The Lost History of 1914 Page 5
It’s unclear how far fear of losing this beachhead of democracy motivated the middle-class parties to break with the SPD after the censure vote. The comment the crown prince’s plotting drew in the Reichstag suggests that it was at least on the deputies’ minds. “People see that if the Crown Prince lives in intimate friendship with men who despise the Constitution and preach the coup d’etat they must take their destinies into their own hands,” Social Democrat Ludwig Frank, declared, warning plotters on the right that a coup would be met by extra-parliamentary action on the left.61
By Christmas 1913, however, the moment of peril for the right had passed, and with it a skein of lost history that might have anchored peace in strife. Shuttering the Reichstag would have plunged Germany into civil war. Socialist voters, an SPD deputy warned in 1913, “formed a fraction of the nation as large as all the southern states of the Reich put together,” and saber rule would have radicalized many to protest and some to resist. As happened in 1905, foreign policy would be hostage to domestic crisis. In that year, citing a crippling miners’ strike in the Ruhr, the kaiser rejected a “radical” plan for a preventive war against Russia, then torn by revolution, for a reason no less cogent in 1914: “Because of our Social Democrats we cannot send a single man out of the country without running the gravest risk to the life and property of the citizenry. First the socialists must be gunned down, decapitated and rendered harmless, in a blood-bath if necessary, and then war abroad!” Decapitating the SPD’s elected leaders would have triggered a backlash at least as severe as a miners’ walkout. In March 1919 to end a right-wing putsch the SPD called a country-wide general strike, an economic weapon that would have been equally potent in 1914. Franz Ferdinand would still have been assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The Austrians would still have asked Germany to support their war on Serbia. Pleading that he “couldn’t send a single man out of the country without running the gravest risk,” the kaiser could have refused without fear of jeopardizing Germany’s alliance with Austria-Hungary, a brittle confection of peoples whose leaders would be the first to understand his dilemma. Unable to fight Serbia’s ally Russia alone, chances are Vienna would have backed down.62
The kaiser often spouted Staatsstreich rhetoric, telegraphing Bethmann earlier in 1913: “The sooner such Halunken are blown to smithereens the better! The German parliamentarian and politician becomes daily more of a swine!” But late in the year, with the Reichstag rallying to Bethmann from fear of the Social Democrats, he chastised the crown prince for wanting to blow up the Halunken: “In Latin and Central America Staatsstreiche may belong to the instruments of the art of government. In Germany, thank God, they are not customary and must not become so, whether they come from above or below. People who dare to recommend such action are dangerous people, more dangerous for the monarchy than the wildest Social Democrat.” This remonstrance was drafted by the head of the Civil Cabinet, a Bethmann ally, who under the kaiser’s signature went on to label Pan-German fantasies to deny civil rights to Jews “down-right childish: they would cause Germany’s departure from the ranks of civilized nations.” That sentiment would not have flowed easily from the pen of the kaiser, a choleric anti-Semite who in 1919 wrote that Jews and mosquitoes were a “nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or other,” adding, “I believe the best would be gas.”63
Ostensibly for telegramming congratulations to Reuter (“Give it ’em!”), the thirty-one-year-old heir apparent was relieved of his command of the “Death’s Head” hussars in Danzig and demoted to what the Berliner Zeitung with brutal candor characterized as “a wholly subordinate post on the General Staff” in Berlin. When it came out that in addition the crown prince was “ordered” to endure a nearly three-hour New Year’s Eve duologue from his parents on the brilliance of the “Kaiser manoeuvres” during the 1913 war games, even Social Democrats must have felt that the young martinet had been punished enough.64
Tragically, the Staatsstreich happened not under the monarchy but in the closing days of the Weimar Republic. On the pretext that the legally elected Prussian State Government could not keep order—over a five-week period Nazi storm troopers had provoked five hundred brawls in which ninety-nine people were killed—the reactionary chancellor Franz von Papen deposed “the last bastion of republicanism and Social Democracy in Germany” and declared a state of siege in Berlin. These emergency powers belonged, under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, to the president of the republic. In 1932 this was the aged field marshal, Paul von Hindenburg, who, with Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau—he of the “shoot the Reichstag” line—whispering in his good ear, authorized Papen’s move. This coup, the last in the series begun in comedy with the “Captain from Köpenick,” was “a crucial step … along the road towards the total elimination of democracy in Germany” that “paved the way for Hitler,” who came to power eight months later.* By this time Zabern was “Saverne,” France having regained Alsace-Lorraine at Versailles in 1919. But the spirit of Zabern survived—and finally came to Berlin.65
Lieutenant Gunther Freiherr von Forstner (1893–1915)
The lame shoe worker Karl Blank had pronounced a “terrible curse” on Lieutenant Forstner; he retaliated by slashing Blank’s skull with his saber, gifting headline writers with a metaphor for Zabern, one of those “relatively minor happening[s],” Lenin wrote at the time, that “sometimes occur in politics when the nature of a certain order of things is revealed.” The future spoke through the shoe worker, for he said, “Young man, you will soon be slaughtered!” and in February 1915, months shy of his twenty-first birthday, while the lieutenant was engaged against Russian forces in the Carpathians, that prophecy came to pass.
2
RUSSIA
SEA OF TEARS
The revolution of 1905 grew directly out of the Russo-Japanese war, just as the revolution of 1917 was the direct outcome of the great imperialist slaughter.
—Leon Trotsky
Six months before Russia entered World War I, Tsar Nicholas II received a clairvoyant prophecy of the war’s final account with his three-hundred-year-old dynasty. Regarding a secretary as being incompatible with his purgatorial view of office, the Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias opened and read his mail himself. But whether he ever saw the so-called Durnovo Memorandum submitted to him in February 1914, warning that war would make “social revolution in its most extreme form … inevitable,” is unknown. He was an absolute ruler; he did what he liked with Russia. So if he had taken the warning to heart, Russia might not have gone to war; there might not have been a war. Russia might have been spared a revolution; Nicholas and his family might have been spared.1
The memorandum, written by the reactionary statesman Peter Durnovo, argumed that war would bring revolution and Russia’s membership in the Triple Entente war. Therefore Russia must break with its entente partners, France and Britain. Peace could be secured, revolution skirted, only by changing sides, renewing the nonaggression pact with Germany that had lapsed in the early nineties.
The dynamic factor in world politics, Durnovo wrote, was the “rivalry” between England and Germany. By building a great battle fleet Germany threatened England’s lifeline to its colonies in Africa and Asia. Since “England cannot yield without a fight … between her and Germany a struggle for life or death is inevitable.” England was a naval power, Germany a land power. England needed continental allies (like Russia) to fight the ground war for it. In fact, the documents reveal, the British believed only a “limited” commitment on land would be necessary—“because Russia would crush Germany from the east.”
“The main burden of the war will undoubtedly fall on us,” since France “poor in manpower, will probably adhere to strictly defensive tactics … The part of a battering-ram, making a breach in the very thick of the German defense, will be ours.” Perhaps Russia could fight a short war, Durnovo allowed, but not the coming war of attrition between industrialized states. “The insufficiency of war supplies” owing to
the “embryonic condition of our industries” would rapidly be exposed, and foreign sources of supply choked off.
This 1909 cover of Der Wahre Jacob (The Real Jacob), a Socialist satirical journal with a circulation of nearly four hundred thousand, depicts the dynamic that Peter Durnovo viewed as driving the world to war. Historians demur: By 1914 Germany had given up the naval race, and as late as July 22, Lloyd George remarked the lack of “the snarling that we used to see” in Anglo-German relations.
Such a war would strain, perhaps crack, the social order. Nicholas’s rule might not survive victory, and defeat would loose an unstoppable slide:
The trouble will start with the blaming of the Government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the Government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitations throughout the country, with Socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of the primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into a hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.2
Events vindicated that scenario in essence and detail.* Yet even as Durnovo was circulating his views among Nicholas’s ministers, his alternative to war and revolution—détente with Germany—had vanished like a forgotten dream. In March, the French chargé reported “a veritable transformation in the feelings of official Russia with regard to Germany.” Nicholas himself underscored the changed mood, telling the French ambassador that a recent German encroachment on the Turkish Straits had “made manifest the German threat to Russia’s essential interests.”3
Russia’s metropolitan dailies exposed Germany’s dark designs. In December 1913, Novoe vremia, an influential nationalist voice, editorialized that “the chief object of our foreign policy should from now on be to break that tightening Teutonic ring around us which threatens Russia and the whole of Slavdom with fatal consequences.” To break the ring Russia needed to strengthen its ties to France “and convert into a firm alliance our existing indecisive agreement with England.” Early in 1914 Russia began negotiating a naval convention with England. The foreign minister, Serge Sazonov, sought more—a “firm” military alliance like the one with France.4
In September 1913 Russian statesmen thought they saw signs that Germany wanted better relations. By February 1914 they were agreed that Germany meant Russia nothing but harm. To quote Alfred D. Chandler, the dean of business history in the United States, “History is the study of change over time.” This celeritous reversal ranks as a momentous change, a precondition of World War I. In ninety days, Germany’s actions, magnified by alarmed Russian perceptions, had rendered Germany’s friends like Durnovo yesterday’s men.5
The Durnovo Memorandum was the last in a series of warnings issued by the tsar’s men in the crisis-charged years before 1914. From Russia’s criminally unnecessary war with Japan in far-off Manchuria they drew the lesson of 1905: War would be the death of the dynasty.
The war with Japan originated in a mercenary lunge of Russian imperialism initiated by Nicholas’s court favorites. To secure a timber concession in Korea, they employed a private army of Chinese bandits to extend Russia’s reach down the peninsula—this in defiance of a prior Russian agreement with Japan to respect its sphere of influence there. Like nothing else since he ascended the throne in 1894, this crony-capitalist war exposed Nicholas’s unfitness to rule. He knew it—“Peter Arkadevitch … I succeed in nothing I undertake,” he once confessed to Prime Minister Peter Stolypin—but Russia’s peasant millions, taught to revere him as “a being intermediate between man and God,” did not. For all but the most mystical royalists among them, that awe died of a debacle in which Russia lost every battle on land and sea.6
“Japan at Russia’s Throat” from London Illustrated Weekly. The Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) was a clash of rival imperialisms: Russia and Japan had designs on the Korean peninsula. Japan was closer. It won. For Russia’s statesmen the lesson of 1905 was, No war … no revolution.
In a postwar memoir, a young army physician recorded the receding hopes of Russia’s ill-equipped, ill-trained, badly led, haplessly commanded, everywhere-battered army: “Earlier [soldiers] said that the Japanese were born sailors and we would beat them on land; then they began to say that the Japanese were used to the mountains and we would beat them on the plain. Now they were saying that the Japanese were used to summer and we would beat them in the winter. And everybody tried to have faith in the winter.” Sergei Witte, the prime minister who negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the war, concluded that the army “was completely demoralized and revolutionized by defeats.”7
Again and again in 1905, the war flowed into the revolution catalyzed that January by Bloody Sunday—the massacre, in the shadow of the Winter Palace, of striking St. Petersburg workers petitioning the tsar for “justice and protection” against their employers’ abuses and his bureaucrats’ indifference. The mobilization of reservists called up to fill the gaps in the ranks set off riots that fueled the revolution. The war drained the treasury of funds to cope with the revolution and deprived the government, which had dispatched Russia’s one-million-man regular army to Manchuria, of the bayonets to end the storm of violence and criminality it unleashed. In September, desperate for those bayonets to picket his throne, Nicholas reached a peace settlement with Japan. The war had fed the revolution, and the revolution devoured the war.8
With St. Petersburg’s two-thousand-man garrison too few, too weak, and too suspect to protect the government, by October 1905 the royal household was readying to flee abroad. With hope gone of riding out the maelstrom while keeping the family autocracy intact and with his uncle Nikolai drawing his revolver and threatening to shoot himself on the spot if he did not bend, Nicholas issued the October Manifesto. Along with granting civil liberties, a milestone in authoritarain Russia, it established a constitutional order, cabinet government, and Russia’s first democratically elected legislature, the duma. “There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking,” he explained to his mother.9
In the vortex of war and revolution the tsarist regime had discovered the formula for its survival—“no war … no revolution.” Following it too faithfully, however, risked undermining Russia’s credibility as a Great Power. Russia’s prime ministers, for whom restoring internal stability was paramount, repeatedly had to rein in her foreign and war ministers, charged with maintaining Russia’s standing in the world.10
At an August 1907 meeting of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Stolypin spelled out the rationale of Russia’s new domestically dictated diplomacy: “Our internal situation does not allow us to conduct an aggressive foreign policy. The absence of fear from the point of view of international relations is extremely important for us since it will give us the opportunity to dedicate with full tranquility our strength to the repair of matters within the country.” Russia’s foreign policy had to buy time for the repairs to work. In a 1909 interview with a foreign journalist, Stolypin said, “Give the State twenty years of internal and external peace and you will not recognize Russia.” To address the grievances that stoked the 1905 revolution, he proposed reforms ranging from granting property rights to peasants to ending discrimination against Jews. Only after this historic program and a parallel crackdown on revolutionary violence had “pacified” Russia, Stolypin insisted, could it “begin to speak its former language” in foreign affairs.11
“The Chamberpotless Tsar,” from Der Wahre Jacob (The Real Jacob), May 1905.
Adjutant: “Majesty, they are asking for your head.”
Nicholas: “Tell them I never had one.”
Alexander Izvolski, Russia’s first post-1905 foreign minister, backed Stolypin’s strategy of “being on good terms with everybody”—at first. During a Council of Ministers meeting in February 1907, he spoke against extending Russia’s influence to the Persian Gulf: “The events of the last years have … shown the unattainability of this plan.” In April he came out for abandoning Russia’s forward policy in Afghanistan because it was “in insufficient accord with the real powers of the country.” The minister of finance, Vladimir Kokovtsov, seconded that view: The “lessons of the past” required a “realistic” foreign policy. An early victory for realism was the Anglo-Russian entente of August 1907, which ended the so-called Great Game between the powers in Afghanistan and carved Persia into Russian and British spheres of influence.12