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Part VIII: World Peace and Total War
“Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” – Karl Marx
Unlike the late emperor, the provisional government did not try to rely on troops of questionable loyalties and attempt to fight it out in the capital. The government took up new residence in Pas de Calais among General Philippe Petain’s Loyalist troops. The term “Loyalist” came to be applied to all troops who fought the “Syndicalist” forces. The Loyalists were divided geographically as well as ideologically. Aside from Petain in the north, Marshall Ferdinand Foch commanded considerable forces in the conservative heartland of Burgundy, and was considered pro-monarchy, though not necessarily loyal to the Napoleonic line. However, in the south the region of Aquitaine declared for Napoleon V, recently released from Iberian captivity. Relations between the Royalist and Provo factions were cold to say the least. Among the Syndicalists, the CGT under Léon Jouhaux claimed to represent the people, and declared itself the new government. However, they vied for the people’s loyalties with the Jacobins, who were further divided between Anarchists led by Sebastian Faure, and Travailers led by Marceau Pivert.
Marceau Pivert Sebastian Faure
Leon Jouhaux Marshall Foch
General Petain Prince Napoleon V
The French Revolution had caught the Allies by surprise. There was a great deal of indecision about what steps to take next. Should the Provisionals or Revolutionaries be recognized? If the Provisionals were recognized, should aid be given? If so, should it be Military or humanitarian? While the Provisional Government advocated democracy, the strength of the Royalist factions meant that a Provo victory would not ensure that democracy would survive in France. Then there were domestic issues to be taken in consideration. Socialist parties everywhere declared their support for their ideological brothers and demanded their home governments recognize the revolutionaries. Decidedly more radical groups advocated revolutions of their own. Obviously the end result would heavily depend on whether or Jouhaux’s government would recognize the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles. Wisely, Jouhaux informed the Allies his government would recognize all the peace agreements, over the protests of his Jacobin cabinet ministers. With this assurance given, the Allies had the excuse they needed not to intervene in French affairs. Without such intervention, the Provo movement was destined to fail. While the Provisional Government managed to secure some funds from the United States, and Napoleon V’s royal government from Brazil, it was no comparison to the resources the Syndicalist forces could collect through mass requisition of foodstuffs from the peasants, and weapons from the now union run factories.
French soldiers loyal to Burgundy.
Syndicalists with an outdated artillery piece defending Toulouse in the opening days of the war.
Burgundy was the first to fall in the summer of 1910, Marshall Foch fleeing into German Alsace-Lorraine with his loyalist forces. Later that winter Clemenceau and Petain and the Provisional Government stepped aboard French Naval vessels destined for loyal French North Africa. Napoleon V would hold out into 1911 before finally boarding loyal vessels with his followers, also bound for French North Africa. To prevent a civil war from breaking out in Algeria, an agreement was reached between Napoleon V and Clemenceau in the Concordant of Algiers. Napoleon V would be given the title president for life of the new French State now presiding over what remained of France’s colonial empire, while Clemenceau would remain Prime Minister. A bicameral parliamentary system would remain the main political body and the future government of France would be decided upon the eventual retaking of metropolitan France. For the time being, unity was required to regroup and rebuild, and Africa offered some excellent opportunities.
While the Allies had ignored France, another revolution in Russia had captured international attention. While promises of domestic reforms had been put off by world war, now the Russian people expected those promises to be fulfilled. However, Czar Nicholas II mistook the resolve the Russian people had displayed in war, continued support for his regime. This was not the case. When the czar announced he would not be holding Duma elections, the people’s resentment exploded in outright revolt. Workers that had stayed in the factories through all the deprivations of war went on strike. Peasants encouraged by the Labour Group and in conjunction with the worker’s Russian Social Democratic Party, went on a rampage appropriating land and expelling or murdering their landowners. While the Russians had granted the western half of their occupied portion of Poland nominal independence for unification with Austrian Galicia (in exchange for certain economic and political concessions), the eastern portions of the old kingdom became rife with nationalist rebellion. The Baltic nations also demanded autonomy. However, after the death of his uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the Czar demanded immediate action. Liberal interior minister Pyotr Dmitrievich Sviatopolk-Mirskii was dismissed and was replaced by the more like minded Pyotr Stolypin. The army was called to suppress all disorder, despite the general’s reports that the largely conscript army could not be relied upon. On March 11 1910, rioting in St. Petersburg had reached such a peak that regiments had been called out to put an end to it, however many garrisons refused to follow orders, some shooting their officers.
Workers and rebel soldiers with captured police officers in St. Petersburg
On March 14, the Czar arrived in the city, his train having been diverted by disloyal troops. The Army Chiefs and ministers who had not fled already, told the Czar that the situation was lost, and that he should abdicate the throne, which he did so on the 15th. Despite the Czar’s request, his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich refused the crown; six days later the Provisional Government placed the royal family under house arrest.
Reds taking Red Square
While the Provisional Government claimed control over all of the Russian Empire, in reality the “Empire” was slipping away. Even in Russia’s main centers of power, Moscow and St. Petersburg, a political body representing the radical left calling itself the Petrograd Soviet vied for power. In different times perhaps more cautious voices would have won out over the hot-headed demands for radical instant change. However, the Second French Revolution which was continuing at the same time, put heart in those who believed the international workers struggle had begun.
In the Russian Provisional Government, it was a moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky who came to predominance, becoming prime minister presiding over a Duma dominated by centrist parties. Despite holding a dominate role in the Petrograd Soviet as well, the later body began to take on a radical perspective. The radicalism was further pronounced by the arrival of Vladimir Lenin who arrived incognito from his exile in Switzerland and taking over leadership of the RSDP. The Kerensky government floundered over the issue of land distribution to peasants and failed to make serious headway against rebels in the Baltic region and in Poland, Lenin garnered thousands of followers with his rousing speeches on Marxist land distribution and calling for an end to the conflicts in the outer regions of the old empire so as to focus on the domestic issues of the working classes. During Chief of Staff General Kornilov’s coup attempt, Kerensky had distributed arms to the workers of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately for his government, after the coup failed, he did not get them back. With the necessary arms, Lenin saw he had the opportunity to strike. On November 6-7, the RSDP through the Petrograd Soviet launched a coup of its own. Kerensky’s government lost control of the city and despite reinforcements, was unable to take it back. With collapse of the Provisional Government, order everywhere disintegrated. Reds, anarchists, and nationalists everywhere attempted to seize what they could.
While the Allies could have abided the Kerensky government, a government led by Lenin and the RSDP was considered unacceptable. Of concern were the large amounts of war materials given to Russia during the Great War, and the Wilhelm II of the German Empire was particularly concerned with the safety of his cousin Nicholas Romanov and his family that up till then had been under protective house arrest in Toblosk. While HBSE forces invaded the Karelian Peninsula to seize war materials in Murmansk and besiege St. Petersburg (the RSDP called it Petrograd), the Germans invaded the Baltic regions, East Poland, and Belorussia. A combined Allied force seized Sebastopol on the Black Sea while in the east, the Allies and the Japanese (suspiciously accepted by the Allies) seized war material in Vladivostok in conjunction with royalist commander Admiral Kolchak.
HBSE troops in Murmansk Allied Intervention in Vladivostok
German soldiers on the attack in Eastern Poland
Lenin’s government was hard pressed to meet all these threats, as well as those from within. The traditionally harsh Russian winter managed to slow the Allied advance, but the Red Army proved to offer a lukewarm defense at best. In January, a civil war had broken amount among the revolutionaries in the Ukraine. Radical Ukrainians fought Communists loyal to Moscow, while General Denekin’s Don Cossack Host sweeped in from the south east. In February the Cossacks were beat back into the territories of the Kuban and Terek Cossacks by a loyal RSDP controlled Kiev.
Cossacks of the Don
By March Allied forces were again on the move, and by April Smolensk had fallen to German and White Russian forces led by General Wrangel. Romania had seized Bessarabia and General Pavlo Skoropadskyi was installed in Kiev by German forces to head an independent Ukraine. By this time it had become obvious that a military system without ranks could not effectively combat the highly organized and well led Allied forces and their White Russian counterparts. As ordered by Commissar of War Leon Trotsky, greater reliance was made of former Tsarist officers, even holding families hostage to instill compliance. Political Commissars were also appointed, not just to educate the soldiers on communism, but to watch the former Tsarist officers and to maintain order and discipline by executions if necessary. Despite these reforms, by July the Red Army was retreating on all fronts. Petrograd was biesieged by the HBSE on one side and the Germans and General Yudenich’s Whites on the other and despite Trotsky’s personal efforts to arm all 700,000 inhabitants and prepare the cities defenses, the amount of armaments and foodstuffs available to maintain a long siege simply did not exist. In the east, Admiral Kolchak’s Japanese supplied forces had forced Red forces to retreat almost as far north as the Kamchatka Peninsula and were moving up the Trans-Siberian railway. In the south, a Cossack State had been created under General Denekin of the Don, Kuban, and Terek Cossack territories and control almost all land south of Tsaristyn up to the Caucuses where it was engaged in border skirmishes with the North Caucasian Mountain Republic. Though both the NCMR and the Democratic Republic of Georgia were leftist, they were also not friendly with the Russian Soviet Republic. Persia with HBSE urging had marched into Azerbaijan with next to no fighting, and had proceeded to seize large parts of Central Asia with the assistance of Turkish volunteers (among them Kemal Ataturk and Enver Pasha).
Basmachi irregluars that fought alongside the Persians and their Turkish allies.
Further advance was stopped only by inferior logistics on the part of the Persian army, and a lack of desire to fight the forces of the Alash Autonomy, a leftist-nationalist state that had declared independence in the Kazakh heartland.
Trotsky realized that the Red Army could not hold against threats coming from so many sides for long. However, he rightly assumed that Kolchak’s forces were the most spread out and dependent on tenuous supply lines and concentrated his most disciplined forces on Kolchak’s army then outside of Omsk. This bought him some time in order to transfer reinforcements to the western front to combat the encroaching German-White Army. Here the lack of coordination showed itself among the Allies and the Whites. A combined offensive by Kolchak from the east, the HBSE from Karelia and Archangelsk in the north, General Denekin’s Cossacks from south of the Volga, and General Hoffmann and Wrangel’s German-White Army from Smolensk could have surrounded the Red Army from all sides and could have very well captured the entire Russian Soviet Republic leadership and saved the Russian royal family. However, the HBSE government did not give the expeditionary force necessary supplies to make a large scale offensive, forcing Generals Ironside and Mannerheim to restrict themselves to merely besieging Petrograd. Admiral Kolchak was seen as to ambitious by the other White commanders to be trusted and a Japanese puppet to boot. Political allegations aside, Kolchak was an aggressive commander prone to risk taking and over reliant on captured enemy troops. For his part, General Denekin claimed he was too involved in securing the Russian frontier in the Caucuses to contribute in a major offensive, which left the majority of the fighting to be undertaken by Hoffmann and Wrangel’s forces.
Admrial Kolchak Leon Trotsky, Commisar for Military Affairs
General Wrangel General Denikin
Trotsky was able to slow but not stop the German-White Army, which was Trotsky and Lenin’s goal. While the German-White army was only 40 miles away from Moscow, fresh conscripts were being thrown into the fray to allow Lenin and his government to escape east following Kolchak’s forces down the Tran-Siberian railway with the best troops of the Red Army. On the way though the area, Soviet forces stopped to execute the royal family in Yekaterinburg on September 17 under Lenin’s orders. The fall mud slowed advance to a slog ensuring that at times the German-White forces sometimes moved only a few miles each day. On October 14, Moscow finally fell to the German-White army while starving Petrograd surrendered two days later. With Wilhelm II’s blessing, Cyril Vladimirovich was crowned Tsar of all Russia’s.
Tsar Cyril Vladomirovich
Now that a Tsar had been returned to the Russian throne, most of the Allies were looking to extradite themselves from the conflict. In Sebastopol, the Allied contingents got on their ships and transferred the peninsula over to the new Crimean government. Archangelsk was returned to Russian sovereignty, and Vladivostok was removed of all war munitions and abandoned, the HBSE caring little for the fate of Kolchak’s army. It was Wilhelm II who wanted to press on the most, stating that he would see his cousin’s murders executed by the end of the year. However, the German people had no interest in pursuing the Communists all the way into Siberia, as it was apparent that even with recent successes, the Imperial Russian Army at its present state was ill equipped for prolonged offensive action. Most Germans wanted to get back to repairing the land and cities ravaged by the Great War, and the Russian Expedition was sucking away much needed funds. The German people began protesting in large numbers and the number of bombings by anarchists and leftists increased. Among Wilhelm II’s cabinet there were fears of soldier’s mutinies and riots, like the ones that had preceded the French and Russian Revolutions. Generals Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Groener and Prince Maximillian of Baden advised the Kaiser that the people would not remain loyal to the Emperor if he continued to pursue vengeance in Russia. On November 3, a company of Bavarian infantry refused to disembark from their troop transport in Riga. The instigators were promptly arrested but word spread of the mutiny to other units, and other displays of disloyalty began to appear in other units raised in the recently annexed South German states, though it was particularly concerning when units from North Germany joined them. On November 7, a red revolt occurred in several large cities led by communists calling themselves the Spartacist League.
Sparatacist Barricade
The “Revolution” was promptly crushed but it further illustrated the level of discontent among the home populace. The Kaiser was strongly encouraged to abdicate, which he did son on November 9, with his son Wilhelm III assuming the crown of Prussia and the German Empire.
Kaiser Wilhelm III
All German advance was stopped at the Urals with a new line running south to north up the chain from the newly proclaimed Idel-Ural Republic (formed by Tartars, Chuvash, Mari, Komi, Mordvin, and other tribes in the area) all the way to the Arctic Circle. While Tsar Cyril complained about the sudden nature of the German withdrawal, in reality he and the recently assembled Duma knew that this was long coming and that at the moment they had more important issues at home to deal with than a renewed offensive on the renamed Soviet Union. This was exactly as Lenin and Trotsky had planned and now they had also been given a respite to rest and rearm. The delaying action in front of Moscow had done more than preserve the best of the Red Army; it also allowed the communists to evacuate important factory machinery, which was reassembled as quickly as possible, much of it in the new Soviet capital of Novosibirisk.
Part of the best of Soviet arsenal moved east
Trotsky making a speech to Red soldiers telling them to do their duty
As things began to settle down, the Soviets still had to finish off Kolchak’s largely defunct Siberian Provisional Government. While large scale offensive actions were stopped by the winter, Kolchak’s remaining forces lost most of the small engagements and more of his soldiers were deserting. By 1912, only the Primorskiy Krai (the Maritime Province) remained under his control and that was due to 70,000 Japanese soldiers who after occupying Vladivostok, guarded the border. Kolchak begged the Japanese for more money and supplies, but was told he would only be granted these if he complied with a number political, military, and economic demands. Kolchak resigned as Supreme Commander of loyalist Russian forces in Siberia on January 4, and set out on a steamer to offer is services to the Imperial government as an Admiral. His successor, General Grigory Semyonov, ataman of the Baikal Cossacks, gave in to every Japanese demand essentially making the Maritime Province a Japanese colony. Both the Soviets and Imperials were furious but neither was in a position to do anything about it.
General Grigory Semyonov
What brought about the end of the Russian Civil War for the time being was a ceasefire agreement pushed forward by HBSE’s Prime Minister H.H. Asquith (became PM in 1908 due to liberal Pm Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s death in office after exhausting wartime work). Signed February 26, 1912, while not really a peace treaty, as no war had been declared, it recognized a peace between the Allied powers and the Soviet Union, and a ceasefire between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
PM Asquith
In a separate agreement, Germany in particular leaned heavily on the new Russian government to recognize the independence of the Ukraine, Karelia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Lithuania and East Poland rewarded for their contributions to the Germans in the early stages of the campaign), Crimea, Georgia, and the Alash Autonomy. The Cossack State and the North Caucasus Mountain Republic proved to be a sticky issue. While the While General Denekin’s Cossack forces were technically loyal to the Russian Empire, the local government (Rada) wanted to remain a republic within the Empire. Also, the Kuban and Terek hosts were more inclined towards independence then that of the Don. What occurred was a minor civil war between those Cossacks that wanted full independence and those that wanted to remain part of the Empire. On April 8, a new deal was struck that restored Imperial authority to the entire Don while half of the Kuban, and most of the Terek territories were folded what remained into the renamed Transcaucasian Republic.
Map of the hosts
The independence of all these countries was practically a reality but the Moscow Accords were necessary to formalize the new relationships, and to ensure continued German support of the new Russian regime. However, it created a lot of bad blood not just between the new nations, but in Russian politics between the more conservative politicians and Tsar Cyril’s government.