italics.]
They very nearly did go home. When the terms were finally received in Germany on May 8, 1919, indignant crowds of thousands massed before the American Military Mission, crying out hour after hour: “Where are our Fourteen Points? Where is Wilson’s peace? Where is your peace of justice?” [21] The Allies on May 17 reacted by holding a hurried meeting of the Supreme Economic Council to prepare all necessary measures for complete restoration of the blockade; and on June 17 sent a sharp note threatening starvation if Germany refused the peace – of which even the cautious Lutz says: “The oppressive conditions of peace imposed upon the German Republic in 1919 are unparalleled in European history.”
Against the ruinous Treaty terms the coalition government (9 Social Democrats, 3 Democrats, 3 Center members) was putting up a despairing resistance; yet “the only possible alternative,” a government of the Independent Socialists, who were for signing without more ado, “would have involved the disbanding of the Reichswehr” and the Freikorps by an Independent Socialist government “and produced general chaos [read socialist revolution] in the interior.” [22] Finally, however, after a few face-saving concessions, the coalition cabinet signed.
The effect of the peace on Germany was summarized at the National Assembly on May 12, during the discussion on ratification, by Fehrenbach:
“However, the German women in the future will also bear children, and these children, who will grow up in bondage, will be able to double their fists to break their slave chains, and to absterge the disgrace which rests on Germany.” [23]
The Allies had laid the foundation for Hitler and the Second World War.
The Allies Destroy Hungary’s Soviets
Freeing the oppressed minorities of the Habsburg empire had been one of the war’s most popular slogans. Point X of Wilson’s Fourteen Points had stated:
“The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”
And two important articles of the Military Convention between the Allies and Hungary signed on November 13, 1918, had guaranteed:
“17 – The Allies shall not interfere with the internal administration of affairs in Hungary.
“18 – Hostilities between Hungary and the Allies are at an end.”
Such were the promises; let us examine the performance.
The revolution of October 30, 1918, set Hungary up as an independent democratic state – precisely what the Allies had claimed to be fighting to accomplish. Yet in January of 1919 Rumania sent an army, reinforced with French Senegalese and advised by the notorious French general, Franchet d’Esperey, to occupy Hungary as far as the Tisza line determined in the Allied Secret Treaty of 1916. The Czechs simultaneously advanced from the north. All the protests of the liberal government of Premier Karolyi (who had supported the Allies during the war) were rejected by Franchet d’Esperey with brutal contempt; and the arms which the Hungarians, in accordance with the armistice terms, surrendered to be destroyed, he passed along to the invading Czechs, Rumanians, and Serbs. [24] When the invasion was an accomplished fact, the Supreme Council at Paris on February 21, 19194 intervened to bless the Rumanian grab by setting up a “temporary” line of demarcation with a neutral zone at about the point the Franco-Rumanian advance had reached. On March 20, the French Lieutenant-Colonel Vix informed Karolyi that still further Magyar territories were to be sliced off the new democratic Hungary. Karolyi, threatened simultaneously with a communist upsurge within the country, decided in despair that only a Social-Democratic cabinet could save Hungarian capitalism, and on March 21 resigned to make way for it. But so great was the communist strength at the Social Democrats had to invite the communists and Hungary was proclaimed a socialist soviet state whose real chief was Bela Kun.
Foch proposed immediate attack by the Czechs and Rumanians while in Constantinople the French military established a strangling food blockade. What especially terrified the Allies was that Moscow by March 26 had prepared to send the Red Army to Soviet Hungary’s aid. The plan was to divert the Rumanians by a direct attack on Bessarabia (which the Rumanians had stolen from the Soviets), and to drive a column direct through Bukovina to Hungary. But the White Russian army of Kolchak, with heavy Allied support, started its major drive into the Volga region, and the Russian Soviets, fighting for life, had to abandon the plan. Holding their breaths in fear, the Supreme Council in early April rushed a “soft cop” mission under General Smuts to try to parley with Soviet Hungary. But, the mission a failure, “hard cop" Franchet d’Esperey renewed the Franco-Rumanian invasion.
The Hungarian Red Army, however, proved a different adversary from the shattered troops of Karolyi. Early in May it sent the Czech army, where revolts were now constant, reeling back out of Hungary; and itself poured into Slovakia. The Slovakians rose to aid their deliverers, and a Slovakian Socialist Soviet Republic was proclaimed. The Allies were again half-paralyzed for fear of making a bad matter worse. Says Temperley:
“Although the Council of Four actually gave instructions for a plan to be drawn up for combined action against Bela Kun (a plan which was worked out by the Military Representatives at Versailles and approved by Marshal Foch about the middle of June), no action was taken, in spite of the fact that Hungary was completely surrounded by French, Serbian, Rumanian, Czecho-Slovak and Italian troops. Moreover, Bela Kun and Lenin were in close communication at this time, a fact which was frequently exposed and emphasized by the General Staff, as the connection between Russian and Hungarian Bolsheviks was fraught with serious risks to the peace of Europe.” [25]
While they abandoned open British-French military intervention, they still secretly urged on the various invaders already in the field. Above all they used food as a weapon. How important that weapon was, Temperley evaluates:
“It may be contended that the stability of all the provisional Governments established or seeking to establish themselves during the early months of 1919 consisted entirely in the measure of their ability to provide food for their people. In these circumstances, with the Bolshevist peril looming large in the East, even hand-to-mouth relief was of the utmost importance and value.” [26]
Hoover’s field agent, Gregory, managed the food campaign. The pitiless and cynical steps by which he undermined Soviet Hungary have already been shown in revealing detail by C. Charles in these pages. [27]
Meanwhile, the double-dealing Allies pretended to seek a peaceful settlement with Bela Kun, sending a note on June 8 asking him to cease his offensive against the Czechs and inviting him to Paris; and they hastened to reassure him by publishing the new definitive Hungarian boundaries with Czechoslovakia. Bela Kun was taken in by these moves: he stopped the advance and withdrew behind the line. The peacemakers’ real intentions were revealed, however, on July 17, when Franchet d’Esperey, acting – as Temperley [28] admits – on instructions from Paris, demanded that the Kun government resign, otherwise military action would be renewed. Bela Kun countered on the 20th with an offensive that broke through to a depth of 15 to 35 kilometers. But the Allied blockade had had its effects; and the Soviet government had been weakened from within by the Social Democrats. A victorious Franco-Rumanian counter-attack rolled the Hungarians back, and occupied Budapest early in August; Bela Kun fled.
On August 1, the Soviets were replaced by a Social Democratic government under Julius Peidl; but reactionary Hungarian officers, aided by the Franco-Rumanians, pushed it over, and set up a cabinet under Stephan Friederich, an extreme nationalist-clerical anti-Semite. The terrified Social Democrats, who had thought their desertion of Bela Kun would be rewarded, now pleaded with the Allies to hold off the Whites and restore a democratic capitalist government. But Sir George Clerk, plenipotentiary representative of the Supreme Allied Council, preferred the White gang, and set up a new government under Huszar, in which the real power was Admiral Horthy. Its first act was to massacre 1,000 Red militiamen who had laid down their arms under the laws of war; it next burned 15,000 books of the University library; and then settled down to a White terror which for sheer sadism has few equals. Between 5,000 and 9,000 – not only Communists, but Social Democrats, liberals, and Jews of all parties – were raped, mutilated, and butchered, in one of the most repulsive orgies in history.
The Allies were proud of their work. Rose Wilder Lane, the effusively laudatory biographer of Hoover, summarizes:
“It was Herbert Hoover in Paris and his man Captain Gregory on the ground who made the counterrevolution in Budapest, made it with their tremendous power of food control and a skilful handling of the political situation. Bela Kun and the soviets fell; Vienna was held in a firm grip with American relief and American soldiers; Czecho-Slovakia stood firm, and Europe was kept from communism.” [29]
Horthy, the Allies’ choice, hastened to put into effect laws restoring flogging, canceling land subdivision, abolishing all civil rights, instituting concentration camps, establishing a super-censorship, forcing serfdom on miners, and encouraging pogroms; he even attempted to introduce universal compulsory labor. The French were closely involved in the terror: a French military tribunal operated steadily, sending over 600 Hungarian militiamen to Morocco and Algeria (whence they were not freed till 1921), and others to the “Devil’s Island” of French Guiana.
Affairs thus arranged, an Inter-Allied Military Mission arrived from Paris to survey the Allies’ handiwork. Its instructions from the Supreme Council end with the statement
“That these Powers have not the least desire to interfere in the interior affairs of the Hungarian nation concerning the choice of their government ...” [30]
Thus – having destroyed two democratic and one soviet regime, and having firmly established the reactionary Horthy regime which lasted to this day to become Hitler’s ally – thus did the Allies make Hungary safe for democracy.
And Elsewhere
The Big Four conceived Poland as the keystone of the cordon sanitaire system, the buffer between a Russian gone Bolshevist and a Germany which threatened to follow. Such a state could be nothing but reactionary; and one of its first actions was to embark on an orgy of pogroms.
Hoover’s American Relief Association, pushed by the Peace Conference, and with funds provided by Congress, distributed in Poland between February and August 1919 more than $50,000,000 in food. That it was intended specifically to darn off advancing communism, there is official admission:
“General Tasker H. Bliss and Secretary of War Baker insisted that such aid was essential to check the spread of Bolshevism and save civilization.” [31]
Despite pressure of the Big Four to strike while the Soviet Union was weakest, Poland held off during the most critical time of the civil war – not from any lack of anti-communism, but in the knowledge that complete White victory would mean demands for the reincorporation of Poland into Imperial Russia.
When, however, the Whites had been sufficiently weakened, the Polish reactionaries were only too happy to carry out Paris’ wishes, and deliberately rejected the most generous peace offers by the Bolsheviks. The Polish army drove deep into the Ukraine, backed by US food and war supplies and a loan of $50,000,000 floated with State Department approval. The French sent arms and military advisors; and when the victoriously counter-attacking Red Army crossed the Curzon Line into Poland, the British also rushed arms and warned that the British fleet would force the Baltic if the Red Army did not withdraw. It was, indeed, only the world working class, with its slogan of “Hands Off Russia!,” which saved the Soviet Union, Czech workers blocked munition trains in transit to Poland; Danzig sailors and longshoremen struck, so that unwilling British troops had to be used under military discipline to unload Poland-bound munitions; and in England itself, the whole official labor movement, creating a “Council of Action,” warned of revolution if the government persisted in aiding the Poles. But Pilsudsky got enough to throw back the Red Army and win the Riga Treaty.
Walter Liggett, in The Rise of Herbert Hoover, reports that more than $100,000,000 worth of US army supplies were turned over to the Polish army, and that Senator Reed on January 4, 1921, charged, proofs in hand, that $40,000,000 of the Congressional relief fund “was spent to keep the Polish army in the field.” Liggett adds that of the $23,000,000 raised by popular subscription specifically “for the suffering children” of the central powers, the greater part was spent on the Polish war against the USSR.
In the Baltic states, the Allies used German troops, at first regulars, then Freikorps. On December 23, 1918, the USSR recognized the Soviet Republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In the last-named, recognition was premature; but in Latvia the local soviets won control, while Lithuania was divided. The Allies allowed German General von der Goltz to capture Riga on May 28, 1919 – and to slaughter several thousand Lettish men, women and children on suspicion of Bolshevism. Once the communist menace was slightly eased, the British, who had their own designs on the Baltic states, made really serious efforts to dislodge von der Goltz. It was not until December 1919 that he could be got to comply; yet as late as October the British were very happy to utilize his 20,000 troops as rear guard while their new White hope, Yudenich, reinforced with British tanks and crews, made his major drive against Red Petrograd. Basing themselves on their policy of self-determination of nationalities, the Russian Bolsheviks recognized an independent bourgeois state in the former Russian province of Finland on December 31, 1917. But the new Finnish government invited in the Kaiser’s troops. The Finnish workers reacted with a general strike which on January 27, 1918, toppled the White government and established a socialist government. The Finnish Whites, under Czarist General Mannerheim, appealed for German aid, and in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty the Germans forced withdrawal of the Russian Soviet troops quartered in Finland.
On March 3, 1918, Mannerheim proclaimed,
“at the request of the Finnish Government, units of the powerful and victorious German army disembarked on Finnish soil to expel the Bolshevik monsters.” [32]
Mannerheim celebrated his victory over the Finnish workers and peasants by jailing 150,000 of them; he slaughtered 15,000 outright, while another 15,000 died in confinement. The Allies recognized Butcher Mannerheim’s pro-German government. As soon as the Armistice permitted, Hoover rushed aid in abundance – aid which Hoover himself admitted “enabled the Finnish government to survive.” That reactionary government has continued unchanged to this day. The same Butcher Mannerheim whom American support enabled to survive has once more invited in the Germans, and it is from Finnish airfields that the Nazi dive-bombers and torpedo-planes take off to murder American merchant seamen in the convoys to Murmansk and Archangel.
Basing themselves on Wilson’s bogus principle of self-determination of nationalities, all Germans, from extreme left to extreme right, wanted German-speaking Austria in the Reich, as did the majority of the Austrians themselves. Austria’s National Assembly voted for it in November 1918; and Germany’s Weimar constitution specifically provided, in article 61, the method by which Austria should receive full representation should she join the Reich. But the peacemakers sent Germany an ultimatum to repeal article 61 within 15 days. The Allies created the monstrosity of an Austria stripped of Austrians. Czechoslovakia alone was given territories embracing 3,000,000 Austrians (it will be remembered what use Hitler made of the Sudeten problem in destroying Czechoslovakia). The wretched Austria set up by the Allies was economically a totally unviable state, with a capital city of 2,000,000 inhabitants based on a hinterland of only 4,000,000. Vienna was held, as we have seen, by “American relief and American soldiers” against the probability of communist revolution; and finally was launched on its wobbling course, which, after unvarying misery and repeated convulsions, brought it to clerical-fascism. The logical end product of the Allied policy of denying Austria the right to unite with democratic Germany was: Anschluss with Hitler.
Indeed, there was no country of continental Europe which, as a result of the peacemakers’ efforts, did not become explosive with old and new imperialisms, gnawed with irredentism, riven with oppressed nationalities, and strangled in frontiers. Such attempts to escape from this strangulation as the Austrian-German union or the efforts of the Balkan States to form a customs federation the Allies forbade, keeping all Europe Balkanized.
In their own revolting colonies, the Allied imperialists tied tighter the noose of repression. Of the state of the British colonies and troops, Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the General Staff, wrote in January 1919:
“We are sitting on the top of a mine which may go up at any minute. Ireland to-night has telegraphed for some more tanks and machine guns and is evidently anxious about the state of the country ...
“I emphasized the urgency of the situation, pointing out that unless we carried out our proposals we should lose not only our army of the Rhine, but our garrisons at home, in Ireland, Gibraltar, Malta, India, etc. and that even now we dare not give an unpopular order to the troops, and discipline was a thing of the past. Douglas Haig said that by February 15 we would have no army in France.” [33]
Thus terrified and jittery, the Allies hastily cobbled together their peace. What they themselves really thought of it is well indicated by Charles Seymour, admirer of Wilson and one of the most serious historians of the Peace Conference, in his Woodrow Wilson and the War:
“It was no peace of reconciliation…The place of the Chinese at the treaty table was empty; for them it was no peace of justice that gave Shantung to the Japanese, and they would not sign. The South African delegate, General Smuts, could not sign without explaining the balance of considerations which led him to sanction an international document containing so many flaws.
“It was not, indeed, the complete peace of justice which Wilson had premised and which, at times, he has since implied he believed it to be. Belgians complained that they had not been given the left bank of the Scheldt; Frenchmen were incensed because their frontier had not been protected; Italians were embittered by the refusal to approve their claims on the Adriatic; radical leaders, the world over, were frank in their expression of disappointment at the failure to inaugurate a new social order. The acquiescence in Japanese demands for Kiau-Chau was clearly dictated by expediency rather than by justice. Austria, reduced in size and bereft of material resources, was cut off from the sea and refused the possibility of joining with Germany. The nationalistic ambitions of the Rumanians, of the Yugoslavs, of the (Czechoslovaks, and of the Poles were aroused to such an extent that conflicts could hardly be avoided. Hungary, deprived of the rim of subject nationalities, looked forward to reclaiming her sovereignty over them. The Ruthenians complained of Polish domination. Further to the east lay the great unsettled problem of Russia.” [34]
The “war to make the world safe for democracy” thus ended in a peace whereby the Allies directly imposed regimes of the most extreme reaction in half Europe, and laid the foundations for their swift rise in the other half. The “war to end war” thus ended in a peace whereby the Allies rendered absolutely inevitable – unless the socialist revolution should intervene – a second and even more catastrophic imperialist explosion.
Footnotes
1. The World Crisis, London 1927, vol.IV, p.540. Our italics.
2. Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol.IV, The Ending of the War, pp.118-9.
3. [Idem., p.139.]
4. Fourth International, February 1943, p.40.
5. Ralph Haswell Lutz: The German Revolution, 1918-1919, Stanford 1922, p.75.
6. Idem, p.87.
7. H.W.V. Temperley, ed.: A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vol., London 1920: Vol.II, p. 445. All subsequent references to Temperley are to this work.
8. Op. cit., vol.V, p.65.
9. Vol.I, p.313.
10. Lutz, op. cit., p.116.
11. Vol.I, p.318.
12. op. cit., p.119.
13. Vol.II, p.115.
14. Andre Tardieu: The Truth About the Treaty, English translation, Indianapolis 1921, p.117.
15. Vol.II, p.461.
16. Idem., p.462.
17. Idem., p.132.
18. Idem., p.462.
19. Idem., p.443.
20. Op. cit., p.142.
21. Lutz, op. cit., p.14.
22. Temperley, Vol.II, p.445.
23. Lutz, op. cit., p. 148.
24. cf. Dauphin Meunier: La commune hongroise et les anarchistes, Paris 1926.
25. Vol.IV, p.160.
26. Vol.I, p.308.
27. The Imperialist Strategy of Food, Fourth International, January 1943.
28. Vol.I, p.356
29. The Making of Herbert Hoover, p.353.
30. Harry Hill Bandholtz: An Undiplomatic Diary, New York 1933, p.369. This US general was a member of the mission.
31. Frederick L. Schuman: American Policy Toward Russia Since 1917, New York 1928, p.176.
32. Fischer, p.90.
33. Fischer, p.163.
34. Charles Seymour, Woodrow Wilson and the War, pp.320-22
From The Fourth International magazine, New York, 1943
