Chapter eighty-three: A revolution and its ghost.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk caused a breach between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who left the coalition. It also managed to alienate the non-Bolshevik left and enraged the rightist whites. Their army, under the command of General Anton I. Denikin, was now a fine fighting force, though small in numbers. Meanwhile the Western Allies were completely devoted in their final Big Push that was to bring final victory over Germany to do anything about Russia. Only Japan did act when, on April 5 1918, Imperial forces landed at Vladivostokl. For a while, Russia lay forgotten.
In the late summer the Communists' hastily reorganized armed forces, the Red Army, recovered most of eastern European Russia. This prompted the reaction of the Allies: at Omsk, the centre of the anti-Communists, a new army was hastily trained under the command of Admiral Aleksandr V. Kolchak, with the assistance of British and U.S. military missions. Meanwhile British forces landed at Murmansk to protect the Allied matériel stockpiled there. In August further British forces landed at Arkhangelsk for the same reasons, and the Japanese reinforced their forces in the Far Eastern territories of Russia.
In Omsk relations between the Socialist Revolutionaries and Kolchak steadily deteriorated. Kolchak and his officers disliked the left-wing views of the politicians, as for them Socialist Revolutionaries and Communists were all "Reds" and enemies. The conflict came became a mute question when, by late 1918, the Red Army invaded Ukraine, forcing the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Ukrainian nationalist forces to retreat westward. In mid-November 1918 some mixed forces under French command landed at Odessa and Sevastopol, and in the next months at Kherson and Nikolayev, but they remained isolated there, unable to advance.
The Allied governments now had to decide on their policy in the confused Russian situation. Russian exiles argued that, since the pre-Bolshevik governments of Russia had remained loyal to the Allies, the Allies were bound to help them. To this moral argument was added the political opinion that the Communist regime in Moscow was a menace to the whole of Europe, with its subversive propaganda and its determination to spread revolution.
After a long and bloody war, just minds in London were up for another conflict. Later on they were to regret this decision
At the beginning of 1919 the French, U.S. and Italian governments favoured strong support (in the form of munitions and supplies rather than in men) to the Whites, while the British government was more cautious. Direct intervention by Allied military forces was, however, on a very small scale, involving a total of perhaps 150,000 soldiers. The French in Ukraine were bewildered by the confused struggle between Russian Communists, Russian Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists, and they withdrew their forces during March 1919, having hardly fired a shot (1). The British in the Arkhangelsk and Murmansk areas did some fighting, but the northern front was of only minor importance and the last British forces were withdrawn in the early fall of 1919. The only "interventionists" who represented a real danger were the Japanese, who were concerned about their northern border, sent the largest military force, numbering about 70,000, and established themselves systematically in the Far Eastern provinces until Tokio withdrew their last forces in 1922.
In the first half of 1919 the main fighting was in the east. Kolchak advanced in the Urals and had attained his greatest success by April but the Red Army's counteroffensive forced his armies to retreat through Siberia. By the end of summer the retreat had become a rout and Kolchak fled to Vladivostok. In the late summer of 1919, Denikin's last effort seized most of Ukraine and his forces moved northward from Ukraine and from the lower Volga toward Moscow while General Yudenich advanced from Estonia to the outskirts of Petrograd. But both were defeated by Red Army counterattacks, albeit with huge causalties, among them General Semyon Budyonny, a daring Cavalry officer. Yudenich retreated then into Estonia, and Denikin was driven back from Oryol and his war ended with the evacuation of the remnants of his army, in March 1920, from Novorossiysk, although he managed to evacuate 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea from the Crimea. This ended the Russian Civil War.
Denikin's short-lived government
Germany had been racked by food riots, strikes and both nationalist and Bolshevik agitation. Nobody was certain of the future. For a while it looked as if the revolution that had devored Russia was to spread to Germany too. However, as the news of the abdication of Wilhelm II spread and the regency and its new Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, followed with the promised constitutional reform that would remodel Germany on a democratic basis, fears began to be tonned down, although not completely. The USPD kept insisting insisted upon the abolition of the monarchy and Ebert refused to satisfy. In fact, he demanded that the dissolution of the soldiers’ and workers’ councils which had sprung up across Germany in the last days of April, a demand which prompted strikes and demonstrations escalated.
Then, for a while, it looked as if revolution could break up in Germany. The spark took place on 4 January 1919, when the government dismissed the chief constable of Berlin, Emil Eichhorn, who was a member of the USPD, for his lack of action against the demonstrating workers. As a reaction, the USPD, the Revolutionary Stewards and the KPD calling for a demonstration to take place on the following day. To the surprise of the initiators the demonstration turned into an assembly of huge masses as, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the centre of Berlin. In the afternoon the train stations and the newspaper district with the offices of the middle-class press and the "Vorwärts" were occupied. For while it looked as if the masses were in control.
Here we can see some Spartakist revolutionaries in the Silesian railway station in Berlin.
However, nothing happened. The initiators failed to make use of its power and was unable to give any clear direction. Karl Liebknecht demanded the overthrow of the government while Rosa Luxemburg thought a revolt at this moment to be a catastrophe and explicitly spoke out against it. Then it dawned on them that not a single regiment stationed in Berlin supported the revolt, and most remained loyal to the Crown and the government. The masses, bored to sobs and not knowing what to do, went home.
Meawnhile Ebert had turned to the Supreme Army Command for support, which Chief of Staff General Groener duly promised on condition that the government take energetic steps to combat Bolshevism. Reluctance on the part of the army to support a socialist Chancellor was dispelled by a common commitment to maintain the monarchy and to defeat the Read menace. It was the duty of the army to defend the Kaiser to protect Germany from revolution. As the first units of the Berlin garrison began to take the streets, reinforcements kept arriving and Gustav Noske began forming anti-Bolsheviks Freikorps, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg denounced the SPD as pawns of the Hohenzollerns. On 3rd July, with Berlin in turmoil, the army took control of the city and hard measures were applied at once. Fearing imminent execution, Liebknecht and Luxemburg had to go into hiding. A few days later the fled Berlin in disguise. The destination: Moscow.
The end of the troubles in Berlin: Troops of the Imperial Army deploys in the Wilhelmplatz and the government quarter.
A few further strikes revolts erupted all over Germany. In some states Councils Republics were proclaimed and existed, most prominently in Bavaria, Hamburg and Thuringia, even if only temporarily as they were put down by the local police before the Imperial Army or the Freikorps could act. By the end of the troubles, 29 people were killed 1,400 arrested. Among the dead were an army officer, captain Waldemar Pabst, who was shot during the storming of the Vorwärts building on July 4th, and Gustav Noske, who was shot by mistake by a patrol from the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division.
Thus vanished the danger of a Bolshevik-style government in Germany.
(1) Old habits die hard
@Viden: Canon, like laws, were made to be ignored, young and angry padawan.
@c0d5579: As said previously, I know it's gamey, but I wanted to do it in that way. And thank God I couldn't find a more stupid and silliest way to do it... Who better to kill Adolf? Stalin, of course...
@Milites: The British Raj? I'll try to do something about it, I promise. The Ghadar Party, Dyer, Jallianwala Bagh public gardens, Ghandi, M. N. Roy, etc...
@Faeelin: In a war with so many dead people, one more... who cares...
@El Pip: Some possibilites: the decimation of the Liberal leadership; a Stalinist-like purge of the Conservative, Laborist and Liberal leadership -but we risk having Britain being led by Scots and Irish... too ASB even for me; some few hand-picked politicians forced to bid farewell well before their time. I'm afraid I'll choose the last one. The two other options were in such fashion that they made look St. Bartholomew's Day massacre like a slightly derranged party.
@Nathan Madien: I'm planning something for the States that ranges from a trekaddictst solution (USSA!! USSA!!!) to something else, including some combination of an endless reign of the "best" US presidents (IMHO Wilson/Coolidge/Hoover/someonetocoverthisgap/Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter) and some
real evil options. Just for you to know: dunno why, but I like McNary. I won't kill him, don't worry.
