Peace or World Revolution?
FISCHER, LOUIS
PERSPECTIVES Peace or World Revolution? Millions of lives and limbs have been saved and Russia might have been spared decades of totalitarian tyranny if World War I had ended in 1917 instead of...
...This moved Ludendorff, bogged down in a two-front war, to provide the Bolshevik leader and his comrades with a privileged passage in an unsealed railway carriage through Germany en route to Petrograd...
...War, not peace, is the crucible of Communism...
...I no longer know how he expressed himself, but the meaning was: that is their Westminster...
...Economies reeled...
...Moisey S. Uritsky, for instance, said: "Comrade Lenin's mistake is . . . that he looks at the matter from the point of view of Russia, and not from the international point of view...
...President Woodrow Wilson told the United States Senate on January 22, 1917, he preferred "peace without victory...
...Germany and her allies?Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey—seeking to eliminate an adversary, attended gleefully...
...An economic zero, too...
...In 1918, however, Soviet Russia was weak, "a military zero," Lenin said...
...He was an either-or man?no third path," he declared...
...Peace at the earlier date, Winston Churchill and Eric Ludendorff wrote in their memoirs, was possible, desirable and desired...
...The Soviets signed on March 3, 1918, and after lengthy, acrimonious debates, with Trotsky now seconding Lenin, they ratified...
...By making peace with Germany, the Bolsheviks served the cause of the nation while assuming they served a world cause...
...He used the time gained to call from the Petrograd and Brest-Litovsk radio towers for proletarian insurrections throughout Europe...
...The Moscow Bureau of the Party, for example, resolved unanimously on February 24, 1918, not to obey the Central Committee (the highest authority in the land) in implementing the peace with Germany, and added: "In the interest of the world revolution we consider it advisable to risk the destruction of the Soviet government which has now become a pure formality...
...Several critics in topmost party and Cabinet posts resigned in protest against the one-party system and warned it would have to rely on terror...
...The Left Communists and Left sr's concurred...
...Most of them foresaw endless difficulties or early defeat if they tried to convert retarded Russia into a lone Socialist dominion...
...But as leader of the Russian Communist party (Bolsheviks), and prime minister (Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars), he guided the Soviet delegation and the heated domestic arguments on policy...
...the big mouth rather than the strong arm would bring world revolution...
...In time of war it is unusual to prepare for peace...
...He would sign because Lenin threatened to resign if the Party rebuffed him on this life-and-death issue, but he would delay the signing...
...Faith can move mountains and dull the most brilliant brain...
...Litvinov had resided long in England, married an Englishwoman, and understood the inner strength of Western society...
...The their meant, naturally, not the English but the enemy...
...The German press," he reported, "has commenced to make loud noises that we do not want peace at all and only are concerned with the extension of the revolution to other countries...
...This meaning was obvious when he spoke of any kind of cultural value or new conquests...
...Hence his stress on propaganda beamed to Germany...
...Significant Communist party segments rejected Lenin's policy of extending the life of the Soviet state at the price of its deformation...
...He prolonged the discussions by every known debating stratagem...
...By Louis Fischer German invasion and kill the democratic benefits of the Tsar's overthrow...
...So at 5:58 p.m...
...It was a magic formula that met practical problems and fed revolutionary sentiments...
...These jackasses cannot understand that, just from the point of view of the development of the European revolution, a very early peace is of tremendous significance for us...
...One hundred and nine days after the establishment in Russia of the world's first Communist government, it had, in the opinion of the most important unit of the Soviet Communist party, become "a pure formality" without content, its form not worth saving, worth sacrificing on the altar of world revolution...
...But within a week the Germans denounced the armistice and crouched to spring at the threat of the Revolution...
...Hence their focus on propaganda...
...Russia's reluctance to quit the War and Allied insistence that she stay were the biggest single factor in the downfall of the Provisional (Kerensky) government...
...This brought the Bolsheviks appreciable popular support...
...But the Bolsheviks, even Lenin, had little confidence in the stability of their state...
...Here he stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin...
...on February 10, 1918, seconds after German State Secretary Baron Richard von Kuehlmann opened the session in bleak Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky rose, faced the military in sparkling uniforms and medals and the diplomats in striped pants and high collars and, after a scorching indictment, said, "We are leaving the War but are compelled to refuse to sign the peace treaty...
...Foreign Commissar Leon Trotsky was in direct charge of the negotiations...
...He predicted its imminent doom, as Karl Marx had in 1848, and was blind to its potential of survival...
...Nationalist interest transcended internationalist ideology...
...it might produce "an historic miscarriage" instead of Lenin's "perfectly healthy baby...
...They regarded world revolution as a Soviet Russian necessity and the Bolshevik Revolution as the first in a chain of similar social explosions which would guarantee the survival and safety of the new regime...
...In 1917 and 1918 Trotsky was acutely afraid that the premature Russian Revolution, unaccompanied by Socialist revolutions in the West, would succumb to its own infirmities...
...But "if no revolution erupted in other countries, our position would be hopeless...
...While still in exile in Switzerland, Lenin had proposed converting "the predatory imperialist war" into civil wars against capitalism...
...In addition, Russia needed peace to save the nation from collapse and further slaughter...
...Lenin never came near the Brest-Litovsk conference...
...Lenin exploited this faith to justify the one-party dictatorship which was never Marxist dogma...
...But in that early phase of the Soviet dictatorship, opposition, however vehement, and criticism, however extreme, remained unpunished...
...Armies were being bled white as mass murder continued amid the lice, rats and mud of the trenches...
...Yours, Trotsky...
...But Lenin was prepared to exchange space for time, time for foreign revolutions to ripen...
...Trotsky was on good Marxist ground...
...That would at least convince the proletariat everywhere that German militarism and Soviet Bolshevism were mortal foes...
...Key Communists disagreed with both of them...
...If Bolshevism had waited for the "organic growth of inner forces" in Russia, it would now be a two-line footnote in academic tomes...
...Thus Bolshevism came to a prostrate Russia...
...they preached "revolutionary war" without specifying how it was to be waged...
...From Brest, Trotsky wrote Lenin a private letter on January 13, 1918...
...Conceived in internationalism, the Soviet Revolution was nevertheless a national act with a national purpose...
...Lenin was right in insisting on his revolution in Russia, where the feeble capitalist class could be overthrown, in wartime, because capitalism was underdeveloped...
...In the autumn of 1902, Leon Trotsky escaped from Siberian exile, traveled by train westward through Russia reading the Iliad, and, practically penniless, crossed Europe to London where he called on Lenin, who took him for a stroll...
...Trotsky was the passionate internationalist who, on becoming the first Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced that he would take over the old Tsarist-Kerensky foreign office and then close down the shop...
...The Germans marched...
...The Kremlin, forced to choose between peace and annihilation, chose peace and relegated world revolution to second place...
...Millions of lives and limbs have been saved and Russia might have been spared decades of totalitarian tyranny if World War I had ended in 1917 instead of 1918...
...Linen was less concerned with the character of bourgeois regimes abroad...
...Lenin was an international in himself: Russian and Kalmuck on his father's side, German, Swedish and probably Jewish on his mother's...
...Trotsky's trouble was that Marx and Engels erred...
...The Bolsheviks, therefore, could only sit by the sea and, reversing Canute, bid the waves advance and engulf their foe...
...Berlin wanted peace with Russia-in-civil-war-chaos...
...Nevertheless, world revolution remained the heart of Communist credo...
...They declared further—November 17, 1917?that the exclusion of "mass proletarian organizations from political life" must conduce to "an irresponsible regime...
...When the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918," Maxim M. Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Commissar, said to me in the 1930s, "I knew the prospect of world revolution was nil...
...The Soviet government's first act, accordingly, was to broadcast a manifesto urging all nations to stop fighting...
...Yet it pinned world revolution on its banner...
...his business would be world revolution...
...The life of the Soviet revolution hung by the hair of the Brest-Litovsk conference (no peace treaty posed the possibility of a German invasion), yet Lenin permitted himself to be outvoted in Party conclaves and yielded to Trotsky on basic diplomatic strategy...
...But he believed that war is a poor incubator of healthy revolution...
...The March-to-November 1917 republican regime, heir to the last Tsar, was itself apprehensive lest withdrawal from the conflict invite a Louis Fischer's article is adapted from his latest book, Russia's Road from Peace to War, to be published on May 28 by Harper & Row...
...Trotsky, to no one's surprise, took an intermediate position between revolutionary war and Lenin's sign-the-peace-immediately program...
...Although Lenin considered world revolution "inevitable" and anticapitalist insurrections in Germany and France imminent, he refused to imperil the Russian Revolution for Red birds in the European bush: "Germany," he declared, "is only pregnant with revolution and here a perfectly healthy baby has been born...
...Lenin said sign...
...Peoples hungered...
...He showed me Westminster Abbey (from outside)," Trotsky recalled, "and some other famous buildings...
...Lenin squirmed...
...Trotsky returned to a hero's welcome...
...But after the United States became a belligerent on April 6, 1917, Wilson never reverted to the idea...
...This was the lamentable Bolshevik situation when Communist commissars met Kaiser counselors in Brest-Litovsk from December 1917 to March 1918...
...This prophetic opposition broke on the steel wall of Lenin's will...
...He refused to join the pessimists who thought the Russian Revolution of so little value that they would sacrifice it for a dream...
...Trotsky said wait...
...Hence Lenin's passionate pleas for peace at Brest no matter how humiliating the terms...
...Trotsky was an artist whose words became fiery darts that seared the thick skins of the Kaiser's generals and ripped the nerves of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Turkish diplomats assembled at Brest in the last good hope that Russia's capitulation would save their hides and countries...
...This was Trotsky's cardinal error, the key to his tragic end...
...a socialist revolution, according to Marx and Engels, must stem from organic growth: the expansion of industry, mechanization of agriculture, and an enlarged working class in advanced countries...
...Russia's Western allies, foreseeing the loss of a partner, absented themselves...
...Trotsky was more sensitive than Lenin to the widespread revulsion, reflected in the votes of Communist party organizations and in official soundings among Soviet supporters, against signing a heavily punitive peace with predatory Prussian militarists...
...Dictatorship of the proletariat was...
...Wait till the invasion actually begins...
...Governments faltered...
...Germany, to be sure, had annexed vast Russian territories with a population of 55 million and wanted more...
...Unaware that she teetered on the brink of Bolshevism, Paris, London and Washington urged her to continue the fight...
...An outsider in the enemy camp, Lenin feared that Trotsky, age 23, avid for culture, might fall in love with the West, the bourgeois West marked by Marx for destruction...
...Intent on triumph, Russia's Western partners had no eye for her exhaustion...
...Trotsky, accordingly, wished to drag out the negotiations at Brest and, over Lenin's quick body, won the aproval of key Communist committees...
...The prolongation of the war into 1919 or 1920 might have turned all Europe Red...
...we already have a newly born, lustily screaming infant, and if we, at this moment, do not clearly say that we accept peace, we shall perish...
...We took the whole situation into the hands of the Bolshevik party alone," Lenin asserted, "we took it for ourselves, in the conviction that the revolution is ripening in all countries...
...Yet the Bolsheviks called for a general peace because peace, they felt, would enable them to stay in power...
...And he dreaded a Kaiser victory that would kill the chances of a Communist revolution in Germany and condemn Europe to reaction...
...The Western social system remained an enigma to him...
...The French government, fearing "a dangerous dependence on England" if it did not gain territory from the defeated, thought Wilson would use the Allies' need of American military power and Germany's dread of it to achieve a nonpunitive peace...
...This was the first case, the first of many, in which the requirements of the Soviet state clashed with the cause of world revolution...
...His mind nursed the misconception that verbal emissions sired revolutions...
...The first extension of Soviet power resulted from World War II, and then by armed invasion, not by revolution...
...His Russocentric brain lived in Russia while his body occupied tight little apartments in Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and London...
...Prominent Communists accused him of being Russia-oriented...
...His mind was now geared to triumph on the battlefield...
...But war with its mountains of maimed and dead fixed the national mind on complete victory...
...Lenin's subjective internationalism thus merged with what was, objectively, a still-unrecognized nationalism...
...history shows that advanced countries do not make socialist revolutions...
...Trotsky preferred the neither-nor way...
...He was afraid that Russia was too underdeveloped to be the first country to reach for socialism...
...The Bolsheviks, however, hesitated to sign a separate peace with Germany and so lend credence to reports that Lenin was a Kaiser puppet...
...He expected a German invasion if Russia delayed signing a peace treaty with the German-led Quadruple Alliance...
...That role belonged to a Western industrialized country...
...Lenin, on the contrary, spent many years in western and central Europe without ever leaving Russia...
...Ultimately, survival depended on revolution in Europe...
...Communist critics charged that Lenin made it hopeless by excluding the other Socialist parties—the Mensheviks and Right and Left Social Revolutionaries (sr's) and the trade unions they dominated?from the central Soviet government, though they belonged to the local Soviets or councils...
...His slogan read "Survival...
...presumably through fraternization of troops at all fronts, general strikes, guerrilla warfare, and propaganda...
...Russian Communists had been bred to the doctrine of world revolution...
...Occasionally during the protracted, oft-postponed sessions, Lenin and Trotsky disagreed...
Vol. 52 • May 1969 • No. 9
