A World Revolution?: Russian Foreign Policy in Europe, 1918-1922
The faces of revolution: (l to r) Bavarian cavalry re-occupy Munich; Bela Kun addresses crowds in Budapest; Mustapha Kemal directs his staff in 1922
The attitude of the Russian delegation was one of the more hotly anticipated and unknowable factors about the Paris Peace Conference. In the context of fighting a war, the British, French and Americans had bent over backwards to keep Russia’s new communist government in the war, including taking actions which explicitly shored up the new regime. Despite this, few in London, Paris or Philadelphia fully trusted them and this was only underlined when Trotsky published his initial bargaining position in the newspaper ‘Pravda’ in September 1918. The most eye-catching proposal was for self-determination for national minorities, which was commonly understood as a challenge to both Europe’s continental multi-ethnic empires and countries with overseas colonies. However, when it became clear that there was no question of independence for its national minorities in the Baltic, or of Russian Poland being seceded to the new Polish-Slovak Republic, these concerns dissipated. (Sir Maurice Hankey, a senior civil servant and aide to Lloyd George, wrote in his diary that “Mr. Trotsky’s view is that the peoples of the world have the right to self-determination, provided that these rights are exercised sparingly and under close supervision.”) Instead, the Russian and the British delegations formed an unlikely partnership, keeping a check on the more extreme French demands while ensuring that the Entente got paid back for the war as much as was possible.
When the Paris Treaty was eventually signed, Trotsky could look at it with a large degree of satisfaction. He had failed to secure the complete dismemberment of Germany and the Habsburgs in Europe but steps had been taken towards this end nonetheless and the Ottoman Empire was, more or less, a dead letter. This left smaller, weaker, poorer states populating central and eastern Europe, countries ripe for the exportation of Russia’s revolution. Trotsky had staked much of his reputation, including his collaboration with the bourgeois imperialist Entente, on the idea that the Paris Treaty would eventually produce smaller nations crying out for revolution.
The first such country to test this theory was Germany, which was suffering under the linked crises of Entente occupation, war reparations and economic and food shortages. The abdication of Wilhelm II (followed by his death of Spanish flu only a few months later) had only partially appeased a restive population and the alliance between the Prussian Junker class which dominated the military and the bourgeois elements which, by and large, controlled the levers of civil political power, was tenuous at best. On 5 June 1919, the radical Communist Party of Germany launched a coup which attempted to oust the civilian government of Max von Baden and replace it with a council republic along the lines of Russia. The provisional government struggled for legitimacy outside of Berlin, however, and was overthrown only ten days later, when Erich Ludendorff arrived in the city with the Freikorps (a paramilitary made up of demobilized Great War soldiers and using military stock), which then reconquered the city in a battle which resulted in the deaths of 156 communist insurgents.
However, despite this failure, revolutions continued to burst into life across the continent once the punitive final terms of the Paris Treaty had been revealed. In particular, violent street protests broke out across Hungary, focused on Budapest. Following the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy in July 1918, the new Hungarian government had imprisoned members of the Hungarian Communist Party until July 1919, when they were progressively released. However, rather than becoming ordinary, if extreme, members of a parliamentary government, the Communists instead followed the Bolshevik programme and proclaimed a socialist republic on 21 August. One month later, the Bolshevik-backed Independent Social Democratic Party of Bavaria responded to its failure to score an electoral breakthrough in the September 1919 legislative elections by taking advantage of King Rupprecht’s absence from Munich to launch a coup. A similar uprising in Vienna was crushed swiftly without seizing control of any levers of power.
While the insurgents in Munich and Budapest seemed to have the authorities in checkmate, the reality was a lot more complicated. In neither country, for example, did they manage to gain the loyalty of the army. Drawing on his experience during the Great War, Rupprecht was able to rally troops to his side and recapture Munich only a month after he had lost it. Although the Hungarian Social Republic managed to hold out longer, they too faced continued insurgency from conservative forces within their own country. Furthermore, when it became clear that Russia was unwilling to re-open the question of the borders set by the Paris Treaty, the new Hungarian government was forced to publicly acquiesce to its terms, which caused it to lose virtually all of its remaining internal support. The remnants of the Social Republic were then removed from power on New Year’s Day 1920, when Admiral Horthy’s troops entered Budapest.
While Trotsky’s revolutions collapsed underneath him in Europe, a new and more complicated one had broken out in Asia Minor. Although its state had completely collapsed under the weight of fighting the Great War, the Ottoman elite still commanded a substantial amount of historical-based loyalty. In January 1920, Sefik Pasha seized control of what remained of the Ottoman government and began a war to try and re-write the Paris Treaty. He found himself opposed not only by Greek and Bulgarian forces but also by Russian-backed communists (lead by Mustafa Suphi), pan-Turkish nationalists (lead by Enver Pasha) and liberal modernisers (lead by Mustafa Kemal).
The fighting over Asia Minor moved from side to side until late 1921, when the British government began to back Kemal’s forces (moving from its previous position of supporting the Greeks and Bulgarians). In secret discussions with the Russians and the Armenians, Kemal agreed to accept their aid in return for mild redrawings of the Paris Treaty and ceasing attacks on Bulgaria and Greece for the time being. This, in turn, lead to Trotsky deciding to withdraw support for Suphi and backing Kemal instead, reasoning that Kemal was a figure who could be bent to the Russians’ will if they got in early. With this new configuration of support, Kemal was able to defeat his opponents and agree the Treaty of Kars in May 1922. By this treaty, Greece returned much of the territory it had been awarded in the Aegean (leaving them with Smyrna and the surrounding area – which was a territory which the Greeks were far more comfortable holding anyway) and the Entente agreed to time-limit the demilitarized zone on the Asian side of Marmara. In return, the newly-proclaimed Republic of Turkey agreed to recognize Armenia’s, Greece’s, Bulgaria’s and Arabia’s new borders. A separate annex of the treaty between Armenia and Russia firmly defined the borders between Armenian and Russian territory in the Caucuses.
Although the failures of these revolutions had not, ultimately, cost Russia anything, they were clearly a political disaster for Trotsky. At the 10th Party Congress in the summer of 1921, he was removed from his position as Foreign Secretary and would remain out of power until 1924. Although Soviet-Turkish relations would be warm for many years, the failure of these revolutions had confirmed the survival of the aristocratic and genteel bourgeois alliance in power in central and eastern Europe. Despite the heady hopes of 1917-18, the revolution had clearly come to a halt within Russia’s borders.