military options for Russia. Churchill havered, arguing that the Allies needed to fix a clear political line before he could offer any financial accountancy.41 This pleased Lloyd George, who felt he was denting Churchill’s aggressive inclinations. The French leaders were as anti-Bolshevik as Churchill. In public, Clemenceau and Poincare? denounced the iniquities of Bolshevism — and they were eloquent about the Soviet expropriation of funds belonging to hundreds of thousands of French investors. But privately they admitted that a war against Soviet Russia would be as onerous for France as Lloyd George saw it would be for the United Kingdom. France had defeated Germany at the cost of ruining the French economy and could not start another big war. And when Bela Kun established a communist regime in Budapest in March 1919 the limits of Allied power were made manifest. American officials in Paris suggested to Marshal Foch that the Hungarians should not be left to their fate at Kun’s hands. Foch’s reply killed off any illusion about France’s preparedness to intervene. He said that he would need a minimum of 350,000 troops to invade and occupy — and he could no longer muster so many soldiers.42
Captain T. T. C. Gregory of the American Relief Administration scoffed that ‘a battalion and a bugle under the Stars and Stripes’ would be quite enough to do the job.43 Whether this was overly optimistic did not matter; Wilson was never going to agree to such an expedition. The President was exhausted and under attack from all quarters. His former admirer William C. Bullitt resigned from the State Department on 17 May 1919. In his letter of resignation, he told the President that the Allied peace settlement could never hold — it was unfair to so many countries. Bullitt went on to say that the President should have ‘made your fight in the open’ and kept faith with the millions of people who had been willing him to stick by his principles.44 He wrote to Lansing more respectfully but ended with a plea against both the German peace terms and America’s entry into the League of Nations: he could see no good coming from either.45
The German treaty was the first to be concluded at the Peace Conference. Clemenceau had worn down Wilson sufficiently to persuade him to accept terms that were deeply shocking for most Germans. Vast reparations were to be paid and war guilt was to be admitted; and Germany and Austria, regardless of what their peoples wanted, were forbidden to merge into a single German state. Wilson had considered lining up with Lloyd George against Clemenceau in order to soften the treaty, but the negotiations behind the scenes proved fruitless. Tired out and drained of practical ideas, Wilson gave up the struggle and, whereas the British and French experts remained active, American influence declined as the President faded.46 The treaty was solemnly signed in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919. The choice of place was deliberate. It had been there in 1871 that the French had been humiliated by the victorious Prussians. Germany had become a pariah power, its only consolation being that German ministers knew exactly what the Allies were demanding of them. Soviet Russia, the other pariah power, still had no idea what the Allied intentions towards it might ultimately be.
19. EUROPEAN REVOLUTION
While the Allied powers had been conferring in Paris, they were troubled by some of the news that reached them from central Europe. Their fear grew that communism might spread across Europe; and although the German government had crushed the Spartacists in Berlin in January 1919, the fact that an insurrection had even been attempted was a worrying sign that the political far left could exploit a situation where unemployment and food shortages were on the rise. Germany was unlikely to be the only country which experienced such disorder. The victor powers felt anxious about the peace.
The Bolshevik leaders in Moscow drew comfort from exactly the same situation. Having made their own revolution by taking advantage of Russia’s wartime disintegration, they remained convinced that European sympathizers would soon emulate them — and although they had not wished for the death of Rosa Luxemburg, her untimely removal meant that Lenin and his Politburo could more easily dominate Comintern. Lenin was in buoyant mood, predicting revolutions that would set the continent on fire. Despite all the military difficulties faced by the Bolsheviks in the Urals, he expressed disdain for the Allied expeditionary forces in Russia. He told Arthur Ransome that Lloyd George might just as well send his soldiers to a communist university.1 He predicted that if the captured conscripts witnessed Bolshevism at work they would quickly turn into Bolsheviks themselves. The Soviet authorities put Boris Reinstein — a former emigrant to America — in charge of propaganda among British POWs who were allowed to stroll around the streets of Moscow.2 After intercepting a letter from a Private A. J. Fardon who had exchanged captivity for a job in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and seemed to be rather taken with the Soviet model, the Directorate of Military Intelligence in London grew worried about the Soviet tactic — and it was irritated with Ransome for facilitating Private Fardon’s correspondence with his family.3
Ransome had also riled Lenin by saying that, while communism could succeed for the Russians, it had no chance of doing the same in Britain. Lenin replied:
We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there.4
When Ransome quipped that any British political disturbances were merely the sign of an abortive revolution, Lenin swatted him aside:
Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative period, in which English workmen will come to realize their political needs, and turn from liberalism to socialism. Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your socialist movement, your socialist parties… when I was in England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a country with so large an industrial population they were pitiable, pitiable… a handful at a street corner… a school class… pitiable… But you must remember one great difference between Russia of 1905 and England of today. Our first Soviet in Russia was made during the revolution. Your shop-stewards committees have been in existence long before. They are without programme, without direction, but the opposition they will meet will force a programme on them.5
Lenin stood by his ideas of historical inevitability. Where Russians had gone, the British would surely follow whether Ransome agreed or not.
The Allied governments knew only too well that this was Lenin’s objective and could see that he and his comrades had attracted foreign sympathizers in Moscow who might return home and stir up revolution. The French were the first to take preventive action when Jacques Sadoul indicated a desire to assume a role in public life in Paris and only a bout of typhus held him back in the winter of 1918–19. He planned to tell his compatriots what he knew — or thought he knew — about the Soviet order. He also aimed to divulge information about France’s actions in Russia. Attacks on him appeared in the French press. Sadoul suspected that ministers had instigated them so as to keep him in Moscow and pre-empt a political scandal.6 When the French Socialist Party adopted him as a candidate in the national elections in honour of his struggle against Allied armed military intervention in Russia, the government in Paris forestalled him by setting up a court-martial for treason. He was tried
The next attempt at communist revolution occurred not in Paris or London but in Munich. Soldiers had returned from the western front angry and exhausted. Unemployment was growing and food shortages increased. Resentment at the Allies’ demands was on the rise. Strikes and demonstrations spread and the Russian idea of workers electing their own councils was copied. Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s Prime Minister, tried to dampen the fire. His moderating influence was not widely appreciated. Indeed, he was hated at both extremes of the political spectrum, and on 21 February 1919 a fiery young aristocrat gunned him down. The assassination encouraged Max Levien, a leader of the Munich Workers’ Council, to think that there would never be a better or more necessary time to seize power. Born and raised in Russia, Levien had come to Germany to take a degree in zoology and unlike other political emigrants he stayed in central Europe after the fall of the Romanovs. His political partner was Eugen Levine, who hailed from St Petersburg and had studied in Heidelberg after being exiled to Siberia. Their German associates were heavily represented in the liberal professions. They were fervent admirers of the October Revolution, and Levien and Levine put themselves forward as the Lenin and Trotsky of the political far left in southern Germany.
