The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (31 page)

Yet Bolshevik forces were also involved in attacks on Jews. Working-class food riots of the sort that occurred in towns and cities all over Europe in the last phase of the war tended to lead to the looting of shops; since these were often Jewish-owned in the provinces of the Pale, protests about prices or shortages could easily take on the character of pogroms. Such incidents occurred in 1917 in Kalush, Kiev, Kharkov, Roslavl (Smolensk) and Starosiniavy (Podolia). After the Bolshevik seizure of power, there were also pogrom-like incidents in Bograd (Bessarabia) and in Mozyr (Minsk). In November 1917, at the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the Jewish journalist Ilya Ehrenburg heard a Bolshevik campaigner tell a queue of Muscovites: ‘Those who are against the Yids – vote for list No. 5; those who are for the world revolution – vote for list No. 5’, which was the Bolshevik list of candidates. In Cherepovets one Bolshevik leader brandished a revolver and shouted: ‘Kill the Yids, save Russia!’ A particularly brutal pogrom in Glukhov (Chernigov) in March 1918 was blamed on retreating Soviet forces. Likewise, Red Army instructors at Smolensk were accused of preparing ‘a Massacre of St Bartholomew’ for the Jews prior to the pogrom of May 1918. As
the Red Army withdrew from territory ceded at Brest-Litovsk there was a spate of similar attacks on Jews. In November 1920 the Red Army’s First Cavalry Army swept through the Jewish communities of Ukrainian towns like Rogachev, Baranovichi, Romanov and Chud-nov, killing and looting as they went. Lenin himself was personally informed about pogroms in Minsk and Gomel the following year. His sole comment scrawled on the reports he received was: ‘For the archives.’ By the end of the civil war, pogroms in southern Russia and Ukraine had claimed up to 120,000 lives.

In clamping down on such behaviour, Stalin soon revealed that he was more than a match for Trotsky and Lenin when it came to ruthlessness. He approved concentration camps for anti-Bolshevik elements in Estonia, calling them ‘excellent’. He ordered exemplary burnings of villages in the northern Caucasus, ordering local Bolsheviks to ‘be absolutely merciless’. When the Bashkirian Revolutionary Committee showed signs of disloyalty, Stalin had its leaders arrested and brought to Moscow for interrogation. He forced Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia into a more easily controlled ‘Transcau-casian Federation’. He yoked Chechens, Ossetians and Kabardians together in an autonomous Mountain Republic in the northern Caucasus. He dismissed the idea out of hand when one of his own staff, himself a young Tartar, proposed an independent Pan-Turkic republic. The aim of Bolshevik policy towards the Jews became ‘to re-socialize the Jewish population so that it would become politically Bolshevized and sociologically Sovietized’. National autonomy, in other words, would be firmly within the context of a centralized one-party dictatorship. So hard did Stalin knock heads together in his native land that Lenin was prompted to accuse him of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. But as Lenin’s health failed following a stroke in May 1922, Stalin was able to kill off the idea of a truly federal Union of Soviet Republics. If it had been left entirely to him, all the other republics would simply have been absorbed back into Russia. By the mid-1920s, the creation of Autonomous Soviet Republics in Moldavia and Karelia was motivated mainly by a desire to advertise the benefits of Soviet rule to neighbouring countries: such republics were to be to their peoples beyond the Soviet border what Piedmont had once been to Italy, a magnet for their national aspirations.

Between 1918 and 1922, around seven million men had fought in the Russian civil war. Of these, close to 1.5 million had lost their lives as a result of fighting, executions or disease. But that figure probably represents no more than a fifth of the war’s victims. The chaos unleashed in the aftermath of the Revolution led to a severe famine in 1920–21. As malnourished refugees travelled in search of food, they succumbed to and spread contagious diseases, of which cholera and typhus claimed the most victims. There were also outbreaks of smallpox and plague, to say nothing of an epidemic of venereal disease, which afflicted 12 per cent of the population of Leningrad. The total number of deaths due to epidemics alone may have exceeded eight million. If this estimate is added to the figures for battlefield casualties, political murders and deaths due to famine, the excess mortality caused by the civil war approaches the global death toll for the First World War. Civilian casualties, including the wounded, outran military casualties nine to one. Between 1917 and 1920, it has been estimated, the population of the Soviet Union fell by around six million. For Western Europe, the war might have ended in November 1918, but for anyone living between Vilnius and Vladivostok the years after the ‘end’ of the First World War brought anything but peace. And the outcome? By the end of 1922, a new Russian Socialist Federal Republic extended from the Baltic to the Bering Straits. It, along with the far smaller Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Transcaucasian and Far Eastern republics, made up the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Apart from a westward strip running from Helsinki down to Kishinev, remarkably little of the old Tsarist edifice had been lost – an astonishing outcome given the weakness of the Bolshevik position in the initial phase of the Revolution, and a testament to the effectiveness of their ruthless tactics in the civil war. In effect, then, one Russian empire had simply been replaced by another. The 1926 census revealed that slightly less than 53 per cent of the citizens of the Soviet Union regarded themselves as of Russian nationality, though nearly 58 per cent gave Russian as the language they knew best or most often used.

Some cynics added that the political system had not changed much either; for what was Lenin if not a Red Tsar, wielding absolute power through the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (which, crucially, maintained direct control over the parties in the other republics)?
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Yet that was to miss the vast change of ethos that separated the new empire from the old. Though there had been ‘terrible’ Tsars in Russia’s past, the empire established by Lenin and his confederates was the first to be based on terror itself since the short-lived tyranny of the Jacobins in revolutionary France. At the same time, for all the Bolsheviks’ obsession with Western revolutionary models, theirs was a revolution that looked east more than it looked west. Asked to characterize the Russian empire as it re-emerged under Lenin, most Western commentators would not have hesitated to use the word ‘Asiatic’. That was also Trotsky’s view: ‘Our Red Army’, he argued, ‘constitutes an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain of world politics than in European terrain.’ Significantly, ‘Asiatic’ was precisely the word Lenin had used to describe Stalin.

Was the port at the mouth of the River Vistula called Danzig, its German name? Or was it to be Gdańsk, as the Poles called it? Once a free, self-governing Hanseatic city under the protection of the Teutonic Knights, Danzig had recognized the sovereignty of the Polish crown from the mid-fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. But in 1793 it was annexed by Prussia, then, after a brief period of independence during the Napoleonic era, in 1871 it became part of the German Reich. More than 90 per cent of the town’s population were German. Most of the peasants in the surrounding countryside, however, were Polish or Slavonic Kashubes.

Danzig was one of countless questions to confront the Western leaders and their entourages when they gathered at Versailles in 1919. The great optimist and moralist among them, the Virginian-born and Presbyterian-raised US President Woodrow Wilson, believed he had the answers.
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Some of these were familiar liberal nostrums, like free
trade and freedom of the seas. Others built on pre-war and wartime proposals for collective security, arms control and an end to ‘secret diplomacy’; from these Wilson fashioned his League of Nations, with its biblical ‘Covenant’. The most radical of Wilson’s schemes, however, envisaged a reordering of the European map on the basis of national ‘self-determination’. From December 1914 onwards Wilson had argued that any peace settlement ‘should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien people’. In May 1915 he went further, asserting unequivocally that ‘every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live’. He repeated the point in January 1917 and elaborated on its implications in points five to thirteen of his Fourteen Points. According to Wilson’s original draft of the Covenant, the League would not merely guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but would be empowered to accommodate future territorial adjustments ‘pursuant to the principle of self-determination’. This was not entirely novel, needless to say. British liberal thinkers since John Stuart Mill had been arguing that the homogeneous nation state was the only proper setting for a liberal polity, and British poets and politicians had spasmodically stuck up for the right to independence of the Greeks and the Italians, whom they tended to romanticize. When trying to imagine an ideal map of Europe in 1857, Giuseppe Mazzini had imagined just eleven nation states ordered on the basis of nationality. But never before had a statesman proposed to make national self-determination the basis for a new European order. In combination with the League, self-determination was to take precedence over the integrity of the sovereign state, the foundation of international relations since the Treaty of Westphalia two and a half centuries before.

Applying the principle of self-determination proved far from easy, however, for two reasons. First, as we have seen, there were more than thirteen million Germans already living east of the borders of the pre-war Reich – perhaps as much as a fifth of the total German-speaking
population of Europe. If self-determination were applied rigorously Germany might well end up bigger, which was certainly not the intention of Wilson’s fellow peacemakers. From the outset, then, there had to be inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in the way Germany was treated: no
Anschluss
of the rump Austria to the Reich – despite the fact that the post-revolutionary governments in both Berlin and Vienna voted for it – and no vote at all for the 250,000 South Tyroleans, 90 per cent of whom were Germans, on whether they wanted to become Italian, but plebiscites to determine the fate of northern Schleswig (which went to Denmark), eastern Upper Silesia (to Poland) and Eupen-Malmédy (to Belgium). France reclaimed Alsace and Lorraine, lost in 1871, despite the fact that barely one in ten of the population were French-speakers. In all, around 3.5 million German-speakers ceased to be German citizens under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Equally important, under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of St Germain-en-Laye, more than 3.2 million Germans in Bohemia, southern Moravia and the hastily constituted Austrian province of Sudetenland found themselves reluctant citizens of a new state, Czechoslovakia. There were just under three-quarters of a million Germans in the new Poland, the same number again in the mightily enlarged Romania, half a million in the new South Slav kingdom later known as Yugoslavia and another half million in the rump Hungary left over after the Treaty of Trianon.

The second problem for self-determination was that none of the peacemakers saw it as applying to their own empires – only to the empires they had defeated. Wilson’s original draft of Article III of the League Covenant had explicitly stated that:

Territorial adjustments… may in the future become necessary by reason of changes in present racial conditions and aspirations or present social and political relationships, pursuant to the principle of self-determination, and… may… in the judgment of three-fourths of the Delegates be demanded by the welfare and manifest interest of the peoples concerned.

This was too much even for the other Americans at Paris. Did Wilson seriously contemplate, asked General Tasker Bliss, ‘the possibility of the League of Nations being called upon to consider such questions as the independence of Ireland, of India, etc., etc.?’ His colleague, the legal expert David Hunter Miller warned that such an Article would create permanent ‘dissatisfaction’ and ‘irredentist agitation’. As a result, Wilson’s draft was butchered. What became Article X merely reasserted the old Westphalian verity: ‘The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.’ As the British historian turned diplomat James Headlam-Morley sardonically noted: ‘Self determination is quite
demodé
.’ He and his colleagues ‘determine[d] for them [the nationalities] what they ought to wish’, though in practice they could not wholly ignore the results of the plebiscites in certain contested areas. There were, it is true, serious attempts to write ‘minority rights’ into the various peace treaties, beginning with Poland. But here again British cynicism and self-interest played an unconstructive role. Revealingly, Headlam-Morley was as sceptical of minority rights as he was of self-determination. As he noted in his
Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference:

Table 5.1: Germany’s territorial and population losses under the Treaty of Versailles