Social Conflict & Elections The United States
October 1918 - January 1920
The experience of the United States in the first world war was brief and somewhat bizarre. Having entered the war after German forces sank numerous American vessels killing hundreds of American citizens, notably the Lusitania, and after the Germans demonstrated their hostility through the Zimmerman telegram, the US came into the conflict without clear goals. These ultimately became Wilson’s 14 points in early 1918, with the US public committing itself to the idea of winning a war in order to liberate the people of Europe and secure US trading interests.
Yet by January 1919 the situation had entirely reversed. With a US peace treaty having been signed at the Treaty of Vienna in late November the US had essentially spent millions, billions even, on financing a foreign war for which they had achieved nothing of true value. Sure, trade was now resuming, there would be no more deaths at sea and Europe at a glance at least seemed to be returning to stability. However, hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been sent to France for almost no reason, and the US military had, despite their eagerness, not performed well for lack of time - and American families had paid the price.
Unlike most of the allied powers too, the US soldiers returning from the front had only very briefly experienced the horrors of modern war. Some returned to the states with their horror stories, of men being mown down in their dozens by a single machine gun, or of entire units being subjected to brutal artillery strikes killing dozens - or even gas attacks. However, the vast majority of America’s troops came home having essentially gone on an all expenses paid holiday to Europe where they felt denied the chance to do their bit for the war.
It’s easy in hindsight to assume most US soldiers were disinterested in the conflict, but in practice war fever had swept through the ranks and US soldiers had mostly volunteered to fight - rather than being forced to go. This meant that many had built a large amount of pride, motivation and determination to serve - and then suddenly it was gone. France broke, and the war came to an abrupt end, and within weeks they were back on their boats.
The number one victim of the war was Woodrow Wilson. While the President had brought the country into the conflict with high hopes and good intentions, his dreams of a third term in office were dead in the water as the general public quickly started to view the conflict as a pointless endeavour. Unfortunately for Wilson, he seemed completely unaware of this fact.
Ever the arrogant, self righteous man that he was, Wilson’s health began declining throughout the end of 1918 and into early 1919 - but he was convinced he would be able to secure a third term in office. This was something Democratic Party bosses quickly became convinced was inconceivable as US labour unrest and social clashes started to increase in the period following the conflict. Thus, very quickly a wide gulf politically began to emerge between the lame duck president and his party leadership.
The GOP meanwhile continued to be led by the Conservative, and often isolationist, right of th party despite the best efforts of Teddy Roosevelt who tragically and unexpectedly died in January 1919 aged just 60. Bequeathed to the earth in a small ceremony, Roosevelt’s son Quentin, returned from France where he had served throughout the final German offensive, led tributes to his father. “Us cubs know little how to thank the old lion” he noted, “but the men at the front will always remember.”
Since the end of the war Roosevelt had lambasted Wilson for his failure to better prepare the US for the war, and had spent the final months of 1918 campaigning for the GOP in the midterms. Achieving stunning success wherever he stood, he was seen as a near shoe-in for the Presidency in 1920 - now the field was wide open. Calling for all kinds of new social security measures, such as old-age pensions, insurance for the sick and unemployed, and the construction of public housing for low-income families among other policies. Roosevelt ‘s death had left the GOP perfectly divided between the Rooseveltian, socially conscious and pro-intervention wing, and the isolationist, old style, conservative wing.
His message had spoken to what the American Expeditionary Force veterans felt was something of a squandered opportunity. While before the US entry into the conflict a debate had raged in the US over how ‘prepared’ the US was in the case of attack, at the time it had seemed something of a low priority issue. After all, if the US were attacked, she had a grand fleet and an army could be created from scratch in no time. However - the practice of creating that army for this war had re-fuelled the debate. Training the hundreds of thousands of men needed for frontline duty had taken months, not weeks, and the French capitulation had showed that was simply too long.
While beloved by the US public, Roosevelt had mixed backing among the GOP party bosses who, fearing a hard economically interventionist stance after 1920, sought to capitalise on their control of the legislature after the midterms - but more on that later. This further split the party as a result, with the old isolationist conservatives calling for the US to cut its losses and end the war as soon as defeat became evident, and focus on domestic development while extracting payment for all war loans.
This defined the two new wings of the GOP. The progressives, inspired by Roosevelt’s views and the massive expansion of state powers that they believed could be used for social as well as military causes after the war, believed firmly that Wilson had wasted a massive chance for America to take global leadership by dithering for too long. They sought to create a new, outward looking America intent on caring for its own citizens and using its power to spread the gospel of freedom and free trade. The protectionists meanwhile saw the war as a dismal failure because the US had never needed to intervene at all. They saw all this time shipping, training and arming these men as money wasted - unforgivable to the primarily big-business based GOP old order, made worse by Wilson’s ‘overreach’ in federal power.
The Democrats meanwhile also had their split views on the war. Some of the more progressive leaning north-eastern Democrats agreed with the Progressives, though did not necessarily agree with their spin on the social commentary of the classless, race-less war effort. Most though backed the war solely because they had been the ones to approve of it, while Southern Democrats began to slowly but surely condemn Wilson’s wasted efforts as time went on and the outcome of the war became more clear.
1918 Midterm Elections
The 1918 midterms were a clear indicator of US public opinion rather decisively turning against the Democrats and President Wilson. The timing of the midterms too proved extremely difficult for the Democrats in particular, who faced a hostile electorate and were unable to explain exactly what the US had achieved from the war. Furthermore, with the Treaty of Vienna still up for negotiation by early November, many Americans questioned why the US was involved in discussions at all by that point and sought an immediate treaty with Germany to permit the demobilisation of US forces and a return to ordinary life - especially Democratic voters.
If you were a democrat supportive of the war, you might still vote Democrat for Wilson’s domestic record. But if you were a democrat hesitant about the war, an independent voter unclear what was gained out of it, a progressive supportive of the war but hostile to Wilson, or a Republican against it - you were far more likely to vote GOP.
Largely focused on domestic issues still but with the Democrats divided over the conflict, the midterms proved to be a landslide for the GOP. Winning 27 contests in the Senate, the GOP entrenched their majority with 53 seats to the Democrats’ 43. Taking a majority in the House too, and the Governorships of Nevada and Ohio, along with five other states out west. The only gain of the season for the Democrats would be the New York Gubernatorial election where Al Smith won with an incredibly narrow margin of victory of fewer than 2,000 votes - seemingly on account of the GOP’s progressive vote being split by the Socialist Party.
The result set the tone for the buildup to the 1920 Presidential election and re-ignited the ever burning fire of US isolationism largely championed by the GOP’s conservative wing, even though many GOP voters would in fact have favoured a more interventionist stance.
The 1919 Legislative Year
One issue the US faced after the war was that they had invested their entire economy into fighting, and had brought numerous utilities and enterprises under state control to execute the conflict. This, and a massive investment into the arms industry, had for a time left the US with a nearly 100% employment rate and greatly boosted the standard of living for many Americans. The end of the war flipped this on its head though.
No longer requiring such an active wartime industry and no longer needing to arm four million men, plus the rest of the allies, as Wilson and Pershing had planned for what they assumed would be a war that would drag into 1920, the arms industry seemed to evaporate overnight. Government contracts were quickly cancelled outside the realms of aircraft and shipbuilding, and 800,000 Americans in France began to return home to a country in need of a standing army no larger than 300,000 prior to the conflict.
This would theoretically leave half a million men without jobs across the country, along with hundreds of thousands more who would ultimately not be needed in the coming years by the arms industry and their various input industries. What made this even worse though was the fact that mine workers, farmers and other primarily resource extraction based industries suddenly facing a huge drop in demand as 1919 rolled on.
Throughout the war workers had been prevented from striking by the federal Government as part of the Lever Act, giving Congress power to set prices and limit union actions to ensure continuity of the war effort. This had the effect of both slowly dampening wages nation-wide, especially in the mining and industrial sectors, and meaning that union membership had risen rapidly as frustrated workers sought a voice to champion their desire for better pay and hours.
For the US economy this proved disastrous. Industrial bosses, faced with a massive fall in weapons orders, naturally sought to cut costs. Unions simultaneously sought to raise wages and protect jobs, both of which would have to be frozen or cut to save profits. Those cuts also then meant there were fewer people with cash on hand, which meant the services industry began to shudder to a halt. Further, this then proliferated out of the cities into the countryside and the agricultural and mining industries, greatly reducing demand while supply remained high - forcing down prices and thus profits for those businesses on a national scale.
On top of this slow economic grind to a halt throughout 1919, Wilson quickly became aware of the very real concerns from the US Treasury about the prospect of European defaults on loan repayments. US Treasury Secretary Carter Glass made clear in a January report to Wilson that with Italy embroiled in civil conflict and certain to default, and France now staring down debts amounting to 200% of GDP, the prospect of a ‘default crisis’ across Europe was very real.
France in particular, along with many of the Entente powers, owed the British and Americans catastrophically enormous sums of money. This was because to finance the war the allies had created an intricate web of IOU’s, with France and most other Entente partners having borrowed from Britain, and Britain having borrowed from France, and both having borrowed from the US in order to spread the capital liquidity among the warring empires. This practice was sustainable for some, but for a country like France absolutely required a victory and massive compensation to be paid by Germany in order for it to avoid wreaking havoc on the French economy. Unfortunately of course, France had capitulated.
This in turn meant that France now had an economy that had been enormously damaged by the war, with over 100bn in damages and billions more in debts to their own internal lenders, which in turn would further damage the French economy if they defaulted. Glass feared that a French default could trigger a global economic contraction the likes of which no state had experienced before, with American banks such as J.P.Morgan seeing catastrophically large debt sheets written off not just by the French, but by the British too who might themselves suffer a default if France did.
The impact of this globally would be unimaginable, particularly if it happened sooner rather than later, leaving members of the cabinet concerned that bolshevism could emerge in other parts of Europe, or even the United States. This was only further emphasised by the insurrection in Italy, which by January had spiralled into an existential civil conflict for the country. The revolt also raised further questions; would Italy be able to repay its own debts to Britain and France? Would this new bolshevist revolution spread to France if Italy defaulted?
For Wilson this spurred two fears. First, despite the rapid death of many of his 14 points, Wilson still hoped to create a community of nations to prevent a second great war that the US might have to become involved with. While primarily focusing on involving the former Allied powers, by late 1919 he even approached the German Government about the prospect of a German membership of the League of Nations. This quickly proved to be its undoing, despite the initial plans being well supported by the French and British - though all of this mattered little as the GOP controlled Congress made clear there would be no US-led League from the outset.
Elected in March 1919, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Henry Cabot Lodge quickly made it clear the US would not tie itself at the hip to foreign powers. While the battle would rage on until the next Presidential election, the Senator from Massachusetts quickly amassed the support of enough GOP and Democratic representatives that Wilson’s foreign policy plans died long before his Presidency did.
The second fear of Wilson’s was that a major economic catastrophe would erase his record as President, and further destabilise Europe to such a degree that a second war - or even a broadly ‘global’ revolution across the west as Lenin so confidently called upon, would emerge. While some historians have painted this as a highly humanitarian and internationalist view, in reality this was a purely selfish view motivated by Wilson’s desire to seek a third term and his view that all of his actions done in the name of and in the support of God would be undone by a major global monetary crisis.
As such, for much of 1919 Wilson set about attempting to change the US approach to foreign debt repayment structuring. This began with the aforementioned Koltz-McAdoo Deal, in which the United States essentially permitted additional foreign loans being made to the French Government in exchange for steel and coal tariff relaxations. This move demonstrated to Wilson that the allied powers in particular still relied on America in this time of uncertainty - and that he could ‘rescue’ his own legacy through generous international credit arrangements.
This in particular focused around seeking to limit interest rates and extend credit to France in additional longer scale lower interest loans intended to allow France to start to recover, and eventually, slowly, repay US loans. Unfortunately though this created an obvious backlash. While war financing was conducted largely by private ventures, the move quickly drew the ire of the GOP in congress. This was both gravely damaging in the long term, and also completely unsurprising at the same time - causing immeasurable difficulties later on.
The GOP, who had come to loathe anything and everything Wilson did by now, immediately did their utmost to cut aid to the allied powers. There would be no understanding or sympathies, these nations owed the United States and its people money for a war they lost - and by God they would pay.
While Wilson would continue to seek better fiscal terms with the Allied powers during 1919, even visiting Paris in February 1919 and London in June, he would suffer a major stroke in October 1919 which marked the de-facto sudden end of his Presidency in everything but name.
The Red Scare
Arguably the culminating event of social unrest in 1919, the Red Scare would dominate the country as increasingly violent labour unrest would explode across the country. Meanwhile in the South, racial tensions would be exacerbated as black servicemen would return home, some of which having fought in Pershing's disastrous delaying offensive, leading towards the confusingly named "Red Summer".
Fuelled by bolshevik victories in Russia, defeat on the continent, Italian conflict and its impact on the Italian-American community, along with a growing sense of American nationalism, the red summer would prove to be a brutally violent and racist period overlooked by the excessively foreign policy orientated Wilson administration.
Before the Red Summer though came the Red Scare. This was primarily triggered by the Seattle General Strike in January 1919 over wage increases, a consequence in itself of the return of millions of servicemen who returned to the United States bored, frustrated and unemployed from the war. Many had not seen combat, and those who did felt they had been let down by their Government and allies in the conflict. This in particular led to a period of distrust of Franco-Americans, and attacks against Italian Americans too following the country’s collapse into civil war in late 1918.
The Seattle General Strike started as a dispute among dockworkers, but quickly spread to a city-wide strike. Terrified of the consequences, particularly given the recent strikes in France and Germany which socialist leaders had clearly intended to become something more, the US press lambasted the strikers as bolsheviks and Seattle’s Mayor deployed large forces of police and strikebreakers to attempt to put down any violent demonstrations. With 60,000 workers on strike though, the situation in Seattle quickly devolved into chaos as the city was put to a standstill.
Much like in France, the middle classes of the city were deeply opposed to the strike and local government officials quickly began piling on the pressure with labour leaders to end the workers action. The sad thing of course was many of the striking workers had perfectly reasonable justification to strike, having suffered years of delay in wage hikes and growing inflation thanks to the massive injection of public money into the economy during the war by the Government. Few, maybe none, wanted anything more radical to happen - but of course the Mayor of Seattle cared little for their true motivations.
Mayor Ole Hanson, who had only held the role for a matter of weeks when the strike began, took a particularly aggressive stance against the strikers - especially for a western Republican, and even more confusingly for one who once was a member of Roosevelt’s progressive Bull Moose Party.
Spurred by the writings of a small number of radicals, who encouraged the Seattle strikers to overthrow their ‘wage slavery’ inspired by the Bolsheviks with pamphlets saying that “Russia Did it” and therefore they could too, Hanson cracked down hard. Deploying police armed with machine guns and vastly raising the number of policemen and soldiers in the city, Hanson threatened striking workers with violent action should they not abandon their strike.
Some union leaders, seeing the sheer weight of forces arrayed against them, did fear that the consequences of continuing the strike may be great - however they remained determined. Buoyed by the successes seen in Germany and France, and questioning whether American troops - so demoralised by the war - would return home to kill their own countrymen, they challenged Hanson’s bluff.
Hanson then addressed the city saying that any man who “attempted to take over the control of the municipal government functions will be shot”, prompting the national committee of the AFL to suggest to the striking committee that the strike end immediately. Boldly, the striking committee voted this down on February 8th, and the general strike in the city thus continued.
By the 11th though several unions had already returned to work, fearful of the consequences of the strike’s continuation. On the 13th, after just a week of striking, the committee would vote to end the strike - fearful of the consequences and having decisively lost the battle for public opinion. This set a tragic and fearful example of what the ‘establishment’ should do in response to major strikes for the future; crackdown with threats of violence.
While the strike, peaceful though it was, had ended - Hanson quickly made sure that the US public viewed it as an attempted ‘revolutionary’ event, even characterising it’s peaceful nature as a sign of violent intent. Resigning as Mayor soon after, he toured the country and made enormous sums speaking against the rights of workers, revolution and the danger of socialism.
What followed elsewhere though was far worse.
In late April 1919, a collection of at least 36 bombs were mailed across the country to prominent individuals, including politicians, judicial officials, businessmen and newspaper editors. One such bomb would be mailed to Mayor Hanson - but he never opened it. The package, wrapped in brown paper and containing an explosive that would trigger when acid was dropped inside a container, triggering a stick of dynamite, instead was opened by his staffer William Langer.
Langer was more or less instantly killed by the explosive, which blasted apart the room he was in on May 1st - the widely celebrated ‘May Day’ dedicated to workers in the United States and abroad. Elsewhere, Georgia Senator Thomas W. Hardwick, who had recently sponsored an anti-extremist immigration act in 1918, narrowly avoided his own maiming when his housekeeper opened the explosive. She would have both of her hands removed in the explosion, while his wife would be severely burned on her face by the bomb.
Naturally, the two explosions and the near identical packing style of each weapon left the postal service easily able to identify other mail-bombs. Perpetrated by an extremist group of anarchists known as the Galleanisti led by Italian Luigi Galleani who had long been an advocate of labour action in the United States. The bombings were primarily in protest of Galleani’s upcoming deportation by the US Dept of Justice, however were widely misinterpreted as a campaign of terror intended to cause a socialist revolution or as ‘revenge’ killings by anarchists.
While the Galleanisti were not initially blamed for the plot - the postal service had no way then of tracking any of the perpetrators - the bombings surprised the US public and instilled a slight paranoia, deepening the red scare.
One such person destined for a mail bomb would be Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer, unfortunately, would be destined for not one, but two bombs - and in the second wave of bombings in June 1919 received a second package. This was not unfortunate for Palmer, but instead for a different senior American couple; the Roosevelts. Carlo Valdinoci, a Galleanisti who had been tasked with delivering the explosive to the home of the Attorney General, would be blown to pieces when the explosive detonated prematurely just as he arrived at the family home. Unfortunately for the young Assistant Secretary to the Navy and his wife Eleanor, who lived just across the street from the incident, they were just a matter of metres from where the attack took place.
The bomb exploded and destroyed virtually the entire front of Palmer’s home, sending bodyparts of Valdinoci flying across the street - later found on Roosevelt’s front porch. Unfortunately, unlike the previous explosives, these bombs had been layered with a metal slug intended to become shrapnel to increase the lethality of the weapon. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a promising young Democratic politician, was thus riddled with shrapnel - along with his wife, and died shortly after from his wounds. Amazingly despite sustaining injuries Eleanor Roosevelt would survive the encounter - experiencing only minor injuries thanks to her husband’s body in effect shielding her from the blast.*
The first and only high profile casualties of the bombings in June, besides the death of a nightwatchman William Boehner, Roosevelt’s death shocked the country - and left Palmer apoplectic with rage. Determined to destroy the perpetrators of the attack, Palmer goes to the House Appropriations Committee and demands $500,000 to fight the terrorists, and remarkably for the time is awarded half of that sum, $250,000.
With his new finances, he sets about beginning what became known as the ‘Palmer Raids’, first arresting several anarchists in Buffalo, New York, in a failed deportation case that sees the group freed after a judge rules that someone cannot be jailed or deported merely for being a member of an anarchist group. Palmer immediately challenged this policy, seeking a new Sedition Law in the Senate that surprisingly was passed in December 1919 on the back of Roosevelt’s death - allowing the deportation of any convicted member of a violent extremist group. Amendments would be made to the original text though by the Republicans, who did not allow Palmer to revoke the citizenship of foreign-born Americans convicted of sedition.
This gave J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer’s new head of the new General Intelligence Division, the power to investigate radical groups, detain individuals almost without cause, and later jail or deport them in a manner that many agree broke the US constitution. Hoover, along with a determined Palmer, would go on to arrest thousands of individuals marked as ‘radicals’ throughout late 1919 and early 1920 in the Palmer Raids. It is believed that before the Wilson administration was removed and Palmer with it in January 1921, Palmer and Hoover would deport around 10,000 people from the United States - often without having committed any crimes.
The 1919 Strikes**
Frustrated after years of patiently waiting for pay rises due to the war and empowered thanks to their hundreds of thousands of members, the American Federation of Labor decided that they would strike for pay on November 1st.
This was a notable strike as it was the first time the workers of any single industry had directly challenged the Federal Government since the end of the war. There had been previous strikes in 1919, but only the coal strike had directly involved the US federal Government.
The Boston Police Strike in September by police officers had briefly threatened to set off a similar incident when officers sought to create a union and associate themselves with the AFL, however the union had failed to back the policemen.
Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge and local police commissioner Curtis made a name for themselves crushing the officers mercilessly by sacking the policemen and deploying the army, even ignoring mediation efforts - making Coolidge a household name. Having not yet directly faced any major strike action since Seattle, which was largely handled at a local level, Palmer used the planned coal miners strike to further improve his own reputation to build a platform for a Presidential run in 1920.
Despite being a vehement anti-socialist, Palmer took a surprisingly restrained approach to the strike in public, failing to heed the call of some radicals to label it as an attempt at revolution or an “insurrection”. Actually viewed historically as being pro-labor, he took the view that any of his actions were not directed against workers as a whole, nor unions, merely against extremism and revolution.
Part of that was his belief that he could not allow a union to ‘break’ the federal Government following the Seattle example, fearing that if he did it would ruin both his reputation and unleash a tidal wave of mass strikes across the country.
Sure of broad, if not universal support from the US public and establishment, Palmer did however heavily suppress the strike through legal rather than forceful means. Threatening AFL chief John Lewis with criminal prosecution for ‘hoarding’ and ‘profiteering’ off necessity goods under the Lever Act. This would prove too much for Lewis to bear, and he quickly withdrew the support of the AFL for the strike - but the 400,000 miners decided to go ahead anyway.
After three weeks of striking, and with pressure mounting on Palmer to act, a deal was eventually struck with the miners in December without violence. The incident gave Palmer a respected reputation among the US conservative right, and would set him up nicely for a run for the Presidency in 1920.
--- * Yes, this really happened ** I cant be arsed to write about the Great Steel Strike - it happened as per OTL and shall be referenced next update.
The Habsburg Reckoning I September 1918 - February 1919
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was by 1918 very much a shadow of its former self. For centuries the pinnacle of European class, diplomacy, and long before that imperial and military might, the war had taken a vast toll on the Empire.
While it had survived until the end of 1916 on the basis of a civil peace that had been established at the outset of the war, after the death of Emperor Franz Joseph the entire concept of what the Empire was and the Imperial legitimacy of its regime had rapidly begun to erode.
However, while some may look at Austria Hungary and see an ethnic hodge podge of chaos that was doomed to collapse into violent upheaval, this would be a misanalysis and would place far too much emphasis on the nationalist streak that emerged in its body politic after 1900.
In 1918 the Empire had several potentially existential challenges, but to assume Austria-Hungary was destined to implode into ethnic, religious and political violence would be an overestimation of the speed to which states collapse into anarchy. Perhaps putting too much emphasis on the modern phenomenon of ‘people's wars’ and ideological struggles that emerged after the great war across Europe.
Background
By the summer of 1918 the political peace that had dominated the empire had essentially come to an end. Austria-Hungary was ruled by a new Emperor aged just 31. Having had the same ruler for 68 years prior, this was something of a transition for the country to go through.
Immediately upon his ascension, Karl had come under immense pressure in his role. Never a seriously popular individual in the eyes of the imperial public, Karl had served in the military as a commander on the Italian and Romanian fronts, but had always found his successes claimed by German officers leading the Austrian army.
This spoke to one of the major challenges to the Empire. Since the outbreak of the conflict Austria’s fiscal and diplomatic position had become immensely isolated. It had a disjointed Armed forces and a frontline three times the length that Germany faced in the east, and one that remained a war of movement, meaning Austria had come under much greater strain much faster than other belligerents.
German influence over the country made up a major part of this; with the Austrian armed forces facing collapse after the remarkable success of Russia in the 1916 Brusilov offensive, much of the Austrian army had come under the control of the German armed forces directly. Austria’s financial situation too had relied upon German aid to the amount of as much as 100mn marks a month by the end of 1918. This had left the country slowly sliding into more and more dominance by Germany, who by the time of the spring offensive victories had forced Austria into accepting post-war commitments for economic ties and political concessions to Germany.
Meanwhile the Empire was paralysed in its response to this German encroachment, with Emperor Karl desperate to demonstrate his political independence by the end of the war. As early as 1916, half of the bakeries in cities such as Prague had closed for a lack of flour, while housing shortages and runaway inflation also left the women in particular of Austria Hungary’s Cisleithanian cities highly vulnerable to the effects of poverty and starvation. Things were not helped either by Hungary’s refusal to share food stocks with Cisleithania, a consequence of the growing rift between the two halves of the empire and Hungary’s own lack of food.
Hungry people move to desperation quickly. The saying that the world is nine meals from anarchy began to truly show in late 1918 Austria Hungary. Between 1914 and 1918, food protests went from 57 a year to more than 280 protests a year - almost on a daily basis. Queues for bread in major cities quickly saw eruptions of violence, looting and rioting when bakers simply ran out of flour. Imports of grain from Ukraine were limited, with most being sent to Germany instead, rendering the Empire’s plan to feed their people from Russian conquest essentially null and void. Even after the allies eventually did throw in the towel, the Empire had few trading partners, almost no commercial shipping industry, and importing ‘food’ was more complicated than a matter of just pressing a button.
This was only further exacerbated by the refugee influx from the east, particularly Jewish citizens of the Empire’s frontline Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. These citizens, facing attack by Russian soldiers in 1916, had fled to the west away from the battlefields with the Romanian and Russian armies - only to find themselves subject to xenophobia or even unfair blame for the shortages in the cities.
Xenophobic german nationalist youth organisations in Bohemia in particular demonstrated the dangers of the food shortages and how they affected the political balance of the Empire. Known for their particularly anti-semitic campaigns and posters, the groups made it their mission to cause as much misery as possible to the Empire’s bohemian Czechs, Jews and other slavs.
Differences in identity among the empire’s many constituent ethnic groups also led to increasingly more conflicting expectations for the war’s outcome. The Hungarians had not wanted to join the war, and then-Prime Minister Istvan Tisza had only agreed to the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914 after the Austrian Government assured him that in victory there would be no further annexations of Slavic land. For Hungary therefore the war was about survival and retention of Magyar authority over their traditional lands.
For the Czechs meanwhile, the war was about autonomy and proving their worth as a constituent part of the empire - a part worthy of its own legislature and independent financial and parliamentary status. This was not to say the Czechs wanted independence - in fact even when Karl was crowned in 1916 the Czech Union of political parties established just days prior to the death of Emperor Franz Joseph had made clear that they saw “No future without the constitutional leadership of the Habsburg scepter”.
For the South Slavs meanwhile, including the Serbs and Croats, the war was about gaining more influence and autonomy - perhaps even becoming a constituent part of a ‘trialist’ three-part Empire of Austria-Hungary-Croatia. Croatia had been the sole other entity other than the Hungarians to have autonomy prior to the war; they now sought to build on that and these goals had largely not changed during the war.
But, in a sharp contrast to this, the Germans of the Empire sought to finally ensure their dominance of the Empire as a fundamentally ‘German’ state. German nationalist parties, now fractured into various parts after 1917 from the original ‘German National Association’, had by 1916 with the ascension of Cisleithanian Minister-Presidents Count Heinrich Clam-Martinic and Ernst Seidler von Feuchtenegg secured their policy goals for the Empire’s future. They sought to affirm German as the official language of Cisleithania, to grant the Kingdom of Galicia Lodomeria autonomy and exclude it from the Imperial Diet, and to subject German minority rule upon the predominantly Czech Bohemia - in effect ‘Germanizing’ Cisleithania.
Both Clam-Martinic and Seidler had endorsed these policies during the mid period of the conflict, though with Seidler’s fall from grace in July 1918 and the appointment of the more moderate and pro-autonomy Max Hussarek von Heinlein this Germanization policy was put on hold. However, this did not stop domestic sentiments from stirring among the German-speaking population; notably including broad celebration among the right over the conviction of prominent Czech politician Karel Kramar in 1916 for Treason - despite his eventual amnesty in 1918.
This conviction and the celebration of it was seen as something of a death knell to the Empire among the Czech academia. They viewed the hardliners as taking a policy of ‘violence’ over ‘discussion’, but Emperor Karl would try to change this during the last months of the war. Karl, along with other political groups such as the Social Democrats, recognised that the only way for the empire to remain whole would be for a large degree of autonomy to be handed out throughout the Empire, with the Socialists having as early as 1914 called for just that. Unfortunately though Socialist backing in the Imperial diet as it stood was small - representing just 46 of the Imperial Diet’s 516 seats after the 1911 elections. Further too, Socialist and trade unionist leaning politicians had been expelled from the Hungarian Parliament, who remained firmly against autonomy and the dismemberment of Hungary.
Thus, in 1918, Austria-Hungary faced a three-fold series of challenges. It faced massive economic degradation, inflation and currency devaluation - all three having further exacerbated the food situation which in Vienna and other Austrian/Bohemian cities left millions on the brink of starvation. It suffered massive German political influence owing to the country’s financial and military reliance on Germany for the prior two years. Third, it suffered from a lack of political direction, with that German influence having further worsened relations between Transleithania and Cisleithania - threatening a post-war split of the Empire that could only be resolved with mass autonomy; which itself may split the Hungarians off from the Empire.
Federalism?
The country’s large Serbian population did somewhat resent Austrian rule, but were largely locked out of local administration, military service and access to any means of toppling their ‘occupiers’ institutionally or really even militarily. It is no coincidence that throughout the entire war there was not one uprising in Bosnia or Croatia against Austrian and Hungarian occupation by the Empire’s Serbian citizens. The fact was many were apathetic to the goals of the Serbian state. This was often because of a lack of education or wealth to enable political calculation, many of the empire’s Serbs largely being poor peasants.
While of course there were some areas that did feature larger, more cosmopolitan middle class populations of Serbs, these were primarily in the cities of Croatia where Serbs and Croats largely lived together in relative harmony and had a degree of autonomy. Importantly, the Serbs played a role in their own governance via the Croatian Parliament; the Sabor, where many were part of the ruling Croat-Serb Coalition.
There was also the issue that Bosnia and Croatia were primarily occupied by Hungarian or German troops - with the same being said for Dalmatia. While there was a Croatian wing of the Hungarian Army that was mostly autonomous, it was never large and by 1918 had suffered serious losses to attrition and desertion. This meant that a large ‘green army’ armed even with light artillery had emerged in the hills and forests of Central Croatia made up of apathetic bandits trying to avoid military service and set on burning down and looting aristocratic houses. This limitation of Serbian military service was intentional in order to prevent an ethnic uprising led by those troops, and frankly so few Serbs even served in the Austro-Hungarian army that it mattered little anyway.
The Serbs within the Empire, like the Croatians, by 1918 for the most part just wanted a form of autonomy. The Croatian and Serbian parties of the Sabor should also not be considered avid backers of the idea of a unified Serb, Slovene and Croat state. In fact they never signed onto the plan and by 1918 with the plan’s evident collapse due to the German victory, while they still desired autonomy, the Croats certainly had no desire to unify with Serbia.
In the east meanwhile nationalist tensions were more prominent - primarily among the Poles. With a Polish state having been established by the Germans and Austrians in 1916, by 1918 many Galician Poles sought to unify with their new state, which created clashes over control of key ethnically contested cities such as Lwow/Lviv/Lemberg.
This was particularly difficult for the Austrians as during the early period of the war it had seemed likely that the conflict would conclude with Poland being made into a member Kingdom of the Habsburg domain. Unfortunately for the Austrians though, their ‘Austro-Polish’ solution as it had become known would by 1918 be seen as essentially dead. The German high command, deeply disappointed with their constantly failing ally, had long sought to undermine Austria’s goal - primarily as Poland was simply too central to the security of the eastern German border and their planned sphere in the Russian periphery.
This further exacerbated the uncertainty over the future of Polish Galicia, which was only worsened by the long existence of the ‘Polish Military Organisation’ established by Jozef Pilsudski in 1914. While initially an illegal paramilitary group, the force had become semi-legal during the war as a means for the Central Powers to tap into Polish manpower. This changed quickly during the ‘Oaths Crisis’ in July 1917 when Germany attempted and failed to establish a loyal Polish army, which refused to swear an oath to the Kaiser, prompting Pilsudski’s arrest and the force going back underground.
The creation of a Ukrainian state by Germany and Austria further degraded the situation in Galicia too, by prompting concern among both cultural groups that the other may end up taking more than they should in any final peace settlement. This prompted the PMO to establish a large underground network of forces throughout west galicia during the last year of the war, now under the command of experienced military officer and nationalist Edward Rydz-Śmigły.
The Czechs meanwhile hosted by far the most nationalistic and active campaign for autonomy, or even nationhood. While few Czechs had thought a Czech state was possible before 1918, by late in the year many sought an independent place to call their own, and the idea that they should be unified with the Slovaks too became entrenched. This was largely on the back of advocacy by Tomáš Masaryk, who had lived in Britain since before the conflict. This made Czech calls for autonomy doubly problematic, as it clashed with Hungarian desires to magyarize Slovakia and retain unity within Transleithania, and with the German Sudetenland being an issue of contention among Germans in Austria proper.
The issue was, any Bohemian Parliament would also host a large constituency of German speakers, and the Germans in Austria proper did not want Bohemian Germans to be ruled over by a majority-elected Parliament of Czechs - and thus vetoed all proposals towards the idea. Equally though, the Czechs would not accept a purely Czech Parliament for only the Czech parts of Bohemia, because such a legislature would not be able to control the industrialised and wealthy German parts of Bohemia - leaving the Czechs with far less status within the empire and far less tax revenue to distribute. This would arguably leave the Czechs financially worse off than before, not to mention most Czechs saw Bohemia as their cultural de jure territory, regardless of German citizens being a majority in some areas.
Transleithania
While the war had certainly strained the relationship between the Austrian and Hungarian Imperial Governments, the issue was less that the two Governments could not cooperate - but that Hungary’s people simply did not want to. You see, Hungary had long maintained a comically small electoral franchise which had allowed the Liberal Party and its successors under the likes of Istvan Tisza to remain in power. Supporters of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, the Liberals faced constant opposition from Hungarian nationalists who were intentionally locked out of power via this miniscule franchise of around 8% of the population.
However, the nationalists under Ferenc Kossuth did eventually break into power with a landslide victory in 1906, but were unable to make any political gains during their four years in power due to the influence of Emperor Franz Josef, and quickly fractured after gaining power over differing views on what to do with it. The Liberals regained power in 1910 with a surprise landslide victory for the National Party of Work led by Tisza, and until 1917 the political situation remained largely stable with the Liberals forming a national unity Government in 1917 first under Móric Esterházy and then under two time Prime Minister Sandor Wekerle.
Upon Wekerle’s return as Prime Minister, the country was in a state of deep political division due to the difficulties of the war. The economy was at best struggling, if not entirely failing, and the people were tired of the conflict that Hungary’s leaders had not originally wanted to join. To make matters worse, the Empire had become politically dominated by the Prussian Germans who increasingly directed its economy and military, further alienating Hungarian frontline soldiers who felt less part of an Austro-Hungarian army than a German-Austrian one. Given that since the 1840’s Hungary’s prime issue was that they felt held hostage by an alien people who spoke a different language entirely and lived very different lives, this greatly worsened the harmony in the Empire.
The main demand for the Hungarian populace thus by 1918 became the imposition of universal suffrage. For the Liberals and the Emperor this was a deeply dangerous prospect, as the odds were that such a franchise would lead to the rapid demise of the Augsleich. It is worth noting though that even the most avid backers of universal suffrage did not advocate giving the Slavs within Hungary the vote. One such advocate, Count Mihály Károlyi, spent much of the war advocating against it, and championed the cause of universal suffrage - but even he did not want to undermine the Magyar rule of Hungary.
Like Károlyi, the nationalist party of Kossuth, largely led by rabid but still aristocratic nationalists like Count Albert Apponyi, had long advocated for a split with Austria - a point that had only become more popular and seen as necessary as the war dragged on. This was largely because Hungary deemed the conflict as one they had been dragged into somewhat against their own will, with Istvan Tisza having only agreed to the Serbian invasion under the assumption it would be brief.
While Tisza later flip flopped on the no annexations policy, ultimately demanding minor territorial changes off Romania as compensation for their declaration of war on the Empire in 1916, Hungary throughout the war stood with little to really gain in practice. This was especially true when it became clear in 1918 that almost all of Austria-Hungary’s war aims would be overruled by Germany’s own goals - with oil and coal fields in Serbia, Romania and Ukraine all being destined for German extractors, not Austro-Hungarians. The rise of German influence over Austria’s military branch of the Empire also left Hungary feeling pushed around by the German speaking half of the Empire, and thus with Austria’s new Emperor looking towards a policy of federalization, many Magyars felt that the territorial integrity of their highly multicultural half of the Empire was being threatened by Vienna.
This meant that most Hungarians, and more importantly most Hungarian politicians, had since moved to advocate a total split from Austria. While few if any sought the end of the Monarchy, with the most radical and socialist leaning likes of Károlyi even opposing this, Hungary would in their minds be better served as a totally independent state - albeit with Emperor Karl as a nominal head of state. Thus, the introduction of universal suffrage could very well destroy the empire - just as autonomy could also if Hungary were scared by whatever the Emperor proposed.
Peace
While the war for Austria essentially ended with Italy’s acceptance of proposed armistice negotiations on August 3rd, the conditions of that armistice meant that the military could not be demobilised for months while negotiations dragged on - in case hostilities flared up again. Thus, throughout the negotiations period the Austrian Army found itself suffering immense bouts of desertion and mutiny.
Stuck in the Alps and the foothills of the Austrian Littoral, the troops grew more tired of their circumstances day by day; eating poor if any rations, suffering the wrath of their officers and sometimes not even receiving pay - all while being stuck in poorly built, frozen mountain forts. This only worsened when Hungary’s own army upped and left prior to the signing of the Treaties in Vienna and Zurich, their political leaders having grown tired of Austrian instruction. Thus, Austria was essentially saved by the Germans - but while Germany could prevent an Italian attack they could not stabilise the Empire for the Emperor.
When the Treaty of Zurich was finally signed on November 23rd, days after Vienna, many rejoiced but little changed in their homeland. The Empire may have won the war on paper, but was defeated in the hearts and minds of most of its citizens.
Desperate to salvage the situation, Emperor Karl quickly moved to take decisive action on the country’s main political disputes. Issuing what would become known as his Volkermanifest - People’s Manifesto - on the 25th, he announced a plan to federalize the Cisleithanian half of the Empire. This in practice meant that the Slovenes, Czechs, Poles and Ukrainians would get their own distinct regional legislatures - along with even some German regions if they wished for one.
For some, this was a very welcome move. Autonomy in regions like Dalmatia and Croatia had worked very well in the past and for many Czechs it seemed promising that they might actually be given some kind of favourable settlement. Elsewhere though, the move was met with mixed or outright hostile responses. The policy flew right in the face of the large and now very powerful pro-German lobby in the country of the former German National Association, who as you may recall had sought a Germanisation of the state, and the impact of that was felt immediately.
Bohemian Despondency
It’s ironic, given the support for autonomy held by the Czechs, that the most gravely affected area of all would be Bohemia. German Bohemians, who made up 20% of Bohemia’s population, had long opposed the idea of a federal system in Cisleithania. The main reason was that to provide Bohemia with its own legislature would require that Germans, who identified as Germans and were governed by Germans, were governed autonomously or near-totally by more populous Czechs.
While no doubt the Bohemian Germans and Czechs had far more in common than a German in Vienna may have had with a Czech, the political system of the country meant that the loud minority of Germans in Bohemia who were particularly vocal in their opposition to the plans were the first to be heard. The response to the volkermanifest in the heavily German region of Egerland and the city of Karlsbad, for example, was violently hostile.
Germans were quick to protest the announcement, prompting the eruption of part bread, part political rioting in Karlsbad and the city of Eger. After all, it always starts with bread. The idea appalled the German people who considered themselves German, were ruled by a German empire, and had fought for their empire at great cost during the war - often against their slavic neighbours who volunteered or defected to the French and Russians. Throughout the war false rumours of mass desertions of Czech units had fuelled anti-Czech sentiment among the Empire’s right-leaning German populace; now that anger reached a new level.
While of course some would back the policy as a pragmatic solution, or simply would at the very least wait to see if they would get their own autonomous zone separate to the Czechs, a very large and vocal minority of angry German-speaking citizens and representatives quickly would call for their city and town councils to reject the idea entirely in mass protests.
Councillors associated with the German National Association for example, who had competed in the 1911 elections and had at one time 2/3rds of their entire national membership in Bohemia alone, quickly rejected the Emperor’s plans. Throughout Bohemia and Moravia Imperial Councillors and Mayors alike called for separation from the Czech part of Bohemia, and retention of direct rule from Vienna.
While the German National Association had largely collapsed in 1917 into approximately 17 different parties, their representatives still remained. This, if anything, made things even less controllable, with MPs such as Gustav Groß from Moravia - the DNA’s former leader and current President of the House of Representatives - openly rejecting the Emperor’s proposals when the Emperor was forced to recall the Imperial Council on the matter, one of his early but inevitable political concessions to the many different factions in the country.
The Emperor faced the issue too that any decision to federalize the empire would inevitably require approval from the legislature to complete, if not just for the sake of constitutional legitimacy, but also for the sake of providing detailed scrutiny and preparation for the policy. After all, while the Empire was largely run from Vienna and the Royal Palaces within it as part of the ‘war state’ during the conflict, there was no way the political factions within the Empire would let an Emperor that so many disagreed with so vehemently to determine the new constitutional settlement. Much of the administration of the empire was also handled by the civil service and legislature who had suspended themselves during the war to stop themselves ‘getting in the way’ - now they insisted on blocking the path.
Recalled during the last week of November, the Emperor faced the issue in the legislature that with no individual ‘nationalist’ party to speak to, he could not easily negotiate with any one party or make concessions to any one leader without another frothing at the mouth from another direction. He also could not easily call elections, as by doing so the result may be even less in his favour than the current legislature’s make up - with the socialists being expected to heavily outperform their previous results, alongside the nationalists who quickly began to re-organise the German National Association to counter a new vote.
Regardless, given that the DNA had originally desired to split Bohemia into three parts, it was doubtful that a single Bohemian legislature would ever get their backing. Thus within two weeks of attempting to convince the right, the Emperor instead sought the counsel of the Socialists, who had a reasonably large backing in Bohemia and had called for a federal solution as early as 1914.
However, this alienated the Christian Social Party, who throughout the war had seen the rapid emergence of a large republican faction within their bloc keen to see greater cooperation with Germany rather than a stale, ineffective imperial system on the verge of being dominated by other minorities. As the largest party in the German part of the Empire and a conservative, pro-German bloc too, this created a divide between the Emperor and the right wing parties needed to maintain his Government in the Reichsrat.
Ironically, the Christian Social Party was actually pro-federalization, and had been since 1905. The Minister-President of Austria Max Hussarek von Heinlein was himself a proponent of the volkermanifest and a CS Party member from Pressberg - the home of a very large Slovak minority near the Austrian border. Unfortunately though this policy was quite contentious in the party due to the fear by some more conservative elements of the party that Austria could quite quickly become governed by Slavs, rather than Germans. For your average middle class or elitist German, such an idea was almost disgusting - a consequence of the prejudices about slavic peoples at the time.
This played on the rapidly rising sense of pan-germanism that had emerged during the war as Austrian German soldiers fought alongside and by 1918 often under the command of German forces. After 1917 in fact, virtually all forces on the Tyrolian and even eastern front north of Lemberg had German officers up to a Battalion level. Thus it should be unsurprising that some members of the CSP quite vocally opposed the move - particularly those backing the republican side of the party.
The Czechs meanwhile did not help the situation whatsoever. While often pragmatists who would accept autonomy within the imperial system rather than outright independence, a policy that was largely the brainchild of Czech academic Tomáš Masaryk who had spent the entire war (and a great deal of time before it) in London. However, the concept of ‘Czechoslovakism’ had become a powerful force throughout and even before the war - that being the concept that any Czech state should, like a good smarter, elder brother, drag along his younger and less experienced sibling to show him the ropes at work and give him a head start on life.
The Czechs by 1916 had almost totally tied their movements aimed at both autonomy and nationhood to the idea of bringing the Slovaks along too. This was largely a consequence of Bohemia being relatively small compared to the rest of the empire - threatening to simply make it a ‘province’ of a much larger state in an autonomous system, where with the Slovaks their voice would be significantly strengthened.
The consequence of this nascent ideology and brotherly unity between the Czech and Slovak peoples was that even the autonomists who advocated remaining within the Empire as early as 1917 had made it clear that an autonomous Czech territory would also have to include Slovak autonomy. This was the view pursued by the Czech Union too - a union of Czech political parties established in 1916 and by 1918 largely headed by the aforementioned Karel Kramář who had come to the view that the Czechs needed a large autonomous zone or independence.
To the Hungarians this was both a challenge to their historic territorial rights and their sovereignty within and without the Empire. Hungary, as aforementioned, was a largely conservative, nationalist state whose population were hesitant about the idea of a federal empire and would probably have chosen to go their own separate ways from Austria decades prior if they had been allowed to.
Hungary saw Transleithania as their land which historically had always been theirs. They viewed the compromise of 1867 as making clear that regardless of the views of the Emperor, they should be able to decide the fate of their own territory - and they did not choose to abandon Slovakia. ‘Slovakia’ as a concept was quite a young one, and to surrender such a vast, populous territory which held an abundance of mineral wealth was seen as beyond a step too far for the Hungarian people and state.
So, the Emperor’s Volkermanifest immediately found its first snag. He could either placate the German people whom he was one of, and who were growing increasingly disinterested in keeping him in his role as national figurehead at all and pursue a Germanophile policy. But in doing so, he would upset the spirit of the compromise of 1867, and almost certainly ensure the secession of Hungary from the Empire.
Alternatively, he could back the reformists and the Slavic-speaking peoples of the Empire, and attempt to restrain by force or through diplomacy the Hungarian state - an effort that would probably ensure the survival of the Empire and it’s long term stability, but would invite civil war with Hungary. This, during a time when Austria’s army was actually smaller than Hungary’s and Germany seemed an unreliable partner against Hungary, all while the country faced a massive and existential economic and financial crisis, seemed an almost mind-bogglingly stupid proposal.
The final alternative, to dither politically and do nothing about the constitutional balance of the Empire, also left the Emperor worse off for it was unclear whether the Czech and Polish peoples would permit such delay, or if Hungary would up and leave in the short term. While Karl was a religious man, praying that the issue would just go away over time ran counter to his governing philosophy and nature. He was a man of action, and he thus chose to act.
The Galician Anarchy
One key footnote in the Volkermanifest would prove the most damaging of all. Within the text, which had been published in literally every language spoken in the Empire, it made clear that the Emperor did not endorse the immediate unity of the Polish speaking parts of the easternmost Kingdom in the Empire of Galicia and Lodomeria with the young Polish state being formed on its northern border. However, he would permit the establishment of autonomous administrations to prepare for a transition to possible future unity.
This was something of a ‘fudge’ solution to the Austro-Polish debate after Germany had essentially informed the Austrians in July 1918 that Austria would have to accept military and economic ties after the war - and that the Poles would be able to choose a German King, not an Austrian. The Empire as such had suddenly been put in a position where they had to try and retain the resource rich Polish territories they had, while not being able to unify those Austrian poles with their northern independent Polish brothers.
The same would also be said for the Ukrainian sectors of Galicia, which covered much of the south of the territory, which Karl saw as something of a valueless far flung sector of the Empire that was destined to become a political problem in the long term. Here he would permit local peoples to form councils to prepare for eventual independence or autonomy - whatever seemed to suit the situation later down the line.
While Karl in his mind had the timescale of this being in the ‘several years’ category though, the locals in Galicia had a more pressing timescale in mind. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the small city of Lemberg, or Lviv in Ukrainian, and Lwow in Polish.
A highly multicultural city, Lemberg sat in a strange, cosmopolitan sector of Galicia that had historically been Polish but, having been ruled for centuries in a commonwealth that occupied much of modern Ukraine, had only ever really seen Poles dominate in the cities. As soon as a Pole stepped out of the beautiful cityscape of Lemberg into the relatively flat, lush fields of southern Galicia they would find only Ukrainians.
This created something of a quandary. A Pole living in Lemberg would, naturally, see the city as inherently Polish. Whereas a Ukrainian living around the city would inherently see the area as Ukrainian. So when posed with a question over which state should occupy that territory, to both sides the answer seemed obvious - but neither could get their way without dissatisfying the other. Lemberg was deep inside the Ukrainian ‘zone’, meaning if it were to be Polish, it would either need to be within a large Ukrainian zone within a Polish state, or it would have to be an enclave within Ukraine - an impossible solution that neither state would accept.
It did not help too that, for the area, Lemberg was one of the wealthier cities in Galicia. Steeped with history, beautiful architecture and a wealthy enough banking sector, the city would be a prize for any state to seize - particularly two states that had no financial backing and would both need every penny available to establish their own fiscal independence.
For the Polish political leadership in Galicia, the Volkermanifest was a perfect invitation to secure not just independence, but complete domination of the entire Galician region in the aim of establishing a powerful independent Poland - even if under German suzerainty. Thus when the manifesto was published, more or less immediately the city council declared that it would form a Polish state committee and would seek to become part of Poland.
Naturally, this immediately caused chaos. Ukrainians in the city and outside of it, understanding that if Lemberg became part of Poland, they would too, essentially besieged the city. Here, Archduke Wilhelm of Austria, who had long hoped to become King of Ukraine after the war and had somewhat ‘gone native’ among the Ukrainian people, used his position and influence in the Austrian Army to further trigger a decline into violence. The Archduke had in October, anticipating a post-war federal settlement, used his position to deploy several regiments of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen in the region from their original base in Bucovina.
These forces now quickly intervened in Lemberg, seizing control in the dead of night and deposing the Polish committee, instead installing a Ukrainian committee made up of former MPs in the Galician diet of Ukrainian origin and local councillors.
For the Polish populace of Lemberg this was a travesty, and they naturally fought back. Hundreds of students and scouts, lightly armed after raiding a local police station, quickly began to resist their occupiers. Within a matter of days the city was in open revolt, with fighting ongoing in the streets day and night as over 6,000 citizens engaged in a small civil war with their Ukrainian neighbours.
Just a week after the Volkermanifest had been issued on December 2nd, it quickly became clear that Galicia would be a far greater issue than had been anticipated. Still deployed with the vast majority of their forces on the Italian front, Austrian army units would immediately have to be redirected to Galicia.
While this was all under way, within a matter of days an unexpected issue would leave Austrian commanders unsure exactly how to redirect troops to the east. It would ultimately be decided that troops from Ukraine, who were occupying the region, would be moved westwards, while troops from Italy would be deployed through Austria proper and into northern Galicia thanks to Austria’s disjointed rail network which featured different gauges in each half of the Empire.
This became an issue for the troops arriving from the Italian direction though when Józef Piłsudski’s Polish Military Organisation, under the command of Edward Rydz-Śmigły, rose up in western Galicia on December 5th. While Piłsudski was still in jail after his arrest during the war, the PMO’s revolt was fantastically well coordinated and remarkably well armed thanks to the competence of Rydz-Śmigły. Spread already throughout all of the Polish sector of Galicia and having prepared for some kind of military stand since 1917, the group quickly established control over virtually all of north western Galicia - even the city of Krakow whose garrison were quickly surrounded and compelled to surrender after two days fighting.
Habsburg Poles throughout the region quickly showed where their loyalties lay and assisted the revolt, amazingly even including Archduke Karl Albrecht of Austria - the son of the now overlooked Archduke Charles Stephen of Austria who had been educated in Polish throughout his childhood. Karl Albrecht, an officer in the Habsburg Army during the war, had since returned to his lands near Krakow when the revolt erupted without his knowledge. Despite initially almost being jailed by those he would otherwise have assisted during an early morning assault on his estate, he quickly pledged allegiance to the revolt and subordinated himself under Rydz-Śmigły’s command - becoming something of a middleman between the rebels and the Habsburg Government.
Inspired by the heroic fighting of the students of Lemberg and the quick takeover by Śmigły’s forces - living up to his nickname’s meaning. Rail workers throughout the region also called an impromptu and unofficial strike in Galicia, interrupting the advance of reliable Austrian army units from Austria and Bohemia to Galicia where the violence continued. Disinterested in fighting and lacking the numbers, these units largely became paralysed and surrounded by Polish rebels, leading to them essentially becoming immobile or simply unsure of what to do for several days.
Austria, true to form, would soon appeal for German assistance - but this was actually rejected by the German Government. In a rare case of mutually aligning interests, Germany’s civilian Government and their General Staff agreed that assistance to the Austrians on this matter would not be desirable - or at best was something they held apathy towards. While the German OHL, now just the peacetime ‘General Staff’ and still headed by Hindenberg, certainly had no huge desire to see a larger Polish client to their east - they certainly had no desire to send in German troops or even order Austrian troops under their command in Ukraine and Lodomeria to do anything about the revolt. Provided, of course, that the rebels negotiated and accepted that Germany would ultimately dictate the settlement, rather than trying to engage Germany in a war for greater Polish national sovereignty.
The German civilian Government meanwhile had no intention of being Austria’s hammer in a game of whack-a-mole with separatists - especially as the SPD who made up a large part of the German Government believed in the right to self determination. Thus, northern Galicia-Lodomeria remained in something of a bizarre limbo during the first months of 1919. Technically free of Habsburg authority, the territory soon proclaimed itself as a constituent part of the German puppet Kingdom of Poland intentionally so as to strengthen their claim to unity and undermine claims that they were seeking to attack German interests. However, in practice neither Germany, nor Austria recognised this reality; even if neither were willing or able to actually do anything about it militarily.
In southern Galicia-Lodomeria meanwhile the Ukrainian attempts to wrest control from the Habsburgs largely failed. This was almost exclusively because ultimately the Sich riflemen who had enforced these Ukrainian claims were Austrian army units who were quickly told within a week to suspend any operations and cease fighting the Poles. In exchange, a negotiated settlement by Archduke Karl Albrecht saw the Polish also cease their advance towards Lviv in early January, creating an uneasy truce in the region overseen by Imperial troops.
By the end of January, as a result, the conflict was for all intents and purposes over. Polish forces had secured most of western Galicia, seizing most of the Polish speaking sector, while their advance had been halted near Przemysl. Austrian forces meanwhile were stretched thin across the empire, exhausted and sick of the war altogether. Demobilisation had been ordered on December 25th - Christmas day - as the Empire sought to cut costs, leaving hundreds of thousands of Austrian soldiers clueless over what to do with themselves, and leaving the state with fewer soldiers to respond to the secessionist crises in the east.
Hungary For Votes
Meanwhile in the mildly more stable part of the Empire, Hungary was undergoing its first election season since the war began. In the immediate post-war period the country had undergone significant political challenges to its existing electoral franchise.
Throughout the last two years of the war, members of the opposition parties had repeatedly introduced legislation to expand the franchise up from the 8% of the population who could vote. However, then-Prime Minister Istvan Tisza had furiously opposed changes to the franchise, knowing that any such change would be devastating to the power of the Liberal bloc, and the pro-ausgleich part of the political establishment.
This changed with the the ascension of Karl as Austrian Emperor in 1917, who indirectly forced Tisza to resign after he demanded the implementation of universal suffrage in the Kingdom. This endorsement of the expansion of the franchise greatly strengthened the pro-suffrage elements in the Hungarian political establishment, which primarily included the Hungarian nationalist wing.
By late 1918 therefore the new and now three time Prime Minister Sandor Wekerle was forced to concede that amendments to the suffrage would be needed. Tisza, who had remained politically prominent well through the end of 1918, fought a bitter and determined battle to oppose this, but ultimately could do little to halt the demands of the Emperor and, by now, the majority of the Parliament.
Despite endorsing the expanded suffrage though, Wekerle was not totally willing to hand significant political power to the slavic minority in Transleithania - potentially giving their nationalist parties the balance of power in the legislature due to the split Hungarian vote. Introducing a law relaxing the franchise to Parliament in October 1918, his Government opted to give all men aged over 21 the vote - not quite ‘universal suffrage’, but close enough to claim to have followed the Imperial decree. Electoral officials were also instructed to print all ballot papers and registration forms in Hungarian, and individuals campaigning to become elected officials would be expected to speak Hungarian in order to participate in legislative affairs - which were conducted in exclusively Hungarian. This was part of an effort to greatly weaken the ability of non-Hungarian slavs to stand for election, be elected, and then deliver for constituents once elected.
Hungarian parties and local officials also sought to actively suppress the voting rights and access of non-Hungarian citizens. This often involved limiting ballot boxes in primarily slavic-speaking districts, intentionally disqualifying voters for not having the correct papers, or for minor infractions on their registration and identity papers - often due to many slavic peasants being incapable of speaking Hungarian, among other ‘dirty tricks’.
The result meant that in theory, a significant proportion of the population became electors - with the franchise also being extended to veterans of the great war aged under 21. However, of the forty or so percent of the population now able to vote, only around four fifths of those would actually ever become registered due to language and administrative difficulties, largely nullifying the minority status of the Hungarian population within their borders.
However, simply by expanding the franchise so aggressively the Hungarian elections in February 1919 were more or less sure to become the chaotic mess they ended up being. The country would not just have millions of additional voters this election, but also an almost entirely new slate of parties.
Wekerle himself had set about attempting to create a new political alternative to the Liberal-Nationalist divide that had haunted Hungarian politics for decades, rightly understanding that the Liberals would be annihilated on their current platform and thus incorporating them inside his own more nationalist leaning bloc in exchange for moderation on the issue and a greater emphasis on aristocratic rule rather than the dualist divide.
Bringing together various former Party of Work and Kossuth party moderates, shortly after becoming Prime Minister he had established the ‘48 Constitution Party’. This party was a confusing mess, with its name referring to the nationalist revolt of the Hungarians in 1848 - implying it to be separatist - while also being pro-monarchy, and in favour of continued compromise with the Austrians, albeit under an amended form.
For Wekerle, the war had shown that Hungary was both able to and needed to take greater power for itself - but that it should retain close ties with Austria in spite of that to undermine growing German influence. He would retain the backing of former liberals such as János Hadik and even Istvan Tisza himself during his ministry in the buildup to elections in February - though Tisza became increasingly marginalised as time marched on due to his intransigence over the franchise issue.
Wekerle, bizarrely, was also joined also by Count Albert Apponyi in the 48 Constitution Party too - in spite of Apponiye believing far more firmly in separation from Austria. This was largely because both Wekerle and Apponyi were from the same aristocratic background, despite Wekerle having actually been born poor, that had ruled Hungary for centuries - and both now feared the likes of Count Mihály Károlyi who wished to change that.
Apponyi though made up something of a separate wing to the 48 party, and the two wings are therefore historically ranked as being separate in most electoral tallies. Apponyi’s wing advocated similar conservative, religious and magyaricist views - just with a heavier emphasis on independence. As education minister he had spent years imposing magyaricism upon the population, and thus much of his wing were considered hardline reactionaries in the spectrum of parties - albeit nationalist ones.
Meanwhile, Count Mihály Károlyi had grown distant from the rest of the nationalist bloc. While pro-seperation form Austria, Károlyi did believe in maintaining the monarchy - but believed that magyaricism was an immoral practice that would likely destroy Hungary in the long run. He additionally had adopted a significant number of almost socialist policies, advocating more extensive land reform and social welfare, and the limitation of church and state. His anti-war stance had also further alienated him from the rest of the establishment parties - which being the son of one of Hungary’s wealthiest aristocratic families ordinarily one would assume he would be a part of.
Forming the United Party of Independence and '48, also confusingly referring to the 1848 failed revolution, Károlyi sought to play on his pro-peace credentials and call for a more radical shift in political power. However, Károlyi struggled to be taken seriously in political circles. While charismatic, he was a generally ineffective leader and considered by the country’s academics and political class to be something of a dimwit - weakening his effectiveness as a political leader. He did benefit from a lack of institutional acceptance of the still legal but otherwise repressed MSZDP - the Hungarian socialists. The MSZDP, or Social Democratic Party of Hungary, was led by the heavily mustachoid Manó Buchinger, and by 1918 was actually the largest party in hungary by membership alone. However, while it's membership was high, the MSZDP struggled to gain popularity among the nationalist peasantry and other sections of scoiety western socialist parties traditionally relied upon for votes. Instead they were wedded heavily to the trade unions movement, and the pacifist movement - popular primarily in the cities.
Buchinger and the party struggled in the elections for two reasons; first and foremost that their party was fairly leaderless. While officially leader of the bloc, Buchinger was relegated from the decision-making role in the spring of 1918 as the Austrians suddenly looked set to actually win the war thanks to the German offensive in France. While the party itself had been split on the question of war, by 1918 the party had become semi-collectively run by various senior officials such as Ernő Garami, Vilmos Böhm and Sándor Garbai - among others. This indecision, combined with the difficulties of the MSZDP's association with the leftist agitation of communists such as Imre Csernyák and Bela Kun - who had spent the final months of the war arranging soldiers protests and food riots at the behest of Lenin - painted a poor picture among the highly conservative, primarily agrarian Hungarian public. The party's relationship with the banned communists also caused internal division, sparking arguments between different wings seeking to cooperate with or outright oppose their more radical ideological colleagues - fearing backlash, or believing that splitting the left further would only damage the party's change at success further.
One of the few parties that survived the war was the Catholic People’s Party under Aladár Zichy. The CPP, a rapidly declining force during the early 20th century, was able to capitalise somewhat on the collapse of the major Liberal v Nationalist blocs in Hungary - surviving another day even if only as a very junior part of the political establishment.
Romanian and Slovak nationalists meanwhile gained a significant backing during the last months of the war and into the new year - ensuring that even with the new gerrymandered and magyaricised electoral system they would see gains in the coming poll thanks to the new franchise.
A new entry to the scene would be the National Labourers Party under Anarcho-Syndicalist Ervin Szabó, a radical who had at one point been on the verge of attempting assassination against Istvan Tisza in 1917 before he resigned as Prime Minister. The Labourers, while hardly a prominent force, would join the messy rhetorical period of the election as dozens of smaller, ordinarily electorally unviable parties sought to capitalise on the new franchise rules.
The campaign period though, in spite of the new franchise, was remarkably quiet and uneventful. Hungarian democracy had always been low key, and with so many inexperienced new voters, while fringe figures would constantly be seen pasting posters up in the country’s cities and speaking to voters on the streets, very few of the major political figures joined the fray. This largely worked against the establishment parties - though in reality the result would never be in question.
The biggest surprise of the election was that Károlyi’s public speaking and limited adoption of a more public style of rhetorical campaigning greatly benefited his relatively small political force. While seen as useless among the elite, the public did not know much of his political ineptitude, and therefore bought his promises of land reform - gaining significant prominence among the peasantry and working classes for his soft socialism and opposition to the war and augsleich.
Károlyi’s United Party of Independence performed surprisingly well, going from Károlyi’s original peace group in the Parliament of around 20 MPs to 87 - and securing 22% of the vote. This would secure Károlyi’s position as leader of the opposition against the 48 Constitution Party under Wekerle, who took 233 seats and 46% of the votes - a healthy majority but one defined by Apponiy’s bloc which made up nearly 160 of the elected representatives.
The Catholics and Labourers would win 18 seats with 4% of the vote, and 2 seats with 2% of the vote respectively - gaining some parliamentary representation and generally defying the major parties but failing to make any significant splash. The more mainstream MSZDP socialist party meanwhile would gain a greater number of seats, winning in 16 urban constituencies by wide margins. However, the party's base being so tied to the trade unions movement meant that it's public popularity was very limited - and in a constituencies based electoral system therefore the bloc struggled to gain a large number of seats despite winning some 15% of the vote.
The nationalists meanwhile made great gains, with the Romanian National Party winning 17 seats and 7% of the vote - up from just 1.2% of the vote in 1910. The Slovaks meanwhile would win 10 seats and 3% of the vote - more modest gains but still a significant rise from the 0.7% of the vote they had previously won.
Meanwhile one of the biggest ‘minor’ victors would not be a party at all, but the slate of independent candidates in favour of the 1867 settlement identified historically as the ‘Independents for '67’. This group, while not a party, won 27 seats and 5% of the population - some modest but notable gains largely due to the absence of any clear ‘67 party remaining after the dissolution of the pre-war party system. The group of Independents for '48 meanwhile fell back to just 3 MPs and less than 1% of the vote, reflecting the slide in the party system towards their ideological constituency.
This meant that Wekerle and his Constitution party would fairly easily dominate the political scene in Hungary for the time being, and gave Wekerle a mandate to govern the country how he saw fit - provided the hardliners agreed anyway.
The Russian Civil War The Whites Advance…?
October 1918 - March 1919
German victory in the west was something of a disaster for Russia. For years the country had toiled in a war against the Reich it was uniquely un-equipped for, only to be forced to the table when they ultimately failed. Upon sitting down with the Germans, Lenin had hoped that Germany would eventually fall - along with the entire west - into their own revolution. However, this never panned out, and this put Russia in a difficult position that we will explore in this piece.
While relitigating all of the events prior to Germany’s ascendency over the Entente during the summer of 1918 in my view would be something of a waste of time, I think it’s important to ‘set the stage’ to remind us what that position was.
Germano-Bolshevik Relations
There has been a common tendency in history to see German-Bolshevik cooperation as something that was destined to end, as two ideologically opposed foes in a temporary relationship that collapsed the moment Trotsky put pen to paper at Brest Litovsk. However, many readers would be surprised to learn that this cooperation ran deeper and for far longer than they might initially assume. Many people see the peace of Brest Litovsk as the final line, after which the Bolsheviks did their own thing - but this was not strictly true.
By January 1919, the Bolsheviks and Germans had grown to have an intensely close relationship. This had primarily been a consequence of the pragmatic policies of the now former German Foreign Minister Paul von Hintze. In the summer and autumn of 1918 there had been great debate within the German Government over the direction of their policy towards the Russians. The first of two camps were led by the hardliners, such as Ludendorff, who despite no longer being Quartermaster General after his stroke had remained a prominent figure at ‘court’ and later in the OHL upon his return.
For clarity: by the time of the French surrender the OHL, now once again the peacetime ‘General Staff’ continued to be dominated by Hindenburg, along with senior figures like the Crown Prince Wilhelm, Crown Prince Rupprecht, Wilhelm Groener and Max Hoffmann. These men were ultimately ‘pragmatists’ of the old order, much less the ‘hardliners’ of the Fatherland-party persuasion like Ludendorff and Bauer.
Ludendorff considered the Bolsheviks something of useful disruptors who had fulfilled their purpose and destroyed Russia, but now ought to be stamped out to prevent a threat to German internal security in the long run. This, he believed, should be done through an intervention through the deployment of forces in Finland and the Baltic states, which would be staged in a feigned excuse of a planned intervention against the Allies in Murmansk. These forces would then suddenly seize Petrograd through overwhelming force, while German forces would also then march on Moscow and seize Tsaritsyn via an alliance with the Whites. This, he believed, would shatter the Bolshevik’s political unity and collapse their armed forces. Ludendorff was even willing to return parts of or even all of Russia’s lost territories in Ukraine and White Russia in order to win over the Whites, who traditionally considered themselves to be at war with Germany.
Germany in that way would then secure a friend to the east who had been weakened by the war and could be economically and politically subjugated to Berlin. However, this ran in sharp contrast to the proposals of the Foreign Ministry and von Hintze - leader of the pragmatic camp within the Government.
Von Hintze saw the Russian civil war as a huge opportunity, and the bolshevik’s weakness as something that could be exploited. Their willingness to negotiate with the Germans, even if potentially in bad faith, made them vulnerable to a slow removal of more and more land and economic concessions in exchange for German non-intervention and economic assistance. Hintze pressed this aggressively, dispatching the General Director of the Deutsche Evaporator A.G Paul Litwin to sit down with Bolshevik negotiator Leonid Krasin, the People's Commissar for Trade and Industry, in late 1918.
The pair sought to negotiate a deal that would alleviate bolshevik economic difficulties by opening trade markets with the Bolsheviks, particularly for key foods such as surplus materials and cereals which the reds would provide in exchange for cash liquidity. In particular, the Germans were even willing to assist the bolsheviks in their conflict with the white armies under Denikin in the south Caucasus. This is quite a shocking fact in hindsight, given the ideological incompatibility between the Kaiser’s autocratic, conservative, landowning Government - but in practical terms makes sense.
The Whites at the time were politically opposed to the Central Powers to almost a deluded extreme. Never the most competent political force, the White leadership saw the Germans as a threat that, even in a German victory, could never be placated or recognized as by doing so they would inevitably be forced to uphold the Treaty of Brest Litovsk - which no White was willing to do. The Whites above all feared that Russia, one and indivisible, could not be upheld. Thus, logically or not, the White military leadership in particular were never willing to compromise - even with the Finns in many cases in spite of their political similarities with the Whites save for the national question.
Potential German interventionism was also primarily a question of national interest; Germany wished for a land corridor with the Georgians and sought to use the Cossacks to achieve that by fracturing the north caucasus politically. The cossacks, while politically independent of the Whites, were under great pressure from the Whites to cooperate with them against the Bolsheviks. This meant that by crushing the Whites in the south, the threat of a political alignment between the two would be more limited. Additionally, the Germans had no faith that the Bolsheviks could successfully govern Russia. This of course somewhat changed after the fall of the OHL-clique from power and the rise of the civilian Government, who did not underestimate the bolsheviks so much, but was certainly a factor at the time. If the Bolsheviks were doomed to fall, and they were busy destroying Russia for the time being - why help their opponent?
Litwin would also offer that the Germans would abandon the absolutely vital supply port of Rostov to the Bolsheviks. This port had been occupied since the 1918 advance by German forces into the country following the Bolsheviks attempt to pursue ‘peace without a treaty’ under Trotsky, and in doing so had massively damaged the Bolsheviks ability to supply forces in the Caucuses. By returning the city, which had remained under occupation since the Treaty, the 30,000 men of the Bolshevik Special Army would find it far easier to attack Denikin without overextending their logistics structure.
German forces would also launch an offensive alongside the Finns against the British forces around Murmansk, driving out the allied expeditionary force there, and could even directly intervene against Denikin if necessary. This, however, was more of a fall-back plan in case the whites ever managed to make progress against the Bolsheviks - part of a plan by Hintze to play both sides off one another. He hoped that both sides would fight each other to the death, burning themselves out and seeing continual peasant revolts that would slowly weaken and fracture the country further, until eventually German economic hegemony came to dominate Russia.
This strategy appealed far more to the Kaiser and Chancellor von Hertling by late 1918 than Ludendorff’s interventionist approach. While the Germans did have concerns about the spread of bolshevism, they did not see the Bolsheviks as a strategic threat in the long term provided they were given the scope to settle their new order in Europe. This would only be undermined by engaging in yet another war, even if against a foe who would be far less competent than the French. The simple fact was, the German people were done with war - and thus was only further cemented by the general strike of 1918 and the election that followed.
This policy evolved following the fall of Von Hertling and the OHL’s unlimited political power though. The new Government, being a civilian administration, adopted an even less interventionist policy. Chancellor von Baden approached the bolsheviks with great caution. Obviously made aware of the previous policies of Von Hintze after entering office, he opposed a direct intervention under any circumstance against the Whites and opposed any military action against the allied intervention in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.
His Government would however pursue a pragmatic policy towards the bolsheviks, led by Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau. In a shocking historical fit of irony, the Social Democrats - unfamiliar with foreign policy but aware of their firm dislike of bolshevism - would end up being the ones that needed convincing. This created a remarkable historical case of the conservative von Brockdorff-Rantzau, convincing the Socialists Ebert and republican Scheidemann that a deal with the Communist bolsheviks could be best for German economic interests - rather than imperial ambitions.
Von Brockdorff-Rantzau had been instrumental in getting Lenin to Russia in the first place. A ‘bismarckian’ diplomat at heart, he encouraged the continuation of Hintze’s policy towards the bolsheviks; aiming to weaken Russia by playing the two sides off one another, and in doing so greatly strengthening Germany’s position in the east, undermining the danger posed by the British to the west and others on a global stage.
This would ultimately lead to the Brockdorff-Rantzau-Krasin Treaty of January 1919, with Germany agreeing to open their markets to imports from Russia of cereals and ores, in exchange for thus providing the bolsheviks with capital in the form of the Reichsmark - albeit at a hugely reduced cost from market rate. This had two positive effects for both sides; it strengthened the Reichsmark a small amount, alleviating heavy inflation that had affected Germany in the immediate post war period, and providing albeit very limited imports of cereals to Germany. Additionally, Germany would automatically gain the first order rights to 50% of all output of cereals, ores and metals in the caucuses - a valuable boon that would only be strengthened by the Bolsheviks de-jure acceptance, if not in writing, that some kind of Cossack autonomy in the North Caucasus was inevitable in the given circumstances. The bolsheviks meanwhile gained additional capital, plus effective legal recognition from Germany - strengthening the country’s claim to political leadership of Russia and raising the stakes for the allies and their interventions in Germany in the east and north.
There was also a third effect of this treaty. While in actual fact data would later show there was very little exchange of goods between the two states in 1919, this meant that the bolsheviks first port of call for trade would be Germany - not the western allies. Having seized considerable ore deposits in Ukraine, in the Caucuses and in Lorraine, this put Germany’s construction and heavy industry in a very powerful position post war that would aid long term recovery - while building a Russian economic reliance on Germany. Yet again, Germany had in effect torn away in all but name another part of Russia that the reds would need to rebuild their state.
It did however dissuade some Russians from the bolsheviks, further opening the door to what was until then largely seen as a myth; that Germany had been financially backing the bolsheviks from the beginning. While of course Lenin rejected this, and the treaty was declared an insignificant act of economic necessity aimed at providing a key Bolshevik promise; bread, the policy would ultimately dog the Government in the long term. For the cossacks of the south meanwhile, the treaty would make it a greater necessity to actually cooperate with the Germans more than the whites - further weakening the White cause.
The Allied Intervention
The Anglo-French-American landings in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in March 1918 had been vital at the time - the allies had spent years providing enormous supplies of arms and munitions to Russia via the ports of the north, and thus the British in particular sought to quickly crack down on the bolshevik ability to access those arms.
This was a part of Britain’s generally pro-white policy under David Lloyd George and his war ministry. Britain had hoped that a white front could be formed and ultimately prove victorious, correctly identifying the bolsheviks as at least reluctantly pro-German while the Whites remained consistently anti-German and thus would continue the conflict.
This strategy obviously started to become quite redundant as the western front began to collapse over spring and the summer of 1918. The war for all intents and purposes was going to end up as an off-continent matter for Britain, and this would be reflected in their approach to their Russian policy. The fall of the Lloyd George Ministry meant the most pro-war ministers against the Bolsheviks, especially Churchill, would leave the cabinet and be replaced by more apathetic and reluctant Tory ministers. The British Foreign Secretary Balfour for example adopted a policy of strategic ambivalence towards the bolsheviks, favouring improved relations in exchange for a repayment of Russian imperial war debts.
The War Minister Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, meanwhile prior to the end of the war, and fearful of a German continuation of the war post-French treaty, sought to bolster aid to the Whites. He believed that it would be pivotal to adopt an ‘eastern strategy’ long term to balance against German influence, thus requiring a friendly Russia to Britain. This dragged on however as the war uncertainty and reluctance of Bonar Law to commit to any specific military approach to Germany besides the existing naval-based and middle-east based policy left the Government unwilling to commit. Additionally, there was a question of means - without access through the Bosporus straits, the southern front under Denikin could not be armed - and the eastern front would require aid to be shipped to Vladivostok, a journey of several months by boat.
Pressure on the eastern front by the bolsheviks was also viewed in Britain as a security threat to India. Unclear on the status of the bolsheviks and their willingness to militarily aid the Germans, Balfour also made clear as early as June 1918 that he believed it vital that Japan advance their military intervention in Russia up to the Urals. In Tokyo this policy was met with constant scepticism. While Japan was on paper intervening in order to establish a staging point for the allies to arm and train the whites under Kolchak, in practice the Japanese were deploying forces in ten times the expected size by the allies with the actual aim to seize control over the transamur region. As a result, and due to legitimate concerns about a direct conflict with the bolsheviks, the Japanese rejected the prospect of expanding their military front all the way to the Urals - citing logistical issues.
This whole approach to the bolsheviks also brought Britain into policy conflict with the Americans. Wilson was vehemently against Japanese interference in the Russian east, fearing that Japan was growing as a major economic, military and territorial power in Asia. These concerns only grew though after the signing of the Treaty of Copenhagen. This created something of a turnaround in British priorities. British forces now had a potentially hostile Russia, a potentially hostile and victorious Germany, and no clear continental allies besides a dilapidated France. Japanese reluctance to expand their intervention up to the Urals also gave rise for concerns in Britain over Japanese expansionism, particularly given the ongoing occupation of German territories in the far east. Britain’s imperial holdings, especially Australia, remained concerned over Japanese territorial ambitions in the west pacific islands in particular - while Britain was more directly concerned with Japan’s desire to control China. However, there was ultimately very little Britain could do about this new development, and with Japan at least an ally of Britain and a creditor to her, ultimately Britain would be forced to acquiesce.
Balfour and Curzon fell out in December 1918 over the Government’s approach to Russia though in the aftermath of the peace. Both men had deeply differing views about how to approach the reds in the new circumstances, with a war-front no longer being required, but instead a ‘check’ on German activity in the east. In this, Curzon backed the position of the War Minister Lord Milner in his view that the Whites needed military assistance or at the very least considerable supplies of arms. He further believed that Japan should be offered territorial concessions in Asia and that Britain may be able to assist Japan in securing all of Germany’s Asian colonies, save for Papua, in exchange for pushing Japan into the west. Britain should, in Curzon’s view, impose on Japan the need for their direct interference in Russia - and should force the Whites to accept territorial losses in the east in exchange for military aid.
This was necessary as by January 1919 the military situation on the Siberian front had greatly degraded. The last months of the war had been cruel to the Whites, and this showed in Balfour’s position. Balfour, a pragmatist of the old diplomatic persuasion, viewed the bolsheviks with contempt and suspicion - but ultimately acceptance. He knew the limits of the British military, and accepted the view of the new generation of diplomats and advisors on Russia who consistently began to warn during 1918 that the prospect of a White victory was slim. In one such note, R. H. Bruce Lockhart to Balfour in late 1918:
“With the defeat of Germany it is clear that our intervention in Russia has now entered upon a most dangerous phase. It is clear that our pretext for intervention, and have at the same time strengthened the position of the Bolsheviks by raising their hopes for a revolution in France and Italy.
“By severing Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic districts to Germany, they have made it difficult for White forces to consolidate in any one place. Without the active support of foreign troops, the counterrevolutionary forces in Russia are not strong enough to overcome the Bolsheviks. By financing these organisations and yet not supporting them actively, we lay ourselves open to the same charges as if we were intervening in force, and at the same time we are only prolonging civil war and unnecessary bloodshed in Russia.
“By restoring order in Russia at once, not only are we preventing the spread of bolshevism as a political danger, but we are also saving for the rest of Europe Russia from reliance upon the German-held fertile grain fields of Ukraine - which by no half measures will render Russia sterile as a counterbalance against Germany.”
Lockhart of course was at the time arguing for a direct intervention, however this was a policy of the semi-naive, over-optimistic men like Churchill who sought intervention at any cost to Britain. However, by January reports of British army mutinies in the ports of Dover and Calais, the former requiring two whole divisions to put down the mutiny. One such report by Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson wrote of a “state of general incipient mutiny in the British army during January and February 1919”, particularly after demobilised soldiers stormed the War Office in Whitehall in their fury at their economic position post-war.
This brought Balfour to a revelation in December; Britain could not alone defeat the reds, the Japanese would not assist her in doing so, and both Britain and the Americans feared the bolsheviks - and thus logically so would the Germans. This was a key thought. Britain had for much of the war accepted that the bolsheviks were near enough German fellow travellers who were introduced to weaken Russia itself and then challenge Britain in Asia, but only when the conflict came to an end did the British consider the prospect of what if the Bolsheviks remained for the long term.
The revelation of the Brockdorff-Rantzau-Krasin Treaty in January also actually further strengthened this conviction; Germany was attempting to tie Russia to its economy by the hip, and wanted the Whites and Reds to fight it out to strengthen Germany’s geopolitical position in Russia - without forcing Germany to intervene. Denikin’s weakness in the south due to his inability to secure a compact with the Cossacks proved this in early 1919, as the Cossacks found themselves more tied to Germany and independence than Russia and the Bolsheviks.
The logical solution to Britain’s strategic dilemma thus became clear, to Balfour at least. An intervention would be extraordinarily unpopular among Britain’s workers. The Whites would not win the war, and Japan would not provide enough assistance to even seriously delay the war’s end. The bolsheviks were going to win; thus Britain could gain a partner in Russia in opposition to Germany by accepting that reality in good time.
Balfour’s proposals were simple; he argued Britain should immediately withdraw all forces, cut off the Whites and let them go. In doing so, Britain would frustrate Germany’s desire to allow Russia to kill itself, and would generate a tiny amount of goodwill with the bolsheviks that could lead to an eventual rapprochement when the Bolsheviks inevitably were forced to accept they would need to win the peace - which would require economic capital to do.
This could be offered by America or Britain, depending on who took power in the United States in 1920, thus shifting the bolsheviks into at least a ‘neutral’ status rather than pro-German. Bringing the concept to cabinet in January, this also caught the attention of the Chancellor Austen Chamberlain who, faced with the ever-growing task of restoring Imperial finances - additionally demanded that any withdrawal ought to require the acceptance of the Bolsheviks to repay Tsarist war debts. In 1918 alone, Britain had provided £100mn in material and financial aid to the Russian Whites - perhaps it was time to pull some of that back in.
Thus, the status of the allied interventions in Russia by January of 1919 was one of rapidly evaporating confidence and uncertainty of White success, all while Britain attempted to decide how best to approach Russia in the frame of the new ‘great game’ against Germany.
The War on the Ground
1919 opened on the Bolshevik side with an unusual showing from the harshest and bloodiest man in the regime; Felix Dzerzhinsky. ‘Iron Felix’, head of the Cheka became hopelessly drunk in his office and, unholstering his pistol, begged Lenin and Trotsky to shoot him dead. “I’ve spilled so much blood, I barely have any reason to live” he said, in a rare show of how even some of the most monstrous men in history can fight battles with their morality. Of course, his request was not honoured, but it goes to show the stress that the reds were facing at the time.
By January, the bolsheviks had now run the country for over a year - going on a year and a half. The nation was in an open civil war, and a united White Russian government had finally at great pains been established in Siberia under Admiral Kolchak as the ‘supreme ruler’ of Russia. While much of Russia’s heartland had been locked in by the Bolsheviks, red control of Siberia was at a total end after the Czechoslovak Legion revolted against the bolsheviks on their journey east via the trans Siberian railway.
This revolt had been entirely avoidable. Trotsky, in a foolish moment of arrogance, had become slowly more frustrated with the Czechs and their insistence on being armed as they crossed to the east to be sailed back to Europe by the allies from Vladivostok. In an unnecessary bid for control, he ordered the Legion’s arrest and disarmament in May, only for the issue to drive the Legion to rebel - something that would not have happened prior. As a result, the Legion seized most of the trans Siberian railway, re-invigorating the White cause and providing them a base from which to expand west.
As a result, the Bolsheviks suddenly gained a new front to the east against an army of whites trained abroad and actually motivated to win - a threat that only became stronger after the failed uprising of the Left SR’s in July. This allowed for the creation of the ‘Komuch’ (Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly) Government in the east, and the formation of an army of the Left SRs supportive of the White cause. Combined with the allied interventions in the North (Arkanghelsk and Murmansk), along with the southern Kuban front where just 8,000 Whites had defeated over 80,000 typhoid-riddled reds in a stunning battle for survival that swelled white numbers.
However the Whites on the southern front had a key issue; they had never been able to lock down a relationship with the Cossacks. The Don Army, under Ataman Pyotr Krasnov, by late 1918 had been struggling to define their purpose in the civil war. The Cossacks had risen up against the Bolsheviks in 1918, but did so as a distinct army independent of the White command. Of course, the two parts had cooperated - but with the arrival of German forces the cossacks had received enormous quantities of military aid, ranging from small arms to artillery. This had left the Cossacks distinctly minded to declare independence, which the Kuban and Don regions did in January and May respectively - quickly establishing an army of 50,000 men and liberating the entire cossack ‘voisko’ of the Kuban by August 1918.
The Whites also struggled to win over the Cossacks as by January their force had decisively decided against expanding their war aims and attempting to seize more lands, primarily as cossack fighters did not wish to fight for lands that were not their own. German diplomatic pressure on the cossacks was also heavy, and while the Germans did not yet wish to see the Whites destroyed, they certainly did not wish to see them win the conflict. Instead, Germany opted to prop up the Cossack Republics and, in doing so, gain even further influence than achieved in Operation Faustschlag and the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.
This left the Whites in a very weak position in the south. Unable to receive aid from the allies via the closed Bosporus straits, unable to ally with the Cossacks and isolated from Kolchak, Denikin and his forces were protected to a degree in the north caucasian steppe - but could not pose any real threat to the reds. This greatly strengthened the Bolshevik position. They had no real strategic threat to the south, no real threat to the north, and thus the only main threat would be to the east. There was, of course, still the threat of German intervention though. This is what spurred the Brockdorff-Rantzau-Krasin Treaty in January.
As early as November, Lenin had faced renewed pressure from the anti-German camp in the Central Committee led by Bukharin. The group viewed German encroachment as a threat to the survival of the state, which showcased an evolution in Bukharin’s thinking at the time. Bukharin and his clique had vehemently opposed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, fearing that it would allow Germany to slowly squeeze the country into destruction due to the lack of Russian union with Ukraine. This had at one point in March 1918 become so serious that the arrest of Lenin by Bukharin and other Left Bolsheviks had been considered.
He quickly felt vindicated in this view thanks to the Brockdorff-Rantzau-Krasin Treaty, which Bukharin saw as being far too amicable towards German interests. He worried that with the civil war, the southern Cossack states would be lost, and then Germany would slowly pressure the bolsheviks into economic dependency - or even directly intervene later. Arguing that the revolution needed to be protected in Russia, or even that war was needed against Germany to force Germany into revolution, Bukharin ran against Lenin in public for the first time to a serious degree in January 1919.
Krushing Kolchak
The end of the 1918 fighting period for winter had seen the Whites successfully take some small territorial gains in Siberia, but generally the Perm Operation of November to January was indecisive. This left both sides with an opportunity to press the attack. For the Whites, the need to attack was serious as the failure to open up new fronts in the south, north or even West with German assistance left them vulnerable to being isolated and destroyed.
For the Reds meanwhile, the need to attack was minor. Their incentive was simple; that by attacking they could crush the last real White threat to their control of Russia and end the civil war. Additionally, by doing so they could begin national recovery rather than face continued German pressure and reliance. Lenin recognised this quickly, and encouraged an offensive in the east above all other fronts.
Supplied with extensive arms, the best troops available and ample ammunition that would no longer be needed so desperately on the southern and northern fronts, the Bolsheviks set about preparing an offensive against Kolchak. For Kolchak’s whites, who were executing an offensive in January 1919 that, due to the increased pressure, soon bogged down and failed to make serious ground, this presented a potentially existential threat. Morale among the whites was low, political infighting remained high and even the Left-SR’s, who had only really ‘joined’ the white cause recently, now began to question their position.
It would be Trotsky who would ultimately lead the main offensive against the Siberian whites in March 1919. Led by Zinoviev’s Turkestan Army, along with Mikhail Frunze and Gaya Gai’s 4th and 1st armies respectively, Trotsky’s spearhead would come from the south - aiming for the key railway junction at Cheliabinsk. The attack initially struggled to make major progress; bogged down by logistical issues along with lacking motivation on the part of what was by now a largely conscripted army, complemented by some of the ‘elite’ troops such as Trotsky’s own personal retinue. The greater training quality of the White soldiers; mostly former cadets and officers, also showed on the battlefield - but their dwindling numbers and the Whites also having to rely on unwilling conscripts as the fighting went on soon meant that the reds began to make ground by late February.
For the whites the attack was a disaster, which only became worse when the bolshevik 5th, 2nd and 3rd armies in the north also joined the fight when White forces were forced to withdraw from their hard-won city of Perm to strengthen their line. This served to be a crushing blow for morale, which soon became worse when red forces neared Cheliyabinsk in April - forcing them to abandon Ekaterinburg. In a battlefield where there were two major rail lines in need of protection and to be used to advance, Cheliyabinsk formed the key junction between both - meaning the loss of it would threaten to cut off the entire White Siberian army of Radola Gajda without a withdrawal.
The withdrawal, as expected, would turn out to be a chaotic rout though. Defeated decisively at the hands of Mikhail Lashevich’s 3rd Army. Red pressure thus soon captured Cheliyabinsk - essentially destroying white hopes of any long term victory in the east. The front had narrowed now, encompassing solely the single-route Trans Siberian Railway, and as such while the railway would be far easier to defend for the whites - it would be impossible for them to attack their numerically superior foe. As a result, white morale soon collapsed - the war may just be over by Christmas.
Biting the Bullitt
Like birds in a dark forest, the eyes of the world watched as the news of the slow white implosion began to spread across the world in early 1919. In the United States, while some naive fools had held out some hope that the Whites could pull it off, most former allied generals involved in the various interventions soon recognized that they could not. Their political forces were simply too disparate, their military too dominated by Tsarists, and Russia’s citizens simply too opposed to Tsarism.
Much akin to Britain’s cabinet beginning to see ‘the bigger picture’, in the White House such a view also began to form as news of the red counter-offensive in Siberia filtered in. Col. House, Wilson’s main man on foreign policy, had lost some credibility since the war drew to a close in the President’s eyes on account of the whole thing having rather blown up in Wilson’s face - however he remained the principle man on foreign affairs.
House, a fervent believer in the 14 points, began to see Russia as simply the consequence of his own ideological view; that Russia’s people clearly wanted bolshevism - and thus who were the allies to attempt to stop them. Concluding that the Whites could not win the war, an Anglo-American proposal had approached the reds in February with a proposal to meet in Tehran to negotiate an end to the civil war with the Whites and Reds. The Reds had approved, but naturally the Whites had not.
Former Russian foreign minister turned White Minister Sergey Sazonov proved to be ‘shocked’ at the potential conference, asking British diplomats if they deemed it reasonable to ask him to sit down with people who had “killed his entire family”. Thus, the proposal had failed - but the idea remained in the mind of American and British diplomats, now furious at the ‘intransigence’ of the White leaders. Thus, when William C Bullitt, a state department official who had travelled to Russia in late 1918 to try and negotiate the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and Bolsheviks, approached House with a proposal to simply ‘go around’ the whites - House condoned the move.
Few expected with much optimism any positive outcome of the ‘Bullitt mission’ as it became known, even Bullitt himself who saw Bolshevik treaty with Germany as a sure symbol of Russo-German ties in the long run, but he held out hope that in truth Lenin was not just a stooge of the Kaiser - but a national leader searching for a way out from under Wilhelm’s boot.
As it turned out, he was right. Travelling to Russia alongside journalist Lincoln Steffens and Swedish communist Karl Kilbom, Bullitt would discover the bolsheviks met him with ‘open arms’. He soon would receive a communique from the bolshevik leadership on March 14 agreeing to conduct ‘peace talks’ with the Allies - provided such talks involved the total evacuation of allied troops from Russia.
The British and American Governments immediately assented - displeased at the collapse of the Whites and seeing no real alternative path forward, and desperate to conclude a deal on war debts. Of course nobody trusted the reds - but it was hoped that by many any deal whatsoever they may just start to approach the west with less suspicion.
The two sides would agree to meet in the city of Visby, the capital of the island of Gotland in Sweden. Georgy Chicherin, as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, naturally leapt at the opportunity to attend as he had at Brest Litovsk - even despite his visceral hatred of the British. Maxim Litvinov, Representative of the RSFSR to Britain, would also attend, along with Krasin and other party delegates. The British meanwhile would send Balfour, while the United States would naturally send Bullitt and diplomat Robert Lansing. Thus, on the week of March 31 1919 - the fate of Russia would be decided.
The New Ummah The Second Arab Conquest
October 1918 - December 1919
Harvard University, 1997.
“Good morning everyone, welcome back to the ‘Modern History of the Middle East’. We’ll go over our essays at the end of today’s session. As promised last week, this morning we will be focusing on the immediate period after the end of the Great War in Turkey and the Middle East as a whole.
“As you will remember last week, we left off with the November 1918 Treaty of Alexandria between the British and the large part of the Entente on one side, and the Ottoman Government of Talaat Pasha on the other.
“The Treaty was fairly brutal for the Ottoman Turks. You will recall that the British had sought primarily to inflict territorial losses upon the essentially broke Ottoman Government and to seize key physical assets from them for long term economic exploitation. This was mainly focused on the oil fields of Mosul, which prior to the war had been discovered to be a potentially large source of oil - a resource that was much sought after by the British as well as our own Government here in the United States.
“It’s important to remember at this point that oil was a booming commodity. We need not forget the German-Turkish ‘race for Baku’ - well the same worked here. Britain had quickly identified at the start of the war that oil would be the key military commodity of the future, and so now it sought to trap additional sources in Khuzestan, Mosul and the Trucial states. In fact, the British made sure to keep advancing even technically after the Ottomans had thrown in the towel to secure Mosul for that precise reason.
“Britain also had obligations to her Arab allies who had been enlisted largely just to distract Ottoman Turkish forces during the war - but ended up mounting a rather vaillant campaign. Despite some initial difficulties, they drove the Ottoman army out of their homeland in Hejaz, a victory largely achieved using British aircraft, showing the revolutionary effect of those new machines.
“The Arabs, under ‘King of the Arabs’ Hussein bin Ali, had then struck out and by the end of the war, advancing faster and further than the British main force under Allenby - attacking the Ottoman rear guard during their painful retreat towards the Taurus Mountains. When British forces landed at Mersin, that Ottoman force based around Aleppo was then in effect cut off from the middle east, and with that ended the levantine campaign.
“Obviously we know fighting went on for another few weeks as Britain attempted to enter the Anatolian plateau, but this was the heartland of Turkey itself and thus was fiercely defended with favourable terrain by Ottoman forces under Mustafa Kemal, and thus came to nothing.
“Britain then made peace and extracted from the Turks virtually everything south of the 37th parallel. Britain had actually planned to just make this be a long, straight line for a border along the parallel - but in the end a more ‘fine tuned’ border was agreed based largely on geographical features, prior Ottoman administrative boundaries and most importantly, the Baghdad railway which was still not quite finished.
“Britain seized this for one simple reason; ease of access to the Mediterranean. This railway would become a new highway for resource extraction post war through lands in Syria once assigned to the French ‘sphere’ which now had entered British control.
“We should also remind ourselves at this point that the French, having chosen to leave the war thanks mainly to exhaustion and a lack of path forward, in the eyes of the British Foreign Office had surrendered their right to lands in Syria post war.
“Much like the Arabs, Britain had no legal or even public responsibility to provide France with any of Syria after the war and therefore simply chose not to. Instead she would establish a wider British administered zone - demonstrating the problem with back room diplomacy.
“There had also been no specific territorial promises to the Arabs either in their dealings with Britain, though there were several vague commitments. These essentially entailed that there would be a single Arab state south of the 37th parallel, with British involvement in its administration at various levels. Britain would also take Palestine, though the Arabs believed that they would de-jure remain in control of the land, and France would take Lebanon.
“Of course, there was also the often forgotten and controversial Sykes-Picot agreement between the British and French over the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. As you can see on the slide, the Sykes-Picot agreement followed the earlier deals in 1915 with Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov, as well as a later deal with the Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Boselli. These deals essentially carved out colonial sectors of interest to each power, which each would receive in the case of an Ottoman defeat.
“Counterfactual historians love this deal because it’s a classic example of 19th-century imperial conference approaches to modern conflicts that became so rare after the Great war. A great book on such a timeline, for those interested, is ‘A Line in the Sand’ by James Barr - which is worth checking out.
“The plan was so classically British; to ally a local native elite only to stab them in the back and just take all of the land themselves - only this time bringing France, Italy and Russia along too. It also highlights how Russian foreign policy goals were always orientated towards the Bosporus straits - though it is somewhat doubted if Britain would have ever accepted Russian capture of Constantinople. Regardless, I digress.
“It was clear all along, and with the outcome of the Middle East's division too, that the British never truly intended to keep their word to Hussein and the Arabs. Of course, we will never truly know how much they intended to, if you mind my language, ‘screw over’ the Arabs - for France would ultimately give in to Germany.
“Russia too fell to the Bolsheviks, who promptly published the entire Sykes-Picot agreement to the international press - outraging the Arabs, and greatly embarrassing Whitehall. Britain meanwhile, furious over France’s refusal to continue the fight, simply reneged on the deal.
“This was more of an angry ‘jerk’ action by the Government as it sought to shore up its credit with the British people, but in reality it’s fairly inevitable that eventually a rapprochement would see France gain something - as we shall see in the coming slides.
“Secretary of State for the Colonies William Hewins, this rather fresh-faced man you can see behind me, would be the man ultimately who would ‘decide’ the fate of the middle east.
“Of course, he was not the only influence here, the British Foreign Office was pivotal in drawing boundaries and engaging with their new rulers, but with Prime Minister Bonar Law fairly satisfied to sit back and let the cabinet deal with most foreign affairs while he concentrated on the home front, Hewins would ultimately make the final calls.
“Hewins was a huge proponent of tariffs, imperial preference and other ‘fun’ economic policies mostly associated with taking from the Empire and giving to the British market. He was keen to give Britain a settlement that benefited the British to the maximum possible extent financially, especially given the country’s financial woes after the war.
“This mostly kept in line with traditional Tory Party foreign policy thinking. As sort of the ‘gentlemen’ of the old Empire, the Tories in some ways were actually quite reluctant Imperialists and therefore usually focused on the economic benefits of conquest. This was particularly true after the war, as the war had shown that modern great power conflicts were more of a battle for resources and time - not a battle for strips of land or prestige.
“This was something very few if any military commanders at the start of the war had realised, but by the end was a keen point in the mind of the likes of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had now retired from frontbench politics after the collapse of the War ministry. The next war, Whitehall believed, would therefore be worth preparing for immediately.
“With the global economy in such turbulence, the Tories therefore looked towards re-establishing Britain's significant economic role in world affairs - and part of that would be formulated around the middle east.
“Hewins therefore would ultimately accept that the basis for a new territorial settlement needed to be formulated upon the Hussein-McMahon notes rather than the Sykes-Picot agreement.
“These notes had been hashed out by British High Commissioner to Egypt Sir Arthur Henry McMahon during the war and basically amounted to a commitment on what the Arabs should expect if they sided with the British.
“On a side note here, McMahon is often unfairly assumed to have ‘tricked’ the Arabs into accepting a deal on the basis that they would get a giant, united Arab state - but in practice McMahon was largely just negotiating a fair deal. Unfortunately it was those in London who did not find the idea of negotiating with the Arabs that ‘fair’, and McMahon actually resigned in protest of the Sykes-Picot agreement after it was published by the Bolsheviks. I always think that goes to show how little the British Government really let their colonial officials know their actual plans long term.
“Anyway, this strategy of rule was not without precedent in Britain; after all Britain had effectively ruled India for centuries by this point through the adoption of a native elite who were then cajoled and bribed into accepting British overlordship. Hewins plan here was identical; Britain would install an Arabic-speaking elite in some areas of the middle east, while other areas of key economic advantage would be placed under direct British rule.
“Adopting McMahon’s notes as a baseline was not some grand gesture, but entirely a policy of British self-interest. Hewins saw the negotiations as necessary because, unlike as planned with Sykes-Picot, without any French involvement in the Middle East, any deal that was opposed by the Arabs would have to be imposed by force - which Britain could not afford or spare men to do.
“We should at this point just take a quick look at what the state of the middle east actually was following the end of the war. While some might assume that immediately upon the end of the conflict there would be new boundaries drawn and institutions established, in actual fact in the Middle East, much like in Europe under German rule, there would be at least six months after the war where administrative systems were basically non-existent.
“Britain had inherited the Ottoman administrative structure, but perhaps partially naively decided to largely ignore it. Instead the entire ‘bloc’ of land they had won from the Turks was transferred straight into military administration. This consisted of several military Governorships broadly headed by a joint military command in the region.
“As expected, this did not lead to effective Government - but it was also not actually intended to do so. Military Government in the levant and mesopotamia, as in most cases, was merely a stopgap aimed at keeping order more than anything. This had several quite important effects though.
“First and foremost, it left the question of an Arab state, along with the boundaries of the future middle east totally in question. Britain had no more than 100,000 men in the middle east as a whole by January 1919; a massive reduction from the over half a million men in Mesopotamia and the Levant in 1918, but a natural consequence of demobilisation.
“Of course, these 100,000 men could still defeat any standing force they wished to, however to do so would be expensive, a waste of time and may seriously destabilise the middle east which Britain hoped to rule.
“With limited forces, Britain struggled to impose direct control over everywhere all at once. As a result a lot of the British forces were concentrated in A) the key cities, and B) the coastal areas, and along the large rivers. This left a lot of the ground uncovered, and allowed Arab forces to move essentially at will.
“Britain also did little to nothing to actually contain their Arab allies, and General Allenby was more than happy to allow them to roam freely, while the around 5,000 British troops which were posted with the three major Arab forces under each of Hussein’s sons largely stuck with those forces as they moved around the region.
“The unintended consequence of this was that it was the Arabs who first liberated major Arabic-speaking cities such as Damascus and Aleppo. During the war this did not seem like a big deal, but it soon turned out to be a bigger one than expected as post-war politics quickly evolved in the middle east.
“You see Hussein had several sons involved in this great Arab revolt, and some were more willing to see their now very aged father gain political power than others. You had his eldest son; Ali, his second son; Abdullah, and then two more; Faisal and Zeid.
“Therefore when the second youngest son of Hussein, Faisal, arrived in Damascus - he was not going to let his older brothers just take what he considered himself to have rightfully conquered.
“You see this was essentially mediaeval level conquest and fighting between siblings. Faisal, being lower in the inheritance scale, stood little chance of having a land to call his own to rule. As such, he viewed the war as his chance to literally carve out a realm - and that he did.
“The idea of ‘arab nationalism’ being the main factor in the Arab revolt is a bit of a myth. It was primarily a land grab by these sons and their Dad who had for around 500-years now been ruled by the Ottomans. A justified land grab built out of desire for self determination, but still a land grab. Hussein wanted independence, and so he may as well build an empire doing it.
“On 5 October 1918 Faisal fired the starting gun on this race to claim land by declaring an ‘Arab Kingdom of Syria’ into existence. Allenby, oblivious to the significance of this or believing it did not hugely matter, allowed this to happen - albeit largely due to his genuine belief that there would be some kind of accommodation with the Arabs anyway.
“Conveniently for Faisal, the territory he claimed for this state was actually some of the land that Britain had less interest in. Britain’s primary goals were as follows, and as you can see on this map. They wanted Direct control of southern Mesopotamia, direct control of Palestine for prestige reasons - as well as to secure the east side of the Suez Canal. They also wanted to gain direct control over the future coast of any arab state in the Alawite northern stretch of the Syrian coast, again in part for security but also to secure ports for oil export. Finally, they wanted the oil of the Mosul area by administering that as some kind of autonomous entity in effect ruled by Britain - very much like Kuwait had been for decades.
“Faisal’s Syrian state, which claimed the in-land territories behind Palestine and up to the Mesopotamian frontier, was therefore not much of a disruption. However, his brothers did not see it that way. You see the brothers had all had very different approaches to the war. Faisal had been all in, and it was his army that had advanced ahead of the British army into Syria.
“Abdullah meanwhile had led his own army, but after liberating Hejaz had essentially stayed there. He was disinterested in grand conquests, and in many ways just fell out with Faisal over the future spoils. He advanced somewhat into Transjordan, eventually settling in the city of Amman which he used as a base following the end of the war.
“Ali, the eldest son, meanwhile had paid little heed to the British revolt and thus had no actual army to speak of. He was due to inherit his father’s lands of Hejaz, and thus was largely satisfied with that. Predictably though he hoped that his father would take all of the new land, if not directly then as suzerain as head of a new Islamic Caliphate based around Mecca. He would be the one ton inherit this title therefore upon his elderly father’s death, and thus it benefitted him to stick to the ‘greater arab state’ plan.
“Finally, Zeid bin Hussein was the youngest brother and had served quite closely with the British. He was a fairly relaxed man, not especially ambitious and in many ways following his brother Faisal who led the Arab Northern Army he was attached to.
“Hewins intended to play on this political division between the brothers. The goal of the Foreign Office was to establish several weaker realms in the middle east through which Britain could rule with ease, and therefore he heavily favoured the brothers Abdullah and Zeid over Faisal and Ali.
“This was a fairly obvious move for the British, as the latter two had pretensions of a pan-arab state which Britain did not wish to assist in creating. In the whitepaper ‘On Governing the Levant’, Hewins therefore argued for the division of the newly conquered lands into various spheres of interest.
“There would be the so-called ‘Arab Zone’, the ‘French Zone’ and the ‘British Zone’. We’ll look at the last and most important one first.
“The British zone in effect covered all the lands that Britain would rule directly. This included the former Baghdad and Basra Vilayets, which unlike Kuwait would be ruled directly by a British Commissioner as a Protectorate of ‘Irak’. This was similar to the arrangement found in much of Africa, especially places like Kenya - which then was known as British East Africa.
“Britain would also directly rule the Mutasarrifate of Palestine, which would also become a British Protectorate under the same model - governed directly by Britain. This was a bit more difficult of an area to conclude, as Hewins also had to contend with the Balfour Declaration.
“I won’t go into a huge historical debate about the Balfour Declaration, but long story short - as you all know the declaration was made by the Lloyd George Government as a commitment to the Jewish community worldwide that they would be given some kind of Jewish-led autonomous status or state in Palestine eventually.
“It was a fairly in-exact commitment, but was a commitment that the British Government felt obligated to uphold as it had been made to some of Britain’s most senior Jewish figures in various industries with an interest in the matter. But, importantly, it would not mean a Jewish state or autonomy any time soon.
“Britain would also establish military control over the coastal zone of what we could call ‘Alawiya’, basically the Syrian coastline area. This would essentially be the ‘British zone’ - an area they directly ruled.
“Then you have the ‘French Zone’. This was basically a consolation prize for the French at this point but also was delivered because if it had not been, France would have been livid. France had long maintained a protectorate status over eastern Christians, and thus the territory of Lebanon was vital to French imperialist ambitions in the Ottoman Empire.
“Sure, France had given up - but Britain was now in the mind to build coalitions for the upcoming protracted struggle against Germany in the long run. France would not get Syria, but Hewins proposed the transfer of the Mutasarrifate of Lebanon to French control.
“This would have the added benefit of anchoring French interests in the region, further locking France into a pact with Britain for the long haul by giving her a stake in the defence of the middle east. Particularly as Lebanon was a source of coal and some ores that the French economy would need.
“Finally, you have the ‘Arab Zone’. Now, unlike the British and French zones, this would not be an area the Arabs would directly administer and would have staggered degrees of autonomy. The Arab zone was essentially a vast area considered by Britain to be in effect under Arab ‘rule’, even if in practice it was under British ‘administration’.
“This is a key difference. Arab Kings may reside here, but the British Government would run much of the civil service, the army, etc.
“This zone essentially included everywhere south of the 37th parallel, excluding the Protectorate of Irak of course and Palestine. Unlike what McMahon had perhaps implied in his negotiations with Hussein though, there would be no recognition of basic Arab suzerainty over Palestine either.
“The Arab lands would also be divided between the various brothers - with Syria being the first issue to confront. It’s worth noting here thar at the time, it was considered possible to simply boot Faisal out of Damascus - however the British saw little need here.
“Faisal was a close ally of the British, a reliable ally at that, and a friend to numerous British officers. He was understood, respected, and seen as reliable. Thus, while the proclamation of such a large Syrian state was annoying to Whitehall - which sought to divide the lands on their terms - it was not something that justified war.
“Instead the British simply sat down with Faisal in Damascus, and discussed what the exact relationship of his state and Britain would be. Ambitious and competent, Faisal was not unreasonable and thus the boundaries of his new Syrian state were fairly easily established. Faisal would take ownership of the Aleppo, Damascus and Dier-ez-Zor vilayets as part of the Arab Kingdom of Syria.
“In exchange, he would concede authority over Palestine and would accept British occupation over the Jabal Ansariyah - the Syrian coastal mountain range. This was made much easier for the British due to Faisal’s pragmatism, even agreeing in principle to the Balfour Declaration in January 1919 as part of the Faisal–Weizmann Agreement.
“Faisal would also hand control of the Baghdad railway to the British, and would accept the appointment of an Envoy to the Kingdom by the British with special powers in his administration.
“For Faisal, this worked out fairly well. He had the backing of a nationalist legislature made up of representatives from across Syria which had proclaimed him King, and in that role he had then successfully defined what the boundaries of that state were. He had the backing of his elder brother Abdullah, as well as his younger brother Zeid, and thus there would not be a contest to his rule.
“His state would also receive guidance through their new Envoy, who much like in Persia would essentially just be an ambassador with unofficial powers over aspects of the economic administration. This benefitted him greatly, as Syria had near no administrative apparatus - which Britain could help to construct.
“Unfortunately some Arabs did not like the new state, notably the Alawites of the Jabal Ansariyah, who rebelled in July after British forces occupied the region - prompting a two year long guerilla war. This dislike largely stemmed from the Alawites sectarian differences with the Sunni Arab Faisal, who had next to no knowledge of the region he now ruled and was out of step with the Shiite Alawites.
“Seeking to avoid Sunni rule and hostile to British occupation, Saleh al-Ali rebelled with the aim of establishing his own autonomous state and in the end would in some ways succeed. While the Alawites were militarily crushed by 1921, Britain would use the rebellion as a justification to detach the Latakian region from Faisal’s state in 1921 and establish yet another area of de-facto British direct rule - in effect cutting the Syrian state from any coast. However, that is for later discussion.
“The next area of contention was the Vilayet of Mosul, which would be established as a new state north of Irak.
“British officials spent significant time actually trying to decide what to label this state, varying between Kurdistan, Assyria and other options, but in the end concluded that much of the work involved in establishing the realm had identified it as ‘Mosul’ - and therefore they called it the Kingdom of Mosul. It was dull, but hey - that’s Britain.
“Mosul would be a Kingdom ruled by the youngest brother Zeid. While some might point to T.E. Lawrence’s proposed division of the middle east and immediately say that he clearly decided Zeid should have this area, in fact Lawrence had exactly zero involvement in the end of war territorial divisions.
“Lawrence was a largely irrelevant figure still, certainly among Government officials, and has only gained his ‘legendary’ status since the war thanks to the British media. Britain instead settled on Zeid because he was low in the line of succession, a minor British officer who had shown his commitment and ability to work with the British, and because he was essentially uninspiring.
“He would rule over a land he had never visited, where the local population actually did not especially even like him, and he would do so as a British puppet ruler equivalent to the Emir of Kuwait. What this meant is that the civil service would be run by British officials, there would be no army for Mosul, and Britain would thus in effect run the state in all but name through a Governor - the first being Major-General Sir John Humphrey Davidson.
“The boundaries of Mosul were easily defined. Britain simply used the boundaries of the Ottoman Vilayet of Mosul, attached any areas of the Van and Diyarbekir vilayets they had seized below the 37th, and left it at that. It was a very ethnically divided land, featuring a large number of Kurds an turkomen - the largest population of Turks outside of the Ottoman Empire in fact. However, it was religiously fairly unified - which helped ensure some stability post-war.
“Zeid was actually initially quite reluctant to accept the throne. He was just 21 years old, and though a successful commander was largely disinterested in ruling. In the end though he would accept in May 1919 but only after the position of his elder brother Faisal was secured in Damascus.
“This created a convenient state for the British to rule through in the north east, and essentially concluded the allocation of new lands in the ‘Arab zone’.
“So, to run over where the middle east was at come the end of 1919, you now have several key new states and dependencies. You have a Syrian state extending from the Taurus mountains to the Hejaz ruled by Faisal - but one that features significant British informal rule and economic control. You have an occupied Jabal Ansariyah, which Britain administers under Syrian de-jure authority but is in revolt and will later be detached in 1921. You have a British ruled protectorate in Palestine. A small French enclave in Lebanon. As well as a largely British-administered Kingdom of Mosul ruled by Zeid, and a large protectorate of Irak in the south eastern area of Mesopotamia directly ruled by a British commissioner.
“Anything unclear about that?”
One hand raises before the student asks “so what about Hussein, Ali and Abdullah?”.
“Good Question.
“Hussein was, naturally, not happy with the arrangement as he expected to personally take control of much of this land - and basically he and the British fell out over the arrangements post-war. His pension, paid by the British, was gradually cut post war and his sons largely fell out with him over the division of the Arab land.
“There was also a significant debate over the title of Caliph, which Hussein had hoped to claim, but we’ll get to that next when we look at the Ottomans. The Kingdom of Hejaz actually also fell to the Saudis in the early 1920’s as a result of this debate, as well as the falling out between Hussein and his sons. This was somewhat ironic, and a rather sad end for Hussein really, as he had essentially broken his relationship with his sons over the land he should have received from the British, only to then also lose his own lands and have calls for his defence be refused by Faisal.
“His eldest son, Ali, would later attempt to retake that land as we will see, but more on that in another lecture. As for Abdullah, he actually had a very interesting life. Initially serving with his brother in Syria, Abdullah was quite dissatisfied by the end of the Arab conquests but equally had little interest in ruling outside of the Syrian area.
“He would eventually be offered the crown of Irak after a series of revolts in 1920 crippled the British administration there, which he fairly reluctantly accepted in August of 1921 after initially having rejected the throne in March of 1920. As such, by the start of 1922 you have a son of Hussein on every throne in the middle east save for Palestine, Kuwait and Lebanon.
“We’ll look a bit more at Abdullah later on. But for now - it’s time to take a look at the post-war development of the Ottoman Empire…”
So, I've unironically rewritten this update four times now. Despite having read three books on the subject, along with dozens of other sources, working out exactly the trajectory of the Ottomans is actually quite difficult in this scenario precisely because they have not won the war - but equally they have not been defeated any where near as badly as OTL.
The difficulty really with my style of alternate history, is that I like to do extensive research, and then base actions and events that follow a PoD on real plans or experiences, certainly in period where we're not too far abridged from reality anyway. This, however, is much harder when there is so little clarity on what those plans and experiences might have been. This is particularly true of Turkey, because it IOTL was so dominated by Atatürk that there was no alternative political opposition. The civil war/independence war allowed him unlimited power, and the CUP's policy during the war eradicated any opposition - before they were themselves eradicated by the defeat.
With the Ottomans having lost the war here, but without allied occupations, it's unclear exactly what various actors may have done - so I've winged it in many places, albeit in a sensible, evidence based manner. So, I'm satisfied with this series of events, and they make sense to me - but may come across as a little 'predictable' or suspiciously close to real history. In many ways I think this is justified given the actors around at this time, and given the effective Ottoman military defeat, but who knows - realistically other actors may have emerged in these circumstances I simply don't know about.
I'll leave it an open question to debate therefore, based on the data below. Given the condition of the empire in late 1918, who would you see as having risen to power, or an alternative path?
Regardless - enjoy my take on it!
The New Ummah Ottoman Woes November 1918 - June 1919
Harvard University, 1997, Continued...
…“The post-war development of the Ottoman Empire was a chaotic culmination of essentially fifteen years of decline and wars against European powers who had slowly stripped away most of the Empire.
“Turkey, as is probably the better way to refer to the state, as a nation had by the end of the war become politically defined by their resistance to the efforts of European powers to colonise them. Starting with the loss of Libya and Rhodes, the Ottomans had gradually lost land in Europe to various nativist revolts and then Balkan wars throughout the period after 1900.
“This had really shaped the Ottoman worldview. Many of their most well known leaders, Mustafa Kemal, Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha etc - they all came from the ‘European’ part of Turkey - often the Selanik region, now Thessaloniki, and Thrace.
“You see, when you look at the Ottoman Empire it’s worth remembering that the very existence of the Empire at all was because of its European holdings. The Ottoman dynasty built itself in it’s very early days in Europe precisely to escape the chaos of Anatolia’s beyliks, and masked themselves as a rightful successor to Rome. So the Turks legitimately saw themselves as part of Europe, not as some foreign invader. That, ultimately, was the cause of their eventual rise to power - and that fact was reflected prior to the Balkan wars when areas like Salonika, like Thrace, Bosnia and others had sizable Muslim populations.
“The loss of such huge tracts of land therefore left these men largely feeling like they’d been robbed of their own home - and they blamed this on the existence of minorities within the Empire which they increasingly viewed as alien. These were primarily non-muslim minorities though, excluding groups like the Kurds, Turkomen and Arabs - though in the latter case the Arabs were seen as in need of being ‘ruled’, and a disruptive, backwards people.
“It’s important to note though that these men were not ethno-nationalists. This is a serious misunderstanding of Turkish history prior to the war that has long been perpetuated inaccurately by historians unfamiliar with this period - but they did not want a homogenous Turkish state for only Turks.
“The ruling party, known as the Committee for Union and Progress, or CUP, wanted an islamic civilization state as a hub for a pan-islamic movement to decolonize the Islamic world. They were a radical, brutal and ideologically purist sect of the Young Turks movement, which we have often discussed when looking at Turkey in this period throughout this module.
“As you will remember, the Young Turks were aiming for a system of more constitutional governance in the Empire - stripping back the old sultanate in exchange for a ‘nation’ of the people, not one defined by a crown. In this there were two main camps, the Liberals and Nationalists.
“The liberals were generally more open to a western, inclusive attempt at nation building behind an idea of ‘Ottomanism’ more than anything else. This Ottomanism basically viewed the nation not as an ethnic state defined by language and race, but as a values-based understanding of nationalism - more like a modern state view than the then European view that a people made a state. Ottomanism firmly advocated the idea that the Empire could be held together as a multicultural community of peoples, united behind a common goal of prosperity and security - regardless of faith.
“The Nationalists meanwhile tended to favour a separate path to modernity than that taken by Europe. They did not see modernising the Empire as a matter of bringing in outside talent or abandoning cultural ideals and heritage as the Liberals did. The nationalists fundamentally saw the Empire as being in need basically of just strong men to lead it as capable administrators, to strip away the 'rot' and industrialize on their own terms.
“They admired Japan greatly as a result of this desire to take a ‘different’ path to modernity; seeing it as the main example of how to modernise without being colonised, and hoping to emulate their rise to international relevance in a similar manner.
“Prior to and during the war therefore they sought to prevent the justification for further internal splintering of the Empire by relocating large segments of the population. This meant moving large numbers of Kurds, Assyrians and other ethnic groups away from cohesive majority regions into a more disparate ‘spread’ across the Anatolian heartland.
“The idea behind this, which was the brainchild of Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha, was that if you spread out minorities enough there would be a Turkish ethnic plurality everywhere. This in turn would then prevent the creation of ethno-states as had emerged in Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Greece - all of whom had now robbed the Empire of its wealthy European provinces.
“The CUP also pursued a brutal policy of displacement and genocide against their Armenian population, though the trigger of this was again not specifically so much the CUP’s ideological beliefs and more the start of the war itself. Unfortunately, due to Armenians practising a strain of Christianity, the CUP had quickly and unfairly painted the Armenians as a sort of fifth column within the country after the start of the war.
“This was absolutely absurd, but was the consequence of military failures against Russia during the war and Russia’s own campaigns to try and bring on side the Armenian population. The frustrating thing here too is that the Armenians by a significant majority served within the Ottoman army over the Russian one - so it was all an entirely deluded paranoia on the part of the Turks. One that was created and mentally justified by the fact that the Balkan wars had emerged in not a dissimilar fashion.
“Armenians were in most cases patriots who accepted the concept of Ottomanism. They wanted a stable nation that they could play a part in, and one that respected them for their different beliefs - rather than suppressing their faith. The war of course changed all of this though, and did so in an enormously self-harming manner for Turkey. In their ruthless campaign to try and prevent the division of their country, the CUP employed genocidal techniques unseen in modern warfare up to this point.
“Stories from the Anatolian east spoke of columns of women being marched naked from town to town, famished, denied basic sustenance and water, and often left to simply rot on the roadsides when they inevitably died.
“Worse tales still were of organised pogroms where police and military officials would cooperate to systematically slaughter entire towns and villages worth of Armenians, looting their corpses in horrifyingly graphic scenes that appalled foreign journalists. One such tale spoke of how the rotting corpses of hundreds of Armenian civilians, still ‘pulsing with life’, were found in one eastern Anatolian town by a German journalist - appalling even the Turks' allies in Berlin.
“There was also an idea to relocate hundreds of thousands of Armenians to camps in Assyria, which some have attempted to use as a justification for the action as simply one of several efforts by states in history to detain ‘suspect’ populations during conflicts. In the eyes of some naive historians, the deaths that followed on these marches were simply an accident or the fault of the war - but this is simply untrue. From the start, it seems blindingly obvious to anyone that marching tens of thousands of people to camps in the desert not built to sustain them was an obviously intentional effort to fail, killing thousands.
“The only cases where I think it could be argued that the Ottoman Government under Talaat probably did not intend to cause the mass deaths of civilians was with the killing of Assyrian citizens, which Talaat was horrified about… and yet entirely to blame for. This was a consequence of commanders on the ground acting without orders in reprisals against the Christian Assyrians, whereas Talaat ideologically saw the Assyrians as turkic and not a ‘threat’ akin to the Armenians. Their killings allegedly 'horrified' Talaat - which just goes to show that he was conscious of his morally bankrupt treatment of the Armenians.
“Regardless, the consequence of all this social engineering with such stupid reasoning was that enormous, staggering amounts of the population were killed. Areas of the national interior had been depopulated by anywhere between 25-50% of the total population by 1919, including all ethnicities, and the economies of the Empire’s eastern provinces absolutely were decimated.
“Starvation ran rife, trade was in collapse, and the entire world - especially the Arab states that these same CUP leaders claimed to be carrying out such atrocities in order to lead - were revulsed by the Ottoman genocide. In fact, as we mentioned before, there was a strong campaign by Sharif Hussein in Mecca to quite literally topple the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph and take the religious title for himself.
“Worse still, the war had killed some 25% of all soldiers called up or volunteering to serve the army; over 800,000 men - with an equal number injured. Most had died from cold, disease, malnutrition - and the incompetence of their commanders. Of 20 million Ottoman citizens at the start of the war, 4 million died during the conflict alone, without considering the loss of millions of Arab citizens to Britain after it. This is statistically one of the largest population losses of any country in the war - only really being oustripped by poor, ravaged Serbia.
“As such, the Ottoman Empire in 1919 was now beyond the sick man of Europe. It was quite literally missing limbs - as were many of its citizens. It’s foot was very much in a grave.
“Yes, it had occasionally ‘proven’ itself in various battles of the war, such as in Kut al-Amara, as well as at Gallipoli… debatably, but these victories were almost entirely driven by luck or other factors - and very hollow at that.
“At Gallipoli for example, a battle hailed in history as a total and complete disaster for Britain - and not without reason - it should be remembered that nearly 100,000 more Turks were killed due to their own lacklustre military planning than allied forces. Many of them simply died from disease and malnutrition.
“The Empire meanwhile was economically shattered, it’s population was decimated, it’s trade links gone, it’s political system shot to the core, and to top it all off, the Ottomans also successfully drew the ire of Germany in their efforts to take Baku.
“So, as you can see, of all the belligerent states it would be the Ottoman Empire who were probably in the worst state of all on the Central Powers side come the end of the war.
“Now, let’s just go over some of the basic political actors involved here. There are several main figures to keep in mind. The first and foremost being Talaat Pasha.
“Talaat was one of three men who took over the country as heads of the CUP just prior to the war. An authoritarian former military man, he joined forces with Enver Pasha and Ahmed Cemal, both senior military figures, to seize power from the Liberal young Turks of the Freedom and Accord Party in 1913 in the ‘Raid on the Sublime Porte’.
“The three men initially governed as Triumvirs, but during the war both Enver and Cemal had allowed themselves to become subordinated to Talaat in all but name due to their own ideological or military goals.
“Enver, for example, was determined to pursue a ‘pan-turanist’ policy in Central Asia with the collapse of Russia aimed at basically building if not an actual empire there, then a sort of sphere of influence. He was an idealogue, and a military man. Hailed once as the saviour of the Empire, he became Minister of War during the world war and in the end committed everything to an attack on the Caucuses in a race to Baku with the German Kaukasien expedition under Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein - which I think we can all agree is easily one of the best German military names out there.
“Cemal meanwhile was out of the triumvirate very early on. As Minister for the Navy, he had actually opposed an alliance with Germany - instead supporting a pact with France, but after being defeated on the issue he staked his reputation on a self-aggrandising mission to reconquer Egypt from the British which ultimately failed - spectacularly. With the failure, and his army’s subsequent destruction at the hands of the British in the Palestinian campaign, by 1919 his reputation was essentially shot.
“Enver and Talaat therefore were really the main rivals of the triumvirs, and the only men truly in charge of the country come the end of 1918 and the armistice with Britain. Enver, despite being Minister of War, spent significant time out in the east in the city of Batumi though and therefore Talaat, who acted as Grand Vizier to the Sultan, was allowed essentially an open road to taking full control of the country.
“Talaat stacked the Government ministries, as well as his own party’s leadership committee, known as the CUP’s Central Committee, with loyalists. As such, Enver soon became an afterthought in the capital - albeit a powerful one within the actual army proper.
"Talaat and Enver had a strained relationship, but were ultimately reliant on one another. Enver was vital to maintaining the war, while Talaat was vital to keeping the civilian Government running - roles befitting of their personalities. Enver being a charismatic, decisive ‘adventurer’ with big ideas, such as his well documented ‘Turanist’ goals, while Talaat was a competent bureaucrat with almost obsessive tendencies to document everything. This made them a capable pair, but one with differing ideological goals and methods which often left their respective supporters at one another’s throats.
"One such well documented dispute would be that between Istanbul party boss Kara Kemal on the one hand, and the quartermaster-general, İsmail Hakkı Pasha. The former, a close collaborator of Talât, controlled the porters of the capital and played a leading role in the organisation of ‘national’ companies that controlled the provisioning of the civilian population and that were explicitly intended to be profitable, in order to accumulate capital for the desired new Muslim business class. İsmail Hakkı Pasha meanwhile was close to Enver, and as Quartermaster General was in charge of the provisioning of the armed forces in a situation where the army was deemed to have automatic priority and controlled the national transport networks. Both men were engaged in intense competition over the spoils of the very lucrative trade in foodstuffs, engaging in massive corruption to the benefit of either side of the party and dispute between Talaat and Enver.
"Thus when the army proved incapable of solving the food shortages in the country in the summer of 1918 a Ministry of Provisioning was created and Talaat’s man Kemal was put in charge. This was possible because of Enver’s absence from the capital, which weakened him politically and allowed the CUP’s central committee to become dominated by Talaat’s men. With the central committee in practice having taken over the governance of the state, this left Talaat in a strong position in 1918.
“Throughout the war, Talaat pursued fervent policies aimed at social engineering that we have discussed, and near-enough replaced the entire state apparatus around the CUP as a political organisation. Ironically, you hear a lot about the Bolsheviks being the main ‘party that were a state’ - well, the CUP got there first. The party’s Central Committee in effect became the cabinet of the Empire, with the actual state Government becoming slowly less and less relevant.
“The Sultan, Mehmed V, had died in July of 1918 just prior to the end of the war and his more ambitious and active half-brother Mehmed VI took the throne. The Sultanate, while technically powerful, by 1918 was lacking any real political allies and credibility. It’s one thing having power on paper, but if the Vizier’s allies controlled the entire military, civil service and political class, that power meant very little.
“As such, Mehmed had largely spent his time just waiting to see how the war would play out. A major player in his own right, he had friends within the CUP - but ideologically favoured the since banned Freedom and Accord Party, known as the ‘Liberal Entente’. He geopolitically tended to favour a rapprochement with Britain, and this view began to be strengthened as the war came to a close.
"Talaat Pasha though, with the end of the war, suddenly found his position far more ‘wobbly’ than it once was. The problem with being an absolute ruler of a state, even with a Sultan technically above you, is that when things go wrong, the blame rather quickly falls upon your own head. Of course this was in part true too for Enver, who the public had grown to hate over his perceived mishandling of the war - though as the frontman of the regime; Talaat was left juggling the most balls.
“The defeat at the hands of Britain was extremely damaging to the credibility of the CUP. The sole Central Powers state to concede to foreign demands in the war, the Ottomans were embarrassed and the credibility of Talaat and Enver was deeply shot by the incident. This was only made worse when in July 1918 Ottoman and Germano-Georgian troops fought a brief skirmish in Georgia.
“The Ottoman 3rd Army’s attack on the German expeditionary force enraged Berlin. This was also worsened by the fact that Enver Pasha then ignored Germany’s request that the ‘Army of Islam’ delay its advance to Baku soon after. German General Hans von Seeckt was soon dispatched to Batumi, where he threatened Enver with a total withdrawal of German advisors and arms from the Empire, forcing Enver to concede.
“The commander of the 3rd Army, Vehip Pasha, was sacked following the incident - but in the end Enver did manage to take Baku first. As a result of his insolence to Germany though, the new German civilian Government quickly cut off the Turks - leaving them to their fate.
“So, now we’ve covered the context, we’ll start in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty of Alexandria. With the signing of the Treaty on November 13 1918, Talaat would come under fire from just about every wing of the CUP; the radicals, the moderates, and even some of his own allies. Of course, he had no real choice, but facts have never prevented critics from taking advantage of political weaknesses - and by late 1918 Talaat had many enemies, albeit ones without significant power.
“The Treaty also did not go down well in the Empire’s major cities. Enraged that after eight years of war the ottomans had lost Libya, lost the Arab provinces and lost literally all of Europe save for a strip of Thrace - the people had had enough. Riots in Konstantiyye and other major cities across the Empire erupted on an almost daily basis and the military dissolved like tissue paper in water. Protests like the Sultanahmet Protest became the first major public demonstrations in Ottoman history, as more than 200,000 people gathered in the Sultanahmet square to protest the defeat. The soldiers returned home, the army’s lower ranking officers lost faith in their commander Enver, and ordinary soldiers asked themselves what exactly they had fought for - even if Enver insisted that the capture of Azerbaijan was in itself a worthy sacrifice.
“For a moment, it really did look like the Empire may just utterly collapse - but the problem was, the CUP had been so effective at destroying dissent that really there was just nobody left to take over. The people couldn’t turn to the liberals - they were all exiled, in hiding or largely irrelevant. They couldn’t turn to bolshevism - most Turks didn’t know what it was; 90% of the Turkish population could neither read, nor write - and the spread of popular ideology in that form simply was simply not compatible with the tenets of Islam. They couldn’t even really easily replace the CUP from within their own ranks, because the party was so stacked with yes-men that the actually competent people had long since been flushed down to the lower ranks.
“For Talaat this exposed the fundamental flaw with his approach to the war; he had taken an ‘all or nothing’ approach that essentially relied on victory to succeed. Now, with his failure to do so, even though the capital had never been threatened and the anatolian core was intact, he had been very publicly and demonstratively proved wrong on the most impactful decision by the Government since its inception.
“Writing of his difficult position in November, he remarked to CUP Opposition figure and anti-war party member Mehmed Cavid that he felt ‘trapped’ between three ‘fires’. The growing fallout of the war, the ever-growing impatience and arrogance of Enver Pasha, and the growing irritation of the new unruly Sultan Mehmed VI. Essentially the only other power figure left was the Sultan, and that’s where dissent began to start.
“Sultan Mehmed VI was not a strong man in November 1918, but the CUP were so weakened by the war that it temporarily made him strong. Politically, he had virtually no allies, and very few options - but strictly speaking constitutionally this was not the case. The Sultan was able to appoint and dismiss Grand Viziers of their liking; but none had actively been able to do so for some time as any time they tried to adjust the national political situation, they were either overthrown or had their Governments replaced by coups.
“Unfortunately, Mehmed was not a man experienced with governing. He’d been Sultan for barely a few months, but he had his head screwed on and he knew that the status quo was not working. An anti-unionist, he recognized that with the current Government in place nobody, and I mean nobody, was going to assist the Empire in its recovery - and that evidently their policies had consistently failed. He also knew that just to the north of him there was a ravaging, raging revolution that had just killed the entire royal family of Russia, and that while I think historians agree it was very, very unlikely that the Ottoman Empire was ever going to erupt into revolution, the Sultan couldn’t have made that judgement at the time.
“Sultan Mehmed therefore made something of a gamble and tried to succeed where his predecessors had failed and dismiss the CUP from power. He was greatly aided at first in this endeavour when Talaat himself came to the verge of resigning after signing the Treaty. He and his senior Government colleagues feared that they may just be swept from power - which was not an unfair concern. The party itself did not control the army, even if a lot of it's officers were members of the CUP, and therefore given the empire's shocking military defeat the party leadership did legitimately fear that the army may just walk in and remove them. This was particularly evident months before the war even ended, while on a visit to palestine, Enver had insisted that the road he had driven on during his drive to Jerusalem be depopulated of soldiers - in case one tried to kill him.
"However, Talaat refrained from stepping down. The reason for this was simple; the best way to protect yourself from consequences, was to be in charge of those consequences. He had successfully negotiated a treaty with Britain that, yes, did cost the Empire its Arab provinces - but did not see the country occupied. As such, outside powers were not going to arrest him; only the Government could do that, and he was the Government. So, he stayed - determined to protect himself.
"Sultan Mehmed though immediately went on the offensive, aided by a CUP member turned turncoat former War Minister Ahmed Izzet Pasha.
“Ahmed Izzet Pasha is one of those men you hear about only in relation to this one event in history, and had he not played this particular part probably would have been easily forgotten to time. He was at best a mediocre general of albanian origins who had fought in the war during 1916 and had been a senior member of the young turks when they had seized power in 1908. In essence, he was a man of the old order who sympathised with the aims of the Young Turks and CUP, but had grown very disenchanted with them during the war itself - particularly after he was so heavily defeated by the Russians in 1916 that he was 'mothballed' to the army reserves.
"Always something of a reluctant Young Turk, the shock of defeat in the war stung Ahmed Izzet to the core, and made him question whether the approach of the young turks had actually achieved anything at all. Discussing the matter with the Sultan, he said in November 1918: 'Since the 1908 revolution the old strength of the sultanate has been lost', arguing that the political scene had just become a battleground between strong personalities like Enver and Talaat.
"The Sultan's gamble was simple. He essentially went to Talaat, and said this; your Government is hopelessly discredited, and the one party that we can rely on for future support is Germany. Germany's alliance is still in place, at least in law, until January 1920 - it therefore is vital that the Government repair relations with them to ensure our future security, and to help facilitate a recovery. If you will not resign, then the only way to do that is to dismiss the person who broke those relations in the first place; Enver.
"This was actually a uniquely clever move. In dismissing Enver, the CUP's effective grip on the military would be weakened, while equally it would be a popular move among the military's rank and file. Further, it provided Talaat with a 'scalp' to blame for the defeat in the war, and dismissed Enver - who presented the main point of disruption between the Empire and Germany. Enver was also powerless to stop this, as he being in Batumi isolated him politically. The Sultan also added to this by demanding that Ahmed Izzet take over as War Minister, thus securing an ally in a key government position - along with demanding a general reshuffle of the cabinet to include more pro-palace inclined CUP members from the ‘Anti War’ faction, including the aforementioned Mehmed Cavid.
"For a strong Talaat, acceding to this demand would have been bizarre at best - but conditions left him with little choice. Any radical use of force or rejection of the Sultan's request would result in further political division due to Ahmed Izzet's status as a member of the anti-war wing of the CUP. Talaat was also unaware of Ahmed Izzet's 'conversion' of sorts to oppose the principles of the CUP's rule - instead believing him to be a party member, just a reluctant one disappointed by the war's conclusion. As such, offering Enver as a pound of flesh and installing a party member, but internal opposition figure of little repute, seemed like a way to win credit and demonstrate flexibility. In an instant, in effect, the Sultan had offered him a way to extinguish one fire and help battle another.
"Instead though, Talaat inadvertently weakened his position as the Sultan had no intention of halting his assault on CUP authority there. Now, I could go into intense detail about the exact negotiations and how they went - but I’ll keep this bit brief so I don’t lose your attention. But essentially what happens next is two key changes. One; Enver immediately saw the writing on the wall and abandoned his Army of Islam, fleeing over the border into, of all places, the Caucuses.
“The reason he went there was simple, at the time much of Dagestan and Chechnya were controlled by Circassian and Turkomen muslims in the form of the ‘Mountain Republic’ - a fairly bizarre state of sorts established by the Germans during their march into the Caucuses. In reality of course this state was barely a state - and more an excuse for local autonomies to govern themselves. However this suited Enver nicely, so he went there and hid out for a while.
“We probably won't touch on him again for a good while, but long story short he eventually went north to Moscow when the Red Army advanced into the Caucuses in the spring of 1919, where he bizarrely made solid connections with the Bolshevik Government there. This of course is bizarre because of his later actions against the reds, general Russo-Turkish hostility, and actions by the reds soon after his arrival - but we’ll touch on those later.
“The second change was, importantly, that the Sultan immediately began pressing on the army to remove Talaat. Now, this may sound bold - but if he was ever going to flip the Ottoman political system around, this would be the time. With an ally as Minister for Defence, Sultan Mehmed saw his chance and took it. The military, then headed by Chief of Staff Cevat Pasha, was extremely hesitant to endorse this policy though - and this is not wholly surprising. For all their power and influence, the Ottoman armed forces were actually surprisingly apolitical - which I appreciate may seem a bit unusual for you all.”
*A hand is raised*
Student: “Was the CUP not installed by the military?”
Lecturer: “Yes and no, but I appreciate the chance to clarify. Much of the CUP came from within the military of the empire - but it was not the same as the party. Ottoman military officials were, remarkably, quite neutral politically towards the end of the war. This is not for a lack of opinions, but actually due to their genuine lack of ambition and motivation.
“The Ottoman Army had, during the constitutional era, become significantly more nationalist - that is absolutely true and military units of course played a part in handing power to the CUP in the raid of the sublime porte. However, by 1918, the entire military was also disenchanted with the current leadership of the nationalist cause, and had grown hostile to their reliance on Germany during the war, which left a lot of their officers feeling a bit like a colony.
“As a result they had slipped into a sense of confused, apolitical apathy. Cevat Çobanlı was therefore never going to leap at the chance to get rid of Talaat, even if he largely disagreed with his policies. Him and his fellow commanders genuinely just saw it as something that needed to be sorted outside of their oversight. Thus, in a private meeting in late November it was made clear that the Army would not act against the Sultan if he dismissed Talaat - which was all that the Sultan really needed.
“So, now the army essentially knows what the Sultan is up to and therefore there is a significantly greater risk that Talaat will, eventually, find out. It is on this basis that the Sultan, perhaps quite boldly, decided to strike.
“On Friday November 22, barely weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Alexandria and just days after Talaat had reformed his cabinet, Sultan Mehmed summoned him to the Dolmabahçe Palace and dismissed him on the spot, before detaining him and a handful of loyalists.
“It is actually really quite remarkable that Talaat had not fled at this point, but historians are generally convinced that he had survived the worst of the post-war crisis, and that he could at least ride out the immediate post-war period to ensure his security. This is doubly shocking because the CUP’s own intelligence branch, the ‘Special Organization’ - or Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa - found out about the Sultan’s discussions with the army prior to the coup and informed Talaat, who apparently just chose to ignore them.
“I think really all of this just points to Talaat having underestimated the Sultan, or maybe having been driven into delusion by his position and the war itself. His arrest near enough caused the effective dissolution of the CUP at this point, though the party would not formally collapse until December 5 during their postponed annual congress. Here, the ascendent anti-war party under Ahmed Izzet expelled a large part of Talaat’s support base, renamed the party as the ‘Renewal Party’, and therefore most historians agree that the CUP ends there.
“Sadly, or I suppose not so sadly, this is where we leave Talaat. He has been hugely influential, but equally hugely controversial - and I’m sure some of you will be glad to see the back of him. He would spend the rest of his life in jail following a show trial conducted at the behest of the Sultan in February 1919 which also saw several other prominent Ottoman CUP officials tried and jailed - though most simply fled into exile; notably the vile Dr. Mehmed Nazım - who would be assassinated by an Armenian man, Soghomon Tehlirian, in Berlin in 1921.
“This was all a great victory for the Sultan, but equally left much of the country in a state of genuine confusion. The Anatolian interior remained largely in anarchy, the military was at best ambivalent about the new Government, and there were active political movements emerging aimed at further eroding confidence in the state.
“The new Ottoman Government, led by Ahmed Izzet, meanwhile saw a return of various actors that had for a long time remained in the background - lucky not to be in jail, and sometimes in exile. The aforementioned anti-war former Minister of Finance Mehmed Cavid, a CUP member of the anti-war persuasion, was appointed to the Finance brief once more. Rıza Nur, an exiled former Liberal Entente official, meanwhile returned to the Empire shortly after the coup on invitation of the Sultan and was appointed to the Foreign Affairs brief. The remainder of the cabinet, as you can see on this slide behind me, was similarly made up of a hodge podge of independents, anti-war CUP officials, and some Liberal Entente officials.
“There is one face there though which you may be surprised is missing. Who are you expecting to see?”
Student: “Mustafa Kemal?”
Lecturer: “Mustafa Kemal, exactly. Now, as you can see the Minister of War appointed by Ahmed Izzet and the Sultan was Shevket Turgut Pasha. A much less reputable leader, but a fairly high ranking officer of the Army Command staff, Shevket Turgut was handed the position as a safe pair of hands for the new Ministry - even though he very firmly supported the military and it’s political opposition to any power grabs by the Sultan.
“Mustafa Kemal meanwhile is not there, in spite of his requests, pleas and demands to take the role. This is indicative of a smaller power battle that was emerging at the time between the ‘new’ officers of the Ottoman Army, and the ‘old’ Officers. This split was essentially over what role in the new state the army ought to play; should it guide the future of the country, or try and take a fairly traditional, neutral stance and allow political actors to decide it’s fate.
“Mustafa Kemal was very much one of the ‘younger’, albeit barely, officers who took the view that the Army should be dictating things, and as you all know he will play a big part in the Ottomans’ future.
“So, let’s just remind ourselves a little about Mustafa Kemal. As I’d said earlier, Kemal was born in Salonika and came to prominence during the war after he commanded forces during the Gallipoli campaign. He had never really been intended as a frontline commander, and was quite junior when the war started on account of his differing, irritable politics that often disagreed with the CUP’s party line. A member of the party, but an opponent of it’s goals and methods, Kemal was both a radical and a moderate within the CUP.
“This may sound confusing, but it comes down to a fundamental difference of opinion between CUP leaders like Talaat and Enver, and Kemal. While those two looked to Germany’s autocratic, almost stratocratic model of Governance, Mustafa Kemal looked more towards Republican France, where he had spent time during his youth.
“To say he was a liberal would be an exaggeration, but he essentially saw in France a model for more moral and effective Governance than Germany offered. He was briefly jailed for his beliefs, but because he was very well liked by the military and ultimately ‘one of them’, he always managed to land on his feet. In many ways too, he often got away with acts of extreme insubordination, at one point going so far as to directly complain to the cabinet over Enver’s head as Minister of War about military policy - which very well could have been the end of him.
“He had of course further cemented his reputation during the war when he was appointed Commander during the desperate defence of Adana against British forces towards the war’s end, and had also further proved himself earlier when he halted the Russian advance during the war. He was broadly seen as one of the Empire’s most competent generals, and had earned himself a national reputation for quite literally being the man who held back three successive attempts to strike a final blow on the Turks.
“He and several of his colleagues, most notably men like Mustafa İsmet, Mustafa Fevzi, Musa Kâzım, Ali Fuat and Refet Pasha, all were marginally younger than the likes of the Chief of Staff Cevat Pasha. These were the kinds of men who saw the Sultanate as a drag and had wholeheartedly backed the efforts of the CUP - right up until they so clearly failed.
“Cevat Pasha meanwhile, along with officers like Wehib Pasha, Esat Pasha Janina, Suleyman Sefik Pasha and of course Ahmed Izzet Pasha, advocated neutrality in the political disputes of the Empire and preferred to maintain the army as a passive observer of affairs - aiming to protect stability. This does not mean that the Army would never act against the Sultan, but Cevat and the others believed that the number one thing the country needed was stability. Politics could come later.
“Cevat’s view of course did not hold for too long. December of 1918 and January of 1919 became dominated by the slow rise of the younger men, who began to organise politically - led above all by Mustafa Kemal.
“Kemal offered a determined vision for the country that involved, in essence, doing away with the old system and reforming the state into a modern, western nation led by non-aristocratic leaders. He wanted radical reforms to the constitution and to society, and that made him dangerous. The other big question though was religion - and this is where Kemal was really controversial. Kemal was hostile even to the concept of the Caliphate, which was a matter that split the Young Officers.
“The likes of Musa Kâzım, Ali Fuat and Refet Pasha were men who were, ultimately, still Unionists. They believed in the ideas of the CUP, but just believed the party’s leaders had been misguided, and their military defeat had forced their removal. They believed above all though in the primacy of the ‘mission’ of the CUP; that being the establishment of an autocratic state built around the principles of political Islam, republicanism and militarism. Unlike Mustafa Kemal, they did not see the west as something to be copied, but as something to target. They wanted industrialization, but without the societal change that Kemal sought.
“This is more important for next week’s lecture, but I should also mention at this point that they, in believing this, quickly amassed support among the CUP’s old rank and file. This was particularly true of Musa Kâzım - for reasons we shall soon discuss. However, I’ll mention here that the former Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa - that special organisation we spoke about - were particularly keen on this group. The Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa had by now collapsed, but it’s agents were still active regionally and by January 1919 had reorganised. Enver, now in exile, was not really deposed as their leader but instead just became irrelevant, and the organisation fell behind Çerkes Dipsheu, an Islamic Socialist from western Anatolia, and an official called Hüsamettin - the last real head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.
“Anyway, all you need to know is that these men were the kind of men who were now taking charge of the skeleton that was the CUP, and these were the political actors. Now we get to what happened in 1919.
“1919, as you would expect, was turbulent. It started with fresh elections which saw the election of a new Grand Assembly mostly composed, ironically, of former CUP members - though there were also a good few dozen Liberal Entente members too who returned from exile. Ahmed Izzet stepped down as Grand Vizier at this point, and was replaced by Rıza Nur, who despite being of the Entente persuasion led a ministry dominated above all by Mehmed Cavid - who came to control the old Anti-War CUP - now dubbed the ‘palace unionists’.
“Nur and Cavid oversaw a Government which largely focused on three things; re-establishing order in Anatolia, stabilising the Ottoman currency, and, above all, desperately clamouring to improve relations with Berlin again. Ironically this was not the preferred direction Nur wanted to take, he instead favoured a rapprochement with Britain, but this largely failed on account of general Ottoman anti-British hostility post-Alexandria and French financial insolvency.
“Berlin thus once again became the only source of future solvency, and thus December through to March were spent by the Ottomans basically trying to put right relations with their former ally. They did this by offering deals to German companies for Ottoman oil in Baku, but negotiations soon stalled over ownership rights and the German desire to see the Ottomans apply pressure on the British over Rhodes - which Britain had seized in early 1919 after the Italians erupted into civil conflict. The negotiations were later scrapped in May - for reasons that will soon become clear.
“On re-establishing order, the Government more or less immediately put an end to Unionist ‘social engineering’, though in practice violations in the east against Armenians continued for months as the effects of unionist violence continued to play out. The army proved helpful fairly quickly in bringing bandits to heel in Anatolia by the end of 1919, and therefore the economy began to function again - particularly when a good harvest, at least given the conditions, came around later in the year.
“Another area where the potential for international embarrassment soon arose though in Smyrna, where the large Greek urban and coastal population began to riot and protest in early 1919 in favour of autonomy. The Greeks, while not overly fussed by the idea of actually joining Greece, had become restless like the rest of the country - but the difference of course was that they were Greek. Their nationality difference immediately set off alarm bells among the military, and violent methods were quickly used to suppress the situation without oversight by the Government. This marked the first major real break on policy between the Government and the Army, and briefly threatened war between Britain, Greece and the Turks for a second time.
“On currency meanwhile, the Ottoman Government attempted to begin exporting oil to, of all places, Russia. The bolsheviks were desperate for foreign currency, and as were the Ottomans. With the Germans stalling therefore, a confused looking delegation of Ottoman officials and a scraggly looking group of Bolsheviks sat down in February 1919 to try and hash out a deal. This was actually successful at first and an agreement was hashed out in late February, but practical constraints of the Bolsheviks not controlling all of southern Russia limited trade opportunities until April to May. The Turks also managed to successfully procure loans from the now net creditor Japan, albeit very small ones made by the Japanese more as a gesture of goodwill following the Germano-Japanese peace agreement in early 1919.
“But, this brings us to the main crisis of the Government. In May 1919, largely without warning, Bolshevik forces invaded Azerbaijan. By May, the whites in southern Russia had largely collapsed due to German inactivity and even aid to the bolsheviks in the region and lacking foreign aid - as well as a German-engineered split between Denikin and the Cossacks.
“As I’ve alluded to, this is where the Germans and Bolsheviks truly collaborated for the first time - with Lenin inadvertently almost triggering an uprising of the Left Communists in the RSFSR over this invasion. However, that’s for my Russian Revolution module.
“Anyway, so the Red Army marches in and are met by Enver’s half brother Nuri Pasha. Nuri had retained the role largely due to his inactivity and, in the kindest possible way, irrelevance. With Enver’s exile, he became a convenient figure to leave out of central Turkish politics and, while nearly tried as a CUP leader, was spared by the Sultan and Ahmed Izzet after he was made to publicly condemn his half brother’s policies.
“Nuri’s Army of Islam was, frankly, just not prepared for the Red Army. While obviously not a stellar force, the Red Army’s forces under a young officer called Tukhachevsky used cavalry, some limited armour and a vast infantry force to quickly push much of the exposed and by now half-dissolved Ottoman Army of Islam into Baku and the mountains. Here, the offensive obviously slowed - but did not stop. Instead, the Ottoman army essentially dissolved and were scattered when Nuri was recalled and his army lost faith.
“The invasion triggered an immediate credibility crisis in the Government, damaging both the state’s credit income and reputation - after all, what did the Turks gain in the war other than Baku. Things were only made worse therefore when Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, seeing an opportunity, began to mobilise forces near the Thracian border - threatening the Turks with Ferdinand’s long-sought aspiration to take their capital.
“Nothing came of the latter of course, the Bulgarians were really just too broke and their army just too weak to successfully attempt an attack, but the Tsar came close - and it was never forgotten by members of the Ottoman leadership.
“Within a week of the invasion, War Minister Shevket Turgut was dismissed and, lo and behold, finally Mustafa Kemal was brought in. By now Cevat Pasha had sided in the military’s internal battle with the Young Officers under Kemal, and therefore the threat quickly became genuine to the Sultan’s position - leaving him and Nur with only one option; to placate the army.
“Kemal was quick, and fairly ruthless about his work. Musa Kâzım and his eastern army had already largely reached Armenia where they crushed a series of red partisan uprisings in Armenia before preparing to meet Tukhachevsky’s Red Army. After some initial engagements though, Kâzım halted Tukhachevsky’s force with relative ease due to their strained supply status, and with that soon won the title of ‘saviour’ of the eastern provinces.
“By June the Soviet-Ottoman War was in effect over. The Bolsheviks took Baku after a brief siege during which a large segment of the local Azerbaijani population actually assisted them against the Ottomans who had become disliked for their corruption. A treaty was signed in Batumi, and the Bolsheviks’ Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was established.
“For the Sultan’s administration, this was in effect the death blow. Protests began again of a similar scale to the post-Alexandria protests calling for Kâzım, or Kemal, or anyone to take over from what most Turks felt was the Government that had lost them their limited gains in the war. And so, the military did just that.
“On Sunday June 2, in what amounted to a very bloodless, very textbook coup, Kemal and his officers took over the Sublime Porte and declared that the military was taking control of national administration. Ahmed Izzet, Nur and Cavid were arrested, though all were soon released, and Sultan Mehmed was placed under house arrest.
“A military council, led by Kemal as President of the Council, was soon established. Kemal dismissed Cevat Pasha as Chief of staff, appointing Mustafa Fevzi, and Musa Kâzım was appointed as Minister of War. The rest of the cabinet was stacked by minor bureaucrats and military officials loyal to the clique, which ultimately became something of a ‘quinquevirate’ led by Kemal, Fevezi, Kâzım and Ali Fuat, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Hüseyin Rauf as Chief Minister. The Sultan was, finally, deposed for good, and with the Grand Assembly suspended, the Military Council chose to simply abolish the monarchy entirely - suspending the constitution.
“And so, there we are. Less than a year and we’ve had four viziers, a military coup, a dramatic dismissal, a war, two peace treaties, an election, and now a suspension of that same legislature by this new regime, and the abolition of the monarchy. The Empire had gone from a nationalist dictatorship, to a sultan-dominated return to pre-1913 ‘politics as usual’, to a military Junta without a monarch at all.
“Now of course, would come the hard part. Fixing everything - and Kemal obviously would meet resistance on that.
“That’s all for today. A lot to cover, well done for sticking with it. We’ll take a closer look at some of those twists and turns next week.”
