Abstract
Max Weber was prescient when he wrote in 1905 about the prospects for the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty in Russia: “Only in the tragic event of a European war would the autocracy finally be destroyed.” Weber wasn’t the first to speculate on how a war of such magnitude and developments in Russia could be interrelated. Frederick Engels raised that possibility in 1888: “revolution in Russia at this moment would save Europe from the horrors of a general war and would usher in universal social revolution.”
Wilson represents a bourgeoisie which has made billions out of the war …
Lenin, January 1917
Here is the ever-recurring question. How shall we deal with the Bolsheviki?
Wilson, January 1918
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Notes
- 1.
Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions, trans./eds. Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P. 1994), p. 142.
- 2.
Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 48, pp. 134–5 (hereafter MECW, 48, pp. 134–5).
- 3.
Ibid. 27, p. 245.
- 4.
Until February 1918 the Gregorian calendar, 13 days behind the Julian calendar, was in use in Russia. I employ both calendars until the narrative reaches that point.
- 5.
As this chapter was being conceived, Arthur Herman’s 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder (New York: Harper, 2017) appeared. He too argues that the actions of the two protagonists in that moment had global consequences far beyond—the origins, he argues, for the Cold War. Herman is less concerned, however, with comparing the real-time decision making of the two—the focus here.
- 6.
I’m unaware of anything that exists for Wilson that’s not in his Papers of Woodrow Wilson (69 volumes); hereafter PWW. For Lenin, I can’t say the same. It’s known that his archives from exile in Krakow have never been made available to the public (Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 2 [Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991] p. 353n32). But that’s prior to his return to Russia in 1917. Richard Pipes suggests that there is a lot that’s not available to the public; what he translated was no doubt intended to cast aspersions on Lenin; so I can’t say for certain if anything relevant to this comparison isn’t in the Lenin Collected Works, 45 volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), hereafter, LCW.
- 7.
MECW, 44, p. 57.
- 8.
- 9.
Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997) claims that Lenin’s position and actions “was not Marxism” (p. 316). For a real-time Bolshevik defense of their reading of Marx and Engels, see Gregory Zinoviev’s 1916 article, “Wars: Defensive and Aggressive,” in 3 Study Guides on Lenin’s Writings (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2017). Hal Draper provides copious evidence that disputes Doyle: Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol 5: War and Revolution (N.Y.: Monthly Review, 2005).
- 10.
LCW, 21, p. 18.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 176.
- 12.
LCW, 22, p. 179.
- 13.
Ibid., pp. 189–90.
- 14.
Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014), p. 50.
- 15.
- 16.
LCW, 23, p. 190.
- 17.
LCW, 23, p. 246.
- 18.
LCW, 8, pp. 561–5.
- 19.
See John Milton Cooper, “Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Man,” https://www.vqronline.org/essay/woodrow-wilson-academic-man.
- 20.
Tooze, pp. 43–4.
- 21.
Tooze, p. 61. PWW, 5, pp. 341–2; also, 12, pp. 217–8.
- 22.
For a recent version of the myth see David Brooks’ op-ed, “Understanding student mobbists,” New York Times, March 9, 2018. On the actual scale of the violence in the War for Independence, see Allan Kulikoff, “Revolutionary Violence and the Origins of American Democracy,” The Journal of the Historical Society, vol. II, no. 2 (Spring 2002).
- 23.
PWW, 12, p. 11.
- 24.
Ibid., 11, p. 94.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 298.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 66.
- 27.
Ibid. p. 299.
- 28.
PWW, 12, p. 44.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 218.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 223. Wilson distinguished between Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The inhabitants of the former, he surmised, were content with their new overlord unlike those in the latter who had rebelled. As for Cuba, he took at face value official US policy that unlike the Philippines and Puerto Rico its inhabitants would actually exercise self-rule.
- 31.
PWW, 15, p. 41.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 143.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 175.
- 34.
Tooze, p. 45.
- 35.
PWW, 45, p. 551.
- 36.
PWW, 30, pp. 231–8.
- 37.
Wilson was at his candid best in a letter to his wife Edith Bolling Galt and closest confidant: PWW, 34, pp. 208–9.
- 38.
PWW, 35, p. 168–9.
- 39.
Ibid., pp. 298–302.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 172.
- 41.
Ibid., pp. 306–7.
- 42.
PWW, 36, pp. 633–48.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 648.
- 44.
For details on the debates in the worker’s movement about Wilson, see Farrell Dobbs, Revolutionary Continuity: The Early Years—1848–1917 (New York: Monad Press, 1980), chapter 6.
- 45.
PWW, 38, p. 272.
- 46.
PWW, 40, pp. 273–6.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 504.
- 48.
Ibid., pp. 534–9.
- 49.
LCW, 23, pp. 237–53.
- 50.
PWW, 41, p. 461. About the “professor,” see below.
- 51.
LCW, 23, p. 373.
- 52.
I thank my colleague Raymond Duvall for suggesting this formulation.
- 53.
PWW, 41, p. 524.
- 54.
PWW, 42, p. 237.
- 55.
PWW, 42, p. 44.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 141.
- 57.
A one-time leading opponent of intervention told Wilson he changed his mind “when the Russian Revolution came” (PWW, 43, p. 278). Intervention did cause many of the illuminati in the American Socialist Party to leave when the majority opposed Wilson’s move. Wilson regarded the stance of the anti-war majority as “almost treasonable” (Ibid., p. 274).
- 58.
PWW, 42, p. 522.
- 59.
Much ink has been spil t, mostly needlessly, about the journey. For a recent example, see Sean Memeekin’s “Was Lenin a German Agent?,” New York Times, June 19, 2017. After reading this chapter readers should have an informed opinion about the question.
- 60.
For a distillation of Lenin’s strategy, see my “‘The Bolsheviks Come to Power’: A New Interpretation,” Science & Society, vol. 81, no. 4 (October, 2017).
- 61.
LCW, 24, p. 65.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 67.
- 63.
PWW, 42, p. 368.
- 64.
LCW, 24, pp. 108–9.
- 65.
A central argument in Tooze’s The Deluge is that twentieth-century history would have been profoundly different had Wilson responded differently to the Russian Revolution in its “first step” as Lenin put it; see his chapter 3.
- 66.
My two-volume, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), provides details on Lenin’s deserved but long-ignored democratic credentials.
- 67.
PWW, 42, p. 319.
- 68.
For an example of the kind of propaganda literature the Bolsheviks employed amongst the armed forces, see Lenin’s article, “Bolshevism and the ‘Demoralization’ of the Army,” LCW, 24, pp. 570–2.
- 69.
PWW, 42, pp. 270–3.
- 70.
PWW, 43, p. 408.
- 71.
PWW, 44, p. 38.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 558.
- 73.
Lenin would have concurred. A year later he told an audience in Moscow that in addition to Russia being a “backward country,” there was the “other reason behind the Russian revolution: Russia had no alternative. The war had caused such destruction and starvation everywhere, made the people and the soldiers so weary, they realized they had been tricked for so long, and that the only way out for Russia was revolution” (LCW, 28, p. 358.).
- 74.
Herman, p. 281. Tooze’s claim that the Bolsheviks “had violently usurped the right to represent” (p. 121) the Russian people echoes the standard Cold War account of Bolshevik ascendancy.
- 75.
See again, my “The Bolsheviks Come to Power” for an overview of that experience.
- 76.
For recent research on how influential the Bolsheviks had been amongst the armed forces, see Olga Porshneva, https://www.c-span.org/video/?436435-5/world-war-russian-soldiers-1917-revolution.
- 77.
LCW, 26, pp. 250–1. Lenin’s call for an end to “secret diplomacy” and the “full publication of the secret treaties” reiterated the same in his aforementioned April Theses (LCW, 24, p. 59).
- 78.
PWW, 45, p. 147.
- 79.
Ibid., p. 119. For details on the “hunger riots” see: https://newyorkhistoryblog.org/2018/10/1917-food-riots-led-by-immigrant-women-swept-u-s-cities/
- 80.
PWW, 46, p. 22n1.
- 81.
PWW, 45, pp. 195–202.
- 82.
See his December 4 memo to Wilson, intended to influence his speech to Congress regarding the Russian question; Ibid., pp. 205–7.
- 83.
LCW, 26, pp. 345–6.
- 84.
- 85.
Tooze misspeaks, then, when he says “democracy” doesn’t “appear in the text” (p. 119).
- 86.
PWW, 45, pp. 534–9. In almost all standard copies of Wilson’s speech, the opening paragraphs about Russia are missing; one can only speculate on the reason for that.
- 87.
Arno Mayer was the first western scholar to recognize the Bolshevik precedent. See his Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1959) for the rich details. For a more recent account that mainly supports Mayer’s reading, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford U.P., 2007), pp. 40–3.
- 88.
House, who helped Wilson write the speech, says this in his diary about the Russian passages: “As to Russia, I urged him to be at his best. I read him a sentence that I had prepared regarding Russia, which I had submitted to the Russian Ambassador who thoroughly approved. I told the President that it did not make any difference how much we resented Russia’s action, the part of wisdom was to segregate her, as far as we were able, from Germany, and that it could only be done by the broadest and friendliest expressions of sympathy and a promise of more substantial help. There was no argument about this because our minds ran parallel, and what he wrote about Russia is I think, in some respects, the most eloquent part of his message” (PWW, 45, p. 553). “Resented Russia’s action” no doubt refers to their objection to Soviet agreement to negotiate with Germany to end its participation in the war.
- 89.
On the impact that Wilson’s speech had on European politics and the negotiations in Paris to end the war, see Mayer, pp. 368–93.
- 90.
Mayer, pp. 372–73. Mayer’s note p. 373n12 is useful about Bolshevik circumspection regarding Wilson’s speech.
- 91.
Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 127. This reading of the fate of the Constituent Assembly stands in sharp contrast to Tooze’s characterization, “its violent suppression” at the hands of the Bolsheviks (p. 128).
- 92.
PWW, 46, p. 45.
- 93.
PWW, 46, p. 598. See p. 597 on House’s role and intent for the note.
- 94.
LCW, 27, p. 171.
- 95.
PWW, 47, p. 79.
- 96.
PWW, 48, p. 550.
- 97.
PWW, 49, p. 203.
- 98.
PWW, 48, p. 543.
- 99.
Ibid., pp. 627–8. Tooze, chapter 8, “Intervention,” argues that Lenin’s diplomatic maneuverings with Berlin caused Wilson to intervene. London and Paris may indeed have been so motivated but there is nothing in the record in regard to Wilson to sustain such a claim. It is what Wilson thought that proved to be decisive. See David S. Foglesong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina Press, 1995) chapter 6, that also challenges Tooze’s explanation.
- 100.
LCW, 28, pp. 62–3.
- 101.
Lenin apparently sent a message—unfortunately lost—directly to Wilson “containing the demand to stop the intervention” (LCW, 28, p. 499n27. Supposedly, it also “called for peaceful and friendly relations. (Wilson never revealed the contents of this letter.)”; see James H. Williams, “From Russia with Love: Lenin’s Letter to American Workers,” New Politics, August 23, 1917.
- 102.
R.B. Spence, “The Voyage of the Shilka: The Bolshevik Revolution Comes to Seattle, 1917,” American Communist History, 2017, vol. 16, nos. 1–2, p. 100.
- 103.
LCW, 28, p. 68.
- 104.
As for the “detachment” that Lenin had long banked on, the Germans, Lenin a month earlier made to a Russian audience one of his most trenchant observations about the revolutionary process: “It was easier for us to start the revolution, but it is extremely difficult to continue it and consummate it. It is terribly difficult to make a revolution in such a highly developed country as Germany, with its splendidly organized bourgeoisie, but all the easier will it be to triumphantly consummate the socialist revolution once it flares up and spreads in the advanced capitalist countries in Europe” (LCW, 27, p. 547).
- 105.
PWW, 53, p. 575.
- 106.
Richards, p. 178.
- 107.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol03/no04/chichtowilson.htm. Another translation of the document is in PWW, 51, pp. 508–10, 555–61.
- 108.
LCW, 44, pp. 152–3.
- 109.
PWW, 53, p. 152.
- 110.
PWW, 53, p. 6.
- 111.
PWW, 51, pp. 563–8.
- 112.
Ibid., p. 604.
- 113.
PWW, 51, p. 607.
- 114.
LCW, 28, p. 358.
- 115.
PWW, 53, p. 352.
- 116.
LCW, 28, p. 209.
- 117.
PWW, 53, p. 709.
- 118.
LCW, 28, p. 216. It’s not clear if Lenin was referring to a specific declaration of Wilson or not.
- 119.
Ibid., p. 218.
- 120.
PWW, 54, p. 8.
- 121.
PWW, 53, p. 709.
- 122.
Ibid., p. 183.
- 123.
Bullitt, who later conducted secret negotiations with Lenin and Chicherin to end the Allied intervention, claimed that Trotsky was less open to engaging Wilson; see his report, “The Bullitt Mission to Moscow” https://www.masterandmargarita.eu/estore/pdf/eren004_bullitt.pdf.
- 124.
LCW, 30, p. 191; Richard, p. 101.
- 125.
PWW, 55, p. 314–20.
- 126.
LCW, 28, p. 455. As well as Germany, Hungary and Britain were beset with, respectively, revolutionary and near revolutionary working-class upsurges.
- 127.
LCW, 29, p. 267.
- 128.
Ibid., p. 269.
- 129.
Ibid., p. 285.
- 130.
PWW, 55, p. 314.
- 131.
LCW, 29, p. 305
- 132.
For details, see Harvey O’Connor, Revolution in Seattle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), pp. 119–45.
- 133.
Ibid., p. 341.
- 134.
LCW, 28, p. 413.
- 135.
PWW, 55, p. 471.
- 136.
For details on Lloyd George’s own liberal contradictions, particularly when “an explosion of Bolshevism in England” was a possibility in his opinion, see PWW, 56, p. 320.
- 137.
Richard, pp. 112–21. Regarding speculation whether Wilson read the report, see PWW, 56, pp. 512–13n1.
- 138.
- 139.
LCW, 44, pp. 224–5.
- 140.
Richard, p. 125.
- 141.
See Richard, pp. 125–33, for details.
- 142.
Ibid., p. 133.
- 143.
LCW, 29, pp. 515–9. For a slightly different translation, see The Liberator, October, 1919, p. 3.
- 144.
Ibid.
- 145.
O’Connor, pp. 158–9.
- 146.
Herman, p. 410.
- 147.
For a rare and recent recognition in the mainstream literature of the indispensable Bolshevik role, see Alexander Anievas, Capital, the State, and War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), chapter 4.
- 148.
For a summary of the current scholarship about that operation, see Michael M. Phillips, “An American Tragedy in Russia” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-one-time-american-troops-fought-russians-was-at-the-end-of-world-war-iand-they-lost-1541772001). Also, Eric Trickey, “The Forgotten Story of the American Troops Who Got Caught Up in the Russian Civil War,” Smithsonian.Com, February, 2019 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-doughboys-who-died-fighting-russian-civil-war-180971470/).
- 149.
LCW, 22, p. 191.
- 150.
LCW, 31, p. 223.
- 151.
LCW, 33, pp. 429–30.
- 152.
PWW, 68, pp. 393–5.
- 153.
I thank Alex Anievas for pointing out the distinction Wilson made between “good” and “bad” capitalists.
- 154.
Wilson’s most current authoritative biographer, John Milton Cooper, Jr., says “the essay sounds like some of Wilson’s immature writings during and just after college” (Woodrow Wilson [New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009], p. 584). But that ignores his May 1919 State of the Union message to Congress, his so-called labor and capital speech, that anticipated in many ways the essay.
- 155.
The second volume of James Bryce’s classic Modern Democracies was also published in 1923. The final chapters, “Democracy and the Communist State,” and “The Future of Democracy” register the same liberal anxiety as that in Wilson’s essay.
- 156.
Richard, pp. 113, 116.
- 157.
According to another interviewer of Lenin in December 1919, Lenin had favorable impressions of Bullitt; “if Bullitt were president of the United States peace would soon me made” (Guardian, December 4, 1919). So much, then, for the widely held claim that Lenin viewed him as a “useful idiot.” (https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/12/magazine/on-language.htmlthe 1987).
- 158.
- 159.
Another telling vignette about Lenin is his penultimate published letter to a family member, his sister Anna, sometime at the end of 1922. He was embarrassed by the fact that “an exception” had been made for him to take a book out of the party’s library that he hadn’t returned: “my fault.” He begged her to do so. LCW, 37, p. 549.
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Nimtz, A.H. (2019). The October Revolution and End of the “Great War”: Lenin versus Wilson. In: Marxism versus Liberalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24946-5_5
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